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Sshhh. Noone tell the proles that it's perfectly natural to have a bit of slack where many individuals in complex systems are doing nothing and, far from being a leech on society, it is actually essential to keeping the overall system alive.

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Are the proles in your metaphor also capable of indefinitely suspending half of all their starvation-level resource consumption? Are they doing it as stochastic insurance against a population-level extinction event, which they are capable of recovering from? This is a mind-numbingly poor extension of this article's actual contents.

Probably not. Which is why the rest of the population should fund their (very modest) consumption until they're ready to be productive again rather than force them into some risky low paid job like delivering pizzas on a push bike so they can generate profits for investors who use those profits to heat their swimming pools and cool down their massive houses. Or lately plough into AI planet heating credits.

The population-level extinction event is coming if we don't change course.

I don't follow. You agree these people are nothing like the bacteria in the story... and that's why they should be treated like them? And also you need to relay your dislike heated swimming pools I guess?

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