> Man, what a weird week. Unless it's on their own terms, it seems nobody wants to work anymore.
It's the only one with any acknowledgement that agreeable terms may actually be needed in order to attract people to work. It doesn't take a PhD to figure this out!
Utah Phillips, one of my favorite storytellers and all-around anarchist and hobo has a line I was reminded of:
That’s when [Fry Pan Jack] told me – you know, he’d been tramping since 1927 -he said, “I told myself in ’27, if I cannot dictate the conditions of my labor, I will henceforth cease to work.” Hah! You don’t have to go to college to figure these things out, no sir! He said, “I learned when I was young that the only true life I had was the life of my brain. But if it’s true the only real life I have is the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition?” Fat chance!
From the track Bum on the Rod off the album The Past Didn't Go Anywhere with Ani DiFranco https://youtu.be/-rw4sd4AuJE
If the reward from working is barely enough to cover the necessities, then there is technically no difference between working as a free citizen, and being forced to work as an indentured servant, other than a vague notion of freedom, which in that case is the freedom to decide between working and living on the streets.
And people don't like being indentured servants. History should have made that clear by now.
People want perspective. In the past, a working man could support a family of five, buy a house, a car and afford vacation once or twice a year, plus save enough to retire comfortably.
Today people, despite burning themselves out in their job, struggle to pay rent in a flat shared with other working people, after loading themselves up with 100k in students debt, and no chance in hell to ever own property of their own.
If the powers that be want people to be willing to work, that work has to pay off.
If it doesn't, well...we're at the beginning of a retirement wave unprecedented in human history. 2 low-birthrate generations to follow. And our entire economic system is designed around constant growth.
I leave doing the math on that as an exercise for the reader.
I think it's important to note that the good old days of a working man being able to support a family of five was only true for a brief period of history in a handful of elite countries. In most of the world, and for most of human history, it hasn't been the case that any single person working 40 hours a week could provide a luxurious lifestyle for a large family. While some lament the loss of this golden age their grandparents experienced, a much greater number of people around the world have seen their living conditions improve markedly since the time of their grandparents.
That doesn't take away from the point that ideally no one should have to work themselves to the bone just to afford a humble lifestyle, but if middle class people in developed countries are really asking for perspective, I think it's worth bearing their relative privilege in mind.
> In the past, a working man could support a family of five, buy a house, a car and afford vacation once or twice a year, plus save enough to retire comfortably.
I think this is a bit of a rose-colored rear-view mirror, and to the extent it's true it's a pretty brief period of time historically. Most people in most times had to work pretty hard. If you were a farmer, you worked pretty much all the daylight hours every day. Immigrants in the early part of the 20th century worked very hard, often the man running a small business or doing factory work and the woman cleaning, sewing, cooking, bookkeeping, etc. for hire. And all of that is when the men weren't off fighting a war as a conscripted soldier.
The "working man" who could support a family on his income alone was a product of the post-WWII economy. And he didn't really have to save for retirement, he had a defined-benefit pension (the kind that bankrupted many of their employers in subsequent years).
The fact that today, people can feel pretty picky about the terms of the work they do is a sign that times are pretty good, despite what people may think and say.
I have heard the argument that a negative effect of the post WW2 "feminist" movement (by that I mean women in the work force) has had the long term effect of causing prices to simply adjust to the dual income household, to the point that now it is a necessity. It is a privileged family today that can afford to live comfortably on only one salary.
I recall a Twitter thread where a lawyer mentions she couldn’t afford the apartment she rented as a law student now that she was an actual lawyer 10-15 years later.
A working man can still support a family of five, buy a house, a car and a vacation once or twice a year. He just needs to be realistic.
House: you can still find houses with plenty of room for ~$100k. It just needs to be in an affordable area: think McKeesport, not San Francisco.
Car: for $5k you can get a 2005 Ford Focus or Honda Civic. They're reliable cars that will get you from A to B perfectly fine, easy to repair and fuel efficient.
Education: a Computer Science degree from WGU costs $18k for the average student, and can be as low as $4k if you accelerate.
Career: plenty of remote software jobs paying above $100k, which can fund a good life in most of the US.
I get it though, the average person wants a nice house in a wealthy area with good schools and low crime and two new cars and gets a degree from a school they can't afford in a field without high paying jobs, and they cannot even code. That's completely their fault, no sympathy from me.
For those people, there's an easy solution: just don't have kids. Kids are crazy expensive, and not required for a good life.
