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Comment by exogeny | Hacker News Reader

He’s being downvoted because it’s a highly sociopathic argument.

Humans also value empathy and compassion as well as mercenary self-fulfillment. Have you never been to, say, a soup kitchen or an animal shelter? I sort of suspect that the poster above hasn’t.

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You can't run a whole economy on altruism --- and the more we transfer wealth from the productive to the unproductive, the closer we get to an altruism economy.

Your bio says you're the leader of a 1,000 person startup: would you expect your employees to show up without getting paid? No? Then how can you call pointing out the consequences of a no-pay economy "sociopathic"? Is it wrong not to want to live in a global soup kitchen?

> You can't run a whole economy on altruism

You don't need altruism. You just need autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Those are incentive enough for meaningful work so long as the worker's basic needs are met.

> so long as the worker's basic needs are met.

So just the one teeny tiny detail of meeting everyone’s basic needs then?

And deciding which things are "needs" and which are "wants". We'll never agree on that, so no level of basic subsidence will ever seem like enough.

I'm not speaking from a position of ideology. I'm describing the world based on a scientific understanding of human motivation.

Sorry if that's incomplete.

I didn’t take your position to be one of ideology (although your position certainly isn’t based on science); I’m pointing out that you responded to the parent’s concerns about meeting everyone’s needs (I.e., “running an economy”) with some stuff about human motivation and the caveat that human motivation will only do the job if basic needs are already met.

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