This is exactly how I think about my money. I’m confused why not many other people do this. It really makes you think twice about what you spend your money on a lot of times.
This only works as a minimum for menial jobs, and if everyone gets 1000 hours every month, no matter their circumstances, and jobs give more hours the harder and more dangerous they are.
May as well call them “credit” instead, since it’d have to be actually detached from hours.
But if you only have credits, you end up with capitalism again.
We need two more currencies: karma and laurels.
You’d get karma when you do stuff that is helpful to others; it doesn’t matter if you do it for selfish reasons, as long as it helps others. You’d get laurels when you do stuff no one has done before. Karma and laurels would be non-transferable.
Karma would represent how much you help society, so society pays back. You could spend karma to pay lower taxes and even to directly get credits from the government. Maybe other benefits too, depending on technological advancements.
Laurels would let you call ‘dibs’ on stuff. Like being able to benefit exlusively for something you invented. The better the invention and the more it benefits people, the more laurels you get and the longer the exclusivity you can maintain before it becomes public domain.Now we just need some sort of benign gestalt AI like in the Culture books to ensure karma and laurels are accounted impartially.
The problem is that in 1 hour some people would do basically nothing and other people would do a ton. So the compensation’s not really fair. Isn’t 1 hour of a brain surgeon’s time work more than a guy spinning a pizza shop sign.
Movie “Out of Time” did this. Oligarchy was definitely not solved by this.
What the hell are you even talking about? The premise of the movie needed there to be extreme inequality for there to be a story to tell… You think that they used economic models to make sure that their fake economy was realistic in any way?
This is just capitalism with extra steps.
Okay but compare two writers. One writer works years on one book and the other is Stephen King. Should the book of the writer who toils to finish one book be more expensive than the book of the writer who finished his book in a matter of weeks when these books are the same length ?
I think you have to factor in the many hours cocaine farmers worked to getting the average Stephen King novel finished.
Personally, I think some people’s work is worth more than other people’s work. If you’re job involves raw sewage for example, I think you should earn a premium. Or if you’re job puts the stress of life and death in your hands. Cardiac surgeons have way more stressful days at work than I do.
At most, only one order of magnitude greater seems fair. Nobody’s job is a billion times as hard as any job.
I would give 1000 hours of my time to a surgeon if it meant they saved the life of my partner. I don’t care if it only took them 60 seconds.
Some things are far, far more valuable than a single extra 0.
I mean, ideally there’s a hospital where lots of doctors work and provide their labour at an equitable rate based on reality, rather than a situation tailored for high stakes. But I get the sentiment.
The number of doctors is irrelevant. The point is that some things are worth far, far more than a single extra 0.
Yes, true. I don’t support Billionaires or the idea that different people in different jobs don’t work hard in their own way, or that management should make so much more money than everyone else. I just think some people should get gross pay, or danger pay, etc. I’ve had rough days at work but I’ve never had to insert a catheter or wipe a patient’s ass.
In our hypothetical world we’re envisioning here, I think a flat multiple would be inducement enough for some. To be able to retire 3x or 4x as fast for hazardous, stressful, or highly unpleasant jobs would be very attractive for a significant amount of the population.
As for education, you could just make it so students earn for studying (rather than paying for the chance) at a low multiple, and make more skilled labour a moderate multiple.
I have several questions for the Marxists in here, because i like the idea of this, but there seem, to me, to be some very serious issues with the labour theory of value as it has been presented in the comments and elsewhere I have seen. Can y’all help me understand?
Skilled Labour(Solved): As others have pointed out, of course, skilled work takes multiple thousands of hours of education to be able to succeed. While I don’t necessarily claim that this makes a Doctor worth more than a Custodian in the same hospital, I, as an educator, must ask: if the educators who educated the doctor got paid in hours of value, where did the value of those hours come from, if not the future labour of the doctor? Those thousands of hours to train the doctor are what allow the doctor to perform the labour, and so the cost of the doctor’s labour must be higher, just as the value of a porcelain bowl must necessarily include the labour of the miners who quarried the Kaolinite, the labour to transport the kaolinite to the kiln, the labour to produce the fuel which fires the kiln which bakes the Kaolinite, etc. Training is labour, so the value of the future labour of those being trained must marginally increase for every hour spent training. In order to calculate the value of that training labour, therefore, must we not estimate the value of all the future labour of the doctor, then divide it over the expected course of a career? Is it possible for someone to go into “training debt” by choosing a career for which their training is not utilised? (For instance, if a person trains to be a doctor, but then chooses to become an artist instead, all of those hours spent educating them to be a doctor have been paid out to their educators, but they will not utilize that training, so does the value of that labour retroactively diminish, or is the student liable for the lost potential labour?) Is there some better framework for calculating the value of training labour?
