One thing we could do, if we wanted, is to build a society focused on automating away jobs. Such a society would not rely on people to work for its function, but on the labor of machines.
In such a place, people would be free to work as hard as they want for additional gain. They could also, however, take as much time off as they desired to go to school, learn on their own, spend more time with loved ones, or just relax and explore life in their own way.
In such a society, I think many people would be motivated to give their labor to open source projects. I think the machines that run such a society would necessarily be open source, and many people could give back to society by contributing to the design and improvement of the machines that provide for us all.
What do you all think of this? Would you want to live in a place like that?
“Automating away jobs” is like “harvesting away corn”.
Sure you can delete someone’s job. But you just leave a job-shaped hole in the person that then goes and finds a new purpose. It only seems like a disappearance for the season, and then you find something new growing there.
The idea that we are anywhere near “doing all the work” is batshit. We are presently doing maybe 1% of the work that needs doing. You could automate the entire economy 50 times and still have 50 more careers waiting for the globe’s population.
Bioremediation in he wake of climate change alone could occupy an entire generation of earth humans. Mental health another. Building permaculture cities will be the work of an entire generation. None of those things will be amenable to robot labor.
I don’t think we’re close to doing all the work, and I don’t want to automate all work. I want to automate away jobs. Those things society relies on from everyone to function.
The point is that a society that requires everyone to work all the time sucks for a lot of people - particularly those at the bottom. We can and I believe should build a world where working a job is optional. I fully expect people would still work a lot, but it would be optional in the sense that their basic needs (food, shelter, clothing, access to computers and internet) would be provided to them by society.
It is certainly possible to build this. And many people want it. The key, I think, is to build the system based on voluntary interaction. Find people who are willing to help support others and then have those people collectively drive the cost of that support down through engineering.
I’m not trying to eliminate work. You can never eliminate work. I want to eliminate jobs.
but who is going to want to pay for such things? The whole reason "jobs" exists is that it's a task somebody wanted done, and is willing to pay some resources for it.
> What do you all think of this? Would you want to live in a place like that?
Yes, but you're going to need to have the political capital to ratchet down the work week and split productivity gains with labor and capital. That does not exist yet, and without it, the advances you speak of will be used to funnel more wealth to the top.
Disclaimer: I am active on the political side, and will be running for office in the next federal Congressional election cycle. Drop me a line if you want to chat on how we can work together to obviate the need to work down the road; that's the future I want for everyone.
> Disclaimer: I am active on the political side, and will be running for office in the next election cycle.
You should make an announcement or something for us in HN (when the time comes)! I'm sure there would be quite a lot of people here to support your candidature.
Don't we already have a world where machines are the ones producing our needs? There's that Discovery Channel series called "How it's Made" where you see it's practically all robots. Do you agree?
> and without it, the advances you speak of will be used to funnel more wealth to the top.
All the technologies for mass production so far has indeed funneled to the top huh? And this I believe has also slowed down advancement in technology (unless it's something that is very profitable).
> split productivity gains with labor and capital
You'll be called Socialist. Giving what the laborers deserve is Socialism. "Share the means of production!"
However, the fact that Bernie had a following is a good indicator. There's also Corbin whom is pushing for a 'right to own' policy.
> Don't we already have a world where machines are the ones producing our needs? There's that Discovery Channel series called "How it's Made" where you see it's practically all robots. Do you agree?
I don't agree, in that we haven't gone far enough with regards to automation. It's still much too expensive, putting it out of reach of anyone without deep pockets or access to capital markets.
> All the technologies for mass production so far has indeed funneled to the top huh? And this I believe has also slowed down advancement in technology (unless it's something that is very profitable).
The majority of productivity gains has been captured by capital, yes: https://i.stack.imgur.com/iCTuo.jpg (the dismantling of labor unions in the US is also a contributor to wages being held down, but that is out of scope for this comment)
> You'll be called Socialist. Giving what the laborers deserve is Socialism. "Share the means of production!"
I identify as a Democratic Socialist politically. The distinction is important.
