Distributing Resources Based On Jobs Is Outdated And Stupid

I want to spend more time writing about the baseline assumptions of our political economy.

One of the worst is that people have to work to get resources. “If you don’t work, you don’t eat”.

This made sense at one time, when famines were common, food and resources were scarce and predatory nobles and priests took most of the surplus. There wasn’t a lot of space for people who didn’t work.

But it doesn’t make sense now. Buckminster Fuller most famously said it:

The fact is that we have more than enough of everything basic, or could easily make it. Food, housing (there are less homeless people in the western world than empty homes), basic electronics, health care, etc, etc…

We waste vast amounts of resources, and we make people work at jobs that either produce nothing or are actually a negative.

Most of those administrators spend their time denying care, not providing it. About a third should become technicians, nurses, orderlies and doctors, the rest aren’t needed at all. The same chart exists for schools:

And while not quite as bad, for universities:

The vast majority of all of this is sheer waste, but it’s also a waste of human lives. These people aren’t doing anything necessary, but they are forced to spend their lives doing meaningless “work”.

At least much of this administrative bloat is just wasteful. People working shadow banking, Private Equity and Wall Street make their money buy rolling up companies, loading them up with debt, laying people off, raising prices and then causing bankruptcy of firms which were actually profitable, who provided real work and products at reasonable prices.

They are actively damaging. It would be more than worth it to forbid such people from working at all and pay then low six figures to stop hurting other people.

Same thing goes with most prison guards and police, who do not reduce crime, but do increase incarceration.

The truth is that at least half of jobs shouldn’t exist. They either aren’t necessary, or they’re actively harmful. It would be better just give people money.

None of this is to deny that there is work which needs to be done. But a vast switch from administration and financial industries and dochebags selling internet ads into actual productive enterprises would produce a far better economy. Even so, all our advances in production mean that we genuinely do or can produce far more than we need. So just give people enough money to live a good life, reduce the standard work week to three days, and let people who want to contribute work at jobs which make the world better, not worse, and which aren’t makework.

We can’t even imagine a world where we don’t force people to spend their entire lives doing things they wouldn’t do if they weren’t scared of starvation and homelessness. We can conceive of a world where we don’t create goods designed to wear out, and instead create long lasting appliances and computers and roads and cars and high speed rail and so on: goods designed to last. We need profit, so we produce vast amounts of crap we only need because of of that “need” for profit.

This insanity has caused global warming, mass extinctions and vast amounts of needless unhappiness, bad health and lives wasted doing meaningless or harmful work.

We need a better way, and the first step is to end the idea that if you don’t work you shouldn’t have a home, food and a decent life.

More on this in the future.