Yes, lots of poor people are getting screwed. Some jobs don’t pay well despite the higher moral standing of directly assisting others. The environment looks pretty bad. But you can’t just say “rich people bad. New economy plz”.
This essay is basically r/im14andthisisdeep
It is a solution? No. I don't think it is trying to be though. It's just trying to be a reminder that letting everything go back to the way it was is the easiest route forward and the quickly route to getting back on the shitty path the country has been on for the past 20 years.
The first step of any solution is convincing people there is a problem. Not just the obvious “things are bad,” but an understanding that these issues are systemic in a way that challenges American ideology. These articles frustrate HN because they aren’t pitching some technocratic reformism, but instead are seeding ideas about the structure of our society that need to be absorbed before we can hope to change it.
I’m honestly surprised to see this pop up at all here, HN isn’t a crowd that is demographically primed to challenge the assumptions of capitalisms.
No, I didn't, but I'm frankly growing tired of cookie-cutter article like this one that just enumerate problems that have existed since the literal dawn of civilization.
The entire "economy bad" brigade is, as parent comment puts it, "r/im14andthisisdeep". They see problems everyone else sees, but they don't have any actual insight, just empty rethoric.
Coming from a publication like theanarchistlibrary.org, purporting a new system is implicit. And the following quote: "to create an “economy” that lets us actually take care of the people who are taking care of us. " - with economy in quotes removes ambiguity on that question.
His solutions though are crap, and he has profited greatly off the misfortune of the poor.
Our current approach to curing cancer sucks and everyone should be reminded how many people die needlessly each year.
Do you disagree? Of course not. Did I contribute anything worthwhile? Not really.
Well yeah.
Meanwhile 20 years after 9/11 we're still taking off our shoes to get on airplanes.
Wait, are you saying she was actually threatened with being fired if she didn't come in sick or that she just thought that she might be? If the latter, no federal mandate would change that - I get sick days, but I feel weird taking them, like I'm getting a black mark on my employment record that will come back to haunt me later. No law can change that, that's just how our society (currently) is.
Just stop doing our dream-work.. and then? What do I do to provide for my family? Should we all get a patch of land and grow food for ourselves? This idea does not seem realistic or scalable.
But maybe I am just misunderstanding the essay or my thoughts are just not deep enough.
A lot of those types would loooove to see lots of people to go back to subsistence.
That is a lot of people but not them, they are way too smart for that and they’ll reluctangly agree to take the job of guiding lights for all those that went back to subsistence.
The current system created artificial scarcity which kept many people poor and a few people rich. We didn't actually need to consume until the planet was ruined, but we did. Now we are all screwed because real scarcity is returning and we still don't know how to share.
The current system has been responsible for creating actual abundance that has vastly improved the living conditions of the vast majority of people. Scarcity is the default state, not artificial.
Yes, there are edge cases like intellectual property but "no economy please" is the kind of thing someone who is completely ignorant to the nature of reality would say.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28908960
His passing also discussed at the time:
And the bullshit jobs book is a reiteration of the earlier essay. While the essay is concise and straight to the point, the book has dubious assumptions and generalisations that are there for attention-grabbing.
David Graeber would have been the greatest mind of our era if he adopted the writing style of @pg: straight to the point essays that form a cult following.
As much anti-estabilshment as he was, he was trying too much to fit his brilliant mind into XX century academia writing standards.
Do you have a link to the article about bullshit jobs?
he was an anthropologist
Which one might I ask?
Bullshit jobs is pretty big, but debt: the first 5000 years is quite good.
yeah, sure, just completely ignore the $2T cryptocurrency industry that’s objectively a response to govt’s handling of 2008 (read Satoshi’s genesis block)?
i’m not really sure what the author’s trying to push for though: that we all don’t go back to working for rich people? well sure, but the valuable part is showing us how to do that…
But otherwise I generally agree. The authors paragraph seems to remember occupy Wall Street but forget that most people don’t care at all about finance if/when things return to normal.
When people say something is a $x industry, I normally think revenue per year.
How big is the industry as measured by transaction/service fees?
Our governments seem to move from crisis to crisis, though the cart/horse roles are ambiguous here.
But apart from that angriness - which I can find some simpaty for - the article does not tell us anything.
Nothing about the complicate reasons our society is in this state. Nothing about some solutions to make it better.
There is a pre-modern tendency toward muscular executive branches that bears re-thinking, though.
This is my observation. People are so weirded out when I tell them all the stuff I want to do. Most people just laze if left to their own devices and provided food. People have this image of hunter gatherer tribes doing interesting things in their free time, but the data show that, unless they're hunting, gathering, cooking, or doing other biological imperatives, most of their time is spent lazing.
That's fine, but if your argument about not working is that humans are going to engage in 'dream work'... well I think that's just silly.
Ultimately, from what I've seen, people with this mentality, often end up becoming quite well off. Those who want to engage in 'dream work' often have the self-motivating spirit that almost inevitably leads to material success.
"And if we simply stopped, it might be possible to make ourselves a much more reasonable set of promises: for instance, to create an “economy” that lets us actually take care of the people who are taking care of us."
