> If your worth is not determined by your productivity, then what remains of you underneath it all?
Everything else. You are worth so much more than your productivity.
I'm glad I never got sucked into the protestant work ethic, since defining yourself based on your labour and the value you generate from that sounds woefully narrow-minded (this doesn't feel like quite the right word, but close enough).
It's probably helpful to at least expand 'productivity' to something beyond just what is useful for your work. Reading the classics is productive because it's enjoyable, even though it doesn't help with your work. Ditto spending time with friends and whatever else that doesn't have anything to do with work.
I hope we figure out what to do about disabilities, since the current status quo is inhumane in large parts of the world (and even in places with good benefits systems, getting that support isn't trivial).
Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you airily define ‘productivity’ as reading the classics and spending time with friends?
They are not trolling. They are stating the simple, undeniable fact that there is more than enough to go around and if we had a more equitable distribution of resources, we could take care of everyone with disabilities 10x over with plenty to spare.
> we could take care of everyone with disabilities 10x over with plenty to spare.
Yes, like the 40%[1] of Stanford undergrads who have disabilities. The greatest long term impediment to what you're suggesting is folks who don't need the help taking advantage of the resource distribution. It both massively increases the costs and sours those who have to pay into the system on the whole thing leading to a backlash.
If we could just solve this quirk of human nature, we'd be all set.
You’re missing the point of the article and of the post. Why do you assume that someone who reads and takes breaks is unproductive? Should we get a second job instead? I spend 8 hours sleeping. Would you like me to work those hours as well? I spend some of my day cooking and cleaning and raising my son. Would you rather I keep working instead?
Maybe it’s time that we worked together to gain that time back for you instead of you fighting for us to lose our free time.
Don't expect much sympathy here, as per many comments folks are mostly on purely capitalistic camps to the extreme. Its distillation of US approach to work and society, something I've grown to detest by mere fact of living in much more humane, while vastly more financially efficient system that doesn't use my tax money to kill civilians all over the world (none other than Swiss system and yes it could easily work elsewhere if people reduced their egos significantly, which they won't).
Its everybody for themselves in US, fuck the rest, the more the better. Some 'society' it is. The more miserable and poor others are, the better you can exploit them right. How horrible the world would be if those folks stocking shelves in shops or trimming your hair would also have a shot for a decent life.
Middle class is for mediocre suckers, either your are a star (at least from financial perspective, usually the rest of life is very opposite of it) or a loser. Can't say I can respect that system, but as long as I am not part of it nor bombed by its military industrial complex to death I simply don't care. Folks can stay and be part of that system or leave, that part of freedom is still sorta there.
Switzerland got its wealth predominantly by shielding money stolen from around the entire world. I'm glad US ended that carnival of happiness to a large degree in 2009.
Whatever the US did in 2009 doesn't seem to have had any long term effect on Swiss GDP. It dipped in 2009, like everyone else, from the "global financial crisis" but recovered the next year.
We have enough medication. People not being able to afford it has little to do with whether or not we have (or could easily make) an excess.
Insulin costs ~3 USD to make per vial. People not being able to afford ~30 USD insulin is not because we have too little medication. It's because there are leeches all over the healthcare system.
And if you genuinely cannot afford it, you should get it for free, as part of a proper healthcare system, which the US famously lacks.
The other commentor mentioned food and clothes to you. I'll add that I can get food for free locally (soup kitchen style, although I don't think they actually serve soup) if I really need it.
Around 10% of houses in the US are vacant, although I'm sure a fair amount are that for good reasons (shitty locations, old and worn to high hell). This to me sounds like a resource allocation problem and not a lack-of-resources problem.
Energy could be free close to free if we made the right choices. The sun's right there. Unfortunately, we've been stuck in a political rut for a long while, making long term projects like 'do something about global warming' and 'transition away from fossil fuels' uninteresting.
Many medicines are only expensive due to patents and making up for research costs. Actual production is usually cheap as hell.
I don't have all the answers. People smarter than me might have them. But I do know that we can do better.
Yes to all of this, and want to double stress the Housing theory of everything [1]. Most of the "scarcity" people feel today in the North American context is driven by housing. And there simply isn't enough of it. And citing badly measured vacancy stats does a huge disservice to the effort to fix this.
I agree we can do a lot better. And I have no moral qualms about giving the excess away to everyone who needs it. But I need people to admit that it will require a lot of work till we can sufficiently claim we have a real realizable "excess".
And that work requires the current system to work more "efficiently" and with "higher productivity", in the economic definition of the word, not as a personal valuation as OP defines.
Housing is clearly the biggest problem, yes, and I doubt you'll find anyone who'll disagree that it's not a big problem. But it's a big problem for political reasons. If we all woke up tomorrow and thought 'we need 10 million new homes', I'm sure it could happen. It's just not in the short-term (and long-term?) interests of the economy as it is now. Maybe we should do something about that?
Or maybe, just maybe, we should do it because it's a thing that raises people's quality of life? I only care about the economy insofar as it helps actual people on the ground, so I'll be happy to ignore it for things like this, assuming that doesn't put us in an even worse rut than we are in now.
>If we all woke up tomorrow and thought 'we need 10 million new homes
The cost (no profit) of 1 Million homes where people want to live (where your community is), would be roughly 0.5 Trillion to 1 Trillion USD [1]. So, I don't think this is true :(.
We simply don't have the construction workers and the supply-chains to make it happen. Again, these are fixable problems and I want this to be true. But it is not today.
> The cost (no profit) of 1 Million homes where people want to live (where your community is), would be roughly 0.5 Trillion to 1 Trillion USD [1].
That sounds worth it to me.
> We simply don't have the construction workers and the supply-chains to make it happen. Again, these are fixable problems and I want this to be true. But it is not today.
What if we let people build their own homes and gave them courses on how to do that?
Also 1 trillion dollars sounds like a single year of national debt interest, the total amount spent and destroyed by the Iran war, or the Pentagon's black budget. I'm sure we can give up one of those for a year to fix every economic problem plaguing the country.
...and the food part, it's been this way for almost a hundred years now - with agricultural productivity skyrocketing in between. But 100 years ago, chronic food overproduction bankrupting farmers, was already a persistent problem. Since then, lots of bright minds spent their lifetimes to invent new ways to bribe or coerce farmers into growing as little as possible for their own safety.
Just a note those "vacancies" include dilapidated buildings and housing that is between leases (literally all the housing on craigslist is included in that number).
Vacancies in most major cities is near-zero. As a market-rate renter, when someone says "we have so much excess", I have no idea what you're talking about.
This assumes production of food is the bottleneck rather than distribution. If distribution is actually the bottleneck, overstocked food is not a measure of excess in society.
By that logic someone working in a care home is worth less than someone building a gambling app. There's little relationship between salary and what people deserve, it's mostly just luck to have skills that happen to be in short supply.
> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc.
The able do. The disabled would love to work hard and earn a nice paycheck. It's a privilege to be able to work and be in good health. Hopefully you don't have to learn that the hard way.
> A privilege, really? Who bestows that privilege?
You do
> I am certainly sympathetic to people who are genuinely disabled.
Agreed, and it can be uncomfortable to sort through what's genuine or not. One of my favorite scenes is in the big Lebowski where Walter confronts the other Lebowski claiming he's not a cripple and lifts him out of his wheelchair...Funny and sad all at once.
> That doesn’t mean we have to lie to ourselves that they are being productive by sitting around reading books.
Not asking for anyone to lie to themselves about what they feel is productive, rather giving another perspective to hopefully help people appreciate being able to work.
Does it matter? In the US, we send a sizable portion of our paychecks to the government's Social Security program so it can provide for us in this exact scenario. The government dictated the terms and we upheld our end of the contract on pain of incarceration. Now it's time for the government to uphold their end.
Technically, SS provides for the next generation. We pay into it to the next generation can use that, not the current one. It's a pyramid scheme meant to pay out early and then die. The math doesn't work if the individual expects to retire on it. It's a great scam.
It's not my problem if the math doesn't work, or if my money doesn't pay for me. The contract as presented to me by the government is "You will pay into this system, it provides Social Security to the aged and disabled. If you do not pay into this system, you will be judged guilty of a criminal offense and sentenced accordingly." The specifics of who pays and for what are the government's problem, not mine. Whether or not the government is guilty of fraud or misrepresentation does not affect the terms. I fail to see why I should consider the government free of the obligations they themselves have mandated.
> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc
You could say the same thing about software engineers. But someone spending their days just creating JS frameworks is oh-so-productive and paid enough money every month to buy several years’ worth of food and shelter.
If they are JS frameworks that enable other engineers to build applications that support farms, and banks, and taxi services and insurance companies and mines and factories, etc. then obviously that is productive.
If someone is willingly paying money for their labor then I see little point in questioning the worth of that exchange.
When JS engineers start asking for public money to support them writing JS frameworks that no one wants to pay for, we can revisit this topic.
My point is that, unless you think that the purpose of human existence is to maximise insurance profitability and mining throughput, lifetime earnings potential is not a good proxy for someone’s value to society.
I think it is sad that many of the people that have the largest positive impact on society — teachers, care assistants and the like — are also some of worst paid.
When I was young, to buy a tee shirts for the kids you have to walk like 10 block to visit like 5 shops and compare prices. Let's say 1 or 2 hour and the choices were quite limited and you must keep a mental list of the location and quality of each shop. [The cheap ones may open only at the same time you have to be in the office.]
Now you can go to Mercado Libre (the local version of Amazon) compare prices and see the reviews and buy them in 15 minutes. There are a lot of more choices and the prices are lower (or higher if you like fancy stuff). It arrives home at the afternoon.
Some software engineer has to program it. Does s/he deserve a few bucks for the time s/he saved all of us?
I mean, if someone is willing to pay them, why not?
Even hundreds and thousands of years ago, people would put semi transparent rocks onto shiny metal shapes and sell those useless gadgets for a lot of money.
If customers are willing to pay for that, it means that those people made something worth that money.
Billionaires, evidently. Why else would they deserve a million times what you make in your entire lifetime, weren't for the fact they're a million times more productive than you? In fact, if one were to die tomorrow that'd be like the loss to the world of a million of you, whereas were you to do the same, that'd be a loss of only one of you. This is also why you can be downsized without that impacting anything important, while downsizing a single billionaire would be a global tragedy.
Or at least, that's the logical consequence of that line of reasoning. If that's incorrect, where's the error in the reasoning?
This has been happening for more than a hundred years now... 90%+ of the people have been farming not that long ago, and mechanized farming equipment has replaced 95%+ of those workers.
This doesn't mean 4 hour workweeks or majority of people not needing to work, but it means that some of you can be social media managers, others can integrate AI chatbots in apps that don't need an AI chatbot, some can rewrite existing software in whatever the language of the week is, etc. Without offloading all that farming to machines, we'd never have what we now consider for "normal" and "must have".
Those few farmers left (2-3% of the workforce, depeding on the country) want to earn money too, so they can buy smartphones, watch netflix and have that smart toilet seats that open automatically and wash your butthole. If all those replaced-by-machines workers don't produce all that, where's the point in farming food for them?
Let’s assume that all human labor goes through the same transition as agriculture: within a single human lifetime, 98% of all the human work is replaced by highly efficient machines and a small minority of highly productive people. If only 2% of the population have the required skills/talents/ownership to remain productive, on what basis does the remaining 98% participate in the economy? The answer has always been: people will invent new ways to be economically productive, but if the agriculture ladder of labor generalizes across the economy - what is left for the average, unexceptional, run-of-the-mill man on the street?
Many places around the world, we work for what is needed, not for hitting it big.
But since you ask, also many victims of late stage capitalism explored in modern forms of slavery without work rights, so that richer nations can enjoy cheap electronics and clothing.
> Reading the classics is productive because it's enjoyable, even though it doesn't help with your work
It's productive in that it is hard and a sign of high intelligence. Don't believe me and swap it out with Candy Crush. Is playing Candy Crush productive?
