> Man, what a weird week. Unless it's on their own terms, it seems nobody wants to work anymore.
It's the only one with any acknowledgement that agreeable terms may actually be needed in order to attract people to work. It doesn't take a PhD to figure this out!
Utah Phillips, one of my favorite storytellers and all-around anarchist and hobo has a line I was reminded of:
That’s when [Fry Pan Jack] told me – you know, he’d been tramping since 1927 -he said, “I told myself in ’27, if I cannot dictate the conditions of my labor, I will henceforth cease to work.” Hah! You don’t have to go to college to figure these things out, no sir! He said, “I learned when I was young that the only true life I had was the life of my brain. But if it’s true the only real life I have is the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition?” Fat chance!
From the track Bum on the Rod off the album The Past Didn't Go Anywhere with Ani DiFranco https://youtu.be/-rw4sd4AuJE
In a similar vein, this poem by Pedro Pietri:
Telephone Booth (number 905 1/2)
woke up this morning
feeling excellent,
picked up the telephone
dialed the number of
my equal opportunity employer
to inform him I will not
be into work today
Are you feeling sick?
the boss asked me
No Sir I replied:
I am feeling too good
to report to work today,
if I feel sick tomorrow
I will come in early
If the reward from working is barely enough to cover the necessities, then there is technically no difference between working as a free citizen, and being forced to work as an indentured servant, other than a vague notion of freedom, which in that case is the freedom to decide between working and living on the streets.
And people don't like being indentured servants. History should have made that clear by now.
People want perspective. In the past, a working man could support a family of five, buy a house, a car and afford vacation once or twice a year, plus save enough to retire comfortably.
Today people, despite burning themselves out in their job, struggle to pay rent in a flat shared with other working people, after loading themselves up with 100k in students debt, and no chance in hell to ever own property of their own.
If the powers that be want people to be willing to work, that work has to pay off.
If it doesn't, well...we're at the beginning of a retirement wave unprecedented in human history. 2 low-birthrate generations to follow. And our entire economic system is designed around constant growth.
I leave doing the math on that as an exercise for the reader.
I think it's important to note that the good old days of a working man being able to support a family of five was only true for a brief period of history in a handful of elite countries. In most of the world, and for most of human history, it hasn't been the case that any single person working 40 hours a week could provide a luxurious lifestyle for a large family. While some lament the loss of this golden age their grandparents experienced, a much greater number of people around the world have seen their living conditions improve markedly since the time of their grandparents.
That doesn't take away from the point that ideally no one should have to work themselves to the bone just to afford a humble lifestyle, but if middle class people in developed countries are really asking for perspective, I think it's worth bearing their relative privilege in mind.
It is funny, people somehow think that a momentary episode of utter economic dominance after all other economic powers had been bombed into dust should be the norm.
And the 50s and 60s weren't that great for e.g. black people or women in the US either.
There were a lot of people working very hard in the 50s and 60s, not having luxurious lifestyles. My grandparents had 6 kids on a farm because they all had to work to make ends meet, and lived in a modest farm house. They grew their own food, and didn't have what some would describe as 'luxury'. My other grandparents had a 1000 square foot home with 5 boys in it. Both parents worked and a vacation consisted of driving 4 hours to a nearby big city once a year, not going to Machu Picchu or the Amalfi Coast.
You talk about the "relative privilege" of middle class people in developed countries as though the cause for their declining standard of living was other people having more, as if their "slice of pie" was being cut in pieces and given away. That's not how economic growth works. When China and India grow, the total productive power of the world economy grows. So now the world ought to be able to support "luxurious" standards of living for more people, but in fact we see fewer people enjoying such lives. So where's the output of all our work going, eh?
All of that is true, even in the US. It is a false narrative that the "middle class is collapsing" in the US
There is a very narrow band, and very specific regions in the US where that is true unfortunately for the the rest of us the people and regions where this is the reality those people hold outsized control over the media, and government so it gives the appearance it is a universal reality. The World Is Becoming a Better Place[1]
Also, wasn't this golden age in the US fueled by concentrated demand for industrial goods after the second world war? Without an unprecedented imbalance in the economy I cannot see this happening.
Some people that hate imperialism also demand it's spoils back (?).
First it was "support a family of five", then "luxurious lifestyle" then "humble lifestyle". Except for the "luxurious" one, it was possible pretty much at any time in human history, including now.
>I think it's important to note that the good old days of a working man being able to support a family of five was only true for a brief period of history in a handful of elite countries. In most of the world, and for most of human history, it hasn't been the case that any single person working 40 hours a week could provide a luxurious lifestyle for a large family.
Keyword "luxurious".
People first and foremost want to be able to have a roof, food, some leisure time, and so on, not luxury.
And people could have a lot of that for more than "a brief period of history in a handful of elite countries". Between common wrong tropes, movies, and ignorance of history, the past is hugely downplayed as to these aspects.
The "industrial revolution" era of Marx and Dickens time, actually worsened (for the first 2 centuries or so) the working conditions and increased the working hours for huge swaths of the population. People had to be forced (via law, violence, and destruction of their prior livelihood) to go work in factories (and many fought hard for keeping their rural way of life).
its also the case that people want different things. Even if all work could be remote, there will still be people that will pay most of their income to live in NYC or SF, because when you are living in those places you are not just paying for a roof over your head. You are getting opportunities professionally and culturally that do not exist elsewhere
> In the past, a working man could support a family of five, buy a house, a car and afford vacation once or twice a year, plus save enough to retire comfortably.
I think this is a bit of a rose-colored rear-view mirror, and to the extent it's true it's a pretty brief period of time historically. Most people in most times had to work pretty hard. If you were a farmer, you worked pretty much all the daylight hours every day. Immigrants in the early part of the 20th century worked very hard, often the man running a small business or doing factory work and the woman cleaning, sewing, cooking, bookkeeping, etc. for hire. And all of that is when the men weren't off fighting a war as a conscripted soldier.
The "working man" who could support a family on his income alone was a product of the post-WWII economy. And he didn't really have to save for retirement, he had a defined-benefit pension (the kind that bankrupted many of their employers in subsequent years).
The fact that today, people can feel pretty picky about the terms of the work they do is a sign that times are pretty good, despite what people may think and say.
> and to the extent it's true it's a pretty brief period of time historically.
That is true, but understandably, people are not thrilled about the prospect of their conditions being worse than those their predecessors experienced.
Especially not if, at the same time, they experience an uninterrupted period of economic growth and ever growing profit margins for the corporations they work for.
this is the problem of believing things are "better".
it's better in terms of people not having to do brutal physical labor.
but it's worse it's ever been in terms of mental labor and mental health. For older folks they may not understand, and we as a society as a whole not understand, how much mental impact growing up with social media and endless amounts of stimulation has an affect on the entire generation. Social media is still incredibly new only several decades old, with every year getting more and more stimulating. We have no idea the consequences of such over a long term impact on mental health.
You may think "just don't go on it" but it's a whole different story for younger kids, when everyone in your peer group is on social media. If your entire social network is dependent on social media, "just don't use social media" becomes incredibly difficult, and you become exposed to algorithms designed to ceaselessly deliver dopamine to your brain.
On top of that work, has become a lot more and more mentally draining vs physically draining, making it way harder to factor how tiring it is. As someone who studied Neuroscience in undergrad, the biggest takeaway for me learning it was Neuroscience is still an extremely new science, and our understanding of the brain is very very limited, funnily enough despite how much advancements we made with ai. So understanding people's mental exhaustion is very difficult to measure.
Endless mental dopamine delivery, combined with rapid technological pace requiring younger individuals to learn more and more, faster and faster,
I argue, that "times are not as good" as people think they say. There is a different kind of pain involved from working long hours in more natural/stable but physically arduous tasks in the fields or whatnot, vs 8 hours in some confined space indoors of having to constantly learn something new of an ever-changing landscape of new technology without stability where you can be rendered useless in a span of a couple years (ie artists and ai image generation). The pain of being in some confined space is not new to the older generation, but it certainly is getting worse because of how faster automation is rendering certain knowledge and jobs useless much faster than it ever did.
I have heard the argument that a negative effect of the post WW2 "feminist" movement (by that I mean women in the work force) has had the long term effect of causing prices to simply adjust to the dual income household, to the point that now it is a necessity. It is a privileged family today that can afford to live comfortably on only one salary.
