Not All Labour Is Valuable

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Hey Jesswage slavers

We are raised from birth with the intensions of becoming functioning members of society through acquiring skills that the market values. Then selling them into the market, using our mental capacity; physical capacity abs time to create valuable goods and services that people want.

If we do those things, we are rewarded with money. People will naturally try to find the opportunities that earn the most but require the least amount of effort. Still, these opportunities are short-lived and often arbitraged away pretty quickly.

The hard tasks and hard problems tend to remain, and when solved, you are meant to be rewarded in multiples for your ability to solve that problem; that’s what an entrepreneur does.

I think we're all sold on that ideology that work, contributing to a business, government or institution and creating value should get a reward. I know I sure was, getting my degree, getting a job, riding the train to work every day, I was contributing to society and getting my little reward for that work.

  • But what is value?
  • Who decides what is valuable
  • and how should that value be rewarded?

Labour.png

Value is already subjective

As much as we can hop on the effort it takes to make things, the hours it takes, the resources it takes, these are only guidelines to price.

Price is purely subjective, it what the people who require something are willing to pay for it. In a market where the money is a sound measuring stick, misallocation of resources can quickly be picked up through price discovery.

Price discovery helps humans understand when something is cheap, expensive, fair value based on their needs.

Now when we throw into the mix the tool we use to measure the subjective value being fiat money, it makes it even more complex.

Since supply can be manipulated and forced into different areas via government programs and taxation, this failed filter we call the government warps the ability fo the market to value tasks, objects, services, and more.

Bullshit jobs are a legacy issue

Humans have not been on this planet for long. Still, in that time, we've rapidly changed the way society works as we leverage our mental capacity; we've built technology of ever-improving magnitude to make work easier and creating goods and services cheaper.

Even though we've built all these time-saving tools, the idea of work still hangs over us. We feel we still need to do 40 hour weeks for 50 years before we can relax.

Instead of liberating ourselves and allowing deflation to give us back our time, we've developed a slew of bullshit jobs, mine included.

If I think of clerical workers, administrators, consultants, telemarketers, corporate lawyers, service personnel, and many others — who are toiling away in meaningless, unnecessary jobs, many of them even know it. But remain as the inflation race keeps them at the trough.

Our monetary policy has become antiquated, and instead of moving on, we've held onto it and patched the system with bullshit jobs to move money around. We’ve invented a whole universe of futile occupations that are professionally unsatisfying and spiritually empty.

Have your say

What do you good people of HIVE think?

So have at it, my Jessies! If you don't have something to comment, "I am a Jessie."

Let's connect

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33 comments
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We feel we still need to do 40 hour weeks for 50 years before we can relax.

That is quite interesting and true also.

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I'd much rather work harder and smarter for a short time instead of dragging it out for 50 years and digging holes only to fill them by the end of the week, over and over

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A lot of very useful to society jobs are paid peanuts while many jobs that are worthless to society are highly paid. Will be interesting to see how society rebalances now that we have technology that can eliminate a lot of the boring and meaningless work.

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the sad thing is we tie our value and identity to these jobs without thinking if they are indeed valuable, the money you get from those jobs also aid to the idea that they are valuable, when all they are is a way for businesses to reduce tax and for governments to distribute their currency.

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Very true... The dignity of a job is determined by its salary and not it's value to society. Sad.

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Indeed we're getting administrators sitting with fancy titles doing nothing but getting paid thousands and thinking they are worth that value, and then people actually creating value have a physical cap on what they earn due to wage and price limits oh and time.

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Funny you mention administrators. We didn't know we had a mayor over here, let alone 4 of them. Then we find out that they're on $660k a year salaries for a part time job.

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Have you read David Graeber's book, "Bullshit Jobs?" I'm curious because I've noticed a lot of your posts echo his ideas, but you seem to approach very different conclusions.

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Yes, I have you caught me, absolutely guilty; his book was such an eye-opener for me because believe me, I drank the kool-aid. I was very much a company man, working my ass off thinking I am creating value. Giving long hours to move up the ladder, but I did feel something didn't feel right, and then this book landed in my lap, and it changed my mind forever.

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Have you read "Debt" or "On Flying Cars" yet? To be blunt, I think a lot of roles the "rich" fill are about as "bullshit" in our economy as anyone else, but from your posts it seems like you aim toward riches as a means of solution.

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No I have not read those, but I'll add them to the list. I would agree with you there, picking up 2 and 20 for moving cash around isn't really valuable work. If you gave a ham sandwich a stock portfolio in the last 40 years in the current environment they would still be making money that's how far removed we are from value.

I wouldn't say riches are the solution, I'd say purchasing power is the solution. There will always be rich and poor, we cannot account for how people spend their purchasing power but as long as they can retain it without it being debased, we keep the Gini coefficient in check which has been a pretty good indicator of a healthy society

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Oh, thanks for clarifying! I'm not sure I agree that there will always be rich and poor - I think we're seeing that if we look at actual value, in the world, what's "rich" and what's "poor..." get a lot muddier, and change a lot more day-to-day. COVID came and suddenly the "rich" people around me couldn't wipe their own butt anymore, since stores were out of supplies and even banks were low on cash, if you wanted to use dollar bills to get the job done. Meanwhile, the knowledge of which plants could serve the role, where they grew abundantly around our town, suddenly made a group of "poor" people, the only ones in the community with clean butts!

