Ask HN: Could we restructure society so that people don't hate their jobs?
14 comments
Technology is deflationary. You get more done with less. Prices should be going down not up. The average steel worker now can produce thousands of times the amount of steel than their counterparts could a hundred years ago, yet they work more hours and receive less purchasing power for their time. Most all of this can be traced to regulations, like fiat currency and patent systems. If we had an honest society not based on grift the average person would be able to work a fraction of the time they have to now to make ends meet, which would let them have massively more free time to pursue what they wanted and may not hate doing some drudge work everyday. When I was a kid you could put yourself through college and rent an apartment delivering pizzas a few nights a week. In the 50's you could work a couple days a month to pay the rent. It is the attempts at social planning that drain the tech gains away from people. Ditch the fiat.
I talk to a lot of retired people. And a lot of them mention they’re bored and interested in finding some kind of fun job. of those that have tried it, it’s gone badly. There’s just so much nonsense in any job.
It seems like employers really take advantage of the fact that the employees need the money to live.
It seems like employers really take advantage of the fact that the employees need the money to live.
Very true. I retired early (around 50) and not having enough money to be a world globetrotter I found things boring around my town. So I started working again (2x) 4 times per week and that helped a lot.
I agree that older workers not in specific high needs businesses are seen as low wage cogs.
Funny but I live in a town with a lot of people who've retired and so even volunteering is difficult - there's a glut of volunteers. Now with Covid stay at home almost all volunteer opportunities have dried up.
I agree that older workers not in specific high needs businesses are seen as low wage cogs.
Funny but I live in a town with a lot of people who've retired and so even volunteering is difficult - there's a glut of volunteers. Now with Covid stay at home almost all volunteer opportunities have dried up.
People don't hate their jobs so much as they dislike having a boss. That's why fishermen, farmers and other bossless occupations stay working way past 65.
Any solution to this problem needs to consider that its not just about getting work done. It's getting the right work done to satisfy the needs of society. Money acts fairly well as a feedback mechanism, because if the work you're doing isn't useful to someone else (or at least believed by them to be useful), you won't get paid to do it.
For example, If I'm feeling generous I might be willing to cut the grass of an elderly neighbor or volunteer to repaint some rooms in a local school. On the other hand, I'm not going to spend thousands of hours learning a trade plus tens of thousands on equipment, licensing, etc so I can build a school or build my neighbor a house for free.
Jobs consist of some mix of fun work and drudge work. If I'm not getting compensated, even if I do need some small amount of work in my life, why wouldn't I focus on the fun work (e.g. writing new software) and skip the drudge work (e.g. software testing, maintenance, planning, work tracking, documentation)?
Also, I'd like to say I've always felt that my jobs took up too much of my time. Even if I decide that some work in my life is valuable, it might be at a much lower level than would benefit society (e.g. 8 hours per week vs. 40 hours per week). Average that over a whole society and that's a lot less getting done.
For example, If I'm feeling generous I might be willing to cut the grass of an elderly neighbor or volunteer to repaint some rooms in a local school. On the other hand, I'm not going to spend thousands of hours learning a trade plus tens of thousands on equipment, licensing, etc so I can build a school or build my neighbor a house for free.
Jobs consist of some mix of fun work and drudge work. If I'm not getting compensated, even if I do need some small amount of work in my life, why wouldn't I focus on the fun work (e.g. writing new software) and skip the drudge work (e.g. software testing, maintenance, planning, work tracking, documentation)?
Also, I'd like to say I've always felt that my jobs took up too much of my time. Even if I decide that some work in my life is valuable, it might be at a much lower level than would benefit society (e.g. 8 hours per week vs. 40 hours per week). Average that over a whole society and that's a lot less getting done.
Of course we could, but it would mean a sharp reduction in the values of most stocks, declines in economic output as measured by products and services bought and sold, and empowerment of regular people at the expense of elites. People would spend a lot more time creating art and spending time with friends and family and not converting raw materials into widgets.