I think piketty would disagree. Productivity per worker has gone up but the share of profits going to workers has gone down. This is not some kind of inflation driven by scarcity.
Theres another level to this going on in certain places too. Its not enough to have both partners working. Now in places like the bay area if you want to be competitive in the housing market, both partners have to be working high income jobs not just working at all. Even if you have a great title, if your partner doesnt, you will be lapped by people who have vastly more buying power than either of you can ever muster together.
I wonder if this creates some serious perverse incentives in the dating scene in these parts of the country. Like people who understand this economic situation and unfortunately write off what might have been great partners because their line of work will never afford the standards of living their dual high income peers are able to achieve.
Women entering the formal workplace and gradually more and more jobs becoming available to both genders has also inflated traditionally “female” occupations like teachers, nurses, and childcare. When someone who could have trained as a lawyer had to instead become a teacher that kept teacher salaries lower. Nuns serving as teachers made Catholic schools affordable. Now many Catholic schools have a one two punch of the economic opportunity cost of becoming a nun being higher than ever and declining enrollment.
Privileged? I worked very hard to get that point of "privileged" to have had two single-job families. In the beginning I worked at different jobs out of necessity and in part, to see what suited me and what suited the work. I learned many different skills that helped me in my personal life - construction, housebuilding, coding (since 1978), electronics, welding, machining, technical diving, industrial rope access, organizational risk management, and leading large teams on world-class, one-of-a-kind projects. I was raised just below or at the poverty level.
I believe the level of lifestyle you may want precludes you from making a single-income household. I am very content with few things even when the times are good. A hike or walk with the family outside doesn't cost much unless you're shopping and eating out all the time while sipping $5 lattes. Plus childcare would cost a pretty significant chunk of rhe second household income, so why not let one parent be with the kids fulltime?
That would only make sense if productivity divided by half.
On the other hand, people's requirements have simply inflated to much higher standards, while technology semi-automated some of the housekeeping stuff - washing clothes, dishes, making food, heating, cleaning.
I recall a Twitter thread where a lawyer mentions she couldn’t afford the apartment she rented as a law student now that she was an actual lawyer 10-15 years later.
A working man can still support a family of five, buy a house, a car and a vacation once or twice a year. He just needs to be realistic.
House: you can still find houses with plenty of room for ~$100k. It just needs to be in an affordable area: think McKeesport, not San Francisco.
Car: for $5k you can get a 2005 Ford Focus or Honda Civic. They're reliable cars that will get you from A to B perfectly fine, easy to repair and fuel efficient.
Education: a Computer Science degree from WGU costs $18k for the average student, and can be as low as $4k if you accelerate.
Career: plenty of remote software jobs paying above $100k, which can fund a good life in most of the US.
I get it though, the average person wants a nice house in a wealthy area with good schools and low crime and two new cars and gets a degree from a school they can't afford in a field without high paying jobs, and they cannot even code. That's completely their fault, no sympathy from me.
For those people, there's an easy solution: just don't have kids. Kids are crazy expensive, and not required for a good life.
I hope what you say is true- mass retirements followed by a plummeting birthrate. We surely do not need so many people, when the overwhelming majority are useless. Robots will be here soon anyway to replace most of the workforce
> For those people, there's an easy solution: just don't have kids
I think most people have started to notice that this is the actual purpose of all these insane policies against workers in the industrialized world. Every vise imaginable is being used to squeeze young people. From rent and real estate extortion, taxes and tributes, to inflation. Then the solution given to them is "Oh just don't have children. You don't deserve to procreate since you have to keep working for us to be comfortable."
There is another word for the kind of policy being supported by you.
Progress on robotics has been extremely slow. I doubt that we will see a robot that can repair a broken air conditioner in our lifetimes.
But I agree that a lot of the whining is due to expectations that are decoupled from reality. A recent survey of college students showed that they expected to earn an average starting salary of $103K. Most are in for a rude awakening.
>>a working man could support a family of five, buy a house, a car and afford vacation once or twice a year, plus save enough to retire comfortably.
I would say my family history is that of a "working man" that closly fits that narraive..
My grandfather was a WWII vet, after military service was a factory worker that raised 4 kids, in their own home.
Let me eliminate some of that illusory rose tint from your worldview. That home with 2 adults and 4 kids was a 950 square foot 1 bathroom box on .25 acres of land, with no garage, basement, or luxury of any type. my family still owns this property.
In comparison me a single man, lives in a 1300 sqft home.. by myself, with 2 car garage, full basement, etc. My home is considered "basic" by modern standards, some would even consider it below minimum standards for a family of 4...(I bought this home from such a family because they felt it was too small for them)
No builder would ever consider building either my home (which was built in the 60's, nor my grandparents home (built in the early 50's) as today home sizes need to be 1500-2000 square foot, each bedroom needs it own bath, kitchens need to be near professional quality, etc etc etc etc etc.
In short home prices are sky high because buyers would never consider, and probally could not legally, raise 4 kids in a 1 bath 950 sqaure foot home.
We often to not actualy compare apples to apple when we look at the conditions of the past. Sure a man could buy a home for his family in 1950... That home was about 1/2 the size of todays home, and had FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR less amenities and comforts of the modern home
> In short home prices are sky high because buyers would never consider, and probally could not legally, raise 4 kids in a 1 bath 950 sqaure foot home.
I live in a place the same size as you, minus the garage and the land, as a family of 3 so far.
There are plenty of potential homebuyers who would kill for this, and I know of nowhere in the USA that it would be illegal. The problem is that cities limit the number of homes that can be built to ludicrous low density setups like "one house on 2 square acres", and there are enough homebuyers who will pay for the house three times that size with a bathroom per bedroom that the builder doesn't bother to worry about the potential buyers who are not being served and have to move out beyond the edges of public transit to afford anything. And these density limits remain because old people swan around moaning that it's inhumane to build studio apartments when everybody wants a 12 sq acre bathroom, and why are there people in tents on the street?
Obviously this depends entirely on the country and region.
My grandfather immigrated to Australia in 1948, got a job assembling cars at the Ford plant, and worked there until he retired.
My Grandmother never worked. They bought a very nice house, had two boys, never really had any debt, plenty of money in retirement.
A generation later my Dad was earning $10k/year as a teacher, and my mum and dad bought their first very nice home for $30k.
So today how many people earning $100k/year can buy a home for $300k?
(As reference, my partner earns $78k/year and bought a modest home for $480k the month before covid. Now there is not a single home in this small town for less than $600k.)
Here's some perspective. In lower cost areas of the country it's still totally possible for a single worker to support a family of five, buy a house, a car, and afford a vacation. But in that idealized version of the past that you're describing the normal standards of living were much lower. The typical worker's house was small with everyone sharing one bathroom. The car was unreliable and dangerous. The vacation was a road trip to go camping. Now it seems everyone's expectations have risen.
I do agree that demographic changes are going to cause economic problems. That is basically unavoidable now.
A big part of this seems to be the idea that a highly-educated urban professional ought to have a better life than a journeyman plumber in a rural area. The reality is that there is a lot more supply of educated professionals and a lot more demand for city life, so it should not be surprising that wages in formerly-elite jobs are being depressed and cost of living is shooting up. In the meantime, the plumber's economic situation has largely improved with the booming economy and the dwindling supply of plumbers.
If you want a high quality of life today and aren't worth $10+ million, the best way to get it is to get out of a city.
"then there is technically no difference between working as a free citizen, and being forced to work as an indentured servant"
A common fallacy. There are light-years of difference. An indentured servant is bound to serve a particular master. A free worker, even earning only enough for necessities, is still free to decide how to meet those necessities, and who to work for under what terms. That's a lot of freedom. No, of course they will not have as many choices as a rich person. But they are very far from indentured servitude.
For most jobs real wages haven't gone up at all adjusted with inflation. Others have mostly gone down in wages, most specifically service type jobs which are critical for basic needs. When you can't afford to live why bother?
This. I don't understand why this is up for debate. Working hard does not buy a house, a convenient apartment, a promotion to higher income, equity at low prices, a lifestyle where one can find partners and settle down, kids, kids education.
