
Eliminate paper, not jobs - corwinstephen
https://blog.citygro.ws/eliminate-paper-not-jobs-a98b607d63b1#.eta9j9kdz
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philipkglass
It is difficult to convey in plain text how repugnant I find suggestions that
people _need to be assigned work_ even if their labor is completely obsoleted
by machines. It's like the worst of Keynesian stimulus combined with the worst
of Puritanism.

Everyone needs goods and services. Not everyone needs work. Not everyone needs
a teacher/supervisor/nanny to keep boredom at bay. People who need _to be
assigned_ tasks and bosses to feel a sense of purpose should have safe, legal
access to that form of domination, of course. In general it does not seem like
a good default to build theme-park imitations of antiquated labor patterns
using the general public as cast members. Is Wayward Pines what everyone
wants? Because that's how you get Wayward Pines. It's a creepy Disneyland
where people are damned to forever repeat the motions of 20th century life
instead of learning to think differently.

I'm all for software that allows people to spend more time on the interesting
parts of their jobs, but the one paragraph about how CityGrows can reduce job
drudgery feels out of place after so much praise of work.

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homagod
You did a pretty good job conveying your passion in plain text! I think we
agree on the key issue of software being good for eliminating drudgery and
paperwork -- I disagree that work is meaningless.

I maintain that getting things for free, without having to earn them yourself,
can feel good in the short run but is corrosive in the long term. When I think
of a work-free dystopia I think of Wall-E.

I'm a huge proponent of people like Mr Money Mustache and the FIRE community
who free themselves from the need to work, but still are engaged in purposeful
pursuits whether it’s soap making, house flipping or care-taking (what I mean
when I talk about 'good work'). The thing is: MMM and other early retirees
earned their freedom through years of labor (and smart investing).

Yes, there are limits and exceptions and all of this notion of raising
yourself up by the bootstraps is predicated on a level playing field (aka
perfect market) that has never existed, but the end notion is, people who
don’t have to earn what they have suffer.

The challenge is distributing opportunity so that people have access to work
that enables them to progress according to their merits, with a strong safety
net to catch those who through a lack of luck or ability are not able to make
it. We have become unbalanced with too much of the opportunity (and money)
being hoarded into a small slice of the population. I don't think automation
will fix that - if anything, automation will exacerbate the trend and leave
many caught in the kind of draining, involuntary, paycheck-to-paycheck work
that I think you are arguing against (and which I also called out).

In either case, I appreciate you reading and taking the time to comment.

~~~
philipkglass
I believe that people who don't need to work for income will generally be
happier if they keep using their bodies, keep interacting in person with other
humans, keep some mix of routine and variety in their lives. (But the means to
those ends don't need to resemble activities we used to have to _pay people_
to do.) I think that it's a good idea to offer guidance to people who don't
need to work but can't figure out what they really want to do with all their
free time. I think that it's a _bad_ idea to plan pseudowork employment for
people who haven't yet requested any make-believe jobs to go to.

If all productive labor can be done better by machines, then making soap with
your own human labor is just as much a game as playing paintball is. It
doesn't really matter that one of those activities provided income for large
numbers of people, historically, and the other did not. Not everyone needs a
job-like activity assigned by others to avoid becoming a Wall-E blob of
boredom. (Just as there are a lot of options for young adults with trust funds
in between the extremes of "get hired for a job like other 22 year olds" and
"suffer endless ennui.") Possessing material security without trading waged
labor for it is "dystopian" the way that being a child in the summertime is
dystopian. (And yes, some children are going to whine "I'm bored!" until
someone gives them chores to do, but don't start planning needless chores for
the children who aren't even bored...)

