Comment by baconandeggs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by baconandeggs | Hacker News Reader

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We live in a planet. A planet that also has other countries.

The reason people in the first world can even produce the thought of wishing for less work is because all of the heavy lifting needed for them to exist was outsourced to third world countries.

The only reason you think you are so productive is because almost all your clothes, technology, medical supplies, house appliances and most of your food was produced outside the US by foreign workers; you had nothing to do with it. IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOUR, YOUR SUPERIOR PRODUCTIVITY, OR ROBOTS.

The US is living off the back of illegal miners in the third world and it tells itself "yeah, we should do less!".

I am not making a point against automation, we clearly need more. But the world is so big and the people so numerous all the automation we have pales in comparison with the needs of us all. That is why the number of people working globally has increased, even with automation, not decreased.

> The reason people in the first world can even produce the thought of wishing for less work is because all of the heavy lifting needed for them to exist was outsourced to third world countries. That is why the number of people working globally has increased, even with automation, not decreased.

It's not because the number of people existing globally has increased? People in poor countries didn't work at all until developed countries started shipping their work overseas? What did they all do then?

Some still don't. Just read the stories about villagers in China being brought in in truckloads to work manufacturing electronics. Not everyone is part of the labor-force, not even today.

> Not everyone is part of the labor-force

That's flat-out untrue. They aren't part of the industrial workforce. Surely they were already doing something back in their village, even if it was low-productivity farm work or manual labor that paid very little. In developing countries everyone works because it's a matter of survival.

> That's flat-out untrue. They aren't part of the industrial workforce. Surely they were already doing something back in their village, even if it was low-productivity farm work or manual labor that paid very little.

Housewives obviously do something they don't stay in bed all day, and what they do is very valuable for society. But they do not directly contribute to the GDP and hence they are not part of the workforce, industrial or otherwise.

Rural "housewives" in the developing world run little businesses or sidelines (cooking, sewing, childcare, midwifery and other medicine, selling produce), and/or work on the farm. They're very much a part of the informal workforce.

This is not true.

I'm talking about worker productivity within the US. Hour for hour we're outputting more and getting paid less. Before overseas labor you weren't less productive because you had to make your own clothes or something. That time had already long passed. I'm talking about what has happened since the 1950s, not the 1850s.

In the US, in the 50s most women weren't in the labor-force. That is about half of the population.

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