I have a background as a corporate IT executive. I remember driving home from work one day depressed after a meeting with a division head that wanted a new multi-million dollar computer system that would be funded by the savings it would derive in a reduction in workforce. I was literally working in a discipline to reduce the number o…
I have a background as a corporate IT executive. I remember driving home from work one day depressed after a meeting with a division head that wanted a new multi-million dollar computer system that would be funded by the savings it would derive in a reduction in workforce. I was literally working in a discipline to reduce the number of jobs in corporate America.
Currently I own and run a couple of small businesses. One of them is a non-profit that provides financing to small business with a mission to grow jobs in the communities we serve (a tonic to my previous professional job-destruction role). Both of my businesses have seen personnel costs and other costs rise, primarily because of the constant increase in regulatory compliance, fee and taxes and dumb policy moves... with the fees and taxes going to government... government that keeps expanding and with government employees that are all paid significantly more than their private sector peers in total compensation.
In the other business, which is a food product manufacturing operation, we needed a piece of equipment to support a task that was significantly difficult manual labor. The equipment was only made in China and Canada... even though the design of the equipment was originally made in the US and produced in the US. The Canadian version of the equipment was not a good fit for our application (they were targeting larger operations). So I had to purchase a Chinese version. The installed equipment freed up my employees to do more valuable labor.
I would have paid 2x or 3x the cost of the Chinese equipment to purchase USA-made equipment.
However, it is not made here. It is not made here for several reasons.
1. It requires welders, and welders are in short supply in the US.
2. The business to make the equipment is industrial and the US regulations for starting an industrial business are complex, costly and restrictive.
3. The energy costs for an industrial equipment manufacturer are extreme in many parts of the US.
4. US parents have sent their kids to expensive liberal arts schools and the kids don't want to work at any physical labor.
5. The parts of the country where these jobs would be welcome are a mess with drug problems and crime. And the education system sucks so bad that there the number of people that can be trained to do the jobs required to manufacture the equipment are too few.
Today there are millions of unfilled jobs, and plenty of opportunity to start and grow small businesses that would provide more jobs. However, the Marxists know that they are better served to push these narratives of automation causing the need to approve Universal Basic Income.
One last point. Collectivism does not work. It sucks in any form. You cannot pay people to not work and expect human needs will be met. We are better off subsidizing work as needed to get more humans doing productive things. We are entering an anti-work cultural shift that is terrible and will be the end of us if it continues.
The idiocy of this comment is astounding but common. Define "free". You mean we can just harvest dollars from the money trees you collectivist are convinced that grow in the gardens of CEOs?
Otherwise who will you take from to provide that "free" education and healthcare?
Let me answer for you. You would take from those that would otherwise start, own and grow business that would provide the jobs that people would claim they don't want to do because they have free education and free healthcare.
Sure, I am the dipshit. This is the effing broke mindset that just ignores that EVERYTHING derives from the productive economy that produces. By increasing benefits to people the cost of that has to be born by taking from the productive economy. The better solution is to allow people to earn what they need in the productive economy and pay for what they need themselves. Redistribution through government is the most inefficient method. And if you don't believe that, let me introduce you to my leftcoast neighbors all retired in their 50s from the government jobs.
1950-1975 - mostly pre civil rights. Really? Scandinavian countries that are 80% ethically homogeneous, the GDP and population of Wisconsin and absolutely love free market capitalism? UK pre-Thatcher is like so historical. Why not go back even further? But then what would you type all this brilliance on after getting on your time machine and going back to a time that you romance as better?
My question is a real one. What countries today are the model we should follow? Because if they don't exist, then you are just pursuing some irrational fantasy.
Believe it or not, designing working social systems has been a primary focus of many people throughout the history of human life. If there was ever a better system, it would have been tried and realized by now.
My neighbor is a retired gubmt worker at 58 (retired at 60 but had two years worth of sick leave accrued that he was credited with). He is now 74. Will likely live until 90+. He gets a six figure pension. Healthcare covered for life. He retired as a mid level manager. He started working for the government at age 20. His pension was 3% @ 30... so after 30 years on the job he retired with 90% of his pay for the rest of his life. Inflation adjusted of course.
So he put in 28 years on the job, and will likely be retired for 42 or more years. The present value of that pension and his healthcare benefits are over $5 million.
Sure he paid $5 million into his retirement benefits over those 28 years.
You’re right. Most people go into local government work for the money. Also please note someone retiring now has a very different benefits picture than people who were hired since the 90s passed into the mists of time.
Well for one thing, you don’t just tax the rich more; you also tax the upper middle class. Give me 1 year of paternity leave, a 32 hour work week, and the good feeling of knowing the poor are fed and have good healthcare, and I’ll gladly vote for paying 50-60% of my salary in taxes.
Collectivism absolutely works. China is demonstrating this as we speak. Such a mindset is alien to our culture, so of course you dismiss it out of hand because you don't understand it.
You see... this is the problem with you people... you failed to take enough Economics classes and thus develop opinions like this that are simply false.
China only became economically strong because of the democratic capitalism success of the US that it looted from. If the US had been a collectivist system, China would still be a 3rd world country today. Over 50% of the products produced in China today, were invented in and made in the US. The US educated almost all of China's engineers and scientists.
You simply cannot make this case that China is an example of how collectivism works if the collectivist system cannot grow and thrive itself.
"You see... this is the problem with you people... you failed to take enough Economics classes and thus develop opinions like this that are simply false."
I know University of Chicago econ people. I'm married to a libertarian who literally used to teach price theory. I'm unsure he'd recognize your economic opinions (for example, on "productivity") as free-market, either.
The free market and the prosperity gospel aren't the same thing. While it's common for American political rhetoric to invoke the spirit of Joel Osteen when it thinks it's invoking the spirit of Milton Friedman, that doesn't mean it's right.
National Socialism = fascism = "private" businesses using market prices and nominal owners to allocate resources. But ALSO doing a lot of what the gov't wants.
Hitler gave fascism a bad name; Insane Jew hate racism is not part of fascism.
REAL fascism has never been tried.
Until "Communist" China. The successful "capitalists" are allowed to get rich, as long as they stay on the good side of those currently in power.
China has built many huge, great things - and brought more millions out of poverty, more quickly, than ever before in history. Using fascist gov't + business + market prices.
Lots of great stuff; but also lots of crap. Recently they had to demolish many housing skyscrapers because of shoddy work.
Jewish collectivist Kibbutzim "worked" at maintaining subsistence level existence, but only after the '67 6 day war did Israel give up their Zionist collectivist dream - and become an economic powerhouse in the ME despite almost no oil nor other salable natural resources.
This is correct. Reganite policies/ideology beget a lumpenproletariat incapable of accessing work, while simultaneously bolstering a lack of incentive/desire to want to work. It then gives the Reganites a scapegoat, which strengthens class divisions and obfuscates the real issues at hand. People will find meaning in work when it actually gives them something in return to live for.
The homeless are forced to survive somehow, requiring some amount of toil to persevere. These are generally not people incapable of or unwilling to work, if given the chance to make a real living. Laziness is a product of bloated Reganite policies that generate meaningless, unproductive and unsustainable labor, it entrenches a mindset of helplessness in those who realize what’s going on so it de-incentivizes labor, and it keeps the boot on those who are already struggling.
This is a lot of BS. Not backed by statistics nor reality.
People will generally pursue what delivers short-term endorphins to their own detriment. They will consume even more hours of entertainment if someone else will just cover enough of their expenses. They feel entitled to that for some reason.
Working for a living in a modern market economy replaces the reality of human existence and evolution that comprises 99% of our time on this planet where we had little time to lay on the couch, eat chips, watch porn, post idiocy on Reddit and play video games. The human animal will become apathetic depressed lumps of flesh without needing some routine struggle to survive and within that struggle a pathway to socioeconomic advancement.
If people are intrinsically driven to labor in some form or fashion, that it's instinct (as you indicate), how could anyone spend their entire life consuming "entertainment", not become bored, AND survive a socialist society where "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" was the creed? The "human struggle" will not disappear.
Welfare does not create entitlement. Our modern market economy and current iteration of ideological capitalism has PRODUCED what you seem to despise the most. Apathy is born of burnout, exhaustion, and feelings of helplessness in the face of insurmountable odds. The answer is not always to just grind down harder - but to find a way to make the struggle successful, efficient, attainable, and worthwhile.
