Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you airily define ‘productivity’ as reading the classics and spending time with friends?
"Have enough" is a static steady state. "Produce enough" now and in the future is a dynamic constraint.
The mechanism is economic surplus, to have the producers (productive people who produce needed goods and inputs to such) create more than they need. This generally requires increasing and maintaining productivity to have surplus.
Once you have a surplus the absolute maximum priority is to maintain it. Plant, machinery, systems, irrigation, fertilizer production etc etc.
The system is dynamic, surplus today is not surplus tommorow.
In my country we have a means to ditribute this excess, and it may even go to those in need, but the cost of distributing it has been increasing at a far higher rate than the rate of increasing surplus.
what i fail to understand is why people come to a technologist forum without a basic understanding of system dynamics. this is entry level material for engineering, mathematics and physics. are they not teaching it in CS?
We are producing enough excess that we can spare enough of those things to those who are unable to take care of themselves, and we have for a number of years.
No, we're not. It just seems like there's excess because the costs of running social programs are being paid with runaway debt. Those bills will eventually require settling, and it will become obvious how much excess there really is.
There are truckloads of perfectly good food and clothes being incinerated every day since that's somehow cheaper for the owners of capital. The excess is there. It's just not ending up in the pockets of those who need it.
Food and clothing are actually an argument against you here. Sure we waste a lot of both, and yet food insecurity is rare in the First World, and lack of clothing is pretty much the least significant part of poverty. Plus, government-forced redistribution reliably increases prices overall due to the increased costs of logistics and administration. There is no free lunch.
If you want to argue your point, you have to address the real fiscal burdens on modern societies, and the real drivers of debt across the West. The biggest components of government debt are medical care and pensions (including Social Security in the US). These are the things that are bankrupting us, not food and clothing.
Debt is just accounting, and has nothing to do with whether or not a surplus exists and who gets to consume it. The surplus exists, it doesn't magically appear because of your accounting system.
My point is not that economic surpluses don't ever exist, but that the perceived surpluses that people invoke in order to defend the present welfare state are unsustainable, and that the system will inevitably collapse without a miraculous increase in economic productivity. Debt (both private and sovereign) is literally the thing that tells us whether a society is able to pay for the things it demands. That's not an accounting trick any more than plain arithmetic is.
The accounting system is what ensures that we can ACCOUNT for if such a statement is true or not.
It also allows us to characterize and understand how the capability to generate surplus has been distributed etc etc.
There is no single lump of goods and services, or a single lump of surplus. There is an economic problem of ensuring such are created in surplus and distributed to those who need them. A surplus of lawn mowing and shopping services (such as disability welfare has created in my country) could easily be accompanied by a shortage in housing. In fact one could be caused by the other.
The economy has capacity today and surplus from yesterday. Beyond that takes vigilance and accountability to maintain the system.
The fundamental question is why exactly you think a system can have some fundamental governing and observation mechanism such as debt (or equity accounting) removed and it would still maintain the same system characteristics that produce said surplus?
This is basic engineering and system architecture 101 and I would expect technologists to have more than a surface level expectation that systems do not operate magically nor label components as redundant without detailed reasoning.
We have runaway debt because since the 1980s Republicans have had a fiscal policy called 'starve the beast' whose intention is to make government funding so fucked government can't function.
Republicans just passed huge tax cuts, it is Republicans that have zero care about debt, again because they choose agenda over strong/healthy federal government so that people like you can make posts like this (and ignore such facts as Republicans are the drivers of debt in order to intentionally undermine/weaken our country/government).
> the cost of distributing it has been increasing at a far higher rate than the rate of increasing surplus.
Is it? Or is it that an increasing proportion of total income ends up going to the people who find ways of hiding it such that it does not get distributed.
They are not trolling. They are stating the simple, undeniable fact that there is more than enough to go around and if we had a more equitable distribution of resources, we could take care of everyone with disabilities 10x over with plenty to spare.
