Do we as citizens have a societal obligation to be productive?

Great Debates
41

Because we have so twisted the term productivity that moving debt from place to place is considered, ‘productive’. As the primary pursuit in our culture is the amassing of debt notes.

You love this line of argument as though an office is some kind of foreign land that none of us have ever experienced. I’ll give you a hint, EVERYONE, knows what actually goes on in an office. I understand why they do it. But still for the most part we are divorced from actual productivity. A lot of our economy is waste and inefficiency, and a lot of it is inflating the prices of commodities in order to turn a profit. Helping manage other people’s risk is an useful thing, but it’s not, ‘productive’.

Yes, I know, which is why I choose not to work in big offices.

The person who creates a hundred widgets in a day. He has produced 100 things whereas the hedge fund manager has produced none. Ablating risk is not, ‘production’.

Well it’s not that I am making some kind of ideological statement. I am just pointing out that the vast majority of jobs are mere busy work. We are largely provided for by machines and a handful of people who run those machines. Industrialized farming has pretty much removed us from any connection to our daily survival. The pretense of productivity is more important than actual productivity.

42

What about someone who has inherited a bajillion dollars? If his whole life consists of drinking Crown Royal and throwing shot glasses at the TV because he didn’t like who the Bachelorette eliminated that week, is he “productive” or somehow morally okay because he isn’t on the government dole?

43

I really don’t think they do. I think a significant number of people here have never worked in a corporate office job or have only worked in very junior positions doing data entry or low-level clerical work.

I’ve spent a lot of time going into companies and looking at them from a “big picture” perspective. Often the people I work with have no idea what goes on outside their department or even outside their own job.

What about the people who sell and market those machines? The accountants who check to see if those machines are being run profitably? The clerical people who make sure the output from those machines get to where they are supposed to go? All the IT and systems people? The gals in payroll and accounts receivables? The R&D folks who come up with new and better machines? And all the supporting staff who do all the mundane tasks and free up people to work on more important stuff?

It’s utterly ridiculous to think that the only kind of “productivity” is building stuff with your hands. Actually building stuff is just a small part of the process.

44

Well, define productive. I consider scientific R&D (creating and discovering new ideas and/or bringing them to market) to be the most productive pursuit a human being can undertake as far as materialism and careers are concerned.

However a person can be unemployed or work part time for $6000 a year and still be productive if they are a decent person. If you are nice to yourself and the people around you that should count for something. Personally I’d be more content with the welfare recipient who is a decent parent than the executive who verbally and emotionally abuses his children. Then again if everyone was a welfare recipient the system would collapse. The line of productive/unproductive is hard to draw.

Plus you can argue that at the material level the truly productive people are the ones who work in construction or manufacturing, since they are the ones who create products. Most everyone else’s job is to take the widgets they create and pass them around.

45

If yes, how large an obligation, and how productive must one be?
If no, why is there no obligation?
There is an obligation to be materially productive. However I do not think material production is the only important factor. People are obliged, to whatever degree possible, to not make the psychological and emotional health of those around them suffer too. I would consider that to be the bigger factor. People who rob emotional and mental health from those around them (with abuse, ridicule, etc) are robbing more from society IMO than people who are working for low wages but who are nice people.

There is also the fact that production varies by field. An advertising consultant who finds ways to make people feel insecure and full of self loathing so that those people will buy beauty products is not productive compared to a home health aide, despite making 10x more than the health aide.

**But is there an obligation to produce as much as possible?
**
Nope. When it comes to scientific and medical R&D, yes. We currently spend about 2.4% of GDP on R&D. The higher that number could go the better.

However when it comes to material culture (chairs, beds, TVs, cars, etc) no. Besides, raw materials are limited and it takes time to invent and discover alternatives. There currently aren’t enough of several raw materials to sustain endless production advances unless we find alternatives or more sources.

**
Should every citizen be striving to do more & make more?**

When it comes to scientific & medical R&D, yes. When it comes to higher standards of living (bigger houses, more cars, bigger TVs, etc) no

**Should we scorn and deride people who decide to withhold their output?
**

No. how many people willingly decide to withhold output? Usually they do it because they either hate the job they are trained in or cannot find work. Neither deserves scorn
**Should we heap praise on those who work 24/7?
**

No.

**At what point would you say that people’s obligation to society ends, if at all?
**

I think people want to be productive by and large. So the concept of this thread is kindof moot to me. People generally enjoy being independent, having income and feeling like they are contributing.