Proposed Solution: Pay the Teachers and their Students as they work through the training. The additional value of the doctor’s future work is not paid out to the doctor, because that added value is the value with which you pay the teachers and students, and thus the doctor’s future payment remains the same, because it was already paid out to them and to their teachers, during the period of time they were training.
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Perverse Incentive of Technology: In a theory of value where the value of a thing is in the labour required to produce it, improvements in technology, which increase the efficiency of a process or otherwise reduce the amount of labour required to produce something, appear to me to have an inflationary effect. Technology makes each thing require fewer hours of work to produce, making each marginally less valuable. This means that, if a producer were to hide their use of technology, and claim they used more hours of labour than they did, this would cause the value of the product to stay high. As long as no outside auditor watches and times every step of the process, efficiency improvements are incentivised, not because they allow labour hours to produce more, but because minor, unreported improvements in efficiency can be capitalised to produce profit. In fact, the entire concept of labour value calculations requires impartial auditors at every step of every manufacturing process, otherwise there is an incentive for fraud, claiming that things required more hours to produce than they did.
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Labour with Increased Risk: Some labour is, inherently, more dangerous than others. Time is not always a factor in safety. From literal risk of bodily injury, to risk of infectious disease, to the risk of malpractice. How do you incentivise people to go into professions which carry greater risk without making their labour worth inherently more? The custodian at the hospital carries a significantly greater risk of suffering infectious disease —and losing the opportunity to produce value— than the custodian at the museum of natural history. From a simple cost-benefit perspective, the increased risk to the hospital custodian effectively increases the “costs” of doing that labour, as it carries with it the negative expected value of lost future productivity due to illness. Does the hospital custodian, who accepts greater risks to do what is otherwise a similar job, produce greater value per hour worked, as both jobs are necessary, but the hospital job has a lower value for the worker per hour worked, due to the expected cost of risk?
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The Auditor: Ultimately, who decides the Value of every product and service? In order for a Labour Valuation to work, we must ensure that value fraud is impossible (or at least very difficult and must carry with it severe disincentives if discovered). Who audits the declared valuations? Who does the calculations for expected value of training? Who establishes regulations to ensure quality of products and services, and how do they measure efficacy? But, most importantly, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who determines the value produced by those who audit value? Who determines the number of auditors that are necessary, or redundant? How do you ensure that there is no corruption amongst the auditors?
My understanding is that “To each according to their needs” is the Marxist perspective. No need to determine value.
So then what’s the point of the labour theory of value? Why do we need to use hours of labour as a measurement of value?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for gay space communism, as long as it can work. I’d love to live in a money-free society, and just take basic income to do what I love: teaching science to others and exploring it more deeply myself. I think that “to each according to their needs” is an admirable baseline, but how do you convince people that it’s worthwhile to buy into that, since it would take serious buy-in from the vast majority of people to make it work (otherwise, the coffers of the state will be empty, and you get mass death)
Personally, I’d be fine with a state takeover of every industry, then turning everything into a worker co-op. Of course, as a public educator, that’s already how it works for me, but my sector could use stronger unions and the right to strike (in my jurisdiction, neither of these are present)
The post wasn’t made to suggest this analogy as the solution but rather as a thought experiment to demonstrate the evil of money hoarders. Once enough of us recognize the evil and farcical nature of capital then we can work towards a solution.
Absolutely, and this post is highly simplified. The reason I’m bringing Marx into this is that many other commenters have been saying that this is effectively an oversimplification of Marx’s Labour Theory of Value, and I’ve been trying to examine communism, socialism, and other theories of governance in an effort to be an informed citizen of the world, as you say, working toward a solution. I firmly believe that, if you don’t have that solution worked out before you begin, you end up just playing catch-up. So, I’m asking the Marxists ITT to help me understand the nuances of the Labour Theory of Value. I recently read about several communes which replaced money with the promise of labour, or the evidence of labour in the public good, and I like the idea, but I want to understand the nuances of how such an upending of economic theory would work. I really want this boat to hold water, so I’m trying to find any potential leaks before we set it adrift on a roiling sea.