I hope what you say is true- mass retirements followed by a plummeting birthrate. We surely do not need so many people, when the overwhelming majority are useless. Robots will be here soon anyway to replace most of the workforce
>>a working man could support a family of five, buy a house, a car and afford vacation once or twice a year, plus save enough to retire comfortably.
I would say my family history is that of a "working man" that closly fits that narraive..
My grandfather was a WWII vet, after military service was a factory worker that raised 4 kids, in their own home.
Let me eliminate some of that illusory rose tint from your worldview. That home with 2 adults and 4 kids was a 950 square foot 1 bathroom box on .25 acres of land, with no garage, basement, or luxury of any type. my family still owns this property.
In comparison me a single man, lives in a 1300 sqft home.. by myself, with 2 car garage, full basement, etc. My home is considered "basic" by modern standards, some would even consider it below minimum standards for a family of 4...(I bought this home from such a family because they felt it was too small for them)
No builder would ever consider building either my home (which was built in the 60's, nor my grandparents home (built in the early 50's) as today home sizes need to be 1500-2000 square foot, each bedroom needs it own bath, kitchens need to be near professional quality, etc etc etc etc etc.
In short home prices are sky high because buyers would never consider, and probally could not legally, raise 4 kids in a 1 bath 950 sqaure foot home.
We often to not actualy compare apples to apple when we look at the conditions of the past. Sure a man could buy a home for his family in 1950... That home was about 1/2 the size of todays home, and had FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR less amenities and comforts of the modern home
Here's some perspective. In lower cost areas of the country it's still totally possible for a single worker to support a family of five, buy a house, a car, and afford a vacation. But in that idealized version of the past that you're describing the normal standards of living were much lower. The typical worker's house was small with everyone sharing one bathroom. The car was unreliable and dangerous. The vacation was a road trip to go camping. Now it seems everyone's expectations have risen.
I do agree that demographic changes are going to cause economic problems. That is basically unavoidable now.
"then there is technically no difference between working as a free citizen, and being forced to work as an indentured servant"
A common fallacy. There are light-years of difference. An indentured servant is bound to serve a particular master. A free worker, even earning only enough for necessities, is still free to decide how to meet those necessities, and who to work for under what terms. That's a lot of freedom. No, of course they will not have as many choices as a rich person. But they are very far from indentured servitude.
For most jobs real wages haven't gone up at all adjusted with inflation. Others have mostly gone down in wages, most specifically service type jobs which are critical for basic needs. When you can't afford to live why bother?
This. I don't understand why this is up for debate. Working hard does not buy a house, a convenient apartment, a promotion to higher income, equity at low prices, a lifestyle where one can find partners and settle down, kids, kids education.
We are talking about the basics, not avocado toast or international vacations.
The juice just ain't worth the squeeze in America any longer.
"If the reward from working is barely enough to cover the necessities, then there is technically no difference between working as a free citizen, and being forced to work as an indentured servant, other than a vague notion of freedom, which in that case is the freedom to decide between working and living on the streets."
What an incredibly privileged perspective. Do you think that actual indentured servants would agree with you on this?
> If the reward from working is barely enough to cover the necessities, then there is technically no difference between working as a free citizen, and being forced to work as an indentured servant, other than a vague notion of freedom, which in that case is the freedom to decide between working and living on the streets.
Slave/indentured servant -> live-in servant -> servant -> service worker -> self-employed service worker (contractor)
At each step along this 'evolution', the beneficiaries of the labour have freed themselves from the burden of supplying some of the resources needed by the worker (shelter, food, holidays, sick pay, health insurance, safety and other equipment, education/training, etc). In theory this has been balanced by increased monetary compensation. When that compensation isn't enough for the worker to meet these needs, what should we expect? That they become indebted?
> People want perspective. In the past, a working man could support a family of five, buy a house, a car and afford vacation once or twice a year, plus save enough to retire comfortably.
Maybe during the 1950s, when two (2) World Wars had blasted multiple empires to dust and essentially gutted a generation of workers aka males between the ages of 18-40.
Sure enough the US, still standing after entering the wars late and not seeing huge casualties or direct combat in-country, was positioned to lead a post-war economic boom.
Now it's back to pre-war conditions, which curiously enough, resemble the Guilded Age, and its associated strikes
You’re going to get a bunch of static because of the objectivist leanings of all the “temporarily impoverished tech billionaires” on HN and pg’s rare miss of an essay about the scarce reagents of the United States manufacturing economy during the Cold War.
