[fleddr]

Great comment.

The status quo is so bizarre. Human life has no inherent value unless it makes continuous contributions to "the economy". It would be economically most efficient to drop dead on the day you retire. Thanks, human!

All of this to keep a machine running that wrecks the planet and everything living on it, including ourselves. Probably some 50% of the economy is pure bullshit that nobody asked for, just keeping each other busy.

At some point we lost the plot. The economy doesn't work for the people anymore and drastic productivity increases have somehow not really improved our lives in terms of freedom, time, physical/mental health, quite the opposite.

[Aunche]

> Probably some 50% of the economy is pure bullshit that nobody asked for, just keeping each other busy.

You mean that 50% of the economy is bullshit that you think nobody should ask for. You and I may agree that developer at an online gambling company is economically useless, but the their boss certainly doesn't and the gamblers probably don't either.

Even if we accept your premise, you can't just assume that tanking the economy will only cut out the useless jobs instead of the useful ones. Useful jobs are perhaps more likely to survive, but that's not always going to be the case. During the next recession, people will more likely give up on a solar roof than give up gambling.

> The economy doesn't work for the people anymore and drastic productivity increases have somehow not really improved our lives in terms of freedom, time, physical/mental health, quite the opposite.

People's lives are objectively improving. It mostly just happening in Asia though. It requires a lot of money to build power plants, hospitals, and water towers, and much of that was financed by selling "useless" trinkets from the West.

[piloto_ciego]

Sometimes people fail to recognize that the oldest super powerful artificial intelligence is several hundred years old. It’s our economic system.

It’s the software running on all our “wet ware” that convinces us to value productivity and money over human life, the environment, or happiness. It is the paper clip maximizer and it’s happily churning away.

But we’re not maximizing paper clips we’re maximizing profits .

[Dig1t]

What does it mean to value human life? I would argue that the economic engine has given us ALL of the improvements in quality of life, and the fact that we live so much longer than we used to, IS valuing human life. There is no other way we could have given ourselves all of the amazing things (tech-wise) we have today.

Why would we value the environment over human lives? That just seems like nature-worship.

[studentik]

> seems like nature-worship

Why not?

[jtr1]

They all like to say the free market is the optimal computer of value until you compare it to runaway AI

[andsoitis]

> The economy doesn't work for the people anymore and drastic productivity increases have somehow not really improved our lives in terms of freedom, time, physical/mental health, quite the opposite.

If trees could just all agree to remain short, they wouldn't need to waste resources to outgrow each other to reach sunlight.

[sethammons]

Watch or read The Hidden Life of Trees and you may have to rethink your imagery. It would appear trees may be "agreeable" with each other.

[happymellon]

Except Poplar. That's the Microsoft call centre scam of the tree world.

[andsoitis]

thanks for recommendation!

[grecy]

> Human life has no inherent value unless it makes continuous contributions to "the economy".

What I love most of all about this is the fact "the economy" has only existed for a few hundred years.

I wonder how modern humans found purpose for the previous 199,700 years?

[ajmurmann]

> Probably some 50% of the economy is pure bullshit that nobody asked for, just keeping each other busy.

Obviously this cannot be true. "The economy" isn't some magical object somewhere, but the emergent behavior from all our needs, desires and faults. If something is truly not wanted by anyone, nobody will pay for the work to get done. That's the magic of the invisible hand of capitalism. Doing stuff that truly nobody wants and getting paid for it is usually more of a feature of socialism and bureaucracies.

There are cases where individual motive leads to macro behavior that's not desirable by any individual, those are the cases where we need to tax negative externalities or regulate, depending on the problem. These issues usually don't emerge though because nobody wants something but because too many wanting a thing creates side effects that nobody likes. The book Micromotived and Macro behavior by Thomas Schelling covers that nicely.

[tsimionescu]

Just look at the huge amount of money being invested into advertising, PR, and marketing. That industry is mostly focused on finding psychological tricks to manipulate us into wanting things we just don't need, in various ways.

One of the best known examples is the PR-manufactured tradition of diamonds in engagement rings, which sky-rocketed the demand for diamonds in the general population.

Another great example is the huge industry of "supplements" which is legalized fraud on a massive scale, selling useless pills to people with a promise of making them better in some way, and relying solely on the fact that it's hard to prove that they don't actually do anything since their claims are so vague.

These are prime examples of entirely artificial demand created out of whole cloth through manipulation. There are numerous other cases of more subtle effects, where marketing is significantly inflating a demand which would exist but be much smaller otherwise (toys, smartphone upgrades, new cars every few years, beauty products, fashion etc).

[jasonfarnon]

I think OP's implication is not that nobody wants the 50% of pure bullshit, but that want is itself manufactured by the economy.

[gruez]

>but that want is itself manufactured by the economy.