We are talking about the basics, not avocado toast or international vacations.
The juice just ain't worth the squeeze in America any longer.
I would make two observations here. First, costs are up. Not just housing and school, but also cars. Additionally, people are required to have smart phones. Most clothing is of poor quality and will need to be repurchased. Food is of poor quality if it’s cheap and therefore health costs get higher.
Second, in a low interest rate environment, any crazy idea gets funding. This squanders time and resources as many bad ideas get funded which would otherwise be laughed away. The low interest rates also encourage monetary inflation which first pushes up asset class prices, and later filters into retail prices. Wages are always the last segment to see price rises as pressure must be put on businesses to raise the price of labor. Essentially, when a company cannot get employees they will begin raising pay for open positions or they will go out of business. This pressure takes time to build. We see it now in fast food and groceries, and we saw it some time ago in the blue collar trades.
The major fix for this is higher interest rates… significantly higher. People would need to be willing to accept a slower growth rate in exchange for more predictable and more stable long term growth.
It's not up for debate. The ruling class is making it a valid point without offering a solution to the problem. It's a lot easier to whine and complain versus actually tackling the issues at hand.
"If the reward from working is barely enough to cover the necessities, then there is technically no difference between working as a free citizen, and being forced to work as an indentured servant, other than a vague notion of freedom, which in that case is the freedom to decide between working and living on the streets."
What an incredibly privileged perspective. Do you think that actual indentured servants would agree with you on this?
> If the reward from working is barely enough to cover the necessities, then there is technically no difference between working as a free citizen, and being forced to work as an indentured servant, other than a vague notion of freedom, which in that case is the freedom to decide between working and living on the streets.
Slave/indentured servant -> live-in servant -> servant -> service worker -> self-employed service worker (contractor)
At each step along this 'evolution', the beneficiaries of the labour have freed themselves from the burden of supplying some of the resources needed by the worker (shelter, food, holidays, sick pay, health insurance, safety and other equipment, education/training, etc). In theory this has been balanced by increased monetary compensation. When that compensation isn't enough for the worker to meet these needs, what should we expect? That they become indebted?
Likely true. But there are plenty of large businesses that are effectively the same. Larger than a lot of government departments, holding a monopoly-like position in some good/service, can't be killed. These orgs are just as good as government at overpaying people.
IMO the productivity loss is misidentified as a government issue, it's actually a large org issue.
> People want perspective. In the past, a working man could support a family of five, buy a house, a car and afford vacation once or twice a year, plus save enough to retire comfortably.
Maybe during the 1950s, when two (2) World Wars had blasted multiple empires to dust and essentially gutted a generation of workers aka males between the ages of 18-40.
Sure enough the US, still standing after entering the wars late and not seeing huge casualties or direct combat in-country, was positioned to lead a post-war economic boom.
Now it's back to pre-war conditions, which curiously enough, resemble the Guilded Age, and its associated strikes
You’re going to get a bunch of static because of the objectivist leanings of all the “temporarily impoverished tech billionaires” on HN and pg’s rare miss of an essay about the scarce reagents of the United States manufacturing economy during the Cold War.
But you’re fundamentally right. It’s really easy to manipulate indices like the CPI (and oh boy do they have some interesting ideas about what people need in life), and it’s really easy to exploit summary statistics like the arithmetic mean to drag “average standard of living” metrics around with a few categories of goods (mostly consumer electronics) to push the absurd notion that anyone outside the investor class is doing as well as they were 10, 20, 30, 40, … years ago.
The United States burns 45% of its corn and smaller but still ridiculous percentages of its other big agricultural outputs as ethanol at a net disaster on carbon emissions. We let poor and homeless people interact with courts and ERs in vast numbers who need housing assistance, basic medical care, and sometimes substance abuse treatment at (people debate this exact number) somewhere in the hand-wave 10-100x range of a markup. Cops and judges and the amortized cost of lawsuits against police departments and ER doctors and ER nurses and ER equipment have a cost structure closer to a military than cheap, tax-subsidized housing and registered nurses.
The United States has absurd surpluses of arable land, exploitable energy, deep-water harbor capacity, riverine transport capacity, exploitable mineral resources, highly desirable and massively under exploited coastal real estate, you name it, it’s easier to list things that are in any way intrinsically scarce here…Coltan maybe?
The United States is in a position unique in history in which its sovereign debt is denominated in its own currency and that currency is the world’s reserve currency and that sovereign debt is the “risk-free return” r-nought embraced by modern global finance. This means that we can tailor the money supply exactly to the level of productivity that it’s used to represent, which means that being a politician or economic regulator is as easy of a job (if your goal is the public welfare) as it definitionally can be.
The United States is basically the only developed nation with no intrinsic demographic challenges (the ones that are ravaging all the other developed nations) because there is a seeming boundless supply of (statistically) young, law-abiding, productive people who still have kids wanting to immigrate here across a porous land border.
Scarcity or want of really any kind is a very, very, very expensive “luxury” (it’s not quite a Veblen good but it’s certainly conspicuous consumption) that we as a society seem prepared to spend whatever it takes to get.
Once you strip the paint jobs off of either Foucault-style postmodernism or Randian objectivism (a challenge that Noam Chomsky describes as a real feat of linguistic manipulation) you’re left with effectively the same actionable value system of there being 2 kinds of people in this world: for the lefty kleptocrats the individual is robbed of agency and identity because they are the product of constructed forces external to them (I mean, except for us of course), for the righty kleptocrats the individual is robbed of agency and identity because they aren’t smart or motivated enough to invent Reardon Metal and therefore insignificant (I mean, except for us, of course).
The action item that falls out is the same in both cases: drive capture to keep the “right people” running things.
The result is the same in both cases: if you do a halfway honest plot of productivity and genuine standard of living against the decades, you get divergent lines that seem to be training for an Olympic gymnastics qualification.
The most dangerous man in the world isn’t a Navy SEAL or a Zeta, the most dangerous man in the world is a man with nothing to lose, which is why we’re up to 4 mass shootings a day (by Mother Jones’s definition but pick one), which is per-capita more than Syria.
This little brochure is a bit hand-wavy on the math and takes a bit of poetic license, it’s not meant to be the book that someone needs to write about this. So it’ll be a trivial exercise to pick it apart in that god-awful “>”-prefixed bad-faith style, but it’s not going to be a fundamental intellectual or epistemological or ethical error that’s going to motivate people to do so, it’s that this is not a comfortable thing to see in the mirror.
> The action item that falls out is the same in both cases: drive capture to keep the “right people” running things.
This rings true, and seems an insightful point. But I lost the plot in the following:
> The result is the same in both cases: if you do a halfway honest plot of productivity and genuine standard of living against the decades, you get divergent lines that seem to be training for an Olympic gymnastics qualification.
I don't really get how this "result" follows, or what prescription you're hinting at. Are you just saying we're very productive but fail to distribute among the citizens? That seems like a garden variety left talking point, which is a bit.. anti-climactic. Not that I even agree or disagree overmuch, but the tone of your post made me think you were building towards a more heterodox take. Am I missing something?
What is freedom if you are working for a top down authoritarian hierarchy ? Be it legal person or a real one. Do we get to enjoy any democracy at work ?
I mean maybe I have work ethic or am lucky. But I don’t struggle to pay mortgage, buy cars, or go on vacations and I am the sole breadwinner for my family… but I also started programming in 3rd grade in the 90s, didn’t go to college so have no debt, and live a pretty non materialistic punk rock life.
And you happen to be in a field that boomed (several times) during your career and was (and to some degree still is) a quite dynamic environment.
I'm glad it worked out for you (and me) but we must acknowledge that luck is indeed a significant contributor.
Let's imagine that instead of getting into programming you began working odd jobs in a field that is generally low income. Some would make it to the top but most will not move forward despite working hard.
From a personal anecdote I have a close relative who is an incredible hard worker in a job adjecant to elder care. As far as I can tell their work ethic is higher than my own (no time for water cooler talks or "code is compiling") but unless things change drastically they will never make more than minimum wage.
It's fair to say that natural skill plays a big role. Despite best effort they wouldn't be abel to get a programming or othe office job because just finishing their apprenticeship took increadible effort and diligence.
In their mid twenties their parents still support them (a little bit) and being anything close to a sole bread winner is highly unrealistic.
