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hey fuck capitalism
@argumate relevant to our discussion
I mean we could go back to 1950 levels of production, if we wanted to live like that?
That doesn’t seem that bad, though. Maybe we don’t have to scale back that far – maybe just have 20-hour weeks. Or better yet, just let the workers decide how much they need to work.
I mean, they can? who needs expensive health insurance if you’re only going to get 1950s level of care anyway; forget iPhones, plenty of people were using kerosene lamps instead of electricity back then.
Obvious problems include:
- Network effects; you can’t be a full participant in society these days without a cell phone and some sort of Internet access
- People who work more will bid up the price of positional goods, most importantly land
- In some cases the old goods are no longer available. A 1950 Chevrolet Deluxe would be dirt cheap today if Chevrolet made them, but they don’t make them and it would be illegal to sell them if they did.
- Lump of labor fallacy? It seems like there’s some debate as to how much this matters and in which cases.
cars won’t kill you as easily now, but it takes a lot of work to get a society where air bags and stability control and laser welding are standard features.
several things:
- why would producing less cause us to regress to the 1950s? what the fuck? show me the carfax.
the thing to take away from this factoid is that the amount of time that a worker has to spend to survive has stayed more or less the same, even as the amount that people produce in that time has increased.
- in a capitalist business, the capitalists innovate to pay fewer wages to get X products. in a worker co-op, workers innovate to spend less labor hours to get X products. in a capitalist system, innovation increases products relative to worker pay, in a co op system, innovation increases products relative to workers hours
the point was that if workers today are much more productive than workers in the 1950s due to technological and other improvements, they could work shorter hours and produce the same level of output (that we used to produce in the 1950s).
there’s a bit of question begging going on here though, how did productivity get so high since then anyway, and would it have improved similarly if everyone was working 11 hours a week.
then think about where we’ll be in 2050…
how did productivity get so high since then anyway
You know how communists are always saying that everything will be great after the revolution because the machines will do most of the work?
Yeah, we already did that.
We had already done that by 1850, and then we built more machines to do most of the remaining work by 1900, then built more machines to do most of the remaining work by 1950, and so on. That’s what improving productivity is. Well, that and education.
So sure, we could all be working 11 hours a week, if we wanted to get by on a 1950s standard of living. Some do, and maybe more people would if they had heard of the idea, but most people want more than that.
would it have improved similarly if everyone was working 11 hours a week
No, because if we had only been working 11 hours a week, we couldn’t have built so many machines and educated so many people.
1) We have iPhones now
2) We work as hard or harder than similarly situated people in the 1950s (no need to describe what we might mean by “similarly situated”)
3) Therefore, all that extra work must go directly into, and be completely necessary for, produce iPhones.
This is a remarkably rickety chain of logic to come from otherwise intelligent people.
“You could work 11 hours a week if you were satisfied with 1950s living!”
You guys know a lot of people who make rent on 44 hours of work per month, do you? And they get doctors who make house calls too???
Honestly it sounds like a great deal, surprised more people don’t do it!
Well, fair point. You’re going to have a hard time finding 1950-style housing in the United States today. Not only would you have to give up a lot of square footage and things like air conditioning and decent wiring, but you’d also have to find somewhere without modern supermarkets and hospitals. Even if you chose not to buy food that wasn’t available in 1950, even if you forego medical treatments that didn’t exist then, just having the choice to do so is part of the value of housing. So to find someplace comparable, you’d have to move someplace where things like cable TV, internet service, UPS deliveries, CAT scans, and Thai restaurants aren’t even available. That’s going to be difficult to do unless you can organize a whole community to do it, because these sorts of options permeate the country and form a part of our wealth.
The fair comparison probably isn’t 1:1 with 1950s U.S because of technology improvements.
A more apt comparison would be 21st century countries with similar per capita rGDP as 1950s U.S.
But still having the same standard of living as the typical South African probably isn’t much more aspirational.
As someone who, a few months ago, calculated how much money it takes to run her household for a week where nothing goes wrong and found it to be *almost exactly* 11 minimum-wage-hours per person, I feel obligated to speak up.
Yes, I have a lot of luck and financially-convenient preferences going for me [link] (not to mention the government assistance, though I’ve known plenty of people who found living on full-time or near-full-time work a struggle even with government assistance; also, these hour figures *don’t* factor in tax benefits), and I absolutely acknowledge that many people are not in positions where they can pull this off. And 11 hours/week is merely the figure for a week *where nothing goes wrong*: I’d need about 16.5 hours† for a week where the average amount of stuff goes wrong, and preferably more like ~20 to get a bit of buffer going. (and more buffer would be nice, of course)
But I *do* exist, so it’s probably a bad idea to base any arguments on the premise that that’s impossible, or impossible without enduring a lot more in the way of acute hardship than I do.
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(For me, the main problem is not expenses but *underemployment*: being able to live on 16.5 hours isn’t good enough if you can only get hold of 10.)
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†I know the linked post says 17, but that was back when we had a dog.
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#reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #discourse cw #long post
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