
Is work necessary? - bendmorris
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/09/11/is-work-necessary/
======
gexla
This could be describing the Philippines. A large number of people don't work
because they don't really have to. OFW remittances send enough money back in
some cases that the local economy makes it seem pointless to work (unskilled
workers here might make $3 - $4 per day.) In other cases, the family has built
a compound and everyone can live super cheap there. Maybe there is enough
money flowing into the family that nobody has to work.

I see a lot of drinking, fiesta's and festivals here. Given the idle time, it
seems that most don't pursue education or other things which could further
them. I suppose many of these people would choose to go to school if they
could afford to do so.

This may be a decent end goal, but I can't help but think there is always
something that someone could be doing to make money. There is always more that
needs to be done. I can see the "suck" all around us. Things which could be
improved.

If we were to ever be able to get large numbers of people off this planet then
there will always be much more things for people to do. We could explore
further and expand outward.

For the foreseeable future. If you are in the U.S. you either work or you
collect food stamps which barely cover you. It would be great for one person
to support 10K, but for now, the less fortunate have to ask from people who
are far less able to provide (family who is getting by, but not doing great
otherwise.)

~~~
kabisote
The Philippines did not come to mind when I read the article. What I took from
the article was that the human race can invent a system that would provide for
their basic needs so that humans don't have to worry about it and they can
spend their time on their hobbies.

(I'm from the Philippines.)

~~~
melling
It seems to me like there are still lots of problems to solve. Many STEM jobs
still go unfilled even though they tend to pay more. If you want to build the
next Android or iPhone, you need large teams of people, for instance. Some
people will choose tennis while others choose medical research? I don't think
anyone has mentioned the fact that there aren't enough hours in the day for
people who do research or creative work.

Personally, I image that if we could put 7 billion people to work on the more
important problems, we'd still need a lot more fall short on resources.

~~~
jeena
Yeah but to fill the STEM jobs you need educated people to do so. To get
educated people you need to make the process of education far less expensive
and risky for the individual, only then you will get more people through the
STEM education.

I'm kind of old (35) and a CS student, I started fairly late in my 39ies. But
I only was able to do so because I payed a high price for that. Nearly
everybody else at my age has a family with kids, many of them even have bought
their first house. Not me, I'm studying, I'm one of the very fiew 35 years old
students at the university.

And yes there are legitimate reasons why I couldn't start to study earlier
(which I won't get into right now). What I want to say is that education is
_very_ expensive for the student, even if here in Sweden I don't even have to
pay for the university myself. Many people who would be able to learn and do
the STEM jobs can't because they're stuck in survival mode earning a living at
a job which doesn't help humanity, instead it is only there to keep someone
ocupied.

------
boyter
I find it interesting that though the use of machines and the like we are
rapidly approaching what occurred in ancient cultures through the use of
slaves, which is many having a great deal of time to devote to leisure.

What do we do we currently do with leisure? Watch TV unwind... but assuming
you didn't need to unwind from work (because there was none) what would you be
doing? Personally I would be studying random topics (sculpture, latin and
dance), working on my own projects (software and community) and generally
improving myself and hopefully society.

I would imagine that the absence of work would be a net gain for society as
people could devote their time to helping others or doing something for pure
merit.

Interestingly enough that's what the ancients did. The ancient greek word for
leisure "schole" means learning or self improvement.

~~~
sliverstorm
Yup, slavery was quite useful in advancing the human race for a while there.
We don't like it today for moral reasons, but Leibniz would not have
discovered calculus if he spent every day in a field somewhere, and it was
slavery that bought him the time to do it.

~~~
delian66
What ? Leibniz lived in Germany and France, and I think there was no _slavery_
(as in ownership of human beings; sure there were servants and nobility and so
on, but no actual slavery) in there at the time ... Would you elaborate how
"it was slavery that bought him the time to do it" ?

~~~
sliverstorm
For the purposes of brevity I'm grouping slavery, peasants, servants,
indentured servants, etc into the same group. They all serve to buy leisure
time at the expense of the sweat of other people.

------
stickhandle
Yes. And its our collective fault. Capitalism and democracy are arguably the
best collective system for living together that humanity has _implemented_. On
a theoretical level, this is wholly up for debate, but in a practical sense, I
believe this to be true. This has directly led to consumerism, the rise of the
individual, and specialization. Follow that path, and you _need_ to work. Or
at least the typical person does. The dream of many is that work == something
they want to do (so much so that it hardly feels like _work_ in the strictest
form), but I put forth that inevitably, as a person changes, they find it
difficult to step away from their area of expertise (gained from years of
specialization) and inevitably, for most, it truly becomes _work_.