There is a danger in focusing all our attention on utility. I am not disagreeing that humans can be lazy but don't think we should put the useful above the good, which is what I see this argument doing. Not that I know what the good is but I favor questioning or probing possibilities more than doing something "useful"
a lot of people who have worked terrible jobs during the pandemic didn't have an opportunity to retrain and rethink about things, they were still working, the whole things are gonna change crowd were those who had the privilege to wait things out from the safety of their computers, they could order doordash or amazon groceries and drink their home made espresso while shopping for a cute new mask to show everyone how much they cared about being safe. the people who made the mask, worked in the food supply chain, delivered your groceries and doordash food kept their 60-70 hour a week job of hopelessness, had zero opportunity to shift away from that. while people were talking about how things are different now, many americans were dealing with the same, except they were now in an extremely dangerous situation (according to the experts) but, in many cases did not receive anything other than "thanks", and maybe a dollar or two more in tips, if they didn't forget anything.
what the pandemic has taught me is that we are not some civilized, future minded society, we are a bunch of naked apes with pitchforks who like to hoard for profit and fight over which candidate sweet talks better but offers zero solutions other than creating race/freedom/whatever division you can think of... culture war. do we have a chance to make things better? yes, when we stop looking at the world through a political lens, and start looking at it from a humanity lens.
That some people can not save up for various reasons does not imply the people who did save for hard times are to blame.
If it angers you, don't work for door dash. Odds are, the people who worked for door dash were actually happy they had a job during the pandemic.
He lost me here. Guy is just a communist hoping for another Bolshevik Revolution.
Maybe it is true of the uber rich, but the majority of millionaires are just normal people who saved, started a business, and just invested.
If I was to judge someone character strictly off their economic status, you’re likely to find on average that the average rich man is a more moral productive member of society than the average poor one.
If he was talking about the bureaucrats way of getting rich by accepting bribes and funneling taxes to their pockets he might have had me. As it is his ideas would just make it worse.
> If I was to judge someone character strictly off their economic status, you’re likely to find on average that the average rich man is a more moral productive member of society than the average poor one.
You didn't give an argument as to why you would believe that. Graeber presumably believes the opposite because the poor suffer needing while the rich refrain from helping despite being able to. It can be considered allowing harm[1], introductory trolley problem stuff. Of course I can't speak for him but based on what he's written elsewhere I think he would agree that it's not possible to be rich and moral while people go starving because he believes people have an obligation to help those in need when they can (i.e. when it is not too harmful to themselves.) If you don't agree with that, then it's likely you differ in the assumptions you have rather than the logic here.
In every argument, there seems to be only two groups of people. The "slaves" working their 9-5 jobs making minimum wage and barely getting by, and the uber-rich like Bezos, Gates, etc.
What they never say is there are tons of millionaires, they didn't have spectacular jobs, they drive regular cars and live in regular houses. They just saved for years and years and now they have a nest egg that's worth 7 figures.
I get why no one talks about them, when you talk about the "millionaires and billionaires", you immediately think of a Bezos type, vacationing on their yacht. You don't think about the husband and wife that both drive Camry's and live in a nice suburban home with a net worth of close to $5M because they invested and saved their whole life.
That should be fifty-nine.
Another example is that monopolies require legislation or they have the effect of “seizing up” the dynamics of a functioning marketplace and turning toxic.
Semiconductor patents being made public and telecom copper being made open to use by other companies are both pretty well understood examples of legislation that helped bring about the computer era we live in now. Not free market in a pure ideological sense, but a kind of curated open market dynamic.
Markets are created by governments and don’t just spring from anywhere whole cloth. Markets are useful for many many things but need to be gardened, in effect.
In our current world labor “markets” are really not that at all— if a participant does not have the ability to withdraw their offer of labor then price signaling doesn’t work.
I’ve been reading the book Freedom From the Market, it’s well-researched and a literature review of sorts. Would recommend.
ok, then what of the cryptocurrency drug markets? those were created by govt?
no. there’s so many instances of unorganized humans doing trade. markets are just a more organized form of trade, and goverment is but one way to achieve that organization.
We dont want either to be exploitative or abusive, but the ideology that the “free market” is our savior and that “government bad” is just played out un-nuanced propaganda at this point
Who is forcing you to work 40h? I personally don't do that. You are free to negotiate your own contracts.
When you make it work. They aren't free by magic; if the freedom isn't enforced and maintained, they rapidly become unfree, and that's what appears to be happening (or has already happened).
Anarchism can be capitalist or communism. Anarcho-communism for example.
In a proper free market, the telephone poles would have 50 wires, most of which wouldn't be functioning. Afterall, how would anyone provide you internet? Without government regulation any startup has to put their own wires up. This leads to rats nests of wires. Tons of expensive wires being put up for customers you used to have. Free market obviously doesn't work, you must come in and fix that.
Communism on the otherhand is misuse of people. Everyone must be employed full time in communism. In the USSR, there would be multiple cashiers you would have to go through. Just to ensure people have something to do. You also have to have government slaves. USSR had the gulags. China has the uyghurs. Vietnam has their slaves in forced labour centers.
We talk about productivity gains and why we still work 40 hour weeks and my answer is always this - you’re free to trade those productivity gains for free time. Go and find a plot of land 1890 homesteaders would normally claim, grow some food, build a sod house and eschew modern society in all its flavors - technology, healthcare, engineering, etc. i don’t mean to sound like a dick, but that’s why we still work 40+ hour work weeks despite the efficiency gains - because a modern lifestyle costs a hell of a lot more than basic subsistence.
People do this! Ted Kazinsky did it. It is possible. But of course everyone wants their mRNA vaccine technology and 10 hours weeks as well.
While some of the potential solutions I've read on this seem incredibly idealistic, I also believe there is probably a path forward where working time could be reduced significantly without the negative effects on technological, scientific or economic advancements that are presumed
The idea is that many jobs do not contribute to "technology,healthcare,engineering, etc.", rather, salaries and work assignments are regulated to simply force people to spend most of their lives doing meaningless activities as a form of social control.
Even Ted Kaczynski talked about "surrogate activities".
This is a human universal. Even uncontacted hunter gatherer tribes spend most of their days doing absolutely nothing useful whatsoever. They sit around and talk shit with their friends. This is not social control. Humans doing nothing useful for most of the day is the norm.