This obsession about people with disabilities is weird. Yes, people with real disabilities exist. But focusing on pathologizing every day life is extremely harmful. This constant focus on "mental health" ironically worsens mental health. For instance, any mild discomfort is "anxiety". Most of these things are pretty normal range of emotions. Roughly 20% of undergraduate students at Ivy Plus institutions (including Harvard, Brown, and Cornell) are registered as disabled and receive accommodations. This figure has surged dramatically over time, rising from fewer than 3% at Harvard and under 6% at Cornell in 2015. This is obviously partly cheating the system, but it's also this harmful over-focus on "mental health"
Hard work is a good in it of itself. People pay lip service to the idea that we shouldn't be productive or measure our "worth" (whatever that is) by productivity but they don't live it. For instance, I don't know any parent that doesn't push or at least hope their children work hard at something. Anything. Do something hard. Play a sport. Learn an instrument. Study math. This is common sense.
> Roughly 20% of undergraduate students at Ivy Plus institutions (including Harvard, Brown, and Cornell) are registered as disabled and receive accommodations. This figure has surged dramatically over time, rising from fewer than 3% at Harvard and under 6% at Cornell in 2015.
That seems to check out with the period people started getting more addicted to social media, pandemic side-effects and increased awareness of mental health issues
I believe the amount of people dealing with crippling anxiety these days is higher than that 20% figure, and we are still under-diagnosing it
> Hard work is a good in it of itself.
Hard disagree tbh
but that's more of a personal values discussion
> Hard disagree tbh but that's more of a personal values discussion
I'm curious about this. Do you have children? Do you look at someone who does nothing hard in his life with indifference? Someone chooses to spend their life playing video games in their parent's basement. Do you think that's an equally admirable life than someone that spends his life doing hard things?
> Roughly 20% of undergraduate students at Ivy Plus institutions (including Harvard, Brown, and Cornell) are registered as disabled and receive accommodations. This figure has surged dramatically over time, rising from fewer than 3% at Harvard and under 6% at Cornell in 2015.
I think it's naive to assume that this phenomenon reflects an actual increase in disability rather than a cohort who has been raised to pathologize every human difference as a sign of some disability and then use those diagnoses to secure advantages in systems meant to help people with actual special needs.
There's clearly a lot of pretending going on. On the extreme end look at the numerous DID[1] "influencers". These folks are plainly pretending to have a debilitating mental disorder (which strangely never prevents them from going on podcasts and YouTube interviews) to curry fame.
Agree completely. Its hard to tease out what percent is a cheating response due to increasing accommodations and actual pathologizing.
Some personal observations, I would say about 90%+ of "emotional support dogs" are fake. And I can't remember the last time I saw someone that was actually disabled use a disabled parking spot. They always have the proper license plate or mirror tag, but every time I've seen someone enter their vehicle it would appear that they do not need special accommodations afforded by the preferred parking spot.
> Hard work is a good in it of itself. People pay lip service to the idea that we shouldn't be productive or measure our "worth" (whatever that is) by productivity but they don't live it. For instance, I don't know any parent that doesn't push or at least hope their children work hard at something. Anything. Do something hard. Play a sport. Learn an instrument. Study math. This is common sense.
Hard work is good insofar as you enjoy it or it leads you to things that you do enjoy. Do those things if you enjoy them. Hard things are enjoyable too. I stopped doing most of them because I didn't enjoy them.
> If you consider Candy Crush as productive I guess words just don't have meaning anymore so there's no point arguing.
I'm using the word differently to you. It's productive insofar as you enjoy doing it.
Just to make a point, have these two definitions from Wiktionary:
> Capable of producing something, especially in abundance; fertile.
Capable of producing enjoyment, yup. I'd call playing Candy Crush productive if enjoyment is your goal.
> Yielding good or useful results
The good result here is, again, the enjoyment of whatever. If you enjoy playing Candy Crush, then playing it gives you a good or useful result, namely the enjoyment of playing it.
> I highly doubt you actually believe this, but I have been wrong before.
If someone truly finds Candy Crush enjoyable to the point they do it everyday or whatever, and we're not talking addiction (so they're not actually enjoying it, but rather feel compelled to do it), then more power to them. I wish my desires were so simple.
And yet, you seemed to have been using it the way the rest of us are in this discussion, right here:
You are worth so much more than your productivity.
I think the issue here is that everyone else is having a discussion about economics, how we efficiently allocate scarce resources as a society, and the role that individual productivity plays in that allocation. You're having a discussion about enjoying your life. Which is great, if you want to play Candy Crush all day and call it "productive" because that makes you feel better, go for it.
But I'm not interested in paying your bills so you can.
The thing that sucks is it doesn’t matter if you don’t get sucked in. Society is and as a result even if you the individual feel valued society largely will not value you. Of course it’s better for your mental health to escape the trap of believing your value as a person _is_ you value to capitalism but that won’t put food on the table or get you the care you need.
This is something that needs to change at the cultural level but is incredibly hard to change because in order to do so you need to convince most people that the foundational understanding of their worth as a person needs to come from somewhere else.
> could you please summarize in short what you meant here as keypoint?
> I'm not sure we are interpreting this right,based also on reactions and troll references in clear contrast to your other comment.
I'm not sure what's unclear about my first comment, but I'll try to rephrase with new words.
People are people and deserve to be treated humanely as such. Productivity is but one aspect of people, and not the only one you can ascribe any value to. People are more than their productivity.
Productivity is often just used to mean 'how much money you earn', but I find it useful to expand its meaning to 'how well you're doing what you're enjoying'. If you spend time reading books because you enjoy it, that's productive. If you spend time at work earning money, that's also productive, since money is needed to, ya know, stay alive, and thus let you enjoy life, for what it's worth.
My point about disabilities is probably better expanded by the article in question, unless you have any pointed questions at that.
> also the comment
> "I've considered suicide because I was unable to make ends meet. I don't want others to experience that. Is that too much to ask?"
> was important and extremely insightful, wanted to ask what you meant with "was unable to nake ends meet" which type of ends?
The instance I had in mind was one where I was in danger of not having food to eat at the end of a month. I wasn't in any danger for that matter. I can get free food locally if I'm desperate. I can call a friend and ask for a favour (and friends have asked me!). But getting to that point is well beyond the point where my mind goes 'oh ffs, just end it, it's not worth the bother'. If someone is at that point, they should get help, but ideally, they shouldn't get to that point in the first place. Prevention is better than a cure (although we should work on cures too!).
thanks a lot for the clarification and effort for it.
Maybe the other reactions made it generally more unclear, but was unsure about the core message.
This is much more clear and direct, and yes I was believing you meant something in that direction.
Regarding the other comment, thanks also, I understand that feeling the moment of having to ask something like that, but I think that if fought with enough pragmacity I think I would try to overcome the psychological part because the need would overcome the shame, and that would overcome the situation. or that is not feasible in that case?
I'm sure it's feasible, but it's treating the symptom rather than the disease. I'd rather people never get to the point of having to call a friend because they can't afford food today than them not feeling shame when it does happen.
"Your worth" is a bit of a vague and meaningless term (everyone is worth infinite in some sense). But if we want to talk about your general ability to secure more comfortable living conditions then your worth is very much linked to your productivity. The average living conditions are largely determined by how productive the average person is. There are some hard-to-escape balance equations at play there.
Good vibes are nice and all, but affirming each other isn't going to actually make the world more comfortable. Looking after disabled people requires an enormous productive surplus from the rest of us and a recognition that the people creating the enormous surplus are in practice worth quite a bit more than the people who are on the receiving end of charity. Playing pretend on this topic is just going to lead to people being worse off.
> Looking after disabled people requires an enormous productive surplus from the rest of us and a recognition that the people creating the enormous surplus are in practice worth quite a bit more than the people who are on the receiving end of charity.
We already don't do this with regards to normal people. Being a farmer isn't a particularly high-paying nor high-status job. I don't mind changing this around if we get a more humane world in return, but these issues seems orthogonal to each other.
Related: "Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions." (Jesus, in Luke 12:15).
Life is not about how much you make or how much you're worth. It's about being worth something to someone. It's about having meaningful relationships.
As a typical software nerd, it took me decades to get that.
I was raised as a Buddhist and in Buddhism it says that the biggest wealth you can have in your life is good health. Most of us take it for granted, that how lucky we are to born without a disability and can function doing daily tasks like taking a shower, going to the toilet without the help of someone else. I cannot imagine how difficult life would be with a disability and even thinking about it makes me anxious
I always try and remember that the majority of the creatures of this planet do not have the luxury to live in an environment where they can freely choose to shield themselves from bad weather and regulate temperature of their surroundings to their convenience.
At some point many years ago I read that the family, not the individual, is the building block of society. It might have been Chesterton or Friedman as I read a lot of both when I was young. It certainly is a lot easier to hold the line when you have a squad of half a dozen to a dozen with you (wife/husband/children/brothers/sisters/uncles etc). If the state is there, then you are fortunate, but I wouldn't want to count on it myself.
I've read that German society, for example, is largely based on contracts between the family unit and the state. Sweden, as a contrast, is largely based on contracts between individuals and the state.
As an example, Germany treats a married couple as a fiscal unit, Sweden abolished joint taxation in the 70s. Swedish parental leave is allocated per individual, and is mostly non-transferable.
In a lot of ways, individualism is produced by state contract in Sweden.
I'll never understand how people think a personal anecdote contradicts a more general point attained by evaluating collected data that would include those anecdotes.
e.g.
The claim:
Planes are a very safe way to travel.
Followed by someone jumping up to say:
I know a person who was injured in a rough landing.
Note I'm not claiming either the individual or family is the atomic unit here just pointing out that your contribution doesn't contradict or even narrow the argument.
HN commenters do this all the time. A lot of people here treat comments as mathematical or logic proofs. They see a statement like "Planes are a very safe way to travel", and their minds go to:
∀x(X(x)⟹(Y(x))
and then they make it their mission to find the falsifying x sub 0 example.
This is how it has always been throughout history (and still is in most parts of the world).
Individual is part of nuclear family, nuclear family is part of extended family, extended family is part of tribe, etc. When one part is in need, the others jump in to help.
The term I am familiar with prior to that was "immediate family" (as opposed to "extended family").
You come across the term a lot in old genealogy books. For instance in "The History and Genealogy of the Prentice, Or Prentiss Family" (from 1883) contains:
> All his immediate family, himself, wives, and children, are dead.
Nuclear family is indeed a recent development and started with industrialization and modern capitalism. While we use the same term, 'family', to refer to (pre-)historic forms of family, too, those family types had little or nothing in common with the modern definition, when it comes to power, inheritance, law, sex, love.
Ancient egypt? Roman times? Medieval times? Byzantine times? Pre-colonial Philippines? Pre-colonial America?
I think it may have started in the late 1800s at the earliest. I would need a bit more evidence to be convinced that your model of individual to nuclear to extended etc has been a thing longer than a few centuries, vs the vast majority of human life experience being in nomadic hunter-gathering, villages, farmland, and walled city-states. We just had clans which were all our family. A fellow villager wasn't much different than a cousin. The individual and nuclear family, not so much a thing.
There's extensive written evidence as far back as writing goes of recognizable family units. Here[1] we see a young man in 18th century B.C.E writing to his mother to ask for new clothing for school. It refers to household units with mothers and fathers having discrete roles. In 1250 B.C.E.[2] Egyptian workers took days off to take care of their wives, or sick members of their immediate household. Cross cultural examples abound. In Mexica (Aztec) culture adult life began upon marriage where a couple was given a small house and plot of land.
The nuclear family lived separate from the extended family. In separate cities. This is a new thing. You lived with your clan in history, not apart. The nuclear family is completely separated physically from their extended families, even across village lines.
Oh, I see. I agree with the other commenters, I think you may be focusing too much on the "nuclear" part of GP's comment. I interpreted that more as "immediate" family, and I think throughout history that people were most likely to rely on immediate family, then extended, then general kin.
I think I'd need quite a lot of evidence that families weren't the major unit of society. A hunter-gatherer tribe is an extended family, so that only proves the point. If there's more than about 30 people in one then surely family based factions will form within it to some extent.
Probably you're focusing too much on the parent comment's mention of nuclear family. Even that, despite only being named a few decades ago, is likely to exist to some extent. Even in some ancient tribe or village, most people would favour their spouse (or equivalent) or child over a cousin or niece/nephew if some dispute formed. That hardly seems controversial.
It was _especially_ like this further back. You literally could not survive without the tribe, and the tribe had norms-and-values you had to adhere to, some of which were to do with family units. This went for nomads and settlers alike.