 _Disclaimer: this is a first world question (and answer)_

------
shittyanalogy
Since this is an opinion piece, I'll give mine on the same topic:

We don't need more jobs or a re-imagining of the meaning of life, we need less
people. We're pushing into the golden age of mechanization, automation and
robotics and instead of being able to celebrate we have to wonder what
everyone is going to do with themselves and invent assistant-inspector-
inspector jobs. We're continuing to over fish, over build, over pollute, under
service people at the doctors office, and under deliver on educational goals.
We've just got too many people plain and simple if you ask me. Every major
solution is aimed at trying to figure out how we're going to live together as
a society of 10 Billion, IMHO we should be figuring out how to reduce the
numbers and figuring out how to live together as much less.

I don't have a good answer and I don't think anyone on this planet has more of
a right to live or have kids than anyone else. And this isn't some immigration
rant. This planet has too many people on it.

~~~
thret
China's one child policy comes to mind. You could approach this in the west
without force by tying tax thresholds to number of children.

~~~
bendmorris
I don't like this idea for two reasons: first, tax incentives for having
children help to make sure the children are taken care of - socio-economic
status is negatively correlated with number of children, and lots of kids are
born into big families that can't afford to take care of them properly. Giving
these families additional money seems like enabling them, but the kid didn't
do anything and deserves to have a reasonable standard of living.

Second, financial penalties for having children give the wealthy more freedom
to reproduce. And couldn't tax penalties be considered a form of government
force? Not that we don't already use incentives and penalties to shape
behavior.

Education, access to birth control, and improving the standard of living of
the poor all seem to result in lower birth rates with no force necessary.

------
jacques_chester
Based on communities with multi-generational welfarism, I'd suggest that
idleness comes with pretty serious social problems. Employment imposes minimum
pro-social requirements on the employee.

~~~
bane
Growing up near a major U.S. city with a very high percentage of multi-
generational welfare recipients. The rampant idleness is one of the visible
signs that actually makes me feel really upset. Driving to meetings and seeing
a couple dozen very healthy guys in the middle of any given workday hanging
around and harassing people because they're bored or, drinking themselves into
a stupor just to kill another day where they do nothing and nothing happens,
is a _very_ serious problem. The parts of town where this happens are
inevitably high crime, run down and dangerous.

None of these people have to work as all of their basic needs _are_ met. Any
extra money they come across (usually by panhandling) doesn't get reported and
is almost always used for either bullshit like "bling", drugs/booze or
gambling.

Very few have more than a cursory education and most dropped out of school as
soon as they could stop getting truancy officers to stop sending them back.
There's simply no reason to learn anything. Interacting with these folks is
difficult even on basic conversational levels.

There's an old saying, "the devil makes use of idle hands" and it has a lot of
wisdom in it on many levels.

I'm a very big proponent of large government work programs. Every one of these
guys who I see every day would be better off earning their way by fixing up
infrastructure in the U.S. or doing migrant farm work or something marginally
productive for society. But instead they drag down entire sections of cities
into such a state that even driving through their areas is a test of patience
and risking your own safety.

~~~
GabrielF00
It's important to note that the "couple dozen very healthy guys in the middle
of any given workday" that you are seeing are almost certainly not receiving
welfare in the form of cash payments - (cash payments are generally how
welfare is defined in the US). Since the 1996 welfare reform act, people who
receive welfare benefits (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) need to be
either working or in a job training program or they will lose benefits after a
maximum of two years.

Welfare reform addresses the problem that you describe, but the work
requirements also create other social problems. For instance, single mothers
who might previously have been able to stay home with young children now need
to work long hours at low-wage jobs.

It's also important to realize that there are other factors besides the
welfare trap that keep otherwise healthy men unemployed. As you pointed out,
one is a lack of education that may only qualify them for low-skilled jobs.
Also consider that if you've been to prison it's incredibly difficult to get a
job at all.

Also remember that when you're driving through these neighborhoods you're not
seeing the people who are working.

