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Comment by lordlic | Hacker News Reader

> The world has tremendous labor to be done.

Is that so? There's already enough housing for everyone, with more empty houses than homeless people. Hunter-gatherer societies worked half or less as much as we do today, and they didn't have the benefit of industrialization. Production gets more and more efficient, but the workweek never gets shorter. Is this reasonable?

> Billions of people yearn to live the kind of comfortable life Russell lived. That won’t come to pass through idleness.

Idleness is the kind of comfortable life Russell lived. The alternative of working your fingers to the bone for your employer is a tragic waste of human potential.

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> Idleness is the kind of comfortable life Russell lived.

Russell was born into a wealthy British family. He grew up in the household of a former prime minister and inherited an earldom. He was able to enjoy idleness due to the labor of other British (not to mention the labor of Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis who enriched the British empire).

Maybe one day we’ll invent replicators and be able to provide everyone—not only in Britain but in India/Bangladesh/Pakistan—with the comfort of Russell’s idle existence. Until then there is much labor to be done!

Compared with Russell's day, we have those magic replicators. Agricultural technology today is such that one farmer can feed thousands of people. We're off in an asymptote where we gets closer and closer to zero cost for basic needs, but the workweek never gets shorter. Clearly it would be ridiculous if one single farmer were able to support the needs of all of humanity but we still had to work the same as when each pre-industrial farmer only supported about 4 people. So at what point do we start seeing the benefits of this "replicator" (in the limit) technology?

> So at what point do we start seeing the benefits of this "replicator" (in the limit) technology?

When we stop consuming more and more. For the most part I could work a single day work week (at 1/5th of my comfy developer salary) and live a lifestyle better than Russell's, that easily covers all basic needs (including modern ones like internet access) with two exceptions.

The first is the sin taxes (cigarettes and alcohol), these are avoidable but the latter is the sort of thing that makes life worthwhile. These are easy enough for society to eliminate if we want to decrease work hours.

The second is housing costs, this is extremely complicated but suffice to say that we aren't at the optimum of what society can achieve, as evidenced by the fact that we've gone backwards in many ways.

If you minimize pointless consumption, live modestly and as a society eliminate those two problems then an 8 hour work week seems achievable.

This is pure fantasy. GDP per capita in the U.S. is $60,000 annually, with a 40-hour work week. Cut that to 8 hours, and we're looking at $12,000 per year. That's about the level of Tunisia. How much "pointless consumption" can we eliminate so that we can live what an American would consider a comfortable life within $12,000 per year? Does that include things like heroic medical care for end-of-live issues, nursing care for the elderly, etc?

I was speaking from my perspective with a comfy developer salary which would be roughly double that and yes that should be more than enough for a reasonable standard of living.

> Does that include things like heroic medical care for end-of-live issues, nursing care for the elderly, etc?

It seems like a good trade to sacrifice a few low quality years of our waning lives to get 4/5ths of our youthful high quality life back.

Total sin taxes in the US are 60 Billion dollars or so or about 0.3% of our 20 trillion GDP.

0.3% of your 40 hour work week is a little over 7 minutes.

You are significantly overstating the importance of these taxes on your budget.

I'm in Australia not the US and sin taxes aren't spread out evenly, especially with cigarettes (not that this is a bad thing). For perspective $50 a week is a doable food budget for an individual, a pack of 40 cigarettes is $50 and a pint of beer can be more than $10. So a weekly budget can look like Food: $50, Cigarettes: $200, Drinking: $100. And that would be a quiet week.

> Agricultural technology today is such that one farmer can feed thousands of people.

Closer to ~100 people. There are about 1 million farm workers who are U.S. citizens, and another 1-3 million undocumented workers. That's just direct farm labor. Related industries (distribution, restaurants, etc.) employ over 20 million people.

> We're off in an asymptote where we gets closer and closer to zero cost for basic needs, but the workweek never gets shorter.

Except we're nowhere close to that asymptote, especially outside the U.S. Countries like the U.K. use a formula called QALY to ration medical treatment. That's the direct byproduct of scarcity of labor (specifically trained medical labor).

Moreover, a society that starts working less is never going to develop the level of wealth and technology that will make things like replicators and space travel possible.

> Closer to ~100 people.

The number is higher if you account for all the foreigners eating US farm exports.

Only a bit higher, if you also account for all the foreigners growing US agricultural imports.

We then perhaps should talk about bullshit jobs, because it seems to me that a good chunk of the population (and a good chunk of our industry) is working on things of dubious usefulness to the society at large. The most charitable way of viewing this I can come up with is that bullshit jobs are really burning human labor to keep the economic engine from stalling. We ought to be able to do better.

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