The question of education ignores that the doctors also did large amounts of labor as students, not just their teachers.
So that provides the solution . . . .pay students for the time they spend working on their future productivity through education.
For 2 - the average across an industry is fine. In that case, the attempted fraudster has the same issue as criminals questioned separately . . . Their stories won’t add up.
For 3 - we don’t currently see hospital janitors paid a premium.
4 is just the same as 2.
I appreciate the response, but I don’t understand how this answers my questions. Could you give me a bit more detail?
The question of education ignores that the doctors also did large amounts of labor as students, not just their teachers. So that provides the solution . . . .pay students for the time they spend working on their future productivity through education.
This doesn’t actually answer where the value comes from. My question is: I presume that you value education, and that teachers should be paid for their labour, but from where does the value of that labor derive? If it isn’t coming from the future expected productivity of their pupils, then it’s coming out of thin air. Saying “let’s also pay the students during that time” doesn’t solve the problem. In fact, it compounds it, because if you’re paying both the students and the teachers for just doing those things, then from where is the value originating?Edit: I think, on reflection, I might understand what you meant on the first point: are you suggesting that the additional value of the doctor’s work is how you pay the teachers, and thus the doctor’s future payment remains the same, because it was already paid out to them and to their teachers, for the period of time they were training? Because that makes some sense, and I’ll have to think about it for a bit. I still don’t get any of the rest of your arguments.
the average across an industry is fine.
This incentivises oligopolistic collusion and price fixing.
Their stories won’t add up.
See 4. Who determines that their stories don’t add up? How much of the population must be engaged in the bureaucracy of measuring every detail of reported value?
we don’t currently see hospital janitors paid a premium.
And? Why shouldn’t we? Are you seriously using the system under capitalism to justify not doing better under socialism? This argument is whataboutism. I can disapprove of the capitalist practice while also pointing out problems with an opposing theory.
4 is just the same as 2.
Patently false. 4 is a necessity because of all of the others. Someone has to determine what labour has value, someone has to determine and publish the values of each product and service. The labour theory of value requires a regulating system. This must either be a command economy, setting the values of everything, or it must effectively be an honour system equivalent to the free market, where the producers simply declare the value of the things they produce and it’s up to the consumer to determine the fairness of different prices. So, I ask again, since you can’t just brush off the question like it’s asked-and-answered: Who are the guards who set the value of all things? Is it the “invisible hand” of the free market “self-regulating”? (in which case, how do we know that excess value is not being assigned to products by their producers?) Is it the audit of a bureaucrat whom we must trust not to be corrupt? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? How do we ensure that this doesn’t simply devolve back into capitalism or, just as bad, oligarchic entrenched corruption?
Again, I want to make this work, but I don’t understand how these questions can be answered without saying, effectively, that we must have a command economy setting the prices of all things, and trusting that the bureaucrats who are running the place aren’t lining their own pockets. I don’t want to hear about how “capitalism is just as bad”. Yes, that’s why we need something better. So I want to understand how this is better in these specific respects.
Yes, taking training time as labor eliminates the deficit problem.
For “oligarchy” - you’re supposing here there’s a small number of owners who would benefit from collusion. If you’re presupposing socialism, and this common ownership, that’s not the case. Why, and how, would a democraticly controlled workplace engage in widespread time fraud?
Thanks for the clarification.I contend that presupposing socialism and collective ownership doesn’t actually change human nature. There will always be those who seek a way to “get ahead” for personal gain. There will always be idiots who are easily manipulated into voting against their own best interests. There will always be those whose desire for power over others compels them to subvert otherwise-beneficial systems.
My goal here is to assume that we aren’t being naïve about human nature, and to ensure that the system can work without devolving to either corrupt bureaucracy or capitalism (or, again just as bad, totalitarian dictatorship):
Why, and how, would a democraticly controlled workplace engage in widespread time fraud?