When discussing how the unemployed "drag down entire sections of cities", you
should consider the causative arrow. Are these neighborhoods in trouble
because of unemployment and idleness or do the chronically unemployed happen
to congregate in these neighborhoods? Consider the effects of decades of
disinvestment in minority neighborhoods and of white flight. Banks spent
decades refusing to provide mortgages and small business loans in minority
neighborhoods ("redlining"). Desegregation busing and the movement of
minorities into traditionally-white working and middle class neighborhoods
often triggered wholesale abandonment of the inner cities by these white
families. When middle class white families abandoned the public school systems
after desegregation policies were implemented, many inner city school systems
ended up as warehouses for the poorest, least prepared students, greatly
degrading the systems' capabilities to provide an education. Similarly, when
middle class white families moved out of inner city neighborhoods these
neighborhoods decayed.

Systemic poverty and unemployment are complex problems with many causes and
cannot be blamed entirely on some culture of idleness.

~~~
bane
I grew up pretty poor, at one stage my family was homeless for a few months --
I've eaten out of food pantries and soup kitchens and grew up knowing where
all the major food manufacturers had day-old surplus stores, I've exhausted
lots of electrons on that story here on HN. I have unbelievable levels of
sympathy for the working poor and for making sure that food and housing are
affordable and that work is available to anybody who needs it and that it's
decent honest work with proper benefits, child care and all that.

I want to make an important note that I'm consciously not attributing any
specific race or ethnic group to this issue as over the years I've seen the
same thing cuts across all of those kinds of barriers. I've seen just as many
idle groups of white men just the same as black. I'm also specifically not
talking about people with very severe mental health or physical issues that
prevent them from working. I don't think we as a society do enough to help
these people live stable, reasonable lives and I think we do a disservice
grouping them in with able-bodied people simply based on income metrics. I'm
specifically talking about otherwise healthy able-bodied people only.

Despite being poor (or perhaps we were poor due to), my parents owned a small
business that I grew up with. Because of the nature of the business, employee
pay was generally not great, and was staffed at first by refugees and then
later almost entirely by ex-cons - most of whom had past issues with
homelessness, drug addiction and the like.

I grew up in that kind of environment and knew hundreds of these guys over the
years and saw exactly how they became successful and what choices they made
that caused them to fail and go back to being homeless or in prison.

Millions of man hours have been spent looking at "this problem" insisting that
it's complex, and difficult and such and such. It all boils down to the
question "how do you motivate people who aren't working, to get to work in an
economy where plenty jobs are available?"

I think "the problem" that everybody's tried to solve is the wrong problem to
solve. I think we've made it very complicated because we're uncomfortable with
the harsh reality. Most of these same idle people would do unbelievable
amounts of work if it meant the alternative was starving to death. But it's
impolite and immoral and makes us very uncomfortable having people starving to
death so we assure them some kind of food access and then kill endless
supplies of ink and electrons figuring out how to get them productive once
this is solved. The simple fact is people aren't motivated to work once their
bellies are full and with all that spare time on their hands they'll find
something, probably not socially beneficial, to fill it with.

So I'm going to say something that's very unpopular and is going to upset
loads of people here who've never had to face these issues directly:

The idleness and urban blight is just a common symptom of what I think is
fairly simple problem that's been solved successfully in the last few decades
by gentrification of urban cores. More than welfare reform, or other grand
social experiments, cleaning up broken parts of town has done more to solve
these problems then just about anything else.

Inside of cities, blighted areas are cleaned up, policed and developed.
Concentrations of idle hands have no choice but to get out and dilute.

Not a single person my parents ever hired lived in a concentrated urban
center, they all lived outside of those areas. Far enough away that the broken
self-organized support systems that keep groups of young, otherwise healthy
men, milling about together doing nothing much are inconvenient to get to. The
concentrations of able-bodies supporting each other is "the problem". Dilution
where they are 1 in a group of tens of thousands of productive people and away
from their broken support system provides them with motivation to work...or go
hungry.

There were two outcomes 100% of the time.

1) These guys would enjoy the improved standard of living that good wages and
a good job provided (increasing every year with seniority) and they'd knuckle
down and work their tails off. Often outgrowing the level of work my parent's
business could provide and eventually moving on to senior positions with
bigger companies. A few of them starting their own businesses. My parents get
many very moving Christmas cards every year.

2) They'd get troubled by the lack of the kind of support system they
remembered, because working through life on your own is hard. And they'd "go
back to the city to visit my cousin" one weekend and end up fired a few weeks
later for coming to work high, or drunk or they'd simply stop coming to work
at all and we'd find out that they'd moved back to the urban core or got
themselves arrested in a PCP induced assault or some such. Making it on their
own was a stress they couldn't handle and the psychological crutch they
received from being in their comfort zone was preferable for them even if it
wasn't as comfortable.

Gentrification removes #2 as an option as that comfortable support system is
shattered and spread all over creation.

The culture of poverty is very real and it's paradoxically very self-
reinforcing. I've also spilled lots of electrons on HN discussing what it's
like to be poor, and the vicious cycle that's much easier to stay trapped in
than to get out of. But it's not theory for me, I got out of being poor, and I
watched dozens of other people who worked for my parents escape it as well and
watched dozens more fail to escape it. There are surprising support systems
that exist and can only really be felt and understood when you are poor.

But the nature of these systems is not to support somebody up and out, they
work more like a fragile and very sticky web, they need each person to
continue to contribute to that support system, the same one which ultimately
traps them there. Breaking the web is a forcing function that forces people to
tap into the normal, upwardly moving parts of the economy and society and it's
the only thing I've ever seen that has any kind of success rate at all.