“ Both of my businesses have seen personnel costs and other costs rise, primarily because of the constant increase in regulatory compliance, fee and taxes and dumb policy moves”
My spouse manages a public safety network for a midsize city and gets paid waaaay less than he would in the private sector. Which government jobs are the ones that have bloated pay?
Are you considering total compensation or just salary? The value of public sector benefits including retirement benefits makes millionaires out of many even rank and file government employees.
There are a number of issues with the 401k and IRA system. How do we know? Because people find the idea of someone having $1 million at retirement something to comment upon. When I’m reality, if you start saving when you get your first adult job - it’s not amazing at all.
No one is taking about guarantees. And of course the S&P 500’s return since 1980 is actually 11.945% so if someone who got their first job on 2/4/1980 and saved $83/month and retired today they would have a million dollars.
Even factoring in benefits, I don’t consider a million bucks after a working lifetime of public service to be inappropriate. Just the opposite. I’m all for eliminating bloat, but fair compensation is something else entirely. Anyone who gets a job in public service and actually sticks it out until retirement has earned their benefits.
I get irritated by the characterization of average public servants (and teachers for that matter) as money grubbers. It’s actually comic. Working for the community for your entire life without pin-balling from job to job I search of higher salary, then retiring comfortably—meaning maintaining a middle class life—well my god isn’t that what the goal is of every economic system? At least ostensibly? So what the hell is the problem, amiright? There are those exposes that show cops, for instance, in big cities who have gamed the system and make these big ol salaries (usually with overtime and side hussles included) and people point and say look!! How dare they! And ok fine, let’s not let that minuscule percent of the population work the overtime beat. Whatever. But the belief that average government/public employees in a system of tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people are retiring as multimillionaires is 1) ludicrous and 2) parsimonious toward people who make the world go round.
Computer programmers, project managers, HR, IT, ... I can't work for the state, I can't stand to see people walking-working in slow-motion, burning the clock.
Me neither. I had a consulting company and did high level technical project management work for some agencies. One contract I would come in and sit in a cubicle all day for six weeks of a six month contract because they could not provision a computer for me, and I could not use my own.
But those employees were all paid as well as their private sector peers, but their real golden ring was to just keep their buts in their seats for 30-35 years so they could retire with a 90% pension and full health care. The value of that is millions. The unfunded government pension liability is a multi trillion dollar whole that government "business" is hiding from the rest of the country.
I have law enforcement in my family. They generally earn their pension. I have fire fighters in my family, their total compensation exceeds the value of their labor. We could pay 2/3 what we are paying for fire fighters in our community and still have a line of applicants two blocks long for the positions that open. I have friends and neighbors who are government workers. Their regular pay commensurate with their responsibilities and level of performance compared to the private sector is generally always equal to or exceeds that of the general job market; however, when adding the value of their benefits including their pension, their compensation is significantly greater than is the general labor market.
One problem is that government employees get to retire early. Another is that their pension is too high as a percentage of their pay at retirement. They also do things like pack on OT at the end of their career to inflate that final pension amount.
The multi trillion dollar unfunded government pension liability is one of the country's biggest problems.
" We are better off subsidizing work as needed to get more humans doing productive things."
How productive is a thing if people need a subsidy in order to do it? What definition of "productive" are you using? It does not sound like the standard economic one.
Is it your personal moral sense of what is "productive" and what isn't?
(Based on your comments elsewhere, your personal sense of what's productive might be awfully specific:
I'm pro-capitalist because it works in reality. I like Freddie because he's a (dreaming) idealist Socialist who has really good critiques of clearly false and/or non-working policies of the Left/ Democrats, AND he writes so well it's a pleasure to read him even when I disagree.
Market Capitalism = "Private property, freely made contracts, freedom to buy and sell. Fraud prohibited, contracts enforced." Depends on anti-fraud & contract & private property enforcement = essentially a gov't. (Could be Home Owners Association security).
Certainly NOT "public (=gov't) ownership". All regulations reduce freedom, including the freedom to harm or excessively risk harm.
I'm glad drunk driving is illegal (tho I wish there were more private roads), because I understand the risk is "high" that drunks cause accidents.
Most people want Freedom. And Security. It's an inevitable tradeoff on the Pareto optimal curve that more freedom means less security. BUT, there are actually 330 million (+-) different trade-off curves in the USA, so many millions can want more of either, and even more of both.
General changes to increase security almost always reduce freedom.
Even my proposal for subsidizing jobs, and having a National (or State) Service corps to employ "everybody", needs to be paid for by taxes and reduces the freedom to not pay those taxes.
Eco? You want to argue Marxism, as in China, or USSR or commie Hungary has less pollution than capitalism?
"Mango you ignorant slut"
China is full, full, full of enviro horror shows. Degradation of environment, and dirty water, was endemic thru all commie countries - Hungarian protests in '89 were strongly against the eco problems of commies.
Yeah, Democrat Deep State government workers in the USA, like in Flint, seem too often willing (not equally, but too often) to pollute when they can get away with it. $600+ million judgement, finally, from the 2014 Democrat gov't fiasco.
Admittedly, if you asked these poor folk how much they'd pay for less pollution, it would be really really small. The poor need more, and better, jobs before much Green luxury beliefs.
You can’t have freedoms without liberties, or else at some point someone’s freedom will impose itself on another’s, which can become irreconcilable. This necessitates a balance between the two in the form of regulations of some sort, which is why laws even exist at all.
Laws are, unfortunately, prone to manipulation and corruption when left to the devices of narcissistic people who do not recognize the importance of others needs, and where they intersect with their own.
"You can’t have freedoms without liberties," - don't you mean without limits?
Most laws are specifications of harms, and "just" punishment for those convicted of doing harm. Tho there are lots of victimless crimes where one or both of the consenting adults is considered the victim of their own decision, like drugs or prostitution.
Drug addition harms the addict. Drug legalization increases addiction. Drug laws increase criminal behavior, corruption, gang violence; but decrease harmful addition.
Should we have drug laws? Good arguments both ways.
(One of the few areas my wife and I disagree; with me accepting legalization and more harmful addiction.)
No gov't free benefits can give "self respect". One must earn it, in one's own eyes. Work and production does that. Even subsidized work like raking leaves or picking up litter, worth only $5/hr, subsidized to be $10/hr, such work is worthy of dignity and self respect.
Forrest Gump-like low IQ folk, willing and able to do simple work, deserve respect AND job offers.
I read, and like, Atlas Shrugged - but the Bible is better, and both should be optional, not required, in schools.
I prefer the Chile style "forced savings" retirement, which a person owns. Such a system, put in with Pinochet and Chicago Boys, has allowed Chile to become the richest S.A. country in 2022 after being one of the poorest in 1973.
Chileans recently voted in a socialist - so I expect the, not Voldemorting, but Venezuelization and reduced or negative growth in Chile.
Anybody forced to be in a system that includes payments and benefits, can be against the system but accept the benefits after paying in the payments. Without the SS, Rand wouldn't have starved. But her system's not worth arguing about.
All of it. Fundamentally wrong. Rand lived what she wrote about. People with your opinions only fantasize about yet another failed attempt at collectivism... the collection of ideologies that always fail and always end up in more profound human misery, suffering and death.
So, for you, "productive" means "productive of 'self-respect'" — productive of a sense of having "earn[ed] it, in one's own eyes"?
I do have moral intuitions about the dignity of work, and I suspect they overlap with yours. I am less optimistic, though, about it being workable to define "productivity" that way. For example:
"I had one patient who worked for GM, very smart guy, invented a lot of safety features for cars. He was probably actively saving a bunch of people’s lives every time he checked in at the office, and he still felt like he was worthless, a burden, that he was just draining resources that could better be used for someone else."
I think it's fine for you to have a spiritual notion of "productive" that works for the average person, but not tough edge cases. After all, most people are average. On the other hand, we're no longer so keen on letting tough edge cases just curl up and die anymore, either (seriously, even when someone is Officially In Hospice Now, our system is set up to make this tough).
Scott now writes at Astral Codex 10. He's talking about "imposter syndrome" of worthy folk feeling unworthy.
"Productive" for me is doing work that has value for others. Nobody I know thinks less litter is not better than more litter.
But the "market value" of such work might be so low that few choose to do that work, when there are other alternatives. Including getting gov't benefits, like food stamps, for doing nothing. UBI makes more folk do nothing, which will be terrible for many, probably most, who need more self respect.