Absolutely! I’d like to go farther, and imagine how we could reinvent society if we had high quality open source automation hardware in addition to open source software. Open source software has paved the way and now I’m excited to see what open source robotics combined with the right attitudes can do.
We could have that today. All our money is getting dumped into arms races. If we:
1. Put a 1000% tax on advertising spending.
2. Taxed property at a much higher rate, but gave each person a basic income.
3. Set a ceiling for the ratio of funds that education institutes can spend on non-professor things. (At least here in Canada they waste most of the money on things that don't actually teach skills, they just look impressive or market the university in some other way.)
4. Set caps on how much individual patents or works of art could earn before they lost financial protected status.
5. Set corporate taxes as a function of in-country sales and total affiliated market cap.
6. Punished corporate region shopping for tax havens and other advantages with trade agreements.
7. Made public healthcare optimize on happy person-years saved and with emphasis on prevention.
8. Make more areas that are 7 storeys tall so people can walk or bike to get their daily things.
9. Set high taxes on cars and invested in high speed city-to-city trains.
Then we'd have houses that were safe, but affordable. Cities that had some quiet areas, but were dense enough to be viable for everyone. Great education via well-paid professors and TAs. Reasonable returns in investments in technology and art, without Walt Disney and other soulless corporations milking the same characters year after year. Products that competed mostly on quality instead of advertising.
Instead we have almost the opposite. Nobody can afford anything because property gets sucked up into mortgage fuelled bubbles and in classes of 100 people where each person is paying $40k per year after subsidies we have professors and TAs struggling to get grants to fund their research.
Why? A single course for a four month term is $350–$500k worth of product. Where did all the money go?
Same place all the money always goes: Competition for the best students to get the best reputation to get the best students to get the best...
Funding everything with taxes concentrated power in a government that then becomes a honeypot to be abused by the wealthy. I absolutely do not think that is a good way forward.
It doesn't have to be either/or. You can have a government that's only big enough to keep corporations in check (e.g. by actively busting anything that gets too large), but no bigger than that.
It's reasonable to worry about the wealthy abusing their position in government, but there should be separate fixes for that. It's not like we worry about the power-hungry trying to take over the military in modern societies.
Also, I don't believe in high taxes across the board and funding everything with the government. I primarily want the state to stop arms races. It's not like I want them to take over shoe manufacturing, for example.
Human beings, at least some of them, crave power. How would one such human behave in a system such as this? How would a group? Could a system be designed to be relient against this threat, at scale?
While it's nice to think of a FLOSS utopia, unfortunately human behaviour will never allow it to happen.
I used to be pessimistic about it too. I think it will happen in a proper way in some places, in others it will be used as a tool to amass more power, as the human nature implies it will.
But the silver lining is that we are creating a collective conciousness through tools like the internet. Humans can naturally create this collective sentient being when forming a tribe for instance. Our problem, in our particular point of history of civilization, was always the problem of scale.
Now with the internet we are again able to form this collective mind in a bigger scale. We are still in the infancy of this process, and thats why this collective is acting as a dumb giant. But I think that as we evolve in this process, this collective mind will get more sophisticated. And soon we will be able to collectivelly control whats best for the greater good, trying to repel all hostile movements that could try to control the resources to the benefit of a few.
The problem is: it will take a lot of fight to get there, some of us will fall, but i believe that some of us will get there first.
> Could a system be designed to be relient against this threat, at scale?
It's a problem that ethereum.org is working on. They have an mvp, but not yet ready to scale.
But one can argue that the internet has enabled some of that utopia. And the printing press from the point of view of those who weren't allowed to read. Yes the Church didn't want people to learn how to read, but humans have prevailed. Hopefully we can solve current problems before the Doomsday clock reaches midnight.
Whenever some human has amassed more power over others, and a group feels ill, the robots solve the problem.
All such a robot would have to do is apply current laws, facebook is too big, google is too powerful, banks are bankrypt, robot just swings the hammer the elected politicians failed to do.
