I was just kvetching about this to my partner over breakfast. Not exactly, but a parallel observation, that a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs.
The utility tech who turned my tiny gas leak into a larger gas leak and left.
The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?)
Cops who have decided it's their job to do as little as possible.
Where I live, it seems like half the streets don't have street signs (this isn't a backwater where you'd expect this, it's Boston).
I made acquaintance to a city worker who, to her non-professional friends, is very proud that she takes home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans.
There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal?
> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal?
I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.
>> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal?
> I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.
Also don't discount the pressure exerted by employers to explicitly encourage mediocrity. So often, there's a huge amount of pressure to implement a half-working kludge and never pursue a more appropriate/complete fix. IMHO, it's all due to the focus on short-term financial results and ever present budget pressures that encourage kicking the can down the road.
If your employer is explicitly discouraging you from doing a good job, what are you supposed to do? Some people will resist, but they're definitely swimming against the current.
Most workers have learned that going above and beyond almost always backfires. Employers don't value long-term employment relationships, so working hard just results in you raising the bar for yourself, with no benefit.
A lot of these people were once starry-eyed highschoolers and college students who got burned too many times. They put in the time, the effort, the blood, sweat and tears, and what did they get? No thank you, just more work. Eventually they can't live up to the standard they themselves set, and they're let go. Meanwhile, bozos show up late and half-ass everything and then that becomes their expectation.
Dang, feeling this right now. Went above and beyond again and again, for years, barely got a thank you - let alone a raise of any sort. Now I’m completely burnt out and don’t have the energy to even consider my own ideas for my own next move.
GE [1]? Boeing [2] [3]? The stocks go up because management and shareholders pull forward the gains as financialization destroys the long term value of the enterprises. Works until it doesn't.
> Fatal Recklessness at Boeing Traces Back to Long-Standing C-Suite Greed
I suspect this is true to a certain extent, but IMO this narrative has been exaggerated to the point where it is completely useless. If Boeing execs were only focused on "short term profits," how did commercial aviation deaths decrease despite there being significantly more flights?
Are there actually more issues or are people just more aware of them? Like I said, commercial airline flights are significantly safer than they were in Boeing's supposed golden era despite these publicized scandals.
If your position is "well, it lasted this long and the organizational rot only killed a few hundred people" we may be unable to meet on this topic. How many deaths would be sufficient? I argue the decline in fatalities over time is due to commercial air traffic regulations and systems.
> "well, it lasted this long and the organizational rot only killed a few hundred people"
It should be clear that is not what I meant. This reinforces my view that popular criticism towards Boeing is unhelpful and ironically is relevant to the posted essay. People care more about gotchas more than deep discussion.
If the 737 Max incidents were due to negligence on Boeing's part, the many of the incidents in the 70s were also due to negligence. You can't have it both ways.
It’s not meant as a gotcha. It’s meant to illustrate that the effects of financialization, stripping an enterprise of its value, and the culture that enables this (of which short termism is a component) can take some time for the symptoms to surface. Boeing cared more about profits than safety, this is what the evidence shows. If you disagree, of course, you’re entitled to your opinion. I believe I’ve supported my thesis adequately with citations. It was a long corporate journey to the crash sites, but the journey is well documented.
(GE also took substantial time to fall apart, but with no deaths to my knowledge)
The problem is that the opposite is as destructive. Doing new things WILL cause accidents. And in the case of Boeing, of course it will result in planes failing.
And the "solution" to any level of this kind of criticism is really easy: do less, eventually do nothing at all anymore. But, in truth, that's even more destructive, in fact that that's happening is what this whole thread is about.
We need a balance. There needs to be some tolerance for risk, certainly at companies like Boeing.
>If the 737 Max incidents were due to negligence on Boeing's part, the many of the incidents in the 70s were also due to negligence.
They don’t necessarily have to be classified as the same contributing factors. The de Haviland Comet may have failed due to our lack of understanding of metal fatigue with a pressurized cabin. That was engineering ignorance. If a manufacturer did the same today, it’s negligence because those are known engineering principles.
Boeing was knowingly not following their own procedures for safety critical design. They also admitted to conspiracy to circumvent FAA oversight. Which of the above categories would you put those in?
We've learned a lot since then. Every time there's an accident, we learn from it and adjust the safety procedures. Incidents going down over time is to be expected, can't compare outcomes today with the past, after so much accummulated experience.
>> GE [1]? Boeing [2] [3]? The stocks go up because management and shareholders pull forward the gains as financialization destroys the long term value of the enterprises. Works until it doesn't.
> Boeing consistently went up for many decades prior to the MAX crisis. So did GE.
The point is they could have probably kept going up if they hadn't done that.
It's like how if you choose to eat your seed corn, you'll be fat and happy for a season, then you and your family will certainly starve to death next year. You'd most likely had lived if you hadn't made that short-term decision.
> Companies have life cycles. They grow until they become unable to function efficiently anymore, then they go down.
And how often are the "life cycles" really just the accumulation of bad short-term decisions catching up with the company?
You can kludge and kludge and kludge, but eventually that makes the app unmaintainable. Then you're in "total rewrite" or go under territory.
> It's like how if you choose to eat your seed corn, you'll be fat and happy for a season, then you and your family will certainly starve to death next year. You'd most likely had lived if you hadn't made that short-term decision.
Part of that is probably embedded in the environment. The market favors risk-taking. Everyone is dipping into their seed corn, hoping they can use the extra energy they have now to secure some new corn and cover for the surplus. Sometimes they can't, and they starve. More importantly though, anyone who didn't dip into their seed corn is no longer there - risking a bit gives you a competitive advantage over those who risk less.
This dynamics plays at multiple levels in large companies, and arguably is deeply embedded in the overall business culture.
It's not totally irrational either - "eating your seed corn" sounds stupid in isolation, but the calculus changes when every village around you is at war with you and everyone else, all while the whole region gets hammered by natural disasters. Saving the seed corn to survive the next year may end up killing you next week.
>And how often are the "life cycles" really just the accumulation of bad short-term decisions catching up with the company?
I do think technical debt is a real problem, but to play devils advocate, the “life-cycle” is often a pivot from “innovation” to “maintenance”. Companies rightly begin to focus on the aspects of business that make them money and will often cannibalize R&D to focus on high-margin areas. That’s why “mature” companies often focus on innovation via acquisition.
Perhaps that's the trick to longevity then, not seeking endless growth. All the oldest companies on earth seem to small, geographically contained entities (e.g., hotels, restaurants) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
> No company goes up forever. They all eventually strangle themselves with bureaucratic inefficiency.
So they should act to strangle themselves faster? It feels like your reasoning is equivalent to, "Eventually you'll die, so there's no point taking care of your health. Go save money by avoiding the doctor, take up smoking, and eat junk food all the time."
Being relentlessly focused on the short term will do that, eventually.
You seem to think the assumption "all companies die" means you can simplify away their journey, but it matters if they get there faster or slower (at least to society, if not the decision-makers to maximize their personal profit while hoping to not being the ones left holding the bag).
> Old companies die and new ones take their place. This is not a problem for society. In most cases creative destruction is a net positive.
That's what they say, but I don't think it's true (at the high end, at least). For instance: if Boeing dies, the market will not replace it. It'll be an Airbus monopoly for large jets, and maybe the the communists will eventually build a competitor (Comac). IIRC, it's too expesnive for Embraer to make the jump into that market.
...which is why the market is supposed to have competition. Company strangles themselves with bureaucracy -> next company is ready to take over. But when a monopoly strangles itself with bureaucracy, there is no next company to take over and you get rent-seeking behaviour and unmotivated employees that just phone it in because they have nowhere else to go. End result: the public foots the bill for less quality at higher prices.
The book on GE is specifically about how they lied, cheated, and committed fraud -- er, accounting irregularities -- for decades, in order to maintain the illusion of number goes up predictably.
In retrospect, it was exactly as unlikely as Madoff's numbers.
But ALL of the FANGs pride themselves on predictably rising numbers. They all have a semi-believable story, and in fact only Amazon has a unique tactic (which is cheating taxes entirely by having zero profit, hence their revenue goes up predictably instead of profit. The others have steadily rising profit with slight variation in the rise of their revenue)
But all of them do it. Facebook/Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Apple. Even the non-FANG fangs like Tesla, Twitter, ... and all have stories about faking it. Most are advertising and that's easy to fake on both sides (buy your own adertising, and of course fake engagement), Amazon has zero profit so they proudly declare they're faking it for the government (but, of course, they're not cheating you), Netflix has steadily rising subscriber numbers where everyone else has failed, even Apple's growth has switched to subscriber growth, the part of their business that would be the easiest to fake.
In fact this is quite common in the whole S&P 500, including outside of the US, with numbers not quite as dramatic as the FANGs, but still going up.
> Companies have life cycles. They grow until they become unable to function efficiently anymore, then they go down.
> It's not about prioritizing short term results.
Why did they need to grow in the first place though? If a company is already profitable, and growing will end up making them less functional and eventually erode profits, that sounds like it's due to prioritizing short-term results over long-term stable profits.
Boeing was forced by courts bolster safety, compliance, and quality programs as well as admitting to conspiracy to thwart FAA oversight. I don’t know about you, but my experience is that when companies undermine those types of oversight, it’s almost always due to schedule and price pressure (ie short term results). (Not to mention, the whole impetus for MCAS was to rush the design to market so they wouldn’t lose out on AA as a customer).
Again, the vast bulk of Boeing's history was before that.
> the whole impetus for MCAS was to rush the design to market so they wouldn’t lose out on AA as a customer
The impetus for MCAS was to make the MAX behave like the previous 737 model to reduce the expense of retraining the pilots.
In general, flying is safer when pilots do not need to "code switch" when switching airplane models. Many crashes result from a pilot reflexively doing the right thing for the previous airplane they flew, rather than the one they are flying at the moment.
>Again, the vast bulk of Boeing's history was before that.
I’m not sure what you intend to convey with this statement. If price reflects reality, the current price should reflect the current reality, no? Whether the White Sox were the best team 100 years ago has little bearing on my prediction about their chances this year. I fail to see how Boeing’s prior culture prevents them from succumbing to short term incentives. I know your point is the downfall is a bureaucratic one, but the evidence does not point to that (they actually cut corners on bureaucratic requirements).
>The impetus for MCAS was to make the MAX behave like the previous 737 model to reduce the expense of retraining the pilots.
Go deeper. Why was this considered necessary?
(Hint: it’s because they wanted to rush the design to market with a less expensive (and lower quality) product. Ie cost and schedule pressure. You stopped at the proximate cause.)
Boeing stock price still almost doubled in the past 10 years. Went up by hundreds of percent in the past two decades. GE stock is worth 40x what it was worth 40 years ago, when Jack Welsh took over management! These two seem like two very successful companies, led by succesful strategies.
Do stock prices even meaningfully represent anything anymore? Looking at some valuations makes me feel like it has all devolved entirely into gambling.
A lot of badly managed companies (or just companies in stagnant industries) saw their stock prices stagnate or fall. Boeing and GE had large rises though (meteoric in case of GE).
The value of a stock is based on long term results. If the investors catch wind of the company sacrificing the long term for the short term, the stock price will go down accordingly.
Stock price is pretty much completely unrelated to the performance of a company because the vast majority of investors have no idea what the fuck is going on in the company.
Look at Tesla. They're doing extremely poorly right now and have been for about a year, and if you look at their stock price you wouldn't think that. They're valued more than, like, every other auto manufacturer combined. Looking at that you'd expect them to hold 50% of the market in all markets they're in. But they don't get anywhere close to that.
The stock market is just gambling. You can't see the other person's hand.
So what is your thesis on GME? Long term play? It is literally a brick and mortar selling physical video games in an era where consoles are increasingly shipping without the ability to play physical media. And yet…
Not really. It’s based on expected future results. Sometimes that’s based in reality, sometimes it’s hopes and dreams. How else do you explain companies that have never made money being having any positive stock price?
There are no “results” just projections.
We probably agree that the stock will eventually reflect value. I think we’d quibble about how long that takes. As the saying goes, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. In other words, don’t bet on the market always reflecting reality.
I don’t see that happening in practice, because the competitors are focusing on the short term as well. Another reason is that it is easy to deceive customers about the relative qualities of a product as long as it is cheaper than the competition. So it’s rather the short-termists that are driving a race to the bottom (or at least to
mediocrity).
The most successful companies, in my experience, are not successful because they're so much more awesome than everyone else. They are successful primarily because of luck... the luck of having competitors that suck total ass.
Microsoft, for instance... or in more modern times, Tesla.
I wouldn't put Boeing into that category, though -- it took more than just a lack of good competition to accomplish what they did, back in the day.
Buybacks do not do that any more than dividends do. Buybacks merely allow publicly listed stock owners to precisely time their capital gains tax events.
Surely, there is some amount of income that a business’s owner is allowed to pocket without bad intentions, which may or may not come at the cost of long term investments. Especially in stable/declining businesses.
No, buy packs are pure market manipulation. There is a reason why they were banned prior to 1982. It's a SEC rule that can easily be reversed too but the rich love their ability to manipulate markets for their benefit.
> Buybacks do not do that any more than dividends do.
There's at least a clear relationship if the dividend is reinvested.
If the dividend is spent, though, eg by someone in retirement, then they're different. Under buybacks, the retiree would have to sell some shares to get cash, and would eventually run out. Under dividends, the retiree would be able to continuously pocket money.
stock markets are indices of successful companies; you need to look at the composition. The metric I would look at is the age of the companies in the S&P 500 or similar, and that IS increasingly skewing young, which shows both a focus on the short term and increasing markets
The focus on short term results could generally be true. Perhaps... generally nothing is true though of course.