~~~
onetwofiveten
What you're describing here is a problem of culture and a problem of
incentives. You're defaulting to a pretty extreme solution - isolate from
their culture and threaten with starvation. It seems likely that there could
be more humane solutions if only it were politically palatable to address the
underlying issues.

~~~
bane
I actually believe that not all cultures are equally valid. There really are
dysfunctional ways that humans congregate.

------
DigitalSea
I fear a world where people don't need to aspire to something to better their
lives (ie studying, learning a skill or educating oneself) wouldn't be a very
nice world to live in at all. If we didn't need to work, what reason would
there to learn to read? If we were rewarded with land, shelter, food and
comfort for doing nothing, what would the incentive for those who will
inevitably be responsible for keeping everything together?

Plants don't grow without care and attention, electricity isn't as simple as
sticking two wires into a powerpoint or setting up solar panels, if nobody
worked, nobody would study and if nobody studied there would be no people left
in the world.

Money, sad to say motivates people, it motivates the disadvantaged to strive
for more, it motivates the rogue developer with a wife and kids to attempt to
build the next big thing knowing the reward will be a comfortable life where
the family doesn't need to worry about money.

Perhaps there is a better way, removing class barriers, maybe there is no such
thing as lower class, you are either middle or upper class. A system where
even a school janitor has an opportunity to do something more and earn a
decent living.

We can only dream, but I doubt for a very long time will there be a shake up
to the class wars and pay discrepancies amongst professions.

~~~
jayfuerstenberg
Boredom is a powerful motivator too.

A couple months of laying around doing nothing will drive most people crazy
and they'll begin asking themselves what they want their life to be about.

And even if they don't contribute anything, should all people be required to
useful to others or can't some just choose to be left alone if they are self
sufficient?

In a world of scarcity I can see the argument of forcing people to contribute
if they want to take back but what about a world of abundance? You and I are
breathing abundant air, for free, and nobody is getting angry right? What if
other resources like electricity were as abundant as Tesla once dreamed?

I'm not saying I'm right or wrong. These are just thoughts worth
consideration.

~~~
bendmorris
>Boredom is a powerful motivator too.

>A couple months of laying around doing nothing will drive most people crazy

I think on HN we frequently assume that "most people" are like us, but HN is
such an unrepresentative sample of the world that this is dangerous,
especially here. You and I and other knowledge workers would probably get
bored and want to do something useful to find purpose. But there are many
people today who work at unskilled jobs because they have to put food on the
table. They don't derive their sense of purpose from it. It's very difficult
to predict what these people would do if they suddenly had no financial
necessity to work. There are listless unemployed people living off of various
forms of government assistance today, and this would make it possible for many
more to join them.

------
dnautics
Fuller is half-right. The true business of people should be to discover skills
which enrich others. In some cases, this is manual labor, but as our society
makes that less and less necessary, we are able to spend more effort on
creative and intellectual pursuits. Now, the problem with Fuller's concept is
that 'creative and intellectual' pursuits are intensely introspective and
rather qualitative.

One could say, 'well I am ENTITLED to money because I spent a lot of EFFORT
reading and analyzing the entire opus of English literature from 1200-1400.'
But whom did that enrich? Why should we reward such behavior if it is
solipsistic?

On the other hand, if someone said, analyze the entire opus of English
literature from 1200-1400 so that someday we can assist Shakespearean actors
in their dramaturgy - and I'm willing to pay you X dollars for it... Now
that's creating value for SOMEONE ELSE. It's not an entitlement, you have
contributed to society in a way that is demonstrable, as proven by the
exchange of resources for your effort.

Work is necessary insomuch as it takes effort for one to provide 'other
people' with goods and services that these 'other people' value. Now, what
constitutes work will be dramatically different and undergo tectonic change -
playing video games, for example, as an alpha tester, can be work (and hard
work, too) - as can being a world-travelling dance teacher - or being a
football player (these are professional jobs that would not have existed 200
years ago)- or who knows what in the future.

Unfortunately the idea of doing work has been corrupted by a narrow-minded
view of capitalism (agents on both the right and the left are guilty of this)
and wages, have been caught up with cost of living and thus a sense of
entitlement. Certainly, there are people who we should contribute to help out
for no reason other than compassion (a quadruplegic multiple gunshot victim I
delivered food to comes to mind) but we should think hard about what the
mechanisms for doing this are, and who gets to decide how much.

But the idea of abolishing all work forever is a dangerous one.