For all those reasons, it can’t happen without some kind of revolutionary break with our current economic system.
I mean on some level you have to see past the whole work/life balance paradigm and see that really, it’s all life, and is this really how you want to live it? If we were genuinely free to make choices and not forced to fight over positional assets we would make dramatically different choices.
For all those reasons, it can’t happen without some kind of revolutionary break with our current economic system.
I mean on some level you have to see past the whole work/life balance paradigm and see that really, it’s all life, and is this really how you want to live it? If we were genuinely free to make choices and not forced to fight over positional assets we would make dramatically different choices.
I've done unpleasant work throughout my life. Some of it blue collar, some of it white collar. It's almost never the work itself that made me unhappy and almost always management. In the vast majority of the cases, the management issues had little to nothing to do with productivity or increasing income for the company. It was about petty turf wars and ego stroking. A minority of the cases were due to death marches from poor management. Conflicts with co-workers have happened but those are almost always short lived and resolved quickly. The nasty jobs like getting burnt by hot exhaust pipes while changing oil all day or manually changing strings random enough to defy regex into something new in thousands of files are unpleasant but you do them and they're done. The petty middle management sociopaths on the other hand, they just keep going on and on and on. Glad I'm financially secure and wise enough now to quickly exit those situations.
We don't need UBI to work less than 8-10 hours a day. We can work less by living with less, and learning to be more productive. It really is that simple.
We are not forced to work. Work is required to produce or acquire the things we consume. There are only two ways to reduce the need for work: Consume less, or produce more with the same amount of work.
We are not forced to work. Work is required to produce or acquire the things we consume. There are only two ways to reduce the need for work: Consume less, or produce more with the same amount of work.
The problem are the major costs that are out of your control when you have a family like the cost of an apartment in major cities with more than 1 bedroom or family health insurance etc. When you're single that makes things a lot simpler but people with families...
Costs are within a family's control. There's just more communication involved.
And costs are just one side of the equation. Income is the other side. People can learn new skills. People can change jobs.
And costs are just one side of the equation. Income is the other side. People can learn new skills. People can change jobs.
A universal basic income is not a cure for this particular problem.
The reason the idea is getting interest is the number of people who don't have and can't get jobs.
Buckminster Fuller talked years ago about the need to abolish the notion of "making a living" because he was prescient as usual and foresaw a time when many people couldn't.
You "make a living" doing a job. The job exists because someone else is willing to pay to have that job done. What happens when you don't know how to do anything someone else will pay for?
Work flows to where it can be done cheapest, and pretty much always has.
As the Internet Eats the World, and robotics become more sophisticated, whole classes of jobs are going away. They are either being automated, or are being done elsewhere because the job does not have to be done where you are and someone elsewhere will do it cheaper than you can. They can do it cheaper because it costs less to live where they do, and will accept a lower price than you can charge.
(Government efforts at protectionism at best slow the process. They cannot eliminate the problem. And protectionist efforts raise costs for everyone else. How much more are you willing to pay for things you buy to see that they are made by workers in your country? At some point you'll say "That's too expensive" and not pay it, which is why those jobs go elsewhere in they first place.)
Technology gets praised as creating jobs, and indeed, it does. But the new jobs created don't help those whose jobs were eliminated by technology. By definition, those new jobs are new, and the folks idled don't know how to do them, and possibly can't learn because the job requires the equivalent of an advanced degree to be able to do it. What do those folks do instead?
Work flowing to where it can be done cheapest has always been a factor. What is changing is the amount of work that can be done elsewhere or by machine. Folks doing unskilled/low skilled labor have suffered the most, as no one will pay living wages for that sort of work in an industrialized nation like the US. Well meaning efforts like mandated minimum wage increases are a band aid. There must be minimum wage jobs covered by those mandates, and the higher the minimum wage goes, the harder employers think about what the job is worth and whether they want to pay that much for it. If you have a minimum wage job, you benefit (if you don't get laid off to cut costs.) If you don't have a job and are looking for a minimum wage job the bar just got raised.