If you read this article and feel worried about your financial situation if you become disabled, you might look into long-term disability insurance (LTD).
It's a policy where, if you become disabled to the point where you can't work, it pays out $X per month, every year until you're 65. And if you're partly disabled and have to cut back your hours, some policies compensate you for those lost wages.
These LTD policies are expensive, but they DO give you peace of mind about this possibility.
I've looked into these kinds of policies a couple of times now, and the premia are just astronomical. (At least from the quotes I've been given).
It's kind of understandable, given that the risk is not all that low. But my guess would be that it's amplified by fraudulent claims in relation to psychological illness, burnout, etc. I asked my insurance guy to exclude those, but, apparently, it's something he can't do.
You can kind of see, how this works for a roofer: If you hurt your leg and can no longer climb a roof, the policy pays. What does it take for me to no longer be able to sit in front of a screen? Well, it would almost have to be something in the psychological realm. Sure, there's the possibility of an illness with chronic pain or cognitive impairment, but those are orders of magnitude less likely, so the psychological stuff is what completely dominates the high premia.
Worker's compensation is similar, and that actually is mandatory for employers to offer in most US states. But IIUC, that's only for injuries that are caused by your job in some way?
don't forget the legal costs insurance to pay the lawyer making the LTD insurance actually pay and a second legal costs insurance to pay the lawyer suing the primary LCI as they will likely claim that case isn't covered by their policy.
> Everytime you meet someone new and they ask “What do you do?” they’re not asking about your passions, hobbies, or the mundane human tasks that take up most of your time; but how you make money, how you turn yourself into income.
1. That's your assumption. They could really ask out of interest. They couldn't care less if that's your main source of income.
2. In some cultures this question will never be asked.
3. If they do ask and judge; what does that matter? If you dislike such personalities, avoid them.
> Much of modern Western culture, particularly in the United States, was shaped by what sociologist Max Weber called the Protestant work ethic: the belief that hard work, discipline, frugality, and productivity were signs of virtue.
I hail from a culture that's decidedly Catholic, but at the same time shares this mindset.
To me it has more to do with farming and the culture around it.
On a farm you have to earn your keep and there's no space for "freeloaders". You work all day, every day and don't complain.
Attitudes are very different in places where there was a significant urban class in the renaissance era already.
...hmm. Not sure that this is quite state-of-the art in sociology today. Crediting a particular strand of a particular religion as the locus of a virtue that confers a clear fitness advantage in and of itself, and without recourse to any outside explanation, seems a bit off.
It's simple, what is written here should be part of basic education for every human being/worker.
For all who mis-interprent the post and focus only on the anti capitalistic view of it, don't worry your body will tell you soon!
Keep an eye for the signals, gut and digestive issues, back stuck and oain, sleeping problems, light sensitivity and irritability. When this will start remember that the problem is probably your work or your working environment not you!
And you should react to it!
This article should be eye opening, and support for disabilities should be always there. The abandonment of human beings is the biggest failure of societes.
The idea that "hard work, discipline, frugality" are Calvinist and Protestant inventions may be the most preposterous thing I've read today. As if the rest of the world or previous eras valued self-indulgence and wasteful lavishness.
Or that an unproductive member of society wasn't always scorned or at least viewed negatively by those having to produce.
It's mere slander. It reminds me of the Smithsonian's insistence that punctuality, hard work, objectivity, and politeness were aspects of "white dominant culture" and "white supremacy".
Some Inuit practiced senilicide up through the 20th century.
"On the other hand, when food did run short, the old and sick were looked upon as drains on the community’s resources. Sometimes they were killed – thrown into the sea, buried alive, locked out in the cold, or starved to death. Far more commonly they were simply abandoned to die. The victim might be taken out in the wilderness and left there, or the whole village might pick up and move away while the old person slept. If the villagers were unexpectedly restored to prosperity, they might go back to rescue those left behind. An abandoned person would also be welcomed back as a full member of the community if he could manage to make his way back to the village on his own. But usually he couldn’t."
> I’m 38 years old and I just had to ask my mom if I could borrow money [...] potentially spending the next 50 years without stable income
Without stable income it might be more like 20 years. (I wish you personally a long and bountiful life!)
I'm in a similar boat. As a 3rd child in a somewhat poor family, I do not have any inheritance and actually need to help my mom financially (though it's not a burden). My wife is also from a rural area and her inheritance is barely worth 5 (hypothetical) figures. We never got or will get anything given to us for free. We are in our 40s and we completely gave up on having children (though it was not overall a financially-motivated choice) or property (this one certainly is). Live day to day while I can work, and die without regrets when I cannot anymore. Thanks to AI that happens probably sooner than later.
"But I am trying to believe there is more to a human life than how efficiently it converts energy into labor."
There absolutely is. Labor can be fullfilling and give joy, but for most people it is just an easy tool on how to survive and hopefully have some comfort as well. Do not ever feel ashamed of your labor and even more, do not ever feel ashamed of not doing labor if you don't want to. You have one life in this universe. Make it a nice one.
We could provide food for the poor and disabled who lack or are not using family support with a tiny fraction of our industrial output. We wouldn’t even notice this expenditure, let alone whine about it. But what we are providing is actually “Healthcare. Specialists. Medications. Supplements. Mobility aids. Physical therapy. Accessible housing. Delivery fees when you cannot physically shop for yourself. Ride shares when public transportation is inaccessible. Caregiving.” and this turns out to be enough effort to make society groan and strain.
It’s good that our society is doing this, and we could do better! but why do we have to characterize this existing herculean effort as “fundamentally hostile to bodies that cannot produce consistently”
I’m saying that providing a better standard of living to adults who cannot work is something we are spending ~3% of our GDP and 5% of all fulltime workers on.
That providing these things is something we are doing, that is good, and that is hard work actually.
Reducing your worth to mere productivity is myopic. Your worth is what you bring others, and while for some people it can include literal production for others it doesn’t have to. There’s wisdom, emotional support, and many other things.
> Earn slightly too much, and vital support disappears
My reading of this is that the threshhold for the USA government to withdraw financial (and other?) support for disabled people is too low, is that right?
Not only is it too low, but it is the discontinuity in support. This leads to perverse incentives where for the wage you could make, you’d barely clear the threshold to lose benefits and make barely more money than on government support.
This isn’t an argument to remove support—it’s an argument to remove binary thresholds with smooth ramps to incentivize people to work.
> My reading of this is that the threshhold for the USA government to withdraw financial (and other?) support for disabled people is too low, is that right?
In general, step functions (earn 200 get benefits, 201 no benefits) are really really bad from a public policy perspective. If you want to get people out of these dependency traps then you need to taper them more effectively.
Even tapering them is problematic as you end up with astronomically high effective marginal tax rates, but it's better than a hard cut off.
I'm not sure that's true, though most policies are implemented that way. If you get, say, a basic income payout that's a function of the income you make, that function scales all the way from 0 income/max UBI to >= max UBI income/0 UBI.
Not that that's like ... a policy slam-dunk or anything. Even putting aside the massive hurdle of getting UBI enacted into law, you'd still have to cope with sources of unreported income, asset/gift valuation, and so on. But that second category are, at least, tractable problems as evidenced by most countries' tax codes having contingencies to deal with them.
This post reminds me of the book recommendation shared on Facebook.
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey
Bedridden and suffering from a neurological disorder, the author recounts the profound effect on her life caused by a gift of a snail in a potted plant and shares the lessons learned from her new companion about her the meaning of her life and the life of the small creature.
I'm very sorry to read of the author's experiences; a permanent disability can be a terrible thing to have to live with.
I would, however, encourage the author that maybe the answer to their question at the end of the article lies in the very world view they rejected half-way through: Christianity. Yes, in the Christian scheme of things, hard work is a virtue and laziness a vice. But to see this as the direct root of ableist capitalism is a severe twisting of the actual Christian teaching.
On the contrary, the Bible simply resounds with two truths, throughout the Old and New Testament:
1) We are to care for those who cannot care for themselves. We have a God-given duty to provide for our family members, community members, and fellow citizens who (for whatever reason) are dependent on our help.
2) Our worth as humans does not depend on who we are, what we can do, how much we own, or any other property residing in ourselves (which may change at any moment). Our worth comes directly from the fact that we are created and loved by an unchanging God. We have worth because we are valuable to the One who made us!
"There were no needy ones among them, because those who owned lands or houses would sell their property, bring the proceeds from the sales, and lay them at the apostles’ feet for distribution to anyone as he had need." Acts 4:34-35
The Catholic Church has an ancient tradition asserting the inherent dignity of the human person (imago Dei), regardless of circumstance, including the very recent Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity) subtitled On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.
In our supposedly rational age we've discarded structures which encoded timeless wisdom because we didn't recognize the value. We thought we'd outgrown it, but it turns out that now is when we need it the most.
It’s sad to see people in the thread conflate capitalist greed with the “Protestant work ethic.” Despite the popularity of prosperity gospel teaching in the US, Jesus’ actual teachings clearly condemn greed and oppression of those who have less. A work ethic is still valuable, because goods have to be produced, but the reason we can’t solve worldwide poverty by just writing a check is that oppressive leaders at some point in the chain will use that money to enrich themselves, or they will take it from those who can’t defend themselves.
This isn’t to say that the purpose of Christianity is to fix these social problems, but it’s easy to forget how central generosity and compassion are to the Christian message. “Money Cult” by Chris Lehmann is a good exploration of how American Christianity corrupts these truths.
> Capitalism has defined ‘health’ itself as a capacity to submit oneself to labor
People keep mindlessly saying this but I have never seen evidence for it. Before money was ever invented the idea was already there that if you're healthy you can sustain yourself. All 'capitalism' did was saying "and most people nowadays perform abstract services in trade for an abstraction of a promise of a pinky swear saying "if you trade this pinky swear to me you'll get some food".
It's not 'economic systems that are fundamentally hostile to bodies that cannot produce consistently', it's a fundamental reality of life. Either you are capable of getting enough food for you and your family, either directly by farming, gathering or hunting, or you are not.
We have plenty of food because of capitalism (particularly the fact that we have plenty of incredibly cheap food grown by a tiny fraction of our population).
You're missing my point. Shortage and conflict is the default. It's not a fault unique to capitalism, and to say that it's its fault is missing the mark.
I'm not saying it's an ought situation or even an is situation; it's that I disagree with his diagnosis of what causes it.
Well right now there isn't a food shortage so what should we do while there isn't a food shortage? Should we perhaps say, that we only jettison the disabled people once we're actually running out of food and are forced to make a tough decision about who to keep alive, instead of doing it 20 years in advance just because there might be a shortage one day?
Whether we as a society support those who cannot productively contribute is orthogonal to capitalism. Capitalism itself has nothing to say about what we do with the increases in productivity. You can see this in many developed countries, which have wealth and surplus thanks to their capitalistic markets, but they also have high taxes and a strong safety net.
Absolutely. It's a gray area though when you become partially able to support yourself. I think this is what the article is pointing out. You have to come to grips with this grim economic reality and it's hard and your future prospects are almost entirely based on where and to whom you were born. The author is simply lucky that they have a safety net. If you are lucky enough to have time to prepare for these things, you can build your own. If you don't prepare, given the opportunity, that's a 'you' problem.
Capitalism reinforces individualistic cultures. The reality is humans aren't so different from ants or other social insects. Individuals don't instantly die when alone, yet we survive better and longer together.
I think part of the lie is that we live for and unto ourselves. We instinctively know it's not true, yet for much of our lives we live as if it is. Until one day we find out what we knew all along.
When you suddenly become unable to "give anything" to others and become the one who must be given to, you feel a disconcerting sense of loss and powerlessness.
I don't think it really has anything to do with capitalism.
The author blames capitalism and religion while greatly indulging in his pride, I think.
It is so much beneath him to ask for help from others, he’d rather change the world so that he doesn’t have to ask — instead of expressing some humility.
I also have a lot of pride in myself, and I feel deeply for the author. However it looks to me that he’a banging on the wrong door, and instead of waiting for all the people in the world to change a lot, he could change himself a little.
> If your worth is not determined by your productivity, then what remains of you underneath it all?
Worth and productivity are synonyms in direction, wouldn't a better phrase not track either? It's difficult to answer anything other than naught without some mental gymnastics because the words themselves are implicit.
