[sarcasm]
You just lack vision!
[/sarcasm]
Actually, I AM still living at home. I couldn’t afford to move out-it’s way too expensive-even when I was working. And I want to go back to grad school, and that’s going to cost money.
And I want to work, because I want money, and I want out of the house. I’m BORED!!!
Try temping. It’s great fun. And it doesn’t pay too badly. I make enough to pay for my apartment, food, clothes, student loans, etc. Not too shabby.
That’s what I’m doing right now to bide my time before I start with the Foreign Service in a few months.
But what WILL happen is that as we get wealthier, we will probably value our time more than we do now, because the marginal value of added wealth will not make up for lost time. So I would expect the work week to gradually shorten and the number of vacations continue to increase, until we reach a new equilibrium where we would rather earn more income than save time.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see a 30 hour work week in a couple of decades. And a couple more Statutory Holidays perhaps. But at some point, since there will ALWAYS be scarcity there will always be a desire to earn more money, which will put pressure on people to work.
What about the people who like their jobs?
Do they just get screwed?
Human beings do not work to create more work; they work to create more time to do what they want to do; learn, live, experience and if necessary; dominate. “I want to have this experience, yet this experience doesn’t want me, so I have to effectively force the experience to have no choice but to select me in the means which I desire.”
The difference lies between two types:
Those who believe that resources should be abstracted to concentrate wealth in small pockets by creating superfluous non-consentual dependencies.
Those who believe resources should be collapsed to allow for equal wealth and experiential capabilities within the entire perameter of a consent only issue. This idea seeks to create virtual representations which mirror consent fullfillment; rather then virtualizing consent on that which would otherwise be represented virtually.
It really is the difference between cognitive dementia, low self-worth, low self-value, and feeling inadequate to perform vs. the ability to collapse reseouces and not feel threatened by collapsing potential dependencies which can be exploited for ones own simulated perception of benefit in in the real world.
One side wants to virtualize the substance; the other side wants to virtualize the consent.
The side which wants to virtualize consent is the current structure we are in, and have been in for quite some-time; even though the desire, motivation and necessary logic which abstracts technology; requires the need for consent to not be virtualized in order to be procured.
These devices are being used counter to the process necessary to bring them into being; and as such effectively collapse motivation and degrade society as a whole for the virtualized benefit of a few. As long as these few can keep logically consistent existential inversions at arms length with technology procured from the desire to collapse it; they will effectively be self-validated for the course of their existence at the benefit of an genuine progress which would enable greater expression of that which they believe to have captured.
Attempts to collapse resources will be met with severe resistance now as has always been the case; as thew ego necessary to achieve authoritative potence in our current society requires these resource collapses to not occur in order to avoid the actual pressure of their ego’s meaninglessness; hovering over them as an ever-present truth, guarded by the spacial luck of presence within this system of logical complacency and existential liberalism.
-Justhink
Nope; they can virtualize the situation rather than the consent.
Big difference.
-Justhink
You cannot be ‘screwed’/violated’ to the degree that consent is given priority to the existant and can be virtualized liberally upon virtualized existents. The current system requires consent to be virtualized upon phenomenal existents. That is where people are being screwed.
-Justhink
Sorry, it’s all clicks and buzzes to me.
There will not ‘ALWAYS’ be scarcity Sam. People who collapse dependencies from which scarcity is procured are ground into beef in this current structure; their findings locked off within the reserves of the national security structure. This society does not want people to have more time unless they become more impotent with that time; an effect of the cognitive dementia selected for power structure. They need to be able to be taxed for the tasks which they perform in their free-time. This can be rendered by causing more mental illness or biological disease with which the tax is in the form of a dependency of taxation - people want to consume more of this drug with their discretionary ‘labors’. You can always make people work in a society like this Sam; even when they feel their appreciating vacation. Virtualized consent is the selective factor which designates currency and capitol hording - collapsing the false abstraction with technology (from which the virtualized consent is run through); is considered the greatest social crime in our current structure. The abstraction collapses are siezed and corrupted to make the virtualized consent even more severely encrypted then before; rather than just releasing the collapse into society. This is how our current system functions.
-Justhink
Is it just me, or is he getting worse?
we have a really powerful military. why not just go usurp other nations’ resources (we can start with iraq’s oil) and sell it to other coutries (if they refuse to buy, then we take over them next) and split the profits amongst all americans. That way we’d have plenty of money and nobody would have to work. Except, I’d still need someone to cut my hair… hmm
Okay, now I’m getting scared.