(1) consider how many stocks are delisted and/or go out of business. We might be thinking with survivorship bias. A cook google gave this headline "America has lost 43% of listed companies since 1996" (though, more research would be needed to really be sure that's accurate and to determine any more nuances that might be important).
(2) If there are an ever-present amount of short term rewards/results, then we would get growth. A series of short term growth would be hard to distinguish from long term growth.
(3) Long term and short term growth can be mixed, and the strategy does not have to be static. A company could hop back and forth between them. This point contradicts the premise a bit, at the same time we can't discount long term from the noise that we see (it could be signal).
(4) Stock price is not necessarily always tied to financial results. It's supposed to be the sum of all future revenue divided by the number of shares (or something like that), thus, stock price is in part also the expectation of revenue and not actual revenue. Tesla is a notable example, the price of their stock is still very high, with anticipation of amazing revenue gains, but recently their revenue has not been growing by a ton.
The financial industry isn’t immune to “who cares”-ism, or folks who are bad at their jobs. Heck, the index fund is the ultimate “who cares?” product - you’re explicitly saying that you don’t care about underlying fundamental valuations and are going to piggyback off the price discovery mechanism of other active investors, and you accept average returns as a result.
In practice, financial results are driven by transactions, and so any mediocrity that doesn’t lead to the customer going elsewhere isn’t going to show up in the financial results. You need an actual competitor to risk losing money to sucking. But I’ll note that in cases where there is an actual competitor to sclerotic old industries, one that actually does care, the investors in the competitor tend to become fabulously wealthy and the investors in the old industry go broke.
Stocks suck up all the value. For example the value of a house is in the living space it provides. If you convert it to money, you end up with... money.
are you discounting the supply of new companies that continually replace the decliners? What's happening to those the previously existed for 50+years? Will we ever see a new company last 100+ years?
This perfectly illustrates why I've always preferred working at startups over major corps including FAANG / MANGA.
There is a top down culture of not embracing mediocrity that genuinely makes me thrive at work. My current company has a good work life balance and if I make a point that some part of the system needs improvement, my voice actually gets heard. Only place I've seen where sprint retros actually made impact. Most of my friends have no work life balance and also don't have a voice when they see half-assed work.
The numbers showcase the effect of this as well. The startup has thrived even when VC's have tightened their purses.
Unfortunately it’s becoming more obvious that “short-term” is all we really have in this world. There is no long term.
So why plan for long term? Life is a series of short-term wins until you finally die. Same with companies. Things change so fast now that you could be crushing it one year and going out of business the next. It’s not like old days where you could setup a blacksmithing shop and have business for generations.
I think your comment comes from a very specific point of view. Like software/tech jobs. (Even there you have long term stuff that we all would definitely benefit from).
There are so many things where short-term only thinking is counter-productive. It swallows money, creates frustration and leaves an overall net-negative to society and the world.
Just one example would be city planning. Repairing a road? What else is there like fiber cables, maybe some tram tracks, and so on, long term planning would be to acquire a holistic picture and to plan one timespan where everything is done fast but with quality. It’s a few months construction, after that everything is fine for years or even a few decades to come. But what you see instead is one part of the state that manages fiber cables doing there own thing, another part that manages street quality do their own thing. So the street has a construction site for a year (for just improving one part) then a few months nothing then another year of construction again, nothing, construction and soon you have over a decade of constant on and off construction work on this one street. Something that could’ve been done in 6-12 months once and be done, if planned correctly and with long term and holistic picture in mind.
And this is just one example. The world is full of stuff like this. Short term might be a good thing for very specific types of projects, but I hard disagree that short term is overall better in any way.
In my opinion this shortterm thinking is a huge negative factor of modern societies. Because not everything is a tech startup where things change super fast.
> Unfortunately it’s becoming more obvious that “short-term” is all we really have in this world. There is no long term.
That's definitely not true. It sounds like a rationalization for the existing bad and unwise behavior.
> So why plan for long term? Life is a series of short-term wins until you finally die.
So, dump the untreated toxic waste into the river, then?
> Same with companies. Things change so fast now that you could be crushing it one year and going out of business the next. It’s not like old days where you could setup a blacksmithing shop and have business for generations.
Maybe if you're in some startup, but that's not the usual case.
> Results now are way better than results later.
So be "very proud [for taking] home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans."?
It's not just a political derail to bring up a highly-visible example of the described behaviour. People don't care if they aren't forced to care, and in a world driven by deadlines, we're only motivated to care a certain amount.
There used to be an intrinsic motivator of "well, my kids are going to suffer if I don't push for long-term relationships", but now we aren't having kids, so that carrot doesn't work, and that attitude is bubbling up into the corporate world.
Sure, but let's be clear, we shouldn't be taking any lessons from the Trump regime on how to live in virtually any aspect in one's life. If anything they're a shining example of everything not to do.
I think they mean (to stretch the analogy), we are razing trees to build rapidly changing highways so much now that the tree you plant today may be chopped down in a couple of years through no fault of your own.
> Unfortunately it’s becoming more obvious that “short-term” is all we really have in this world. There is no long term.
The opposite seems far more obvious to me. Short-term results aren't going to last. Planning for the long-term - whether that's a career, family, or whatever - is critical to a fulfilling and healthy life.
Seems self evident that increasing pace of change of society tilts the rational strategy towards short-term over long-term gain.
Do people disagree that the pace of change is increasing? Do people disagree that short termism is rationally appropriate in a highly changeable situation? Long term planning requires a stable backdrop. I agree with you.
“ I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees.”
Exactly. Companies and wealthy people have cancelled the social contract a long time ago and have decided to go for profit at any cost. It’s hard to be excited about work when you know that you get raises below inflation rate while the company makes record profits. And the CEO may do a town hall claiming how great business is and then lay off people two weeks later. Or DOGE. In theory this is a good idea but instead of improving processes so government workers can do a good job they just laid off people and let the people who are left deal with the mess.
The supermassive corporate structures that have accreted together in the modern world are beyond the scale of imagining. We are familiar with a vastly smaller % of the org chart, as the size of that chart balloons.
I tend to think there used to be a connection within and across the corporate entity, more shared purposes, shared cause/alignment, and perhaps sometimes at successful places ability for the good ideas to rise. Large companies sometimes love to preach "intrapreneurial" spirit, encourage the individual will & ownership, all while refusing to acknowledge the constraints & impositions of corporate hierarchy, the lack of freedom, that the large organizational structure imposes.
I think there's a real muting of the human will at most large companies, and that caring and trying is only permitted in very narrow scopes. That only some folks are able to maintain will and drive, while fitting themselves into the particular shapes demanded by the org chart around them. At the smaller scale we are not individually abutted by so many others to whom a concern may be charged.
(The impacts of what behaviors we see around us are also bounded by these forces, dimish our spirit collectively too. We grow up & adult in a world where everyone is buried deep in an org chart.)
When a group of people get together to do something, the most visible effect will be that of GCD(each person's motivations).
If you collect enough people, with sufficient heterogeneity, you will find that the GCD is always financial self-interest, everything else, while it may exist, contributes with an arbitrarily smaller intensity.
In my mind, there are various links from this to the financialization-led practice of securitizing and "cutting up" everything into an "optimal" number of pieces, without stopping to think if the objective function truly captures the desired end result. However, these links are not clear enough yet for me to expand further on.
“ you will find that the GCD is always financial self-interest”
I think most people want to have security and some predictability for their lives. One way to achieve this is by having money but there are other ways too. Reducing humans to purely economical beings who always want to maximize profit is a gross simplification that appeals to economists and bankers but it doesn’t reflect reality.
I didn't. Please read the multiple qualifiers I added to that phrase.
>> If you collect enough people, with sufficient heterogeneity, you will find that the GCD is always financial self-interest.
What that means is that if you scale groups of people too much, the only common interest you'll find among _all_ of them will be financial self interest. Hence GCD - "greatest common divisor". Of course people do things without monetary incentives. But these interests don't overlap within a sufficiently large and diverse group of people, as much as financial self-interest does.
"But these interests don't overlap within a sufficiently large and diverse group of people, as much as financial self-interest does."
I honestly don't think this is true. Finances are a tool to get security and comfort in our society but it's still just a tool to achieve the real goal. I bet if we had viable UBI that gives people their basic needs, most people wouldn't worry about finances.
At the end of the day, most people are employed in part because they want to (or need to) make money.
Therefore, the greatest common denominator for an arbitrarily large and heterogenous group of employees at the company is the paycheck.
This isn't really disputable. Your argument doesn't really counter this fact, either. Sure, UBI might remove that common need that nearly every employee has, which could change the calculus entirely... But we don't have UBI, and the GP wasn't making an argument about some hypothetical world, they were making a point about the one we actually live in.
> Large companies sometimes love to preach "intrapreneurial" spirit, encourage the individual will & ownership, all while refusing to acknowledge the constraints & impositions of corporate hierarchy, the lack of freedom, that the large organizational structure imposes.
Eloquently put. This is what drives me nuts about Brian Chesky. He wants employees to take ownership - but doesn't give them any ownership.
If I worked for BNB and was aggressively pursuing a new idea, I could still be laid off any second because of his ego. That isn't ownership.
In software specifically, we're now at year two+ where the entirety of investment and innovation is in literally replacing people.
We have CEOs and prominent figureheads making openly hostile statements about replacing their software workforce with LLMs, and coming out with bold proclamations about whatever models are going to be better than whatever title of developer in $TIME.
How there can be any loyalty or long-term thinking from employees at all in such circumstances is beyond me.
I can't even think of an analogous scenario at any time in my life. Open worker hostility.
IT/tech has kind of represented this to the average worker since forever.
When I switch from development to running IT, I sat with people to understand how the company worked. Everyone I sat with was terrified I was going to automate away their jobs.
Personally, I find it harder and harder to take pride in the work that I do, and in the effort I put in, when others who have no understanding of the quality of my work or amount of effort I put in are empowered to handwave it away with bullshit excuses and are applauded for doing so.
I don't think you're wrong that hard work is also no longer rewarded the way it used to be, but I think there are a lot more factors in play here.
Hard work is also a bit of a commons problem. If you're the only hard worker in a group, it's easy to be taken advantage of. If everyone's a hard worker, they probably all understand the value of hard work, and are more likely to reward it accordingly.
I think another social issue affecting this is people's measure of what makes hard work "hard". Social media shows is a parade of very talented people doing impressive things, while rarely giving us insight into the amount of effort that goes into those accomplishments. To anyone who hasn't put in the level of effort required to be "really good" at something, it's very easy to underestimate how much effort is truly involved. And when someone consistently underestimates how much effort is involved in doing "hard" things, they'll also consistently overestimate the amount of effort they're putting in relative to the results they're achieving. This will lead them to believe they're doing "hard work", when in reality their level of effort is closer to "mediocre".
The solution to this is worker's self-management, an economic model that was pioneered by Yugoslavia, but has mostly disappeared with its dismantlement.
Any company with more than five employees had to be run as a worker-run coop. The board and execs were elected by the workers. Companies still competed on the market.
This would solve for the problem of alienation while still having an environment of competition.
Yugoslavia also had severe political repression, with peace between the provinces only maintained by a (near) dictator with a cult of personality. Their economy and standard of living was mediocre at best, and only even possible within a limited geopolitical context where they sat between competing superpowers. It wouldn't be possible to create something like Yugoslavia today. Stupid to even try.
I'd argue the repression of reactionaries was part of the secret sauce that made it work so well. We saw what happened when they were loosened in the 90s.
I'd posit that the rise of the Nazis (which caused the rise of the SFR Yugoslavia as a resistance movement) taught us differently.
Karl Popper, himself an Austrian that saw the rise of the Nazis and had to live in exile as a result famously formulated it as the paradox of tolerance.
In Yugoslavia you couldn't even get bananas or coffee or jeans. People had to go to Italy or Austria to buy it. You had to wait more than a year to get a car. Of course then there was no gas for it. Inflation ate your paycheck before you could spend it.
Because it was destroyed by right-wing extremists in the 90s, funded by Western capitalists that were scared it would show the world a viable alternative on how to run an economy
I really like what you wrote, because it demonstrates what kids in Yugoslavia were thought from a young age. There was this idea of a foreign enemy that it there to get them and any economic and political fault in the country was because of the sabotage of this invisible foreign enemy.
Yes. Or would you prefer working dawn to dusk picking bugs off of your crops, with the constant spectre of crop failure and famine?
Do you prefer living in a mud hut to a house with air conditioning, central heat, hot and cold running water, electric lighting and flush toilets? All courtesy of economic powerhouses.
Maybe you'd prefer spending your free time spinning thread with your spinning wheel, making cloth, and sewing all your clothes? (The first industrial target was textiles.)
This is a false dichotomy: Either your country is an "economic powerhouse", or you're living in a mud hut, with nothing in between. A country can be a good, decent place to live, where people's basic needs are taken care of, with opportunities for modest life improvements for those who want them, without being an economic powerhouse (and all of the bad that comes with that).
> Despite facing numerous challenges, including political instability and external pressures, the Yugoslav economy achieved significant growth and modernization during its existence, with a particularly strong emphasis on education, health care, and social welfare
You need bricks to make a house. Where are you going to get the bricks from? You need lumber to build a stick frame house. How are you going to saw the lumber? Where are you getting the steel for the saws? Where are you getting the nails from?
Those all come from economic powerhouses.
The steps from mud huts to modern buildings came from economic powerhouses.
Only some parts were industrialized. Most of the the best companies were existing before Yugoslavia. They were nationalized after the revolution, the owners killed or they escaped to the west. Very little new industry was developed by the regime itself.
