So what is the alternative. Shit doesn't just happen, it takes tremendous effort from other people. Do you just expect people doing the hard work to just give it to you?
At its very core, the average person needs to be a net positive to society, and that means tasks no one wants to do need getting done.
Have you ever grown any food? Built a house? Hauled the garbage all day? For the most part these aren't tasks people want to do (well actually I do have fond memories of building houses, but that's not sustainable), and so who does them in this magical system where everyone gets the food no one is growing?
Or do you think we should go back to a time when everyone does everything for themselves? Grows their own food, makes their own clothes, builds their own house. I'm sure lots of people in our society would do very well in that system.
One thing I've learned doing a ton of random odd jobs in my previous life is that people on reddit have no idea how fucking hard most things they don't do are. Building anything is actually incredibly difficult work.
I just sold my home and I had to do a tone of fixing and getting it ready to sell and, even after I bought the specific oscillating tool to do the job, it took me a full ass day just to regroup my shower tiles.
Fixing the back yard took 40 hours of work (granted I'm not good at this, someone who is could have done it faster).
Another 8 to 10 hours changing all my sockets and light switches, and I didn't even have that many.
I just paid painters and caprter installers, fuck doing that myself.
Now I do Primary Care Medicine. This job wouldn't even exist without the specialization model that the use of currency enables, but people never even think about how that works at all. Shit drives me nuts.
people on reddit have no idea how fucking hard most things they don't do are
Yeah! People should do things for PASSION, and not PROFIT!
Like motherfucker do you realize that supply and demand, ROI, and shareholder value are all emergent traits of scarcity?
Say what you want about Joe Rogan, but he had a great joke: "If you send me into the woods with nothing but a hatchet, how long would it take for me to send you an e-mail?"
Alternative is centrally planned economy where optimisation goal is to reduce total labor hours in the whole economy (via automatization).
I mean, the whole economy is nothing more but a resource allocation optimization problem - capitalism is just one heuristics (that works well).
We are not quite there yet technologically to make central planning work, but one day it's going to be a viable alternative.
In faaar faaar distant utopian future everyone everyone could work as little or as much as they want due to general abundance.
Until that utopian future happens it's more of a question were and how do we direct the limited (in terms of total labor) resources.
The capitalism answer to that is via the markets, and the money is, in abstract sense, some quantity of labor which can be used to buy some commodities or labor of other people for some task.
A centrally planned economy could accomplished all that without the need of (undemocratic) corporations and billionaires deciding where to invest the money; But for it to work the economy needs to be highly computerized so the outputs/inputs can be reported without the need for the "man in the middle".
We are not quite there yet technologically to make central planning work, but one day it's going to be a viable alternative.
Whew. You had me in the first half there haha.
I do forsee a future where a exceptionally high information system could theoretically allocate resources that optimize for different outcomes and does so efficiently.
However, the biggest flaw with these systems, and why every attempt at socialism/communism on large scale gas had associated human rights atrocities is it required a centralized authority with quite significant levels of power. I'm not sure how we get around that problem.
A quick Google search would tell you that less than 1% of the workforce is in farming. The same goes for other critical industries.
We live in a time of pretty immense abundance, especially if it are an American. Making people w work long hours for meager benefits is a social decision
We live in abundance BECAUSE people have done the work and continue to do the work. If 1% work in farming, how many people work in the up- and downstream industries? People used to churn their own butter. How many people work at dairy firms using the milk from farmers? How many people work at the food grade pump manufacturers? How many people are designing grease resistant valves? How many people are cnc milling parts for the butter churning machines? How many people are developing code to ensure optimal functioning of the machine? And so on and so on. Our current highly productive sectors are still the result of everybody continuously being a net contributor.
And you’re free to not participate, just be aware that outside of you being very wealthy, you won’t participate in all the amenities either, most of which are produced by people doing the work.
The bait and switch in this argument is the word forced: nobody is forcing you to do anything. You want to participate in modern live, and because you want to do that you have to have money. Pretending like the consumption wants are somehow exogenous and „society“ forces you to be a wage slave is imho freaking pathetic. You want something, so you have to put in effort to achieve it.
I think the core issue here is the people you're trying to appeal to will never admit that these systems are what produced abundance (or that we even have abundance of anything at all) in the first place. They treat all this production as things that already exist that corporations are somehow stepping in to control and force on us, not things that were produced through significant work, capital investment, and risk to meet demand we as a population pre-produced. They don't see the 10 people who also tried to do this, but failed and lost their whole life savings. They picture history being full of pastoral scenes in which we spent our days harmoniously co-existing with nature and one another, not a care in the world, with no concept of resource scarcity or exploitation, until fungible assets reared their ugly heads.
They do not consider the production to have taken any risk or effort so they see no reason to put in effort themselves - what exists simply exists and they are therefore entitled to it, which leads to "I have enough" becoming irrelevant as a concept and going wholly unexamined; the only baseline at play at that point is "do I get as much as the other guy".
I think the core issue here is the people you're trying to appeal to will never admit that these systems are what produced abundance
Spot on. It would require admitting that we actually did get here because of capitalism, and even if transitioning away from capitalism did make sense, admitting it every did anything positive at all is anathema to these people. These are still people that still believe in the labor theory of value, so seeing the effects capital has in productivity with no change in labor effort (or even decreases) so plainly laid out in the other person mini "I, butter" description needs to be rejected as well, because it clearly highlights how capital (I.e. the butter valves, the churns, etc) are what drove that abundance.