Avg IQ =100; almost nobody is exactly average; some 34+34 = 68% of the people are within one 15 point standard deviation of 100: 85-115, which are all sort-of average.
You really think staying home playing video games and watching porn and masturbating all day leads to self respect?
I know Scott's new place, but old classics are still old classics.
"'Productive' for me is doing work that has value for others."
Yes, but how do you *know* it does, unless they're willing to pay you? "Don't play dumb, Midge," I can imagine you saying — because that's exactly what I'm telling myself right now.
But I've also been in volunteer situations where the volunteers took on unusually unpleasant work to make life more pleasant for everyone else involved — and were ultimately treated as "losers" and "parasites" for volunteering, with overt appeals to the reasoning that, if the work were truly worth anything, it would be paid, not volunteer!:
Work does not *have* to be paid for in a free market in order to be "worth something", but the sad fact is that, in a pluralistic society, it's hard to *prove* it's worth anything unless it is.
"You really think staying home playing video games and watching porn and masturbating all day leads to self respect?"
No, *not typically on the margins*. (Indeed, I belong to a tradition that still sees masturbation as a sin: nonetheless, if someone were wanking as a distraction from drug cravings or active suicidal ideation, what kind of shriveled heart would I have to have to not consider that the lesser of evils?) But I also know it's common enough for some people to behave like that and somehow still end up thinking higher of themselves than others who've earnestly beavered away through all the traditional advice about self-improvement.
This is not the economic or Marxist definition of production, there are two different concepts being discussed here.
However, there should absolutely be value seen in productivity and work, yes. I think most Marxists would agree that self worth and dignity is manifest by the generative power of an individual to create change in the world around themselves.
Also, social security is a form of welfare, so there’s that.
SS is both welfare for poor folk, and forced savings for all workers. And a huge benefit of (Christian) capitalist society. It's good to take care that older people, too old to work, have enough for food & clothes & a place to live. Maybe not full "middle class", but not absolute poverty.
Tho those getting it had to work at least 10 years, paying taxes, so they've "earned" it, even those who get more than was taken from them.
Mhmm. So if Ayn Rand was on social security, the welfare system you just described (which doesn’t address the issue of what causes poverty at all), that’s in contradiction with what you claimed her to have not done…
SS isn’t an “earning”. It’s a redistribution-subsidization tax. This is, as you said, not a bad thing. Dunno why Rand would be against that either.
Christian ideology is often spurious correlated to producing capitalism. Check out Max Weber’s “Capitalism and the Protestant Work Ethic” and it’s criticisms. There’s reason to believe that religion can enhance, enable and influence capitalist ideology, but it is not the cause.
My law firm pays learning disabled adults to perform a variety of tasks, some of which have modest utility, most of which we simply wouldn't do but for our desire to employ them. We get some government subsidy for employing them that offsets some portion of the cost, but we all understand that there is still a net cost to us in excess of the benefit of their work. Is it productive? No, not as you and I understand that term. Are we going to keep doing it? Yes, we are. It's charity, but unlike most charity, it isn't degrading. It enhances these people's sense of independence, it makes them more responsible. The things Ben Franklin said about work and idleness are true, regardless whether millennials would call it all cringe. We have citizens that suffer from severe mental health problems and/or drug addiction. I don't have any easy, compelling solutions to those problems, but if there are any, some form of fulfilling make-work is likely to be part of it.
Really? You've never met someone that finds it degrading to buy their groceries with a SNAP EBT card? Never met a child embarrassed by using their free school lunch benefit?
I would add that there are probably a number of jobs that could be done by adults with learning disabilities that would be productive. However, you are absolutely correct, IMO, that work enhances people's sense of independence. It also increases self-worth, self-confidence and sense of purpose.
I agree with Jordan Peterson that the west is having a crisis in people failing to fine enough life meaning. He describes it as having three primary ingredients: love (loving and being loved), spirituality (belief in something bigger than self), and meaningful work. However, he says, and I agree, that work is meaningful even when there is a feeling that it is not meaningful work.
We should not only crush any no-work narratives being promulgated today, but we should both strive to make sure work opportunities are plentiful for everyone, and to encourage people to work and discourage them from accepting a life without work.
Would sex work and the disability fraud I described in reply to ih8edjfkjr count as better than "a life without work"?
Who decides what's work?
(For example, as a fairly traditionally-religious woman, I sometimes run into traditionalist men who have more difficulty than they realize reconciling the "sacred" unpaid work of women in the home with supposing that modern women who only do this work aren't really working at all.)
For one thing, I asked about a specific scenario ("the disability fraud I described in reply to ih8edjfkjr") that I doubt should morally count as fraud, but instead ought to count as something by your own rhetoric you might approve of: maximizing useful work in an intermittently-able person who may lose what intermittent ability he has without steady benefits.
That's very sweet, and I'm glad you do it, though I'm likewise unsure why most charity should be degrading, or what kind of make-work would be generally fulfilling — or whether exemption from minimum-wage so more people wouldn't have to do make-work but could do real work at their own pace would be better.
Granted, the disabled people I know tend not to be stupid, but skilled people with relapsing mental or physical problems for whom some form of disability fraud (getting paid for their skills when they can, but not reporting it if they can't get by without disability benefits) might serve their dignity (pride in using real skills to provide someone else a net benefit rewarded with pay) better than "honest" make-work would. It does seems reasonable to suppose, though, that others might benefit more from the steadiness a more "make-work-y" job might provide.
I know of landlords whose own experience caring for disabled family means they look the other way when their building managers hire the intermittently-sane to help them commit disability fraud — a chance to use real skills for real pay during their lucid months, knowing psychiatric care would disappear altogether if steady benefits did. I've heard of 14(c) exemptions both exploiting the disabled and greatly enriching their lives.
I have an instinctive horror of multiplying carve-out which themselves may be abused, and pessimism that supposed safeguards against idleness, fraud, and malingering, will succeed in punishing enough wrongdoing that they justify punishing those whose "wrong" is suffering ill-suited to carve-outs.
Good for you guys. I used to work for HP. They contracted with PRIDE Industries to bring in the handicapped, and put them to work. Also I spent many years at Intel, again PRIDE Industries did the janitorial work. I was very glad to see the participation, and work alongside the handicapped.
That is a funny twist. Government employees are generally overpaid as per the actual labor market. You are referring to corporatism not collectivism. And neither work for the long-term.
Maybe Texas is different, but I live on the left coast and have been directly involved with community budget difficulties from the crushing expense of government employees. A senior city fire fighter used to be able to retire after 30 years of service (at age 50) at 90% of his pay which would be $135,000 on average and 100% of his he and his family health care covered for life. And all of it would be inflation adjusted.
I have friends that have worked for the federal government. Would have all their relocation expenses covered, retired in their late 50s. Same type of situation. And no, these government workers do not have any more difficult jobs than do their peers in the private sector. They benefit from job security and for this reason they have to work with a bunch of low energy losers... and that makes the job more difficult. However, there is much more competition for jobs and positions in the private sector and employees have to hustle more.
The primary issue is that private sector workers are having to rely on their own savings from their own pay to retire on other than maybe 25% of their retirement expenses being covered by SS that they paid into. Because private sector workers have to fund their own healthcare too. And inflation eats up their savings unlike the government pensioner who even if Biden and the Democrats fuck up the economy, will see their pension payments increased.
The problem with this type of critique, and one I was once very much in favor of, is the valorization of production and/or productive work. A book that really helped me to understand this issue is Martin Hagglund's "This Life" (side note I'd love to see Freddie review this book). The main take away that I had is that all we have in life is our actual time. In a capitalist society, or in whatever society that you appear to desire, your time is valued entirely in terms of your productive capacity. Therefore, working is basically the only way for you to have value. I think underlying your critique is that unstated belief that in order to have value to society you must work. I know for myself I've heavily internalized that value and I work 50+ hours a week at the expense of my free time because I actually enjoy my IT job. However, as Freddie shows in the Cult of Smart there will be likely a majority of people who are not going to want to work overtime cleaning toilets. For those people work is just a means to an end.
So if we have so much abundance why do we still only valorize people who are productive? Additionally, what about all the valuable things people can do but are not valued by capitalism? Child care, elder care, etc.
People should be allowed to pursue their own desires without having to be productive in order to be truly free.