Do you think that was the lifestyle in Yugoslavia? And their heyday was half a century ago at this point. You're presenting a false dichotomy. Nobody's gonna live in a mud hut using a spinning wheel just because workers run companies.
>Nobody's gonna live in a mud hut using a spinning wheel just because workers run companies.
That exactly what will happen. In the best case, if you lacky enough, you will be live in a mud hut. The rest will envy those who can afford to live in a mud hut.
Workers can start running companies at any time, no one restricts them from running their companies. The only reason they don't do this is that this will be worse for workers.
So you are being hypocritical. You don't want workers to run companies (they can do that now), you want workers to have no alternative.
What are you even talking about? Nobody lived in mud huts in Yugoslavia, that is verifiable fact.
And no, workers can't start running companies because they lack the capital and thus the means of production. That's the problem with a capitalist system, the power is with the entrenched capitalists.
When a "problem" has no solution then it's not actually a problem, just a fact to be accepted. Like gravity. There's nothing wrong with worker owned cooperatives, but for anything that requires significant capital you have to run things the way that capital owners want. And large-scale economic central planning where governments allocate capital has been an abject failure everywhere it has been tried, so don't insult our intelligence by suggesting that we give it another shot.
This is absolutely not true. In absolute numbers, the cost of starting a business is quite low, and workers have a lot of money, much more than their employers. And if workers collectively stop spending their salaries on unnecessary things, and instead organize a fund - on average, in 2 years they will have enough money to buy out the entire company they work for, or organize a comparable one.
There are no problems with capitalism, capitalism just allows you not to do all of this, not to suffer 2 years of poverty for the sake of living in a mud hut (if you're lucky enough).
You’re roughly describing the whole point of Yugoslavia’s workers’ self-management. This is in contrast to what the Eastern Bloc had with the government establishing and running the factories directly. Also in contrast to the capitalist system where someone with enough capital establishes and runs the factory themselves while employing the workers.
And no, you didn’t have to live in a mud hut for it. In fact, it was more affordable for the regular worker to build a house than it is now. Those houses were/are comparable to what you see in Germany today. Go check out the real estate market in Slovenia if you don’t believe me, look for houses built 1950-1990.
Ah yes, taking the last 4 years post pandemic, in the midst of massive climate change, and in a near world war and then comparing it to 60+ years ago in the height of the Cold War and US global dominance.
Usually the sign of the fairest and most humane systems of government and economy is when people get shot in the back by border guards if they try to escape.
Generally yes. Unlike Soviet occupied Eastern Europe, most regular people in Yugoslavia were able to obtain passports and travel internationally. There were some people barred from leaving or held as political prisoners.
You responded to a rhetorical question with the wrong answer (you can obviously live well on only modest means as arguably the majority of people do, even in the US), and then proceeded to lay out maybe the most egregious false dichotomy I've ever seen right after. I'll try to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you hold a definition of "economic powerhouse" that aligns more with "a first world country" rather than "a shareholder-maximized corporatocracy".
There seems to be a false narrative here that increased economic production will always lead to higher quality of life. I would venture to guess you only have to look into your own life to disprove that narrative.
I doubt you work 20+ hours a day. You probably realize there are diminishing or outright negative returns on quality of life for trying to maximize productive output. I would say we should apply the same logic to the economy as a whole; focus production on the things that actually improve society instead of operating on the assumption that “more production is always better.”
Being an economic powerhouse or not isn't required for the idea to be a reasonable and workable one.
But given the high levels of dysfunction/conflict that led to the breakup of the country, I doubt they'd meet whatever bar you set for "economic powerhouse".
The conflict was due to it being a federation of several culturally quite different nations. When Tito died, the politicians that replaced him started heavily pushing nationalist ideologies amidst the 1980s economic crisis (which was not limited to Yugoslavia).
PS. You're arguing with people who lived there. How can you be so certain you know better than those of us who saw it first hand? And I'm in no way saying it was a perfect system, btw.
If you had lived in then you should know the standard of living was poor. More then a million people left to work in Germany as Gastarbeiters to send money home. Gas was limited. Common goods had to be brought through the border with Austria or Italy. Inflation was crazy, everybody bought German Marks the same day they got their paychecks, otherwise the money was worthless by the next day. What happened to you if you were caught as a political opposition in Yugoslavia is a story on its own.
Are you asking about diets? During most of the Cold War period, average people in Yugoslavia generally had more and better food than the USSR or China but less than the USA. They ate a lot of bread and potatoes. You probably won't find detailed records with percentages.
That is such a big lie. There was no worker self-management in practice. All the companies had leadership structure like most companies have today. Those leading them, were loyal members of the communist party and were politically appointed. They were the betters, the avant-garde and had access to things a normal worker couldn't dream of, like special stores which had western goods. No worker had any say how a company will work and had no share of the profits besides a paycheck.
> I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.
I agree that I think this is a big chunk of it. There's no loyalty on either side, and it's not rewarded if there is. Doing good work is only rewarded with more work without the extra pay or benefits.
A ton of large employers have removed any and all incentive to do anything but the absolute bare minimum to not get fired.
“ There's no loyalty on either side, and it's not rewarded if there is”
Loyalty actually gets punished. The only way to get a decent raise is to change companies. Your car insurance will keep going up until you change companies. With cable the best deals are available only for new customers and existing customers see their cost go up.
It seems companies hate their employees and customers
> It seems companies hate their employees and customers
They do! Imagine the profits if they could keep making the same money without the customers or employees! Those pesky humans really get in the way of maximizing the profit
Agree that part of it is the increasingly toxic work circumstances. Many people get no health care, poor wages, and zero job security, so... they are pretty demoralized much of the time. And many work multiple gigs, so they are also tired all the time.
Grey beard here, it's much different than in the past. In the past people worked a second jobs for XYZ, like a vacation fund, a fancier new car than they could normally afford, or home remodels. Today people work a second just so that they can afford their 1/3 of rent with their roommates.
Blaming employers seems incomplete at best, since many of the worst abuses are employees practically bilking the very cosy employee-employer relationship, eg the MTA in NYC. Huge budgets, lots of dysfunction, very little done. Even the grandparent mentions a city worker.
I'm not trying to absolve employers here, since they are almost certainly the ones who initiated this trend, but there are very few incentives to care about employees when employees take advantage of it. The end result is they make life more difficult not just for the employer, but for their fellow employees.
It's kind of a self-fulfilling cycle in that way. Employers have taken away any and all incentives to do anything but the absolute bare minimum to not get fired, so now that's what they get.
Because that's now employees behave, now employers won't offer anything else - but without offering anything else, employee attitudes aren't going to change.
> without offering anything else, employee attitudes aren't going to change.
In my lived experience, unions permanently cement the anti-employer (and often anti-customer) attitude present in some employees. Once in place, they don't produce a massive change of heart where employees are willing to rise above and beyond the exact terms of their collective bargaining agreements, but instead result in a rejection of the traditional work ethic and the embrace of minimal output and often malicious compliance across the board.
It's one reason many of us have had such bad experience working with unions in the past. The customer suffers along with the employer, and worse the customer often pays a higher price for this privilege.
Employers behave as adversaries to their workers anyway, comparatively wealthy and powerful adversaries. So either you union-up and present yourselves as a united and somewhat formidable adversary, or you don't and remain a (relatively poor and powerless) individual, no match against your (already existing) adversary.
A good chunk of the readership here is in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_aristocracy and have their incentives firmly aligned with their employers thanks to superb pay and equity grants. Poor? Powerless? Certainly not them.
Yeah, right up until the point where you get sucked into a massive layoff right as your company is posting record profits and boasting how much code is written with AI now.
I think a lot of people in tech are realizing how helpful unions could be right now.
I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees.
A lot of companies, including mine, played this game for a long time. They were forever going on about how we're all a big family, and we all have to watch out for one another, and how's your mental health today? Do you need a hug? Here, have some free burritos.
Then COVID hit, and all that ended. They fired half of the staff in 10 hours, and since then have showed their real faces, because it's too soon for them to go back the other way. Everyone will know it's just a show.
On the gripping hand, if you do put in the hard work, you are likely to be exploited. I can think of several examples of excellent workers: they come in, do great work, do not play politics, are known for being dependable, etc. Management ignores them and promotes the mouth breather who does nothing but cheerlead themselves at every opportunity for accomplishing the most basic of tasks.
Be careful that's not selective memory kicking in. I've thought that too but have had to point out to myself that some very deserving people were in fact promoted.
Your point more generally, that squeaky wheels get the grease, does seem to be typical.
Obviously deserving people do find career advancement. Yet it is incredibly frustrating that I can think of two load bearing individuals who were the most dependable people in the company, yet received no recognition for this fact. They would just constantly roll up their sleeves and do the vital, non flashy work that kept the business functioning.
I think you're right, but it's not just work. It's all organizations and social institutions.
We have relationships with other individuals, but we also have relationships with groups as a whole. And the way we tend to those relationships depends on how we believe the other party tends to us.
If you have a relationship with someone who treats you with trust, kindness, conscientiousness, and care, you will naturally reciprocate and feel good about doing so. But if the partner is thoughtless, callous, or cruel, only a fool would put effort into that relationship.
So it is with our relationships with all of the various organizations that make up society. If the company I work for is giving me the fewest possible benefits and is happy to fire me if they get the chance, why should I do anything but the bare minimum? If my government is being used as a tool for enrichment by cronies and oligarchs, why shouldn't I do everything I can to skirt paying taxes? If the giant store chain I buy my groceries from keeps jacking up prices and shrinkflating products, why shouldn't I slip a few extra apples in the bag without paying?
Acting their wage is reasonable. Can't ask for a smile and pride in work from those forced to participate in the torment nexus. 60 percent of Americans can't afford to meet their basic needs, for example.
If we want better outcomes, employers must provide the necessary comp, benefits, and work life balance to arrive at those outcomes. Otherwise, we get slop because that's what is paid for.
Yea, I was also going to trot out the "act your wage" phrase. As a worker, you can't buy groceries with "pride". And as an employer, you're not going to get a craftsman who cares by paying them bottom of the barrel wages. The labor market is completely broken.
there's also the fact that you can't really show pride in work if you're being forced to follow a script or the demands of some piece of bureaucratic paperwork.
i think a prerequisite for being proud of your work is that you have enough autonomy so that the final product is truly the result of your decisions and mastery.
It is broken, but complaining is free. Everything else mentioned (wages, benefits, quality of life) has a cost. We can either pay up, stop complaining, or treat the complaining as performance art when we know the solution but choose not to implement it. If we want people to care, we have to pay them enough to care.
Completely broken on multiple levels. In a lot of industries now, as an employer you can't win even if you buck the trend and lead out your competitors on wages and benefits. The highest paid warehouse worker, waitress, etc. will still barely make ends meet, never be able to afford a house, so on. Decades of devaluation of labor (automation, venture capital, bad laws & regulations, etc.) has really done a number, and I don't see a way to easily reverse the damage. IMO, the top end of the economy needs to be brought back closer to the bottom end, but I just don't see it happening.
Which is of course an argument for the idea that workers rights, civil liberties and welfare might just have outsized effects on productivity and economic growth compared to their sticker price.
All roads lead to unionization and strong worker rights, which HN is allergic to (broadly speaking). “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.” Churchill supposedly said. Wages must go up, worker power must go up, there is no other legal path to success (broad improvements in economic security) in this context. If you can show me an alternate path derived from first principles, I’m all ears.
1. People are embracing the fact that there is no possible objective direction for society
2. People a rejecting the directions they were told to prioritize (education, family, religion etc…) because none have predictable outcomes
As function of both, there’s no consistent or coherent philosophical for people to align to.
In the past, the percentage of the population that was forced to align with a local philosophy was basically 100%. Most people had no options to defect from the ritual and social structure they were born into, so they adapted and adopted them even if they didn’t want to.
Now, humans have infinite mobility - which means anyone can defect. That also means you have to either find a new affinity group that fits your vectors or make your own.
That’s new in the last 500 years for humanity.
“God is dead” was meant as a lament, because it epistemologically fractured society - and even if that epistemically was “more correct” or “less wrong” it shows how all ritual and culture is built on effectively nothing but non-testable hallucinated stories.
So how do you align society to coherent action when the core epistemology is constantly changing and being overrun?
> 1. People are embracing the fact that there is no possible objective direction for society
I saw one on twitter the other day and was struck by it's take:
"in the 1900s, it was common to dream of the 21st century. when was the last time you heard talk of a 22nd century? it's like we don't believe we're going to make it anymore, but to endure, we MUST dream of futures worth suffering for. please, dare dream of a 22nd century."
Like, yeah, I'm not really thinking about the year 2125 and what that will be like. I just kinda assume it's beyond some tech singularoty or something that I can't imagine.
Part of it too is that the world seems 'solved' in a lot of ways. Like, we're not worried about the great economic debate of capitalism or communism. We know which works better. We don't care for climate change right now but are worried about it a lot, yet we all kinda know that we just have to get our act together to solve it and that's not going to happen until things get really bad. The gender and color barriers are broken. The trans barriers are like, something I guess. Sure light speed, but all the physicists say that impossible. Mars, yeah, I guess, but that's a lot harder than we thought it would be. SpaceX is doing cool stuff, I guess, sorta, when things don't blow up in the sky or with their boss. The AIs are here and they kinda just took our jobs and all the fun out of the world. Video games are cool, but we all know it's just coasting through time. You can order a pizza now at the south pole, it's hot when it gets to you. That dude fell out of a balloon for Red Bull, I guess. All the rivers are mapped, it's just people speed swimming them now. Poverty isn't a question of if, but which asshat to get out of the way.