But you’re fundamentally right. It’s really easy to manipulate indices like the CPI (and oh boy do they have some interesting ideas about what people need in life), and it’s really easy to exploit summary statistics like the arithmetic mean to drag “average standard of living” metrics around with a few categories of goods (mostly consumer electronics) to push the absurd notion that anyone outside the investor class is doing as well as they were 10, 20, 30, 40, … years ago.
The United States burns 45% of its corn and smaller but still ridiculous percentages of its other big agricultural outputs as ethanol at a net disaster on carbon emissions. We let poor and homeless people interact with courts and ERs in vast numbers who need housing assistance, basic medical care, and sometimes substance abuse treatment at (people debate this exact number) somewhere in the hand-wave 10-100x range of a markup. Cops and judges and the amortized cost of lawsuits against police departments and ER doctors and ER nurses and ER equipment have a cost structure closer to a military than cheap, tax-subsidized housing and registered nurses.
The United States has absurd surpluses of arable land, exploitable energy, deep-water harbor capacity, riverine transport capacity, exploitable mineral resources, highly desirable and massively under exploited coastal real estate, you name it, it’s easier to list things that are in any way intrinsically scarce here…Coltan maybe?
The United States is in a position unique in history in which its sovereign debt is denominated in its own currency and that currency is the world’s reserve currency and that sovereign debt is the “risk-free return” r-nought embraced by modern global finance. This means that we can tailor the money supply exactly to the level of productivity that it’s used to represent, which means that being a politician or economic regulator is as easy of a job (if your goal is the public welfare) as it definitionally can be.
The United States is basically the only developed nation with no intrinsic demographic challenges (the ones that are ravaging all the other developed nations) because there is a seeming boundless supply of (statistically) young, law-abiding, productive people who still have kids wanting to immigrate here across a porous land border.
Scarcity or want of really any kind is a very, very, very expensive “luxury” (it’s not quite a Veblen good but it’s certainly conspicuous consumption) that we as a society seem prepared to spend whatever it takes to get.
Once you strip the paint jobs off of either Foucault-style postmodernism or Randian objectivism (a challenge that Noam Chomsky describes as a real feat of linguistic manipulation) you’re left with effectively the same actionable value system of there being 2 kinds of people in this world: for the lefty kleptocrats the individual is robbed of agency and identity because they are the product of constructed forces external to them (I mean, except for us of course), for the righty kleptocrats the individual is robbed of agency and identity because they aren’t smart or motivated enough to invent Reardon Metal and therefore insignificant (I mean, except for us, of course).
The action item that falls out is the same in both cases: drive capture to keep the “right people” running things.
The result is the same in both cases: if you do a halfway honest plot of productivity and genuine standard of living against the decades, you get divergent lines that seem to be training for an Olympic gymnastics qualification.
The most dangerous man in the world isn’t a Navy SEAL or a Zeta, the most dangerous man in the world is a man with nothing to lose, which is why we’re up to 4 mass shootings a day (by Mother Jones’s definition but pick one), which is per-capita more than Syria.
This little brochure is a bit hand-wavy on the math and takes a bit of poetic license, it’s not meant to be the book that someone needs to write about this. So it’ll be a trivial exercise to pick it apart in that god-awful “>”-prefixed bad-faith style, but it’s not going to be a fundamental intellectual or epistemological or ethical error that’s going to motivate people to do so, it’s that this is not a comfortable thing to see in the mirror.
What is freedom if you are working for a top down authoritarian hierarchy ? Be it legal person or a real one. Do we get to enjoy any democracy at work ?
I mean maybe I have work ethic or am lucky. But I don’t struggle to pay mortgage, buy cars, or go on vacations and I am the sole breadwinner for my family… but I also started programming in 3rd grade in the 90s, didn’t go to college so have no debt, and live a pretty non materialistic punk rock life.
The gig economy has worn many out... The promise of services like social media, Uber, Political Parties, and airBnB that promised to create wealthy entrepreneurs fell flat on it's face after making the people at the top of the pyramids very wealthy.
I think that social media really tipped the balance of fairness in the working world... With social media, suddenly Trust fund Babies could fake success, and promote schemes that helped them to profit. The Social Media model was set up to raise Trust Funders and Popular individuals far above everyone else, and it killed hopes of upward mobility for people who didn't fall into any fame or wealth category unless they became famous for negative reasons or for ridicule.
It's not that no one wants to work anymore, it's that people are tired of weak work schemes, and being used and then thrown away in order to elevate others. It's not until real opportunity for growth, entrepreneurship, and excellence returns that things will begin to get back to normal.