Why, and how, would a democratically-elected government turn to fascism or imperialism? Why and how would a communist government become a totalitarian dictatorship? While all three of these questions have merit, unfortunately, the fact is that they do, and in at least the latter two cases, have happened (the first has never been given a chance to at a widespread level). The vox populi is easily manipulated by those who can convince them to fear the other, or to shift blame for ills onto a convenient scapegoat, often either a minority or the apparatus of governance itself (by attacking social programs). It is too easy to manipulate people into going along with a plan because they are convinced that it will work out well for them. Heck, it doesn’t even need to be secret. It doesn’t even have to be intentional. All it takes is people working to do their job better or faster, and without any intervention, you will get inflation. If managers simply implement efficiency measures, but don’t re-evaluate value calculations, it will not lead to inflation, but then you have labourers at those workplaces being compensated equally for lower labour. And as much as I hate to say it, we can’t just imagine away the need for managerial roles, especially in a world such as this, where we seek to ensure that all needs are met. Yes, workers produce the majority of the value, but actual project management is also labour that deserves pay. Auditing and publishing values is not something that will just go away, and must be done either by management on the honour system, or by external bureaucrats on the mandate of the state. I contend that ignoring regulating checks and maintenance is a surefire way for any system to fail, so you can never do away with value audits to ensure that everything is working correctly, otherwise the populace will become complacent and easily manipulated. In any decent government, all actions must be transparent, justified using evidence, and rigorously investigated in order to ensure that the public interest is being served. In my view, the only people who can “guard the guards” are a well-educated populace with time enough to spend investigating their government to place a check on corruption. People are lazy, too, so most people will not actually be checking government data themselves, just like most people aren’t reading the source code of everything they download, even if it is open-source. The problem, then, is that there will be those who seek to subvert the system at every level, and as long as there remain perverse incentives buried in the system —such as inflation through technology— there will be those trying to cheat the system to realize those potential gains. I’m trying to understand if it is possible to remove those perverse incentives. Can you think of a way to remove (or at least minimise) the incentives toward corruption, fraud, and tech inflation?
As an example of removing an incentive (or, in this case, a disincentive) I still feel that the question of Hazard Pay remains unanswered, as that throws a wrench into the idea that all labour is of the same value to society. The disincentive to take on additional risk to perform a necessary job is a serious problem, and already leads to issues such as the teacher shortage. There are many very good reasons why people do not want to be teachers, but it isn’t just “I can’t survive on a teacher’s salary”. As a teacher, I can tell you that the biggest reason I see my fellow teachers quitting is because the practice of teaching can be seriously deleterious to mental health. I can cite studies, if it would be helpful, that show that teachers leave because they don’t see teaching as a profession that is sustainable long-term, because the majority of all teachers are experiencing some level of burnout, and that they might consider staying if the pay were better. The fact is, if there isn’t an incentive to choose education over jobs which are less taxing to mental health, you won’t have people staying as teachers, even those who are very good at it. This applies for any job with serious risks, and those facing greater risks deserve greater pay to incentivise people to train for and enter into those careers. A factory line worker deserves greater pay than their manager, because it isn’t the manager who’s going to get their arm degloved if they lose concentration for two seconds around a rotating axle. Under this system of hours of labour+hazard, A teacher should not be paid as much as a farmer or construction worker because the risks of death and serious injury working on a farm or construction site far outweigh the risk to mental health a teacher faces (even including the guarantee that every teacher will get every single disease known to man, because everyone sends their kid to school sick). Thus, the risks of doing labour must be factored into the values of products and services, and must also be included in the compensation for labour, or there will be a disincentive to choose, e.g., Farming as a career.
I contend that presupposing socialism and collective ownership doesn’t actually change human nature
You’re defining human nature, but not providing data on that.
Yes, some humans will try to game the system. Humans also will try to aid other humans, and do things because they find them interesting. Homo economicus is a myth, and one that is disproven daily.
would a democratically-elected government turn to fascism or imperialism?
Well, for one thing, there has NEVER been a government of “democracy” that includes economic matters. If you’re asking why a bourgeois government would turn to those, it’s because it’s in the interest of capital. Fascism is in fact the immune system of capitalism.
Again, you’re trying to have it both ways here it seems - to say that the behavior of humans under the coercion of capitalism is proof that coercion is needed, but also that socialism must not have coercion.
teachers leave due to low pay
Right, and if you look at the rates that teachers receive, compared to global production as a whole, they’re tiny. And yet you still see people become teachers, over and over. It’s obviously not in their self-interest to do so, even for a short while.
You’re proving the point. Now imagine that labor is actually given the value it creates, just in time spent. The amount of production that is taken by those who produce nothing but own is huge. If that was evenly distributed, the problem would be too many possible teachers, not too few, as the low pay would no longer be an issue. An hour of teaching would buy so much.
because the risks of death and serious injury working on a farm or construction site far outweigh the risk to mental health
You’re ignoring personal preference - DIY existing alone shows that people want to take some of these risks.