There are economic reasons why some people are paid better but I'd say "pure luck" is a larger portion then most of us would like to admit.
Some people get a yacht and a nice holiday home for their 12 hours shifts and some get to pay their rent.
That's part of it. But yeah, say you got massively unlucky, like a ministroke or a really bad car crash, affecting your ability to bring in cash and that took much of your savings.
Safety nets are needed, and typically are underfunded. With one in place, most people can rebound to their most able.
> but I also started programming in 3rd grade in the 90s, didn’t go to college so have no debt, and live a pretty non materialistic punk rock life.
Likely luck then; would you be in the same place if you didn't happen to be interested in a field that makes big money with no formal education needed?
You could remove all the arcane laws, regulations, and zoning which make constructing new houses ludicrously expensive. Most people would be perfectly happy to live even in a shoddy log cabin built by them and their family if it meant they would could save those hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars they would've spent otherwise to improve their lives in other ways. This alone could be enough to shave decades off the career of the average person.
You could disallow corporate ownership of dwellings of any sort, and heavily tax ownership of more than two homes per family unit.
You could provide significant tax benefits to lifestyles that approach self-sufficiency, such as people in rural areas that grow their own food.
You could mandate a quota of completely remote workers for many industries, encouraging the diffusion of people and opportunities across the country, instead of everyone rushing to expensive cities in hopes of finding work.
It seems like the primary consumer of our money is the artificial lack of housing inventory brought upon by the ability of folks to own more than one property.
I suggest (and have suggested numerous times) that we disallow ownership of property for profit. Create a system that allows people to “buy” property short term through government loan structures that have very low interest rates and allows them to create an equity building mechanism early on. On paper it would have all the benefits of purchase with all of the benefits of leasing as well.
The flood of new available property would absolutely crash our current economy, since it’s so extended on property ownership, but we did it wrong and we need to correct.
The housing market is probably permanently ruined for individual family buyers as long as they are competing with businesses/individuals buying multiple residential properties as investments.
Subsidies or government backed contributions won't be the answer. Universities have a societal function and could conceivable operate without profit in mind, but they still chose to be greedy and act like for-profit businesses once government backed loans became a thing. The government tried to fix access to education by directly injecting cash via students instead of fixing it through the universities. Taking the same approach with home buyers would be a mistake because real estate obviously is meant to be for-profit and acts that way, so they will obviously raise prices as well.
So you'll probably need to fuck over a lot of banks, investors, construction and real estate companies to get housing prices accessible to the wider population and change economic interactions in that market. I wouldn't count on that though - the government will probably choose to fix it through backed loans or subsidies again, if they do anything.
Inflation can be combatted by taxing it out of the economy - the issue is who do we tax. One should always tax the rich first - like robbing banks that's where the money is
The economic system seem to be more than capable of plunging itself into an inflation with stagnating wages already...and still rake in money left right and center.
If you were lucky. Many did not get a pension at all though. And many others had a pension that went bankrupt so they go nothing. The 1980s (starting before then) were reforms on a system that wasn't working well for many.
The gig economy has worn many out... The promise of services like social media, Uber, Political Parties, and airBnB that promised to create wealthy entrepreneurs fell flat on it's face after making the people at the top of the pyramids very wealthy.
I think that social media really tipped the balance of fairness in the working world... With social media, suddenly Trust fund Babies could fake success, and promote schemes that helped them to profit. The Social Media model was set up to raise Trust Funders and Popular individuals far above everyone else, and it killed hopes of upward mobility for people who didn't fall into any fame or wealth category unless they became famous for negative reasons or for ridicule.
It's not that no one wants to work anymore, it's that people are tired of weak work schemes, and being used and then thrown away in order to elevate others. It's not until real opportunity for growth, entrepreneurship, and excellence returns that things will begin to get back to normal.
Talking about is as "Nobody wants to work anymore" is an injustice... Millions of people are working very hard every day on content creation that rivals TV programming and others are regularly posting their best and fully composed and edited work on Internet sites daily, most without any pay in HOPES of being discovered for their work, as proof of that.
I think you've really hit the nail on the head there. People are absolutely happy to work dog hours on something they're passionate about, or something that is meaningful (to the world, or to a company, or anything higher than themselves).
But to take those same people, use them up, and then discard them... it makes them lose hope that their work is meaningful. Why try, when the world tells you repeatedly that it does not need or value you?
The only people I can see being happy with this arrangement might be more libertarian minded, where the goal was never outside the scope of their own self betterment.
If someone isn’t successful in making money on that work, though, it means it isn’t very good. I know it’s not a 1:1 result, but in reality, if you put in the hours and you make things people want, you will be successful.
The problem is everyone who works on something they’re passionate about (even if they suck at it) thinks they ought to be compensated, even if their contributions amount to exactly Jack shit.
Meanwhile, I do decent carpentry on the side and am hit up _regularly_ for it, simply because I’m willing to show up. And I make as much per hour as I do in my day job.
The work is out there to be passionate and make things and be successful, but you 1) have to show up and work and 2) have to not suck at it.
You can be a baker and make the best cakes in the world, but if your shop is located in the wrong place (like a dark alley with no foot traffic) where no one knows it exists, your business can fail if you don't also learn marketing, and possibly move to a better positioned (but more expensive of course) spot. A better spot, and marketing lessons though, are hinged on having the money to make that happen... Many people can't pay for advancement because they aren't profiting off of their work to fund expansion and growth.
The ideal that people don't succeed because of the quality of their work is a fallacy... Many people who do succeed who have a shoddy/marginal history of work is also yet another example of why that ideal is not accurate.
>if you put in the hours and you make things people want, you will be successful.
What thing does a landlord make? What are the hours on the job of owning dividend-paying securities? Being successful in this economy has literally nothing to do with "making things people want" and "putting in the hours".
I don't think that's true. Think about musicians -- someone can create incredible music and never make enough to support themselves, it happens all the time. Same with visual art. It has much less to do with quality and more to do with social trends, having a certain "look" or identity, etc. Sure, hard work and not sucking are the prerequisites, but they aren't enough on their own.
I disagree with your premise - just because someone doesn’t make money on their work doesn’t mean it’s not good. We live in a capitalistic society, where the laws of supply and demand rule.
You’re able to make good money in carpentry by simply showing up, because there aren’t many carpenters left. Just like my cousin is able to do the same with landscaping. It’s all work fewer people are doing.
Other friends of mine, some of the most talented and hardworking people I know, have tried their stints on broadway, television, journalism, etc. and are struggling massively. Is it because they aren’t good? Of course not. It’s because there are 1,000 people lined up behind them who are just as good. And there’s another 1,000 behind that group who aren’t quite as good but are willing to do it for poverty wages.
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
Always wondered if it was an actual Ancient Time quote.
Doesn't seem like it :
> It was crafted by a student, Kenneth John Freeman, for his Cambridge dissertation published in 1907. Freeman did not claim that the passage under analysis was a direct quotation of anyone; instead, he was presenting his own summary of the complaints directed against young people in ancient times.
This is of course the famous quote from Socrates, and I absolutely hate this "argument". "Socrates was wrong in 400BC and it's wrong today" is one possible scenario, but it's also entirely possible that:
- Socrates was right in 400BC.
- at multiple points in 2,400 years there was a problem with "kids these days".
- Socrates was wrong in 400BC, but it's fair today or at other points in history.
It's just a complete non-argument.
Edit: and according to a sibling comment it's not even a genuine quote, but that doesn't matter: it's a non-argument whether it's a genuine quote or not.
The same applies to this "list", which is not a "long history" but just 19 quotes from the last 19 years from random people. Maybe some had a point and some didn't? Maybe none did? Maybe all did? That 19 people about of several hundred million complained about something (fairly or unfairly) in the last 19 years is just a non-argument.
If you can find reliable evidence across time, space and cultures that humans have complained about the same X, then complaining about X is part of human nature in, at least, cultures that leave durable evidence.
