I'm puzzled by the idea that people, when left to their own devices, won't improve their education and health, or that they would keep spawning children until some authority figure told them to stop.
It is also worth noting that our current concept of work makes all those things (health, education, and childcare) a lot harder to do, and extremely difficult to do well. People do not have time in their week to cook good meals, do exercise, or spend as much time with their children as they would like to.
Labour doesn't just magically transform into food and clothes. These things also require inputs from solar energy, from the activity of plants, and most usually from fossil fuels. Not to mention the knowledge required to do these things well, which is available for free (mostly) but earned at great cost over centuries by other people.
The arrogance is not claiming that people have the right to live on the Earth without working 50 hours a week; the arrogance is in thinking that just because you are the end producer of something, you don't owe anyone or anything else for being able to produce that thing.
I'm slightly concern that you have just admitted that, for you personally, being forced into paid employment is the only thing that stops you living a life of inactivity and producing children you support. You are like a Christian claiming that fear of God is all that keeps people moral - you are essentially revealing you have no internal ethics whatsoever.
...and the above poster demonstrates why western society is absolutely doomed.
I didn't mention socialism. I certainly didn't advocate the bringing back the USSR. I said nothing about regulating the markets (not a bad idea at all, but one not actually connected to my suggestion.) Yet you invoke some inane, pop-economic truthiness and claim you can predict exactly how people will act, and that this makes any suggestion counter the the current economic order equivalent to Soviet socialism.
You also suggest that anybody who isn't working is a layabout. To support this stupid statement, you would have to conclude that the recession currently going on has coincided with a great increase in laziness over a very short period of time...
You incorrectly assume that providing everyone with a decent standard of living automatically, means that nobody will be paid for doing anything.
Plumbers are always going to get paid. You certainly do need to compensate people for doing jobs that might be considered unpleasant - but that isn't a huge portion of our economies. When was the last time you heard the UK chancellor talk about sanitation?
My personal experience of the British economy is of shuffling papers around offices. There is a lot of busywork that bizarrely pays as much as the far more essential work that plumbers do prevent us from being knee-deep in our out feces.
Oh, and I don't know about you, but I already grow food, for free, in addition to myself and wife having jobs. We still have to buy some items (turns out carrots are easier to raise than cattle) but certainly your absolute statement that people won't grow food without a conventional, monetary incentive is disproved by my counterexample.
The question is, if the creative industry is largely rent-seeking instead of producing, where is the money coming from to pay them? Its not like western economies manufacture enough to feed the 'knowledge economy' beast on their output alone.
The answer, I think, is resources. The dirty little secret of modern economies is that the largest determinant of our output is our input of resources. The notion that we shape our own fate through our ingenuity is largely a fable, told to justify a blatantly unfair economic order.
So, the problem highlighted is that 'creative' people - and lets for the moment give them the benefit of the doubt on the level of their creativity - cannot find paid employment that allows them to produce new the new ideas and culture that keeps a society from stagnating.
My question is, why does everyone have to work?
We are trapped by absurd, outdated Protestant work ethics. Failure to bust your gut 50 hours a week is a sign of moral weakness, according to our leaders (most of whom have only ever worked through choice, not necessity) and our newspapers - sometimes even our teachers and parents.
This ethic is reflected in a society that is structured in a way that survival is next to impossible without work. Don't fool yourselves - even social safety nets here in Europe are specifically designed to make lack of full time employment unsustainable over the long term. What we need is to provide people with a decent living regardless of what they do, and make anything earned through work a bonus.
Maybe its time to stop blindly forcing the square pegs of our society (and everyone else) into the round hole of clock punching, just to serve some ancient disgust at the supposed 'fecklessness' of those who don't like the 8-6 run (I think its safe to say 9-5 is mostly a fantasy in the west now)
Its a valid question of how to pay for this; but not actually a difficult one. The simplest is to go after the rent-seekers; money earned by not doing anything can't possibly be created due to an incentive for the person earning it to do anything, so lets have it. Start with the Earth's natural resources - I have always considered the notion of a creature with a maximum lifespan barely over 100 years claiming that part of a 4 billion year old planet is his and his only to exploit.
Might it not work? Sure. But considering the current economic order is grinding to a halt, it is certainly worth a shot.
Carl Sagan explained this eloquently in his book Demon Haunted World - by using the example of what policies Queen Victoria's British Empire would have had to do in order to deliberately develop television.