Talking about is as "Nobody wants to work anymore" is an injustice... Millions of people are working very hard every day on content creation that rivals TV programming and others are regularly posting their best and fully composed and edited work on Internet sites daily, most without any pay in HOPES of being discovered for their work, as proof of that.
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
My theory is that this is all true, and it’s fantastic. Generally, over the last century, in year X, nobody wants to work anymore compared to year Y (Y < X).
This is a success of social democracy and it is a success of technology. We can afford to have people work less hard and still be richer than we ever were. It’s the success story of western progress and the rest of the world is going through the same steps as we speak. That a few old-fashioned managers are surprised they can’t get people at the same bad terms as before is just a symptom of a very positive development.
Working in most jobs sucks. Some people are lucky to have jobs they love, but that's the minority. I know that to be the prevalent sentiment even in top notch, AAA, "I can't believe they pay me to do this" companies such as Google, Apple etc.
If people had, for the sake of a thought experiment, a guaranteed 20K/month income and free healthcare no matter what they do with their life, it's very unlikely they will choose to work on regular jobs. They will instead generally pursue arts/crafts (including the craft of building computer programs in areas they are interested in), learning, exercise etc.
As a long-time software engineer and related positions. When covid started it felt as if the world said "We worked enough we need a collective time off"
Beyond the usual rationale of I don't want to work for pennies, I think hard work as a cultural vibe has fallen out of the times. It's also what we have designed our reward systems around.
Today's reward systems are tuned not around hard work, but around being smart. The disintermediation of media makes it feel like we are all in a celebrity lottery and we just need a lucky break. We don't need to compound our skills or put in the grind.
Why would anybody want to work as a default? Work is a trade of your time for some financial security. It's a sacrifice that doesn't need to be glorified.
I do understand that a functioning society needs to good work ethic where this transactional aspect is not in the mind of the worker while he's actually doing the work, since it's a hinderance. When we're discussing work as a topic though it needs to be considered as a core truth.
Conflating salary work and personal activities (cooking, cleaning, fixing something around the house) is part of the definition of work as well.
One thing that's funny to think about is in the distant past, one of the big selling points of automation and industrialization was that we could have the same things but work much less. That didn't quite work out. Now we work more, for more things. The tragedy though is there isn't a great option for trading luxuries for time. You're either 40+ hours a week invested in a career, or you're barely scraping by on a bunch of part time gigs with no health insurance or retirement plan.
>>But at the end of the day there's no satisfaction.
If that's the case then you need to find a different job. Plenty of people are really satisfied with what they do at work. I've accepted lower salary for years because the job I did was really satisfying and I'm still glad I was part of it.
The easiest way for leaders to mitigate the problem of 'not wanting to work' is to make work a more desirable place to be. It's not even hard to do. Some simple rules for managers and leaders:
1. Treat others as you wish to be treated. Remember all the shitty bosses you had, and be the first to break the cycle.
2. Pay people slightly above market rate. Make that your #1 hiring message: "We pay above market rate" and watch the referrals flow. Turn your employees into evangelists and you won't need a platoon's-worth of recruiters.
3. Be very loud and very public about commonsense balance of work and just 'life'. No emails after 5, prioritize social-family events like PTA meetings, or dates, or "Hey I'm gonna take my team bowling Friday afternoon, can I expense the chicken tendies?"
4. You can't build culture; it's created from within. Embrace what your employees bring culture-wise and make THAT your work culture.
I disagree on #2. I think if you want to build culture you need to find people who value culture over money, and that if you don't live up to your end they can complain about the deal. If you over pay and offer better culture when the culture inevitably falters people are stuck because you over pay.
There ain't no short-handle shovels
No axes, saws or picks
I'm a-goin' to stay where you sleep all day
Where they hung the jerk that invented work
In The Big Rock Candy Mountains
"I wanna be rich, rich, rich. WHY won't anyone give me half of their waking life to help?"
Found this quotation on Wiki earlier today, attributed to Jonathan Sudholt:
"In the Jacksonian era of antebellum America, class inequality was a major concern as fiscal downturns and the economy's transition from guild-based artisanship to private business sharpened socioeconomic disparity."
I do enjoy things like this, but from a statistical standpoint, I don't think this really tells us all that much? I'm sure if you search hard enough through news archives, you can find at least one person saying something every year that validates your position.
But it does matter if only one person is saying that thing in a particular year, or thousands of people.
As an aside, I also find the idea that work is somehow virtuous to be pretty gross. That's something humanity has invented, not some natural truth. Sure, basic survival does require some amount of work, but beyond that, it's all unnecessary. Some people may want to continue to work more and more, in order to make it possible (in today's capitalist system) to do more than just survive, but we shouldn't look down on people because they've found a particular lifestyle or quality of living that works for them (as long as doing so isn't negatively impacting others).
