"People Don't Want to Work Anymore" Duh? | Hacker News Reader

"People Don't Want to Work Anymore" Duh?

blog.absurdpirate.com

45 pointsspeckx49 comments

I’m going to take it a step ahead and say no one has ever wanted to work the kind of hours most people work. Left to their own devices people might work 15 hours a week but very few would voluntarily work 40-60 hours per week. It’s always been about it being a necessity for survival.

He talks about that in the article, but people did less work than they do now when all they did was survival. We are working more than people who were at subsistence levels.

I don't think that's true. There are some subsistence societies, blessed with abundant resources and neighbors with no interest in taking them, where people worked less. In many societies people worked more. (And of course, in all premodern societies, it was common to have famines where many of your neighbors would starve to death because they couldn't get enough food no matter how much they worked.)

The type of work people used to do was a lot more varied too. Even specialists would have to do more work than just their speciality

As people have specialized more and more we spend more time on a much more narrowly defined set of tasks

And we spend a lot more time per week doing just those tasks

I think the "work" he talks about was unpaid and enforced. Stuff armed people forced you to do, that took up time you needed for your subsistence farming.

Kind of unrelated but sorry that you are currently unmedicated. I have found that it's nice to take a break of like one day from my medication but, in line with the point of the article, I find life too difficult to handle unmedicated for more than a day at a time.

People don’t want to work anymore, but they keep expecting more from their already debt loaded governments - the free ride has to end at some point.

You actually believe that most people are getting a “free ride”? You’re reducing this to simple laziness?

I don't think that very many people are getting a free ride. I'm sure it happens but it's not common.

I do think there are a lot of people, like the OP, who think people should be. They view the structure of modern society and the lack of free rides as something that "boomer, petite-bourgeoise types" have imposed on us, rather than a reflection of underlying realities.

I think there should be free rides for a lot of circumstances tbh. Like, I want children to be clothed, housed, fed, educated, and exposed to minimal trauma or workplace/economy pressure. I want anyone too disabled to work to also be clothed, housed, fed, educated to the degree possible depending on their disability... I want single moms to not worry about that stuff either... I want 70+ y/o folks to not feel pressured to be in the workforce so they can leave leadership opportunities to younger folks... None of this has to do with some characterization of people that are against those things I just think we disagree

Against what things? The US government spends over 2 trillion dollars each year providing resources to elderly and disabled people through the Social Security and Medicare programs. I don't think "free ride" is exactly the right way to phrase this - we live in a society, we're obligated to take care of those who can't take care of themselves - but basically nobody in the modern US argues that old people should starve if their nest egg isn't big enough. The debates are about precisely how generous the funding should be and what tradeoffs we should make to obtain additional funding that may be required.

> I want single moms to not worry about that stuff either

Uh, that's like 20% of households with children, or 25% of children (plus another 5% are raised by some other guardian, so likely also a welfare situation). That's again where we're getting into unrealistic territory (not to mention the terrible incentive). Across all of your groups, you're basically saying half the population should be taken care of by the other half.

A more pressing issue is why are a quarter of children raised by single parents? Even if they were completely taken care of economically, that's still a disaster.

Oh yes, 60% contribute less than they receive over lifetime. It is a well known fact.

"Free ride" is what big biz and especially big AI are getting, the government reduces their taxes, pays for the bailouts and gets saddled with the debt which is then passed to... those who elect it.

I agree – the freeloaders being the billionaire class.

Actually they just expect people with over a billion dollars to pay a lot more tax. And seeing as those people built so much wealth by raping society and exploiting people and through corruption I'd say it's the least that should happen to them.

The debt the US has is not due to hand outs, but whatever you say.

We produce more than anyone could want. We don't have a debt problem, we have a capital and resource allocations problem. Capitalists jerk themselves off with "capitalism dragged billions out of poverty", but when suddenly the idea of using that capital to provide everyone with basic necessities, you shit yourselves.

Wealth inequality will destroy America. Tax wealth. Tax wealth violently.

each technological advance increases wealth inequality. Problem is not wealth inequality its things getting worse for ppl low on totem pole vs getting better. I am sure ppl wouldnt mind inequlity if things were getting cheaper, healthcare being more accesible ect. Thats what AI promised but never delivered. Nothing has gotten cheaper like predicted.

No, it’s definitely the insane amounts of inequality we have today. The inequality is why there is less money flowing through the economy, why folks with incredible amounts of wealth can buy media outlets and attempt to buy elections to further their interests to hinder attempts to make things cheaper for average people. The inequality gives them their power, it’s the whole point.

Absolutely. Lack of effective enforcement of anti-trust and consumer protection laws are major factors in rising costs of everyday people. Corporations and oligarchs get to do whatever they want and suffer no consequences for it, because Citizens United gives power to those with the most wealth.

There’s a reason why half the country would vote for a democratic socialist now.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/6178694-voters-support...

People don’t mind mild inequality. Some people have more, that’s fine. When it’s extreme it’s a problem. 100% we need to make sure everyone is taken care of before we worry about if someone can have even more money than they will ever need.

There was a demonstration of this asking people to divide a pie representing wealth among various low, middle, and upper classes in a way they felt was fair. The result was uneven, upper classes getting more, lower classes getting less. But when compared, the actual division of wealth as demonstrated using a pie resulted in the richest 10% getting 70% no one thought that a system that resulted in such inequality was fair.