But sure, let’s say that people no longer want to work on ice fishing boats anymore. There’s a couple ways to address this - either we stop eating crab (maybe not the worst idea ecologically), or we build robots to do it for us.
I’m increasingly concerned that it seems like you are dismissing my concerns about risk of harm by just saying “it’s already that way under capitalism, so why should it need to be better?” It also seems like you are claiming that I hold the burden of proof for saying that the conclusions of game theory and simple economics hold, rather than that a totally untested, never-successfully-implemented system must prove its worth before completely discarding every single model which describes the system of humanity as we know it. Doesn’t that sound, very literally, reactionary? As in, a reaction on reflex? That we should just throw ourselves to the wind in the hope that we end up somewhere better than capitalism?
By saying that no true democracy that “includes economic matters” has ever existed, you make my point clear: you are saying “this has never been done before, therefore it must work because it is different”
The reason I do not provide data on human nature is because the burden of proof lies with those attempting to disprove the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis here is the current understanding under the system known to the querent: I.e. very basic economics and game theory. The untested system is the one which must prove itself. I would be very genuinely interested to see your data on “homo economicus is a myth, one that is disproven daily”, preferably starting with a rigorous definition of what, precisely, are the implicit assumptions of “Homo Economicus” which are to be disproved. The only presuppositions I have made, as far as I can tell, are that humans are not perfectly rational actors (hence the “easily manipulated” part), but that they are still capable of rational choices given incomplete information. Basic game theory can describe why people would make selfish decisions. All you need are the right perceived cost and benefit weightings to show that a rational actor would and should make betrayer moves. Just saying “altruism exists”, or that people who choose to become teachers have intrinsic motivation is insufficient to prove what appears, at least to me, to be a patently naïve view of the innate goodness of people. If you want my “data” on “a fair portion of people suck, and it is often rational for people to betray others”, I recommend the lovely little simulation “the evolution of trust”. That’s nothing but simple game theory.
As far as “having it both ways” on coercion, I believe that any society that I would want to be a part of should incentivise people to make cooperator moves, and disincentivise betrayer moves, rather than relying on intrinsic motivation in a pie-in-the-sky, all-in bet that humans are intrinsically good enough to cooperate at scale without people gaming the system. All you need to see that intrinsic motivation is insufficient for most, is to look in a classroom. I can provide studies on intrinsic motivation in the classroom (which is about as far as you can get from capitalism in the modern age), if that would be helpful.
Anyway, Coercion is not something in which I’m interested. If a system cannot act without being based primarily on coercion (as you seem to be calling it or, as I would say it “without the clear inevitability of falling to a totalitarian state”), then that’s not sufficiently better than the status quo for me to justify the effort of instantiating such a system
You treat the amount of teachers at equilibrium as the goal, but if you want an educated populace, your primary focus needs to be in incentivising those who are good at the job and those who have enough intrinsic motivation to want the job, to stay in the job. If you’re constantly shuffling out the experienced teachers for new blood, then not only have you effectively just recreated the current Teacher-Crushing Machine™ (brought to you by the makers of the Orphan-Crushing Machine™ and the Torment NeXus™), but you’ve also just put the education of your entire population into the hands of inexperienced and mentally-taxed people desperate to get out. That’s simply an untenable situation, and it’s the same for every sector which carries risk. You want to minimise the risks, then actively incentivise those who are suited to the job and who are willing to take the risks to actually keep doing so. Is the goal of this whole endeavour not maximising utility? How is creating huge populations of jaded ex-firefighters supposed to serve the public good, let alone help to convince the populace that the system works better than the capitalist way? If the end goal just looks like a slightly different torment nexus, why should I want to upgrade to Torment Nexus 2 (now made with 30% recycled material!), for the low-low price of a violent revolution or three?
Yeah, dude, thanks for the wall of text deciding what my position is (erroneously) for me.
You asked a question, I answered it. You want to make up a straw man to yell at, you can do it without me.
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So how does it work if I spend 10-20,000 hours in medical school and then spend three minutes setting your broken bone?
Healthcare’s goal should not be to be profitable. The government should subsidize both the education and pay of medical staff for the wellbeing of their people.
Ok, now do any other form of higher education.