~~~
rquantz
Fuller is arguing otherwise here. He says we need to get away from the idea
that we have to do something to deserve to make a living. Your whole comment
is premised on that idea. Whether it not you're right, you haven't engaged
with what Fuller said. The closest you come is making the unsubstantiated
statement that getting rid of work is a dangerous idea. Dangerous for whom?
Other than, you know, powerful people who depend on an endless supply of cheap
labor, and politicians who rely on an exhausted, frightened, ADD electorate.

~~~
dnautics
Sorry, I was going to mention that it was dangerous for the ayn-rand types who
see that it is individual value that ought to be the highest objective for
society, but I decided that that was too politically-baitey.

Moreover, to address your comment: that the 'labor is cheap' has to do with a
lot of things, why don't people simply negotiate for higher wages and refuse
to do the work otherwise? That it's so difficult to live on a low wage has to
do with the political infrastructure throwing money at the financial sector
for decades, and not to do with any form of natural exchange _per se_.

~~~
deminature
>why don't people simply negotiate for higher wages and refuse to do the work
otherwise?

Because union membership has been outlawed or seriously frowned upon in many
professions. Most other people seem to think unionism is somehow destructive
and end up only looking out for themselves, not realising they have been
divided and conquered. Obviously, your experiences with this may differ.

~~~
dnautics
I don't think most people in the US think unionism is destructive, but most
people in the US believe that unions (as given legal protections, etc.) have
become political entities (versus economic entities) that look out for the
union and not for the worker. I believe this is not far from the truth - have
you seen what the headquarters of the AFL-CIO (2 blocks from the capitol)
looks like? It's really quite shameful.

------
captainmuon
Some work is neccessary, _labour_ not so. (absolutely speaking)

In our current society basically everyone has to work to earn money, to then
buy such products on a more-or-less free market. We are able to produce more
and more goods with ever less work. That's great on the surface, but wrecks
the system, because:

\- Experience shows we can't really split the remaining work evenly, so some
people work a lot, and some are unemployed. But people can only really
participate in the economy if they do labour (and get money). It sucks for
them to be unemployed, but they also fall away as consumers, which hurts the
whole economy. \- Stuff only ever get's done when labour is applied. (If I
could produce and sell something with no human work, everybody else would do
the same, and it would have no value. So, in the equilibrium that's not going
to happen.) In a sense, labour is the secret engine of the economy. At the
same time, you're trying to reduce the amount of labour needed, because it's
expensive and cuts into your profits. All kinds of instabilities arise from
this contradiction.

In the end, we'll probably have to transition away from capitalism to
something better suited to our modern realities of production, whatever that
will be. An unconditional basic income would be a first step in this direction
- acknowledging the fact that we need less and less work, but we still need to
feed the same number of people.

------
sfx
Bill Joy's essay "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" [1] is a good read for
anyone working through what such a society would be like and what it means for
our race. I think it comes down to the philosophical question of what man's
purpose is.

[1]
[http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html](http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html)

------
yetanotherphd
Work is necessary to get a whole lot of stuff that needs to be done done. That
does not mean that we should not have a basic income, reverse income tax, or
generous welfare system with few strings attached.

However, it is annoying that proponents of basic income tax act as if the only
reason for opposing basic income as a policy, is the idea that "work is
necessary". The three policies I described are actually very similar, (well
basic income is really a subset of negative income tax) but to choose between
them is a subtle issue. Unfortunately the people who tend to get attached to
political movements (or wannabe political movements) are rarely subtle. They
prefer easy to identify bad guys, like people who believe in work as an
ethical principal.

------
Kiro
"It amounts to saying that we should have fairly high taxes, and redistribute
most of the money as a minimal income to every person."

Yes, but before that we would need to have as low taxes as possible in order
to stimulate the innovation needed.