"will be likely a majority of people who are not going to want to work overtime cleaning toilets. "
Tell that to immigrants that come here and want all the OT they can get to save money to buy a house, start a business, etc.
I am a CEO of two companies. A one percenter. I worked as a janitor for a year while attending college. It was a perfect job for that as I worked at night. I did so well that the owner of the company gave me a crew and additional locations. I learned a great number of things that are part of my knowledge and skills climb that enable me to handle the job of corporate CEO.
Yes there are some people that will be stuck cleaning toilets because they lack the language skills or other innate capabilities to advance. But for most people their failure to advance is explained by their "not wanting to work" mindset.
Certainly there is a problem with single mothers and the challenges of child care. There is a solution for that problem but it starts with a simple lesson in self control in unprotected sexual activity. Other than that there is no reason that anyone should not be working, and if low wage, working to gain skills and experience that allow them to advance to a higher paying job.
I think it's great that you have risen to the 1% but you realize everything you are discussing about your story is an example of survivorship bias? The 1% exists because of the 99% who helped you get there. Not everyone can be you.
I think that not wanting to work is definitely not going to be a key to success in our current society. However, I'd like to see a society where you didn't have to work in the sense that you didn't have to spend your time being productive in the current definition of the term.
Lol. You do realize that attributing the 99% as being responsible for my success is the epitome of the mindset of a collectivist looter. It is this biggest crock of shit dished out by the over educated under producing social and economic malcontents.. that not only did not help, are consumed with resentful energy to block, check, stall and destroy those that do succeed by their own efforts because that demonstration is inconvenient to the victim narrative and makes the malcontents feel even worse about their whiney miserable lives.
"in whatever society that you appear to desire, your time is valued entirely in terms of your productive capacity. Therefore, working is basically the only way for you to have value... / So if we have so much abundance why do we still only valorize people who are productive? Additionally, what about all the valuable things people can do but are not valued by capitalism? Child care, elder care, etc."
I've been giving our "Social Misfit" a hard time, but my impression is that he, and others such as Tom Grey, do sincerely cherish a notion of productivity-as-virtue that isn't measured by pay alone, and includes unpaid labor like child and elder care.
Having done both unpaid elder and childcare myself now, as in-kind payment for moral debts I owed to others, I get the impression that nostalgia for a simpler time, when notions of Christian virtue (and division of labor by sex) were more widely shared, can blind traditionalists who sincerely cherish productivity-as-virtue to how contradictory social expectations respecting unpaid labor can be, including the expectations of traditionalists themselves!
On the on hand, "work is prayer", and any piously-undertaken occupation that's not actively vicious could be virtuous. Grow a garden. Write a motet. Mind your children. On the other hand, gardening and artistic pursuits are also seen as "only recreation" unless you're one of the few making bank on them, and so, in that sense, a frivolous waste of time, compared to whatever more "useful", remunerative ways bystanders judge you could be using your time instead. Caregiving can also be belittled as frivolous unless it's "done right".
Even cleaning toilets, which virtuously sacrifices your own pleasure for the hygiene and enjoyment of others, can be belittled as "menial", as the sort of occupation proving your unworth if you're never promoted to something "better". That, too, diminishes the rewards of toilet-cleaning, and people's motivation to work overtime doing it.
Jordan Peterson covers a lot of ground in his work to explain the human dominance hierarchy (the lobster thing). When I first heard him talk about that it resonated and connected the dots for almost everything we experience in human behavior in advanced society. It explains why immigrants will do work that citizens will not do. The immigrant sees the work as advancing their perceived social status. The citizen sees the work as below their perceived social status.
However, the citizen that perceives the work as below their perceived social status is correct only if social status is provided for demonstrated social hierarchy value other than productive returns. And this is what we have done with generations that have a college degree, no useful job skills and a bucket of student debt. They FEEL that their degree has advanced their social status and refuse work beneath that social status. But what the fail to understand is that their social status compared to someone without a college degree who is working their way to greater prosperity is actually lower and will continue to decline unless they get their ass in gear and focus on working and a career.
First, humans are not lobsters, and while our chicken-hearted (poultry pecking orders are brutal!) drive to be top bird and peck those beneath us may be natural, it's one of those natural things that isn't good. I'm not calling for the abolition of hierarchy: hierarchy can be an efficient means of organizing information and effort. But status as an end in itself is Satanic. Your impatience with status-seeking that strikes you as obviously unworthy (that of YouTube influencer, for example) suggests you recognize this yourself in some cases.
(That said, when I was stuck in focused protection figuring out how to cut my kids' own hair, I did benefit from tutorials by YouTube influencers showing off their DIY haircut how-tos. The status-heavy attention economy they've entered may be Satanic, but their work be more useful than you'd suppose.)
Second, regarding college degree and status, you might overlook how much obligation to others, rather than vain self-importance, might motivate youth to turn down "honest work" to complete a credentialing process that they've been taught from the cradle to regard as a "success sequence".
I worked so hard temping for a landscaping crew one summer the owner offered to make me partner — provided I quit college. In some respects, the offer was tempting: I liked the work and, since I'd already accumulated some medical debt, I could use the cash. On the other hand, I felt obligated to my family and future to complete my degree, which was in a demanding subject with higher expected returns than landscaping. And, in hindsight, I would have made an unreliable landscaper anyhow, since, unbeknownst to me at the time, underlying connective-tissue disease meant I couldn't sustain my summer's pace of work year in and out, year after year.
I did not, personally, feel landscaping was "beneath" me. But I certainly faced the social expectation — including costs already sunk into a degree — that it would be!
As it happened, while the landscaper I worked for was honest, the temp company responsible for paying me was not, and would end up preferring bankruptcy over actually paying workers like me. So there I was at the end of summer, the hardworking sucker with mounting medical debt, who'd also "foolishly" turned down paying work for degree prospects — but not, I think, out of personal snobbery.
Simply put, I'd had the kind of experience that teaches that rewards for hard work cannot be counted on. There's evidence that children who "fail" the "marshmallow test" accumulate such experiences from an early age:
At any rate, people can learn through experience that hard work won't be rewarded. In the revisited marshmallow experiment, this was done by experimenters repeatedly promising children a reward and then reneging. It wasn't done by teaching the kids the hard stuff was "beneath them".
As Eve Tushnet points out, the "bloodless moralism" of conflating virtue with the success sequence has problems!:
I have a background as a corporate IT executive. I remember driving home from work one day depressed after a meeting with a division head that wanted a new multi-million dollar computer system that would be funded by the savings it would derive in a reduction in workforce. I was literally working in a discipline to reduce the number of jobs in corporate America.
Currently I own and run a couple of small businesses. One of them is a non-profit that provides financing to small business with a mission to grow jobs in the communities we serve (a tonic to my previous professional job-destruction role). Both of my businesses have seen personnel costs and other costs rise, primarily because of the constant increase in regulatory compliance, fee and taxes and dumb policy moves... with the fees and taxes going to government... government that keeps expanding and with government employees that are all paid significantly more than their private sector peers in total compensation.
In the other business, which is a food product manufacturing operation, we needed a piece of equipment to support a task that was significantly difficult manual labor. The equipment was only made in China and Canada... even though the design of the equipment was originally made in the US and produced in the US. The Canadian version of the equipment was not a good fit for our application (they were targeting larger operations). So I had to purchase a Chinese version. The installed equipment freed up my employees to do more valuable labor.
I would have paid 2x or 3x the cost of the Chinese equipment to purchase USA-made equipment.
However, it is not made here. It is not made here for several reasons.
1. It requires welders, and welders are in short supply in the US.
2. The business to make the equipment is industrial and the US regulations for starting an industrial business are complex, costly and restrictive.
3. The energy costs for an industrial equipment manufacturer are extreme in many parts of the US.
4. US parents have sent their kids to expensive liberal arts schools and the kids don't want to work at any physical labor.
5. The parts of the country where these jobs would be welcome are a mess with drug problems and crime. And the education system sucks so bad that there the number of people that can be trained to do the jobs required to manufacture the equipment are too few.
Today there are millions of unfilled jobs, and plenty of opportunity to start and grow small businesses that would provide more jobs. However, the Marxists know that they are better served to push these narratives of automation causing the need to approve Universal Basic Income.
One last point. Collectivism does not work. It sucks in any form. You cannot pay people to not work and expect human needs will be met. We are better off subsidizing work as needed to get more humans doing productive things. We are entering an anti-work cultural shift that is terrible and will be the end of us if it continues.