I don't think people realize how much evening out society will impact them. This is a very US (and probably EU) way of thinking. Everyone thinks they are middle class but when it comes down to it there are far more people in poverty and that evening things out will bring down the quality of life for the people advocating for evening out things.
No. This is what capitalists want you to believe. The truth is that we are all subsiziding the capital gains of the wealthiest 2%. You could easily pay for generous social security programs by taxing property and capital more (as opposed to labor). But the ultra-wealthy point at the weakest and poorest and tell the average worker "look, they're coming for your house and your humble savings!". This is a very deliberate distraction.
If that's true, it's odd that so many social welfare programs across the western world are consuming an ever-growing share of GDP, incurring massive debt, and grinding toward insolvency and collapse. Exactly how much more of our money and labor do you want to take from us in order to continue this madness?
European here. I left Europe 14 years ago. I tried to come back. My decision was to run away bc it is impossible to build a reasonable life in a stable way where you do not get smashed mercilessly...
The problem is that when you get more for less, it kills the incentive to do more. This is a really glaring problem, and people go to really great lengths to either sweep it under the rug or hand wave it away.
Incentives don't disappear at some arbitrary level of taxation. I think you can have both sufficient incentives and more equitable distribution. The frankly obscene levels of wealth concentration we are witnessing suggest that there is a lot of room for refinement.
I do find it interesting that a lot of people (not trying to imply that you are one) bang on about incentives while also fighting tooth and nail in favour of weighting taxes toward earned income (derived from doing useful/productive things) instead of unearned income (derived from simply owning things).
I get that some people view all forms of tax as theft and while I appreciate their honesty, I simply can't take them seriously.
Your tax dollars just go into a cesspool of fraud, corruption, waste, incompetence, distribution to cronies. Money taken and spent badly feels like theft.
I'm an employee. I don't really benefit from doing more. When I do more, someone else makes money. In my experience that someone else is just as likely to lay me off for a cheaper worker as they are to give me a raise
The incentives our system produces are already really skewed, and it would be nice to see them skew the other way for once
It seems your complaint is a lack of recognition, and maybe redistribution would provide vengeance for this injustice. But that is different than "we ought to start giving raises to people who do less work, not more" which is what "skewing the other way" seems to imply.
There are still human societies on Earth that still live the same way they did 2,000 years ago. Most people would not want to live that way, and therefore they need to rely on people who did/do more. The best way to rely on them is to make then rely on you too.
"Valuable work leads to good outcomes for everyone" is probably one of the slipperiest slopes there is.
The only reason there's more than enough to go around is people work for the betterment of their own life. If you disconnect the link between work and material comfort that simple, undeniable fact will no longer be fact.
> > If you disconnect the link between work and material comfort that simple, undeniable fact will no longer be fact.
The disconnect is already there, any 5 year old already understands that stealing a comic book at the comic book store is better than paying for it. And more and more people are resorting to it at every level of society
Yes, remove the human incentive to produce, which is that the rest can consume in a way that is profitable enough for the producer and you will see the wxcess disappear in front of your eyes for killing the incentive to produce.
Infinitely redistributing does not yield products for all, but scarcity for all.
I see, so you are suggesting making black markets appear. Good, I see you studied economic history a lot...
There is no way around this, believe me.
Not sure why you call pigs to people producing actually. That is how things end up working.
Not waiting for people to produce fornyou while you insult them amd try to set infinite restrictions until they do what you want... which by the way looks to me like modern slavery.
People say this, but I'm not sure I understand how it could be true. For example, taxing billionaires is often cited as the solution to this problem. But if we took Elon Musk's $730 billion fortune and divided it evenly among the US population, people would receive a one-time payment of about $2000, and then that fortune would be gone, and any opportunities or advancements it was creating. So I'm genuinely curious where you see this incredible excess coming from.
