logoalt Hacker News

ap99yesterday at 4:45 PM1 replyview on HN

Speaking of fairytales, you're living in your own.

Disconnecting value from productivity sounds good if you don't examine any of the consequences.

Can you build a society from scratch using that principle? If you can't then why would it work on an already built society?

Like if we're in an airplane flying, what you're saying is the equivalent getting rid of the wings because they're blocking your view. We're so high in the sky we'd have a lot of altitude to work with, right?


Replies

IgorPartolayesterday at 4:56 PM

Imagine a society where one person produces all the value. Their job is to do highly technical maintenance on a single machine that is basically the Star Trek replicator: it produces all the food, clothing, housing, energy, etc. that is enough for every human in this society and the surplus is stored away in case the machine is down for maintenance, which happens occasionally. Maintaining the machine takes very specialized knowledge but adding more people to the process in no way makes it more productive. This person, let’s call them The Engineer, has several apprentices who can take over but again, no more than 5 because you just don’t need more.

In this society there is literally nothing for anyone else to do. Do you think they deserve to be cut out of sharing the value generated by The Engineer and the machine, leaving them to starve? Do you think starving people tend to obey rules or are desperate people likely to smash the evil machine and kill The Engineer if The Engineer cuts them off? Or do you think in a society where work hours mean nothing for an average person a different economic system is required?

show 1 reply