Its not a state, its a petition. You can try and create your pathetic little Galt's Gulch if you want, but after you've realised that you aren't quite the innovators you've convinced yourselves you are, and that you rely heavily on public goods, you will come crawling back.
People are starving, primarily, because they can't afford food (The journal Nature did a good, sourced, infographic on this a few months back.) The idea that its Big Bad Government stopping the magic invisible hand supplying us with a utopia is not supported by the fact that the massive global deregulation of the last few decades has failed to make a significant dent on hunger. Furthermore, consider that the last time Russia got anywhere close to famine was not under the nasty old commies, but immediately after their fall during the libertarian program of 'shock therapy' - in an episode of disastrous free-market policy that was described by one of Russia's own lawmakers as 'Economic genocide'
I actually think Zuckerberg, Jobs, and Edison are examples of why the "Great Man" myth is bullshit, rather than counterexamples. Zuckerberg built a single application, that relied on billions of dollars worth of labour being invested in free software, and billions of dollars of R&D being done to develop the Internet in the first place. Jobs just gave a stylistic flair to some fairly ordinary hardware (which, again, drew heavily on expensive research someone else paid for). Edison basically stole a bunch of shit, and tried to FUD the competition out of the market by murdering an elephant.
The idea that innovation would not have proceeded without these individuals is unfounded. The 'Great Man' idea has never been true, the truth has always been 'Standing on the Shoulders of Giants'
Oh, yes, I nearly forgot. Fucking Marxist Idiot! Go back to North Korea!!!!11
If they are so obvious, the evidence should abound, and you would be able to cough some up. You can't, so I'm calling bullshit on your paranoid ignorance. I'm also going to take a wild guess, and say that you've never worked in a school?
In other words, Mr. Passive Aggressive, you agree with him, but know you don't have a leg to stand on factually, so aren't actually going to get into the argument. LMAO
My entire life (born 1981) has been a history of market deregulation, so don't come at me with all that 'government gets in the way' horseshit. Deregulation has not protected pre-appointed 'winners', otherwise the dot com bubble would never have happened. Government has been rapidly getting out of the way for 3 decades plus, and the result has been a market running out of control with greed and bad information (which, according to the prophets of neoliberalism, shouldn't happen)
Libertarians have their ideal, utopian state - its called Somalia. Kindly go live there.
He just accused the educational establishment (and the supposed 'liberal' forces behind it) for stifling human innovation. Its an extraordinary claim, not only lacking extraordinary evidence but lacking any evidence at all. Why shouldn't I talk to such a cretin like he is a child? There is no onus on me to disprove something he hasn't proved in the first place!
Idiot. You do understand what the word 'deregulation' means don't you? Reagan and Thatcher got rid of government regulation of the economy, for ideological reasons.
Do you have any evidence, outside the 'truthiness' of your deranged, tea party inspired brain farts, that changes to the education system (supposedly instituted by 'liberals') such as you describe a) ever took place and b) if they did had an effect.
I expect you to cite peer-reviewed work, thankyou.
Bollocks and more bollocks. You do not get in the top 1% by inventing something. You get in the top 1% by inventing absurd financial ponzi schemes with other peoples money. Yes, there are exceptions. Fantastically rare exceptions, that do not disprove the rule
The period that Stephenson identifies with a decline in the ability to get 'big' things done coincidence near perfectly with the rise of neoliberalism in the west. The more markets are deregulated, the less ability we have to actually get things done, because corporations will break up anything large scale for profit - with the full cooperation of sleazy, dishonest politicians who are in their pockets.
But a whole bunch of us are ingrained with a kind of market fundamentalism, that the 'invisible hand' will make things right if you just deregulate some more, that you simply cannot see any way to stave off this decline.
It isn't just technology. This deregulated, global market lets 25,000 people starve to death each year, despite global agriculture producing enough food for each person get 3000 calories per day.
Now cue the stream of/.ers defending their dead ideology because they can't face up to the fact that something they support, both with their ideas and their everyday activities, is so corrosive and destructive to our prospects for survival, happiness, and development.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm puzzled by the idea that people, when left to their own devices, won't improve their education and health, or that they would keep spawning children until some authority figure told them to stop.
It is also worth noting that our current concept of work makes all those things (health, education, and childcare) a lot harder to do, and extremely difficult to do well. People do not have time in their week to cook good meals, do exercise, or spend as much time with their children as they would like to.
You have made a glaring error in your argument.