It also misunderstands that nature of Musk's fortune. He's not Scrooge McDuck and they pretend he is. Sell SpaceX at a fire sale. What's it worth? A lot less then it is now. Who would buy it? Poor people? Somehow I don't think so.
Musk is a golden goose and there are people who think the best move is to cut him in half and get at all the gold inside.
I'm so sick and tired of hearing about this mythical "excess". I can't afford housing. Millions like me can't. There is no excess. Unless it's being hoarded by the capital class.
I mean, it is very obviously being hoarded by the capital class! there has been tons of writing on the subject, no one can credibly deny that that's what's happening right now.
The wealth of the capital class is, unsurprisingly, capital - the facilities, equipment, organizational structures, etc. used to make stuff. What does it mean for capital to be hoarded?
The wealth of the "capital class", whatever that means, is dwarfed by the debt being run up by governments.
My favorite example: if you confiscated all of the wealth from all of the billionaires in the USA, it would fund the federal government for around six months. If you add state and local governments, those funds would last just weeks.
The rich don't have your money. Your government does, and they're flushing it down the toilet (and bombing Iran).
Certainly, and notably the 'capital class' that's 'hoarding' the housing he's talking about are what look like normal people. You'd make more money taxing half of the value of those who own SFHs in Santa Clara alone than you would Elon Musk - and hurt productive capacity and jobs far less. The disconnect between the desire to extract what people describe as a fair share from the 'capital class' comes up rapidly against the wall of realizing they themselves are the 'capital class' in question. Everything else then becomes a war of definition as they try to narrowly constrain the scope of this such that they can send their kids to Monta Vista while simultaneously having everyone else pay much higher taxes.
> we could take care of everyone with disabilities 10x over with plenty to spare.
Yes, like the 40%[1] of Stanford undergrads who have disabilities. The greatest long term impediment to what you're suggesting is folks who don't need the help taking advantage of the resource distribution. It both massively increases the costs and sours those who have to pay into the system on the whole thing leading to a backlash.
If we could just solve this quirk of human nature, we'd be all set.
You've just arrived back at capitalism: it's the least bad resource allocation optimization algorithm assuming everyone is an amoral asshole and willing to take every advantage they can.
Superior systems exist, but they require relaxing the adversarial asshole constraint.
Yeah, disability accommodation like having single dorm room and being allowed to cook for themselves rather then using cantine. Maybe the question is why the cantine is obligatory anyway.
Anyone who thinks that it's "controversial" to discuss where the benefits from productivity gains go isn't worth talking to: they are either ideologues set in their ways, or underinformed on recent economic history.
You’re missing the point of the article and of the post. Why do you assume that someone who reads and takes breaks is unproductive? Should we get a second job instead? I spend 8 hours sleeping. Would you like me to work those hours as well? I spend some of my day cooking and cleaning and raising my son. Would you rather I keep working instead?
Maybe it’s time that we worked together to gain that time back for you instead of you fighting for us to lose our free time.
More than half of employment is “bullshit jobs” needed only for capitalism. There’s artificial scarcity but artificial scarcity in minds of people is much worse problem.
Recently, I had a conversation with a bunch of people who have worked in the tech industry since the 90s. Someone asked which technologies have greatly improved our lives. Outside of some specific medical innovations, we struggled to agree on more than three.
What you are saying here, and I am not a protestant, is that some people will work for you while you do what you feel like.
That mindset, taken to the extreme, hides a kind of sibylline slavery, Idk if you get why.
It also makes for far less responsible and comfortable individuals.
Trying to be useful and auronomous is our obligation. Thinking others will do it and that it is automatically ok is not the best we can do to contribute.
The other commentor mentioned food and clothes to you. I'll add that I can get food for free locally (soup kitchen style, although I don't think they actually serve soup) if I really need it.
Around 10% of houses in the US are vacant, although I'm sure a fair amount are that for good reasons (shitty locations, old and worn to high hell). This to me sounds like a resource allocation problem and not a lack-of-resources problem.