Maybe raising the minimum wage was never a good idea and we should instead consider a wage cap that taxes heavily those that make above some insane figure everyone should be happy with... $10m a year? That seems generous enough for now until someone turns the money printer back on.

You could make it a function of a median income of some sorts.

But think about the poor people with only ten million dollars, how will they face inflation when in ten years their $5 carton of eggs that they don't purchase is $8? :(

I’m a little more nuanced on this. I personally think paradigm shifting changes come from having insane capital and being able to fund those large scale changes (and it’s not just the US. That’s literally how east Asia developed their economy. The analog for very rich people was the state in China and India is basically currently following the same model as the other Asian countries). Only billionaires or very large corporations have that sort of capital. All of that to say we definitely need very rich people in society but at the same time you cannot have one person literally have more wealth than 50% of the country that is insane. There needs to be some limit maybe 100 billion or 200 billion is all you can have or something like that something that literally applies to 10 people

I think we've had quite enough paradigm shifting changes recently to the point that we no longer need financial incentives to keep these changes happening.

Perhaps companies should be required to diversify their set of investors as they grow so that no individual investors have anything approaching a plurality.

Confiscate all billionaire liquidity and distribute it as a dividend today and you get a one-time $$$ payment for every citizen. Liquidate all their assets and you get another $$$ payment, but you've dismantled businesses which have massively raise the standard of living accross the country (next day delivery of goods, ubiquitous home internet) and ended many jobs. You've also dis-incentivized a lot of people future ambitions.

> Liquidate all their assets and you get another $$$ payment, but you've dismantled businesses

How does this follow? Liquidating assets means selling them to a buyer... who can continue to operate the business.

> a buyer... who can continue to operate the business

I considered this route, but if the goal is to reduce wealth inequality, then leaving Amazon intact doesn't make sense. You leave it intact while selling to another wealthy buyer, you just traded Bezos for Bezos 2.

If you leave Amazon intact but nationalize it, giving every American own an equal share of the business, this doesn't give the average American any more control than the stock market does, except the new nationalized entity has government cover for fraud and mismanagement.

> You leave it intact while selling to another wealthy buyer, you just traded Bezos for Bezos 2.

> If you leave Amazon intact but nationalize it

Sure. So leave it intact and sell it to a cooperative owned by the employees. Now you traded Bezos for a healthy incentive-aligned going concern with 1.6 million folks sharing the wealth. And Bezos still has his (one) vote!

Why are you assuming those are the only available options?

The ol' straw man with a side of false choice.

> dis-incentivized a lot of people future ambitions.

Let's assume this is true. It must be compared to how many people's ambitions will have been awoken.

Tax any and all annual income after $5 million annually at 100%. Confiscate all existing wealth from anyone beyond that $5 million per year for each year they filed income taxes. Should they move their wealth offshore, seize it. Elections should be strictly publicly funded.

"if you redistribute in the most inefficient way possible, then things end up not being efficient" no shit sherlock

hell, even your dumbass suggestion isn't even considering second order effects. hundreds of millions suddenly being able to purchase products has a massive positive effect on the economy, more than anything Bezos could provide. It's VAT going in, it's smaller businesses seeing activity and providing more economcal activity in return, VAT that allows you to improve public services, rebuild roads, fix infrastructure, provide daycares and hospitals and social security so people can work.

But you're right, it's not enough: we must also seize land & properties from those owning 10+ to redistribute it, as well as build insane amounts of publicly managed housing to crash rental & purchase prices so people can live.

OMG the swearing on this article. Whatever message the author wanted to convey is lost on me - I could not go beyond the first paragraph.

I have a similar disdain to high levels of unnecessary cursing in something written, like the trend of "The Fucking Weather" style things, but I think this wasn't particularly noticeable. I would stick with it to the end.

Your loss!

I found it refreshing compared to polished corpo speak, and I think it aligns with the message the author wants to convey.

The language used in that article segmented the audience very effectively :)

I also found it refreshing - particularly given the semi lobotomised LLM slop we're seeing most articles written in nowadays. It's nice to see someone's actual tone coming through even if it is peppered with profanity!

Tough fucking luck ?

precisely. precisely. precisely.

the core root of it is private property. abolish it, own nothing and be happy is it. that stupid wef thing that ain't so stupid.

think like a hunter gatherer. but how do we scale sharing? well we don't need Epstein anymore, we have surveillance tech. can we use it so that rich people are brought down and the bottom is lifted up? and that we all cooperate and it's good without it being coercive?

big country problems. in the 50s what I never hear is just how much conformity was coerced. yeah rich were taxed etc.

it comes down to as simple as getting on the bus and offering to drive instead, no questions asked just drive a public bus. or just work spontaneously at a grocery store in the morning. extrapolate that.

also, know when enough is enough. do we really need elaborate superficialities to live?

hunter gatherer hunter gatherer.

we are out here, its hard to adjust a big nation but who knows how far we can push disaster until we get the "blessings"

I became useless, an anonymous nobody with no merit.

might miss the trump admin when it's gone

A bit "edgelord" and really not sure, but I sense schizophrenia too.

truth nuke

Gotta love this one.

More self betterment less work

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