> I think if you've put in 40-45 years for the man, you should be allowed to have some good 10 years for yourself.
Who do you think would "allow" this? God? This is a resource constraint imposed by reality itself catching up to an excessively idealistic set of policies; this policy decision is downstream of that, not arbitrary.
It is entirely arbitrary. Society heavily favours capital above labour. That’s why we have very rich inheritors never working and people toiling until they are 70. It’s entirely a choice. This issue has solutions we collectively decide not to put in place.
Isn't that exactly how retirement works though? Old people who produce no labour but just get everything given to them because of the capitol they built up previously.
Those mean the government always gets its cut (and pisses off the inheritors), but functionally whether you inherit 10 or 5M doesn’t really make a difference.
Can you quantify what you think that choice looks like?
Say you seized the entirety of Elon Musk’s assets: that could pay for a year and a half of the Dept of Transportation. Say you seized all the wealth (somehow) of the world’s 100 richest people. That’s 2 years of US non-discretionary spending (social security, Medicare and Medicaid). I often see comments that assume all problems could be solved by just taxing the rich more, but I just don’t think that’s true.
The Nordic countries pay for their social safety nets by taxing the middle class more heavily than we do in the US. If you want to change that, it’s less about capital vs labor, and more about your dentist vs labor (dentists be the classic example of jobs that earn high incomes without being “capital owners”).
Funny that we have a ton of people asking what people would do in a post scarce society. Stating that man needs work. Yet, it also seems to be said most by the people who have been free from the need to labor for generations. They still do, they still desire more, yet their lives are certainly post scarce. Hell, the whole goal of retirement is to become post scarce, and have a few years where you can live without the need to labor. Seems like we already have some decent evidence to what such a world would look like.
People will always yearn and wonder and imagine. Sure some people will spend their time fishing but a lot of people need things to strive for a and they will make things up or seek out others who feel the same way.
I agree. Lots of evidence to suggest that this would allow humans to be the most human they could be. Calling it a new Renaissance is not a stretch. Nor reminding those that much of the scientific advancements in the past were made by those who had the luxury of enough free time to sit around and think. But I think too many confuse this message with suggesting some form of Communism or Socialism. I'm not advocating for that (personally, I'm strong believer in Capitalism, even if not the Laissez-faire kind. You can't control a wild horse, but neither should you let it freely destroy your farm). Those notions are related, but not the same thing. You can clearly, as demonstrated by rich elite and people retiring, have post scarce lives without the need for such direct control.
If you stop "rich inheritors" from existing, this moves you away from the knee of the optimization frontier and you're certainly even worse off as an old person.
If you can't conceptualize this as a constrained optimization problem, you're not even worth arguing with; you simply lack the tools to think about this in a useful way.
While I have little interest in humouring the idea that all of this boil down to an optimisation problem (it doesn’t - fiscal policies and social policies scarily live at the intersection of economy and politics - plus even from a pure economic point of view it is much more complicated than a simple optimisation problem and I do have an economic degree by the way), on top of you being frankly condescending while bringing little to the table which would somehow explain if not justify the attitude, you can certainly get away with far heavier inheritance taxes without actually hurting your economy in any meaningful way. You can also tax the rich a lot more heavily without hurting your economy in any meaningful way.
And I don’t ask you to believe me from the goodness of your heart. I think Piketty must have had something like half a dozen best sellers on this topic alone at this point.
> I have little interest in humouring the idea that all of this boil down to an optimisation problem... I do have an economic degree by the way
I hope your degree was "economic" in the sense that you didn't pay much for it
> I think Piketty must have had something like half a dozen best sellers on this topic alone at this point.
Thinking pop-slop authors like Piketty are worth paying attention to is a worse self-indictment than the most condescending thing I could possibly say here.
You should downgrade your confidence that it's possible to meddle with natural resource allocation without causing problems.
Do you have any argument to share outside of insulting me and Piketty?
Charitably, you seem to be implying that any actions which would disturb the current situation would be detrimental because current allocation is the best that can be done.
That seems highly suspicious to me because I don't think anyone is happy with the current fiscal policies. People disagree about what should be done but I think everyone agrees we are not at an optimum.
Of course there is no guarantee that your 65-75 years will be good, but it's a lot more likely that your 65-75 years will be good than your 75-85 years.
And why wouldn't a society owe its citizens anything after 40+ years of keeping their nose at the grindstone, and obeying all of its laws?
Society is defined by what we owe one another in pursuit of civil interactions with one another.
If the only contract society offers me is "work your hands to the bone and then be discarded once you can't work anymore" then I have no incentive to keep up my side of the contract and perform labor or observe property laws in the first place. And once everyone is trying to cheat and steal from one another then you no longer have a society anymore.
Ask that to any serf throughout history. You don't have to "prefer to be dead" in order to recognize that what is being asked of you fails to be worth what you get in return, and then be in a rational position to decide to default on what others frame you as being obligated to do.
If society doesn't owe me for working under its rules and constraints, why should I care about society and following its rules and constraints and putting anything into it? In my opinion such a stance makes governmental rule illegitimate, and completely kills the social contract, making me wonder why I should care about following the law at all except through fear, which is not a great long term motivator both historically and personally. If society isn't going to help provide for me when im feeble and old, why should I care about putting anything into it when im young and sharp? Especially when private capital economics is already so biased against me as just some regular working joe.