But increasingly, it's not just unskilled/low skilled labor affected. I tell people, if it can be done by machine, or elsewhere for less than you want to be paid, it will. We are still discovering how many that applies to.
Will a guaranteed basic income make everyone couch potatoes? Hardly. Aside from providing income needed to live, jobs structure time, and give you something to do with your waking hours. The bigger question is just what sort of potential people have to unleash. What would you do with your time if you didn't have to work for a living?
This is ultimately a political and social pro0blem more than an economic one. The notion of "making a living" is embedded in our culture. Jobs are status markers. What you do for a living and what sort of living you make doing it is a principal source of status. What happens to your status when you can't make a living?
I don't have good answers for any of this. I am simply convinced that we aer mostly not even asking the right questions.
The reason the idea is getting interest is the number of people who don't have and can't get jobs.
Buckminster Fuller talked years ago about the need to abolish the notion of "making a living" because he was prescient as usual and foresaw a time when many people couldn't.
You "make a living" doing a job. The job exists because someone else is willing to pay to have that job done. What happens when you don't know how to do anything someone else will pay for?
Work flows to where it can be done cheapest, and pretty much always has.
As the Internet Eats the World, and robotics become more sophisticated, whole classes of jobs are going away. They are either being automated, or are being done elsewhere because the job does not have to be done where you are and someone elsewhere will do it cheaper than you can. They can do it cheaper because it costs less to live where they do, and will accept a lower price than you can charge.
(Government efforts at protectionism at best slow the process. They cannot eliminate the problem. And protectionist efforts raise costs for everyone else. How much more are you willing to pay for things you buy to see that they are made by workers in your country? At some point you'll say "That's too expensive" and not pay it, which is why those jobs go elsewhere in they first place.)
Technology gets praised as creating jobs, and indeed, it does. But the new jobs created don't help those whose jobs were eliminated by technology. By definition, those new jobs are new, and the folks idled don't know how to do them, and possibly can't learn because the job requires the equivalent of an advanced degree to be able to do it. What do those folks do instead?
Work flowing to where it can be done cheapest has always been a factor. What is changing is the amount of work that can be done elsewhere or by machine. Folks doing unskilled/low skilled labor have suffered the most, as no one will pay living wages for that sort of work in an industrialized nation like the US. Well meaning efforts like mandated minimum wage increases are a band aid. There must be minimum wage jobs covered by those mandates, and the higher the minimum wage goes, the harder employers think about what the job is worth and whether they want to pay that much for it. If you have a minimum wage job, you benefit (if you don't get laid off to cut costs.) If you don't have a job and are looking for a minimum wage job the bar just got raised.
But increasingly, it's not just unskilled/low skilled labor affected. I tell people, if it can be done by machine, or elsewhere for less than you want to be paid, it will. We are still discovering how many that applies to.
Will a guaranteed basic income make everyone couch potatoes? Hardly. Aside from providing income needed to live, jobs structure time, and give you something to do with your waking hours. The bigger question is just what sort of potential people have to unleash. What would you do with your time if you didn't have to work for a living?
This is ultimately a political and social pro0blem more than an economic one. The notion of "making a living" is embedded in our culture. Jobs are status markers. What you do for a living and what sort of living you make doing it is a principal source of status. What happens to your status when you can't make a living?
I don't have good answers for any of this. I am simply convinced that we aer mostly not even asking the right questions.
[deleted]
I think we humans rely on ourselves doing menial and unrewarding work too much for us to give ourselves the ability to refuse.
Slavery was abolished though, so I am hopeful.
Slavery was abolished though, so I am hopeful.
[deleted]
Check out Murray Bookchin.
There are plenty of jobs which are meaningful yet worthless from a capitalistic respect. I've turned down plenty of jobs in the past that would provide much more benefit to the world at large because they couldn't pay me enough to save up comfortably for retirement. So instead I've just worn these golden handcuffs for the past few years while working in marketing tech (which if anything is a net detractor from society). I'm a fantastic teacher and enjoy getting the opportunity any chance I can, but I could never do that for a living because the wages wouldn't leave me with enough to be financially secure in this nation.