I mean, this is usual with humans. Same goes for corruption and politics. It's all just muddling along without a lot of 'zazz' to it. We're just stuck waiting for enough bad to occur to get over that activation energy and get moving. Like a frat bro piling more garbage onto the already overflowing can, eventually it will get taken out, by someone, maybe me, but not right now.
Like, what could the future hold that is worth actual suffering for, per the tweet? It's all just oatmeal beige.
Every year, the 22nd century looks more and more like the movie Elysium: With a small, ultra rich segment of society living in luxury, physically isolated from the remaining N billion living basically peasant/subsistence lives, working for the ultra rich if they are lucky. That's how things are trending, anyway. I don't think anyone wants to think about the year 2125. They see themselves as increasingly economically irrelevant cast offs.
I try not to think about it, but HZD (game) had the most believable take on the future.
AI war machines apocalypse - War machines that consume earth's sources to build drones and other war machines. There are autonomous supply chain of these to the war front, all managed by the AI.
They're unhackable, with the newest encryption that would take years to decrypt. Unfortunately, there is a bug in the production code that causes the AI to start targeting everything. AI starts killing all humans instead of the filters it was given.
How do you defeat an autonomous self-replenishing robot army that consumes the earth for energy and grows in size each day? You can't.
Frankly, the younger I was the longer my prospective time horizon was.
E.g. in 2000 I might have cared about what's going to happen in 2100.
Now, in 2025, as I got older, my time horizon has shrunk down to maybe 10 years at most, but typically ~3 years, as my life experience has taught me that life is often unpredictable, sometimes too short, and age has that ability to temper our expectations through health issues and other things.
I also don't have the executive function anymore to think about long-term abstract things, since it is primarily occupied with my shorter-term responsibilities.
So yeah, I really don't give a shit what 2125 will look like. I don't have the arrogance in me to even make an educated guess, because 99.9% chance it will look different than what I imagine.
I think it's inflation. And I don't just mean Covid era inflation. Inflation has been an on-again, off-again problem since the collapse of Bretton Woods.
It's because of inflation that slowly and subtly, everything gets shittier all the time. It encourages businesses to cut corners, shave costs, and find cheap labor overseas. It encourages you to not give a fuck about your job because you haven't had a raise in 5 years and the price of gas just keeps on climbing.
Inflation destroys everyone's belief in the future. Why work hard when everything is always getting a little bit worse anyway?
We've staved off a lot of the worst material effects with tech and productivity increases, but half the time the benefits from those just go to shareholders (indeed, even if all you did was hold the S&P 500 in recent decades, your portfolio is one of the bright spots in all this).
But I think the spiritual effects can't be staved off once you internalize the idea that it'll continually cost you more to keep on getting the same results. The bar of soap you buy will be a little thinner, there'll be a little less meat in your burger. You're always fighting the current. There's never a rest. If you feel this way then why would you care about what you're doing?
Historically I don't think there are a lot of societies that find an easy solution to this, the solutions usually involve defaults and wars.
Maybe this is part of why the crypto cult is so rabid, Bitcoin has deflationary properties, it's the opposite of the inflation trend.
The problem isn't just laziness or corporate greed, though those play a role. It's the result of a financial system that has spent years prioritizing short-term profits over lasting value. When success is measured by clicks, quarterly earnings, and engagement metrics rather than quality or truth, the natural outcome is a flood of cheap, disposable content. The AI-generated newspaper supplement isn't an exception, it's exactly what the system was designed to produce. Think about the ripple effects: as money flows toward fast, scalable content instead of deep, meaningful work, the people who actually care, journalists, editors, even readers, are left with fewer resources and less reason to invest effort. Local news shrivels, media gets bought up by profit-driven investors, and algorithms push whatever keeps people scrolling. When the financial incentives don't support real journalism, why would anyone bother?
The deeper damage is harder to see. A society fed on algorithmically generated mediocrity starts to lose its ability to recognize, or even expect, better. It's not that people suddenly stopped caring; it's that the system has made caring unrewarding. Underpaid workers cut corners, audiences grow numb to low standards, and the cycle keeps spinning. The "Who Cares Era" isn't about moral failure, it's what happens when the economy no longer values quality. The irony is this same system depends on trust to function. But when readers doubt what they read, workers take no pride in their jobs, and institutions lose credibility, the foundation starts to crack.
It’s easy to blame money, for it’s the most visible and measurable metric in a technologically driven culture. But other scholars have pointed to technology itself as being the issue, the relentless chase of data-driven efficiency, not money, which is just a secondary effect downstream. We went from being a tool-making species, to using tools to organize every aspect of our lives. I recommend Neil Postman’s Technopoly and, of course, good old Uncle Ted.
On the other hand, not paying with money for quality content is breeding the even worse cancer of shallow ad-driven content. Where the only thing that matters now is enough of an illusion to generate a click, horizontally scaled with AI-slop to trawl coverage of every possible search term.
Success of online advertising model seems to have destroyed a lot. It is now so bad that even if you pay you get the advertisements... So you end up with worst of the both worlds...
And all the reasons why economists say inflation is necessary and a good thing seem to make assumptions that aren’t true if taken to their logical conclusion (e.g. infinite growth) and hand wave away negative consequences in order to maintain what amounts to psychologically manipulating people into not saving their money.
Index all wages to inflation and we’ll see how much those holding all the assets feel about it.
I agree with you. The Fed prints trillions, mortgage rates plunge, and suddenly BlackRock's buying up entire neighborhoods with cheap debt while renters get priced out. Inflation is "healthy" if you're the one holding the deeds. But tell that to the family paying 40% of their paycheck just to keep a roof over their heads while wages crawl.
Or look at food prices. The USDA says inflation's "moderate," but try explaining that to the diner owner who's paying double for eggs and bacon while his customers stiff on tips on tips because their paychecks buy less. Meanwhile, Tyson Foods posts record profits, not because they're more efficient, but because they've got pricing power and a Fed that's terrified of "deflationary shocks" (corporate margins shrinking).
And don't even get me started on healthcare. Hospitals jack up bills 8% a year, insurers shrug and pass it on, and the economists call it "normal." But when a nurse asks for a raise to keep up? Suddenly it's "wage-price spiral" panic. Funny how inflation's a "tool" when it's squeezing workers, but a "crisis" when it threatens profits.
The game's rigged. Inflation's just the cover story. They'll print to save banks, but let Main Street eat the inflation tax. They'll cheer "record GDP" while your real paycheck buys less. And if you dare demand wages indexed to inflation? You're "unrealistic", but God forbid the bond market misses its 2% target.
So yeah, inflation's not the problem. The problem is who gets the upside (asset owners) and who gets the shaft (everyone else). And until that changes, all this talk about "necessary inflation" is just a con.
It’s Blackstone that’s investing in single-family homes, not BlackRock. They also only own 0.06% of US single-family housing stock. Easy mistake to make.
Also, there was absolutely inflation before Bretton Woods, and significantly worse inflation at that. See, for example, the hyperinflation during Weimar Germany which led to WWII. Or the nearly 10% deflation in the US during the Great Depression, which just exacerbated the effects by severely discouraging investment that would have helped kickstart the economy again. Post-Bretton Woods, major currencies are generally substantially more stable and predictable.
The Weimar hyperinflation wasn't caused by gold's limitations - it was the inevitable result of political cowardice and monetary arson. After WWI, Germany made the fatal decision to abandon gold convertibility and fund reparations through the printing press, transforming the mark from 4.2 to $1 in 1914 to 4.2 trillion to $1 by 1923. This wasn't some unavoidable monetary phenomenon but a deliberate policy choice to avoid fiscal responsibility. The Great Depression tells a similar story of government malpractice rather than gold standard failure. During the Roaring Twenties, the Federal Reserve artificially suppressed interest rates, creating massive distortions in credit markets and fueling the stock bubble. When the inevitable correction came, instead of allowing the market to clear, Hoover's administration compounded the crisis through disastrous interventions - hiking interest rates during a liquidity crunch, imposing Smoot-Hawley tariffs that strangled global trade, and strong-arming businesses into maintaining unsustainably high wages. The resulting deflationary spiral wasn't gold's fault but the direct consequence of central planning arrogance. The Bretton Woods system's collapse in 1971 followed the same pattern of political expediency overriding monetary integrity. The U.S. promised dollar convertibility at $35/oz gold but only to foreign governments while banning domestic ownership. When LBJ's simultaneous Vietnam War and Great Society spending spree drained U.S. gold reserves, Nixon simply severed the dollar's last tether to reality rather than confront fiscal discipline. The post-Bretton Woods era of pure fiat has created the illusion of stability while systematically eroding purchasing power - the dollar has lost 87% of its value since 1971, with the Fed responding to every crisis by printing trillions to bail out financial elites while main street struggles under crushing inflation. Weimar, the Depression, and Bretton Woods all share the same root cause: governments refusing to accept that money must be anchored to something beyond political whims. Gold doesn't cause collapses. It reveals them. Fiat doesn't prevent crises , it merely delays them while making the eventual reckoning worse. The historical record is clear: when governments treat money as a policy tool rather than a sacred trust, the result is always catastrophe dressed in different eras' clothing. Today's $35 trillion debt and monetary debasement suggest we've learned nothing from these lessons.
> One of the main themes of the book is the role played by the central bankers' insistence to adhere to the gold standard "even in the face of total catastrophe."[1] As Joe Nocera, a book reviewer at the New York Times, stated, "the central bankers were prisoners of the economic orthodoxy of their time: the powerful belief that sound monetary policy had to revolve around the gold standard...Again and again, this straitjacket caused the central bankers — especially Norman, gold’s most fervent advocate — to make moves, like raising interest rates, that would allow their countries to hold on to their dwindling gold supplies, even though the larger economy desperately needed help in the form of lower interest rates."
The argument that the gold standard was some kind of economic straitjacket that worsened the Great Depression is nothing more than elite gaslighting, a convenient myth peddled by central bankers and Keynesian apologists to justify their disastrous experiments with fiat money. The reality is that the gold standard didn't fail; governments and central banks did.
Take Britain's catastrophic return to gold in 1925. Churchill, egged on by Montagu Norman at the Bank of England, made the fatal error of pegging the pound at its pre-war parity, overvaluing it by 10-20%. This wasn't gold's fault, it was sheer political hubris. Had they adjusted the peg to reflect actual economic conditions, the ensuing deflationary spiral could have been avoided. Instead, British industry was crushed under the weight of an artificially strong currency, all so London's financial elites could cling to the illusion of imperial prestige.
Then there's France, whose central bank, rather than stabilizing the global monetary system, hoarded gold, which ended up sucking liquidity out of the world economy. And let's not forget the Federal Reserve, which in the early 1930s raised interest rates during a depression to defend gold reserves, turning a recession into a full-blown catastrophe. These weren't flaws of the gold standard, they were acts of economic malpractice by central bankers who either didn't understand the system or deliberately sabotaged it to serve creditor interests.
The classical gold standard, which had functioned smoothly for nearly two centuries before World War I, delivered price stability, facilitated global trade, and forced fiscal discipline on governments. It only broke down when politicians, eager to fund their wars and welfare schemes, suspended convertibility, then tried to haphazardly reinstate it in the 1920s without proper adjustments. The problem wasn't gold; it was the refusal of policymakers to play by the rules.
The truth is, central bankers like Norman didn't cling to the gold standard out of blind orthodoxy, they used it as cover for deflationary policies that protected the financial elite at the expense of workers and industry. The Bank of England sacrificed British manufacturing to maintain London's position as a financial hub. The Fed tightened money when it should have eased, deepening the Depression. The Banque de France hoarded gold, destabilizing the global system. These weren't "prisoners of economic dogma", they were architects of disaster, hiding behind gold to justify their incompetence.
And what did we get when we abandoned gold for the "flexibility" of fiat money? The stagflation of the 1970s, the financial crises of 2008, and the inflation surge of the 2020s, each one a direct result of central banks printing money with no anchor to reality. The Keynesian promise that we could spend and inflate our way to prosperity has been exposed as a lie. The gold standard didn't fail; governments failed the gold standard, and now we're paying the price.
The lesson of history is clear. Every time we discard monetary discipline, we get short-term euphoria followed by long-term collapse. The "gold standard caused the Depression" narrative is nothing more than a smokescreen, designed to absolve the real culprits, central planners and political elites, of their catastrophic mistakes. The bill always comes due, and this time, it's going to be paid in devalued dollars and economic ruin.
Further reading: "Did France Cause the Great Depression?
by Douglas A. Irwin"
As long as US Dollar supply was increasing at the rate of 2% per year (I don't know the exact rate but some predictable small rate) which is commensurate with Gold supply increase, everything was ok with the world, nobody cared whether it was USD or Gold. It is only when US started abusing this privilege that system started breaking.
The claim that the dollar system worked perfectly until the Fed got greedy is pure fantasy. The post-WWII Bretton Woods system wasn't a gold standard, it was a dollar hegemony masquerading as one, a rigged game where America played banker to the world while quietly running the printing press overtime. The U.S. promised dollars convertible to gold at $35 an ounce, but only for foreign governments, while internally, the Federal Reserve and Treasury operated with the restraint of a coked-up stockbroker. This was never sustainable. By 1971, the U.S. had a mere $24 billion in gold reserves backing $140 billion in foreign-held dollars, a laughable imbalance Nixon tried to conceal with capital controls and strong-arm diplomacy. But when France, under the leadership of then-President Georges Pompidou (a former Rothschild banker who, unlike today's economists, actually understood monetary games), started demanding physical gold in exchange for its dollar reserves, the gig was up. The London Gold Pool, a desperate central bank cartel formed in 1961 to artificially suppress gold's price, collapsed by 1968, precisely because the market smelled the rot.