Ok, now disconnect the ability to live comfortably from one’s labor value.
Sure, but that doesn’t answer the question.
I think you can draw a line somewhere between “everyone’s skills are equally valuable” and “billionaires should exist.”
This metaphor doesn’t address the time required to develop skills.
The line I’m drawing is a wall between the value of your skills and the need to spend time using them just to afford to survive. Then if you choose to develop skills and use them for the benefit of others, it will be because you chose to and not because you felt you had no other choice. The time spent will be your own, for your own reasons and no one else’s. Its value will be a value you hold, not relying on the value others perceive it to have.
That’s cool except what happens when there aren’t enough people who find 20,000 grueling hours in med school to be worth it when operating a water slide will give them the exact same lifestyle? How do we make more people want to be doctors? Or drive garbage trucks for that matter?
There are already people who spend years of effort getting less valuable positions. If it was purely about time/money spent, everyone would be competing for the most valuable jobs.
We could decrease the demand for doctors and garbage collectors any time we want, but capitalism says maximum growth, maximum consumption. Getting rid of that system will change the demand for those social roles as much as the supply.
Why are you picking apart this simplification? OP is not suggesting we eliminate money, they are simply trying to showcase how fucked up billionaires are.
Are you here to defend billionaires?
Because it’s a dumb oversimplification that doesn’t really add anything to the discussion.
“Imagine you need to work to make money, but some people have more money than they could have ever made working” works just as well and doesn’t introduce a bunch of society-breaking plot holes.
Your training increases the value of your labor power (the cost of reproducing your labor and what the value of wages tend towards) making your hourly wage larger. The meme is good agitprop but it isn’t real marxian analysis.
You also get paid while studying. What a concept :O
I’ve played around with this idea, and the best solution I came up with was amortizing hours spent in training over the course of a career. If you spend 20,000 hours in med school, and you have a projected career of (40 years × 2,000 hours per year) 80,000 hours, one hour of your labor would have a value of 1.25 “unskilled” hours.
Yeah but that doesn’t really work because it still treats all the hours as fundamentally equal which just isn’t true. It may take someone 20000 hours to become a doctor with a particular skillset, but that doesn’t mean ANY person can do that. Person X may never, regardless of investment of time, be able to obtain a mastery of that skillset. Moreover, for things like surgery you’re talking about the stacking of hours for regular education, med school, specialty, residency, and then surgery. Each of these is a threshold that increasingly fewer people can cross.
It seems that reasonably the best thing to do is to award additional value based on scarcity and necessity of profession, but you might just back yourself back into capitalism I guess? At the end of the day I can dig a ditch but you can’t fix your grandfather’s heart so that amortization is not a very satisfying split.
To be fair this isn’t necessarily how socialism/communism works - it’s just a good way to get people thinking about the insane disparity between the common person and the 1%.
Under socialism roles that are hard to fill either because they’re hard/specialized or just undesirable can be certainly be compensated. It may not be directly monetarily, it could be earlier retirement, more time off, more desirable housing/location, etc.
And more realistically in a milder/earlier form of socialism different jobs could absolutely pay more. Maybe a doctor gets 5x what a grocery store stocker makes. (But housing/healthcare/etc is covered for both) That would still lead to a world exponentially more equitable than the one we live in.
I didn’t say it was a particularly good solution. It’s definitely more complicated than hour-for-hour.
It doesn’t really matter for this point.
The point is that nobody earns ten million hours (1,140 constant years) of work ($1b @ $100/hr).
You can have a lot of leeway with ratios and that’ll still never be true.
That only makes sense if you get paid for medical school.
You did a whoopsy by picking health care as your example, but you’re spot-on. Our ability to develop new skills, learn from experience, and invent new ways of doing things is perhaps the distinguishing feature of human labor over mechanical processes.
This is a decent meme for the world of 15 years ago, but as algorithmic (and now AI) centric labor has taken over and turned us into “chickenized reverse centaurs” (as Cory Doctorow says), I think it accidentally makes the same case that the tech lords are making.
That is: output is output. Artists are valuable for the art they produce, not for being an embodied being in our shared space that specializes in looking at things from new angles. Coders are valuable for the finished software they produce, not for understanding the system in motion. Etc.
Edit: There’s a Marx quote I like…
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.