I sometimes feel like if we could just make volunteer labor tax deductible, we could get part way to this place.
For some projects a couple hours of my time might be more valuable to everybody than the twenty bucks I’m willing to donate. And ten hours a week would increase your take home pay by about 6%, versus working 50-60 a week for your employer for a slightly bigger raise.
That society will not exist. People derive meaning from work. Ambition also drives personal development. You take those away and all a person has left is self-medication with drugs and booze and suicide. We need the struggle.
>All of human desires for competition and struggle would still be catered to.
Maybe. This discussion is a little abstract, but if OP is proposing a system where there is an outlet for ambition that lets crazy people push themselves to raise themselves above others, then I have no qualms against that. The problem is that such a system is going to look a lot like capitalism or some sort of market-economy (maybe with a social welfare state). That is, such as a system is going to to look like either our society, or it will be a disaster like Venezuela (in the extreme) or Argentina and Brazil.
You point me to a past, or present society that is a model for what OP is trying to argue for?
Obviously I don't condone this.. but a good example would be White Slave owning society in the United States pre 1860.
Most of the "labor" on a plantation was done by slaves which will be very similar to the automated labor provided by robots of the future.
But those slave owners still had jobs to do, they were still competitive with each other. They still used money and tried to acquire more wealth.
Sparta was a neat example too. Menial labor was provided by slaves, but Spartan Citizens competed with each other for military honors and societal placement.
>a good example would be White Slave owning society in the United States pre 1860.
Wow. Ok. Setting aside the humanitarian disaster that the South was in the 1800s, here's some qualification to your example:
- The South was poor, much poorer than the North, both in economic and technological advancement.
- The vast majority of Southerners were NOT slave owners. Meaning that Southern society was extremely stratified with wealth concentrated with a relatively small number of plantation owners. So your example is more inline with a bunch of rich people hanging out together.
But your example does touch on the actual deep problem with automation. The Southerners that prospered under Slavery did so because they owned most of the capital (land and slaves), but the poor non-plantation-owning population still had to work to provide for themselves! Under a cynical (but realistic) views on automation, we expect to see owners of the automatons do great, but what of the masses? Bolting either UBI or increasing our social welfare state is not a solution, because redistribution of wealth is not the core problem (we know how to redistribute wealth - with plenty of examples from modern market economies with social welfare, to less-market/more-socialist attempts as exemplified by your traditional Soviet-style economies). The problem is we don't know how to run a society where the vast majority of people have nothing to do.
I mostly agree with this and I’d add: work does not have to be a “job”. Work can be your family, it can be art, and it can also be exploring the universe. I think Star Trek captures this idea very well.
People tell me this all the time - work is vital to human happiness so we’d better keep buying in to a system that holds the threat of disaster and starvation over our heads if we don’t work.
I have full faith that if work is this valuable, we’ll do it voluntarily. I cannot believe the fantasy that we have to be forced to work or we’ll be miserable. Humans are way too intelligent to just sit there getting more and more miserable because they don’t have to work. Yes, people coming from a capitalist society usually don’t know what to do when their work goes away. But people in a society where no one needs to work will find things to do. Maybe they’ll repair motorcycles as a way of finding Zen.
There is a lot of work we can do that is not focused on economic productivity. In a world where people don’t have to work to survive, they choose what they do. Some will waste away, just as some do now. Most will not.
> Humans are way too intelligent to just sit there getting more and more miserable because they don’t have to work.
We have multitude of examples of populations with generational unemployment, accompanied by crime and drug use even though basic necessities are provided for by the larger welfare state. We see that with rich trust fund kids who also degenerate into drug use, crime, and suicide and are shitty people too.
>Yes, people coming from a capitalist society usually don’t know what to do when their work goes away.
This is not a capitalist thing. This is a human thing. Many people (not all mind you) need some pressure to push themselves ... because if not you can always find a way to fill your time with drugs. I don't think I could survive in a society where you don't have to do anything.