I think that since we are hardwired to want to be productive (both for the personal and societal gains it gives) that there really is no external obligation. The obligation comes from inside. The rates of depression and suicide are much higher among the unemployed than among the employed. There is no external pressure, it comes from inside.

And people who are emotionally destructive to those close to them tend to feel like shit about themselves too.

Being productive (or at the very least, not being a material or psychological parasite) is pretty much innate to our personalities in my view.

46

In the Republic of Korea, according to Article 32(2) of the Constitution of the Republic,

47

That’s completely different than the accusation you regularly make. All of those people know what goes on in an office. They just don’t know the difference between various departments.

When you account all the support staff that goes into the maintenance of the machine, how should you rate that vs the productivity of that machine? Having worked in IT for years I have on many occasions come up to the point where I have to measure my own costs vs the cost of simply replacing a machine. One of the more irritating aspects of the job is when some minor annoyance that is caused by some idiosyncratic issue comes to me to fix it. Now, I am expected to fix it, but the client doesn’t really think about how much I should get paid to fix that minor issue, and they don’t value the fact that it would take a lot of work for me to fix something that really barely matters. Then they don’t want to pay for it because they think of the issue in terms of how much that issue is worth to them, not in terms of how many hours it takes me to find out why some program is getting an obscure error message.

A huge part of the process though, comes in with derivatives markets where people largely drive up the prices of goods. And then they get patted on the back for ‘creating money’. Which isn’t true, they didn’t create money, they created inflation. They turned 5 into 6 but devalued the currency so that 6 is now the same value as 5. If I buy 50 tons of rice at 1 per kilo and sell it for 1.10 per kilo, it’s still the same amount of rice, it still has the same nutritional value that it always had. All I succeeded in doing is making rice more expensive. That is not production. Though by the way we use production these days, you’d say that I produced something. I produced, ‘value’, through commodity speculation. Really all I did was drive down the value of debt in the aggregate.

48

Totally disagree. You obviously do not really understand what goes into producing stuff.

The guy jointing part “A” to part “B” in a factory is not all that is necessary for making things. There is a reason manufacturers hire a bunch of accountants and lawyers and other “nonproductive” folks; there is also a reason markets and stockbrokers exist.

They are, in point of fact, more necessary to putting the widgets you love to use on the table than a guy in a homeless shelter.

49

Ahh yes, the good old, “If you disagree you don’t understand.”, argument. I do so love the tediousness of this particular argument.

Yes, there are reasons for everything, but being, ‘productive’, is not the only reason. What about a massage therapist. They produce nothing, nothing at all. That doesn’t make their profession not a noble one. Reducing people’s stress and tension is a worthwhile pursuit. But it doesn’t ‘PRODUCE’ anything. Just like stock brokers and hedge fund managers don’t ‘PRODUCE’ anything.

And yet I wonder how many hours of the workday people spend at work posting to the SDMB and watching Youtube videos. A guy in a homeless shelter may be unproductive but that’s irrelevant to whether or not other people are also productive.

msmith again is the perfect example. He may have changed jobs but that does not diminish the point that he used to work for a department that was basically pointless, by his own admission. That sort of department exists. He got paid well for working in it, and yet it didn’t produce much, if anything.

50

There is a reason it tends to be brought up in this area …

Exactly how are you defining “productive”?

I disagree that a massage therapist isn’t "productive’. What they produce is a service rather than a good.

Seems your definition of ‘productive’ is narrowly focused on making physical goods. Which is absurd. By that token, a heart surgeon saving lives isn’t “productive” any more than a rummie wasting away in a homeless shelter, whereas a guy working on a novelty fake vomit factory is.

So the fact that some people waste some of their time is proof of … ?

51

Well then that’s the crux of our disagreement. I think of being productive as manufacturing a ‘product’.

Well my point was generally that being ‘productive’ isn’t anything particularly special or noteworthy. Producing novelty fake vomit is productive but it’s not particularly important. Then there are people who would probably benefit humanity more by NOT producing anything, such as IED manufacturers.

By your definition of production, then pretty much anyone and everyone is productive.

People being rewarded for non-productivity. As such salary is not a good indicator of productivity.

52

Agreed; if that’s your definition than I’d agree, using that definition “being productive” isn’t particularly important.

I’d argue that this is not the preferable definition for analyzing the question “do we have an obligation to be productive?”