It's amazing how much of privilege there is attached to volunteer work. So much of it can make a significant difference in other people's lives. Yet such time commitments either require that you've made money elsewhere (normally through means not super productive to society) in your "real job" making business widgets/yet another spreadsheet, or that you also willfully give up on your own financial security.
Even if a significant portion of the population were to become couch potatoes I posit that society would be no worse off in the long run. Such people are not the people currently making the next cure for cancer, or rescuing people from burning buildings. Such people are those barely getting through the day as is, not giving a crap about their boring job, just going through the motions to make money for someone else. Sure the companies that currently pay an unfairly low rate for those people's limited time will suffer... GOOD, such predatory behaviors should not be supported, propped up, an even enforced as they currently are by our government.
By providing people with an alternative to meaningless work we not only free up those who would want to do truly beneficial work to do so, we also provide much greater market power to those who simply want something minimally productive during the day. So many people make minimum wage or less for amazingly demanding and unsafe work. Currently that is the only option for so many people, so those employers who are unscrupulous can wield so much power and demand so much while providing so little in return.
Even if a significant percentage of the population ends up just spending their time out hiking, watching tv, or generally spending more time with their friends family (horrible outcome right?!?), if the rest of us get to benefit from either of the two previous scenarios then the only humans who wouldn't be better off would either be 1) those who think they deserve all the riches of the world even if they must bury the rest of us, or 2) those who use insecurity to force people into laying down their lives to fight their battles for them because they can keep those "lowly" people from having anything of meaning in this life.
It's amazing how much of privilege there is attached to volunteer work. So much of it can make a significant difference in other people's lives. Yet such time commitments either require that you've made money elsewhere (normally through means not super productive to society) in your "real job" making business widgets/yet another spreadsheet, or that you also willfully give up on your own financial security.
Even if a significant portion of the population were to become couch potatoes I posit that society would be no worse off in the long run. Such people are not the people currently making the next cure for cancer, or rescuing people from burning buildings. Such people are those barely getting through the day as is, not giving a crap about their boring job, just going through the motions to make money for someone else. Sure the companies that currently pay an unfairly low rate for those people's limited time will suffer... GOOD, such predatory behaviors should not be supported, propped up, an even enforced as they currently are by our government.
By providing people with an alternative to meaningless work we not only free up those who would want to do truly beneficial work to do so, we also provide much greater market power to those who simply want something minimally productive during the day. So many people make minimum wage or less for amazingly demanding and unsafe work. Currently that is the only option for so many people, so those employers who are unscrupulous can wield so much power and demand so much while providing so little in return.
Even if a significant percentage of the population ends up just spending their time out hiking, watching tv, or generally spending more time with their friends family (horrible outcome right?!?), if the rest of us get to benefit from either of the two previous scenarios then the only humans who wouldn't be better off would either be 1) those who think they deserve all the riches of the world even if they must bury the rest of us, or 2) those who use insecurity to force people into laying down their lives to fight their battles for them because they can keep those "lowly" people from having anything of meaning in this life.
Thanks for a very insightful post
I find the discussion in the comments very interesting.
Yes, we could restructure society. More than hate, what worries me is the many people that can't find a way forward in the current world and the immense amount of wasted human potential.
We live in the world with most opportunities we have ever seen, and yet we are really poor on time and spaces to develop that potential. Maybe in the past we also didn't have that much time, but nowadays the dissonance in "what could be and what is" is definitely at an all time high.
But I believe the current crisis we are facing is a good opportunity to let everyone know how fragile capitalism is. I don't say everything is terrible with capitalism, but its need for an efficient market that needs to keep growing and becoming ever more efficient has some clear downsides. First, the consumism and the general stress it causes to the population with its relentless pace. Keep finding new ways to convince people that you are giving them something valuable. Otherwise you won't be competitive enough and you will fall. The second problem is the inflexibility during times of economic deceleration. So, if we have a pandemic and we must only provide essential services, what? Why does the world need to collapse? What kind of miserable system is this?