How about happiness? That is one human quality that is not directly tied to any of worth, value or productivity.
My situation is similar. I'm exhausted from life, and I don't even have a disability
I got scammed and lost all the money I had saved up. AI reduced my workload, and because of the war, factory expansions were canceled, so for a while I had no work at all.
I've worked 96-hour weeks for six months at a time. Even working nonstop, I can't save any money. I don't have enough to buy a house, and I'm exhausted. I've done so many different kinds of work, but no matter how much I work, the money just doesn't accumulate. It's not that I haven't tried.
Good jobs are only in big cities, and to live in a big city, you have to pay rent. If I pay rent, my salary doesn't accumulate. I can't even think about getting married.
I really gave it my all, but I don't know anymore. Why is my life like this? By the time I paid off my student loans, I was already in my mid-30s, and I still can't even think about marriage.
I just work and try hard, but the money doesn't add up. It feels like my life has gone wrong. I used to laugh at people who gambled or traded coins, but now I feel like a fool for working so diligently
You gotta start prioritizing 'the soul' over what you think you're supposed to be doing. "Can't even think about marriage?" I bet marriage will take you further than you think. Maybe. But you gotta try. Try coming at it from a different angle. The answer doesn't leap off the page when you tick enough boxes. The answer becomes apparent when you take it.
hEDS and POTS, which is what the author claims to suffer from, are not good reasons for a disability. hEDS is responsive to particular supplements, especially methylfolate, etc., so build up your stack. For me, POTS was caused by a PPI drug, and eventually remedied upon discontinuation of the drug in combination with daily exercise. Afaik, there is no genetic basis for POTS, and if it there were one, it would be unlikely to be the cause. As I keep telling myself, choosing inaction is a personal choice.
The author lays most of this at the feet of capitalism, and I agree that the system has excesses that have contributed to the atomization of society, which can cause people to slip through the cracks, but...has any other system been obviously _better_ at supporting those with disabilities? Did feudalism or communism do this better?
(I think about the "worst system, except for all the other systems" quote often)
Democratic socialism. The US has quite a few such experiments like the New Deal. And they've been quite a bit better than the grinding, unbridled industrialism that consumed and spat out young and old alike.
Read up on "democratic socialism" because it was a term I wasn't familar with. I have to say people should be mindful of words and ideas meaning different things in different places.
"Capatalism" means something different in the USA than it does in say France. In the USA, any attempt to keep check of or reign in capatalism is seen as socialism, and governemnt overreach. In France it's seen as common sense, though they would still say they practice "capatalism". Similarly, taking care of people that can't take care of themselves is obvious in France, but seen as nearing socialism in the USA.
It's important to note, because when people go for things like "democratic socialism", they may not be against what they think they're against.
>the ones most countries implement don't work very well
I guess this is the basis of my critique: the author seems to be writing as though capitalism is robbing him of some ideal that would otherwise exist: invoking the so-called "Protestant work ethic" to describe a system that took over the world and made us all worse off.
That doesn't feel right to me because I don't think previous economic systems did better at protecting the vulnerable. (But I'm not sure, that's why I framed my comment the way I did!)
Most replies to me are framed more as either "do what Europe does" (but the author lives in Europe!) or "we haven't gotten there yet" - which...sure! We shouldn't accept the status quo. But that's a different argument.
Why limit the discussion to the current system and past ones? That's like saying memory safety is bad because before C++ there was assembly code and that was even less safe.
I think most people conflate the 2 things the current problems are not just because of capitalism but rather the capture of the government by capitalism.
I agree with you. I don't believe pure capitalism or pure socialism works; we need something in between. China is somewhat like that, but because of the type of government it has, it is viewed with a jaundiced eye. Countries exist for their citizens, so things like healthcare, housing, and most infrastructure should be provided or subsidized by the government.
I bristle a bit when it comes to discussing productivity an an ill that is _specific_ to capitalism. It's certainly an ill of capitalism as well, but I don't know many other systems where productivity is not valued and lack of productivity does not come with downsides.
As another commenter has pointed out, the surest ally in this case is family. Not all families are tight, but families are largely the ones who will take care of the indigent in a compassionate, long-term way.
The productivity topic is interesting. From my view, it really is _people_ that require you to be useful. Different social or political systems can be better or worse about this, but all of them are sort of playing with the same base human behavior.
Try being the one who constantly needs help from your friend. That friend will leave eventually. And they'll leave in an emotional sense. They'll sort of think less of you, or be a bit disgusted.
Try getting a woman to be sexually attracted to you if you constantly need her help or support. Outside of a few interesting fetishists, you're out of luck.
You don't even need to imagine the workplace scenario -- you already know how that works.
But picture a pre-industrial, barter economy. How well would you do when you're not able to contribute? There is history of people caring for the old, infirm, and indigent ... but remember that when you go that far back you're talking about kin-groups. You're taking care of your grandfather, or your great uncle. Not some random guy you happened upon.
There's nothing wrong with valuing productivity and unvaluing unproductivity, but capitalism fetishizes it to the extreme, kills people who don't have it, and defines the One True Productivity that you have to meet to not be killed. A lot of artists suffer from this last point where they are being productive but not in ways that capitalism values.
>A lot of artists suffer from this last point where they are being productive but not in ways that capitalism values.
I'm just not convinced. If there's not a market for your art, yes you will not be able to sell it and make a living. But, in other systems:
- Your art disagrees with the soviet government, so you are sent to a torture / labor camp to work until you die.
- The soviet government does not care about your art, but you're still in the soviet union and everyone is poor so no one can pay for your art anyhow.
- It's the 1600s Europe, and you're only sort-of in a capitalist society given modern definitions, but the Church doesn't like your writing so you've been locked up.
- Your are a subsistence farmer, and have absolutely no chance of creating art whatsoever given how busy and poor you are.
- You're a subsistence farmer, and somehow you manage to make art, but the only people you have access to are the ~2,000 people in your immediate vicinity, and none of them have any money to pay for your art to support you, and they are not willing to trade a chicken for a song.
vs.
- You have the most niche art you can imagine, (eg: Dark Souls analysis, or Harry Potter fanfiction where Snape gets pregnant and is constantly embarrassed by it) but due to (lousy, imperfect) platforms such as Patreon and the internet you can get enough patronage to support yourself, even if it's just barely.
I'm just not convinced that artists are doing worse now (in terms of per-capita artists) than other times in history, or under other systems.
>oh my god can we stop acting like the only possibilities are american "capitalism" or soviet "communism", it's exhausting
No way -- I threw in 1600s Europe as well as subsistence farming in there.
I think the Patreon point is really interesting. I really don't like Patreon or anything like that, but is a bit miraculous. There's some really, really, niche art up there. That sort of art would have NEVER found an audience, even as recently as the 90s. If it had to be on TV, or in a book, no publisher or producer would have touched it. And even if they had, said publisher or producer would have never managed to find the 0.001% of the population who was interested in it.
The kind of niche art that's available now was simply never possible in any other time in history.
A potential counter-argument could be something like: yes, in the past artists could not have just produced just what they wanted, but perhaps more artists were previously employable (even if they had to just make paintings or Jesus or some other popular thing they didn't really care for.)
The site is full of people, who believe in capitalism like a religion, slave their life to labour while being paid enough to feel good and better than others.
The claim that the link between human value and productivity originated in capitalist societies (or via Protestant work ethic) is such bullshit. You think hunter-gatherers valued each other for their "inner worth"? Keep dreaming.
At any rate, judging by the author's 4.3k subscribers, he is doing fine. Whether you react with a heart emoji or revulsion, broadcasting sob stories into the internet is productivity -- in the attention economy, something that only exists in rich, capitalist societies.
It’s always there in the subtext of a lot of alt-med and the sort of pure-eating wellness stuff, that if it doesn’t work then you’re just not trying hard enough and your mindset is wrong. Still got cancer? Well clearly you didn’t juice, enema and positive-think enough! That’s the flipside of every “you can heal yourself!” assertion.
I feel very sorry for this person, as much as I aspire to be out of work one day, I aspire to be out of work on my terms and with enough financial resource to support myself, and I fully expect to still be able to support myself. This is very different from having to face the fact you can’t, and adjust to that fact and then struggle like hell just to survive on barely adequate provision.
Tech people in particular seem to see themselves (ourselves…) as capable, independent and entirely autonomous beings. Being forced to reframe your whole existence must be very tough.
I mean... I'm sure it's not easy being a disabled artist but this feels a lot like undeservedly blaming the rest of society.
The benefits cliff is a real problem (and the UK seems intent on making it worse). But "ooo nasty capitalism doesn't force people to pay for art"... Come on. And disabled people have it better than at any time in history. The UK is bankrupting itself to pay for PiPs and other benefits (and pensions unfortunately).
Ffs, this whole thread is just full of toxic positivity as far as I'm concerned.
The reality of it is that the reason why it hurts is you're essentially being kept alive artificially. As at any other time period you'd have just starved to death or died to freezing a winter or two later, putting an end to the misery.
Can you still have fun moments and learn to live your life as a glorified leech? Sure, a lot of people do so, and our society has decided that's for the best.
And in case you or someone else has an issue with the term leech here I'm going to be extra clear: you need to face reality to get over this pain. Accept what you have been forced to become. Then you can make an effort to life with your lot in life, and potentially find acceptance to the cards you've been dealt.
Probably wasn't your fault and almost certainly unfair, but that's just how life is
> If your worth is not determined by your productivity, then what remains of you underneath it all?
Everything else. You are worth so much more than your productivity.
I'm glad I never got sucked into the protestant work ethic, since defining yourself based on your labour and the value you generate from that sounds woefully narrow-minded (this doesn't feel like quite the right word, but close enough).
It's probably helpful to at least expand 'productivity' to something beyond just what is useful for your work. Reading the classics is productive because it's enjoyable, even though it doesn't help with your work. Ditto spending time with friends and whatever else that doesn't have anything to do with work.
I hope we figure out what to do about disabilities, since the current status quo is inhumane in large parts of the world (and even in places with good benefits systems, getting that support isn't trivial).
Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you airily define ‘productivity’ as reading the classics and spending time with friends?
We have enough excess in society that we can spare enough of those things to those who are unable to take care of themselves.
It almost seems as if you are trolling. Surely we can, at least, agree that the excesses you mention exist only because of those who produce.
A society where just stating this is called trolling is such a sad society. I pity you and you brainwashed siblings.
it's a very common trolling tactic to imply a controversial thing while overtly saying a less controversial thing
They are not trolling. They are stating the simple, undeniable fact that there is more than enough to go around and if we had a more equitable distribution of resources, we could take care of everyone with disabilities 10x over with plenty to spare.
> we could take care of everyone with disabilities 10x over with plenty to spare.
Yes, like the 40%[1] of Stanford undergrads who have disabilities. The greatest long term impediment to what you're suggesting is folks who don't need the help taking advantage of the resource distribution. It both massively increases the costs and sours those who have to pay into the system on the whole thing leading to a backlash.
If we could just solve this quirk of human nature, we'd be all set.
[1] https://fortune.com/article/rise-in-elite-students-seeking-a...
Have I said anything to the contrary?
You’re missing the point of the article and of the post. Why do you assume that someone who reads and takes breaks is unproductive? Should we get a second job instead? I spend 8 hours sleeping. Would you like me to work those hours as well? I spend some of my day cooking and cleaning and raising my son. Would you rather I keep working instead?
Maybe it’s time that we worked together to gain that time back for you instead of you fighting for us to lose our free time.
Don't expect much sympathy here, as per many comments folks are mostly on purely capitalistic camps to the extreme. Its distillation of US approach to work and society, something I've grown to detest by mere fact of living in much more humane, while vastly more financially efficient system that doesn't use my tax money to kill civilians all over the world (none other than Swiss system and yes it could easily work elsewhere if people reduced their egos significantly, which they won't).
Its everybody for themselves in US, fuck the rest, the more the better. Some 'society' it is. The more miserable and poor others are, the better you can exploit them right. How horrible the world would be if those folks stocking shelves in shops or trimming your hair would also have a shot for a decent life.
Middle class is for mediocre suckers, either your are a star (at least from financial perspective, usually the rest of life is very opposite of it) or a loser. Can't say I can respect that system, but as long as I am not part of it nor bombed by its military industrial complex to death I simply don't care. Folks can stay and be part of that system or leave, that part of freedom is still sorta there.