Definitely not a non-argument. Its a circumstancial argument, that does not prove a whole lot, but its perfect against a unsubstantiated claim like the one its used against. It doesnt even have to have happened to be a good argument, because the counterparty does not give any facts either. Just a hollow statement. I love the Monty Python sketch on this subject:
https://youtu.be/VKHFZBUTA4k
The perennial nature of “kids these days” being insolent and otherwise generally poorly disciplined is that discipline is something to be cultivated within and not imposed from without. As a result, children who lack years of practice in discipline are not particularly well behaved. Adults tend to forget their childhoods, remembering only bits and pieces. In truth, every child was scolded for his/her bad behavior, and each generation tends to have the same bad behavior as the one before it. If each generation of kids were perfectly well behaved there’d be no need for raising, and there’d be no statements from old people such as “children are to be seen and not heard” or as “do not speak unless spoken to” or even as “get your elbows off the table”. That such statements are uttered and remembered by multiple generations proves that kids have made roughly the same “mistakes” over the course of those selfsame generations.
What if people have always been complaining about this because it was always a problem that popped up and neede to be handled. Maybe any change in society meant parents can't use the same techniques to raise their children, and neede to evolve.
Overall, not sure how a complain popping up all the time means it's invalid. People have always complained about injustice, and it's not like that's ever gone away entirely.
My theory is that this is all true, and it’s fantastic. Generally, over the last century, in year X, nobody wants to work anymore compared to year Y (Y < X).
This is a success of social democracy and it is a success of technology. We can afford to have people work less hard and still be richer than we ever were. It’s the success story of western progress and the rest of the world is going through the same steps as we speak. That a few old-fashioned managers are surprised they can’t get people at the same bad terms as before is just a symptom of a very positive development.
It might also be due to demographics in Western countries. If the ratio of workers to total population decreases while the demand for work remains the same, there will be less competition for jobs and workers will be able to demand higher pay. It also depends on how many can be replaced by machines.
Correction: It's the success story of western progress at the expense of the rest of the world, which must find its own way because we've ripped up the steps.
FWIW, we haven't just ripped up the steps, we're actively standing at the top pointing a gun down.
Do you know why Switzerland exports the 2nd most processed coffee of any country in the world [1] while Ethiopia (where coffee was "invented" remains extremely poor, only exporting raw beans? Because the IMF and World Bank would send them back to the dark ages if they attempted to do anything different.
Working in most jobs sucks. Some people are lucky to have jobs they love, but that's the minority. I know that to be the prevalent sentiment even in top notch, AAA, "I can't believe they pay me to do this" companies such as Google, Apple etc.
If people had, for the sake of a thought experiment, a guaranteed 20K/month income and free healthcare no matter what they do with their life, it's very unlikely they will choose to work on regular jobs. They will instead generally pursue arts/crafts (including the craft of building computer programs in areas they are interested in), learning, exercise etc.
> They will instead generally pursue arts/crafts (including the craft of building computer programs in areas they are interested in), learning, exercise etc.
I always hear this argument about UBI and it almost sounds too good to be true. Like utopian. And I wonder what segment of population will actually become artists and craftsmen with renewed sense of purpose and fulfillment vs. the folks that will accelerate even further into melancholy and feelings of deep meaninglessness.
Didn’t we have this experiment during Covid where many people found themselves being paid, sometimes for 2 years, to just wait till their job comes back? I don’t think many became artists (surely, some did). But there were also a lot of stories of increased depression, addiction, and despair.
I’m not saying it’s better to do a bullshit job that getting paid to do nothing. I’m just saying it doesn’t seem to be as simple.
As a long-time software engineer and related positions. When covid started it felt as if the world said "We worked enough we need a collective time off"
Agreed. I will never work a job with a >10 minute commute another day in my life. On top of the time lost, you don’t even get paid for it. It costs you time and money to go to work.
Yes, the commute removal definitely added a new perspective to many people who have been working in offices for many years.
I ended up renting a small office near my house because working and being in the same place without any change felt dismal.
The mental and financial toll of long commutes was (and still is, to a reduced extent) consistently underestimated. Doubly so if that commute is driven, where one must remain focused on driving and deal with associated frustrations the whole time.
> School, homework, part-time job, college, study, full-time job... it never ends. For many of us, covid is the first taste of freedom we ever got. It was eye-opening and delivered some serious perspective.
Don't you have vacations? A whole month away from work or school every year should have given people that same perspective.
I think people do want to work when they can enjoy and feel pride for the fruits of their labor. But often the fruits of labor in our economic system either don't pay the bills, aren't worthy of pride, or are almost entirely enjoyed by someone else in exchange for a small wage.
I think the spirit of the original comment is people don't want to do enforced work at someone else's behest in order to live. I agree a lot of people would choose to do some kind of work voluntarily even if they didn't have to. Many people on here are probably coders. They may grudgingly drag themselves out of bed to go and code whatever their boss says in their day job, but then go home and code whatever they want to code purely for the joy of building something. It's not that people don't want to do work, they just don't want to do work someone else prescribes. Sometimes prescribed work and work you want to do intersect, then great, but often that is not the case.
It comes down to how you define "work". People seem to want to put a lot of energy into doing stuff, sometimes stuff which is very hard labor or mentally challenging. The key is that they are most happy and willing to do this when they have a passion or a goal.
But when the "work" you are being asked to do seems pointless, or it seems like the vast majority of the benefit of your work is going to people who are already wealthy and powerful, there's much less motivation.
One of the most demotivating things is seeing your work thrown away. In the software world, we experience this often. Sometimes you can even finish a big project, really being proud at having built something great, but then something will change and render that product pointless (at least based on the current business plan).
After a few situations like that, one becomes more cautious. Performing heavy tasks on the whim of leader is less attractive.
im likely being too pedantic here so apologies up front if this is the case. if by “work” you mean, sacrificing your own dreams to make a boss’ dreams come true, then we’re probably on the same page. but if by “work” you mean, doing yard work, passion projects, etc… i’m not sure i agree. my parents are heading into retirement in a few years and i’m deeply concerned they won’t know what to do with themselves without work keeping them occupied. they’re both extremely lucky in that they immensely enjoy and are passionate about their work, tho.
even in my free time i have so many projects that take work but i absolutely love them.
i just wanted to chime in that people feel genuinely energized by work if it’s something they care about, something that matters to them, feeds their soul or whatever phrase you prefer. again, sorry to be the obnoxious pedant.
The term "work" may not be sufficiently precise. And that's how "Nobody wants to work" can be both simultaneously true and false at the same time, depending on what is meant by "work".
To say "Nobody wants to to engage in drudgery anymore" is true and always has been. To say "Nobody wants to be employed at a job that's meaningful and rewarding" is false (for most people at least; there may be exceptions).
I think this depends on what your definition of “work” is. I’m going to assume the poster you’re replying to means your typical office, service, or labor job - most of which are as you said, meaningless, consuming or alienating.
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> Man, what a weird week. Unless it's on their own terms, it seems nobody wants to work anymore.
It's the only one with any acknowledgement that agreeable terms may actually be needed in order to attract people to work. It doesn't take a PhD to figure this out!
Utah Phillips, one of my favorite storytellers and all-around anarchist and hobo has a line I was reminded of:
That’s when [Fry Pan Jack] told me – you know, he’d been tramping since 1927 -he said, “I told myself in ’27, if I cannot dictate the conditions of my labor, I will henceforth cease to work.” Hah! You don’t have to go to college to figure these things out, no sir! He said, “I learned when I was young that the only true life I had was the life of my brain. But if it’s true the only real life I have is the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition?” Fat chance!
From the track Bum on the Rod off the album The Past Didn't Go Anywhere with Ani DiFranco https://youtu.be/-rw4sd4AuJE
woke up this morning feeling excellent, picked up the telephone dialed the number of my equal opportunity employer to inform him I will not be into work today Are you feeling sick? the boss asked me No Sir I replied: I am feeling too good to report to work today, if I feel sick tomorrow I will come in early
aka the Law of Supply & Demand.
If the reward from working is barely enough to cover the necessities, then there is technically no difference between working as a free citizen, and being forced to work as an indentured servant, other than a vague notion of freedom, which in that case is the freedom to decide between working and living on the streets.
And people don't like being indentured servants. History should have made that clear by now.
People want perspective. In the past, a working man could support a family of five, buy a house, a car and afford vacation once or twice a year, plus save enough to retire comfortably.
Today people, despite burning themselves out in their job, struggle to pay rent in a flat shared with other working people, after loading themselves up with 100k in students debt, and no chance in hell to ever own property of their own.