Energy could be free close to free if we made the right choices. The sun's right there. Unfortunately, we've been stuck in a political rut for a long while, making long term projects like 'do something about global warming' and 'transition away from fossil fuels' uninteresting.
Many medicines are only expensive due to patents and making up for research costs. Actual production is usually cheap as hell.
I don't have all the answers. People smarter than me might have them. But I do know that we can do better.
Yes to all of this, and want to double stress the Housing theory of everything [1]. Most of the "scarcity" people feel today in the North American context is driven by housing. And there simply isn't enough of it. And citing badly measured vacancy stats does a huge disservice to the effort to fix this.
I agree we can do a lot better. And I have no moral qualms about giving the excess away to everyone who needs it. But I need people to admit that it will require a lot of work till we can sufficiently claim we have a real realizable "excess".
And that work requires the current system to work more "efficiently" and with "higher productivity", in the economic definition of the word, not as a personal valuation as OP defines.
Housing is clearly the biggest problem, yes, and I doubt you'll find anyone who'll disagree that it's not a big problem. But it's a big problem for political reasons. If we all woke up tomorrow and thought 'we need 10 million new homes', I'm sure it could happen. It's just not in the short-term (and long-term?) interests of the economy as it is now. Maybe we should do something about that?
Or maybe, just maybe, we should do it because it's a thing that raises people's quality of life? I only care about the economy insofar as it helps actual people on the ground, so I'll be happy to ignore it for things like this, assuming that doesn't put us in an even worse rut than we are in now.
>If we all woke up tomorrow and thought 'we need 10 million new homes
The cost (no profit) of 1 Million homes where people want to live (where your community is), would be roughly 0.5 Trillion to 1 Trillion USD [1]. So, I don't think this is true :(.
We simply don't have the construction workers and the supply-chains to make it happen. Again, these are fixable problems and I want this to be true. But it is not today.
Housing is a problem and not surprisingly a very big problem in all the English speaking countries the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia, the scarcity of starter homes, high cost, low pay, and a epidemic of those so-called luxury apartments being built everywhere.
Most young people will be going back to the good old days, staying home and not leaving until they are married, which is what happens in most of the world today.
> and I doubt you'll find anyone who'll disagree that it's not a big problem.
As far as I know, people vote against housing developments, among other things to prop up their own house values. They might not disagree it's a problem, but they also don't care to do anything about it. I don't think the housing issue is strictly economics and logistics.
Sure, if one ignores constraints then we can do everything. It's like saying that you could find an element in an unsorted array in O(1) if you just pick the right index. Obviously. The part that makes it hard is that you can't pick the right index. Coordination and resource allocation is everything. It's not free. It costs effort just like searching an unsorted array is O(n) worst case. There's no way to not pay the price. Energy has to be expended.
You'll see this if you're ever at sea. You have an infinite amount of fresh water around you. All you have to do is avoid the salt in it.
...and the food part, it's been this way for almost a hundred years now - with agricultural productivity skyrocketing in between. But 100 years ago, chronic food overproduction bankrupting farmers, was already a persistent problem. Since then, lots of bright minds spent their lifetimes to invent new ways to bribe or coerce farmers into growing as little as possible for their own safety.
Just a note those "vacancies" include dilapidated buildings and housing that is between leases (literally all the housing on craigslist is included in that number).
Vacancies in most major cities is near-zero. As a market-rate renter, when someone says "we have so much excess", I have no idea what you're talking about.
This assumes production of food is the bottleneck rather than distribution. If distribution is actually the bottleneck, overstocked food is not a measure of excess in society.
Don't expect much sympathy here, as per many comments folks are mostly on purely capitalistic camps to the extreme. Its distillation of US approach to work and society, something I've grown to detest by mere fact of living in much more humane, while vastly more financially efficient system that doesn't use my tax money to kill civilians all over the world (none other than Swiss system and yes it could easily work elsewhere if people reduced their egos significantly, which they won't).