Wilson’s article is a great big load of…well, you know. One good tip-off is if the author attempts to lend intellectual credibility to his writing by using mathematical language without any definitions, justification, or rigor. Here is an example: “As society evolved from tiny bands, to larger tribes, to federations of tribes, to city-states, to nations, to multinational alliances, the increment-of-association increased exponentially.” How can this grow exponentially when “increment-of-association” “simply [means] that when we combine our efforts we can do more than the sum of what each of us could do separately.” The concept is purely qualitative; it is not a quantitative thingie, and its “exponential” growth is meaningless. That’s not to say that, for example, work done hasn’t increased, but it is to say that that is not what the author wrote. “Gains from cooperation” are not as new as the author seems to think. The recognition of them goes back at least to Adam Smith.
His non sequitur, which he draws from this increment-of-association, is flagrant. That uncooperative behavior is responsible for the fact that “a stone-age hunting band could not build the Parthenon” or that “a Renaissance city-state could not put Neil Armstrong on the Moon” is just silly.
His completely undefended assertion that “unemployment is directly caused by this technological capacity to do more-with-less” is naive at the very best. If this assertion had any merit, then unemployment would have been growing steadily since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, if not before, and it would have skyrocketed since WWII. But it hasn’t. This is a glaring contradiction to his assertion, one that he needs to address, but he fails to do so. Could he have possibly overlooked such an obvious fault in his reasoning? That seems hard to believe.
His assertion that hourly pay for work is “the modern equivalent of slavery” is offensive in the extreme. :mad: The very idea that working at McDonald’s, or heck, even cleaning Greenpiece’s toilet is equivalent to the current slave system in the Sudan, or the American antebellum slave system, or the Roman slave system is a slap in the face to all those poor luckless bastards who suffered and, in the case of the Sudan, continue to suffer under those awful institutions.
He goes on to assert that “corporations…tacitly agreed to slow down the pace of cybernation [technological growth?], to drag their feet and run the economy with the brakes on.” I didn’t realize that corporations (and presumably privately owned firms) were so generous. Let’s see, they have the technology to lower their labor demands with much more efficient technology, and thereby increase profits (a boon to privately owned firms) and, in the case of corporations, increase share prices, but refuse to do so just because they don’t want to cause people to lose their jobs. I must admit that I am just a little bit skeptical about that. But that’s not all. He says that he would “argue” that this is so. He should watch more Monty Python, then he might know what an argument actually is.
Since I still have a little over 16,000 characters more room, let me take a moment to consider these “intelligent and plausible plans for adapting to a society of rising unemployment.”
- The National Dividend: Each citizen is given one share in the United States of America Business Concern (USABC - pronounced “yoo-sab-ka”) and collects dividends based on the GDP. He goes on to claim that the dividends will be “at least five times more” than what “a welfare recipient receives.” According to the CIA World Fact Book, per capita GDP in USABC is $36,300. According to Public Radio’s Marketplace, the “maximum average welfare payment for a family of three is $4,900 a year.” Let’s use that. So, $4,900 / 3 * 5 = $8,166 per year for each citizen of USABC. That means that $8,166 / $36,300 * 100 = 22.5% of GDP will have to be taxed, at a bare minimum, to satisfy this plan. According to Cecil, the “top 7 percent of those filing returns, those reporting adjusted gross income of $75,000 or more, paid 51 percent of total U.S. income taxes” under the current system. And that’s with a top marginal rate of something like 29%. I’m not in the mood to do the math to figure out how much of an increase in the marginal rate that would require for the top 7%, but if they pay 51% of the tax, it would probably be significant. But I don’t need to, because his argument is assuming a high GDP, which is unwarranted. His argument is based on the assumption that business can increase productivity by an amazing amount with very little effort–hence his “dragging feet” remark. But that simply doesn’t hold water. If business could increase productivity, it would increase productivity because that would mean more profit! But it doesn’t. Not out of generosity, but because his fantasy of cybernation is just that: fantasy. Without his cybernation, GDP will plummet with with massive unemployment, hence dividens will plummet, an we won’t be living too high on the hog.
Of course, the dividends go only to citizens. So green-card holders, even though you contribute to GDP, you will get no benefit. Good to see Wilson is a true egalitarian! :wally:
Even more important, if that is possible, is the question of governance. How is this scheme, it surely isn’t a plan, is going to promote healthy unemployment. Off the top of my head, there seems to be a good economic argument why such a scheme should lower GDP, but the same argument implies lower overall welfare since disconnecting costs from benefits creates economic distortions. But that’s moot. What’s important is that if I get paid my dividends, I’m going to want everybody (but me) to do a lot of work and I will support gov’t policies to encourage that. It is not obvious that this scheme will create a society of leisure; a fascist work-state seems just as likely.
- The Guaranteed Annual Income: A poverty line is drawn, anyone earning below it gets financial assistance. Evidently there is no work requirement. This will get awfully expensive. It will ultimately have to be paid for by business, since business is the productive element of the economy**, but as we’ve seen, his argument that business can make production skyrocket through cybernation is wholly unproven and not worth much consideration.