If the powers that be want people to be willing to work, that work has to pay off.
If it doesn't, well...we're at the beginning of a retirement wave unprecedented in human history. 2 low-birthrate generations to follow. And our entire economic system is designed around constant growth.
I leave doing the math on that as an exercise for the reader.
That doesn't take away from the point that ideally no one should have to work themselves to the bone just to afford a humble lifestyle, but if middle class people in developed countries are really asking for perspective, I think it's worth bearing their relative privilege in mind.
And the 50s and 60s weren't that great for e.g. black people or women in the US either.
There is a very narrow band, and very specific regions in the US where that is true unfortunately for the the rest of us the people and regions where this is the reality those people hold outsized control over the media, and government so it gives the appearance it is a universal reality. The World Is Becoming a Better Place[1]
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J5s6aZCPSg
Also, wasn't this golden age in the US fueled by concentrated demand for industrial goods after the second world war? Without an unprecedented imbalance in the economy I cannot see this happening.
Some people that hate imperialism also demand it's spoils back (?).
Keyword "luxurious".
People first and foremost want to be able to have a roof, food, some leisure time, and so on, not luxury.
And people could have a lot of that for more than "a brief period of history in a handful of elite countries". Between common wrong tropes, movies, and ignorance of history, the past is hugely downplayed as to these aspects.
The "industrial revolution" era of Marx and Dickens time, actually worsened (for the first 2 centuries or so) the working conditions and increased the working hours for huge swaths of the population. People had to be forced (via law, violence, and destruction of their prior livelihood) to go work in factories (and many fought hard for keeping their rural way of life).
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BUT
I would point out the wealth distribution in our economy.
If it was more equable would this luxurious lifestyle for all still be possible ?
I think this is a bit of a rose-colored rear-view mirror, and to the extent it's true it's a pretty brief period of time historically. Most people in most times had to work pretty hard. If you were a farmer, you worked pretty much all the daylight hours every day. Immigrants in the early part of the 20th century worked very hard, often the man running a small business or doing factory work and the woman cleaning, sewing, cooking, bookkeeping, etc. for hire. And all of that is when the men weren't off fighting a war as a conscripted soldier.
The "working man" who could support a family on his income alone was a product of the post-WWII economy. And he didn't really have to save for retirement, he had a defined-benefit pension (the kind that bankrupted many of their employers in subsequent years).
The fact that today, people can feel pretty picky about the terms of the work they do is a sign that times are pretty good, despite what people may think and say.
That is true, but understandably, people are not thrilled about the prospect of their conditions being worse than those their predecessors experienced.
Especially not if, at the same time, they experience an uninterrupted period of economic growth and ever growing profit margins for the corporations they work for.
it's better in terms of people not having to do brutal physical labor.
but it's worse it's ever been in terms of mental labor and mental health. For older folks they may not understand, and we as a society as a whole not understand, how much mental impact growing up with social media and endless amounts of stimulation has an affect on the entire generation. Social media is still incredibly new only several decades old, with every year getting more and more stimulating. We have no idea the consequences of such over a long term impact on mental health.
You may think "just don't go on it" but it's a whole different story for younger kids, when everyone in your peer group is on social media. If your entire social network is dependent on social media, "just don't use social media" becomes incredibly difficult, and you become exposed to algorithms designed to ceaselessly deliver dopamine to your brain.
On top of that work, has become a lot more and more mentally draining vs physically draining, making it way harder to factor how tiring it is. As someone who studied Neuroscience in undergrad, the biggest takeaway for me learning it was Neuroscience is still an extremely new science, and our understanding of the brain is very very limited, funnily enough despite how much advancements we made with ai. So understanding people's mental exhaustion is very difficult to measure.
Endless mental dopamine delivery, combined with rapid technological pace requiring younger individuals to learn more and more, faster and faster,
I argue, that "times are not as good" as people think they say. There is a different kind of pain involved from working long hours in more natural/stable but physically arduous tasks in the fields or whatnot, vs 8 hours in some confined space indoors of having to constantly learn something new of an ever-changing landscape of new technology without stability where you can be rendered useless in a span of a couple years (ie artists and ai image generation). The pain of being in some confined space is not new to the older generation, but it certainly is getting worse because of how faster automation is rendering certain knowledge and jobs useless much faster than it ever did.
I wonder if this creates some serious perverse incentives in the dating scene in these parts of the country. Like people who understand this economic situation and unfortunately write off what might have been great partners because their line of work will never afford the standards of living their dual high income peers are able to achieve.
We know that it isn't. Productivity of the workforce is ever increasing. The generated wealth simply doesn't make it to the workforce.
I believe the level of lifestyle you may want precludes you from making a single-income household. I am very content with few things even when the times are good. A hike or walk with the family outside doesn't cost much unless you're shopping and eating out all the time while sipping $5 lattes. Plus childcare would cost a pretty significant chunk of rhe second household income, so why not let one parent be with the kids fulltime?
On the other hand, people's requirements have simply inflated to much higher standards, while technology semi-automated some of the housekeeping stuff - washing clothes, dishes, making food, heating, cleaning.
https://www.amazon.com/Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Parents-...
House: you can still find houses with plenty of room for ~$100k. It just needs to be in an affordable area: think McKeesport, not San Francisco.
Car: for $5k you can get a 2005 Ford Focus or Honda Civic. They're reliable cars that will get you from A to B perfectly fine, easy to repair and fuel efficient.
Education: a Computer Science degree from WGU costs $18k for the average student, and can be as low as $4k if you accelerate.
Career: plenty of remote software jobs paying above $100k, which can fund a good life in most of the US.
I get it though, the average person wants a nice house in a wealthy area with good schools and low crime and two new cars and gets a degree from a school they can't afford in a field without high paying jobs, and they cannot even code. That's completely their fault, no sympathy from me.
For those people, there's an easy solution: just don't have kids. Kids are crazy expensive, and not required for a good life.
I hope what you say is true- mass retirements followed by a plummeting birthrate. We surely do not need so many people, when the overwhelming majority are useless. Robots will be here soon anyway to replace most of the workforce
I think most people have started to notice that this is the actual purpose of all these insane policies against workers in the industrialized world. Every vise imaginable is being used to squeeze young people. From rent and real estate extortion, taxes and tributes, to inflation. Then the solution given to them is "Oh just don't have children. You don't deserve to procreate since you have to keep working for us to be comfortable."
There is another word for the kind of policy being supported by you.
But I agree that a lot of the whining is due to expectations that are decoupled from reality. A recent survey of college students showed that they expected to earn an average starting salary of $103K. Most are in for a rude awakening.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2022/05...
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I would say my family history is that of a "working man" that closly fits that narraive..
My grandfather was a WWII vet, after military service was a factory worker that raised 4 kids, in their own home.
Let me eliminate some of that illusory rose tint from your worldview. That home with 2 adults and 4 kids was a 950 square foot 1 bathroom box on .25 acres of land, with no garage, basement, or luxury of any type. my family still owns this property.
In comparison me a single man, lives in a 1300 sqft home.. by myself, with 2 car garage, full basement, etc. My home is considered "basic" by modern standards, some would even consider it below minimum standards for a family of 4...(I bought this home from such a family because they felt it was too small for them)
No builder would ever consider building either my home (which was built in the 60's, nor my grandparents home (built in the early 50's) as today home sizes need to be 1500-2000 square foot, each bedroom needs it own bath, kitchens need to be near professional quality, etc etc etc etc etc.
In short home prices are sky high because buyers would never consider, and probally could not legally, raise 4 kids in a 1 bath 950 sqaure foot home.
We often to not actualy compare apples to apple when we look at the conditions of the past. Sure a man could buy a home for his family in 1950... That home was about 1/2 the size of todays home, and had FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR less amenities and comforts of the modern home
I live in a place the same size as you, minus the garage and the land, as a family of 3 so far.
There are plenty of potential homebuyers who would kill for this, and I know of nowhere in the USA that it would be illegal. The problem is that cities limit the number of homes that can be built to ludicrous low density setups like "one house on 2 square acres", and there are enough homebuyers who will pay for the house three times that size with a bathroom per bedroom that the builder doesn't bother to worry about the potential buyers who are not being served and have to move out beyond the edges of public transit to afford anything. And these density limits remain because old people swan around moaning that it's inhumane to build studio apartments when everybody wants a 12 sq acre bathroom, and why are there people in tents on the street?
