# What percentage of people would work in this hypothetical society? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [July 10, 2025, 8:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-percentage-of-people-would-work-in-this-hypothetical-society/1020712 "2025-07-10T20:11:28Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 17\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![Kropotkin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kropotkin/32/18045_2.png) [@Kropotkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kropotkin)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2025, 12:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-percentage-of-people-would-work-in-this-hypothetical-society/1020712/121 "2025-07-16T00:09:41Z")
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations: “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgement concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life… But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.” ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2025, 11:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-percentage-of-people-would-work-in-this-hypothetical-society/1020712/122 "2025-07-19T11:35:09Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#): > > Part of the problem is that we chop work up into bits, so that instead of taking out the garbage as part of the larger job which created it\* we land some people with just taking out garbage, others with just cutting up carcasses, and so on. > > Another part of the problem is that we tend to define any job involving physical labor as “dirty” – and then define driving to the gym and working out there as “recreation” and charge people for doing it. > > People quite willingly dig in the dirt as part of a hobby, and love doing it. Not everybody, of course; but quite a few people. > > / > / > > - of course, a lot of the “garbage” is defined as “garbage” also because we’ve chopped things up into bits; instead of the livestock producing valuable manure, they’re producing pollutants, because the feedlot has been separated from the fields; instead of our food waste going into compost or being fed to livestock, it becomes landfill garbage, because the livestock and gardens are so separated from most peoples’ llives that it’s impractical to get them there – I could go on. Why is that a “problem”? Isn’t it better for doctors, lawyers, engineers, artists, and most other professions to spend more of their time working on their specialty than everyone individually driving their trash to the dump every day? That’s why we have systems. So we can scale activities like trash collection and whatnot to free up thousands or millions of people to work on other stuff. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2025, 12:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-percentage-of-people-would-work-in-this-hypothetical-society/1020712/123 "2025-07-19T12:05:40Z")
I suppose it’s a problem in the same way an assembly line is a problem. It’s great for economic efficiency. It’s rather soul-deadening for the workers. Many of whom find that most of the benefit of that efficiency accrues to someone other than themselves. Which was exactly what @Kropotkin’s cite to Adam Smith was going on about. ---
**Author:** ![doreen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/858c86/32.png) [@doreen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/doreen)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2025, 12:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-percentage-of-people-would-work-in-this-hypothetical-society/1020712/124 "2025-07-19T12:29:26Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#): > > Part of the problem is that we chop work up into bits, so that instead of taking out the garbage as part of the larger job which created it\* we land some people with just taking out garbage, others with just cutting up carcasses, and so on. Some jobs are just like that - sure, the person who created the garbage ( the cook for example) can take the garbage out of the kitchen and place it outside. But then what? Is each individual person going to take it away or bury it or burn it? It’s relatively easy to compost your own food waste if you live on a farm - not so easy if you live in an apartment building. So composting in my city means the same people who pick up the recyclables and the trash that goes to landfills also pick up the yard waste and food waste, that agency composts the food and yard waste, and residents can get free compost. While if everyone had to handle their own garbage , I can’t even imagine what would happen - everything I could think of wouldn’t work in a city with a lot of apartmentless car dwellers. It’s more efficient for _me_ as an individual to just put my household garbage at the curb rather than trying to transport it to wherever. And nobody is making a profit off it. ---
**Author:** ![Kropotkin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kropotkin/32/18045_2.png) [@Kropotkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kropotkin)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2025, 12:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-percentage-of-people-would-work-in-this-hypothetical-society/1020712/125 "2025-07-19T12:49:06Z")
> [@doreen](#): > > And nobody is making a profit off it. There are many examples of privatized garbage collection where companies do indeed make a profit, albeit from tax dollars. Heck, it is so well known that it figures as a key plot device in fiction, such as The Sopranos. No one is saying systems should not be put in place to handle all sorts of tasks. The issue is how can those systems be designed to fit the real needs of people, including those who handle the garbage. Reducing their hours of work by hiring more people and increasing their pay would be a start. This is the sort of thinking that is required to address the OP’s question. Think big! Dare to dream! We can do better. We have so much waste, useless effort, wealth created by working people and funnelled up to those on top (Tony Soprano: “Shit flows down, money flows up!”), bullshit jobs, harmful production, that it is pretty clear we have the resources to do much, much better. Let’s reduce work, reward it better, change the conditions of work, (that is, an end to bosses), so we can deal with the OP’s question. In his 1930 essay, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes-- no socialist–suggested we have the possibility of reducing work drastically. And indeed, productivity has tripled since the 1950s, meaning we could be working a lot less for the same standard of living. Achieve that, and let’s see who wants to work more. ---