The idea that the Fed "matched" gold supply growth with disciplined printing is historical revisionism at its worst. Throughout the 1950s, the Fed quietly monetized Treasury debt to bankroll Cold War spending. By the 1960s, it was cranking the dollar printer into overdrive to fund Vietnam and LBJ's Great Society fantasies, policies that sent inflation to 6% by 1969, even as the Fed kept interest rates below inflation (a.k.a. financial sabotage of savers). The so-called "2% rule" was fiction; the Fed was juicing the system for political convenience long before Nixon officially torched the gold window. And let's not forget the Fed's role in the speculative Eurodollar market, where offshore dollar lending exploded without reserve requirements, an early preview of the unregulated shadow banking systems that would later implode in 2008.
The fatal flaw was baked into the Bretton Woods design from day one, a paradox economist Robert Triffin warned about in 1960: To serve as the world's reserve currency, the U.S. had to supply dollars globally, but the more dollars it printed to meet demand, the shakier confidence in its gold backing became. This wasn't an accident; it was a structural time bomb. By the late 1960s, foreign central banks were drowning in dollars they couldn't redeem without triggering a run on Fort Knox. Meanwhile, the U.S. hollowed out its own industrial base, outsourcing manufacturing to Asia and Germany while replacing real production with financialization, Wall Street alchemy turning debt into "wealth."
Fast-forward to today, and the chickens are coming home to roost with a vengeance. The dollar's purchasing power has cratered, 92% loss since 1971. The national debt has ballooned to $35 trillion, nearly triple U.S. GDP. Decades of negative real interest rates have turbocharged asset bubbles, turning housing into a speculative casino while wages stagnate. And now, thanks to Washington's rampant weaponization of dollar sanctions, the BRICS nations are actively dismantling the dollar's reserve status, with China stockpiling gold and brokering oil deals in yuan. The Fed's response? More printing, more deficits, more pretending the laws of monetary gravity don't apply.
The breakdown wasn't caused by "abuse" of the dollar system, it was the inevitable result of a system designed to be abused. Fiat currencies don't fail because people mismanage them; they fail because they enable mismanagement. Gold didn't collapse in 1971, the U.S. government simply abandoned it to avoid fiscal accountability. Now we're stuck with the consequences: a financialized husk of an economy where billionaires mint fortunes in leveraged speculation while workers get paid in depreciating digits.
I have question. If new value is produced in the system (say an iphone or google search), isn't it ok to produce more dollars to represent that value, which is also the reason why people didn't care for decades, because the system was working.
You're asking the right question but the answer isn't the Fed's money printer, it's the real economy's ability to back that money with actual productivity. Yes, an iPhone or Google search creates value but not all value is equal in monetary terms. The dollar's legitimacy hinges on scarcity and trust, not just raw economic output. If you could print money every time someone coded an app or assembled a gadget, Venezuela would be an economic superpower.
In a gold system you get rich by innovating, building, and trading. Not gaming financial systems. No Fed to bail out failed banks or corrupt hedge funds. Modern "hoarders" thrive because JP Morgan can lose billions, then get free Fed loans. Tech CEOs pump stock prices with buybacks, not R&D. Politicians borrow trillions, stick taxpayers with the bill. Under gold, these parasites starve. Gold forces all wealth to prove its worth in the free market.
The #1 driver of modern wealth inequality is fiat-fueled asset inflation. The rich own stocks, real estate, and hard assets, which soar as money is printed. The poor own cash and labor, which get crushed.
Hard money (gold) forces productive capitalism. Easy money (fiat) breeds crony oligarchy. The fear that gold leads to wealth hoarding is a myth. In reality, gold has built-in discipline mechanisms that punish idle capital and force productive use of wealth. The exact opposite of today's fiat-driven oligarchy.
Unlike fiat currency (which rots at 2-10% yearly inflation), gold appreciates in purchasing power over time as the economy grows (real deflation). Hoarding cash results in wealth growth, so saving is rewarded. But unproductive hoarding carries an opportunity cost because gold doesn't pay interest or dividends.
The wealthy can't just sit on mountains of gold. They must invest it to earn returns, fueling productive enterprise. In 19th-century Britain, capital flooded into railroads, factories, and infrastructure, not Wall Street derivatives.
Compare that to today's fiat hellscape where the rich park wealth in low-yield bonds, speculative bubbles, or offshore tax havens and central banks bail out hoarders (2008 bank rescues, 2020 PPP "loans" for billionaires).
Under fiat regimes, the politically connected get new money first (banks, corporations, government contractors) before inflation hits the working class. Gold eliminates this. No central bank can create gold out of thin air to enrich cronies. All wealth accumulation must come from actual production. No Fed-backed stock buybacks or real estate bubbles. No "passive income aristocracy" living off monetary inflation. Capital flows to useful ventures (factories, tech, agriculture), not unproductive asset-stripping.
Under gold, interest rates are set by real savings, not central planners. This means that reckless spending gets punished and long-term investing gets rewarded. If the rich hoard gold without investing, interest rates naturally rise (less gold available for loans), forcing them to deploy capital or lose out. Contrast this with yesterday's Fed-set near-zero rates, which allowed billionaires to borrow cheaply and speculate endlessly without real productivity. In the 1800s, Vanderbilt couldn't just borrow free money from the Fed to buy up railroads. He had to convince investors with real profits.
Unlike feudal systems (where land means power) or modern equities (where BlackRock/Vanguard dominate), gold's physical nature prevents monopoly hoarding. No "too big to fail" banks because gold can't be bailed out. No endless financialization because hard money kills derivatives casinos. And it's easily tradable because unlike real estate or fine art, gold circulates freely. The wealthy can't lock up the system. Gold moves to where it's most useful, not where it's politically protected. Bring back hard money. Watch the rentier class collapse.
I think Fed's money printers make all the entreprenuers chase value creation. It's like accelerated Red Queen Hypothesis. They are keeping everyone on their toes to gather as much of future new money as possible (that will be printed in future) at the same time creating value. My problem is if people just sit on the gold and not allow it to circulate and suffocate the economy because the gold hoarders would be rest assured that value will be eventually created in the system and their gold would appreciate and capture that value so they don't even try.
> They also only own 0.06% of US single-family housing stock.
This is one of those situations where averages hide the harm. Yes, when you look across everything it's not a big deal. But you can find clear instances where it is a problem, particularly in homes of certain value in growing markets (like Atlanta: https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-news/data-investors-now-own...).
Ultimately all of this comes down to currency power, which is why I personally hope one of these highly alternative web-of-trust currencies takes off and starts supplanting mainstream currency. (Any currency will end up getting corrupted too, eventually, though)
The only two I remember are Circles and LedgerLoops.
In Circles, each user gets their own currency not fungible with anyone else's. Payment channels are set up between each user and their immediate friends; users also allow automatic conversion between their currency and their friends' currency. Payments are routed through the trust network through a route that has capacity at each step - this is the anti-Sybil design - you always receive coins of your immediate friends' currency. Each user's coins are minted at a certain rate, and the system does accounts for the devaluation over time of each user's currency, so it's a bit like balances can be somewhat negative, and reset towards zero from either direction with time.
That's obviously a complex system, and radically unlike ordinary currencies. There are many reasons it probably doesn't work; I hope they all turn out to be wrong.
LedgerLoops is the other one I remember. Users post things they want to buy and things they want to sell. The system finds loops where each user gives something to the next in the loop. Apparently this is surprisingly efficient. There is no currency at all. This one, by contrast, is extremely simple, and also radically unlike ordinary currencies. This doesn't have a UBI component.
I’m doubtful because things always got a little worse all the time even before money existed. It’s the natural state of nature; erosion. Cleaning up after yourself and maintaining your space is a virtue for that very reason. Seems like that virtue is, itself, is in a state of disrepair (which implies an obvious course of action).
It really didn't always get worse for a while (at least in the US). McDonalds went from just a burger/rare treat to affordable, to so affordable we had to pass laws to limit how much food they gave out. Homes grew in size, stopped having shared bedrooms/bathrooms. Everyone started having dishwashers/microwaves in their kitchens. Clothes purchases moved from planned to spur of the moment. 27 inch TVs stopped being the norm. (I know this one is cliche, we'd rather decent lives than fancier circuses to distract, but at the time it was a 'wow the future is here' moment, big TVs only existed in rich friends homes, and they were HORRIBLE because they upscaled content designed for 27 inch TVs). Exercise clubs went from only for the rich tennis clubs to affordable gyms. Kids got their OWN computers. Meanwhile, quality was improving everywhere. Shoes, oh my god did shoes get better. Clothing quality got better to the point people in the 80s routinely just started wearing silk (SILK!!! can you believe it?) shirts. Sheet thread counts actually became a thing, holy moley the luxury. Computers went from Commodore 64s to modern wonders. Foods people ate at home/out got fancier, with all kinds of new discoveries.
My entire life up until 2008, almost everything around was getting better/cheaper. Yesterday at the store I wanted ice cream. I walked the aisle. Half the brands can no longer call themselves 'ice cream' legally. None of it felt like food to me. There is boutiques super expensive 'ice cream', but there used to be buckets of family friends priced 'ice cream' not whatever slop they sell now for the masses. Every single 'old school' brand I'm familiar with was a hollowed out corpse living off the name but selling trash that I don't consider fit (and remember, this is the junk food, already not really fit, segment).
Inflation is mostly a symptom though. Of natural resources getting scarcer (harder to extract). As you can imagine the price of gasoline is quite tied with the worldwide market price of oil.
And overall we have in the West (and in the US in particular) been living way "above our means" for more than half a century. And this 'debt' is starting to come due. It will get a lot worse too, for longer, before it starts getting better again.
> a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs.
Is this similar to the Peter principle, though? And not that it is exactly that concept, but that book is from 1969. People have been making this observation for a while.
In this context, it's more comforting to really pay attention to very competent people. I had a home inspector spend ~5 hours on my house and was amazed by every little detail he discovered and documented, and how knowledgeable he was, etc.
Similarly, I like it when I occasionally see little bits of on the job training when I'm a customer -- the barista this morning teaching another about pouring latte art, the senior dentist nudging the trainee into what the right diagnosis was based on the symptoms I was reporting, that kind of thing. It's encouraging to see people caring about what they do and passing their skills on to other people who care about getting better.
I was in New Zealand a couple of months ago and today something crystallized about my experience there - I consistently encountered people who were good at their jobs there.
They've got a shortage of people in the trades, but their tradies seemed highly professional and efficient, the folks at the bike shops were on point, the airport staff were quick to help and super informative (gate attendant explained visibility 'minimums'!)
I think that observation stands in the US too -- there are certain professions where you're more likely to find someone who cares.
You mentioned bike shops. At least in my area (New England) every person I've ever seen working in a bike shop was competent and cared about working in a bike shop. (They weren't necessarily the nicest and most personable people, but that's a different story.)
Who works in a bike shop? Almost no one "ends up" there the way people usually "end up" at their jobs -- following the easy flow of high school to college to a bunch of interviews at marketing-adjacent (or whatever) firms and finally working where ever offers them a job.
You're only likely to even consider working at a bike shop if you want to work at a bike shop.
Wondering what the other "bike shop" jobs are now.
> Wondering what the other "bike shop" jobs are now.
I'd say software & tech were those jobs before more and more folks just started going into it for the money. Working as a sysadmin and sysadmin adjacent roles my whole career, I've seen it shift in real time from skilled craftspeople whom had a true curiosity and interest in computing, to folks who have zero interest in the field at all, many of whom hate their job, but stay in it purely for the money as very few other careers pay as well as what you can make in tech without advanced education.
Oter "bike shop" jobs I think you'll find in mostly hobby places - photography/camera shops, outdoor gear shops, local/independent bookstores, and craftmanship work - woodworking/hand-made furniture, musical instrument repair, some mechanics.
It makes me wonder if there are still those "bike shop" jobs to be found in tech. I feel like I missed out on the golden years of the tech age where I would have found my curiosity and interests satisfied by my job, but maybe there might be a few niches out there somewhere...
I think some of the indie game studios have this. Think of team behind Clair Obscur. Not that it also isn't very hard place with lot of risk and on average more meagre rewards...
VFX software development, repairing and modifying pipelines for artists, at a company with a large internal tool infrastructure like Weta, ILM, Pixar, is my target job
Bike shops generally don't drug test, rarely have a dress code and attract a pretty select crowd.
Aside from that, you're a mechanic. Motorcycle dealers/car dealers/random car lots hire mechanics too any may or may not care what you do on your own time.
Plenty of maritime industries need that same skill set, as do mining operations, agricultural equipment dealers and all of the medium size shops that repair heavy equipment you've never heard of.
Fab shops are great, if you want a bicycle shop experience but bigger and with 100% more yeehaw. You can teach yourself how to weld for a pretty low sum of money if you've got a couple hundred bucks, some space and creativity.
I think some of it is about getting away from big box stores and working with smaller shops. Now, that's not saying that small shops are automatically good, but you'll find people way better at some of them than you ever will at a big store. Big stores tend to care about pushing numbers and not expertise.
These are usually individual, passion-driven jobs. Others that come to mind include local outdoor outfitters, musical instrument makers, clock repairers, craftspeople (like textile artists, quilters, and jewelers), artisanal food producers, and coaches.
GP says "consistently encountered" and you respond with "well, that's true, but only in certain places". Seems like you're contradicting what they're saying and acting like you're in agreement.
I worked several different SW roles in Norway last year, it was the opposite; I now suspect the entire country is simply faking it until they run out of oil.
I think New Zealand tends to follow the same trends of cultural rot as the rest of the Western world, but years behind, and therefore a bit weaker too.
Home inspection is basically the tradesman version of how real-estate developers and GCs pretty much all try getting their realtor's license and dabbling in that at some point in their career and then rage quit because smiling and pushing papers is below them.