My grandfather immigrated to Australia in 1948, got a job assembling cars at the Ford plant, and worked there until he retired.
My Grandmother never worked. They bought a very nice house, had two boys, never really had any debt, plenty of money in retirement.
A generation later my Dad was earning $10k/year as a teacher, and my mum and dad bought their first very nice home for $30k.
So today how many people earning $100k/year can buy a home for $300k?
(As reference, my partner earns $78k/year and bought a modest home for $480k the month before covid. Now there is not a single home in this small town for less than $600k.)
I do agree that demographic changes are going to cause economic problems. That is basically unavoidable now.
If you want a high quality of life today and aren't worth $10+ million, the best way to get it is to get out of a city.
A common fallacy. There are light-years of difference. An indentured servant is bound to serve a particular master. A free worker, even earning only enough for necessities, is still free to decide how to meet those necessities, and who to work for under what terms. That's a lot of freedom. No, of course they will not have as many choices as a rich person. But they are very far from indentured servitude.
History has also made it clear that people can be made to endure living conditions they don't like or a very long time.
I submit that, historically, life for the common people was far, far more often barely tolerable or even intolerable, than agreeable.
We like to hear about peasant and slave revolts in history classes, but overall those were few and far between.
We are talking about the basics, not avocado toast or international vacations.
The juice just ain't worth the squeeze in America any longer.
Second, in a low interest rate environment, any crazy idea gets funding. This squanders time and resources as many bad ideas get funded which would otherwise be laughed away. The low interest rates also encourage monetary inflation which first pushes up asset class prices, and later filters into retail prices. Wages are always the last segment to see price rises as pressure must be put on businesses to raise the price of labor. Essentially, when a company cannot get employees they will begin raising pay for open positions or they will go out of business. This pressure takes time to build. We see it now in fast food and groceries, and we saw it some time ago in the blue collar trades.
The major fix for this is higher interest rates… significantly higher. People would need to be willing to accept a slower growth rate in exchange for more predictable and more stable long term growth.
What an incredibly privileged perspective. Do you think that actual indentured servants would agree with you on this?
Slave/indentured servant -> live-in servant -> servant -> service worker -> self-employed service worker (contractor)
At each step along this 'evolution', the beneficiaries of the labour have freed themselves from the burden of supplying some of the resources needed by the worker (shelter, food, holidays, sick pay, health insurance, safety and other equipment, education/training, etc). In theory this has been balanced by increased monetary compensation. When that compensation isn't enough for the worker to meet these needs, what should we expect? That they become indebted?
The government has grown enormously in my lifetime, sucking up much (most?) of the productivity increases.
IMO the productivity loss is misidentified as a government issue, it's actually a large org issue.
Maybe during the 1950s, when two (2) World Wars had blasted multiple empires to dust and essentially gutted a generation of workers aka males between the ages of 18-40.
Sure enough the US, still standing after entering the wars late and not seeing huge casualties or direct combat in-country, was positioned to lead a post-war economic boom.
Now it's back to pre-war conditions, which curiously enough, resemble the Guilded Age, and its associated strikes
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Because I can't help but note that in North America that there were plenty of people who couldn't do so but were of the "undesirable classes"....
And the reason those who could afford such were able was because they were effectively standing on the backs of those "less privileged".
Afaict, even when it's not racial such things still existed in most places at the time.
But you’re fundamentally right. It’s really easy to manipulate indices like the CPI (and oh boy do they have some interesting ideas about what people need in life), and it’s really easy to exploit summary statistics like the arithmetic mean to drag “average standard of living” metrics around with a few categories of goods (mostly consumer electronics) to push the absurd notion that anyone outside the investor class is doing as well as they were 10, 20, 30, 40, … years ago.
The United States burns 45% of its corn and smaller but still ridiculous percentages of its other big agricultural outputs as ethanol at a net disaster on carbon emissions. We let poor and homeless people interact with courts and ERs in vast numbers who need housing assistance, basic medical care, and sometimes substance abuse treatment at (people debate this exact number) somewhere in the hand-wave 10-100x range of a markup. Cops and judges and the amortized cost of lawsuits against police departments and ER doctors and ER nurses and ER equipment have a cost structure closer to a military than cheap, tax-subsidized housing and registered nurses.
The United States has absurd surpluses of arable land, exploitable energy, deep-water harbor capacity, riverine transport capacity, exploitable mineral resources, highly desirable and massively under exploited coastal real estate, you name it, it’s easier to list things that are in any way intrinsically scarce here…Coltan maybe?
The United States is in a position unique in history in which its sovereign debt is denominated in its own currency and that currency is the world’s reserve currency and that sovereign debt is the “risk-free return” r-nought embraced by modern global finance. This means that we can tailor the money supply exactly to the level of productivity that it’s used to represent, which means that being a politician or economic regulator is as easy of a job (if your goal is the public welfare) as it definitionally can be.
The United States is basically the only developed nation with no intrinsic demographic challenges (the ones that are ravaging all the other developed nations) because there is a seeming boundless supply of (statistically) young, law-abiding, productive people who still have kids wanting to immigrate here across a porous land border.
Scarcity or want of really any kind is a very, very, very expensive “luxury” (it’s not quite a Veblen good but it’s certainly conspicuous consumption) that we as a society seem prepared to spend whatever it takes to get.
Once you strip the paint jobs off of either Foucault-style postmodernism or Randian objectivism (a challenge that Noam Chomsky describes as a real feat of linguistic manipulation) you’re left with effectively the same actionable value system of there being 2 kinds of people in this world: for the lefty kleptocrats the individual is robbed of agency and identity because they are the product of constructed forces external to them (I mean, except for us of course), for the righty kleptocrats the individual is robbed of agency and identity because they aren’t smart or motivated enough to invent Reardon Metal and therefore insignificant (I mean, except for us, of course).
The action item that falls out is the same in both cases: drive capture to keep the “right people” running things.
The result is the same in both cases: if you do a halfway honest plot of productivity and genuine standard of living against the decades, you get divergent lines that seem to be training for an Olympic gymnastics qualification.
The most dangerous man in the world isn’t a Navy SEAL or a Zeta, the most dangerous man in the world is a man with nothing to lose, which is why we’re up to 4 mass shootings a day (by Mother Jones’s definition but pick one), which is per-capita more than Syria.
This little brochure is a bit hand-wavy on the math and takes a bit of poetic license, it’s not meant to be the book that someone needs to write about this. So it’ll be a trivial exercise to pick it apart in that god-awful “>”-prefixed bad-faith style, but it’s not going to be a fundamental intellectual or epistemological or ethical error that’s going to motivate people to do so, it’s that this is not a comfortable thing to see in the mirror.
> The action item that falls out is the same in both cases: drive capture to keep the “right people” running things.
This rings true, and seems an insightful point. But I lost the plot in the following:
> The result is the same in both cases: if you do a halfway honest plot of productivity and genuine standard of living against the decades, you get divergent lines that seem to be training for an Olympic gymnastics qualification.
I don't really get how this "result" follows, or what prescription you're hinting at. Are you just saying we're very productive but fail to distribute among the citizens? That seems like a garden variety left talking point, which is a bit.. anti-climactic. Not that I even agree or disagree overmuch, but the tone of your post made me think you were building towards a more heterodox take. Am I missing something?
Dead Comment
I'm glad it worked out for you (and me) but we must acknowledge that luck is indeed a significant contributor.
Let's imagine that instead of getting into programming you began working odd jobs in a field that is generally low income. Some would make it to the top but most will not move forward despite working hard.
From a personal anecdote I have a close relative who is an incredible hard worker in a job adjecant to elder care. As far as I can tell their work ethic is higher than my own (no time for water cooler talks or "code is compiling") but unless things change drastically they will never make more than minimum wage.
It's fair to say that natural skill plays a big role. Despite best effort they wouldn't be abel to get a programming or othe office job because just finishing their apprenticeship took increadible effort and diligence.
In their mid twenties their parents still support them (a little bit) and being anything close to a sole bread winner is highly unrealistic.