Switzerland got its wealth predominantly by shielding money stolen from around the entire world. I'm glad US ended that carnival of happiness to a large degree in 2009.
Whatever the US did in 2009 doesn't seem to have had any long term effect on Swiss GDP. It dipped in 2009, like everyone else, from the "global financial crisis" but recovered the next year.
https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/national-eco...
Do you know how tone deaf this is? Some people literally can’t afford their medication and you are saying “meh, we have too much already”
We have enough medication. People not being able to afford it has little to do with whether or not we have (or could easily make) an excess.
Insulin costs ~3 USD to make per vial. People not being able to afford ~30 USD insulin is not because we have too little medication. It's because there are leeches all over the healthcare system.
And if you genuinely cannot afford it, you should get it for free, as part of a proper healthcare system, which the US famously lacks.
“We have enough excess in society”
How are you measuring this? Hopefully something better than stock prices.
The other commentor mentioned food and clothes to you. I'll add that I can get food for free locally (soup kitchen style, although I don't think they actually serve soup) if I really need it.
Around 10% of houses in the US are vacant, although I'm sure a fair amount are that for good reasons (shitty locations, old and worn to high hell). This to me sounds like a resource allocation problem and not a lack-of-resources problem.
Energy could be free close to free if we made the right choices. The sun's right there. Unfortunately, we've been stuck in a political rut for a long while, making long term projects like 'do something about global warming' and 'transition away from fossil fuels' uninteresting.
Many medicines are only expensive due to patents and making up for research costs. Actual production is usually cheap as hell.
I don't have all the answers. People smarter than me might have them. But I do know that we can do better.
Yes to all of this, and want to double stress the Housing theory of everything [1]. Most of the "scarcity" people feel today in the North American context is driven by housing. And there simply isn't enough of it. And citing badly measured vacancy stats does a huge disservice to the effort to fix this.
I agree we can do a lot better. And I have no moral qualms about giving the excess away to everyone who needs it. But I need people to admit that it will require a lot of work till we can sufficiently claim we have a real realizable "excess".
And that work requires the current system to work more "efficiently" and with "higher productivity", in the economic definition of the word, not as a personal valuation as OP defines.
[1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
Housing is clearly the biggest problem, yes, and I doubt you'll find anyone who'll disagree that it's not a big problem. But it's a big problem for political reasons. If we all woke up tomorrow and thought 'we need 10 million new homes', I'm sure it could happen. It's just not in the short-term (and long-term?) interests of the economy as it is now. Maybe we should do something about that?
Or maybe, just maybe, we should do it because it's a thing that raises people's quality of life? I only care about the economy insofar as it helps actual people on the ground, so I'll be happy to ignore it for things like this, assuming that doesn't put us in an even worse rut than we are in now.
>If we all woke up tomorrow and thought 'we need 10 million new homes
The cost (no profit) of 1 Million homes where people want to live (where your community is), would be roughly 0.5 Trillion to 1 Trillion USD [1]. So, I don't think this is true :(.
We simply don't have the construction workers and the supply-chains to make it happen. Again, these are fixable problems and I want this to be true. But it is not today.
[1]: https://medium.com/@dtxtransitposts/how-much-does-it-actuall...
> The cost (no profit) of 1 Million homes where people want to live (where your community is), would be roughly 0.5 Trillion to 1 Trillion USD [1].
That sounds worth it to me.
> We simply don't have the construction workers and the supply-chains to make it happen. Again, these are fixable problems and I want this to be true. But it is not today.
Sounds like something we need to fix then.
What if we let people build their own homes and gave them courses on how to do that?
Also 1 trillion dollars sounds like a single year of national debt interest, the total amount spent and destroyed by the Iran war, or the Pentagon's black budget. I'm sure we can give up one of those for a year to fix every economic problem plaguing the country.
By the fact medicine has an expiration date on the bottle. You can have so much of it you don't have the chance to use it all before it expires.
The world produces so much excess food we pay farmers not to grow it and fast fashion brands burn unsold merchandise in the desert.
...and the food part, it's been this way for almost a hundred years now - with agricultural productivity skyrocketing in between. But 100 years ago, chronic food overproduction bankrupting farmers, was already a persistent problem. Since then, lots of bright minds spent their lifetimes to invent new ways to bribe or coerce farmers into growing as little as possible for their own safety.
In the US, it can be measured by the overstocked food that gets discarded everyday, and by the houses that are vacant nine months a year.
Just a note those "vacancies" include dilapidated buildings and housing that is between leases (literally all the housing on craigslist is included in that number).
Vacancies in most major cities is near-zero. As a market-rate renter, when someone says "we have so much excess", I have no idea what you're talking about.
This assumes production of food is the bottleneck rather than distribution. If distribution is actually the bottleneck, overstocked food is not a measure of excess in society.
But individual grocery stores throw out a lot of food each day. So the problem isn't distribution, it's that nobody bought it.
By that logic someone working in a care home is worth less than someone building a gambling app. There's little relationship between salary and what people deserve, it's mostly just luck to have skills that happen to be in short supply.
> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc.
The able do. The disabled would love to work hard and earn a nice paycheck. It's a privilege to be able to work and be in good health. Hopefully you don't have to learn that the hard way.
A privilege, really? Who bestows that privilege?
I am certainly sympathetic to people who are genuinely disabled.
That doesn’t mean we have to lie to ourselves that they are being productive by sitting around reading books.
> A privilege, really? Who bestows that privilege?
You do
> I am certainly sympathetic to people who are genuinely disabled.
Agreed, and it can be uncomfortable to sort through what's genuine or not. One of my favorite scenes is in the big Lebowski where Walter confronts the other Lebowski claiming he's not a cripple and lifts him out of his wheelchair...Funny and sad all at once.
> That doesn’t mean we have to lie to ourselves that they are being productive by sitting around reading books.
Not asking for anyone to lie to themselves about what they feel is productive, rather giving another perspective to hopefully help people appreciate being able to work.
At least for food, we went from 80% 500 years ago to about 1-5% now. Maybe less, soon, when fruit picking robots come online. Work is not destiny.
Does it matter? In the US, we send a sizable portion of our paychecks to the government's Social Security program so it can provide for us in this exact scenario. The government dictated the terms and we upheld our end of the contract on pain of incarceration. Now it's time for the government to uphold their end.
Technically, SS provides for the next generation. We pay into it to the next generation can use that, not the current one. It's a pyramid scheme meant to pay out early and then die. The math doesn't work if the individual expects to retire on it. It's a great scam.
It's not my problem if the math doesn't work, or if my money doesn't pay for me. The contract as presented to me by the government is "You will pay into this system, it provides Social Security to the aged and disabled. If you do not pay into this system, you will be judged guilty of a criminal offense and sentenced accordingly." The specifics of who pays and for what are the government's problem, not mine. Whether or not the government is guilty of fraud or misrepresentation does not affect the terms. I fail to see why I should consider the government free of the obligations they themselves have mandated.
> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc
You could say the same thing about software engineers. But someone spending their days just creating JS frameworks is oh-so-productive and paid enough money every month to buy several years’ worth of food and shelter.
If they are JS frameworks that enable other engineers to build applications that support farms, and banks, and taxi services and insurance companies and mines and factories, etc. then obviously that is productive.
If someone is willingly paying money for their labor then I see little point in questioning the worth of that exchange.
When JS engineers start asking for public money to support them writing JS frameworks that no one wants to pay for, we can revisit this topic.
My point is that, unless you think that the purpose of human existence is to maximise insurance profitability and mining throughput, lifetime earnings potential is not a good proxy for someone’s value to society.
I think it is sad that many of the people that have the largest positive impact on society — teachers, care assistants and the like — are also some of worst paid.
When I was young, to buy a tee shirts for the kids you have to walk like 10 block to visit like 5 shops and compare prices. Let's say 1 or 2 hour and the choices were quite limited and you must keep a mental list of the location and quality of each shop. [The cheap ones may open only at the same time you have to be in the office.]
Now you can go to Mercado Libre (the local version of Amazon) compare prices and see the reviews and buy them in 15 minutes. There are a lot of more choices and the prices are lower (or higher if you like fancy stuff). It arrives home at the afternoon.
Some software engineer has to program it. Does s/he deserve a few bucks for the time s/he saved all of us?
I mean, if someone is willing to pay them, why not?
Even hundreds and thousands of years ago, people would put semi transparent rocks onto shiny metal shapes and sell those useless gadgets for a lot of money.
If customers are willing to pay for that, it means that those people made something worth that money.
Stephen Hawking wouldn't exist in our society if we didn't care for people like him.
People who the current system fully agrees should be paid like dirt while others party, that's who.
Billionaires, evidently. Why else would they deserve a million times what you make in your entire lifetime, weren't for the fact they're a million times more productive than you? In fact, if one were to die tomorrow that'd be like the loss to the world of a million of you, whereas were you to do the same, that'd be a loss of only one of you. This is also why you can be downsized without that impacting anything important, while downsizing a single billionaire would be a global tragedy.
Or at least, that's the logical consequence of that line of reasoning. If that's incorrect, where's the error in the reasoning?
Increasingly, the answer is a “what”, not a “who”.
This has been happening for more than a hundred years now... 90%+ of the people have been farming not that long ago, and mechanized farming equipment has replaced 95%+ of those workers.
This doesn't mean 4 hour workweeks or majority of people not needing to work, but it means that some of you can be social media managers, others can integrate AI chatbots in apps that don't need an AI chatbot, some can rewrite existing software in whatever the language of the week is, etc. Without offloading all that farming to machines, we'd never have what we now consider for "normal" and "must have".
Those few farmers left (2-3% of the workforce, depeding on the country) want to earn money too, so they can buy smartphones, watch netflix and have that smart toilet seats that open automatically and wash your butthole. If all those replaced-by-machines workers don't produce all that, where's the point in farming food for them?
Let’s assume that all human labor goes through the same transition as agriculture: within a single human lifetime, 98% of all the human work is replaced by highly efficient machines and a small minority of highly productive people. If only 2% of the population have the required skills/talents/ownership to remain productive, on what basis does the remaining 98% participate in the economy? The answer has always been: people will invent new ways to be economically productive, but if the agriculture ladder of labor generalizes across the economy - what is left for the average, unexceptional, run-of-the-mill man on the street?
Is the majority of jobs that are related to this space and most people do here productive, by this definition? I would say it is destructive even.
At least what OP says produces no harm at worst.
Many places around the world, we work for what is needed, not for hitting it big.
But since you ask, also many victims of late stage capitalism explored in modern forms of slavery without work rights, so that richer nations can enjoy cheap electronics and clothing.
What a tone deaf comment.
> Reading the classics is productive because it's enjoyable, even though it doesn't help with your work
It's productive in that it is hard and a sign of high intelligence. Don't believe me and swap it out with Candy Crush. Is playing Candy Crush productive?
This obsession about people with disabilities is weird. Yes, people with real disabilities exist. But focusing on pathologizing every day life is extremely harmful. This constant focus on "mental health" ironically worsens mental health. For instance, any mild discomfort is "anxiety". Most of these things are pretty normal range of emotions. Roughly 20% of undergraduate students at Ivy Plus institutions (including Harvard, Brown, and Cornell) are registered as disabled and receive accommodations. This figure has surged dramatically over time, rising from fewer than 3% at Harvard and under 6% at Cornell in 2015. This is obviously partly cheating the system, but it's also this harmful over-focus on "mental health"
Hard work is a good in it of itself. People pay lip service to the idea that we shouldn't be productive or measure our "worth" (whatever that is) by productivity but they don't live it. For instance, I don't know any parent that doesn't push or at least hope their children work hard at something. Anything. Do something hard. Play a sport. Learn an instrument. Study math. This is common sense.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/26/opinion/mental-health-exe...
> Roughly 20% of undergraduate students at Ivy Plus institutions (including Harvard, Brown, and Cornell) are registered as disabled and receive accommodations. This figure has surged dramatically over time, rising from fewer than 3% at Harvard and under 6% at Cornell in 2015.
That seems to check out with the period people started getting more addicted to social media, pandemic side-effects and increased awareness of mental health issues
I believe the amount of people dealing with crippling anxiety these days is higher than that 20% figure, and we are still under-diagnosing it
> Hard work is a good in it of itself.