Anyone capable of working at a higher level like that will quickly be up and out to somewhere they can get paid to work on that level. Peter principal in action.
> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity.
Even worse, it's become a sort of cultural expectation. Among my friend group here in the UK, people think you're weird for even trying and classify you as a tryhard for simply doing well. It's very different to Asia and I'm not surprised the UK is falling behind.
For many, it's a morality, not just an expectation. You're a bad person if you're not mediocre. See this from a recently posted article 6 hours ago:
> It does preclude, practically from first principles, those exceptional individuals many of us have encountered in our career who seemed to be able to hold the entire code base in their brains. Arguably that’s a net positive. Those individuals were always problematic similar to those folks who are willing to work 80 hours a week and jump on every incident. At a minimum they make the rest of us look bad.
Not only is working too much bad, but competence and intelligence itself is bad, or at least suspect. No doubt it's rationalized as being against anti-teamwork traits, but the reality is much more sinister -- jealousy, and lies to package up that jealousy as something that isn't jealousy.
I don’t know what the context of that quote is, but I gotta say the realization that I would never be the smartest person in the room if I want to do interesting things (bec I simply don’t have the reasoning or memory that these people have naturally) was super humbling. I’ve spent the last few years coming to terms with it and in the meantime… I hate to say it but, I’ve surrounded myself with mediocrity as an ego boost. Only one job in the last decade did I feel like I wasn’t the smartest person on the team… and I got out of there so fast, I had way too much imposter syndrome and too big of an ego to admit it.
So I don’t get to do interesting things but my ego doesn’t feel stupid.
In the UK at least I suspect it's at least partially a generational thing. When I was in school back in the 90's it was deeply uncool to be in to anything academic. It's also not a surprise it was the height of lads mags and a very heavy drinking culture. These days that social pressure is entirely different for kids.
That said there are lots more ways to be good at your job than a narrow focus on hours worked and raw brain power.
> In the UK at least I suspect it's at least partially a generational thing. When I was in school back in the 90's it was deeply uncool to be in to anything academic. It's also not a surprise it was the height of lads mags and a very heavy drinking culture. These days that social pressure is entirely different for kids.
This was in the US too--there was a "Gen-X slacker" ethos that persisted into mid-millenial "culture". Radically different for people born even 5 years later, I think it largely reflects the relative (perceived) security back then.
> Not only is working too much bad, but competence and intelligence itself is bad.
That could be also because of the employer's rising expectations. The baseline expectation goes up as soon as one person overdelivers. The "making us look bad" doesn't mean you underdeliver, just that it's all of a sudden proven that all of you could do more.
When another employer offers higher salary you might also go to your current job suddenly pissed at your employer or boss. Not because your current salary is low but because it could be higher.
It feels particularly bad if these capabilities come as part of one’s natural state.
I don’t think I’m an exceptional programmer or anything like that for example (on a whole I’d say I’m average), but the ability to keep a codebase in my head just kind of appeared after hitting a certain threshold of experience. It’s not something I intentionally developed. To meet social expectations, what am I supposed to do, pretend I don’t have that capability and handicap myself, ultimately making my workday harder? That doesn’t make any sense.
I'm not sure where you read that in the quote above. Surely the person who knows the codebase inside out, the person who "jumps on every incident," the person who is willing to put in the long hours IS the person doing the daily grunt work?
Even that person is likely being underpaid for the work they are doing. And unless they're the ONLY PERSON AT THE JOB then they're not doing all the work. Everyone is important to make things work. And I guarantee those other people aren't seeing the fruits of their labor either.
Productivity gains going to the top 0.1% since the 1970's has caused the rest of us to not want to work hard, because we don't capture our own productivity gains. I'm not sure how this is hard to understand.
The belief that grunts (like the hard working grunt) aren't paid enough might not be sufficient on its own to make the end result (people getting mad at that grunt) believable.
But what if one considers it as one of several beliefs frequently held together? What if a grunt believes the following?
A) grunts (in general, but also including the hard worker) don't get paid enough for how much they work
B) grunts have more control over how hard they work than over how much they are paid
C) if one grunt works extra hard, management will start expecting all grunts to work that hard (exacerbating what they already think is a poor work/pay ratio; see A)
One or two of your friends, the influential ones, are driving that narrative. If you're lucky one of them will get an ambitious partner and the dynamic will suddenly switch.
If you're not, you can get away with it in your 20s, but they'll drag you down in your 30s.
But don't extrapolate to the whole UK from an echo chamber of a friendship group.
It’s different when in general the experience interacting with a government bureaucracy is poor, and government produces expensive and inefficient outcomes these days. As opposed to big tech which is creating huge profits and new technology.
to be fair we now have the knowledge and ability to begin to see the scale of the universe but are still burdened with the expectation of continuing the industrial age factory worker schedule of 40 hours a week coupled a constant barrage of information that it's actually doing more harm than good. How can you really blame anyone when the society is just working for the sake of it.
This parallels an article that someone I follow wrote a couple of weeks ago. His way of describing this is the "second world effect". The article is better than I could write (link below). But basically, the "third world" is a low-trust society and everyone understands that and behaves in a defensive way. The "first world" is a high-trust society where things work. There is a discontinuous jump from third to first world once the culture has enough high-trust built in. But if the first world devolves back to low-trust, it doesn't go back to third world, it transitions to "second world" where things look like the first world, but nothing works any more because it's low-trust, but the society hasn't really recognized that.
Thanks for the link, I thought it was a good read. I assumed it would dance around the causes but he was pretty direct with it. Getting society to recognize what's happening and then take meaningful action seems intractable. Suppose that's why the path looks like 3rd -> 1st -> 2nd -X. I'm not aware of any society or even a single city that really breaks out of it once they land in "second world".
The original second world was a bit like that in that it used to refer to the soviet and socialist countries. Looked like the west but not quite right.
This is largely a consequence of the economic opportunities presented to people at work. There is basically no organization that will pay you more as a direct consequence of being better at your job. Compensation is almost never tied to performance, and is in practice most closely tied to age. Compensation isn't adjusted quickly enough for people to associate it with the quality of their work. A yearly meeting where your wage is adjusted to keep up with inflation or reflect your time in the workforce isn't something you can control.
This leads to a lot of doing the bare minimum, since any effort beyond what is necessary to keep the job is wasted effort. You will get paid more just for existing longer, so just hang on. The only real way to get more money is to switch jobs, which is more about negotiation and politics than being good at the previous or next job. Most people aren't ambitious enough to repeatedly job hop, but would be ambitious enough to chase more money at their current job, were the opportunity presented.
The only way to fix this is to encourage larger variations in salary between high and low performers and get the union (I've done my time) mentality out of these organizations. It will never happen for the government.
Yes, this is the obvious exception, and good career advice. But it doesn't solve the problem for the consumers, which is that important services are done poorly or not at all. Not everyone can work for themselves, and if you want the people who collect a salary to do a good job, the incentives need to come from compensation.
The goal is the same as it's always been: get the most resources for the least amount of effort. This is true whether you're a squirrel, a person, a company, or a government.
> The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?)
I occasionally point out to my neighbors that a new seven-story apartment building down the street took as long to build as the Empire State Building. Denial and/or a lack of understanding that this might represent a problem are common.
(if you don't adjust for inflation it cost about the same in USD to build, but that's a separate topic)
>Where I live, it seems like half the streets don't have street signs (this isn't a backwater where you'd expect this, it's Boston).
I've noticed that this is a New England thing. Driving up for the first time, I got lost repeatedly. Signs were placed too close to exits, hidden behind trees, etc. I came to the conclusion that there must be some local aversion to proper signage, probably based in the area's age and relative insularity. "Keep things the way they are and have been for hundreds of years," and, "If you're supposed to be here, you'll know where you are," attitudes, respectively. Boston, Providence, etc. are cosmopolitan, but I'd wager that the people who control public works iniatives are decidedly not.
I've shared this before. In a lot of modern jobs, how hard you turn the crank of effort is almost completely disconnected from the outcomes that you see.
Beyond a small minimum requirement, turning the crank more only leads to the expectation that you will continue to turn that crank that much. Rewards for going beyond -- money, security, autonomy -- are rarely present and almost never in proportion to how much you turn the crank. Plus, one day the company will decide it no longer needs you to turn the crank anymore, and without so much as a "thank you" you're on your own.
People only have a finite amount of 'caring' to give out. Why invest a lot into something when you feel you won't see any difference for your effort?
I don't know if this helps, and I am pretty out of touch with the work culture because I run my own business (boy am I glad I stuck with this in the 2000's because now its so crazy in the job market) but you know where working hard really matters? its with the people you come into contact with that value your hard work that counts. I don't necessarily work hard expecting a return (but I understand fiances are soo tight for people right now that it maters a lot), I work hard because I enjoy what do and I want people to have a good experience. I'm not sure if that is available for everyone in this day and age, but I would strongly encourage everyone that is finding this situation untenable to find something you love a start doing it. The people that values this work will come, it takes awhile to build it, but it does happen eventually.
Take a look at the poor construction quality of new build homes too--there's an entire subgenre of social media where home inspectors find all sorts of horrifying and "hilarious" issues with newly assembled McMansions. This runs the gamut from beer bottles overturned in insulation to doors that don't fit in frames, fire hazards, etc.
I've seen the same in apartments I'd rented over the last few years. The owners (management co's in many cases) will perform the most quarter-assed repairs and the poorest paint jobs imaginable before renting the place to the next schlub, while charging you for "wear" on the cheapest model dishwasher on the market.
An embrace of mediocrity in one's work, specifically, though.
In many countries, the UK for example, wages have become stagnant over the last 15 years and "getting on in life", "social mobility", whatever you want to call it, appears to have stalled entirely.
Maybe "Who cares?" is the correct response for many people.
UK real wages stagnated directly in line with the 2008 financial crisis [1]. Enough has been written about 'too big to fail' that I don't need to rehash it, but ascribing guilt to the workers of a chronically underpaid and historically innovative nation doesn't feel right.
Wage stagnation always happens at the start of any economic downturn. However, once over and the economy resumes, typically the stagnation ends, and wages jump.
The massive, huge cynic in me says, people make less because all they do is stare at their phones. Yes, I know, I'm overstating things a bit.
But the other day I noticed the approx 20 year old garbage collector, was staring at his phone the whole time. I am not joking. Truck pulls up, he glances at my garbage bin, back to phone as he snags it. While rolling it to the truck? Staring at phone. While pulling the lever to lift and dump it? Phone. While putting it back in my driveway? Phone.
While hanging off the truck from one arm as it careens up to 100km/hr to the next rural property? Phone.
He's literally not doing his job. He's supposed to be looking for things in the garbage (car batteries, or something else not for normal garbage) during the dump. My bin also fell into the ditch, because he didn't even look at where it was headed.
(And I've had garbage collectors for my entire life, decades of them, and yes it's worse.)
Another example? I had a fridge delivered. One guy was 40. The other 20.
40 year old talks to me, etc as the delivery proceeds. 20 year old? Staring at phone literally every second, monosyllabic answers. Had to be prompted by 40 year old a dozen times to do basic jobs.
I'm not saying it's all phones. But I've heard the cries of horror from people who have been told "if your phone is in your hand at work, you're fired".
I can just imagine, when one is literally that addicted to something, how normal "I don't like work" unpleasantness skyrockets to mega-proportions of inane misery, from the conjoined "ARG, WORK!" and "OMG my fix is missing!"
I envision it as "OK, now I'm working this sucks" mixed with "plus I have shards of glass in my shoes" or some such.
This isn't just a problem on the job. EVERYONE suddenly seems addicted to their phones. You walk into a coffee shop or restaurant. Everyone (including behind the counter) is staring at a phone. Look at other drivers on the road. Everyone is scrolling their phones while driving 70mph on the freeways. Even social gatherings among friends. I used to do movie night with friends, but we stopped doing it because people pull out their phones within 5 minutes of the movie starting, and there's no point. Might as well just turn off the movie and sit there in silence while everyone watches videos of random nobodies. And if I instituted a no-phones rule, nobody would come. My 11 year old has invited a few friends over to our house to play, and their parents come with, but they don't socialize! They just sit their awkwardly silent staring at their phones. I remember one parent didn't even hear me when I offered her some coffee.
As a non phone user, when I go out into the world, I feel like I'm on that movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where I'm surrounded by these weird non-humans everywhere, and nobody thinks any of their behavior is odd but me.
If you look at the rate of wage growth compared to inflation, it's pretty clear that wages have stagnated for a long time, with periodic bumps. The goal of most businesses is growth and increased productivity. The easiest way to have higher productivity is to constrain wages.
I will agree that in certain parts of the world, this is quite true.
However it's not a universal. China has had immense wage growth, and the emergency of a "middle class" income bracket, where no such bracket existed before. Of course it's an economy still in the throws of massive transformation.
Yet regardless, "staring at phone instead of doing job correctly" isn't going to reverse that trend. Or I guess it could for the few unaddicted.
>However it's not a universal. China has had immense wage growth
Yea, showing transforming economies to established economies isn't really a great comparison at all. You have two huge things happening at once. A massive transfer of wealth from those 'rich' economies building new factories to use the cheap labor. This drops wages in the rich economies by shipping the jobs out. In the meantime the people in the rich economies have to move to service style jobs away from manufacturing.
In a few decades the same will happen with China as it converts to a service economy.
I visit my local hospital and am in the back getting tests, etc. and the number of employees on their personal phones bugs me.
Supervisors could just request users to step out into the hall and check their phone. The amount of non work that occurs when people become glued to their phone is incredible.
