Yargh... I'm tired but I'll post up the work I've done for this so far. So much work to do and so much to fix up and organize and... eurgh.
HollowThought
Tuesday 19 November 2013
Tuesday 12 November 2013
A Concept of Concepts: Introduction
There's right and left buttons on the bottom corners of the screen.
Wednesday 23 October 2013
Why do we live the way we do. A simple economic explanation for why life seems to get harder and harder.
You would think that
with first world countries the way they are, where nearly everyone has cars,
computers, internet, and countless other excesses that we could at least stop
people around the world from dying of hunger and curable diseases. You would
think that all the inventions like the tractor, electric tools and computers
that have been made over the course of history would be making life easier. Yet the facts would point contrary to that. 70%
of the world lives on less than $10 dollars a day and we have gone from
majority of comfortable single income families to struggling two income families.
This paradox stems
from two things that by themselves seem reasonable yet together are the cause
of needless pain and suffering. The first cause of the problem is that we like
things fair. We believe that we have to do something in order to get something.
We believe in equal pay for equal work. It means that everyone needs a job in
order to live. The second cause is we like getting as much as we can for their
effort. In other words we like getting things cheap and free.
Because we like things
as cheap as possible, efficiency kills jobs. For example, a tractor can help
create food much faster and cheaply than person can. However since people like
things as cheap as possible, the owner of a farm will choose to use the tractor
instead of hiring people do the work. Consequently people lose jobs. However
since people have to work in order to gain something, these people have two
options. The first option to change jobs where they can still produce things
most cost effectively. When that isn’t an option, they have to work for less. The
cost of living however doesn’t suddenly disappear. In order to earn the same
amount of money that people has to work more hours. Most people end up taking
the first option and this has allowed society to function and grow. However slowly
but surely every market will become more and efficient. Without the option to
change, everyone will have to work harder and harder. In short, increasing
efficiency reduces the value of human work. Because we make money based on the
amount of value we can bring, people have to work harder in order to make a
living.
(This is obviously a
simplification and there are obviously more complexities)
Society has needlessly
made people work far harder than is required. If you want a measure of how
efficient markets have become, 1 farmer feeds on average 500 people. Imagine
that most of society had 50 needs.(food, sewerage, police and fire services,
medicine, etc) If we were all working at that sort of efficiency, 9 in 10
people wouldn’t have a job! However if you think hard about it 9 in 10 jobs
could be removed. Most retail shops could be replaced by a single shop. If
there weren’t multiple companies creating the same product, you could
streamline the production… We could make use of the 90% of wasted work and help
provide food and services for those who need it. We could reinvest our time
into family, friends and hobbies that we have left to gather dust.
The problem is more
difficult that just saying that people don’t have to work as hard to earn what
they have. If we people don’t have to work as hard, what would they do? How
would we choose to distribute good? Why would people work at all? How would we
transition? But regardless of these other issues, this is still something to
think about and something definitely worth looking deeper into.
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