A house costs a year? There’s a house being built near me and it’s been under construction for about a year by several teams of workers plus the owners every afternoon and weekend. (this is in Germany so it’s not made of matches and paper). And that’s not counting the hours needed to extract the raw materials and process them into bricks, insulation, glass, cables or pipes. There’s a TON of labor to build a modern house.
Are they working all through the night? One man working 40 hours a week with no sickness but including 5 weeks holidays per year works 1880 hours. A year of hours is 8760.
No, they work during the day, Monday through Friday and the owners on weekends too. Usually they get 6 weeks of PTO and about 13 more days of public holidays.
Skill issue. They build houses out of concrete here in China in like a month, in Japan they use wood and do the same, tho they lose all value after 30 years.
Yeah, but we have Ethernet in every room, filtered ventilation systems, heat pumps, solar with storage, water acconditioning systems and in winter we can heat it up by a fart.
Plus our workers don’t do 996 and have sick days, vacation and others.
All those things exist over here and doesn’t account for yall taking 12x+ longer.
Maybe so this doesn’t happen?
With >10x the population of Germany, we should expect >10x more collapses. In any case, what exactly are you against? Using central planning to keep prices low by ensuring the necessary amount of concrete and steel are produced while enough builders are educated? Or is it just because it’s chinese?
Japan has more people than Germany and doesn’t take a year to build a single house.
Paper walls do that, yeah.
Nah, skill issue. We can build a house in under a year in India, and India is … India. The only difference is we don’t usually have the heating infrastructure since we don’t need it.
I can set up a tent in under 5 minutes!
Makes sense. If it’s taking years to build actual houses, then y’all better learn to make tents.
If we make them out of paper it will be even faster!
Amazing chauvinism. Also 996 is not real commentary.
Anything critical of China is fake news, I know.
There are so many other lines of propaganda you could have employed. It’s not my fault you chose one as laughable as believing 996 is a real thing Chinese citizens experience as a whole.
Straight on the train with you.
Fake news!
A top liberal mind.
I mean, maybe. But a year seems like a lot for a full team, so either that team is not working as much and as consistently as you’d think OR that house is worth a lot more than a year.
Everyone’s hours would be equally valued. The problem is not every job’s hours is equal.
You would have lots of people in white collar jobs, but you would struggle to fill positions like sanitation worker, oil rig worker etc.
The issue is not with currency, the problem is with capital markets and value that is not directly linked to a product or time.
Lots of white collar jobs just straight up shouldn’t exist. Not all, but a lot of them.
But also hours should be for luxury items and basic necessities should be free for everyone.
The hour system on its own just pushes the issues with capitalism one step back.
Sanitation is definitely one of those jobs that don’t get valued and paid enough.
Would you be surprised to learn that a lot of those guys are making 65k with union benefits?
Not that much. That’s like ~$43k after taxes which doesn’t seem like a lot for most major cities. Good luck affording a home with that wage, and forget about saving for retirement or even regular vacations when rent can easily eat up half the remaining money.
More like 58k after taxes. And you won’t find me arguing against the fact that we’re in an affordability crisis. 58k should get you a house or the pay should be enough to get a house. But that goes for everyone in the working class, not just garbage collectors.
Isn’t that backwards? You would get more sanitation workers if they were paid the same as white collar
The fact that we’re making different assumptions highlights how different people want to do different things.
I think you misunderstood
I’m saying, if everyone was paid equally, sanitation workers would be paid better than they currently are. So it would, necessarily, be easier to find people willing to do it
Working on an oil rig is a lot more dangerous than most white collar jobs. The time cost would have to account for the expected years of your life that you lose from taking on that job.
stumbles upon socially necessary labor power…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca_Hours
Many towns/places have tried doing that as a local currency. It never seems to stick…
Money has a network effect (especially physical cash) so it needs to have a compelling advantage to unseat whatever is dominant in the area. Like Glover said in the article, every local currency needs at least one dedicated evangelist.
I’m surprised modernizing it to digital didn’t help, since that reduces the impact of the network effect. In 2019 you could already do “atomic transactions” between cryptocurrencies without having to trust an exchange.
What if you had a multiplier for things like education or years of experience… You could say 2x for every year of experience or 4x for degrees, you’d still never come close to justifying billionaires
Some systems consider receiving the education as on par with performing the job it prepares you for. I.E. you get paid to attend school and it doesn’t work out like you have to put your life on hold until school is finished.
