
You should be amazed - ghosh
http://oliveremberton.com/2014/you-should-be-amazed/
======
asgard1024
I thought about a similar thing recently; and I concluded that what most
people make (in money) is completely undeserved in terms of work they do. (At
least, in my case, I am SW developer and I am sure I wouldn't myself pay for
the amount of work I do - there is like 3 orders of magnitude difference of
what I would be willing to pay for a feature and what a feature costs to
develop.)

The point is, we should stop thinking in terms what we deserve; if we truly
were making what we deserve (for our work), most of us couldn't live.

This idea is related to labor theory of value, which is simply wrong.
Currently, thanks to organization and machinery, the vast amount of work
needed to sustain our lifestyle is not done by human beings, but it's simply
granted to us.

That's one of the reasons why I am against libertarianism. Strict meritocracy,
while nice in theory, would mean utter poverty for most people.

~~~
icebraining
I'm confused. What do you mean by deserve? If you reject the labor theory of
value, then on what do you base that amount?

And whether a meritocracy would lead people to poverty depends on what you
consider meritorious. People have widely different ideas of such, which means
that no such evaluation can be made.

~~~
asgard1024
On the amount of work I put in compared to amount of work I get back in my
salary (or the amount of work necessary to have my living standard). The
latter is much higher. So either (a) I exploit other people or (b) the extra
work comes from machinery and organization (productivity). But although my
salary is above average, it doesn't explain the difference, so (a) is probably
not such a big factor.

I consider merit based on amount of work you do, disregarding the
productivity. I am not my own cause of high productivity, I was simply born to
that world. In capitalism, why should I? The productivity can be (and often
is) ascribed to capital, which is owned by somebody else.

As you correctly say, people have different ideas about this. But the point
is, someone has to _own_ the capital and the productivity gains (it may be the
collective ownership, though). Just saying you don't care who owns it (because
you believe in value of your work alone) will make you poor, because you will
in essence give up those enormous gains.

~~~
bryanlarsen
There's a third explanation: c) you're capturing some of the value put in by a
lot of dead and some not-quite-dead people.

The value of a computer running your software is tremendous. The delta in
value between a computer that runs your software and one that doesn't is
pretty miniscule in comparison. The value you're delivering is due in part to
people like Archimedes through Von Neumann and Linus Torvalds and millions of
others. Does that mean you owe part of your salary to Archimedes' descendants?
We're all Archimedes descendants.

"We stand on the shoulders of giants" \-- Chartres

This is partly a different way of expressing your (b), but I prefer this
framing.

~~~
asgard1024
The question then is, is this (c) a part of the merit? It seems to me that not
entirely so. If this is part of merit then inheriting a factory is also merit
of the person who inherited it, which contradicts my intuition.

Of course, knowledge as such is in public domain, which is a state of affairs
I am perfectly happy with. But I guess I can imagine a system where it isn't
(just like factories of dead owners are not becoming public domain), so I
cannot be completely ignorant to the issue of who owns that knowledge (unless
I want to be really poor).

------
unfunco
I think about these ideas quite often, and someone who has put this idea out
there with much more eloquence and humility than I am capable of is Louis C.K
-
[http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=aba_1332656862](http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=aba_1332656862)
\- Everything is amazing and nobody is happy.

------
mnemonicsloth
When the history of the last 20 years is written, most of what happened in the
developed world will be relegated to the footnotes, or compressed into slogans
like "technology advanced rapidly."

Here's what really matters: according to the UN, nearly a billion people have
been lifted out of extreme poverty in the last 20 years. Further gains are
feasible and expected.

[http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill...](http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-billion-
people-have-been-taken-out-extreme-poverty-20-years-world-should-aim)

~~~
antihero
The question is this - is this due to capitalism, or if we'd moved past
capitalism, would this have happened far far sooner?

~~~
adamtj
Sure, if we had moved past capitalism, we could have eliminated poverty by
now. And if we had moved past the light-speed limitation, we'd be traveling
amongst the stars by now. So why don't we just do that?

As is often said, capitalism is the worst economic system we've come up with .
. . except for all the others. The trick to moving past capitalism is not
regressing backward from it.

Some big regressions famously happened in recent centuries with our big
experiments in public ownership. Unfortunately, large scale public ownership
has some complications that tend to result in large scale death.

