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Comment by atomashpolskiy | Hacker News Reader

What these scholars are pushing for eerily resembles good old aristocratic society.

Instead of promoting to consume less (having smaller houses and less clothes, producing less garbage, eating less) they advocate for buying a couple sturdy negroes to do the hard work, while their master can learn to play the piano (and not feel bored/unhappy to cleanup his own shit).

Has the western society already arrived at the point, when there is such an abundance of low-income, unskilled, badly educated people, that the capitalists from Harvard Business School see big potential profits in building a brand new time-saving services industry with all this underutilized labour?

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Yeah. This is pretty much the same problem I had with the book "The 4 Hour Work Week". The ultimate solution in my opinion is to automate crappy jobs out of existence and to set up social safety-nets for the displaced workers so that their quality of life increases.

Crappy jobs still bring some income that can then be spent on consuming, often with the leverage of bank loans, keeping the wheels of the economy spinning. Who could be more striving for buying and consuming than a person who can hardly afford anything?

Right. I'm looking at it not from an economics perspective, but from a humanitarian perspective. As much as possible, we should be trying to eliminate drudgery and misery from the human condition.

I remember watching a documentary about a sulfur mine in southeast Asia. The average life expectancy for miners there was something like 2-5 years. It's crazy to me that anyone would even take that job, but:

A. The miners probably didn't know the life expectancy B. The miners didn't have much of an alternative C. The society viewed (views?) them as expendable

I think this is an excellent illustration of an area where automation needs to be done, but market forces won't encourage it. The labor is just too cheap. But just because the economics doesn't work, it doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.

Economics shouldn't be the only consideration.

I absolutely agree with you. In the above comment I was just speculating on the possible economical/political reasoning behind the lack of automation. In addition to simply being cheaper than automated solutions (in the short run), cheap labour might also be seen by capitalists/governments as an economical agent, that is more preferable for the economy with regards to increasing GDP, than those on welfare, because the former still has some spare money to spend, and welfare covers only the very basic needs. I agree that it's truly awful that in some extreme cases people have to pay with their health/life to be a part of a consumerist society.

Non sequitur. Your whole conclusion is based on an non-existing premise, or one that has little sense.

It's not clear why you think this article suggests precluding a healthy system in which people have the ability to afford time-saving services (in exchange of their service to others, which is arguably a foundation of any sane such system). Moreover, it's not clear what does consumption have anything to do with the point of the article; it seems rather orthogonal.

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