Its everybody for themselves in US, fuck the rest, the more the better. Some 'society' it is. The more miserable and poor others are, the better you can exploit them right. How horrible the world would be if those folks stocking shelves in shops or trimming your hair would also have a shot for a decent life.
Middle class is for mediocre suckers, either your are a star (at least from financial perspective, usually the rest of life is very opposite of it) or a loser. Can't say I can respect that system, but as long as I am not part of it nor bombed by its military industrial complex to death I simply don't care. Folks can stay and be part of that system or leave, that part of freedom is still sorta there.
Switzerland got its wealth predominantly by shielding money stolen from around the entire world. I'm glad US ended that carnival of happiness to a large degree in 2009.
Whatever the US did in 2009 doesn't seem to have had any long term effect on Swiss GDP. It dipped in 2009, like everyone else, from the "global financial crisis" but recovered the next year.
Switzerland was already the second richest country in Europe in 1913 despite not having a colonial empire to exploit, ample raw resources or the best geographic location.
Norway is kind of the same, but they made a decision to set up the Norwegian sovereign fund to save and invest that North Sea oil money their counterparts however on the other side of the North Sea, Great Britain decided to spend like a drunken sailors most of the money ended up mostly in the hands of the upper crust of the country. if a country is wealthy and unselfish enough, they can make provisions for society in general.
What is terrible is the fact that our leaders who should think ahead long-term don’t whether it’s Covid or current measles outbreak there are going be a large number of people that will potentially be disabled by the effects of catching either one, and sadly the policy makers who are charged with the responsibility of solving problems, can’t think ahead. Those are just two recent examples, but there are many things in the course of life which can happen to anyone.
Norway's fiscal discipline is certainly the exception that proves the rule. Britain's failure to steward the wealth of its half of the North Sea's bounty provides a good example of that rule.
We have enough medication. People not being able to afford it has little to do with whether or not we have (or could easily make) an excess.
Insulin costs ~3 USD to make per vial. People not being able to afford ~30 USD insulin is not because we have too little medication. It's because there are leeches all over the healthcare system.
And if you genuinely cannot afford it, you should get it for free, as part of a proper healthcare system, which the US famously lacks.
By that logic someone working in a care home is worth less than someone building a gambling app. There's little relationship between salary and what people deserve, it's mostly just luck to have skills that happen to be in short supply.
Does it matter? In the US, we send a sizable portion of our paychecks to the government's Social Security program so it can provide for us in this exact scenario. The government dictated the terms and we upheld our end of the contract on pain of incarceration. Now it's time for the government to uphold their end.
Technically, SS provides for the next generation. We pay into it to the next generation can use that, not the current one. It's a pyramid scheme meant to pay out early and then die. The math doesn't work if the individual expects to retire on it. It's a great scam.
It's not my problem if the math doesn't work, or if my money doesn't pay for me. The contract as presented to me by the government is "You will pay into this system, it provides Social Security to the aged and disabled. If you do not pay into this system, you will be judged guilty of a criminal offense and sentenced accordingly." The specifics of who pays and for what are the government's problem, not mine. Whether or not the government is guilty of fraud or misrepresentation does not affect the terms. I fail to see why I should consider the government free of the obligations they themselves have mandated.
Social security taxes explicitly pay for the current generation of retirees. it's not a pyramid scheme (how would that even make any sense?). The "trust fund" is running out of money but that could easily be solved if we were willing to tax the rich, corporate profits, and capital gains, at higher rates or more aggressively (that is not allowing corporations to escape tax so easily). Or we could continue to fund it at a deficit. But, again, it's not a pyramid scheme. That doesn't make any sense.
I think the person you were responding to meant ponzi scheme, not pyramid scheme. The first sentence from Wikipedia sounds quite similar to SS
> A Ponzi scheme (/ˈpɒnzi/, Italian: [ˈpontsi]) is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors
What a great collection of incorrect right wing talking points!