The idiocy of this comment is astounding but common. Define "free". You mean we can just harvest dollars from the money trees you collectivist are convinced that grow in the gardens of CEOs?
Otherwise who will you take from to provide that "free" education and healthcare?
Let me answer for you. You would take from those that would otherwise start, own and grow business that would provide the jobs that people would claim they don't want to do because they have free education and free healthcare.
Sure, I am the dipshit. This is the effing broke mindset that just ignores that EVERYTHING derives from the productive economy that produces. By increasing benefits to people the cost of that has to be born by taking from the productive economy. The better solution is to allow people to earn what they need in the productive economy and pay for what they need themselves. Redistribution through government is the most inefficient method. And if you don't believe that, let me introduce you to my leftcoast neighbors all retired in their 50s from the government jobs.
Please point to a country that models your favored system. And why are you not living there and still living here taking up space?
I ask this in all seriousness.
1950-1975 - mostly pre civil rights. Really? Scandinavian countries that are 80% ethically homogeneous, the GDP and population of Wisconsin and absolutely love free market capitalism? UK pre-Thatcher is like so historical. Why not go back even further? But then what would you type all this brilliance on after getting on your time machine and going back to a time that you romance as better?
My question is a real one. What countries today are the model we should follow? Because if they don't exist, then you are just pursuing some irrational fantasy.
Believe it or not, designing working social systems has been a primary focus of many people throughout the history of human life. If there was ever a better system, it would have been tried and realized by now.
Yeah because they paid a larger than typical percentage of their paychecks into a pension and retired after 30 years.
LOL. No. That is a myth and a half.
My neighbor is a retired gubmt worker at 58 (retired at 60 but had two years worth of sick leave accrued that he was credited with). He is now 74. Will likely live until 90+. He gets a six figure pension. Healthcare covered for life. He retired as a mid level manager. He started working for the government at age 20. His pension was 3% @ 30... so after 30 years on the job he retired with 90% of his pay for the rest of his life. Inflation adjusted of course.
So he put in 28 years on the job, and will likely be retired for 42 or more years. The present value of that pension and his healthcare benefits are over $5 million.
Sure he paid $5 million into his retirement benefits over those 28 years.
His story repeats all over the country.
You’re right. Most people go into local government work for the money. Also please note someone retiring now has a very different benefits picture than people who were hired since the 90s passed into the mists of time.
Maybe if you weren’t so lazy and made good financial decisions you could retire at 50 too. Sounds like you’re jealous.
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
Well for one thing, you don’t just tax the rich more; you also tax the upper middle class. Give me 1 year of paternity leave, a 32 hour work week, and the good feeling of knowing the poor are fed and have good healthcare, and I’ll gladly vote for paying 50-60% of my salary in taxes.
That is lazy looser stuff. You need that other 8 hours a week to watch porn?
You must have no loved ones and no hobbies if all you can think to do with 8 extra hours of free time is to watch porn.
8 extra hours to work and be productive.
Says the moocher.
I have been working since I was 12. Cared for a dying mother. Still working over 50 hours a week. Love it.
I get plenty of work life balance.
Don't be a loser.
In the age of the internet, education technique needs rethinking. Try that.
The case for single payer is so solid I won't discuss it.
Collectivism absolutely works. China is demonstrating this as we speak. Such a mindset is alien to our culture, so of course you dismiss it out of hand because you don't understand it.
Is widespread bribery and corruption a hallmark of collectivism? Or the worst kind of crony capitalism?
Yes. People is the problem, and genetic technology will solve it.
You see... this is the problem with you people... you failed to take enough Economics classes and thus develop opinions like this that are simply false.
China only became economically strong because of the democratic capitalism success of the US that it looted from. If the US had been a collectivist system, China would still be a 3rd world country today. Over 50% of the products produced in China today, were invented in and made in the US. The US educated almost all of China's engineers and scientists.
You simply cannot make this case that China is an example of how collectivism works if the collectivist system cannot grow and thrive itself.
What that I wrote is nonsense? You just seem to be upset that your worldview isn't being supported by facts and reality.
"You see... this is the problem with you people... you failed to take enough Economics classes and thus develop opinions like this that are simply false."
I know University of Chicago econ people. I'm married to a libertarian who literally used to teach price theory. I'm unsure he'd recognize your economic opinions (for example, on "productivity") as free-market, either.
The free market and the prosperity gospel aren't the same thing. While it's common for American political rhetoric to invoke the spirit of Joel Osteen when it thinks it's invoking the spirit of Milton Friedman, that doesn't mean it's right.
National Socialism = fascism = "private" businesses using market prices and nominal owners to allocate resources. But ALSO doing a lot of what the gov't wants.
Hitler gave fascism a bad name; Insane Jew hate racism is not part of fascism.
REAL fascism has never been tried.
Until "Communist" China. The successful "capitalists" are allowed to get rich, as long as they stay on the good side of those currently in power.
China has built many huge, great things - and brought more millions out of poverty, more quickly, than ever before in history. Using fascist gov't + business + market prices.
Lots of great stuff; but also lots of crap. Recently they had to demolish many housing skyscrapers because of shoddy work.
Jewish collectivist Kibbutzim "worked" at maintaining subsistence level existence, but only after the '67 6 day war did Israel give up their Zionist collectivist dream - and become an economic powerhouse in the ME despite almost no oil nor other salable natural resources.
Are you saying that subsidized work differs from paying people a UBI?
Who gets the subsidy, business owners like yourself?
What's the upper limits on riches that goes with these subsidies?
I would rather subsidize a job-producing business than subsidized lazy ass people that don't want to work.
They need to hear from people outside of their bubble. Otherwise they are getting their wrong validated.
This is correct. Reganite policies/ideology beget a lumpenproletariat incapable of accessing work, while simultaneously bolstering a lack of incentive/desire to want to work. It then gives the Reganites a scapegoat, which strengthens class divisions and obfuscates the real issues at hand. People will find meaning in work when it actually gives them something in return to live for.
The homeless are forced to survive somehow, requiring some amount of toil to persevere. These are generally not people incapable of or unwilling to work, if given the chance to make a real living. Laziness is a product of bloated Reganite policies that generate meaningless, unproductive and unsustainable labor, it entrenches a mindset of helplessness in those who realize what’s going on so it de-incentivizes labor, and it keeps the boot on those who are already struggling.
This is a lot of BS. Not backed by statistics nor reality.
People will generally pursue what delivers short-term endorphins to their own detriment. They will consume even more hours of entertainment if someone else will just cover enough of their expenses. They feel entitled to that for some reason.
Working for a living in a modern market economy replaces the reality of human existence and evolution that comprises 99% of our time on this planet where we had little time to lay on the couch, eat chips, watch porn, post idiocy on Reddit and play video games. The human animal will become apathetic depressed lumps of flesh without needing some routine struggle to survive and within that struggle a pathway to socioeconomic advancement.
Have you ever been bored?
If people are intrinsically driven to labor in some form or fashion, that it's instinct (as you indicate), how could anyone spend their entire life consuming "entertainment", not become bored, AND survive a socialist society where "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" was the creed? The "human struggle" will not disappear.
Welfare does not create entitlement. Our modern market economy and current iteration of ideological capitalism has PRODUCED what you seem to despise the most. Apathy is born of burnout, exhaustion, and feelings of helplessness in the face of insurmountable odds. The answer is not always to just grind down harder - but to find a way to make the struggle successful, efficient, attainable, and worthwhile.
“ Both of my businesses have seen personnel costs and other costs rise, primarily because of the constant increase in regulatory compliance, fee and taxes and dumb policy moves”
Such as?
You need me to list all the increased government regulations, fees and taxes? Or just the dumb policy moves?
All? Certainly not. Just a few regs, fees and taxes.
My spouse manages a public safety network for a midsize city and gets paid waaaay less than he would in the private sector. Which government jobs are the ones that have bloated pay?
I’ll co-sign that, for sure.
Are you considering total compensation or just salary? The value of public sector benefits including retirement benefits makes millionaires out of many even rank and file government employees.
Remind me how much you have to save to have $1 million at 65. Oh right if you start at 22 and retire at 65 it’s $166/month.
He’s not talking about houses.
There are a number of issues with the 401k and IRA system. How do we know? Because people find the idea of someone having $1 million at retirement something to comment upon. When I’m reality, if you start saving when you get your first adult job - it’s not amazing at all.
