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Comment by smnrchrds | Hacker News Reader

> very alternative to work requires you to turn your life upside down.

Oh, yes, absolutely. But this is moving the goalpost. The question was not whether one could stop working without having to make changes to their lifestyle. The question was whether one could stop working without literally starving to death. In most developed countries, the answer is yes. No one really starves to death due to poverty in developed nations anymore.

I am not too familiar with the situation with the poverty in the US. Do people there still die from poverty-induced starvation in the 21st century?

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My entire contribution to this thread has been an attempt to move the goalposts :) If the question is “is it possible to stop working without literally starving to death?” the answer is trivially yes, but I don’t think that’s particularly interesting.

Getting thrown in jail will get you fed without working. But most people would consider that an absurd tradeoff. So we pretend it’s not an option, moving the goalposts in order to have a more interesting discussion about how to stop working without upending your life or withdrawing from society.

Seconded. Move the goalposts, because the question without moving them is absurdly uninteresting. I can live a horrible, miserable, shorter life, but it's not a literal death sentence? So, OK, that's better than them taking me out and shooting me, but...

So we concede. smnrchrds wins the point. It's not a point we cared about, though, and we're going to move on to talk about a question we find more interesting: Can a person live a decent life without working?

> Can a person live a decent life without working?

Here is how I read this:

"Can I live a decent life?" - > Can other people make sure I have what I need when and where I need it?

"...without working?" -> ...without me doing anything for them in return?

Sounds awesome. For me.

I'd prefer not to have to keep making the "life or death" argument but people continually bring it up, probably to try to conflate it with the question of "should you be able to live comfortably without working?"

I would argue you can already live a comfortable life with a minimum of work (say 20h per week part time at big city minimum wage, $13/hr). For example, in Chicago you could rent a room with heating and AC, cook your own basic but flavorful meals, have healthcare through Medicaid and basic transportation on the bus/trains, thrift store clothing and a cheap cell phone with data plan for internet.

Welfare is a full time job. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never had to get the right forms filled out, wait hours on end every x weeks at some govt building that takes hours to get to without a car and then fight the bill collectors that buy junk debt to be collected from the poor.

The point of welfare is to make not working so unpleasant that a minimum wage job is less work to hold down.

This is true across the whole developed world, the majority of which I have lived in.

I have been on welfare in the developed world and it wasn’t like that at all - I’m very skeptical that you’ve managed to get significant personal understanding of welfare across even a majority of the developed world. It sounds like you’re not thinking of pensioners, for one, who generally don’t have many recurring forms to fill out.

I was not aware 20 year olds could be pensioners.

I'm not sure how that's relevant.

You are using a welfare system available to under 20% of the population (in the best countries) to argue that the majority have access to a system that is well designed. This is moving the goalposts at best and outright intellectually dishonest at worst.

No, I'm not. The comment about pensioners was a throwaway note at the end of my comment about having been on welfare and knowing that your sweeping claims are simply wrong.

>I am not too familiar with the situation with the poverty in the US. Do people there still die from poverty-induced starvation in the 21st century?

I think the question needs to be a little more nuanced than that. Here are a few resources to get you started:

https://hungerandhealth.feedingamerica.org/understand-food-i...

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/27/912486921/food-insecurity-in-...

https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/food-insecu...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/11/23/hungry-at...

https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/54-million-people-america...

Check out the correlation between poverty and lower life expectancy, and it will become clear that poverty is indeed a death sentence (not to mention its effects on quality of life).

Again, you are absolutely right, but moving the goalpost once more. The lower life expectancy is not due to starvation to death. It is mostly a result of health issues, which is in all likelihood more due to the lack of access to healthcare than food.

> It is mostly a result of health issues, which is in all likelihood more due to the lack of access to healthcare than food.

Is it? What statistics do you have to support that? And do those statistics track poor nutrition due to poverty as a component, or do they just ignore that?

Correlation is not causation, it doesn't really explain anything... I thought that by 2020 at least people on HN get that.

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