There are economic reasons why some people are paid better but I'd say "pure luck" is a larger portion then most of us would like to admit.
Some people get a yacht and a nice holiday home for their 12 hours shifts and some get to pay their rent.
Safety nets are needed, and typically are underfunded. With one in place, most people can rebound to their most able.
Likely luck then; would you be in the same place if you didn't happen to be interested in a field that makes big money with no formal education needed?
Dead Comment
You could disallow corporate ownership of dwellings of any sort, and heavily tax ownership of more than two homes per family unit.
You could provide significant tax benefits to lifestyles that approach self-sufficiency, such as people in rural areas that grow their own food.
You could mandate a quota of completely remote workers for many industries, encouraging the diffusion of people and opportunities across the country, instead of everyone rushing to expensive cities in hopes of finding work.
I suggest (and have suggested numerous times) that we disallow ownership of property for profit. Create a system that allows people to “buy” property short term through government loan structures that have very low interest rates and allows them to create an equity building mechanism early on. On paper it would have all the benefits of purchase with all of the benefits of leasing as well.
The flood of new available property would absolutely crash our current economy, since it’s so extended on property ownership, but we did it wrong and we need to correct.
Subsidies or government backed contributions won't be the answer. Universities have a societal function and could conceivable operate without profit in mind, but they still chose to be greedy and act like for-profit businesses once government backed loans became a thing. The government tried to fix access to education by directly injecting cash via students instead of fixing it through the universities. Taking the same approach with home buyers would be a mistake because real estate obviously is meant to be for-profit and acts that way, so they will obviously raise prices as well.
So you'll probably need to fuck over a lot of banks, investors, construction and real estate companies to get housing prices accessible to the wider population and change economic interactions in that market. I wouldn't count on that though - the government will probably choose to fix it through backed loans or subsidies again, if they do anything.
Dead Comment
Individual saving for retirement was cooked up in the 80s. You used to get your pension and be set.
I think that social media really tipped the balance of fairness in the working world... With social media, suddenly Trust fund Babies could fake success, and promote schemes that helped them to profit. The Social Media model was set up to raise Trust Funders and Popular individuals far above everyone else, and it killed hopes of upward mobility for people who didn't fall into any fame or wealth category unless they became famous for negative reasons or for ridicule.
It's not that no one wants to work anymore, it's that people are tired of weak work schemes, and being used and then thrown away in order to elevate others. It's not until real opportunity for growth, entrepreneurship, and excellence returns that things will begin to get back to normal.
Talking about is as "Nobody wants to work anymore" is an injustice... Millions of people are working very hard every day on content creation that rivals TV programming and others are regularly posting their best and fully composed and edited work on Internet sites daily, most without any pay in HOPES of being discovered for their work, as proof of that.
But to take those same people, use them up, and then discard them... it makes them lose hope that their work is meaningful. Why try, when the world tells you repeatedly that it does not need or value you?
The only people I can see being happy with this arrangement might be more libertarian minded, where the goal was never outside the scope of their own self betterment.
The problem is everyone who works on something they’re passionate about (even if they suck at it) thinks they ought to be compensated, even if their contributions amount to exactly Jack shit.
Meanwhile, I do decent carpentry on the side and am hit up _regularly_ for it, simply because I’m willing to show up. And I make as much per hour as I do in my day job.
The work is out there to be passionate and make things and be successful, but you 1) have to show up and work and 2) have to not suck at it.
The ideal that people don't succeed because of the quality of their work is a fallacy... Many people who do succeed who have a shoddy/marginal history of work is also yet another example of why that ideal is not accurate.
What thing does a landlord make? What are the hours on the job of owning dividend-paying securities? Being successful in this economy has literally nothing to do with "making things people want" and "putting in the hours".
You’re able to make good money in carpentry by simply showing up, because there aren’t many carpenters left. Just like my cousin is able to do the same with landscaping. It’s all work fewer people are doing.
Other friends of mine, some of the most talented and hardworking people I know, have tried their stints on broadway, television, journalism, etc. and are struggling massively. Is it because they aren’t good? Of course not. It’s because there are 1,000 people lined up behind them who are just as good. And there’s another 1,000 behind that group who aren’t quite as good but are willing to do it for poverty wages.
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
400BC
Doesn't seem like it :
> It was crafted by a student, Kenneth John Freeman, for his Cambridge dissertation published in 1907. Freeman did not claim that the passage under analysis was a direct quotation of anyone; instead, he was presenting his own summary of the complaints directed against young people in ancient times.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/?amp=1
Edit: Oh, maybe you meant "Ancient Rome"?
- Socrates was right in 400BC.
- at multiple points in 2,400 years there was a problem with "kids these days".
- Socrates was wrong in 400BC, but it's fair today or at other points in history.
It's just a complete non-argument.
Edit: and according to a sibling comment it's not even a genuine quote, but that doesn't matter: it's a non-argument whether it's a genuine quote or not.
The same applies to this "list", which is not a "long history" but just 19 quotes from the last 19 years from random people. Maybe some had a point and some didn't? Maybe none did? Maybe all did? That 19 people about of several hundred million complained about something (fairly or unfairly) in the last 19 years is just a non-argument.
If you can find reliable evidence across time, space and cultures that humans have complained about the same X, then complaining about X is part of human nature in, at least, cultures that leave durable evidence.
Maybe you’re not seeing them all, but there’s one quote per year from 2023 to (at least) 1940. 83 years.
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The real complaint is "young people won't let me boss them around".
Overall, not sure how a complain popping up all the time means it's invalid. People have always complained about injustice, and it's not like that's ever gone away entirely.
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Dead Comment
This is a success of social democracy and it is a success of technology. We can afford to have people work less hard and still be richer than we ever were. It’s the success story of western progress and the rest of the world is going through the same steps as we speak. That a few old-fashioned managers are surprised they can’t get people at the same bad terms as before is just a symptom of a very positive development.
Do you know why Switzerland exports the 2nd most processed coffee of any country in the world [1] while Ethiopia (where coffee was "invented" remains extremely poor, only exporting raw beans? Because the IMF and World Bank would send them back to the dark ages if they attempted to do anything different.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1096413/main-export-coun...
If people had, for the sake of a thought experiment, a guaranteed 20K/month income and free healthcare no matter what they do with their life, it's very unlikely they will choose to work on regular jobs. They will instead generally pursue arts/crafts (including the craft of building computer programs in areas they are interested in), learning, exercise etc.
I always hear this argument about UBI and it almost sounds too good to be true. Like utopian. And I wonder what segment of population will actually become artists and craftsmen with renewed sense of purpose and fulfillment vs. the folks that will accelerate even further into melancholy and feelings of deep meaninglessness.
Didn’t we have this experiment during Covid where many people found themselves being paid, sometimes for 2 years, to just wait till their job comes back? I don’t think many became artists (surely, some did). But there were also a lot of stories of increased depression, addiction, and despair.
I’m not saying it’s better to do a bullshit job that getting paid to do nothing. I’m just saying it doesn’t seem to be as simple.
Dead Comment
I did not understand how much my 45min x 2 commute was draining my stamina before I stopped commuting, e.g.
... but still got paid.
For many of us, covid is the first taste of freedom we ever got. It was eye-opening and delivered some serious perspective.
This "not working" could be called a sane response based on good information.
Don't you have vacations? A whole month away from work or school every year should have given people that same perspective.
Dead Comment
But when the "work" you are being asked to do seems pointless, or it seems like the vast majority of the benefit of your work is going to people who are already wealthy and powerful, there's much less motivation.
One of the most demotivating things is seeing your work thrown away. In the software world, we experience this often. Sometimes you can even finish a big project, really being proud at having built something great, but then something will change and render that product pointless (at least based on the current business plan).
After a few situations like that, one becomes more cautious. Performing heavy tasks on the whim of leader is less attractive.
even in my free time i have so many projects that take work but i absolutely love them.
i just wanted to chime in that people feel genuinely energized by work if it’s something they care about, something that matters to them, feeds their soul or whatever phrase you prefer. again, sorry to be the obnoxious pedant.
To say "Nobody wants to to engage in drudgery anymore" is true and always has been. To say "Nobody wants to be employed at a job that's meaningful and rewarding" is false (for most people at least; there may be exceptions).