Beyond that, I think choices like working toward financial independence early are fantastic, and I wish more people could have the opportunity to achieve that. The idea of working for even the old-school expectation of around 45 years (starting work after high school or college, and then retiring in the mid-60s) sounds awful to me... and these days people Not only are there plenty of ambitious people who want to work and build new things (to compensate for those who don't want to), but there are so many bullshit jobs that just don't need to be done, but exist mainly just to feed the self-imposed fiction that work is a virtue.
For me, the issue is there's work, but nobody wants to hire me because I:
* Have been off the job market for a while because nobody would interview me let alone consider me
* The last job I had was a month long, and it ended with my termination for performance in a setting where I arguably could not succeed.
And my run of bad luck has led to difficulty keeping work for the past two years. Its not fair, and I can't blame anyone for not wanting to do it anymore. The juice isn't worth the squeeze.
[+] [-] cypherpunks01|2 years ago|reply
> Man, what a weird week. Unless it's on their own terms, it seems nobody wants to work anymore.
It's the only one with any acknowledgement that agreeable terms may actually be needed in order to attract people to work. It doesn't take a PhD to figure this out!
Utah Phillips, one of my favorite storytellers and all-around anarchist and hobo has a line I was reminded of:
That’s when [Fry Pan Jack] told me – you know, he’d been tramping since 1927 -he said, “I told myself in ’27, if I cannot dictate the conditions of my labor, I will henceforth cease to work.” Hah! You don’t have to go to college to figure these things out, no sir! He said, “I learned when I was young that the only true life I had was the life of my brain. But if it’s true the only real life I have is the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition?” Fat chance!
From the track Bum on the Rod off the album The Past Didn't Go Anywhere with Ani DiFranco https://youtu.be/-rw4sd4AuJE
[+] [-] usrbinbash|2 years ago|reply
If the reward from working is barely enough to cover the necessities, then there is technically no difference between working as a free citizen, and being forced to work as an indentured servant, other than a vague notion of freedom, which in that case is the freedom to decide between working and living on the streets.
And people don't like being indentured servants. History should have made that clear by now.
People want perspective. In the past, a working man could support a family of five, buy a house, a car and afford vacation once or twice a year, plus save enough to retire comfortably.
Today people, despite burning themselves out in their job, struggle to pay rent in a flat shared with other working people, after loading themselves up with 100k in students debt, and no chance in hell to ever own property of their own.
If the powers that be want people to be willing to work, that work has to pay off.
If it doesn't, well...we're at the beginning of a retirement wave unprecedented in human history. 2 low-birthrate generations to follow. And our entire economic system is designed around constant growth.
I leave doing the math on that as an exercise for the reader.
[+] [-] alisonatwork|2 years ago|reply
That doesn't take away from the point that ideally no one should have to work themselves to the bone just to afford a humble lifestyle, but if middle class people in developed countries are really asking for perspective, I think it's worth bearing their relative privilege in mind.
[+] [-] SoftTalker|2 years ago|reply
I think this is a bit of a rose-colored rear-view mirror, and to the extent it's true it's a pretty brief period of time historically. Most people in most times had to work pretty hard. If you were a farmer, you worked pretty much all the daylight hours every day. Immigrants in the early part of the 20th century worked very hard, often the man running a small business or doing factory work and the woman cleaning, sewing, cooking, bookkeeping, etc. for hire. And all of that is when the men weren't off fighting a war as a conscripted soldier.
The "working man" who could support a family on his income alone was a product of the post-WWII economy. And he didn't really have to save for retirement, he had a defined-benefit pension (the kind that bankrupted many of their employers in subsequent years).
The fact that today, people can feel pretty picky about the terms of the work they do is a sign that times are pretty good, despite what people may think and say.
[+] [-] bbarn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheCaptain4815|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] welshwelsh|2 years ago|reply
House: you can still find houses with plenty of room for ~$100k. It just needs to be in an affordable area: think McKeesport, not San Francisco.
Car: for $5k you can get a 2005 Ford Focus or Honda Civic. They're reliable cars that will get you from A to B perfectly fine, easy to repair and fuel efficient.
Education: a Computer Science degree from WGU costs $18k for the average student, and can be as low as $4k if you accelerate.
Career: plenty of remote software jobs paying above $100k, which can fund a good life in most of the US.