Everybody would be working sooooo sloooowly…
Good, maybe we wouldn’t be such a bunch of wastrels if we weren’t running around because a website might go down or meeting might be delayed if we don’t rush
My job involves fixing machines that unload container ships.
If one breaks down mid vessel it needs to be up and running, my poor performance has a massive flow on effect around the world
Or maybe Just-In-Time supply chains should be heavily regulated. Companies using cargo freighters as warehouse space inevitably leads to everything grinding to a halt when anything gets delayed during shipping. Know how companies used to avoid short-term supply chain issues? They had enough stock in their warehouse to last more than a single fucking day at a time.
But manufacturing companies realized that instead of paying for warehouse space to store excess raw material, they could just throw massive fucking hissy fits whenever a shipping container gets delayed. And the MBAs gave it a nice pretty name (JIT) to make themselves feel smart. And now shipping companies get blamed when manufacturing grinds to a halt, instead of blaming the manufacturers that failed to plan for a single day of shipping delays.
And manufacturing that has the potential to cascade into critical/infrastructure delays shouldn’t be allowed to use JIT. Very little would be impacted when a popsicle stick manufacturer has a JIT delay. But a lot of people would care if chemicals used in water treatment plants got delayed, and they suddenly had no clean drinking water.
Yeah but a day here then the ship leaves late, a day at the next port and the next its never good.
Things tend to always run behind as is. We get notified ships in from 21 to 24ty etc then 2 days before its thr 22nd to the 25th a almost every time
Does it though? Where does the “need” in your sentence come from?
How come the supply chain has no slack to allow for (inevitable) hiccups and accidents? The answer is two part. It used to have them but they were optimized away. It still has them, but you are led to believe they aren’t there because putting this pressure on you allows your bosses to extract more work out of you.
And how come the supply chain is so stressed? Is everything that goes through it so essential that a single late ship is a catastrophe? The answer is obviously not, we are shipping gigatons of drivel across the world that gets immediately forgotten in a drawer or tossed in the bin once it reaches its final destination.
If you are shipping essential goods then there is a safety net of supplies at the destination to absorb any issues in shipping (if there isn’t, clearly these goods were not essential). If you aren’t shipping essential goods, then it’s already factored in global insurance markets, and late shipping is merely someone’s bank account getting bigger at a lesser rate.
I live in a port city everything comes by boat or train at the same place.
Food everything.
If the boat over stays its time someone pays for the demurrage.
It can get up to 100k a day to have a ship sit there.
Congratulations, you’re one of the few.
I strongly disagree (given this system is fleshed out a lot more, obviously). This is the bullshit they sell us at the top of corrupt systems.
I work slowly sometimes because I don’t earn a fair wage. Fifteen years ago, I earned a fair wage and I put extra time in that I didn’t need to. Today, I do the opposite. This is because my employer today is untrusting, abusive, and exploitative.
Op’s post is a very simplified rendering of Marx’s Labor Theory Of Value. Marx says that the value of a commodity isn’t just determined by the labor time it took to make, but rather the socially necessary labor time.
In short, the average amount of time that a society uses to make a given commodity. So of you, as an individual, were really slow at the widget factory, your widgets don’t get more expensive just because it took you longer. You just get fired for being lazy.
Instead, value is determined by this Socially Necessary average, and that average is augmented by technological advancements in production. By extension, Marx says, those technological advancements in turn influence the way production, and therefore society itself, is organized;
slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity.
The reason people lack access to the necessities of life is because they labor for, say, 8 hours a day, and only recieve a fraction of the value they produce by their labor, in wages. The solution isn’t necessarily to give those workers all the money, though pay raises are often a good thing, but to take the surplus value that would have previously been hoarded by a capitalist, and have its use be put towards the betterment of society, and be democratically decided upon in some way.
Maybe, but I would probably be excited to pick up other professions. I feel like I could do drywalling as a side hustle.
This brings up the question of experience and how good you’re at what you’re doing - because no matter how enthusiastic you would be (assuming you’re new to this), someone with 20 years of experience will always be better than you - and we’re back at square 1 and putting prices on things.
The movie gets panned a lot, but I liked it.
Yeah, it was really ahead of its time.
Huh. I found it to be remarkably middling.
We were making a joke about its name.
I don’t mean to brag, but sometimes I’m rather stupid.
It’s okay, not every being can know everything all the time.
That’s what I was thinking of while reading the post, too.
