[throwawaye3735]

This seems be a prevailing sentiment on hackernews.

It is a very common thought that we should just spread the wealth to everyone and focus on some total well-being metric to evaluate how "happy" people are and make decisions based on that metric for the greater good. This can easily seem like utopia but it sounds like a nightmare to me. It's nice to think we should stop progressing as a society and not worry about our labour force decreasing cause we are already 'wealthy'. In a perfect society of course it would be wonderful if we could all work exactly the jobs we want or not work at all.

These past 100 years have seen an amazing amount of progress in almost all areas of technology and standards of living. We have a lot more to go and stagnation or worse regression to what we see in places like Russia is not where we want to be. We have to keep innovating and moving forward and working hard to do it. I hope that we can solve the problems we have as a society and stop the gap from growing in the haves and have nots. I believe the solution is focusing on what has made this progress possible in the past; mainly the values of our culture - honesty, treating people fairly, working hard - all of these are important values that we have to work hard to preserve. In the US our society is dependent on three branches of government to exist - We have a lot of checks and balances, but if all three become full of corrupted, greedy, or uninformed people we are screwed. Ultimately everything comes down to people and their decisions. Preferably we have more people making informed intelligent and reasonable decisions than not. This really depends on cultural values and education. All of this is not free and takes a ton of hard work to maintain. In this dynamic world if we aren't progressing, growing, getting better we will get left behind, stagnate and probably die as a country and society. This is how nature works. We always have to work hard and get better and keep progressing.

[shmageggy]

> It's nice to think we should stop progressing as a society

> it would be wonderful if we could all work exactly the jobs we want or not work at all

> honesty, treating people fairly, working hard

> all three [branches of government] become full of corrupted, greedy, or uninformed people

> Preferably we have more people making informed intelligent and reasonable decisions than not

This is a wild response to me. I don't see where I suggested (or suggested giving up) any of these things.