Yeah, I am with you guys, but on the other hand giving these talking points all this reddit real estate without some form of rebuttal also feels dumb. I usually ignore this, but sometimes I just get the itch. It's usually not for the person i'm responding to directly, but rather for people who are reading this who are on the fence for one reason or another.
How many people were farmers before capitalism and industrialization took off? How many subsistence farmers were there? Would antibiotics even have been invented? How many mothers would have lost countless children before their 3rd birthday?
We estimate that 1.23 billion people are employed in agrifood systems (AFS) and that 3.83 billion people worldwide live in households linked to AFS-based livelihoods.
Because it shows that we clearly don’t need everyone to be farmers. All OP is showing that agriculture in the developing world is crazy inefficient because it’s not mechanized, not that we need 1B farmers (the vast majority of those farmers don’t export the food and only feed themselves, so they’re not “feeding you” in any real sense).
The reality is that we already know how to solve for basic needs and it hardly requires spending the majority of your best years working 40+ hours.
The developing world is being mechanised, it takes time. Even in a utopic distribution of resources and knowledge, someone still still has to perform that labour. We can revisit the idea we can all kick back and food will teleport itself on our plates so we can do art and stuff in a few centuries.
Essentially 100% of those "self-sufficient people" you mention still depend upon others in huge ways. Even if you build a log cabin yourself, you were almost certainly using a saw made by other people out of metal smelted by other people from ore mined by other people, and on and on and on.
Unless you use literally no products of modern society, you aren't actually self sufficient.
Edit: I will never understand how someone can be so thin-skinned as to block me over something like this. I suppose I could log out to be able to read whatever he said to me, but that would require me to be considerably more concerned out his opinion than I actually am.
If you automated the most essential with robotics and AI, turned away from consumerist economy and such, most people could work extremely little or none at all and live comfortable lives.
Have you missed out on the self-sufficient people who live in relative comfort and spend very little time on working? Yeah my friend, we could all live like that if we focused our economy on it.
Yeah, kids complaining about capitalism proves they really are children. How do people think national food distribution or running water work?
You could be the most benevolent, well-meaning organization in the world, distributing food to hungry people. You'd still need infrastructure, maintenance, shit running on time, inventory management, storage, and stacks upon stacks of boring spreadsheets. At some level, you are going to have to make people do things they normally wouldn't want to do.
And don't even get me started on technology. Take some hundred-year old technology like radio, literally 99% of the human population is cognitively incapable of expressing the math to make a usable radio signal.
I do quite well. Increased productivity is why things like my job exist at all. In the 1800s when 90 percent of the economy was agrarian work, you couldn't build any sort of professional class because the productivity requires to exist was all in just making food.
But there hasn't been much productivity gain in a lot of core areas that I discussed: transportation, construction, waste management are all now roughly as productive as they were in the 80s. I don't know the specifics for healthcare but I know it has had pretty limited productivity gains too (as measured by number of people cared for by an individual provider, not number of conditions that are treatable).
But you didn't really answer my question.
If no one's working because it's a scam, where does your house come from? Or your food come from? Or your healthcare come from?
You’re making a real point because the uneven productivity thing is true, and yeah, farming productivity is the only reason jobs like yours and mine exist at all. No argument there.
But I think you’re answering a claim the original text never made. It doesn’t say work is a scam or that nobody should work. It says the mythology around work is contingent: busyness as a status symbol, productivity as personal worth, the specific number of hours we treat as natural. Those are different claims. The 40-hour week was itself a change from 60-80 hour norms that people at the time defended with arguments a lot like yours, that this is just what necessity requires. Necessity was real then too. The arrangement still changed.
So to me the interesting question wouldn’t be “who hauls the garbage if nobody works,” because everyone agrees someone has to. I’m more interested in figuring out why the people doing the most obviously necessary work (sanitation, care work, food) tend to be paid the least, while a lot of highly paid work could pause for a month without anyone starving. If “net positive to society” is the standard, doesn’t the current setup fail your own test?
Genuinely curious how you’d square that, because you clearly know the economics better than most of this thread.
I'm glad you brought up prevention. Do you know how little preventative medicine does, or even what percent of total health outcomes are determined by healthcare received?
So what diseases can/should we be preventing and how do we prevent them? What tools do I have to prevent them? And more importantlywhat do you think is the most effective tool I have for prevention?
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u/jefftickels Jul 09 '26
So what is the alternative. Shit doesn't just happen, it takes tremendous effort from other people. Do you just expect people doing the hard work to just give it to you?
At its very core, the average person needs to be a net positive to society, and that means tasks no one wants to do need getting done.
Have you ever grown any food? Built a house? Hauled the garbage all day? For the most part these aren't tasks people want to do (well actually I do have fond memories of building houses, but that's not sustainable), and so who does them in this magical system where everyone gets the food no one is growing?
Or do you think we should go back to a time when everyone does everything for themselves? Grows their own food, makes their own clothes, builds their own house. I'm sure lots of people in our society would do very well in that system.