Labour doesn't just magically transform into food and clothes. These things also require inputs from solar energy, from the activity of plants, and most usually from fossil fuels. Not to mention the knowledge required to do these things well, which is available for free (mostly) but earned at great cost over centuries by other people.
The arrogance is not claiming that people have the right to live on the Earth without working 50 hours a week; the arrogance is in thinking that just because you are the end producer of something, you don't owe anyone or anything else for being able to produce that thing.
I'm slightly concern that you have just admitted that, for you personally, being forced into paid employment is the only thing that stops you living a life of inactivity and producing children you support. You are like a Christian claiming that fear of God is all that keeps people moral - you are essentially revealing you have no internal ethics whatsoever.
Speak for yourself!
...and the above poster demonstrates why western society is absolutely doomed.
I didn't mention socialism. I certainly didn't advocate the bringing back the USSR. I said nothing about regulating the markets (not a bad idea at all, but one not actually connected to my suggestion.) Yet you invoke some inane, pop-economic truthiness and claim you can predict exactly how people will act, and that this makes any suggestion counter the the current economic order equivalent to Soviet socialism.
You also suggest that anybody who isn't working is a layabout. To support this stupid statement, you would have to conclude that the recession currently going on has coincided with a great increase in laziness over a very short period of time...
You incorrectly assume that providing everyone with a decent standard of living automatically, means that nobody will be paid for doing anything.
Plumbers are always going to get paid. You certainly do need to compensate people for doing jobs that might be considered unpleasant - but that isn't a huge portion of our economies. When was the last time you heard the UK chancellor talk about sanitation?
My personal experience of the British economy is of shuffling papers around offices. There is a lot of busywork that bizarrely pays as much as the far more essential work that plumbers do prevent us from being knee-deep in our out feces.
Oh, and I don't know about you, but I already grow food, for free, in addition to myself and wife having jobs. We still have to buy some items (turns out carrots are easier to raise than cattle) but certainly your absolute statement that people won't grow food without a conventional, monetary incentive is disproved by my counterexample.
The question is, if the creative industry is largely rent-seeking instead of producing, where is the money coming from to pay them? Its not like western economies manufacture enough to feed the 'knowledge economy' beast on their output alone.
The answer, I think, is resources. The dirty little secret of modern economies is that the largest determinant of our output is our input of resources. The notion that we shape our own fate through our ingenuity is largely a fable, told to justify a blatantly unfair economic order.
So, the problem highlighted is that 'creative' people - and lets for the moment give them the benefit of the doubt on the level of their creativity - cannot find paid employment that allows them to produce new the new ideas and culture that keeps a society from stagnating.
My question is, why does everyone have to work?
We are trapped by absurd, outdated Protestant work ethics. Failure to bust your gut 50 hours a week is a sign of moral weakness, according to our leaders (most of whom have only ever worked through choice, not necessity) and our newspapers - sometimes even our teachers and parents.
This ethic is reflected in a society that is structured in a way that survival is next to impossible without work. Don't fool yourselves - even social safety nets here in Europe are specifically designed to make lack of full time employment unsustainable over the long term. What we need is to provide people with a decent living regardless of what they do, and make anything earned through work a bonus.
Maybe its time to stop blindly forcing the square pegs of our society (and everyone else) into the round hole of clock punching, just to serve some ancient disgust at the supposed 'fecklessness' of those who don't like the 8-6 run (I think its safe to say 9-5 is mostly a fantasy in the west now)
Its a valid question of how to pay for this; but not actually a difficult one. The simplest is to go after the rent-seekers; money earned by not doing anything can't possibly be created due to an incentive for the person earning it to do anything, so lets have it. Start with the Earth's natural resources - I have always considered the notion of a creature with a maximum lifespan barely over 100 years claiming that part of a 4 billion year old planet is his and his only to exploit.
Might it not work? Sure. But considering the current economic order is grinding to a halt, it is certainly worth a shot.
Carl Sagan explained this eloquently in his book Demon Haunted World - by using the example of what policies Queen Victoria's British Empire would have had to do in order to deliberately develop television.
It is accurate. Evidence or STFU is the golden rule, and none of you morons have provided any evidence, so...
Borders has just closed because it didn't get in on online book sales. You are refuted.
Its not a state, its a petition. You can try and create your pathetic little Galt's Gulch if you want, but after you've realised that you aren't quite the innovators you've convinced yourselves you are, and that you rely heavily on public goods, you will come crawling back.