Hard disagree tbh but that's more of a personal values discussion
> Hard disagree tbh but that's more of a personal values discussion
I'm curious about this. Do you have children? Do you look at someone who does nothing hard in his life with indifference? Someone chooses to spend their life playing video games in their parent's basement. Do you think that's an equally admirable life than someone that spends his life doing hard things?
> Roughly 20% of undergraduate students at Ivy Plus institutions (including Harvard, Brown, and Cornell) are registered as disabled and receive accommodations. This figure has surged dramatically over time, rising from fewer than 3% at Harvard and under 6% at Cornell in 2015.
I think it's naive to assume that this phenomenon reflects an actual increase in disability rather than a cohort who has been raised to pathologize every human difference as a sign of some disability and then use those diagnoses to secure advantages in systems meant to help people with actual special needs.
There's clearly a lot of pretending going on. On the extreme end look at the numerous DID[1] "influencers". These folks are plainly pretending to have a debilitating mental disorder (which strangely never prevents them from going on podcasts and YouTube interviews) to curry fame.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder
Agree completely. Its hard to tease out what percent is a cheating response due to increasing accommodations and actual pathologizing.
Some personal observations, I would say about 90%+ of "emotional support dogs" are fake. And I can't remember the last time I saw someone that was actually disabled use a disabled parking spot. They always have the proper license plate or mirror tag, but every time I've seen someone enter their vehicle it would appear that they do not need special accommodations afforded by the preferred parking spot.
> Is playing Candy Crush productive?
If you enjoy it, then yes.
> Hard work is a good in it of itself. People pay lip service to the idea that we shouldn't be productive or measure our "worth" (whatever that is) by productivity but they don't live it. For instance, I don't know any parent that doesn't push or at least hope their children work hard at something. Anything. Do something hard. Play a sport. Learn an instrument. Study math. This is common sense.
Hard work is good insofar as you enjoy it or it leads you to things that you do enjoy. Do those things if you enjoy them. Hard things are enjoyable too. I stopped doing most of them because I didn't enjoy them.
If you consider Candy Crush as productive I guess words just don't have meaning anymore so there's no point arguing.
I highly doubt you actually believe this, but I have been wrong before.
> If you consider Candy Crush as productive I guess words just don't have meaning anymore so there's no point arguing.
I'm using the word differently to you. It's productive insofar as you enjoy doing it.
Just to make a point, have these two definitions from Wiktionary:
> Capable of producing something, especially in abundance; fertile.
Capable of producing enjoyment, yup. I'd call playing Candy Crush productive if enjoyment is your goal.
> Yielding good or useful results
The good result here is, again, the enjoyment of whatever. If you enjoy playing Candy Crush, then playing it gives you a good or useful result, namely the enjoyment of playing it.
> I highly doubt you actually believe this, but I have been wrong before.
If someone truly finds Candy Crush enjoyable to the point they do it everyday or whatever, and we're not talking addiction (so they're not actually enjoying it, but rather feel compelled to do it), then more power to them. I wish my desires were so simple.
Oh come on. Parent is right, at this point, words have no meaning. By this logic, everything produces something, therefore everything is productive.
> By this logic, everything produces something, therefore everything is productive.
Yes. That word is only useful insofar as you say or imply a goal. Candy Crush is not productive in gathering food.
Most people imply the goal to be money. I'd rather imply enjoyment. See my OP.
And yet, you seemed to have been using it the way the rest of us are in this discussion, right here:
You are worth so much more than your productivity.
I think the issue here is that everyone else is having a discussion about economics, how we efficiently allocate scarce resources as a society, and the role that individual productivity plays in that allocation. You're having a discussion about enjoying your life. Which is great, if you want to play Candy Crush all day and call it "productive" because that makes you feel better, go for it.
But I'm not interested in paying your bills so you can.
YES I am vegan and YES I eat meat. We exist
Relevant:
In Praise of Idleness
https://ia801002.us.archive.org/27/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.4...
The thing that sucks is it doesn’t matter if you don’t get sucked in. Society is and as a result even if you the individual feel valued society largely will not value you. Of course it’s better for your mental health to escape the trap of believing your value as a person _is_ you value to capitalism but that won’t put food on the table or get you the care you need.
This is something that needs to change at the cultural level but is incredibly hard to change because in order to do so you need to convince most people that the foundational understanding of their worth as a person needs to come from somewhere else.
could you please summarize in short what you meant here as keypoint?
I'm not sure we are interpreting this right,based also on reactions and troll references in clear contrast to your other comment.
also the comment
"I've considered suicide because I was unable to make ends meet. I don't want others to experience that. Is that too much to ask?"
was important and extremely insightful, wanted to ask what you meant with "was unable to nake ends meet" which type of ends?
> could you please summarize in short what you meant here as keypoint?
> I'm not sure we are interpreting this right,based also on reactions and troll references in clear contrast to your other comment.
I'm not sure what's unclear about my first comment, but I'll try to rephrase with new words.
People are people and deserve to be treated humanely as such. Productivity is but one aspect of people, and not the only one you can ascribe any value to. People are more than their productivity.
Productivity is often just used to mean 'how much money you earn', but I find it useful to expand its meaning to 'how well you're doing what you're enjoying'. If you spend time reading books because you enjoy it, that's productive. If you spend time at work earning money, that's also productive, since money is needed to, ya know, stay alive, and thus let you enjoy life, for what it's worth.
My point about disabilities is probably better expanded by the article in question, unless you have any pointed questions at that.
> also the comment
> "I've considered suicide because I was unable to make ends meet. I don't want others to experience that. Is that too much to ask?"
> was important and extremely insightful, wanted to ask what you meant with "was unable to nake ends meet" which type of ends?
The instance I had in mind was one where I was in danger of not having food to eat at the end of a month. I wasn't in any danger for that matter. I can get free food locally if I'm desperate. I can call a friend and ask for a favour (and friends have asked me!). But getting to that point is well beyond the point where my mind goes 'oh ffs, just end it, it's not worth the bother'. If someone is at that point, they should get help, but ideally, they shouldn't get to that point in the first place. Prevention is better than a cure (although we should work on cures too!).
thanks a lot for the clarification and effort for it.
Maybe the other reactions made it generally more unclear, but was unsure about the core message.
This is much more clear and direct, and yes I was believing you meant something in that direction.
Regarding the other comment, thanks also, I understand that feeling the moment of having to ask something like that, but I think that if fought with enough pragmacity I think I would try to overcome the psychological part because the need would overcome the shame, and that would overcome the situation. or that is not feasible in that case?
I'm sure it's feasible, but it's treating the symptom rather than the disease. I'd rather people never get to the point of having to call a friend because they can't afford food today than them not feeling shame when it does happen.
"Your worth" is a bit of a vague and meaningless term (everyone is worth infinite in some sense). But if we want to talk about your general ability to secure more comfortable living conditions then your worth is very much linked to your productivity. The average living conditions are largely determined by how productive the average person is. There are some hard-to-escape balance equations at play there.
Good vibes are nice and all, but affirming each other isn't going to actually make the world more comfortable. Looking after disabled people requires an enormous productive surplus from the rest of us and a recognition that the people creating the enormous surplus are in practice worth quite a bit more than the people who are on the receiving end of charity. Playing pretend on this topic is just going to lead to people being worse off.
> Looking after disabled people requires an enormous productive surplus from the rest of us and a recognition that the people creating the enormous surplus are in practice worth quite a bit more than the people who are on the receiving end of charity.
We already don't do this with regards to normal people. Being a farmer isn't a particularly high-paying nor high-status job. I don't mind changing this around if we get a more humane world in return, but these issues seems orthogonal to each other.
Related: "Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions." (Jesus, in Luke 12:15).
Life is not about how much you make or how much you're worth. It's about being worth something to someone. It's about having meaningful relationships.
As a typical software nerd, it took me decades to get that.
I was raised as a Buddhist and in Buddhism it says that the biggest wealth you can have in your life is good health. Most of us take it for granted, that how lucky we are to born without a disability and can function doing daily tasks like taking a shower, going to the toilet without the help of someone else. I cannot imagine how difficult life would be with a disability and even thinking about it makes me anxious
I always try and remember that the majority of the creatures of this planet do not have the luxury to live in an environment where they can freely choose to shield themselves from bad weather and regulate temperature of their surroundings to their convenience.
At some point many years ago I read that the family, not the individual, is the building block of society. It might have been Chesterton or Friedman as I read a lot of both when I was young. It certainly is a lot easier to hold the line when you have a squad of half a dozen to a dozen with you (wife/husband/children/brothers/sisters/uncles etc). If the state is there, then you are fortunate, but I wouldn't want to count on it myself.
It's cultural.
I've read that German society, for example, is largely based on contracts between the family unit and the state. Sweden, as a contrast, is largely based on contracts between individuals and the state.
As an example, Germany treats a married couple as a fiscal unit, Sweden abolished joint taxation in the 70s. Swedish parental leave is allocated per individual, and is mostly non-transferable.
In a lot of ways, individualism is produced by state contract in Sweden.
I know several families who are absolutely not a building block of society. Some not by choice.
I'll never understand how people think a personal anecdote contradicts a more general point attained by evaluating collected data that would include those anecdotes.
e.g. The claim: Planes are a very safe way to travel.
Followed by someone jumping up to say: I know a person who was injured in a rough landing.
Note I'm not claiming either the individual or family is the atomic unit here just pointing out that your contribution doesn't contradict or even narrow the argument.
HN commenters do this all the time. A lot of people here treat comments as mathematical or logic proofs. They see a statement like "Planes are a very safe way to travel", and their minds go to:
∀x(X(x)⟹(Y(x))
and then they make it their mission to find the falsifying x sub 0 example.
This is how it has always been throughout history (and still is in most parts of the world).
Individual is part of nuclear family, nuclear family is part of extended family, extended family is part of tribe, etc. When one part is in need, the others jump in to help.
Wasn't "nuclear family" something marketers invented in post-war USA to sell more houses?
The term I am familiar with prior to that was "immediate family" (as opposed to "extended family").
You come across the term a lot in old genealogy books. For instance in "The History and Genealogy of the Prentice, Or Prentiss Family" (from 1883) contains:
> All his immediate family, himself, wives, and children, are dead.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_History_and_Genealo...
Nuclear family is indeed a recent development and started with industrialization and modern capitalism. While we use the same term, 'family', to refer to (pre-)historic forms of family, too, those family types had little or nothing in common with the modern definition, when it comes to power, inheritance, law, sex, love.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_the_Family%2C_Pr...
> throughout history
Ancient egypt? Roman times? Medieval times? Byzantine times? Pre-colonial Philippines? Pre-colonial America?
I think it may have started in the late 1800s at the earliest. I would need a bit more evidence to be convinced that your model of individual to nuclear to extended etc has been a thing longer than a few centuries, vs the vast majority of human life experience being in nomadic hunter-gathering, villages, farmland, and walled city-states. We just had clans which were all our family. A fellow villager wasn't much different than a cousin. The individual and nuclear family, not so much a thing.
There's extensive written evidence as far back as writing goes of recognizable family units. Here[1] we see a young man in 18th century B.C.E writing to his mother to ask for new clothing for school. It refers to household units with mothers and fathers having discrete roles. In 1250 B.C.E.[2] Egyptian workers took days off to take care of their wives, or sick members of their immediate household. Cross cultural examples abound. In Mexica (Aztec) culture adult life began upon marriage where a couple was given a small house and plot of land.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_Iddin-Sin_to_Zinu
[2] https://mymodernmet.com/ancient-egyptians-attendance-record/
> the vast majority of human life experience being in nomadic hunter-gathering, villages, farmland, and walled city-states.
in which they lived in families, extended families and tribes as the primary units. I didn't understand your argument at all.
The nuclear family lived separate from the extended family. In separate cities. This is a new thing. You lived with your clan in history, not apart. The nuclear family is completely separated physically from their extended families, even across village lines.
Oh, I see. I agree with the other commenters, I think you may be focusing too much on the "nuclear" part of GP's comment. I interpreted that more as "immediate" family, and I think throughout history that people were most likely to rely on immediate family, then extended, then general kin.