Is that an issue? There's not much demand for 8k ohm SMD resistors from people, but people do want smartphones that require 8k ohm SMD resistors to manufacture. The same applies for stuff like managers and other "bullshit jobs". Nobody wants them, but they're nonetheless required to keep the company/economy humming along. And if they're actually not required, then the economy that supposedly cares what's "economically most efficient" should have eliminated them.

[sw104]

I think the previous poster may be thinking more along the lines of a Mickey Mouse shaped bar of soap, rather than an important component of something useful, like resistors.

There is a mountain of trash end-products out there, which marketing is creating the want for. These products may not otherwise exist without the manufactured want, and could be removed entirely without much detriment to the very small amount of people that conscientiously decided of their own free will they wanted that product.

Marketing is what makes something like a Peloton a viable business, rather than those customers just taking a regular static bike and adding a tablet mount to the handlebars.

In some senses, I think the economy isn't always looking for the most efficient methods. I believe there is some political input involved to keep everybody's heads down under a quagmire of pointless work, so those people (even in a democracy) don't start asking too many questions. Some people could easily be automated out of work, yet they aren't, despite the efficiency it would bring.

To each their own, but I'd be fine with a huge amount of (what I deem) useless products and jobs being removed from the market. Most serve very little real purpose and as somebody else stated, are destroying our planet and wasting away the best years of our lives to attain them.

[andsoitis]

> want is itself manufactured by the economy.

I would frame it with a different emphasis. Want is inherent to living organisms, humans and others alike. The economy discovers, amplifies, and satisfies our wants. But it is also important to remember that economies emergent, not some external object imposed on humans.

[Supermancho]

> "The economy" isn't some magical object somewhere

It's not magical, granted. "The economy" is a subjective state (eg metrics) that solely resides in the human mind, rather than a singular thing.

[ajmurmann]

Don't confuse the metrics with the thing itself. The economy is not metrics in the human mind. The economy is me liking Envy apples more than disgusting Red Delicious apples and buying Envy instead. The economy is an employee getting a good offer to fill a need a company has and going back to their current employer to find out who will pay them more / gets more value from them and it's willing to thus pay more. Things like the GDP just try to approximate the sum of all these actions and exchanges.

[Supermancho]

> The economy is not metrics in the human mind.

It most certainly is and I have not encountered anything to indicate otherwise. Individual transactions are no more relevant than GDP is. These are individual metrics or acts that influence those metrics, which try to quantify aspects of an aggregate concept.

[WalterBright]

> drastic productivity increases have somehow not really improved our lives in terms of freedom, time, physical/mental health, quite the opposite.

Here's where the money went:

https://www.federalbudgetinpictures.com/federal-spending-per...

And that doesn't include all the state and local government.

[toomuchtodo]

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-debt-25-percent/ (25% of national debt was incurred during the last administration; half was COVID relief measures, the other half was tax cuts for the wealthy)

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fiscal-deficit-idUSKB... (Republican tax cuts to fuel historic U.S. deficits: CBO)

Sources at bottom of the first link.

This doesn’t include healthcare cost inflation due to a grossly inefficient healthcare model.

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2...

[WalterBright]

Your thesis is the government consumption of the GDP has nothing to do with where the productivity improvements went?

[toomuchtodo]

You’re comparing decades of productivity going to capital to debt incurred within the last half decade (“Here's where the money went”).

The US does have a lot of sovereign debt, no doubt, but that’s not why Labor isn’t seeing a greater share of the productivity gains since the 70s. A loss of collective labor power and 10% of the country owning 89% of public equities gets us here.

To arrived at an improved end state, one would need more unions and labor organizing, as well as perhaps ratcheting down the work week to 4 days.

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-gro...

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-...

[WalterBright]

I presented a chart going back to 1970. It covers the time period in question. It shows an enormous increase in government per-person spending. Why do you think that has nothing to do with where did the money from the productivity increase go?

[TexanFeller]

> why Labor isn’t seeing a greater share of the productivity gains since the 70s

Globalization seems like a major factor that's often ignored for that. We had productivity gains. We didn't benefit from them as much as expected because people in Asia had bigger productivity gains. Joe six pack now competes with people in China working 996 instead of just his neighbors like in the 70s.

[TexanFeller]

> the other half was tax cuts for the wealthy

The other political sports team cuts taxes for the rich too. For instance they recently removed the cap on the SALT tax deduction which primarily benefits rich people, largely in coastal cities, i.e. those most likely to vote for and donate to them.

[pweezy]

This isn’t true - the cap on SALT tax deduction hasn’t changed since it was put in place in 2017.

Some members of congress, apparently from both major parties, are proposing legislation to raise the cap from $10,000 to $100,000 or otherwise raise or remove the cap. But these proposals are not certain to go anywhere.

[JimBright]

Ha ha ha. If you taxed 100% of the wealth of the wealthiest (Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, John Kerry, et al - everyone worth say over $100 million) amongst us, you wouldn't even make a dent in the national debt. And I mean take every nickel they have, the national debt will still be out of control. The old saw that tax cuts for the wealthiest increases the national debt is an argument that simply cannot stand up to scrutiny.