Look up when benefits began to be paid. The current payments very much and by design pay for the current retirees. The idea that this is some kind of elaborate “scam” when it is one of those things that every other civilized country has figured out is hilarious. Go travel. Go talk to some retirees there. Turn off the Fox News.
> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc.
The able do. The disabled would love to work hard and earn a nice paycheck. It's a privilege to be able to work and be in good health. Hopefully you don't have to learn that the hard way.
> A privilege, really? Who bestows that privilege?
You do
> I am certainly sympathetic to people who are genuinely disabled.
Agreed, and it can be uncomfortable to sort through what's genuine or not. One of my favorite scenes is in the big Lebowski where Walter confronts the other Lebowski claiming he's not a cripple and lifts him out of his wheelchair...Funny and sad all at once.
> That doesn’t mean we have to lie to ourselves that they are being productive by sitting around reading books.
Not asking for anyone to lie to themselves about what they feel is productive, rather giving another perspective to hopefully help people appreciate being able to work.
And yet, the lifestyles of some of the greatest minds were basically taking leisurely walks and reading / writing letters (Einstein). The other day there was Ian Fleming's daily routine - have a walk, sit on the beach, have a drink / dinner, oh and do some writing in between.
People can contribute value AND have a comfortable life. That's the ideal. We (in the west) fought hard to limit how much employers can exploit us, else we'd still be doing 12 hours / 6 days work weeks. And the economy / society didn't collapse.
There is more than enough excess labor that farmers, seamstresses, power plant workers, and everybody else could have more time to have their own self-defined productivity too. The idea that people need to be working nonstop to survive in organized society is nonsense. Labor has been growing in excess since atleast the bronze age, and likely significantly earlier, and in just the last 50 years we have increased productivity 2 orders of magnitude further. Even if we assumed people 20,000 years ago worked 16 hours a day 365 days a year to survive, and that the needs of the people grew 1000x over, we still would have plenty of spare man hours to spread among everybody. The fact that many people now live entirely off capital holdings and others struggle to find work is proof that people should be having far more free time for themselves across the board.
You could only really do that if you walled your country off from the rest of the world. Otherwise there will always be someone willing to outcompete you.
The trouble is that would make your own industries lazy and uncompetitive. Are you willing to accept the decrease in material wealth?
> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc
You could say the same thing about software engineers. But someone spending their days just creating JS frameworks is oh-so-productive and paid enough money every month to buy several years’ worth of food and shelter.
When I was young, to buy a tee shirts for the kids you have to walk like 10 block to visit like 5 shops and compare prices. Let's say 1 or 2 hour and the choices were quite limited and you must keep a mental list of the location and quality of each shop. [The cheap ones may open only at the same time you have to be in the office.]
Now you can go to Mercado Libre (the local version of Amazon) compare prices and see the reviews and buy them in 15 minutes. There are a lot of more choices and the prices are lower (or higher if you like fancy stuff). It arrives home at the afternoon.
Some software engineer has to program it. Does s/he deserve a few bucks for the time s/he saved all of us?
If they are JS frameworks that enable other engineers to build applications that support farms, and banks, and taxi services and insurance companies and mines and factories, etc. then obviously that is productive.
If someone is willingly paying money for their labor then I see little point in questioning the worth of that exchange.
When JS engineers start asking for public money to support them writing JS frameworks that no one wants to pay for, we can revisit this topic.
My point is that, unless you think that the purpose of human existence is to maximise insurance profitability and mining throughput, lifetime earnings potential is not a good proxy for someone’s value to society.
I think it is sad that many of the people that have the largest positive impact on society — teachers, care assistants and the like — are also some of worst paid.
Cost of labor is based on supply and demand not the value created. If there were more engineers capable of creating those JS frameworks than there was demand for they'd get paid way less and whoever was paying them would pocket the difference.