~~~
hershel
Yes. Like in the nordic countries , which are pretty good at innovation. Or in
israel where taxes are high but venture capital investments per capita are the
highest in the world.

~~~
Kiro
They would be even more innovative with lower taxes and more market incentives
to make technological advancements.

~~~
hershel
It's a nice opinion based on no data.

~~~
Kiro
Do you agree that the market advances technology?

------
ctdonath
A human being daily needs something like 2000 kcal food-sourced energy, a
slate of vital nutrients, 250 square feet of personal living space, some
average BTUs of heating/cooling, a gallon of clean water, and a share of
infrastructure to produce/acquire/deliver this. (YMMV; point of context made;
details left as exercise for reader.) We can view this baseline as the
objective essence of "value": one needs the aggregate of these points to
sustain life for one day, anything less begins the descent into death. We can
also view anything substantially beyond standard deviations of this as
unnecessary (albeit desirable). _SOMEBODY_ has to produce this, be it basic
sustenance farming or creation & maintenance of high-tech high-productivity
machinery; _this work is necessary_.

The objective value of this baseline is the true "poverty line": if you try to
exist on less than this, you're gonna die; if you can acquire substantially
more than this, you can start indulging in relative luxuries. For sake of
simple argument (detailed accuracy left to reader), we'll use the official USA
poverty line as the currency equivalent of this objective value of what it
takes to keep a median human alive under normal conditions: about US$30 per
day.

So...to keep one person alive & stable one day requires $30/day of work. This
is invariant. If someone's work produces $30 of value (exchangeably equivalent
to those enumerated basic daily needs), one person maintains sustainable life
another day; if the worker "gives" that to someone else, keeping none for
himself, he is literally giving his life to the other. If his work produces
$60 of value, he can sustain himself for two days (work one, idle the second),
sustain himself for one day and spend the remainder on comforts & luxuries, or
give $30 to another and keep both sustained for a day. Technology makes it
easier for one to earn more with the same expenditure of effort.

The consternation about "is work necessary?" stems from who gets to decide how
the extra earnings are distributed.

If you retain your extra earnings, you are saving for future idleness
(vacation, retirement) or statistical fluctuations (temporary increased cost
of acquiring necessities).

If you spend your extra earnings on comforts & luxuries, you are giving others
the opportunity to work for their daily basic needs thru means other than
direct acquisition (building cars, writing software, acting theatrically, etc.
instead of sustenance farming, hewing trees, carrying water, etc).

If you give away your extra earnings strictly voluntarily (no coercion), you
are charitable (sacrificing idleness, preparedness, or comfort/luxuries for
others).

If you give away your extra earnings under coercion (if you don't consent it
will be taken from you, or worse), someone else is making the decision for you
regarding how your extra earnings should be distributed - and this, quite
understandably, produces enormous consternation.

(If your baseline earnings (the $30/day) are taken under coercion, your
continued existence is threatened and the issue becomes a matter of self-
defense - a separate topic to discuss.)

Is work necessary? Yes, insofar as _someone_ has to expend effort which can be
converted into providence of basic needs. If someone can work earning
$300/day, then he can take the next nine days off, purchase comforts/luxuries
which pay enough to sustain nine other people another day, or sustain nine
other people another day _without_ obligating the benefit of creating
comforts/luxuries. This thread addresses this last point: _given no obligation
to produce something exchangeable for basic needs, will a populace on the
whole produce_ more* value or less? and does the populace at large have the
"right" to compel individuals to give up their extra earnings without
compensation, or does the individual have an absolute "right" to keep his
earnings and distribute them as he sees fit? _

~~~
FD3SA
Excellent analysis from first principles. However, this is an extremely simple
model. In reality, human ability is roughly distributed normally about a mean.
Technological progress began automating work starting at the very left tail,
and worked its way along to the right. This progress has shown no signs of
slowing down.

How do you imagine a society will look, when only those with abilities four
standard deviations from the mean can compete in the labor market? This is
known as "winner-take-all", or the superstar effect.