I get it though, the average person wants a nice house in a wealthy area with good schools and low crime and two new cars and gets a degree from a school they can't afford in a field without high paying jobs, and they cannot even code. That's completely their fault, no sympathy from me.
For those people, there's an easy solution: just don't have kids. Kids are crazy expensive, and not required for a good life.
I hope what you say is true- mass retirements followed by a plummeting birthrate. We surely do not need so many people, when the overwhelming majority are useless. Robots will be here soon anyway to replace most of the workforce
[+] [-] phpisthebest|2 years ago|reply
I would say my family history is that of a "working man" that closly fits that narraive..
My grandfather was a WWII vet, after military service was a factory worker that raised 4 kids, in their own home.
Let me eliminate some of that illusory rose tint from your worldview. That home with 2 adults and 4 kids was a 950 square foot 1 bathroom box on .25 acres of land, with no garage, basement, or luxury of any type. my family still owns this property.
In comparison me a single man, lives in a 1300 sqft home.. by myself, with 2 car garage, full basement, etc. My home is considered "basic" by modern standards, some would even consider it below minimum standards for a family of 4...(I bought this home from such a family because they felt it was too small for them)
No builder would ever consider building either my home (which was built in the 60's, nor my grandparents home (built in the early 50's) as today home sizes need to be 1500-2000 square foot, each bedroom needs it own bath, kitchens need to be near professional quality, etc etc etc etc etc.
In short home prices are sky high because buyers would never consider, and probally could not legally, raise 4 kids in a 1 bath 950 sqaure foot home.
We often to not actualy compare apples to apple when we look at the conditions of the past. Sure a man could buy a home for his family in 1950... That home was about 1/2 the size of todays home, and had FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR less amenities and comforts of the modern home
[+] [-] nradov|2 years ago|reply
I do agree that demographic changes are going to cause economic problems. That is basically unavoidable now.
[+] [-] Nifty3929|2 years ago|reply
A common fallacy. There are light-years of difference. An indentured servant is bound to serve a particular master. A free worker, even earning only enough for necessities, is still free to decide how to meet those necessities, and who to work for under what terms. That's a lot of freedom. No, of course they will not have as many choices as a rich person. But they are very far from indentured servitude.
[+] [-] brazzy|2 years ago|reply
History has also made it clear that people can be made to endure living conditions they don't like or a very long time.
I submit that, historically, life for the common people was far, far more often barely tolerable or even intolerable, than agreeable.
We like to hear about peasant and slave revolts in history classes, but overall those were few and far between.
[+] [-] throwaway33381|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nine_zeros|2 years ago|reply
We are talking about the basics, not avocado toast or international vacations.
The juice just ain't worth the squeeze in America any longer.
[+] [-] paintman252|2 years ago|reply
What an incredibly privileged perspective. Do you think that actual indentured servants would agree with you on this?
[+] [-] tmnvix|2 years ago|reply
Slave/indentured servant -> live-in servant -> servant -> service worker -> self-employed service worker (contractor)
At each step along this 'evolution', the beneficiaries of the labour have freed themselves from the burden of supplying some of the resources needed by the worker (shelter, food, holidays, sick pay, health insurance, safety and other equipment, education/training, etc). In theory this has been balanced by increased monetary compensation. When that compensation isn't enough for the worker to meet these needs, what should we expect? That they become indebted?
[+] [-] WalterBright|2 years ago|reply
The government has grown enormously in my lifetime, sucking up much (most?) of the productivity increases.
[+] [-] red-iron-pine|2 years ago|reply
Maybe during the 1950s, when two (2) World Wars had blasted multiple empires to dust and essentially gutted a generation of workers aka males between the ages of 18-40.
Sure enough the US, still standing after entering the wars late and not seeing huge casualties or direct combat in-country, was positioned to lead a post-war economic boom.
Now it's back to pre-war conditions, which curiously enough, resemble the Guilded Age, and its associated strikes
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] DropInIn|2 years ago|reply
Because I can't help but note that in North America that there were plenty of people who couldn't do so but were of the "undesirable classes"....
And the reason those who could afford such were able was because they were effectively standing on the backs of those "less privileged".
Afaict, even when it's not racial such things still existed in most places at the time.
[+] [-] benreesman|2 years ago|reply
But you’re fundamentally right. It’s really easy to manipulate indices like the CPI (and oh boy do they have some interesting ideas about what people need in life), and it’s really easy to exploit summary statistics like the arithmetic mean to drag “average standard of living” metrics around with a few categories of goods (mostly consumer electronics) to push the absurd notion that anyone outside the investor class is doing as well as they were 10, 20, 30, 40, … years ago.