My second point was that you need an outlet for ambition because there are people who will push themselves extraordinarily hard in order to raise themselves, and their families above others - in those cases material wealth is major a factor in that even if there are other goals (like saving the environment, or improving patient outcomes). Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk are examples, startup founders are too, and even immigrants are examples of that. My father left an eastern european communist nation to work (much harder) in a western capitalist democracy even though though his country did not suffer from political instability, nor was it the case the he could not provide food or shelter for his family. Within certain constraints you could live a comfortable life, and yet, a third of the country left over 50 years.
>But people in a society where no one needs to work will find things to do.
Again, we have many many examples where that isn't the case. I can't think of a SINGLE example that illustrates this however (even under communism, it was illegal not to work)
Would we? Many (most?) people push themselves not only to satisfy some abstract goal (save the environment, build the best widget for industry X to improve efficiency, etc.) - and that's great, but the material wealth is a major component of that. This is literally the startup culture that resulted in the biggest corporations on the planet. It was a bunch of people who wanted to change the world for the better, with wealth being a secret (or not so secret) secondary goal. This also explains economic immigrants, or anybody who decides they want more than they have and so push themselves to get it.
Also, why is Noam Chomsky an expert on everything? I understand he is a brilliant linguist, but what could somebody who self-identifies as an Anarchist could add to a reasonable political discussion? That is, his political ideas are clearly crazy and so his political reasoning is suspect because who the hell could think Anarchism is a good idea. Anarchism is an unworkable utopia that manifests itself as warlord-based tribal disaster akin to what is happening in Somalia and Afghanistan with warlords holding all power in a region, or El Salvador and Honduras with gangs and crime.
What special credentials or expertise give him insight into work?
Well you already said it yourself. It is but a secondary goal. Those that do things worthwhile do it because it is worthwhile, however they understand that we live in a capitalist world where you don't eat if you don't profit.
Only the investors (or gamblers) are in it for money.
> This is literally the startup culture that resulted in the biggest corporations on the planet.
So you think having these corporations are good for us? These are simply big because it allowed gamblers to take a share in the pie. Once the actual people who truly want something worthwhile happen leaves, then we are left with Oracle or Balmer.
> Anarchism is an unworkable utopia that manifests itself as warlord-based tribal disaster akin to what is happening in Somalia and Afghanistan with warlords holding all power in a region, or El Salvador and Honduras with gangs and crime.
What do you really think Anarchism simply means chaos? It's like talking to this person then:
>they understand that we live in a capitalist world where you don't eat if you don't profit.
... I disagree.
>Only the investors (or gamblers) are in it for money.
I think you're severely downplaying the incentives that material wealth and ambition and wanting to rise above others, have on people's behaviour. It doesn't matter whether the person is a startup founder raised in a rich, upper-class household, a gang member from the 'hood', or an 'economic' immigrant (i.e. not a refugee) resettling in an another country, this same base incentive drives all them. In all three cases, the individuals have their basic necessities provided for, but they choose to struggle because they want more.
>What do you really think Anarchism simply means chaos?
That's the colloquial understanding but that wasn't why I made my pont. The utopian Anarchism (as described by the 'Anarchist FAQ'[1] which was my introduction to Anarchism) isn't actually that far from the colloquial understanding. In practice there is no mechanism under Anarchism to prevent violence, and there is all the incentive to engage in gang and tribal warfare (why farm, when you and your friends can go beat-up the hippy farming commune for their supplies). The typical Anarchist answer to this is that under their utopia people would simply not do that because they only do that today because they are brainwashed by capitalism. OK. SURE. Good luck with that. You may think I'm strawmanning that position, but think again, this theme that every single vice of humanity is only there because of Capitalism comes up in Anarchist writings all the time. And you're doing the same thing! You attribute common attributes of humanity, that cross cultures and history, to a socio-political system that was only in existence for 200 years. This is just utopian thinking, not reasonable thinking, and this is why your view isn't taken seriously outside of internet forums populated by like-minded people.
>His credentials doesn't matter. What matters is what he said.