By your example, the majority of mankind will be at the whims of an extremely
tiny elite, due to their lack of marketable skills.

What happened to horses after the onset of the automobile?

~~~
jrs99
are you talking about a world in which robots perform surgery better than
surgeons?

~~~
tiglionabbit
Probably not. Surgeon is a highly skilled occupation. He's referring to a
world where only Surgeons (and equally skilled people) can get any money at
all.

~~~
baddox
But that's a fallacious idea. If only surgeons and equally skilled people get
any money, where is that money coming from?

~~~
sergiosgc
Excellent question. Capitalism is a model to allocate _scarce_ resources where
they are most productive. Take scarcity out of the equation and suddenly
Capitalism makes a lot less sense.

What comes afterwards? I have no idea. Everytime one imagines a post-scarcity
world under our current model, questions like yours arise; a symptom that at
some point in the future, we'll need to invent and transition to a new society
model. It's pretty obvious it's not the current model, it's entirely non-
obvious which model will it be.

~~~
dnautics
Capitalism is not a model to allocate scarce resources, although there is good
reason to believe it is more efficient than socialism. It is a system to
allocate _rivalrous_ resources in a system that uses a minimum of political
involvement. Why is an economic allocation preferable to a political
allocation? Because in order to use your economic power, you have to give it
away (or at least, offer to give it away). This is not true for political
allocation: cronies enrich each other often without giving away anything;
popularity can snowball as people join bandwagons... So political allocation
is a more dangerous system for creating haves- and have-nots, widening the gap
between the chosen and the left behind, than economic allocation.

------
dreamdu5t
Ugh, HN really has become reddit. Half-baked ramblings about socialist utopias
powered by machines. I mean come on...

~~~
wazoox
Actually, most of the answers are ranging from far-right (work or degenerate!)
to extreme libertarianism (individuals must compete!), and that complete lack
of basic humanity from HNers really is saddening.

~~~
clarkm
> complete lack of basic humanity from HNers

Does that actually mean anything? Or is it just another way of expressing
vague, general disapproval?

------
Aqueous
The machines of the future will convert energy into wealth. They will do this
by performing a large number of automated tasks for us. We will not have to
work - it will be redundant to work.

~~~
electromagnetic
Consider what the world, sorry universe will be when anything you can conceive
of is a function of energy vs time.

Set a self-replicating constructor going. All it has to do is harvest sunlight
to produce more solar cells to capture more energy until it has a sufficient
supply to expediently build that new house you ordered.

------
forgottenpaswrd
"It amounts to saying that we should have fairly high taxes, and redistribute
most of the money as a minimal income to every person."

It is called disguised communism. From each according to his ability, to each
according to his need.

The redistributors redistribute to their friends and family first, then on
their party, and then the rest so now you have people living really well, most
people living bad, like today, but with no connection between generating
wealth and being rewarded by it at all.

Don't let me wrong, this works, for a while. Until you get to consume all the
savings of the productive society. And nobody wants to work anymore. Then
societies collapse(Venezuela has 40% inflation per month now, Cuba, URSS)

Some of my family members come from communist countries. I don't want some
political commissar to decide who deserve what and who doesn't.

I believe in distributed power, not centralized authority. Technology is
making distributed power efficient again, with computers in every pocket and
inexpensive 3d printers, laser cutters and CNC mills. Ironically we are
supporting too centralized, too big to fail business.

------
bsbechtel
The idea in theory is great, but we are generations away from getting there.
Right now, the idea of having really high taxes for those who own/control
technology to pay a minimum living wage for those who can't work would stop
all forward progress from here on out. Case in point - Elon Musk. Musk nearly
went bankrupt in 2008 trying to make Tesla and SpaceX succeed. If he had been
taxed at any higher a rate, both companies would have failed. Musk is arguably
a once in a generation entrepreneur. I'd hate to be waiting another 20 years
for electric cars and private rockets to come around.

~~~
damon_c
But, on the other hand, there might be dozens of Elon Musks each generation if
people didn't have to worry about their children falling into poverty because
the idea they quit their job and spent their savings trying to execute didn't
take off.

Or, imagine during that crucial make or break period, being able to go cut the
founder of the electric car company you're working at a little slack with
payroll because you already had a check coming in each month that covered your
rent and data plan.

~~~
bsbechtel
Your first comment is a fair point, although the article is about not having
to work and taking from those who are rich to pay for it, not providing a
safety net so entrepreneurs could try risky thing.