He also tells us, without argument or proof, nor apparently with thought, that this scheme will be less expensive than welfare. Of course, he’s assuming that the number of recipients does not grow for that to be true. But his goal is to make the number of recipients grow to a significant majority of the population, which implies that it will be more expensive–a lot more expensive. But with less people working, i.e. a significant majority unemployed, and no reasonable argument as to why business can become sufficiently productive, GDP will necessarily fall. The collision course should be obvious.
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The Negative Income Tax: Well, let’s just say that the fact that Wilson can’t see that this is identical to scheme #2 makes me wonder if he was really paying attention to what he was thinking. Now I have great respect for Friedman, and I find it hard to believe that this is not being taken out of context. As an economist, Friedman would know that the Neg. Income Tax would have to specify a poverty line that really isn’t that attractive. That’s because if it is too attractive, no on would work and therefore no one could pay for the Neg. Income Tax. The system would implode. But to obtain Wilson’s goal of massive unemployment, it would have to be quite attractive. That would leave the productive burden on a very small segment of society, which he assumes is possible, but does not prove.
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The RICH Economy: For the most part, this is just applying the above three (two, actually) schemes with the goal of creating massive unemployment. To the extent that the above schemes are not workable, this one is also pure fantasy.
Well, I guess that’s about it for that. Wilson is full of it. That’s not to say that I’m not all for shortening the workweek. That could be done, but it would involve sacrifice. Less labor implies less income. Do we have the choice as individuals? Probably not. That is the only sense in which the “wage slavery” concept seems to be valid–in general one doesn’t have much choice but to work 40 hours per week. Most part-timers don’t get benefits, which makes part-time work effectively impossible for most people. Ultimately, what needs to be done is to build a system where each individual has the choice of how much to work. A neg. income tax with a not very attractive poverty line, one enough to cover housing, medical insurance, and not-quite-starving amounts of food would probably be a good start. Then one’s personal decision to work, if at all, and how many hours to work are up to the individual. And really, isn’t that sort of choice what life should be all about?
**Yeah, I know that is kind of inaccurate–but it is a close enough approximation for this context.
“I propose that unemployment is not a disease, but the natural, healthy functioning of an advanced technological society.”
Suppose in the far future all production are handled by automated machinery, and anybody can get whatever he wants without working for a living.
Then what? People get really bored. There is a thing as having too much time on your hands. Besides, a lot of people derive meaning from working with/for other people, hence volunteers.
So, you mean I’m not getting paid for surfing the web and checking my email? :eek:
So work if you want. Maybe the flaw of communism was trying to make everyone work. Maybe there are enough people that like working to cover for the rest of us.
Hey, right now you pretty much work or die. This is why consent is virtualized on phenomenal existents in Justhink’s post. IOW, it is laughable to call “work or die” and then working an application of “consent” (a life or death choice is not a choice since choice can only operate inside of the context of “being alive”, for the same reason it isn’t moral to survive because one needs to be alive in order to act morally in the first place). So, you virtually consent to do real things to and for real people. However, if you weren’t obligated to work for a living, those who wanted to work could really choose to. Since this work was not essentially necessary for existence, then it more or less has virtual consequences (that is, nothing much happens from one man’s work, and it doesn’t actually threaten anyone’s life).
“What if everyone stopped working?” I mean, what the heck. This question has as much weight as “What if everyone looked the same??” Huh? Huh?!?! What THEN? 
Is it a pipe dream? I don’t know. I think it is not a laughable thought that technology will one day advance to the point where pretty much none of us have to work at things we don’t really want to as machinery or other technological advances will correct the issue. I mean, it is like someone saying, “Someone will always have to be around to clean the septic tanks on your property!” as proof that we’ll always have to work.
I think for most of us, in a true utopia, we would – at something we truly enjoyed. Plus, the working conditions would be pleasant. Most people would choose to do some sort of work, most of the time.
They could go right on working (and probably enjoy improved working conditions). The point isn’t to end work, the point is to end the current system of wage slavery, the system whereby people have to accept bad working conditions and bad treatment, and work at jobs they don’t like, in order to survive.
Erislover said: “Is it a pipe dream? I don’t know. I think it is not a laughable thought that technology will one day advance to the point where pretty much none of us have to work at things we don’t really want to as machinery or other technological advances will correct the issue.”
Yes. To me, this is the point. I don’t know when or how, but I do think it is possible.
js_africanus said: “Ultimately, what needs to be done is to build a system where each individual has the choice of how much to work. A neg. income tax with a not very attractive poverty line, one enough to cover housing, medical insurance, and not-quite-starving amounts of food would probably be a good start. Then one’s personal decision to work, if at all, and how many hours to work are up to the individual. And really, isn’t that sort of choice what life should be all about?”
This would indeed be a good start. Does it really seem impossible?