**Author:** ![Horatius](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/horatius/32/3572_2.png) [@Horatius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horatius)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2025, 1:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-percentage-of-people-would-work-in-this-hypothetical-society/1020712/126 "2025-07-19T13:02:44Z")
> [@doreen](#): > > While if everyone had to handle their own garbage , I can’t even imagine what would happen I don’t think he have to imagine it. Historically, that’s what most cities were like, and people just tossed their garbage out into the street. Cities were notorious for being filthy. ---
**Author:** ![Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/elmer_j.fudd/32/1211_2.png) [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elmer_J.Fudd)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2025, 1:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-percentage-of-people-would-work-in-this-hypothetical-society/1020712/127 "2025-07-19T13:53:32Z")
Most of us have automated systems for removing piss and shit from our homes; why not garbage? ---
**Author:** ![doreen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/858c86/32.png) [@doreen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/doreen)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2025, 3:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-percentage-of-people-would-work-in-this-hypothetical-society/1020712/128 "2025-07-19T15:28:37Z")
I’m not saying nobody could ever make a profit off collecting garbage. I’m saying in my city no one makes a profit - it’s a municipal service, funded by taxes and the sanitation workers are city employees.They are paid well enough that lots of people want that job and the pay might make up for the soul deadening , repetitive work - but it’s still going to be repetitive and soul deadening. ---
**Author:** ![Kropotkin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kropotkin/32/18045_2.png) [@Kropotkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kropotkin)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2025, 3:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-percentage-of-people-would-work-in-this-hypothetical-society/1020712/129 "2025-07-19T15:36:36Z")
And yet it doesn’t have to be. The minds here on the board alone could undoubtedly come up with all kinds of solutions. Repetitive soul-deadening work, say, gets 6 weeks vacation; jobs that include that work with other work that is different so people get spelled off; well, over to the rest of you now! ---
**Author:** ![xtenkfarpl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/c2a13f/32.png) [@xtenkfarpl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/xtenkfarpl)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2025, 3:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-percentage-of-people-would-work-in-this-hypothetical-society/1020712/130 "2025-07-19T15:41:46Z")
> [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](#): > > Most of us have automated systems for removing piss and shit from our homes; why not garbage? That’s a fairly well-defined and limited problem in terms of the material to be removed, though. And does depend on a lot of historically amortized infrastructure… sewage systems and waste treatment etc. General waste and garbage is a more complicated issue. It could almost certainly be done with AI and robotics, but the systems and investment to create them are not anywhere near in place yet. ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2025, 8:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-percentage-of-people-would-work-in-this-hypothetical-society/1020712/131 "2025-07-19T20:12:00Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > Why is that a “problem”? For one thing, turning a resource into a pollutant is definitely a problem. > [@msmith537](#): > > Isn’t it better for doctors, lawyers, engineers, artists, and most other professions to spend more of their time working on their specialty than everyone individually driving their trash to the dump every day? Even when everybody’s taking their own trash to the dump, you don’t do that every day. You do it maybe once a week, and see half the rest of the town in the process, and find a great chair in the maybe-reusable pile. (Except most modern dumps around here have nothing of the sort. I think some places are re-starting them, though.) And I doubt you get the best doctoring, artists’ work, or much of anything else by having the people doing those things do nothing else all of their waking hours. I suspect that’s how you get massive burnout. > [@msmith537](#): > > That’s why we have systems. So we can scale activities like trash collection and whatnot to free up thousands or millions of people to work on other stuff Such as telemarketing. > [@doreen](#): > > everything I could think of wouldn’t work in a city with a lot of apartmentless car dwellers. This is true. Or even in a city with a lot of carless apartment dwellers. > [@Kropotkin](#): > > There are many examples of privatized garbage collection where companies do indeed make a profit, albeit from tax dollars. Not only from tax dollars. There are plenty of places where individual households have to hire private trash collectors with their own money, because outside large cities many municipalities don’t provide trash service. > [@Kropotkin](#): > > The issue is how can those systems be designed to fit the real needs of people, including those who handle the garbage. Yup. And these days, at least around here, there’s very little actual handling the garbage involved. The mechanisms that are part of the truck pick up the dumpster, dump it into the appropriate container, and set it back down. It’s more of a truck-driving and machinery-handling job; and there are plenty of people who like working with trucks and machinery, as long as there’s decent pay, limited hours so they’ve time to do other things with their lives, decent working conditions including a truck that’s not unsafe to drive and is comfortable to work in, and the condition that in this society they’re least likely to get – a decent level of respect for doing a job that’s at least as essential to society as surgery. Probably more so – a society with no surgeons will have a lot of people die earlier and less pleasantly than they need to; but a society of anywhere remotely near our population levels that doesn’t, one way or another, deal with the trash is going to strangle nearly everybody in the mess and kill them with disease. Our theoretical post-scarcity society, of course, might have robots deal with the garbage. Those dumpster-emptying trucks are partway there. But if we’re going to keep turning fertilizer into pollution by separating systems, they’ll only do that faster and more out of the way of human notice (until the pollution comes back and hits us upside the head, at least.) > [@Kropotkin](#): > > Repetitive soul-deadening work, say, gets 6 weeks vacation And lots of time off during the week. And for some people, repetitive work becomes not soul-deadening but the equivalent of my “weeding trance”; or the time during which they write poetry or equations in their heads. > [@xtenkfarpl](#): > > > [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](#): > > > > Most of us have automated systems for removing piss and shit from our homes; why not garbage? > > That’s a fairly well-defined and limited problem in terms of the material to be removed, though. There are actually most likely significant problems occuring, though not well tracked, because modern people put a lot of stuff down the john that isn’t piss, shit, or toilet paper: some of it flushed on purpose, some of it medications their systems are flushing without them noticing. Current systems treat for or filter some of this out, but not all of it; and some of the filtered stuff is a problem on its own. ---