Part of what intrigues me about crypto is how the fungibility, plus liquidity, might help us move our sense of value around to what's more appropriate for today, more quickly, than older financial instruments allowed. In a way, I think I'm agreeing that purchasing power is the solution - but rather than existing as its own thing, I view purchasing power only as a reaction to the state of the world. (The actual world, not what goes inside the minds of bankers.)

Under it all, I think we're expressing a very similar fundamental goal: "Stop letting petty human forces manipulate any person's wealth." It's just what that'd let flourish that we seem to have some difference of opinion on.

(Of Fly Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit is good, and fairly short, and free online. As I look around Hive these past few weeks, I wonder if this isn't where the flying cars are.)

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We've had rich and poor since Cave men days. I doubt it's going to change, especially in this society where we're so used to consuming and not producing.

Yeah, I get the richer you are, the more removed you are from daily toils, but let's not pretend that all middle class and poor people are self-sufficient and have a boot on their throats; they choose a lot of the problems that keep them down too.

I like the idea of crypto and people making their own currencies or doing whatever agrees with them as a community that I have no issue with, but what it currently is being used for is a lot of shit. Most of the altcoins in the top 100 are seen as investable, but they're all cash grabs. I still see a lot of it as a smaller casino of the greater financial casino.

Yes, I agree, we're all standing on different sides of the same issue and coming in with different solutions. I don't know what the right answer for everyone is, I think we all have to pick our preferred solution, for me that's Bitcoin

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This idea you keep floating that all humans share the same history just isn't true, though, and to be blunt, is just a white supremacist myth. (Specifically, it's descended from the theory of social Darwinism, which was a political theory created to advocate for the genocide of African and Pacific peoples in the 19th century and became the foundation for eugenics. It also served as part of the foundation for Marx's historical materialism.) A lot of what you're presenting here is, tbh. A unified history, in which classism has always been present, isn't accurate to the combined history of human people. As you continue exploring new means of economic organization, I'd really encourage you to step outside the myths that show you how your society /is/. Your society is such a small, small part of the Earth, and has proven itself utterly incapable of dealing with any problem except the ones it creates for itself.

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(Edited)

I am not really tied to my race of which I composite several, I don't care much for it as a debate either I hope you understand, living in apartheid I've had enough race issues for a lifetime.

I can't do anything about cultures, people nor animals purged from the planet of which we've lost many during humans existance, I can only talk about the existing forces and my observations.

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I understand and respect that you don't want to debate racism. Neither do I: I want to share how you are expressing anti-Indigenous beliefs. Since you aren't Indigenous, there's really no debate to be had. I hope you can appreciate that this isn't necessarily an easy conversation for me to bring up, since you're basically claiming that parts of who I am don't exist.

My people are not "lost" or "purged": we exist. That Indigenous people don't exist, or are irrelevant or disconnected from the world, is a part of the myth that Western culture tells. I mean, you introduced me to another Native person here on Hive. We clearly exist. :P We have entire nations engaged in work that provides for ourselves and works with other communities and societies. And our communities, while influenced by the West, aren't Western. That's what I'm trying to say: it's a bit offensive for you to talk about my culture like it never existed, is some ancient anomaly, or is irrelevant. There are Native economists, physicists, astronomers, and their Native culture has a major affect on their work. You can't do anything for what is lost, that's true. I'm talking about acknowledging what hasn't been. I'd really encourage you to re-examine that stories that you know as history.

From a rhetorical perspective, I hope you don't mind me saying that it's a bit funny, you say you don't care much for racism as a debate, but from my perspective, you're the one who brought racial supremacy into it and all I'm doing is pointing it out! Your perspective on history, which clearly influences how you argue economics, seems derived from the arguments made by 19th-century Europeans who were debating whether or not non-Europeans were actually people.

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I agree that there are many robotic jobs sucking the life out of the people. People don't get paid for time, they get paid for the value. That's what Jim Rohn said. I would agree. There are too many people who worked 30 years + and the reward for that are pennies. The proof that the system is flawed and not thought for the advantage of the individual. Working for so many years only to collect a small fraction until you die of old age. You contribute and work more than you enjoy. And many call this life.
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People are meant to be paid for value I agree but it’s also subjective so your boss my value what you do and mine doesn’t so we get paid differently

Being paid for time to me is a race to the bottom especially in a world where we are using tech to free up more time create things faster!

I think many people are applying old economy rules to the new economy and it’s going to leave them with nothing! The way the world world before of working a job for 30 years abs saving isn’t the world we live in, that doesn’t work anymore so we need to adapt or get left behind

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The world is changing. A lot of jobs will become irrelevant. A large portion of businesses grow online therefore homo sapiens will become homo digital lol. Glued to the screen from a very early age

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LOL I work in tech and I can tell you a large portion of the jobs in this field are also useless and should and will be automated away. Oh goodness, I was kind of hoping the digital age means we need less screen time as it does more work for us so we can spend more time out in the world.

But I can also see a world where we are totally stuck in fantasy digital land, have you seen the movies Ready Player One or Surrogates? Could be a lot like that, and we all just sitting around watching stuff on a screen for credits so we can buy stuff just basically human vegetables

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Ahhh sounds horrible. Couch potato leveled up. It would be horrible to see people go this way. Sitting veggies with a credit card

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Have you seen the movie Idiocracy? Theres a few scenes that play out just like you mentioned and sure its humourous now but its so tragic, its like factory farming for humans

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