Remind me what the annual investment return needs to be for that.
Oh right it's 9.5%.
Please point me to the investment that is guaranteed to earn 9.5% per year for the next 42 years. Thanks, I'll wait.
No one is taking about guarantees. And of course the S&P 500’s return since 1980 is actually 11.945% so if someone who got their first job on 2/4/1980 and saved $83/month and retired today they would have a million dollars.
DOW. No one beats the Dow Jones Industrial Average on a consistent basis. The average for the past 10 years is 11.29%.
Even factoring in benefits, I don’t consider a million bucks after a working lifetime of public service to be inappropriate. Just the opposite. I’m all for eliminating bloat, but fair compensation is something else entirely. Anyone who gets a job in public service and actually sticks it out until retirement has earned their benefits.
I get irritated by the characterization of average public servants (and teachers for that matter) as money grubbers. It’s actually comic. Working for the community for your entire life without pin-balling from job to job I search of higher salary, then retiring comfortably—meaning maintaining a middle class life—well my god isn’t that what the goal is of every economic system? At least ostensibly? So what the hell is the problem, amiright? There are those exposes that show cops, for instance, in big cities who have gamed the system and make these big ol salaries (usually with overtime and side hussles included) and people point and say look!! How dare they! And ok fine, let’s not let that minuscule percent of the population work the overtime beat. Whatever. But the belief that average government/public employees in a system of tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people are retiring as multimillionaires is 1) ludicrous and 2) parsimonious toward people who make the world go round.
Computer programmers, project managers, HR, IT, ... I can't work for the state, I can't stand to see people walking-working in slow-motion, burning the clock.
Me neither. I had a consulting company and did high level technical project management work for some agencies. One contract I would come in and sit in a cubicle all day for six weeks of a six month contract because they could not provision a computer for me, and I could not use my own.
But those employees were all paid as well as their private sector peers, but their real golden ring was to just keep their buts in their seats for 30-35 years so they could retire with a 90% pension and full health care. The value of that is millions. The unfunded government pension liability is a multi trillion dollar whole that government "business" is hiding from the rest of the country.
Apparently y’all have never worked for a public safety agency. It’s the opposite of sleepwalking and burning the clock.
I have law enforcement in my family. They generally earn their pension. I have fire fighters in my family, their total compensation exceeds the value of their labor. We could pay 2/3 what we are paying for fire fighters in our community and still have a line of applicants two blocks long for the positions that open. I have friends and neighbors who are government workers. Their regular pay commensurate with their responsibilities and level of performance compared to the private sector is generally always equal to or exceeds that of the general job market; however, when adding the value of their benefits including their pension, their compensation is significantly greater than is the general labor market.
One problem is that government employees get to retire early. Another is that their pension is too high as a percentage of their pay at retirement. They also do things like pack on OT at the end of their career to inflate that final pension amount.
The multi trillion dollar unfunded government pension liability is one of the country's biggest problems.
" We are better off subsidizing work as needed to get more humans doing productive things."
How productive is a thing if people need a subsidy in order to do it? What definition of "productive" are you using? It does not sound like the standard economic one.
Is it your personal moral sense of what is "productive" and what isn't?
(Based on your comments elsewhere, your personal sense of what's productive might be awfully specific:
https://gfile.thedispatch.com/p/it-takes-two-sides-to-fight-a-war/comment/4891645
)
I'm pro-capitalist because it works in reality. I like Freddie because he's a (dreaming) idealist Socialist who has really good critiques of clearly false and/or non-working policies of the Left/ Democrats, AND he writes so well it's a pleasure to read him even when I disagree.
Market Capitalism = "Private property, freely made contracts, freedom to buy and sell. Fraud prohibited, contracts enforced." Depends on anti-fraud & contract & private property enforcement = essentially a gov't. (Could be Home Owners Association security).
Certainly NOT "public (=gov't) ownership". All regulations reduce freedom, including the freedom to harm or excessively risk harm.
I'm glad drunk driving is illegal (tho I wish there were more private roads), because I understand the risk is "high" that drunks cause accidents.
Most people want Freedom. And Security. It's an inevitable tradeoff on the Pareto optimal curve that more freedom means less security. BUT, there are actually 330 million (+-) different trade-off curves in the USA, so many millions can want more of either, and even more of both.
General changes to increase security almost always reduce freedom.
Even my proposal for subsidizing jobs, and having a National (or State) Service corps to employ "everybody", needs to be paid for by taxes and reduces the freedom to not pay those taxes.
Eco? You want to argue Marxism, as in China, or USSR or commie Hungary has less pollution than capitalism?
"Mango you ignorant slut"
China is full, full, full of enviro horror shows. Degradation of environment, and dirty water, was endemic thru all commie countries - Hungarian protests in '89 were strongly against the eco problems of commies.
Yeah, Democrat Deep State government workers in the USA, like in Flint, seem too often willing (not equally, but too often) to pollute when they can get away with it. $600+ million judgement, finally, from the 2014 Democrat gov't fiasco.
https://www.michiganradio.org/criminal-justice-legal-system/2022-02-04/federal-judge-trims-attorneys-fees-request-in-flint-water-settlement
Admittedly, if you asked these poor folk how much they'd pay for less pollution, it would be really really small. The poor need more, and better, jobs before much Green luxury beliefs.
But he reads and subscribes to Freddie. As you noted originally. People are more complicated than the labels you want to throw on them -- both of you.
You can’t have freedoms without liberties, or else at some point someone’s freedom will impose itself on another’s, which can become irreconcilable. This necessitates a balance between the two in the form of regulations of some sort, which is why laws even exist at all.
Laws are, unfortunately, prone to manipulation and corruption when left to the devices of narcissistic people who do not recognize the importance of others needs, and where they intersect with their own.
"You can’t have freedoms without liberties," - don't you mean without limits?
Most laws are specifications of harms, and "just" punishment for those convicted of doing harm. Tho there are lots of victimless crimes where one or both of the consenting adults is considered the victim of their own decision, like drugs or prostitution.
Drug addition harms the addict. Drug legalization increases addiction. Drug laws increase criminal behavior, corruption, gang violence; but decrease harmful addition.
Should we have drug laws? Good arguments both ways.
(One of the few areas my wife and I disagree; with me accepting legalization and more harmful addiction.)
Liberties are limits to freedoms. “Free from” means that a freedom cannot impede upon something, which is a liberty.
It’s hard-baked into the US constitution, yet not many people seem to understand that.
Yes, but considering that the top 10% of the people pay 90% of all the taxes, it kind of evens out.
Yes, Reading Freddie is like reading Trotsky. Completely wrong solutions, great rhetoric.
Go checkout Marxists.org. They have a great online library.
No gov't free benefits can give "self respect". One must earn it, in one's own eyes. Work and production does that. Even subsidized work like raking leaves or picking up litter, worth only $5/hr, subsidized to be $10/hr, such work is worthy of dignity and self respect.
Forrest Gump-like low IQ folk, willing and able to do simple work, deserve respect AND job offers.
I read, and like, Atlas Shrugged - but the Bible is better, and both should be optional, not required, in schools.
It would be stupid to be forced to pay for SS and not accept benefits - she wasn't dumb. Nor on welfare.
"Ayn Rand was not on welfare when she died. She was, however, receiving Social Security payments. "
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-Ayn-Rand-died-on-welfare-and-in-fact-was-on-it-a-few-years?share=1
But good art can be made by bad people - didn't you read Freddie about that in the last couple weeks?
I prefer the Chile style "forced savings" retirement, which a person owns. Such a system, put in with Pinochet and Chicago Boys, has allowed Chile to become the richest S.A. country in 2022 after being one of the poorest in 1973.
Chileans recently voted in a socialist - so I expect the, not Voldemorting, but Venezuelization and reduced or negative growth in Chile.
Anybody forced to be in a system that includes payments and benefits, can be against the system but accept the benefits after paying in the payments. Without the SS, Rand wouldn't have starved. But her system's not worth arguing about.
Chile's economic success was heavily dependant on its nationalized copper mines, which even Pinochet didn't privatise
Funny, Wrong, but funny. Another form of art called unknowing satire.
All of it. Fundamentally wrong. Rand lived what she wrote about. People with your opinions only fantasize about yet another failed attempt at collectivism... the collection of ideologies that always fail and always end up in more profound human misery, suffering and death.