The parent may or may not be right about work being necessary to for a meaningful life. I don't have a strong opinion either way [1].
What matters more to me is that we are just so far away from all the important work being "done". As long as there are sick people, people in physical or emotional pain, people needing better housing or better education or any form of improvement to their lives, and as long as the global population has yet to figure out how to exist without harming the environment, there will be work to be done, much of it of great importance and urgency.
This idea that we are within reach of all the important work being "done" so we can all just live a life of leisure seems fanciful to me; I haven't heard anyone propose a realistic pathway to bring about that version of reality - at least not one that doesn't just rely on handwavy concepts from science fiction.
I'd be happy for you to point me to any solid material on this if I'm missing something.
[1] I personally think all kinds of things can give people meaning, and those things may be considered "work" by some people and not by others (E.g., caring for loved ones, learning to create art, or indeed, writing open-source software), so it quickly becomes a futile debate over definitions.
Its not black and white. Currently folks have lives all over the map - from working retail, fry cook, desk jockey, doctor, engineer. Then there are the underemployed. Some folks could be 'ramped down' now with a UBI that frees them from make-work drudgery. Others will find the UBI insufficient and keep working. It could actually be adjusted to tune the workforce to available work.
Later, its true even some engineering, doctoring, lawyering (wait that happened already) jobs will be automated too, and those folks will find the UBI useful.
Its a strawman that work just comes to a halt at some date.
"Make work drudgery" will still need to be be done by someone.
>its true even some engineering, doctoring, lawyering (wait that happened already) jobs will be automated too, and those folks will find the UBI useful.
How?! How will they find UBI useful? It is really frustrating to hear people argue that UBI solves problems that it does not actually solve.
UBI has no answer to automation. For one thing our current welfare state can already provide the basic necessities (for example, nobody ever starves in developed economies), and we can keep adapting it as things change. What we don't know is how we can have a functioning society where the majority of the population doesn't need to do anything.
UBI also has no answer for third world countries which have no capital to drain on a social spending. How is UBI going to work with failed states like Congo? Or Somalia? Or a developing nation like Bangledash? How is immigration going to work? Right now there is an economic case that developed nations can make for new immigrants, but in a fully automated world immigration is ONLY charity since every immigrant you take in will be a drain on your social system and provide no contributions back.
UBI is also ill-defined. Libertarians think UBI will replace our social welfare state (including healthcare system). Progressives, Leftists and Socialists will NEVER EVER agree to that. At best, they may see it as a complement to the existing welfare state.
Oh come on - make-work is defined as 'something that doesn't have to be done'. Lets get on the same page here.
Everybody needs to do something. But we're not all brainwashed drones that only live for work. This is getting ridiculous. What do we do when we leave work? Go to a game, play on a team, socialize with friends, help a buddy renovate her garage, fool with our car.
The world doesn't collapse every Friday after work as it is. We muddle along somehow until Monday morning.
And who is resisting now, is not any kind of argument for who will go along in the future. It may take 30 years for the old farts with the almost religious work ethic to fade away (grow old and die), but it will definitely happen.
Society isn't going to fall flat if we don't have to sit in a chair for 8 hours, 5 days a week. Just the opposite.
>Society isn't going to fall flat if we don't have to sit in a chair for 8 hours, 5 days a week.
Why not?
Has there ever been a functioning society where the vast majority of the population did not have to work for a living and all their needs were provided by a massive central bureaucracy?
Why is it so obvious that such a society would work given that we also have many examples of populations (within existing societies) that suffer from multitude of social ills when their basic needs are provided by the welfare state but no jobs are available.
>But we're not all brainwashed drones that only live for work.
What brainwashing??!?!? You make it seem like working for a living was invented last week. This has been the reality for all of human history.
UBI to me, should be understood as like receiving dividends like how rich people does today. They simply go to their mailbox and voila, money. I can now work on my GPL'ed 2D game in Java. Or work on free software projects for human sustainability.
The problem however will still remain. The Capitalism system encourages businesses to work for profit mindlessly, and so we have invoked Oracle from the depths of hell. And a demagogue who can possibly tweet us into nuclear annihilation.