Sure such thoughts are not probably concerning for the majority of people, but it only takes a small percentage of people losing faith in society combined with a bit of public apathy about people living criminal lives or doing criminal things for them to bring the entire thing to its knees.
I am curious: From where did you get that it owes you that?
So, I completely agree with most things you say. The core here is: Just don't work 40+ years for a retirement.
Take sabbaticals along the way.
Change your career when it is stale.
The counter for this: Don't buy into the hype. You cannot afford sabbaticals if you need two new cars every 4 years and a house that stretches your finances.
And this is why I give as little to society as possible. If it owes me nothing, I owe it nothing and therefore it’s only right I give it as close to nothing as possible to balance the scales.
> This is a resource constraint imposed by reality itself
No, it is a resource allocation problem.
I don't think we should have ceilings, but we certainly should have floors. Minimum standards. Despite that belief, I think there is something wrong when there's about 20 people who make more money while they take a shit, than most American families make in a year[0] and a buttload who make that same amount while they're asleep[1]. These levels of wealth are so large that they are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to spend within several generations, not just one lifetime.
This is only a problem, because the floor is lowering while the number of people in these groups are growing, especially the shit group.
If we have to make trades between ceiling and floor, I'd rather sacrifice ceiling for floor than floor for ceiling. Because the latter is simply greed.
Importantly, we can have both. This isn't a zero sum game, we produce more wealth and resources as time goes on. It is only zero sum at a single point in time. We can simultaneously raise the ceiling and the floor. But currently, we are shifting what percent of these gains go to which groups.
It would be insane to build extravagant and ornate Cathedral ceilings to only have a dirt floor. It would be dangerous to build those ceilings without ensuring there is a strong foundation and forgetting to build the pillars to support them. Without that, the ceilings fall and it all becomes dirt and rubble.
It is an allocation problem, not an amount problem.
[0] If you have $100bn, are able to make a conservative 0.05 yearly interest and take 5min to shit, you've made ~$50k during that time.
[1] You only need $1bn given the same statistics, but closer to $45k. There's over 3k billionaires.
There are finite resources to allocate. If you can't conceptualize this, there's literally zero chance you can think about this in a productive way.
> I think there is something wrong when there's about 20 people who make more money while they take a shit, than most American families make in a year
That's usually indicative of a lack of understanding of highly connected networks, power law distributions, etc. - the types of things you need to grapple with if your question is "how do I maximize some economic objective for X million people?".
> This isn't a zero sum game
It's a constrained game (and there exists a zero-sum tradeoff between instantaneous allocation of resources to capital good production and consumable good production)
> Cathedral ceilings to only have a dirt floor
You're really leaning on this analogy that isn't very useful for actually thinking about the problem
I'll try to illustrate this with an easy example. There's a finite amount of gold that humans have mined, and thus available for use. We could even say that there's a finite amount of gold on Earth, that is available. But these are different things. If we do no more mining, we have a fixed amount of gold. If we mine more, we get more. Total gold available for use, increases.
The analogy extends. As our technology advances, more gold becomes available to be mined, and eventually we could even transmute gold. There's more resources in our solar system than we could conceivably use in the next billion years (even with exponential growth in use), so it can be treated as infinite (over these bounds).
This is especially important as we build... software. It is similarly effectively infinite within our bounds. We are rapidly building better hardware, increasing computing power and memory. This is a positive sum game.
The same is true about the economy in general.
You're right!
> If you can't conceptualize this, there's literally zero chance you can think about this in a productive way.
We just disagree about what needs to be conceptualized. I believe you just missed the context of what I was writing about. I'm not giving the example as a way to teach you, I'm giving it so that we can make sure we're aligned in what we're talking about. I agree, there's a really limited amount of gold. But it is important to recognize that we mine more, and the amount of gold increases. I was trying to clarify this with my mention of time. But that's no different from when you say "a zero-sum tradeoff between instantaneous allocation". All I'm saying is that the hands on the clock continue to tick forward...
IF IT WAS ZERO SUM, then it would be even more important to discuss allocation, not less. In an extreme case, let's assume we have enough resources to make everyone in the world live at a middle class level. It is finite. But there are an infinite number of ways in which we may allocate these resources. I think it would definitely be a problem if we were allocating it in ways that some people could buy a private jet every day for the rest of their lives ($100bn easily does this), while others are can't eat at least one meal every day. That's not a lack of resource problem, that's an allocation problem.
What's your math background. You can formalize what we're talking about with game theory. We're talking about stuff you'd learn in an introductory course. Economics courses discuss a lot of this at length too. But you should try to draw from both the applied econ side as the more theoretical math side. Least you get trapped by naive models, or at least not recognize their limitations.
CS and math should be a solid basis here. To be honest I don't remember at all where I picked this stuff up - a lot of it comes from random disjoint fields like optimization theory, graph theory, etc. which impinge on econ all the time, although I couldn't tell you a definitive book on the subject(s)
Who do you think would "allow" this? God? This is a resource constraint imposed by reality itself catching up to an excessively idealistic set of policies; this policy decision is downstream of that, not arbitrary.