So, for you, "productive" means "productive of 'self-respect'" — productive of a sense of having "earn[ed] it, in one's own eyes"?
I do have moral intuitions about the dignity of work, and I suspect they overlap with yours. I am less optimistic, though, about it being workable to define "productivity" that way. For example:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/burdens/
"I had one patient who worked for GM, very smart guy, invented a lot of safety features for cars. He was probably actively saving a bunch of people’s lives every time he checked in at the office, and he still felt like he was worthless, a burden, that he was just draining resources that could better be used for someone else."
I think it's fine for you to have a spiritual notion of "productive" that works for the average person, but not tough edge cases. After all, most people are average. On the other hand, we're no longer so keen on letting tough edge cases just curl up and die anymore, either (seriously, even when someone is Officially In Hospice Now, our system is set up to make this tough).
Scott now writes at Astral Codex 10. He's talking about "imposter syndrome" of worthy folk feeling unworthy.
"Productive" for me is doing work that has value for others. Nobody I know thinks less litter is not better than more litter.
But the "market value" of such work might be so low that few choose to do that work, when there are other alternatives. Including getting gov't benefits, like food stamps, for doing nothing. UBI makes more folk do nothing, which will be terrible for many, probably most, who need more self respect.
Avg IQ =100; almost nobody is exactly average; some 34+34 = 68% of the people are within one 15 point standard deviation of 100: 85-115, which are all sort-of average.
You really think staying home playing video games and watching porn and masturbating all day leads to self respect?
Or maybe you think respect doesn't matter?
I know Scott's new place, but old classics are still old classics.
"'Productive' for me is doing work that has value for others."
Yes, but how do you *know* it does, unless they're willing to pay you? "Don't play dumb, Midge," I can imagine you saying — because that's exactly what I'm telling myself right now.
But I've also been in volunteer situations where the volunteers took on unusually unpleasant work to make life more pleasant for everyone else involved — and were ultimately treated as "losers" and "parasites" for volunteering, with overt appeals to the reasoning that, if the work were truly worth anything, it would be paid, not volunteer!:
Work does not *have* to be paid for in a free market in order to be "worth something", but the sad fact is that, in a pluralistic society, it's hard to *prove* it's worth anything unless it is.
"You really think staying home playing video games and watching porn and masturbating all day leads to self respect?"
No, *not typically on the margins*. (Indeed, I belong to a tradition that still sees masturbation as a sin: nonetheless, if someone were wanking as a distraction from drug cravings or active suicidal ideation, what kind of shriveled heart would I have to have to not consider that the lesser of evils?) But I also know it's common enough for some people to behave like that and somehow still end up thinking higher of themselves than others who've earnestly beavered away through all the traditional advice about self-improvement.
"The heart is deceitful above all else."
This is not the economic or Marxist definition of production, there are two different concepts being discussed here.
However, there should absolutely be value seen in productivity and work, yes. I think most Marxists would agree that self worth and dignity is manifest by the generative power of an individual to create change in the world around themselves.
Also, social security is a form of welfare, so there’s that.
SS is both welfare for poor folk, and forced savings for all workers. And a huge benefit of (Christian) capitalist society. It's good to take care that older people, too old to work, have enough for food & clothes & a place to live. Maybe not full "middle class", but not absolute poverty.
Tho those getting it had to work at least 10 years, paying taxes, so they've "earned" it, even those who get more than was taken from them.
Mhmm. So if Ayn Rand was on social security, the welfare system you just described (which doesn’t address the issue of what causes poverty at all), that’s in contradiction with what you claimed her to have not done…
SS isn’t an “earning”. It’s a redistribution-subsidization tax. This is, as you said, not a bad thing. Dunno why Rand would be against that either.
Christian ideology is often spurious correlated to producing capitalism. Check out Max Weber’s “Capitalism and the Protestant Work Ethic” and it’s criticisms. There’s reason to believe that religion can enhance, enable and influence capitalist ideology, but it is not the cause.
Working people pay into SS. But given the abuse and misuse of the funds, it would better for many people to just have that money to invest themselves.
That’s an interesting way of ignoring how that would affect the impoverished.
Why are people impoverished?
My law firm pays learning disabled adults to perform a variety of tasks, some of which have modest utility, most of which we simply wouldn't do but for our desire to employ them. We get some government subsidy for employing them that offsets some portion of the cost, but we all understand that there is still a net cost to us in excess of the benefit of their work. Is it productive? No, not as you and I understand that term. Are we going to keep doing it? Yes, we are. It's charity, but unlike most charity, it isn't degrading. It enhances these people's sense of independence, it makes them more responsible. The things Ben Franklin said about work and idleness are true, regardless whether millennials would call it all cringe. We have citizens that suffer from severe mental health problems and/or drug addiction. I don't have any easy, compelling solutions to those problems, but if there are any, some form of fulfilling make-work is likely to be part of it.
Really? You've never met someone that finds it degrading to buy their groceries with a SNAP EBT card? Never met a child embarrassed by using their free school lunch benefit?
Is that charity? I've heard plenty of people say government benefits aren't charity.
Bingo. Thank you for what you do there.
I would add that there are probably a number of jobs that could be done by adults with learning disabilities that would be productive. However, you are absolutely correct, IMO, that work enhances people's sense of independence. It also increases self-worth, self-confidence and sense of purpose.
I agree with Jordan Peterson that the west is having a crisis in people failing to fine enough life meaning. He describes it as having three primary ingredients: love (loving and being loved), spirituality (belief in something bigger than self), and meaningful work. However, he says, and I agree, that work is meaningful even when there is a feeling that it is not meaningful work.
We should not only crush any no-work narratives being promulgated today, but we should both strive to make sure work opportunities are plentiful for everyone, and to encourage people to work and discourage them from accepting a life without work.
Would sex work and the disability fraud I described in reply to ih8edjfkjr count as better than "a life without work"?
Who decides what's work?
(For example, as a fairly traditionally-religious woman, I sometimes run into traditionalist men who have more difficulty than they realize reconciling the "sacred" unpaid work of women in the home with supposing that modern women who only do this work aren't really working at all.)
Disability fraud is disgusting and very common.
That does not answer my questions, though.
For one thing, I asked about a specific scenario ("the disability fraud I described in reply to ih8edjfkjr") that I doubt should morally count as fraud, but instead ought to count as something by your own rhetoric you might approve of: maximizing useful work in an intermittently-able person who may lose what intermittent ability he has without steady benefits.
Yes, in Hayward, California, I saw these signs offering to buy diabetic test strips, what's that about?
That's very sweet, and I'm glad you do it, though I'm likewise unsure why most charity should be degrading, or what kind of make-work would be generally fulfilling — or whether exemption from minimum-wage so more people wouldn't have to do make-work but could do real work at their own pace would be better.
Granted, the disabled people I know tend not to be stupid, but skilled people with relapsing mental or physical problems for whom some form of disability fraud (getting paid for their skills when they can, but not reporting it if they can't get by without disability benefits) might serve their dignity (pride in using real skills to provide someone else a net benefit rewarded with pay) better than "honest" make-work would. It does seems reasonable to suppose, though, that others might benefit more from the steadiness a more "make-work-y" job might provide.
I know of landlords whose own experience caring for disabled family means they look the other way when their building managers hire the intermittently-sane to help them commit disability fraud — a chance to use real skills for real pay during their lucid months, knowing psychiatric care would disappear altogether if steady benefits did. I've heard of 14(c) exemptions both exploiting the disabled and greatly enriching their lives.
I have an instinctive horror of multiplying carve-out which themselves may be abused, and pessimism that supposed safeguards against idleness, fraud, and malingering, will succeed in punishing enough wrongdoing that they justify punishing those whose "wrong" is suffering ill-suited to carve-outs.
Good for you guys. I used to work for HP. They contracted with PRIDE Industries to bring in the handicapped, and put them to work. Also I spent many years at Intel, again PRIDE Industries did the janitorial work. I was very glad to see the participation, and work alongside the handicapped.
"government employees that are all paid significantly more than their private sector peers in total compensation"
That's the fault of the private sector, not government.
"Collectivism does not work."
Agreed, but consider that corporations are collectives.
That is a funny twist. Government employees are generally overpaid as per the actual labor market. You are referring to corporatism not collectivism. And neither work for the long-term.