I think I'd need quite a lot of evidence that families weren't the major unit of society. A hunter-gatherer tribe is an extended family, so that only proves the point. If there's more than about 30 people in one then surely family based factions will form within it to some extent.
Probably you're focusing too much on the parent comment's mention of nuclear family. Even that, despite only being named a few decades ago, is likely to exist to some extent. Even in some ancient tribe or village, most people would favour their spouse (or equivalent) or child over a cousin or niece/nephew if some dispute formed. That hardly seems controversial.
It was _especially_ like this further back. You literally could not survive without the tribe, and the tribe had norms-and-values you had to adhere to, some of which were to do with family units. This went for nomads and settlers alike.
Tribes aren't the nuclear family. The nuclear family lives separate from the tribe.
The Odyssey is in theaters right now; it rather famously deals with the importance of family and that's a close to 3000 year old poem.
Not really relevant at all
If you read this article and feel worried about your financial situation if you become disabled, you might look into long-term disability insurance (LTD).
It's a policy where, if you become disabled to the point where you can't work, it pays out $X per month, every year until you're 65. And if you're partly disabled and have to cut back your hours, some policies compensate you for those lost wages.
These LTD policies are expensive, but they DO give you peace of mind about this possibility.
Wouldn't it be marvelous if these were mandatory and paid by state with huge scale benefits ?
I've looked into these kinds of policies a couple of times now, and the premia are just astronomical. (At least from the quotes I've been given).
It's kind of understandable, given that the risk is not all that low. But my guess would be that it's amplified by fraudulent claims in relation to psychological illness, burnout, etc. I asked my insurance guy to exclude those, but, apparently, it's something he can't do.
You can kind of see, how this works for a roofer: If you hurt your leg and can no longer climb a roof, the policy pays. What does it take for me to no longer be able to sit in front of a screen? Well, it would almost have to be something in the psychological realm. Sure, there's the possibility of an illness with chronic pain or cognitive impairment, but those are orders of magnitude less likely, so the psychological stuff is what completely dominates the high premia.
Worker's compensation is similar, and that actually is mandatory for employers to offer in most US states. But IIUC, that's only for injuries that are caused by your job in some way?
It’s for injuries that take place while you’re on the job. Chronic issues are difficult to prove.
don't forget the legal costs insurance to pay the lawyer making the LTD insurance actually pay and a second legal costs insurance to pay the lawyer suing the primary LCI as they will likely claim that case isn't covered by their policy.
> Everytime you meet someone new and they ask “What do you do?” they’re not asking about your passions, hobbies, or the mundane human tasks that take up most of your time; but how you make money, how you turn yourself into income.
1. That's your assumption. They could really ask out of interest. They couldn't care less if that's your main source of income.
2. In some cultures this question will never be asked.
3. If they do ask and judge; what does that matter? If you dislike such personalities, avoid them.
> Much of modern Western culture, particularly in the United States, was shaped by what sociologist Max Weber called the Protestant work ethic: the belief that hard work, discipline, frugality, and productivity were signs of virtue.
I hail from a culture that's decidedly Catholic, but at the same time shares this mindset.
To me it has more to do with farming and the culture around it.
On a farm you have to earn your keep and there's no space for "freeloaders". You work all day, every day and don't complain.
Attitudes are very different in places where there was a significant urban class in the renaissance era already.
Well, everyone saw the freeloader class in Catholic countries too - clergy.
> Max Weber called the Protestant work ethic
...hmm. Not sure that this is quite state-of-the art in sociology today. Crediting a particular strand of a particular religion as the locus of a virtue that confers a clear fitness advantage in and of itself, and without recourse to any outside explanation, seems a bit off.
It's simple, what is written here should be part of basic education for every human being/worker.
For all who mis-interprent the post and focus only on the anti capitalistic view of it, don't worry your body will tell you soon!
Keep an eye for the signals, gut and digestive issues, back stuck and oain, sleeping problems, light sensitivity and irritability. When this will start remember that the problem is probably your work or your working environment not you! And you should react to it!
This article should be eye opening, and support for disabilities should be always there. The abandonment of human beings is the biggest failure of societes.
The idea that "hard work, discipline, frugality" are Calvinist and Protestant inventions may be the most preposterous thing I've read today. As if the rest of the world or previous eras valued self-indulgence and wasteful lavishness.
Or that an unproductive member of society wasn't always scorned or at least viewed negatively by those having to produce.
It's mere slander. It reminds me of the Smithsonian's insistence that punctuality, hard work, objectivity, and politeness were aspects of "white dominant culture" and "white supremacy".
https://web.archive.org/web/20200715153724/https://nmaahc.si...
Some Inuit practiced senilicide up through the 20th century.
"On the other hand, when food did run short, the old and sick were looked upon as drains on the community’s resources. Sometimes they were killed – thrown into the sea, buried alive, locked out in the cold, or starved to death. Far more commonly they were simply abandoned to die. The victim might be taken out in the wilderness and left there, or the whole village might pick up and move away while the old person slept. If the villagers were unexpectedly restored to prosperity, they might go back to rescue those left behind. An abandoned person would also be welcomed back as a full member of the community if he could manage to make his way back to the village on his own. But usually he couldn’t."
https://www.straightdope.com/21343302/did-eskimos-put-their-...
(His title is sarcastic. They aren't known to have done that in particular.)
https://www.britannica.com/money/Protestant-ethic
> I’m 38 years old and I just had to ask my mom if I could borrow money [...] potentially spending the next 50 years without stable income
Without stable income it might be more like 20 years. (I wish you personally a long and bountiful life!)
I'm in a similar boat. As a 3rd child in a somewhat poor family, I do not have any inheritance and actually need to help my mom financially (though it's not a burden). My wife is also from a rural area and her inheritance is barely worth 5 (hypothetical) figures. We never got or will get anything given to us for free. We are in our 40s and we completely gave up on having children (though it was not overall a financially-motivated choice) or property (this one certainly is). Live day to day while I can work, and die without regrets when I cannot anymore. Thanks to AI that happens probably sooner than later.
"But I am trying to believe there is more to a human life than how efficiently it converts energy into labor."
There absolutely is. Labor can be fullfilling and give joy, but for most people it is just an easy tool on how to survive and hopefully have some comfort as well. Do not ever feel ashamed of your labor and even more, do not ever feel ashamed of not doing labor if you don't want to. You have one life in this universe. Make it a nice one.
They may not feel ashamed, but they'll still feel dead when they have no food and shelter.
We could provide food for the poor and disabled who lack or are not using family support with a tiny fraction of our industrial output. We wouldn’t even notice this expenditure, let alone whine about it. But what we are providing is actually “Healthcare. Specialists. Medications. Supplements. Mobility aids. Physical therapy. Accessible housing. Delivery fees when you cannot physically shop for yourself. Ride shares when public transportation is inaccessible. Caregiving.” and this turns out to be enough effort to make society groan and strain.
It’s good that our society is doing this, and we could do better! but why do we have to characterize this existing herculean effort as “fundamentally hostile to bodies that cannot produce consistently”
I'm not clear on what you're trying to say here.
Are you saying we're providing those things instead of food? Or that if we provided food we wouldn't need to provide those things?
If so, that's patently false. A lot more than food is needed to give someone a better standard of living.
I’m saying that providing a better standard of living to adults who cannot work is something we are spending ~3% of our GDP and 5% of all fulltime workers on.
That providing these things is something we are doing, that is good, and that is hard work actually.
Makes sense, thanks for clarifying.
Reducing your worth to mere productivity is myopic. Your worth is what you bring others, and while for some people it can include literal production for others it doesn’t have to. There’s wisdom, emotional support, and many other things.
> Earn slightly too much, and vital support disappears
My reading of this is that the threshhold for the USA government to withdraw financial (and other?) support for disabled people is too low, is that right?
Not only is it too low, but it is the discontinuity in support. This leads to perverse incentives where for the wage you could make, you’d barely clear the threshold to lose benefits and make barely more money than on government support.
This isn’t an argument to remove support—it’s an argument to remove binary thresholds with smooth ramps to incentivize people to work.
> My reading of this is that the threshhold for the USA government to withdraw financial (and other?) support for disabled people is too low, is that right?
In general, step functions (earn 200 get benefits, 201 no benefits) are really really bad from a public policy perspective. If you want to get people out of these dependency traps then you need to taper them more effectively.
Even tapering them is problematic as you end up with astronomically high effective marginal tax rates, but it's better than a hard cut off.
But at a certain level, you'll need a step function to go from 0 (none; no taper) to 1 (taper).
I'm not sure that's true, though most policies are implemented that way. If you get, say, a basic income payout that's a function of the income you make, that function scales all the way from 0 income/max UBI to >= max UBI income/0 UBI.
Not that that's like ... a policy slam-dunk or anything. Even putting aside the massive hurdle of getting UBI enacted into law, you'd still have to cope with sources of unreported income, asset/gift valuation, and so on. But that second category are, at least, tractable problems as evidenced by most countries' tax codes having contingencies to deal with them.
Perhaps too low. Definitely too much of a step function.
This post reminds me of the book recommendation shared on Facebook.
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey
Bedridden and suffering from a neurological disorder, the author recounts the profound effect on her life caused by a gift of a snail in a potted plant and shares the lessons learned from her new companion about her the meaning of her life and the life of the small creature.
I'm very sorry to read of the author's experiences; a permanent disability can be a terrible thing to have to live with.
I would, however, encourage the author that maybe the answer to their question at the end of the article lies in the very world view they rejected half-way through: Christianity. Yes, in the Christian scheme of things, hard work is a virtue and laziness a vice. But to see this as the direct root of ableist capitalism is a severe twisting of the actual Christian teaching.
On the contrary, the Bible simply resounds with two truths, throughout the Old and New Testament:
1) We are to care for those who cannot care for themselves. We have a God-given duty to provide for our family members, community members, and fellow citizens who (for whatever reason) are dependent on our help.
2) Our worth as humans does not depend on who we are, what we can do, how much we own, or any other property residing in ourselves (which may change at any moment). Our worth comes directly from the fact that we are created and loved by an unchanging God. We have worth because we are valuable to the One who made us!
Find a Church which still does this:
"There were no needy ones among them, because those who owned lands or houses would sell their property, bring the proceeds from the sales, and lay them at the apostles’ feet for distribution to anyone as he had need." Acts 4:34-35
The Catholic Church has an ancient tradition asserting the inherent dignity of the human person (imago Dei), regardless of circumstance, including the very recent Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity) subtitled On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.
In our supposedly rational age we've discarded structures which encoded timeless wisdom because we didn't recognize the value. We thought we'd outgrown it, but it turns out that now is when we need it the most.
It’s sad to see people in the thread conflate capitalist greed with the “Protestant work ethic.” Despite the popularity of prosperity gospel teaching in the US, Jesus’ actual teachings clearly condemn greed and oppression of those who have less. A work ethic is still valuable, because goods have to be produced, but the reason we can’t solve worldwide poverty by just writing a check is that oppressive leaders at some point in the chain will use that money to enrich themselves, or they will take it from those who can’t defend themselves.
This isn’t to say that the purpose of Christianity is to fix these social problems, but it’s easy to forget how central generosity and compassion are to the Christian message. “Money Cult” by Chris Lehmann is a good exploration of how American Christianity corrupts these truths.
> Capitalism has defined ‘health’ itself as a capacity to submit oneself to labor
People keep mindlessly saying this but I have never seen evidence for it. Before money was ever invented the idea was already there that if you're healthy you can sustain yourself. All 'capitalism' did was saying "and most people nowadays perform abstract services in trade for an abstraction of a promise of a pinky swear saying "if you trade this pinky swear to me you'll get some food".
It's not 'economic systems that are fundamentally hostile to bodies that cannot produce consistently', it's a fundamental reality of life. Either you are capable of getting enough food for you and your family, either directly by farming, gathering or hunting, or you are not.
You are a fish unable to see water.
Yes, you need food. Guess what, we have plenty of food. But the system for allocating food says this guy doesn't get any because he's disabled.
We could make virtually infinite food as well, but that isn't profitable enough.
Guess what, we have plenty of food
We have plenty of food because of capitalism (particularly the fact that we have plenty of incredibly cheap food grown by a tiny fraction of our population).
You're missing my point. Shortage and conflict is the default. It's not a fault unique to capitalism, and to say that it's its fault is missing the mark.