While a "Javascript Framework engineer" is a very neutral example how do you feel about the engineers working on ads, making exploitive predatory video games, gambling apps etc. etc. they can get paid even more yet the net value they create for the society is negative.
You’re assuming supply and demand is logical or efficient but like the stock market it’s often irrational and driven by some C Suite who doesn’t know what he’s doing. FAANG blew billions over hiring software engineers in 2021-2022 and often paid engineers to do effectively nothing for months or years. Despite their very high salaries, these individuals contributed nothing to society in exchange.
Meh. Those are just Making meaningless things that tracks users, hogs computer resourses, showing nonsense social media posts, brainrot contents, changing things constantly to put in their resume at the expense of users. Would prefer if these people did not exists in first place.
I mean, if someone is willing to pay them, why not?
Even hundreds and thousands of years ago, people would put semi transparent rocks onto shiny metal shapes and sell those useless gadgets for a lot of money.
If customers are willing to pay for that, it means that those people made something worth that money.
He was an established prodigy before he needed in-home nursing care. I suspect he’d have been taken care of regardless of access to socialized healthcare.
This has been happening for more than a hundred years now... 90%+ of the people have been farming not that long ago, and mechanized farming equipment has replaced 95%+ of those workers.
This doesn't mean 4 hour workweeks or majority of people not needing to work, but it means that some of you can be social media managers, others can integrate AI chatbots in apps that don't need an AI chatbot, some can rewrite existing software in whatever the language of the week is, etc. Without offloading all that farming to machines, we'd never have what we now consider for "normal" and "must have".
Those few farmers left (2-3% of the workforce, depeding on the country) want to earn money too, so they can buy smartphones, watch netflix and have that smart toilet seats that open automatically and wash your butthole. If all those replaced-by-machines workers don't produce all that, where's the point in farming food for them?
Let’s assume that all human labor goes through the same transition as agriculture: within a single human lifetime, 98% of all the human work is replaced by highly efficient machines and a small minority of highly productive people. If only 2% of the population have the required skills/talents/ownership to remain productive, on what basis does the remaining 98% participate in the economy? The answer has always been: people will invent new ways to be economically productive, but if the agriculture ladder of labor generalizes across the economy - what is left for the average, unexceptional, run-of-the-mill man on the street?
The $20k gig worker, the $100k salaried worker, and the billionaire owner work roughly equally hard. Productivity gains mostly come from better tools, techniques, and leverage, not people working proportionally harder. The question is where those gains go.
If we valued time with friends, helping each other, and making sure everyone can live a vibrant life, we'd spend them on that. If we don't, they go toward status and class distinction.
Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you post this comment?
Exactly. And later the person just insists that even the best of rely on the care of others-- while omitting the fact that the "care" is really the labor of others.
Yes, we must recognize that we're more than the sum total of our job, but it's also important to celebrate the people who work hard to develop a talent and deliver the fruits of this talent.
Billionaires, evidently. Why else would they deserve a million times what you make in your entire lifetime, weren't for the fact they're a million times more productive than you? In fact, if one were to die tomorrow that'd be like the loss to the world of a million of you, whereas were you to do the same, that'd be a loss of only one of you. This is also why you can be downsized without that impacting anything important, while downsizing a single billionaire would be a global tragedy.
Or at least, that's the logical consequence of that line of reasoning. If that's incorrect, where's the error in the reasoning?
Being a billionaire is understood as having a net worth of $1 bi, so we ought to compare the net worth of the median someone at retirement. If that someone are Americans, that's $200k, so 5k times. If it's the world at large, that's roughly $10k,so 100k times. If we consider the billionaires at the top of the ladder, it surpasses 1M times.
Many places around the world, we work for what is needed, not for hitting it big.
But since you ask, also many victims of late stage capitalism explored in modern forms of slavery without work rights, so that richer nations can enjoy cheap electronics and clothing.