Maybe Texas is different, but I live on the left coast and have been directly involved with community budget difficulties from the crushing expense of government employees. A senior city fire fighter used to be able to retire after 30 years of service (at age 50) at 90% of his pay which would be $135,000 on average and 100% of his he and his family health care covered for life. And all of it would be inflation adjusted.
I have friends that have worked for the federal government. Would have all their relocation expenses covered, retired in their late 50s. Same type of situation. And no, these government workers do not have any more difficult jobs than do their peers in the private sector. They benefit from job security and for this reason they have to work with a bunch of low energy losers... and that makes the job more difficult. However, there is much more competition for jobs and positions in the private sector and employees have to hustle more.
The primary issue is that private sector workers are having to rely on their own savings from their own pay to retire on other than maybe 25% of their retirement expenses being covered by SS that they paid into. Because private sector workers have to fund their own healthcare too. And inflation eats up their savings unlike the government pensioner who even if Biden and the Democrats fuck up the economy, will see their pension payments increased.
The problem with this type of critique, and one I was once very much in favor of, is the valorization of production and/or productive work. A book that really helped me to understand this issue is Martin Hagglund's "This Life" (side note I'd love to see Freddie review this book). The main take away that I had is that all we have in life is our actual time. In a capitalist society, or in whatever society that you appear to desire, your time is valued entirely in terms of your productive capacity. Therefore, working is basically the only way for you to have value. I think underlying your critique is that unstated belief that in order to have value to society you must work. I know for myself I've heavily internalized that value and I work 50+ hours a week at the expense of my free time because I actually enjoy my IT job. However, as Freddie shows in the Cult of Smart there will be likely a majority of people who are not going to want to work overtime cleaning toilets. For those people work is just a means to an end.
So if we have so much abundance why do we still only valorize people who are productive? Additionally, what about all the valuable things people can do but are not valued by capitalism? Child care, elder care, etc.
People should be allowed to pursue their own desires without having to be productive in order to be truly free.
"will be likely a majority of people who are not going to want to work overtime cleaning toilets. "
Tell that to immigrants that come here and want all the OT they can get to save money to buy a house, start a business, etc.
I am a CEO of two companies. A one percenter. I worked as a janitor for a year while attending college. It was a perfect job for that as I worked at night. I did so well that the owner of the company gave me a crew and additional locations. I learned a great number of things that are part of my knowledge and skills climb that enable me to handle the job of corporate CEO.
Yes there are some people that will be stuck cleaning toilets because they lack the language skills or other innate capabilities to advance. But for most people their failure to advance is explained by their "not wanting to work" mindset.
Certainly there is a problem with single mothers and the challenges of child care. There is a solution for that problem but it starts with a simple lesson in self control in unprotected sexual activity. Other than that there is no reason that anyone should not be working, and if low wage, working to gain skills and experience that allow them to advance to a higher paying job.
I think it's great that you have risen to the 1% but you realize everything you are discussing about your story is an example of survivorship bias? The 1% exists because of the 99% who helped you get there. Not everyone can be you.
I think that not wanting to work is definitely not going to be a key to success in our current society. However, I'd like to see a society where you didn't have to work in the sense that you didn't have to spend your time being productive in the current definition of the term.
Lol. You do realize that attributing the 99% as being responsible for my success is the epitome of the mindset of a collectivist looter. It is this biggest crock of shit dished out by the over educated under producing social and economic malcontents.. that not only did not help, are consumed with resentful energy to block, check, stall and destroy those that do succeed by their own efforts because that demonstration is inconvenient to the victim narrative and makes the malcontents feel even worse about their whiney miserable lives.
"in whatever society that you appear to desire, your time is valued entirely in terms of your productive capacity. Therefore, working is basically the only way for you to have value... / So if we have so much abundance why do we still only valorize people who are productive? Additionally, what about all the valuable things people can do but are not valued by capitalism? Child care, elder care, etc."
I've been giving our "Social Misfit" a hard time, but my impression is that he, and others such as Tom Grey, do sincerely cherish a notion of productivity-as-virtue that isn't measured by pay alone, and includes unpaid labor like child and elder care.
Having done both unpaid elder and childcare myself now, as in-kind payment for moral debts I owed to others, I get the impression that nostalgia for a simpler time, when notions of Christian virtue (and division of labor by sex) were more widely shared, can blind traditionalists who sincerely cherish productivity-as-virtue to how contradictory social expectations respecting unpaid labor can be, including the expectations of traditionalists themselves!
On the on hand, "work is prayer", and any piously-undertaken occupation that's not actively vicious could be virtuous. Grow a garden. Write a motet. Mind your children. On the other hand, gardening and artistic pursuits are also seen as "only recreation" unless you're one of the few making bank on them, and so, in that sense, a frivolous waste of time, compared to whatever more "useful", remunerative ways bystanders judge you could be using your time instead. Caregiving can also be belittled as frivolous unless it's "done right".
Even cleaning toilets, which virtuously sacrifices your own pleasure for the hygiene and enjoyment of others, can be belittled as "menial", as the sort of occupation proving your unworth if you're never promoted to something "better". That, too, diminishes the rewards of toilet-cleaning, and people's motivation to work overtime doing it.
Jordan Peterson covers a lot of ground in his work to explain the human dominance hierarchy (the lobster thing). When I first heard him talk about that it resonated and connected the dots for almost everything we experience in human behavior in advanced society. It explains why immigrants will do work that citizens will not do. The immigrant sees the work as advancing their perceived social status. The citizen sees the work as below their perceived social status.
However, the citizen that perceives the work as below their perceived social status is correct only if social status is provided for demonstrated social hierarchy value other than productive returns. And this is what we have done with generations that have a college degree, no useful job skills and a bucket of student debt. They FEEL that their degree has advanced their social status and refuse work beneath that social status. But what the fail to understand is that their social status compared to someone without a college degree who is working their way to greater prosperity is actually lower and will continue to decline unless they get their ass in gear and focus on working and a career.
Two things:
First, humans are not lobsters, and while our chicken-hearted (poultry pecking orders are brutal!) drive to be top bird and peck those beneath us may be natural, it's one of those natural things that isn't good. I'm not calling for the abolition of hierarchy: hierarchy can be an efficient means of organizing information and effort. But status as an end in itself is Satanic. Your impatience with status-seeking that strikes you as obviously unworthy (that of YouTube influencer, for example) suggests you recognize this yourself in some cases.
(That said, when I was stuck in focused protection figuring out how to cut my kids' own hair, I did benefit from tutorials by YouTube influencers showing off their DIY haircut how-tos. The status-heavy attention economy they've entered may be Satanic, but their work be more useful than you'd suppose.)
Second, regarding college degree and status, you might overlook how much obligation to others, rather than vain self-importance, might motivate youth to turn down "honest work" to complete a credentialing process that they've been taught from the cradle to regard as a "success sequence".
I worked so hard temping for a landscaping crew one summer the owner offered to make me partner — provided I quit college. In some respects, the offer was tempting: I liked the work and, since I'd already accumulated some medical debt, I could use the cash. On the other hand, I felt obligated to my family and future to complete my degree, which was in a demanding subject with higher expected returns than landscaping. And, in hindsight, I would have made an unreliable landscaper anyhow, since, unbeknownst to me at the time, underlying connective-tissue disease meant I couldn't sustain my summer's pace of work year in and out, year after year.
I did not, personally, feel landscaping was "beneath" me. But I certainly faced the social expectation — including costs already sunk into a degree — that it would be!
As it happened, while the landscaper I worked for was honest, the temp company responsible for paying me was not, and would end up preferring bankruptcy over actually paying workers like me. So there I was at the end of summer, the hardworking sucker with mounting medical debt, who'd also "foolishly" turned down paying work for degree prospects — but not, I think, out of personal snobbery.
Simply put, I'd had the kind of experience that teaches that rewards for hard work cannot be counted on. There's evidence that children who "fail" the "marshmallow test" accumulate such experiences from an early age:
https://ricochet.com/228454/archives/un-teaching-grit-the-marshmallow-test-revisited/
At any rate, people can learn through experience that hard work won't be rewarded. In the revisited marshmallow experiment, this was done by experimenters repeatedly promising children a reward and then reneging. It wasn't done by teaching the kids the hard stuff was "beneath them".
As Eve Tushnet points out, the "bloodless moralism" of conflating virtue with the success sequence has problems!:
https://ifstudies.org/blog/whats-wrong-with-the-success-sequence