I'm not saying it's an ought situation or even an is situation; it's that I disagree with his diagnosis of what causes it.
Well right now there isn't a food shortage so what should we do while there isn't a food shortage? Should we perhaps say, that we only jettison the disabled people once we're actually running out of food and are forced to make a tough decision about who to keep alive, instead of doing it 20 years in advance just because there might be a shortage one day?
Whether we as a society support those who cannot productively contribute is orthogonal to capitalism. Capitalism itself has nothing to say about what we do with the increases in productivity. You can see this in many developed countries, which have wealth and surplus thanks to their capitalistic markets, but they also have high taxes and a strong safety net.
Absolutely. It's a gray area though when you become partially able to support yourself. I think this is what the article is pointing out. You have to come to grips with this grim economic reality and it's hard and your future prospects are almost entirely based on where and to whom you were born. The author is simply lucky that they have a safety net. If you are lucky enough to have time to prepare for these things, you can build your own. If you don't prepare, given the opportunity, that's a 'you' problem.
Capitalism reinforces individualistic cultures. The reality is humans aren't so different from ants or other social insects. Individuals don't instantly die when alone, yet we survive better and longer together.
I think part of the lie is that we live for and unto ourselves. We instinctively know it's not true, yet for much of our lives we live as if it is. Until one day we find out what we knew all along.
When you suddenly become unable to "give anything" to others and become the one who must be given to, you feel a disconcerting sense of loss and powerlessness.
I don't think it really has anything to do with capitalism.
The author blames capitalism and religion while greatly indulging in his pride, I think.
It is so much beneath him to ask for help from others, he’d rather change the world so that he doesn’t have to ask — instead of expressing some humility.
I also have a lot of pride in myself, and I feel deeply for the author. However it looks to me that he’a banging on the wrong door, and instead of waiting for all the people in the world to change a lot, he could change himself a little.
> If your worth is not determined by your productivity, then what remains of you underneath it all?
Worth and productivity are synonyms in direction, wouldn't a better phrase not track either? It's difficult to answer anything other than naught without some mental gymnastics because the words themselves are implicit.
How about happiness? That is one human quality that is not directly tied to any of worth, value or productivity.
I'd love to read this. A shame it's on Substack.
My situation is similar. I'm exhausted from life, and I don't even have a disability I got scammed and lost all the money I had saved up. AI reduced my workload, and because of the war, factory expansions were canceled, so for a while I had no work at all.
I've worked 96-hour weeks for six months at a time. Even working nonstop, I can't save any money. I don't have enough to buy a house, and I'm exhausted. I've done so many different kinds of work, but no matter how much I work, the money just doesn't accumulate. It's not that I haven't tried.
Good jobs are only in big cities, and to live in a big city, you have to pay rent. If I pay rent, my salary doesn't accumulate. I can't even think about getting married.
I really gave it my all, but I don't know anymore. Why is my life like this? By the time I paid off my student loans, I was already in my mid-30s, and I still can't even think about marriage.
I just work and try hard, but the money doesn't add up. It feels like my life has gone wrong. I used to laugh at people who gambled or traded coins, but now I feel like a fool for working so diligently
You gotta start prioritizing 'the soul' over what you think you're supposed to be doing. "Can't even think about marriage?" I bet marriage will take you further than you think. Maybe. But you gotta try. Try coming at it from a different angle. The answer doesn't leap off the page when you tick enough boxes. The answer becomes apparent when you take it.
This lacks relevant details.
hEDS and POTS, which is what the author claims to suffer from, are not good reasons for a disability. hEDS is responsive to particular supplements, especially methylfolate, etc., so build up your stack. For me, POTS was caused by a PPI drug, and eventually remedied upon discontinuation of the drug in combination with daily exercise. Afaik, there is no genetic basis for POTS, and if it there were one, it would be unlikely to be the cause. As I keep telling myself, choosing inaction is a personal choice.
In other news, natural selection still applies, even to smart primates in 2026.
The author lays most of this at the feet of capitalism, and I agree that the system has excesses that have contributed to the atomization of society, which can cause people to slip through the cracks, but...has any other system been obviously _better_ at supporting those with disabilities? Did feudalism or communism do this better?
(I think about the "worst system, except for all the other systems" quote often)
Democratic socialism. The US has quite a few such experiments like the New Deal. And they've been quite a bit better than the grinding, unbridled industrialism that consumed and spat out young and old alike.
Read up on "democratic socialism" because it was a term I wasn't familar with. I have to say people should be mindful of words and ideas meaning different things in different places.
"Capatalism" means something different in the USA than it does in say France. In the USA, any attempt to keep check of or reign in capatalism is seen as socialism, and governemnt overreach. In France it's seen as common sense, though they would still say they practice "capatalism". Similarly, taking care of people that can't take care of themselves is obvious in France, but seen as nearing socialism in the USA.
It's important to note, because when people go for things like "democratic socialism", they may not be against what they think they're against.
How does Portugal compare to the US and France? (I actually don't know, though a quick search indicates it's more like France than the US.)
The author of this post apparently lives in Porto.
Even just capitalism with more regulation and safety nets (the ones most countries implement don't work very well) would suffice here.
>the ones most countries implement don't work very well
I guess this is the basis of my critique: the author seems to be writing as though capitalism is robbing him of some ideal that would otherwise exist: invoking the so-called "Protestant work ethic" to describe a system that took over the world and made us all worse off.
That doesn't feel right to me because I don't think previous economic systems did better at protecting the vulnerable. (But I'm not sure, that's why I framed my comment the way I did!)
Most replies to me are framed more as either "do what Europe does" (but the author lives in Europe!) or "we haven't gotten there yet" - which...sure! We shouldn't accept the status quo. But that's a different argument.
Why limit the discussion to the current system and past ones? That's like saying memory safety is bad because before C++ there was assembly code and that was even less safe.
> which...sure! We shouldn't accept the status quo. But that's a different argument.
It's literally the exact same argument.
Restoring something that was lost is very, very different than creating something that hasn't been done before.
There's no way in hell that humans have tried all possible forms of governance and economic systems.
I think most people conflate the 2 things the current problems are not just because of capitalism but rather the capture of the government by capitalism.
If you don't discipline capitalism with a firm hand, double insulation guarantees that it takes over the government.
I agree with you. I don't believe pure capitalism or pure socialism works; we need something in between. China is somewhat like that, but because of the type of government it has, it is viewed with a jaundiced eye. Countries exist for their citizens, so things like healthcare, housing, and most infrastructure should be provided or subsidized by the government.
I bristle a bit when it comes to discussing productivity an an ill that is _specific_ to capitalism. It's certainly an ill of capitalism as well, but I don't know many other systems where productivity is not valued and lack of productivity does not come with downsides.
As another commenter has pointed out, the surest ally in this case is family. Not all families are tight, but families are largely the ones who will take care of the indigent in a compassionate, long-term way.
The productivity topic is interesting. From my view, it really is _people_ that require you to be useful. Different social or political systems can be better or worse about this, but all of them are sort of playing with the same base human behavior.
Try being the one who constantly needs help from your friend. That friend will leave eventually. And they'll leave in an emotional sense. They'll sort of think less of you, or be a bit disgusted.
Try getting a woman to be sexually attracted to you if you constantly need her help or support. Outside of a few interesting fetishists, you're out of luck.
You don't even need to imagine the workplace scenario -- you already know how that works.
But picture a pre-industrial, barter economy. How well would you do when you're not able to contribute? There is history of people caring for the old, infirm, and indigent ... but remember that when you go that far back you're talking about kin-groups. You're taking care of your grandfather, or your great uncle. Not some random guy you happened upon.
There's nothing wrong with valuing productivity and unvaluing unproductivity, but capitalism fetishizes it to the extreme, kills people who don't have it, and defines the One True Productivity that you have to meet to not be killed. A lot of artists suffer from this last point where they are being productive but not in ways that capitalism values.
>A lot of artists suffer from this last point where they are being productive but not in ways that capitalism values.
I'm just not convinced. If there's not a market for your art, yes you will not be able to sell it and make a living. But, in other systems:
- Your art disagrees with the soviet government, so you are sent to a torture / labor camp to work until you die.
- The soviet government does not care about your art, but you're still in the soviet union and everyone is poor so no one can pay for your art anyhow.
- It's the 1600s Europe, and you're only sort-of in a capitalist society given modern definitions, but the Church doesn't like your writing so you've been locked up.
- Your are a subsistence farmer, and have absolutely no chance of creating art whatsoever given how busy and poor you are.
- You're a subsistence farmer, and somehow you manage to make art, but the only people you have access to are the ~2,000 people in your immediate vicinity, and none of them have any money to pay for your art to support you, and they are not willing to trade a chicken for a song.
vs.
- You have the most niche art you can imagine, (eg: Dark Souls analysis, or Harry Potter fanfiction where Snape gets pregnant and is constantly embarrassed by it) but due to (lousy, imperfect) platforms such as Patreon and the internet you can get enough patronage to support yourself, even if it's just barely.
I'm just not convinced that artists are doing worse now (in terms of per-capita artists) than other times in history, or under other systems.
oh my god can we stop acting like the only possibilities are american "capitalism" or soviet "communism", it's exhausting
>oh my god can we stop acting like the only possibilities are american "capitalism" or soviet "communism", it's exhausting
No way -- I threw in 1600s Europe as well as subsistence farming in there.
I think the Patreon point is really interesting. I really don't like Patreon or anything like that, but is a bit miraculous. There's some really, really, niche art up there. That sort of art would have NEVER found an audience, even as recently as the 90s. If it had to be on TV, or in a book, no publisher or producer would have touched it. And even if they had, said publisher or producer would have never managed to find the 0.001% of the population who was interested in it.
The kind of niche art that's available now was simply never possible in any other time in history.
A potential counter-argument could be something like: yes, in the past artists could not have just produced just what they wanted, but perhaps more artists were previously employable (even if they had to just make paintings or Jesus or some other popular thing they didn't really care for.)
What do you think about that?
The site is full of people, who believe in capitalism like a religion, slave their life to labour while being paid enough to feel good and better than others.
The claim that the link between human value and productivity originated in capitalist societies (or via Protestant work ethic) is such bullshit. You think hunter-gatherers valued each other for their "inner worth"? Keep dreaming.
At any rate, judging by the author's 4.3k subscribers, he is doing fine. Whether you react with a heart emoji or revulsion, broadcasting sob stories into the internet is productivity -- in the attention economy, something that only exists in rich, capitalist societies.
The toxic wellness thing is real.
It’s always there in the subtext of a lot of alt-med and the sort of pure-eating wellness stuff, that if it doesn’t work then you’re just not trying hard enough and your mindset is wrong. Still got cancer? Well clearly you didn’t juice, enema and positive-think enough! That’s the flipside of every “you can heal yourself!” assertion.
I feel very sorry for this person, as much as I aspire to be out of work one day, I aspire to be out of work on my terms and with enough financial resource to support myself, and I fully expect to still be able to support myself. This is very different from having to face the fact you can’t, and adjust to that fact and then struggle like hell just to survive on barely adequate provision.
Tech people in particular seem to see themselves (ourselves…) as capable, independent and entirely autonomous beings. Being forced to reframe your whole existence must be very tough.
I mean... I'm sure it's not easy being a disabled artist but this feels a lot like undeservedly blaming the rest of society.
The benefits cliff is a real problem (and the UK seems intent on making it worse). But "ooo nasty capitalism doesn't force people to pay for art"... Come on. And disabled people have it better than at any time in history. The UK is bankrupting itself to pay for PiPs and other benefits (and pensions unfortunately).
Ffs, this whole thread is just full of toxic positivity as far as I'm concerned.
The reality of it is that the reason why it hurts is you're essentially being kept alive artificially. As at any other time period you'd have just starved to death or died to freezing a winter or two later, putting an end to the misery.
Can you still have fun moments and learn to live your life as a glorified leech? Sure, a lot of people do so, and our society has decided that's for the best.
And in case you or someone else has an issue with the term leech here I'm going to be extra clear: you need to face reality to get over this pain. Accept what you have been forced to become. Then you can make an effort to life with your lot in life, and potentially find acceptance to the cards you've been dealt.
Probably wasn't your fault and almost certainly unfair, but that's just how life is