Legislation often lags immensely behind change. The worst of this has only being going on for a little over 10 years. Maybe 12, so 3x changes of elected legislators.
Some of these issues are also safety issues. Being distracted is certainly obvious in a car, and massive fines and even criminal charges are now the result. But there are subtle things one must do in many jobs, just generically paying attention, which results in a save vs unsafe outcome. Boredom at work used to be filled with paying attention to ... work.
The garbage truck example I mentioned? I can think of a dozen safety issues. Safety for the employee, safety for someone walking by. Any accident could result in criminal charges for negligence, surely, but workplace safety rules are an issue too.
Soon, eventually, workplace safety rules will likely mandate "No phone at work, period"... at least for many professions. At least, that's how I see some of this resolving.
Another possibility is governments outlawing addictive social media. There are probably several ways this could be done, but breaking up the big advertising monopolies would be a good first start
I would love to see Social Media and addictive apps like sports betting treated like smoking. If not outlawed altogether, at least forbidden to children, and socially and legally discouraged for adults. We need to start seriously treating these things like the terrible things they are.
people are addicted to their phones, its true, and its becoming so normalized that having any interest in talking to people you dont already know is considered antisocial
Well that's the word, isn't it: 'typically'. That hasn't happened. The activities that make life worthwhile have largely been priced out for the average person. I think that we can tarry about historical causes (and accomplish nothing, creating an ever-worsening feedback loop) or identify where changes could be made to incentivize productivity beyond what amounts to macroeconomic punishment.
As for the garbage man... can you blame him? What reason does he have to maintain the appearance of vigilance? Their routes are long, getting longer with cuts, they're largely understaffed, and they deal with both the contempt of the public and their refuse.
Conditions are actively getting worse for some; the UK's second largest city has proposed cutting wages by up to £8,000 p/a due to a bureaucratic nightmare of their own making [1].
It is a thankless job with no opportunity for progression which most people would rather put out of mind completely. Frankly, they deserve better.
Just thinking about every point in my life where I ended up in "who cares?" was due to concerns outside of my control/power. When I feel I have some agency, power, and/or recognition it just naturally follows that I will care (in varying degree but I will care somehow); even if not for the larger organisation I will care about my immediate peers/team.
If I'm not paid enough, or I don't have agency, or I don't feel heard and my point is proven later (multiple times), or a superior is an asshole, so on and so forth, I naturally end up in "who cares?" after some beating.
Of course, it's all personal experience/anecdotal evidence, but in general I don't think most people just turned the "who cares?" mode on and wage stagnation followed, it seems to be much rather the opposite, you take away safety, money, agency, and any other aspect that might make a job more fulfilling and the only natural progression is people disengaging from the activity.
It might be part of the feedback loop, but from my experience it always starts at the company level.
I think I've been under a pay freeze for 4 of the last 6 years, and a capped 2% raise one of the others. No matter how much effort I put in, my wages would have stagnated.
Thats kind of part of the problem, though. Yes, switching jobs constantly is a solid path to higher wages in fields like tech (at least it was before this year, some of the most competent people I know are struggling to change jobs), but in my experience that act tends to reduce ones number of "give a damns".
I was wondering if maybe this is the result of a tight labor market. A lot lf what I see kind of lines up with what happens if you have to make do with underskilled or otherwise sloppy staff.
The throughline I think is that there's no consequence for being bad at one's job. Not to say I'm perfect - I am pretty sure I've been a mediocre employee before, but I've also never been sacked.
I have a high work ethic but I mostly keep it to myself.
That is: I don't hold strangers to my standards or expect them to feel the same way about their work that I do about mine.
I've never been sacked for poor performance, but I have been included in mass layoffs and restructurings throughout my career, which always makes one wonder if they were secretly not meeting some metric.
This is my read on the situation. I have been weirded out when I get "excellent" service at a restaurant. Like my friend, you literally aren't getting paid enough to give this much of a shit. You're doing me a favor by working this drive-thru job so I don't have to cook while I'm sick. The gratitude goes the other way.
Society standards have been dropping since 2010, COVID accelerated it. Most of it is people mad that they are barely making it, and often they are in service of people that don't even realize prices have risen.
I've been saying this for years and people are still dumbfounded.
> I made acquaintance to a city worker who, to her non-professional friends, is very proud that she takes home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans.
It's easy to pick on a public sector worker, but if they were a tech worker, we'd probably praise them to high heaven for "working smarter, not harder", but we have a different standard for public sector workers (and blue collar laborers).
In the private sector, the burden of a shirking employee is borne by owners, investors, shareholders. In the public sector, the weight is borne by our collective dollars, and shirking represents money that could have gone into a playground, better wayfinding infra, curb cuts... We necessarily have a stake in what our governments do, therefore the expectations of the public are different vs. the private sector.
people are hugely dependent on private sector companies as well. sure the financial impacts are passed onto the capital owners, but those are passed onto consumers in most cases no? i dont see a huge difference here
also the wage differences between tech and a public service worker is laughable. if you underpay in a high pressure environment, of course they won’t care. we get what we pay for with publicly owned utilities
In the case of a company, you can simply refuse to pay them if you feel that the goods and services you receive are not worth the money they are asking for.
If you try to stop paying to the government, you will be robbed blind and sent to prison for life.
I did some business with the a city department at one time. I discovered that from Thanksgiving to New Years, no work was done at that department. Everyone was "out of the office" or will "be back later".
My partner and I ended up sleeping on an air mattress while we waited for the one person at the building department who could sign off on our project to come back from vacation. They were in fact completely unresponsive between thanksgiving and two weeks after new years.
This is only an example of people being bad at their jobs or not caring if you are referring to the management/administration responsible for staffing and scheduling over that time period. The people who are actually out of the office are presumably using approved PTO.
Every place I have worked has had meticulously tracked PTO days that most people delayed taking until the end of the year; there were notably fewer people in the office in December.
This is happening all over and I think a lot of it has to do with society moving from communities to larger societies where they increasingly feel less significant. They work for a large bureaucratic systems that don't give two shits about them. The small mom and pop businesses are all consolidated into cold soulless corporations who's only goal is numbers go up. So you do just enough to fulfill that goal and use the rest of your mental and physical energy on things that make you feel better about being a insignificant cog.
My work was a kind-of dysfunctional mom and pop shop. Then the owner decided to get in bed with VC to boost his business. It became a numbers go up game headed by a CEO who lives 800 miles away. We lost benefits, worse insurance, less flexibility in work hours and loss of work from home for certain roles. That totally incentivizes people, right? Then the moron president VC installed uses AI like a crutch and talks about a future with more robots and less people. Again, totally incentivizes people to work more, right? Yet these detached morons wonder why people are apathetic. Then add on the state of the world being delivered via 24/7 fast news and meme cycles. People are literally being mentally beaten into submission. So it becomes "fuck em, I'm doing the minimum."
It's also way more in your face that you are a sucker now that you can see the rich, carefree lives of people online. While it might not be your boss, it's people in the same circle living the same lifestyle.
Before it wasn't shoved in people's faces the difference in quality of life/reward/return.
Yes, precisely this. I understand that if I died tomorrow, some services would clean up the body and that's it. Nobody cares about me, I don't care about anyone. My goal is to maximize the amount of resources I own while minimizing the amount of time and energy I spend. Being shit at my job is an essential part of it. That's just how modern society works.
To be fair though, I don't think there's ever been an era better for people like me. I've always been an outcast, I've always been a little different, so living in times that allow me to just pretend to do bare minimum and fuck off is a huge blessing. Imagine living in middle ages when your existence depends on your village but you don't like them.
Recently a memory popped up in my mind. My uncle used to grow beans. The thing is, beans grow in peels, but they can only be sold without the peel, so you need people to peel the beans. So we'd sit in the barn and peel the beans while talking and listening to music and whatnot. This is what industrialization took from us.
Yeah I think this is spot on. It's just a side effect of widespread, pervasive alienation, in the Marxist sense. With LLMs we're at the point where the last enclave of relatively alienation free work is disappearing.
I just travelled to a province to pay for some private healthcare i cant get at home. Its a simple procedure, but a specific one. I sent the treatment plan to the customer service liason I was dealing with and triple checked that the doctor i was seeing was familiar with it.
Then I get there and the doctor's never looked at the document I sent. No one even told him about it.
The customer service liason is "very sorry for the miscommunication and will be looking internally to see how this occurred!"
This quote from The Expanse summarizes our society right now:
> Prax: They're using distilled water in the hydroponic supply instead of the proper mineral solutions needed for long-term stability.
> Amos: That sounds bad.
> Prax: They'll only be able to get away with it for another week, maybe two. After that, the air, the scrubbing plants, what's left of them, will die off. When that happens, they won't be able to stop the cascade.
Cultural failure - I thought Alex Karp's recent book was pretty good and worth reading. It makes the case that our culture has failed to articulate the things that make the west great (and worth defending) and as a result it's creating a lot of political and cultural problems. https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Republic-Power-Belief-F...
Religion (particularly Judeo-Christian) has a lot of issues with empirical historical / scientific claims, but one thing it was good at is it's culturally adaptive. A lot of the cultural tooling and support it provided both with community and with some of the core cultural ideas around family and children - life purpose and direction are probably good things for most people. Secularism does this pretty poorly for the average person and what people substitute for what's missing is often much worse.
It all seems like the same Utopian thinking any way you cut it. It makes for good fiction books because we can't see the actual counterfactual.
The simpler explanation to me would be it wouldn't matter if you had a religious or secular society. Just different trade offs on the long march of progress.
People 80 years from now will live better lives than we do today. That is just the way it goes. Of course if you asked anyone during WW2 this 80 years ago about 2025 they would give a highly pessimistic answer about 2025.
>Not exactly, but a parallel observation, that a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs.
I do not think that's it. I think that many people are very capable of delivering decent work, but they choose not to.
This begs two questions, why are people not interesting in delivering high quality work and why are people accepting low standards of work quality?
>There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity.
Let's not be too kind here. This is not mediocrity. A mediocre worker would be someone who performs his work satisfactorily, but does not ever go beyond his duties. The person you described certainly is not that, corrupt, lazy and lecherous would describe her behavior.
In my town they seem to have spent a decade building "luxury housing for seniors" in a project that seemed about as bungled as a building a nuclear reactor. They blame the pandemic but the project stretched on for years before the pandemic.
Of course they find out when it is ready to rent that there is no market for "luxury housing for seniors" because seniors who have money either split for Florida or go to Kendal [1], and the remainder are on a fixed income and looking for "affordable housing".
Not sure how the lenders benefit by building apartment buildings that can't find renters though I can see how they might systematically fool themselves into believing in a luxury market that doesn't exist. Affordable units might be less profitable on paper but it's a choice between getting less rent than you wish you would get vs getting no rent at all.
I think it's the lack a of deeper meaning in the things we do have to do in this system. We're just cogs in a large machine that creates more and more wealth, but after you have enough to live a comfortable life that is no longer enough to make you care. There's no more purpose to it. Yet the pursuit of wealth is the only goal our economic system, and increasingly our culture as well, provides. Any other goal gets trampled under the herd of organizations seeking wealth for the purpose of making more wealth.
Part of it is COVID and also the destruction of pension and job security. Companies want to pay employees as little as possible and employees want to do as little work as possible.
Hahaha! I spent the morning explaining to a network installer who bought the wrong jacks and tools for the project that I wasn't going to keep the incorrect jacks and pay for the correct ones just so he wouldn't have to accept the return of "products that no one wants." Correct, no one wants them, me especially.
Don't work with incompetent people. Even if you set a low bar for success they'll just go and find a way to trip over it.
> Where I live, it seems like half the streets don't have street signs (this isn't a backwater where you'd expect this, it's Boston).
This is a phenomenon in eastern Massachusetts that I've been hearing people talk about for ~25 years. I've heard it hypothesized as an attempt to be hostile to outsiders.
> but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and priceless an even lower energy route
I don't think AI has anything to do with cops acting as scarecrows (at best) or construction workers take 6 years to build parking.
AI wasn't even as much of a thing 6 years ago, so these things seem fundamentally unrelated. And anyway, the cops and construction workers aren't using Claude 4...
You had me up until then. It's not related to AI at all. It's more related to post-Covid than AI imo. Even before this, blame social media since 2010 people have been more and more sucked into a small screen in their hand and a virtual set of "friends" than what's actually happening in the real world right in front of them. At this level, it's just basic detachment. Their head isn't where their body is.
> I made acquaintance to a city worker who, to her non-professional friends, is very proud that she takes home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans.
If she's able to do this without risk of being fired, she's absolutely succeeding according to the values of capitalism. The worker / employer dynamic under capitalism is: employers try to extract the most labor value for the least cost (maximizing profit margin) while the worker tries to retain the highest labor profit margin possible for the least labor cost (wear and tear on mind and body, time, etc). Since it's not possible to retain / change total capture of labor profit margin on the employee side, since compensation for labor isn't attached to value but rather to "market conditions" (geography, whether or not another employer in the industry recently laid people off, the phase of the moon), the employee's only option is to reduce personal labor cost: work as little as possible, as lazily as possible.
One of the genius strokes of this arrangement is that humans aren't purely economic rational actors: we generally take pride in our work, and also want to be a part of something greater, and even if we don't have either of those things, we suffer social pressure to do good at our jobs or not leave our teammates hanging. So, in reality, the employer has an advantage, because it's basically immune to these human traits. Therefore the corporation can extract even more value for less cost (people will work harder than necessary per their compensation because e.g. they take pride in their work).
As the overall system destabilizes further and normalization deepens and people feel the inherent contradictions more strongly, I believe cynicism will increase and these human traits will hold less influence over the employer / worker dynamic, and people will operate more like rational capitalist actors.