What new system would you propose that is better?

~~~
gremlinsinc
Curious, what do you consider the next 'leap' from capitalism? Something
completely new, or some socialist/capitalist hybrid?

Or something like the Incans(? - correct me if I'm wrong) - one of the Ancient
indians had a system where there was no money, people took what they
needed/wanted, and everyone contributed to the whole of society.. There was no
such thing as currency.

------
CmonDev
I could describe the medieval age same way: "Gee guys, we have stuff made of
iron - so sturdy.". This is not to lessen the achievements, I just want my
mind to be safely backed up among several planets before I die.

Also there is an implicit assumption that certain countries are rich based on
their merits and not based on geo-political manipulation.

------
dredmorbius
I _am_ amazed. This _is_ the best of all possible worlds.

That's the good news. It's also the bad news.

The capabilities we have are, largely, drawn from that finite stock of petrol
Emberton mentions in passing, as well as larger stocks of coal, and somewhat
smaller ones of natural gas (though we've been using less of those to date).

When they're gone, there's going to be a hell of a bill for the piper.

This isn't a new revelation. William Stanley Jevons, no raving left-wing
radical himself (he's a father of the "marginal revolution" of economics on
which much of neoclassical economics is based) wrote of this in 1865 in a book
called _The Coal Question_ , asking what would happen when Britain exhausted
its admittedly considerable stores of coal. It begins:

 _DAY by day it becomes more evident that the Coal we happily possess in
excellent quality and abundance is the mainspring of modern material
civilization. As the source of fire, it is the source at once of mechanical
motion and of chemical change. Accordingly it is the chief agent in almost
every improvement or discovery in the arts which the present age brings forth.
It is to us indispensable for domestic purposes, and it has of late years been
found to yield a series of organic substances, which puzzle us by their
complexity, please us by their beautiful colours, and serve us by their
various utility._

[http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Jevons/jvnCQ1.html#C...](http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Jevons/jvnCQ1.html#Chapter)
1

Jevons notes that he's hardly the first to raise the spectre of coal
exhaustion -- barely 13 years after Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_ was
published, mineral surveyor John Williams asked the question in _The Limited
Quantity of Coal of Britain._

It's one thing to admire the pleasing vista in the rearview mirror. Another to
ignore the rapidly approaching cliff's edge.

------
charlieirish
The most powerful tool on the web is still words... And if your words are
good, people will read them. [1]

There's something incredibly powerful about this piece of work and about the
world in which we live. That's why Justin's single web page was translated in
to 20 languages and shared over 8,000 times in just a few hours. [2]

[1] [http://justinjackson.ca/words.html](http://justinjackson.ca/words.html)

[2] HN Submission & Discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5913381](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5913381)

------
codewiz
Reminded me of the famous sketch Everything's Amazing & Nobody's Happy:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E)

------
Mithaldu
While i sympathize in some ways, i.e. looking back things are quite something
to compare with the past, the reason we aren't happy yet is that things are
also still kind of shitty.

Cars are still a brilliant way to get killed; cars are extremely inefficient.
Oil is going to run out at some point. Traffic monitoring works only in some
places. Internet via cellphones is generally prohibitively expensive, and
quite laggy compared to wired internet. Cellphone UI and especially data input
is still an order of magnitude slower than mouse and keyboard. Smartphones, if
used with some regularity, do need a recharge once every two days at least. I
don't even want to think how ineffecient they are. Humanity's knowledge in the
internet is difficult to access and only really accessible to those who spent
a lot of time learning how to search it. I write software for a living too,
but i've no idea if it'll ever benefit anyone. Sometimes i spend more time on
a software solution to a problem that could be solved faster with less time in
a manual way. I enjoy all the fruit in the supermarket, but i don't like to
think about which elements along that supply chain live a life that's much
worse than mine and don't get even remotely adequate compensation. etc.

I hold both of these truths in my mind: Things are amazing. Things aren't
nearly as amazing as they were thought to be.

------
MarcusBrutus
People will not be amazed, at least for more than a day, by anything that's
widely shared. Never had, never will. Human beings, being what they are, a few
enlightened souls excluded, derive happiness by the advantages they enjoy and
the power they hold __over other people__. Henry VIII lived in an age before
anesthesia, dentistry, where bathrooms were appalling by today's standards,
where palaces where rat-infested and where life could be cut short in often
agonizing ways. Yet, I am sure he would trade all the advances of the last 400
years for being able to sent men to their deaths for no reason other than
angering him and being able to have any woman that attracted his gaze. Most of
us would.

------
Torn
> The entirety of humanity’s knowledge is – of course – free

Really? Isn't most of the important, peer-reviewed, scientific stuff behind
academic paywalls?

> you live in the most amazing time imaginable

Sorry to put a downer, but mankind has been marvelling at their own progress
since the dawn of time. In 100 years people will look back at the primitive
beginnings of the information age and marvel how much better things are in
their current time.

There's plenty wrong with our current world and societies. I can easily
imagine a world where technology benefits us better, solves more problems,
societies become more equal, etc. etc.

~~~
oliveremberton
Author of the piece here.

> The entirety of humanity’s knowledge is – of course – free

I was using a degree of hyperbole for the benefit of word economy. It's like
when Louis CK remarked "Everything is amazing, no-one is happy". It's obvious
he doesn't mean "everything" or "no-one", but a more factually precise "Most
of our first-world lives are remarkably great, yet most of us complain
disproportionately about them" isn't quite so catchy. I was aiming to write a
commentary, not a white paper.

As for your second point, I think we're in agreement. I agree it's likely that
in 100 years our current best will look like crap. That's a _good thing_. It
seems that mankind is on a permanent positive trajectory – a realisation that
seems to elude most people, sadly – and that by itself is pretty damn amazing.

------
jrs99
if all these things were interesting to people and they couldn't get used to
it, we wouldn't be able to function as a society.

~~~
pstack
Exactly.

Not being content with what we have and not being endlessly amazed by it is
what propels us to drive for even greater advancements instead of standing
around like remnants from an ancient society completely gobsmacked by a guy
making a quarter appear out of our ear.

Yes, we live in the most advanced times ever and there's lots of awesome
stuff. Let's go make more awesome stuff.

------
nodata
I'd be amazed too if I could buy 12 pence bananas.

~~~
oliveremberton
Where do you live? I imagine price varies hugely depending on demand/transport
distance, but 12p is about right for the UK:
[http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/grocery-
categories/bananas_in...](http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/grocery-
categories/bananas_in_tesco.html)

