[fleddr]

Great comment.

The status quo is so bizarre. Human life has no inherent value unless it makes continuous contributions to "the economy". It would be economically most efficient to drop dead on the day you retire. Thanks, human!

All of this to keep a machine running that wrecks the planet and everything living on it, including ourselves. Probably some 50% of the economy is pure bullshit that nobody asked for, just keeping each other busy.

At some point we lost the plot. The economy doesn't work for the people anymore and drastic productivity increases have somehow not really improved our lives in terms of freedom, time, physical/mental health, quite the opposite.

[Aunche]

> Probably some 50% of the economy is pure bullshit that nobody asked for, just keeping each other busy.

You mean that 50% of the economy is bullshit that you think nobody should ask for. You and I may agree that developer at an online gambling company is economically useless, but the their boss certainly doesn't and the gamblers probably don't either.

Even if we accept your premise, you can't just assume that tanking the economy will only cut out the useless jobs instead of the useful ones. Useful jobs are perhaps more likely to survive, but that's not always going to be the case. During the next recession, people will more likely give up on a solar roof than give up gambling.

> The economy doesn't work for the people anymore and drastic productivity increases have somehow not really improved our lives in terms of freedom, time, physical/mental health, quite the opposite.

People's lives are objectively improving. It mostly just happening in Asia though. It requires a lot of money to build power plants, hospitals, and water towers, and much of that was financed by selling "useless" trinkets from the West.

[piloto_ciego]

Sometimes people fail to recognize that the oldest super powerful artificial intelligence is several hundred years old. It’s our economic system.

It’s the software running on all our “wet ware” that convinces us to value productivity and money over human life, the environment, or happiness. It is the paper clip maximizer and it’s happily churning away.

But we’re not maximizing paper clips we’re maximizing profits .

[Dig1t]

What does it mean to value human life? I would argue that the economic engine has given us ALL of the improvements in quality of life, and the fact that we live so much longer than we used to, IS valuing human life. There is no other way we could have given ourselves all of the amazing things (tech-wise) we have today.

Why would we value the environment over human lives? That just seems like nature-worship.

[jtr1]

They all like to say the free market is the optimal computer of value until you compare it to runaway AI

[andsoitis]

> The economy doesn't work for the people anymore and drastic productivity increases have somehow not really improved our lives in terms of freedom, time, physical/mental health, quite the opposite.

If trees could just all agree to remain short, they wouldn't need to waste resources to outgrow each other to reach sunlight.

[sethammons]

Watch or read The Hidden Life of Trees and you may have to rethink your imagery. It would appear trees may be "agreeable" with each other.

[grecy]

> Human life has no inherent value unless it makes continuous contributions to "the economy".

What I love most of all about this is the fact "the economy" has only existed for a few hundred years.

I wonder how modern humans found purpose for the previous 199,700 years?

[ajmurmann]

> Probably some 50% of the economy is pure bullshit that nobody asked for, just keeping each other busy.

Obviously this cannot be true. "The economy" isn't some magical object somewhere, but the emergent behavior from all our needs, desires and faults. If something is truly not wanted by anyone, nobody will pay for the work to get done. That's the magic of the invisible hand of capitalism. Doing stuff that truly nobody wants and getting paid for it is usually more of a feature of socialism and bureaucracies.

There are cases where individual motive leads to macro behavior that's not desirable by any individual, those are the cases where we need to tax negative externalities or regulate, depending on the problem. These issues usually don't emerge though because nobody wants something but because too many wanting a thing creates side effects that nobody likes. The book Micromotived and Macro behavior by Thomas Schelling covers that nicely.

[tsimionescu]

Just look at the huge amount of money being invested into advertising, PR, and marketing. That industry is mostly focused on finding psychological tricks to manipulate us into wanting things we just don't need, in various ways.

One of the best known examples is the PR-manufactured tradition of diamonds in engagement rings, which sky-rocketed the demand for diamonds in the general population.

Another great example is the huge industry of "supplements" which is legalized fraud on a massive scale, selling useless pills to people with a promise of making them better in some way, and relying solely on the fact that it's hard to prove that they don't actually do anything since their claims are so vague.

These are prime examples of entirely artificial demand created out of whole cloth through manipulation. There are numerous other cases of more subtle effects, where marketing is significantly inflating a demand which would exist but be much smaller otherwise (toys, smartphone upgrades, new cars every few years, beauty products, fashion etc).

[jasonfarnon]

I think OP's implication is not that nobody wants the 50% of pure bullshit, but that want is itself manufactured by the economy.

[Supermancho]

> "The economy" isn't some magical object somewhere

It's not magical, granted. "The economy" is a subjective state (eg metrics) that solely resides in the human mind, rather than a singular thing.

[WalterBright]

> drastic productivity increases have somehow not really improved our lives in terms of freedom, time, physical/mental health, quite the opposite.

Here's where the money went:

https://www.federalbudgetinpictures.com/federal-spending-per...

And that doesn't include all the state and local government.

[toomuchtodo]

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-debt-25-percent/ (25% of national debt was incurred during the last administration; half was COVID relief measures, the other half was tax cuts for the wealthy)

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fiscal-deficit-idUSKB... (Republican tax cuts to fuel historic U.S. deficits: CBO)

Sources at bottom of the first link.

This doesn’t include healthcare cost inflation due to a grossly inefficient healthcare model.

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2...