To your second point, I'm not convinced that would happen...even if it did,
labor is a fairly small portion of an auto company's costs (I think at one
point I saw around 20%).

------
austinl
> The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about
> whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told
> them they had to earn a living

This made me think of a world like Neal Stephenson's Anathem, where a portion
of the population chooses to separate themselves and focus purely on
education. Their lifestyles are essentially monastic/akin to $30 per day. Part
of me wishes an option like that were more prevalent/acceptable in our
society.

------
yarou
I think "work" is necessary, at least the connotation that implies one has to
strive for more or give up something in exchange for a tangible reward.
However, work just for the sake of working is unnecessary and detrimental to
the person that must endure it.

------
everyone
This article makes some good points.

In my opinion, it isnt just that a lot of jobs today dont contribute anything
to society, they actively work to its detriment by wasting precious resources
and contributing to serious problems like climate change and pollution.

------
kabisote
Yes, work is necessary. Even before money was invented, our ancestors still
needed to work for their basic needs. They had to harvest or hunt for food,
build their houses and sew their clothing. All of that is work.

~~~
boyter
I think you may be missing the point. Pretty much all developed countries
produce an abundance of these things, and more to the point have automated a
lot of it. A lot of jobs that used to be done by many people can now be done
by a few.

~~~
bane
It would kinda suck to end up as one of the poor schlubs who has to be one of
the "few" who works while everybody else kicks back and screws around all day.

~~~
md224
I would think in a future where work is optional, the goal would be to create
a system where choosing to work would still provide you with additional
privilege (via more money)... the difference would be at the bottom end of the
scale, creating a society where unemployment is a feasible lifestyle if all
you really want in a material sense is basic needs (food, shelter, clothes)
plus healthcare.

Feasibility of that system is another question altogether. I'm just saying I
think in an ideal world, there would still be motivation to contribute to
society (in a capitalist sense); it just wouldn't be a hard requirement for
maintaining your dignity.

~~~
bane
I think many people in this thread have a very self-informed and naive view of
what a society made up of people with unlimited free time would do with that
time -- it wouldn't be self-actualizing.

I know where this idea comes from, I think it's very tempting as well. I was
fascinated with the society described in the Culture books. But the harsh
reality is that most people would not go in the direction that's hoped.

~~~
md224
I know this thread is a day old, which in Internet time is ancient history,
but in case you see this:

You seem to be making the basic assumption that "self-actualizing" should be
the goal of all human beings, rather than something more general like "being
satisfied with one's life." It's possible that you believe the former is a
prerequisite for the latter, and I can't refute or confirm that hypothesis.

Personally, my goal for the lives of citizens living in a work-optional utopia
would be something along the lines of Sen's capability approach to welfare
economics
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_approach](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_approach)).
As long as everyone has the opportunity to be the kind of person they want to
be, and as long as they don't negatively affect the freedom and welfare of
others (e.g. you can't aspire to be a car thief or serial killer), then
however they choose to live is fine with me, self-actualized or not.

~~~
bane
Ha! I just checked down here to see if there were any more replies.

I'm basing the self-actualizing notion on the several posts in the last couple
weeks I've seen here and the comments that followed. There's some kind of
pervasive view here that if people just didn't have to struggle for the basic
act of living, the world would be full of self-actualized people filling the
world with the products of their new hobbies.

I agree with you that your outcome would be fine by me with the same caveat

> as long as they don't negatively affect the freedom and welfare of others

The problem we see today is that for people who've managed to figure out how
to get their most basic needs taken care of for them, is that they don't
subscribe to the need not to negatively affect the freedom and welfare of
others.

My theory is that it's out of boredom and a lack of things to keep them
otherwise occupied -- 'idle hands makes for the Devil's work' and all that.

Regardless, what lots of people want to be, is not an isolated island of self-
fulfillment, but one that's fulfilled through interaction with other people --
even if that interaction is a negative one. However, parsing positive from
negative interactions on a universal level is near impossible. One person's
negative interaction, may be another person's deepest wish.

------
parasight
The title is misleading I think. Fuller does not really question the necessity
of work. He questions the ideas of "earning a living" and "work as a
justification to exist".

------
vacri
It's nice to see an article title which violates Betteridge's law.

------
enraged_camel
The fact that a very large percentage of jobs are unnecessary and were created
simply because we felt like everyone should work for a living needs to be
accepted before we can experiment with economic models such as Unconditional
Basic Income.

