[pdonis]

> We could have a society without starvation even if 99% of the population did not work.

Only if nobody wanted anything else but food. Which is nonsense. People want lots of things besides food. And clothing, and shelter. And sanitation, and medical care, and...

What you are calling "rich" countries are countries in which people have way, way more options--where their lives are a lot more than just bare subsistence. And history shows that the vast majority of people want all those options; they don't want to live a bare subsistence life. (If you do, how are you even posting here? The Internet is not possible in a bare subsistence world.) And providing all the things needed for all those options requires lots of work.

[Iv]

I am obviously making an extreme reasoning there. It is just to illustrate the absurdity of the notion that unemployed people should starve because otherwise no one would work to produce food.

Society is designed in a way where non-working people are shamed and considered parasites and anomalies. If we want to transition to a non-working society, this has to change, or the fear of losing one job's to a machine will stall automation.

We have subway drivers despite the tech to automate this job has existed since the 1960s.

[pdonis]

> the notion that unemployed people should starve because otherwise no one would work to produce food

I don't see where anyone is making an argument based on any such notion.

I think the reason most people are suspicious of those who don't work for a living is fairness: we all benefit from the many goods and services that our society produces, so we all should contribute our fair share to producing them.

I agree that the market for jobs in our society is very inefficient, which means that many people are unemployed not because they are unable or unwilling to do productive work but because of our inefficient process for matching people to jobs that will actually be meaningful for them. However, no one has any more efficient process for doing that; there are processes that lead to less unemployment in the sense of fewer people not having a "job" on paper, but those processes (as shown by the Soviet Union and China) don't care about the actual job satisfaction of individual people, so they don't solve the problem we are discussing here.

I also agree that industrialization created many "jobs" that actually aren't meaningful at all; the only reason people were used to do them is that nobody (yet) knew how to build machines that would do them. I agree that those jobs should be automated. What should happen as a result of such automation is that the necessities of life--food, clothing, shelter, basic transportation--should get cheaper over time. The main reason this hasn't actually happened in developed countries (or hasn't happened as much as it should--there are areas in which it has) is governments artificially keeping prices high to serve special interests (for example, the US government paying farmers not to grow crops). That is a political problem, not a technical problem.

Even if all the drudge work is automated, however, people will still need to design the machines, make sure they are doing what they're supposed to do, take care of any malfunctions, and update the designs as conditions change. Plus, there are many services that only humans can provide. So I don't think we are anywhere close to having a shortage of work that people will pay other people to do.

[coffeecat]

> I think the reason most people are suspicious of those who don't work for a living is fairness: we all benefit from the many goods and services that our society produces, so we all should contribute our fair share to producing them.

This implies that an employee of a firm like Renaissance Technologies should have the same social status as an unemployed welfare recipient; I do not believe this is the case in our society.

[chordalkeyboard]

> This implies that an employee of a firm like Renaissance Technologies should have the same social status as an unemployed welfare recipient; I do not believe this is the case in our society.

No, rather it implies the opposite because the employee is working whereas the unemployed person is not.

[ytwySXpMbS]

The grandparent of your comment suggested that unemployed people are shamed because they don’t contribute meaningfully to society, in that they don’t produce anything or provide any services. Similarly, a hedge fund employee contributes nothing of tangible value to society. Sure, they use pension money to make money for themselves, but pensions don’t depend on that.

[chordalkeyboard]

> Similarly, a hedge fund employee contributes nothing of tangible value to society.

Thats your opinion, but it's not something that can be assumed to be true. Its equally likely that you just don't have the education and experience to perceive their contributions as valuable. Lots of people say the same thing about professions they don't respect such as artists, educators, police officers, mental health professionals, dog walkers etcetera. It says more about the person holding the opinion than the profession itself.

[CuriouslyC]

People want to feel empowered to choose. If there are so many options that choosing is hard, then it's just another source of stress. Research indicates that the ideal number of choices is four, with anywhere from three to seven being good.

In an ideal world, we would have artisans that could craft high quality bespoke items for a fair price, and a small selection of popular items that suit most people.