Prices will keep increasing and economist will confuse us by calling it 'inflation' and put a bunch of fantasy-based math to delude themselves. The money I got from the mailbox won't be enough to afford me a much need vacation to unwind. And so I will have to gamble my meager UBI money into buying shares, insurance, retirement etc.. Then the corporations will keep exploiting the countries you mentioned, sending firearms to fanatics while extracting resources like oil.
The answer? There is no guaranteed answer I believe. There are simply just too many moving global variables. With that said, I found the idea of worker-owned-cooperatives to be one good path to improvement. The idea is for employees to own the corporation and vote upon what to do with the profits. Ofc, this will require maturity of the employees just like how Agile requires that the team members to be seasoned in building software. The Mondragon umbrella of cooperatives is a good case study of this working in scale. Not perfect but still a success. The worker-owners used the profit to build a school, compensate for the effects of recession etc. Prof. Richard Wolff whom ironically is an Economist himself has been working hard to push this idea.
You know you can have today, if you want to. You can go on food-stamps and make use of the plethora of social programs to provide your basic necessities and then you can spend your days writing your 2D game engine in Java. ... But you won't do that. And we both know why.
>The Capitalism system encourages businesses to work for profit mindlessly, and so we have invoked Oracle from the depths of hell.
OK. So this is where hysterics start against the best socio-political system we have developed. And you do agree with that, right? That the modern iteration of capitalism (i.e. a market-economy with democratic government oversight and social safety net) is the best system we have ever tried?
>The Mondragon umbrella of cooperatives is a good case study of this working in scale.
I have nothing against Mondragon or worker-owned coops in general, but ownership structure doesn't really change anything. The core challenge that people have with Capitalism is 'creative destructive' because it means constant change, and change is always hard. If you've been making horse-and-buggy wheels for 20 years and you've been put out of business by automobiles, it doesn't matter whether you're employed by a Capitalist corp or a co-op - it is still hard. So worker-owned coop doesn't solve this or any problem. In fact, I'm not even sure what problem it does solve.
> plethora of social programs to provide your basic necessities and then you can spend your days writing your 2D game engine in Java. ... But you won't do that. And we both know why.
And that is because these basic necessities is not enough. To be human is to have family and travel (in economy not in business class).
> OK. So this is where hysterics start against the best socio-political system we have developed. And you do agree with that, right? That the modern iteration of capitalism (i.e. a market-economy with democratic government oversight and social safety net) is the best system we have ever tried?
Doesn't mean it is good enough. And you do agree with that, right? Feudalism, Caste System, Slavery, Central Planning, Capitalism, Church control. One replacing the other. And with less centralized power, we get a better system.
> and you've been put out of business by automobiles, it doesn't matter whether you're employed by a Capitalist corp or a co-op - it is still hard.
Well during 2008 recession. One of the big products of Mondragon was creating Washing Machines. Then demand suddenly fell, and they had to lay-off man-power like many other Capitalist corps. However because their policies was made democratically, they have handled it better than traditional Capitalist corps.
Any excess worker of the Washing Machine Cooperative (remember Mondragon is a group of many Co-ops) is offered two options:
1) Keep their membership in Mondragon. Company will re-skill you and get you to work in another coop. Any additional commute time will be compensated by the company.
2) Retire early. You get your retirement benefits. And parting compensation.
Mondragon, since they are not servant to investors can afford to do this. The profits are used for the workers, not for the 1% capitalists. Oh and by the way, compensation for managers and CEOs are only several times the lowest salary. Unlike your capitalist corps where CEOs get a bajillion times more than the avg salary. The key is in the details.
Capitalists are not workers. You can create this utopian society by distributing capital in a way that all individuals have their basic needs provided. At that point everyone is a capitalist and is free to pursue whatever interests they desire.
Note that all economic systems are concerned with distribution of resources so the idea of distributing capital is not unique to a "welfare state".