Correction: pretty much anybody doing something that other folks value. A heart surgeon creates no physical object but other folks value what s/he does very highly; a person smoking dope and playing video games all day, not so much. By your measure they are equally “unproductive” but not by mine …

Measuring how other folks value what you do is always tricky. There is no one absolute measure. Money is certainly the best one we have, but it doesn’t by any means tell the whole story, as some highly valued pursuits are not well paid, and contra-wise. Also, some people value stuff that we, as a society, frown upon (a person might value and pay highly for a hit man, for example).

For the purpose of this particular question, I’d submit the following definition: “productive” means doing something that others value and that is not clearly anti-social in nature. A heart surgeon is “productive” but a hit man is not, if what you want to know is “do you have an obligation to be productive?”.

53

But your criteria are based on what you value. Why is a hit-man not productive?

Mostly this argument seems to come down to the protestant work ethic. Working is a good for its own sake. I disagree. For the most part, what we produce is novelty vomit.

Do you think a video game developer is as productive as a heart surgeon?

54

But even that’s not a very clear-cut definition. I write copy for a magazine. What I do directly affects the product that is produced, but am I “productive” or is only the guy who actually runs the press that prints, cuts, folds, staples, etc. the physical magazines “productive”?

55

I’ve explained the hit man: because what they do is directly anti-social. Thus if the question is one of your “social obligations” it makes sense to exclude activities that are anti-social from your consideration!

Is working good for its own sake? No. Is doing stuff others value good for its own sake? Yes.

The heart-surgeon vs. game designer issue is an interesting one, because it contrasts doing something that is very important for one individual (saving his or her life, what could be more important?) with doing something only a little important for any particular individual, but that affects a lot of people (“playing a video game entertains me” multiplied by a million players).

I’d say it is difficult to measure, as our natural tendancy is to place an almost infinite value on an individual human life, so best rely on money as a very rough guide to do the measuring for us.

56

Well. Yes, and no. If an individual is lucky, he can assume (and hope) that he will go through life without ever needing the services of a heart surgeon. But, even if he doesn’t, he can rest comfortably knowing that one is available should the need arise.

So, in any instance, that individual who lives to be 100 and dies from a gunshot wound in the back of the head from a jealous husband, has still benefited from the heart surgeon by that surgeon’s very existence. And if that person never played video games, he wouldn’t give a hoot about them.

Thus, I think that any measure of “productive” has to be from a societal standpoint, as any one individual can measure what is needed based on his own experiences

57

I would agree that salary is not a measure of productivity. Otherwise how could anyone ever determine whether you are creating value?

For sake of discussion, let’s define two separate terms. Let’s say “productive” means to physically produce some tangible good. And let’s say “add value” means to offer some sort of service that provides some sort of net benefit.

A guy making widgets on a widget press may be productive. But his stack of widgets is useless just piling up next to his machine . To get those widgets to the customer, you need a whole army of people who, while not directly productive, add value. Many of them may seem like they don’t add value at all, at least until they are needed.
Companies don’t become bloated and inefficient on purpose. They create positions and departments because they think there is a need at the time. As those needs change, sometimes people manage to slide under the radar.

58

I don’t see the distinction you are making. People take comfort in the fact that a medical establishment exists to cater to their health; they also take comfort that an entertainment industry exists to cater to their leasure. It isn’t the existance of any one heart surgeon or game designer that is significant.

The fact is that in some occupations (particularly the mass media), one individual’s contribution will be better known to more folks, though it may affect any particular individual person less deeply than another occupation. That’s why we all know who Nicole Kidman is, but we do not all recognize many individual doctors by name.

59

Sure, but I can take or leave the next Grand Theft Auto. I might need the next heart procedure for my continued existence.

And, yes, if you group things into broad categories, then the differences are not that great. But this thread was talking about “productive” as it pertains to one person’s life (that is, the person doing the producing).

So, if you could make a formula assigning values for the importance, need, and other factors, I would say that one particular heart surgeon does more than one particular game designer. Though each serves his particular purpose in society and is “productive”.

And I also disagree with this idea that you must produce a physical product. It makes no sense. The secretary answering Edison’s phone (hypothetical) contributed to his products as much as anything else did. It allowed him to devote his knowledge to inventing while she devoted her skills to scheduling appointments. Simple comparative advantage. Just because she didn’t build something from the earth with her own two hands is irrelevant, IMHO…

60

You’re productive. But really you guys have forgotten my initial point so I will remind you.

My initial point was that salary is not a measure of productivity.