I think we could reach a social contract where we all contribute a bit on what we need to satisfy our basic needs, without having to work endless hours in miserable shifts, treated like production machines instead of what we are, which is humans.
But without a doubt, changing society seems extremely hard at this point. It's not like anyone owns the system. The monster has already grown under its own premises, and no one really holds a key or controls it.
From my perspective, the only thing we can do is try to find ways to free more time for people, and create spaces that exist outside the capitalist system, with as little relation to money as possible. You can't really convince everyone with an ideology. We need to slowly change the dynamics under which we live, and with that progressively shift the direction to which we walk. Sadly, this only tends to happen as enough people hit the wall, and that means an astounding and unnacceptable amount of suffering.
Still, I really wonder about people's potential. I'd like to live in a world like this just to see what would we be capable of. Would it be something extraordinary, or wouldn't it be that different from what we have now? I'd really want to see it.
Reducing the problems we currently have and giving everyone more space and time to pursue whatever they feel will fill their hearts is not such a big technological / technical problem as a problem of social organization, communication and consensus.
Yes, we could restructure society. More than hate, what worries me is the many people that can't find a way forward in the current world and the immense amount of wasted human potential.
We live in the world with most opportunities we have ever seen, and yet we are really poor on time and spaces to develop that potential. Maybe in the past we also didn't have that much time, but nowadays the dissonance in "what could be and what is" is definitely at an all time high.
But I believe the current crisis we are facing is a good opportunity to let everyone know how fragile capitalism is. I don't say everything is terrible with capitalism, but its need for an efficient market that needs to keep growing and becoming ever more efficient has some clear downsides. First, the consumism and the general stress it causes to the population with its relentless pace. Keep finding new ways to convince people that you are giving them something valuable. Otherwise you won't be competitive enough and you will fall. The second problem is the inflexibility during times of economic deceleration. So, if we have a pandemic and we must only provide essential services, what? Why does the world need to collapse? What kind of miserable system is this?
I think we could reach a social contract where we all contribute a bit on what we need to satisfy our basic needs, without having to work endless hours in miserable shifts, treated like production machines instead of what we are, which is humans.
But without a doubt, changing society seems extremely hard at this point. It's not like anyone owns the system. The monster has already grown under its own premises, and no one really holds a key or controls it.
From my perspective, the only thing we can do is try to find ways to free more time for people, and create spaces that exist outside the capitalist system, with as little relation to money as possible. You can't really convince everyone with an ideology. We need to slowly change the dynamics under which we live, and with that progressively shift the direction to which we walk. Sadly, this only tends to happen as enough people hit the wall, and that means an astounding and unnacceptable amount of suffering.
Still, I really wonder about people's potential. I'd like to live in a world like this just to see what would we be capable of. Would it be something extraordinary, or wouldn't it be that different from what we have now? I'd really want to see it.
Reducing the problems we currently have and giving everyone more space and time to pursue whatever they feel will fill their hearts is not such a big technological / technical problem as a problem of social organization, communication and consensus.
I’d argue that it’s not capitalism that is fragile, markets are a natural phenomenon, what we are witnessing is government being very powerful and technology enabling people to communicate rapidly and effectively force the market into submission.
I have worked in a few industries that I had zero interest in at all. Yet every time I made contributions to those industries out of a sense of satisfaction that I never could have got sitting at home. Perhaps you might say people will get satisfaction from playing video games but I think that’s a hollow argument. It's hollow in the same way that winning at video games makes you feel. Like you just wasted a bunch of time when you could have gotten something done. People will use video games to escape, for sure. But few will find real meaning in them.
We are forcing people to spend all of their waking hours drudging through a routine that leaves them exhausted before they are free to make any choices for themselves. But if we gave people time to live up to their potential we would see a net positive in both the health and financial security of our nation.