**Author:** ![xtenkfarpl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/c2a13f/32.png) [@xtenkfarpl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/xtenkfarpl)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2025, 10:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-percentage-of-people-would-work-in-this-hypothetical-society/1020712/132 "2025-07-19T22:07:14Z")
> [@Kropotkin](#): > > Repetitive soul-deadening work, say, gets 6 weeks vacation; Per year? Not to be ad-hominem, but it looks as if you are in the US. People in many European countries _already_ get that. One of the things I _hated_ about working in the US was the assumption that 2 weeks vacation per year was ‘normal’ (and there was a strong pressure to not take it, or dribble it out in occasional days off). ---
**Author:** ![Kropotkin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kropotkin/32/18045_2.png) [@Kropotkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kropotkin)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2025, 10:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-percentage-of-people-would-work-in-this-hypothetical-society/1020712/133 "2025-07-19T22:14:05Z")
I’d prefer 6 weeks vacation a month, but I’m told that’s not feasible. I’m in Canada, but here too 6 weeks’ holiday for all workers would be a big deal. Many workers do not get any paid vacation time in a year, due to “creative” scheduling by bosses to avoid the requirements for X number of hours before being entitled to vacations. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2025, 11:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-percentage-of-people-would-work-in-this-hypothetical-society/1020712/134 "2025-07-21T23:54:22Z")
My son and his best friend (they met in first grade in Montreal and now both live around Seattle) both retired with a lot of money from Microsoft. BF has never worked again. He goes to a lot of movies, accompanies his wife on bird watching exposition or travels by himself or with my son. A year ago, they went (by ferry and car) to northern Yukon to dip their toes into the Arctic Ocean. My son, on the other hand, stayed home for a couple years to write a book and help raise their four kids. His wife is really a trad mom. When their youngest went off to first grade, he got his old job back, worked about ten more years and retired for good. After a year or so he got bored and get another job. It is gig work and he can work from anywhere. He works as much as he wants and takes off whenever he wants. So there are two stories with quite different answers to the OP. ---
**Author:** ![OldGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/3bc359/32.png) [@OldGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OldGuy)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2025, 1:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-percentage-of-people-would-work-in-this-hypothetical-society/1020712/135 "2025-07-22T01:12:25Z")
I see two difficulties with this question. First who decides the rate of payment for jobs. Is it set by the government. Is it a pure capitalistic system with little or no oversight? The second issue is that many jobs have both pleasant and unpleasant aspects. I’m a retired professor. I’m still writing. I assume in this society I’d have done that most of my life. On the other hand, I would not have wanted to go to most faculty meetings. I liked to teach some classes, but did not like to teach other classes that someone had to do. Can I pick and choose? Or is the answer to this tied up with my previous question? ---
**Author:** ![Grrr](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/grrr/32/146_2.png) [@Grrr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grrr)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2025, 1:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-percentage-of-people-would-work-in-this-hypothetical-society/1020712/136 "2025-07-22T01:44:10Z")
Jobs still work the same. You can’t pick and choose the parts that you like unfortunately. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2025, 11:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-percentage-of-people-would-work-in-this-hypothetical-society/1020712/137 "2025-07-22T11:54:47Z")
A side effect of a UBI _given no change in the composition and duties of jobs_ is to place a bit of a floor price under jobs. Price both as to wage, and as to quality of experience. The percentage of people on UBI wanting to still pursue their professoring or lawyering or software development or upper management gigs will be larger than the percentage of people on UBI wanting to still pursue their gig of being night janitor, hotel maid, or convenience store clerk. As a result those crappier lower paying jobs will simply no longer be occupied in nearly the absolute numbers required. Kinda like what would happen if certain factions in this country got their wish and all immigrants, legal or otherwise, were disappeared to their home countries tomorrow. The consequences would be felt at every level of employment, but most severely at the bottom. Under UBI, either those jobs get improved a bunch, go undone, or are eliminated through automation or other process reforms. The experience in the petro-states that have what amounts to UBI for natives only is that very quickly all low-end work is simply “beneath” the citizenry and a rightless, voiceless class of temporary immigrants is procured to do all that scruffy work while not being eligible for the UBI. The immigrant population is permanent, but the regs are set up so any individual person is only temporary. To ensure they don’t become a social or political force, just a silent source of worker-hours. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-percentage-of-people-would-work-in-this-hypothetical-society/1020712.md?page=6)