The United States burns 45% of its corn and smaller but still ridiculous percentages of its other big agricultural outputs as ethanol at a net disaster on carbon emissions. We let poor and homeless people interact with courts and ERs in vast numbers who need housing assistance, basic medical care, and sometimes substance abuse treatment at (people debate this exact number) somewhere in the hand-wave 10-100x range of a markup. Cops and judges and the amortized cost of lawsuits against police departments and ER doctors and ER nurses and ER equipment have a cost structure closer to a military than cheap, tax-subsidized housing and registered nurses.
The United States has absurd surpluses of arable land, exploitable energy, deep-water harbor capacity, riverine transport capacity, exploitable mineral resources, highly desirable and massively under exploited coastal real estate, you name it, it’s easier to list things that are in any way intrinsically scarce here…Coltan maybe?
The United States is in a position unique in history in which its sovereign debt is denominated in its own currency and that currency is the world’s reserve currency and that sovereign debt is the “risk-free return” r-nought embraced by modern global finance. This means that we can tailor the money supply exactly to the level of productivity that it’s used to represent, which means that being a politician or economic regulator is as easy of a job (if your goal is the public welfare) as it definitionally can be.
The United States is basically the only developed nation with no intrinsic demographic challenges (the ones that are ravaging all the other developed nations) because there is a seeming boundless supply of (statistically) young, law-abiding, productive people who still have kids wanting to immigrate here across a porous land border.
Scarcity or want of really any kind is a very, very, very expensive “luxury” (it’s not quite a Veblen good but it’s certainly conspicuous consumption) that we as a society seem prepared to spend whatever it takes to get.
Once you strip the paint jobs off of either Foucault-style postmodernism or Randian objectivism (a challenge that Noam Chomsky describes as a real feat of linguistic manipulation) you’re left with effectively the same actionable value system of there being 2 kinds of people in this world: for the lefty kleptocrats the individual is robbed of agency and identity because they are the product of constructed forces external to them (I mean, except for us of course), for the righty kleptocrats the individual is robbed of agency and identity because they aren’t smart or motivated enough to invent Reardon Metal and therefore insignificant (I mean, except for us, of course).
The action item that falls out is the same in both cases: drive capture to keep the “right people” running things.
The result is the same in both cases: if you do a halfway honest plot of productivity and genuine standard of living against the decades, you get divergent lines that seem to be training for an Olympic gymnastics qualification.
The most dangerous man in the world isn’t a Navy SEAL or a Zeta, the most dangerous man in the world is a man with nothing to lose, which is why we’re up to 4 mass shootings a day (by Mother Jones’s definition but pick one), which is per-capita more than Syria.
This little brochure is a bit hand-wavy on the math and takes a bit of poetic license, it’s not meant to be the book that someone needs to write about this. So it’ll be a trivial exercise to pick it apart in that god-awful “>”-prefixed bad-faith style, but it’s not going to be a fundamental intellectual or epistemological or ethical error that’s going to motivate people to do so, it’s that this is not a comfortable thing to see in the mirror.
[+] [-] tap-snap-or-nap|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m0rissette|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] momirlan|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qaq|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] cool_dude85|2 years ago|reply
Individual saving for retirement was cooked up in the 80s. You used to get your pension and be set.
[+] [-] winternett|2 years ago|reply
I think that social media really tipped the balance of fairness in the working world... With social media, suddenly Trust fund Babies could fake success, and promote schemes that helped them to profit. The Social Media model was set up to raise Trust Funders and Popular individuals far above everyone else, and it killed hopes of upward mobility for people who didn't fall into any fame or wealth category unless they became famous for negative reasons or for ridicule.
It's not that no one wants to work anymore, it's that people are tired of weak work schemes, and being used and then thrown away in order to elevate others. It's not until real opportunity for growth, entrepreneurship, and excellence returns that things will begin to get back to normal.
Talking about is as "Nobody wants to work anymore" is an injustice... Millions of people are working very hard every day on content creation that rivals TV programming and others are regularly posting their best and fully composed and edited work on Internet sites daily, most without any pay in HOPES of being discovered for their work, as proof of that.
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|2 years ago|reply
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
400BC
[+] [-] skrebbel|2 years ago|reply
This is a success of social democracy and it is a success of technology. We can afford to have people work less hard and still be richer than we ever were. It’s the success story of western progress and the rest of the world is going through the same steps as we speak. That a few old-fashioned managers are surprised they can’t get people at the same bad terms as before is just a symptom of a very positive development.