> You can create this utopian society by distributing capital in a way that all individuals have their basic needs provided
This is currently not even close to possible based on our current technology level. In order for everyone to have their basic needs provided for free we would need full automation for all of these things:
* all of healthcare
* all of food production
* all of shelter construction and maintenance
* all energy generation
* all transportation
* all waste disposal
* all water collection and treatment
* maintenance of the things that automate all of the above
Given that this is not the scenario now, countries are forced to tax the currently economically productive people to pay for some of these things for those not currently participating in the economy.
There is no country in the world that provides all of these things for free to all citizens because there would be no incentive for anyone to do the work to support all of the basic needs. It's already hard enough to incentivize people to work to support the economy when they have to do it in exchange for food/shelter/transportation.
>Capitalists are not workers
This is completely false. Anyone with a retirement account or money sitting in a bank earning interest is a capitalist. Even as a worker with no money earning growth, you are a capitalist selling your own labor/skills/time.
Your definition of "capitalist" does not seem to bear much relation to the ideas of Adam Smith. Also, you added a clause ("for free") to the statement you responded to, then argued against it. This is disingenuous and invalid as a form of argument.
> Given that this is not the scenario now, countries are forced to tax the currently economically productive people to pay for some of these things for those not currently participating in the economy.
It's at least as valid to say that capitalism is incorrect in valuing people only in relation to the value of their labor. We have massive social and financial structures to subsidize students, because we recognize that activity has a great deal of future value to individuals, nations, and the world at large. We provide a great deal of support to mothers, and the elderly, because societies are more than just economic engines.
> There is no country in the world that provides all of these things for free to all citizens because there would be no incentive for anyone to do the work to support all of the basic needs.
Contradicted by studies. People work because they want to, and because they want more than a basic existence. You would also need to show that it's less expensive to have a bunch of homeless and/or sick people, which is not really possible in a democratic society. Not paying for things that are necessary for your fellow citizens to survive usually ends up being the most expensive way possible to pay for things.
I think that you should rethink a great deal of your sociopolitical philosophy.
>We have massive social and financial structures to subsidize students, because we recognize that activity has a great deal of future value to individuals, nations, and the world at large
Based on capitalism though. We incentize it because educated people are must more useful economically so their future earnings potential is the reason they are able to take pictures of out student loans in the first place.
Places that offer student discounts aren't magically treating them better because they are thinking about their future, they do it because it's an easy way to ensure that someone is likely poor and unable to afford your regular price. It's no different than grocery stores giving coupons to people via annoying mailers so only people with lots of time get the discount.
>Contradicted by studies.
Which are all bullshit because there is no place where this is done on a national level. Nobody unplugs toilets just for fun. You'd have a lot of artists and carpenters contributing things that society doesn't need.
>I think that you should rethink a great deal of your sociopolitical philosophy.
And I think you should spend a little time learning about economics.
This is close to a non sequitur, and it doesn't help that you're talking about student discounts as if they were a particularly large component of student financial support. Mentioning that is absurd. Massive subsidies are not "based on capitalism", and they're particularly antithetical to the laissez-faire capitalists.
A blanket dismissal of related studies is simply prejudice.
A lot of jobs just act as distractions to create jobs
A better target than automoting away cashier jobs at pointless retailers would be to target universal access to healthcare and social services as the key economic drivers
Then folks aren’t tethered to dumb jobs and can make jewelry or chairs and such for personal needs when they’re on vacation from their job that supports the health economy
Creating is an important human outlet. Don’t think it’ll do to automate it away. But we can open it up to anyone learning to create whatever so long as they don’t need to be tethered to a dumb job
In such a place, people would be free to work as hard as they want for additional gain. They could also, however, take as much time off as they desired to go to school, learn on their own, spend more time with loved ones, or just relax and explore life in their own way.
In such a society, I think many people would be motivated to give their labor to open source projects. I think the machines that run such a society would necessarily be open source, and many people could give back to society by contributing to the design and improvement of the machines that provide for us all.
What do you all think of this? Would you want to live in a place like that?