Wrong
People are starving, primarily, because they can't afford food (The journal Nature did a good, sourced, infographic on this a few months back.) The idea that its Big Bad Government stopping the magic invisible hand supplying us with a utopia is not supported by the fact that the massive global deregulation of the last few decades has failed to make a significant dent on hunger. Furthermore, consider that the last time Russia got anywhere close to famine was not under the nasty old commies, but immediately after their fall during the libertarian program of 'shock therapy' - in an episode of disastrous free-market policy that was described by one of Russia's own lawmakers as 'Economic genocide'
If it is so obvious, the proof should be everywhere. If the proof isn't there, you should recant your position. Choose.
I actually think Zuckerberg, Jobs, and Edison are examples of why the "Great Man" myth is bullshit, rather than counterexamples. Zuckerberg built a single application, that relied on billions of dollars worth of labour being invested in free software, and billions of dollars of R&D being done to develop the Internet in the first place. Jobs just gave a stylistic flair to some fairly ordinary hardware (which, again, drew heavily on expensive research someone else paid for). Edison basically stole a bunch of shit, and tried to FUD the competition out of the market by murdering an elephant.
The idea that innovation would not have proceeded without these individuals is unfounded. The 'Great Man' idea has never been true, the truth has always been 'Standing on the Shoulders of Giants'
Oh, yes, I nearly forgot. Fucking Marxist Idiot! Go back to North Korea!!!!11
If they are so obvious, the evidence should abound, and you would be able to cough some up. You can't, so I'm calling bullshit on your paranoid ignorance. I'm also going to take a wild guess, and say that you've never worked in a school?
In other words, Mr. Passive Aggressive, you agree with him, but know you don't have a leg to stand on factually, so aren't actually going to get into the argument. LMAO
My entire life (born 1981) has been a history of market deregulation, so don't come at me with all that 'government gets in the way' horseshit. Deregulation has not protected pre-appointed 'winners', otherwise the dot com bubble would never have happened. Government has been rapidly getting out of the way for 3 decades plus, and the result has been a market running out of control with greed and bad information (which, according to the prophets of neoliberalism, shouldn't happen)
Libertarians have their ideal, utopian state - its called Somalia. Kindly go live there.
He just accused the educational establishment (and the supposed 'liberal' forces behind it) for stifling human innovation. Its an extraordinary claim, not only lacking extraordinary evidence but lacking any evidence at all. Why shouldn't I talk to such a cretin like he is a child? There is no onus on me to disprove something he hasn't proved in the first place!
Lack of evidence means you concede the argument. Thankyou for admitting defeat so readily. Your implied apology is accepted :)
Idiot. You do understand what the word 'deregulation' means don't you? Reagan and Thatcher got rid of government regulation of the economy, for ideological reasons.
Perhaps, but stagnation is definitely real. Here is a more scientific account of the exact problem:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/
(Those blog posts are best read in order, there aren't many.)
Cite your fucking evidence.
Do you have any evidence, outside the 'truthiness' of your deranged, tea party inspired brain farts, that changes to the education system (supposedly instituted by 'liberals') such as you describe a) ever took place and b) if they did had an effect.
I expect you to cite peer-reviewed work, thankyou.
Really? Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were proponents of "big government welfare statism" were they?
Facts do not agree with your Tea Party lunacy. Please wipe the dribble from your chin and have another try.
Bollocks and more bollocks. You do not get in the top 1% by inventing something. You get in the top 1% by inventing absurd financial ponzi schemes with other peoples money. Yes, there are exceptions. Fantastically rare exceptions, that do not disprove the rule
The period that Stephenson identifies with a decline in the ability to get 'big' things done coincidence near perfectly with the rise of neoliberalism in the west. The more markets are deregulated, the less ability we have to actually get things done, because corporations will break up anything large scale for profit - with the full cooperation of sleazy, dishonest politicians who are in their pockets.
But a whole bunch of us are ingrained with a kind of market fundamentalism, that the 'invisible hand' will make things right if you just deregulate some more, that you simply cannot see any way to stave off this decline.
It isn't just technology. This deregulated, global market lets 25,000 people starve to death each year, despite global agriculture producing enough food for each person get 3000 calories per day.
Now cue the stream of /.ers defending their dead ideology because they can't face up to the fact that something they support, both with their ideas and their everyday activities, is so corrosive and destructive to our prospects for survival, happiness, and development.