[+] [-] glimshe|2 years ago|reply
If people had, for the sake of a thought experiment, a guaranteed 20K/month income and free healthcare no matter what they do with their life, it's very unlikely they will choose to work on regular jobs. They will instead generally pursue arts/crafts (including the craft of building computer programs in areas they are interested in), learning, exercise etc.
[+] [-] mike10921|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rightbyte|2 years ago|reply
I did not understand how much my 45min x 2 commute was draining my stamina before I stopped commuting, e.g.
[+] [-] swayvil|2 years ago|reply
For many of us, covid is the first taste of freedom we ever got. It was eye-opening and delivered some serious perspective.
This "not working" could be called a sane response based on good information.
[+] [-] justin_oaks|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mercurialsolo|2 years ago|reply
Today's reward systems are tuned not around hard work, but around being smart. The disintermediation of media makes it feel like we are all in a celebrity lottery and we just need a lucky break. We don't need to compound our skills or put in the grind.
[+] [-] mihaic|2 years ago|reply
I do understand that a functioning society needs to good work ethic where this transactional aspect is not in the mind of the worker while he's actually doing the work, since it's a hinderance. When we're discussing work as a topic though it needs to be considered as a core truth.
Conflating salary work and personal activities (cooking, cleaning, fixing something around the house) is part of the definition of work as well.
[+] [-] overgard|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swayvil|2 years ago|reply
So you invest your remaining time in entertainments, drugs and shopping. Frantically groping for a scrap of joy.
My friends in carpentry call it "feeding the monkey". The monkey must be fed, one way or another.
[+] [-] gambiting|2 years ago|reply
If that's the case then you need to find a different job. Plenty of people are really satisfied with what they do at work. I've accepted lower salary for years because the job I did was really satisfying and I'm still glad I was part of it.
[+] [-] constantly|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pelagic_sky|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 23B1|2 years ago|reply
1. Treat others as you wish to be treated. Remember all the shitty bosses you had, and be the first to break the cycle.
2. Pay people slightly above market rate. Make that your #1 hiring message: "We pay above market rate" and watch the referrals flow. Turn your employees into evangelists and you won't need a platoon's-worth of recruiters.
3. Be very loud and very public about commonsense balance of work and just 'life'. No emails after 5, prioritize social-family events like PTA meetings, or dates, or "Hey I'm gonna take my team bowling Friday afternoon, can I expense the chicken tendies?"
4. You can't build culture; it's created from within. Embrace what your employees bring culture-wise and make THAT your work culture.
[+] [-] etothepii|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darkerside|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quelsolaar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldcode|2 years ago|reply
There ain't no short-handle shovels No axes, saws or picks I'm a-goin' to stay where you sleep all day Where they hung the jerk that invented work In The Big Rock Candy Mountains
[+] [-] BirAdam|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|2 years ago|reply
Found this quotation on Wiki earlier today, attributed to Jonathan Sudholt:
"In the Jacksonian era of antebellum America, class inequality was a major concern as fiscal downturns and the economy's transition from guild-based artisanship to private business sharpened socioeconomic disparity."
[+] [-] iambateman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelnos|2 years ago|reply
But it does matter if only one person is saying that thing in a particular year, or thousands of people.
As an aside, I also find the idea that work is somehow virtuous to be pretty gross. That's something humanity has invented, not some natural truth. Sure, basic survival does require some amount of work, but beyond that, it's all unnecessary. Some people may want to continue to work more and more, in order to make it possible (in today's capitalist system) to do more than just survive, but we shouldn't look down on people because they've found a particular lifestyle or quality of living that works for them (as long as doing so isn't negatively impacting others).
Beyond that, I think choices like working toward financial independence early are fantastic, and I wish more people could have the opportunity to achieve that. The idea of working for even the old-school expectation of around 45 years (starting work after high school or college, and then retiring in the mid-60s) sounds awful to me... and these days people Not only are there plenty of ambitious people who want to work and build new things (to compensate for those who don't want to), but there are so many bullshit jobs that just don't need to be done, but exist mainly just to feed the self-imposed fiction that work is a virtue.
[+] [-] thrillgore|2 years ago|reply
* Have been off the job market for a while because nobody would interview me let alone consider me
* The last job I had was a month long, and it ended with my termination for performance in a setting where I arguably could not succeed.
And my run of bad luck has led to difficulty keeping work for the past two years. Its not fair, and I can't blame anyone for not wanting to do it anymore. The juice isn't worth the squeeze.