Comment by zackmorris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zackmorris | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Well ya. I've found at middle age that I'm most interested in connection and transcendence, finding meaning and such. When one realizes that material things truly are valueless compared to things like consciousness, friendship, love, dignity, etc etc etc, then everything else falls away. I often find myself realizing that I am looking at the world with the same childlike wonder I had when I was 5. To me, this search for meaning was what the 1960s was all about, as well as every other cultural renaissance and era of spiritual awakening.

Which makes the conceptual basis of things like economics suspect. The idea that humans are motivated by monetary rewards and material things turned out to be false. So did concepts like scarcity, reciprocity, commoditization, and so on. Those things worked at one time, up until the middle of the last century and dawn of the information age (where technology surpassed what was required to meet humanity's basic needs), but now actively inhibit human evolution IMHO.

So how to fix the mess we're in? I think it starts with questioning basic assumptions. Sadly, American culture seems to be racing away from that as fast as it can in these times. Dunno about the rest of the world.

> Which makes the conceptual basis of things like economics suspect.

> Dunno about the rest of the world.

If you are poor, then money is the means to have the necessary things for survival.

My opinion is that materialism is something separate from money, but it is often induced by desire for more money.

The only main problem to me with the way money works is that value generation != money generation. So, what I mean is that if you plant food, it doesn't mean that money necessarily exists. And hence money != labour * scarcity if there isn't a way to introduce the money in the first place. This observation is mostly for third world countries, where you have scarce things and a lot of labour, but you don't necessarily have money. The USA suddenly becomes much nicer in your world view when one realises that for the most part money = scarcity * labour does hold there.

Anyway, I would say, don't worry about the USA too much. I don't think the issues you are feeling are due to economic theories, I think it's more due to social circumstances. Culture is something you can build for yourself, you don't have to worry about the rest of your fellow countrymen.

It's just a matter of optimal strategies.

When you're young, take risks, explore, maybe fail on occasion. There's still time to fix all that.

When you're old, go for the more likely reward. If you screw up, that's how it stays, forever.

It's been known for years that oftentimes paying people more for intellectually demanding tasks, leads to decreases in productivity Capitalism and the ideologies surrounding it, fall apart when you start looking at real assets and how the exchanges value of those assets takes a hit during economic down turns. The idea that "humans [were] motivated by monetary rewards and material things" didn't turn out to be false, it's just always been the case that it wasn't true.

There's converse to this however, when you charge a company more they're less inclined to waste your time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com