Annoyingly this will probably lead to more articles about how "people just don't want to work anymore."
>she's absolutely succeeding according to the values of capitalism.
It is not entirely clear why you call these the values of capitalism. These are universal human values that do not depend on the economic formation.
If anything, capitalism makes people less cynical, simply because it is designed to function independently of such qualities in people. While in many other systems, cynicism, cruelty, unscrupulousness and deceitfulness of people are simply ignored, giving people with such qualities huge advantages within the system and ruining the lives of everyone else.
Capitalism is not "designed", for starters. It is an economic formation that emerged through natural forces. And if there's anything that process optimized for, it's allowing cynical, cruel, unscrupulous and deceitful people (who, as you rightly note, existed before) to take advantage of the new technological advancements like industrialization, which the previous arrangement was not particularly good at.
The reason these qualities aren't rewarded isn't because of capitalism itself, it's due to the enforcement of laws and regulations against them. The profit motive incentives owners to adopt practices like employing children because they will work for less than an adult, or suppressing research harmful to their core business like how tobacco companies were aware of the harm of smoking long before they publicly acknowledged them
To clarify, are you suggesting capitalism doesn't select for cynicism, cruelty, unscrupulousness, and deceitfulness? If so I find that remarkable.
If I were to guess at what true universal human values were, I'd take a look at history, anthropology, theology, and philosophy. The trend seems to be that humans universally value selflessness, sharing, doing good to one another, long term thinking, justice, and fairness. Humans seem to universally deride greed, selfishness, cowardice, causing harm to other humans, injustice, unfairness, and boastfulness.
I argue that the derided values are those that are rewarded the most under capitalism, and capitalism at its worst punishes those that live the desired values.
It sounds like you disagree, so, some examples:
In my characterization of the worker / employer relationship, the employer that best is able to exploit their workers (without going so far as to have measurably negative consequences on output or turnover), will have the highest profit margins compared to their competitors, all other things being equal. When they've all found all the other inefficiencies in the market, the last that remains is how terribly they can treat the workforce and still turn a profit. The investment market will see this organization having the highest margins and reward it with the largest stock price. The people who made the decisions to treat the workers poorly will be compensated well for it, being executives and having equity. They might even build career reputations on being able to come into a company and find the maximum possible level of exploitation (it won't be called that, it's called cost cutting or similar).
Thus capitalism rewarded treating humans poorly and short term thinking. Conversely the employer that treats its workers well won't have as high profit margins or growth, money to spend on stock buybacks etc, and so will have a lower stock price, lower valuations, etc, and will be punished according to the KPIs of capitalism. "How happy are your workers" isn't a KPI of capitalism.
Next, the cigarette industry. People like smoking tobacco. People would have bought paper tubes with tobacco in it. But they wouldn't smoke it as much as paper tubes with tobacco and a shitload of known-toxic additives. So, the companies that added a bunch of toxic additives (that increase addictiveness, etc), were rewarded immensely under capitalism. When non capitalist mechanisms kicked in to limit their profits, the companies leveraged their capitalistic power to maintain margins, through lobbying. Thus greed and harming humans was rewarded under capitalism. Marlboro is worth far more than your given indie tobacco purveyor that doesn't add additives.
Just look at the overall state of our society and the fact that capitalism rewards our most derided values and often punishes our most treasured values is fairly obvious: teachers make less than investment bankers. Landlord success is correlated with tenant misery. Public transit in the USA died to feed the automative industry. I mean, America turned its healthcare into a for-profit industry, and just look at the results. But, the health insurance industry is worth 1.59 trillion, so, by capitalism's values, it's awesome!
>you suggesting capitalism doesn't select for cynicism, cruelty, unscrupulousness, and deceitfulness?
Yeas, that is exactly what I am saying. People with these qualities still receive certain advantages, but selection selection by these qualities does not happening as in other social systems.
>The trend seems to be that humans universally value selflessness, sharing, doing good to one another, long term thinking, justice, and fairness.
Not universlly, and that's the problem. And you can ignore this fact and fall into slavery to the most cruel, deceitful and selfish people, or you can effectively protect yourself from such people with the help of capitalism.
>I argue that the derided values are those that are rewarded the most under capitalism
For the purposes of the discussion, I am even ready to agree with this to a certain extent. It's just that without capitalism, people with such qualities get everything, including other people as slaves.
>The people who made the decisions to treat the workers poorly will be compensated well for it
The people who made the decisions to treat the workers poorly will not receive a single worker. Because there is competition for labor and because the worker has the freedom to decide where and how to work. This is why workers under capitalism get the best conditions among all social systems.
>the companies leveraged their capitalistic power to maintain margins, through lobbying.
That is, through other non-capitalist mechanisms. The obvious problem of the lack of capitalism
> Yeas, that is exactly what I am saying. People with these qualities still receive certain advantages, but selection selection by these qualities does not happening as in other social systems.
Oh, well, I disagree, and the evidence supports my position. The people who capitalism has most rewarded are billionaires. Billionaires became as rich as they are through cynicism, cruelty, unscrupulousness, and deceitfulness. I challenge you to find me a billionaire without these qualities in spades.
I'm happy to hear arguments that other modes of economic organization may also reward these values if it makes you feel better, but I maintain my point that capitalism rewards them also. In comparison, gift economies reward the opposite values.
> Not universlly, and that's the problem.
I do agree that it's worth a hedge, however, it appears these values are as near-universal as is possible for humans. Every religion I've ever learned about teaches these lessons, Confucianism for the most part as well, we can read about these values in Plato, Aristotle, ancient Greek myths, ancient native american myths... certainly there are outlier cultures, but for these values to be an underlying current in so many cultures... what else could we call universal?
> . And you can ignore this fact and fall into slavery to the most cruel, deceitful and selfish people, or you can effectively protect yourself from such people with the help of capitalism.
But, under capitalism, the majority of people are wage enslaved. Certainly an improvement over chattel slavery, no arguments from me! However given that many forms of slavery persist in the capitalist world, including wage slavery, I don't agree that capitalism stops slavery. In fact totally unfettered capitalism would select for it. We saw this with factory towns. Why do you think capitalism prevents slavery?
> It's just that without capitalism, people with such qualities get everything, including other people as slaves.
I don't understand, are you talking about feudalism or something? I agree with you that feudal lords had many of these features, but feudalism even more than capitalism selected for orifice origin, so I don't think it really selected for much other than how long you could keep enemy states at bay and how long you could keep the peasants from revolting.
> The people who made the decisions to treat the workers poorly will not receive a single worker.
Why do Amazon warehouse workers work in such terrible conditions?
> Because there is competition for labor and because the worker has the freedom to decide where and how to work. This is why workers under capitalism get the best conditions among all social systems.
You genuinely believe working class people have freedom to decide where to work? Geographical limitations, background limitations, whether or not someone has any criminal record, there's so many reasons that many people are trapped in their jobs and can't really move. This is like the fundamental reason wages are allowed to be as low as they are today. It's flagrantly obvious there's today almost no worker freedom today.
> That is, through other non-capitalist mechanisms. The obvious problem of the lack of capitalism
I wonder if this is actually true, or if it's an instance of selection bias - the instances of things not working draw our attention more than the instances of things working. "This thing is working just fine" doesn't draw eyeballs.
I tend to agree with your overall point, but I’m not sure this supports it. To me, the difficulty in building things like parking structures isn’t indifference but the opposite: we care too much.
We care about the environmental impact. We care about the safety of workers. We care about the impact on local residents. We care about property values. All of those things create a layer of risk management, and the administrative overhead is what slows many of those projects down. If we were less risk adverse, we could get things done more quickly but we care about those things enough to manage them.
(To be clear, I’m not saying any of those are bad, just pointing out the natural consequence of caring about things and how it runs counter to the OPs point.)
If you don't build motivation for competence by navigating difficulties in everyday life (fetching water, building a fire), where do you find that motivation? Putting humans in boxes with a screen in front of them and everything they need to survive around them without requiring much effort produces a different human.
For the past five decade, we have lived in a society where the dominant ideology was about how “egoism lead to the greater good thanks to the magical forces of the free market”.
It turns out the greater good in fact came from people caring about what they where doing.
Too bad we only realize it now, when the destructive ideology has eventually trickled down from the profiteers class to the working class.
Maybe people are bad at their jobs. Maybe they have poor management who is always increasing the scope of their job, in an attempt to maximize their profits at a cost to customer satisfaction.
In my experience, there's certainly a mix of both, but the latter is much more common.
It’s a result of people disliking the system. Personally thriving by gaming the system is seen as the enlightened thing to do, because people don’t respect or appreciate the system, often viewing it as actually harmful and malicious.
Nothing that all of these examples are public sector monopolies or related (e.g. permitting). Being bad at your job definitely exists in the private sector, but there are competitive forces that work against it.
My experience is that people want to do their jobs well, but SYSTEMIC reasons tend to prevent this.
Typically (almost ubiquitously, really) this comes in the form of time constraints. I mean, come on, we're (nearly) all engineers here.
How much suboptimal code have you shipped? How much of it was due to a lack of skill or motivation vs. time constraints or other external factors?
Where I live, it seems like half the streets
don't have street signs (this isn't a backwater
where you'd expect this, it's Boston).
Again, I'd bet dollars to pennies that it's a systemic issue. Voters tend to demand lower taxes as their #1 or #2 issue, especially in local elections where big-picture issues like abortion etc. are not decided.
So, are Boston's missing street signs a symptom of people not caring? Or a symptom of that department probably being underfunded? I obviously don't know, but my money would be on the latter.
In my experience the only people not trying their best on an indivdual basis are people who have been completely screwed over and beaten down by their jobs. Everybody else is trying, if only out of rational self-interest (wanting promotions, or at least needing to keep their jobs)
Because you have to deal with them anytime you want to get anything done - planning and approval offices, tax departments, construction crews, contractors and on and on.
Life in the outside world means relying on a ton of people doing their jobs decently.
I'll add one: New house construction. There are now multiple building inspectors who are making ad revenue on youtube by showing how bad the standard of construction is.
Honestly, I hate to say it because it’s become an annoying topic—but the problem is social media. Full stop.
People are so distracted, scrolling ad-nauseam, that the only hope and dream they have is: to become an “influencer.”
They’ll sell a view of their children and family life to the highest bidding sponsor. Then, peddling products to a fresh batch of spectators who think, “Ah! Wouldn’t that be the life? I should do that too—then I will be famous and making a hell-of-a lot more money than I am now!”
I mean the amount of scam ads on YouTube alone selling a lifestyle of abundance and riches—living like a rockstar—only perpetuates the wrong values.
People should be PROUD of hard work. And they will be, when they become less distracted and start to see the joys of value creation again.
Note: I just want to clarify that my intent is not to say that social media is inherently evil—there’s lots of value-creation happening there—just that THIS particular issue is because social media has misdirected people’s ambitions.
> that the only hope and dream they have is: to become an “influencer.”
I might be too introverted for that sort of thing in the first place, but that sounds like hell, having to pretend in front of a bunch of strangers just to get clicks, all for clout.
Then again, I did delete Facebook too because I didn’t quite get posting bunches of vacation pics either: if there’s a cool picture or a few I can share those in the likes of WhatsApp or Discord with a more narrow and closer knit group instead of the world.
I’m guessing it’s quite different for most folks and I assume that the few of those who also do successfully become influencers are swimming in money, more than I’ll ever make.
> I might be too introverted for that sort of thing in the first place, but that sounds like hell, having to pretend in front of a bunch of strangers just to get clicks, all for clout.
There's an excellent movie called Eighth Grade. The main girl in it, as a pastime, records videos for YouTube or similar in which she delivers nostrums to her audience about confidence and being authentically who you are and that sort of thing. Meanwhile, in her real school life, she's plagued by self-doubt and pressured by peers into being something different, something "better" than who she is.
That movie hit so hard, looking back on my xennial eighth grade experience, and it still injected ancillary commentary on modern social media trends.
Vacation pictures are a great use of Facebook though. If that's all it was (and say, cats) then it would be worth using.
I have an uncle who takes interesting holidays and writes great updates on what he's seen as he travels. This is all A+ what Facebook should've been...but not what it became.
Because that entire experience...would be equally well serviced by a group chat bar some interface issues. And that's what Signal actually provides for super short form stuff now - I mostly lament that it can't quite fill that longer update niche.
> but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal?
Our natural state tends to laziness - both mentally and physically. There are exceptions of-course. What AI now promises is that we sip cocktails on a beach in equilibrium state while social media+AI provide narratives we want to hear, sort of the dystopia portrayed in Matrix.
> To whine or complain, often needlessly and incessantly.
I'm not sure the parent is quite using it correctly: either they're just using it to mean "complain" (which I'd disagree with; the word to me definitely carries the "needless" connotation.) or they're engaging in a bit of self-deprecating humor that just isn't really coming across fully.
It's a bit of a regional word, in the US. (Regional to PA, IME.)
They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work. Not a new principle. Turns out that extreme capitalism results in extreme inequality results in similar outcomes as socialism.
The person in question was literally paid by the government, which is notoriously and world wide chronically inept, "despite" being complete isolated from any capitalist motive.
> The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?)
This doesn't happen because nobody cares. It happens because the financing dries up, or labor is straight up not available. And that still comes back to money.
I had my renovation stall for 6 weeks because someone at Mass DEP couldn't be arsed to approve an asbestos abatement work plan. My contractor called the guy's boss and it was approved the next day.
Wouldn't surprise me to find out that they are trying to do it with way too few people and in your case, the squeaky wheel got the grease, and you jumped to the front of the line.
This is definitely true of the building department here. They're understaffed in part due to the inability to come to a new union contract agreement, which means that pay has stagnated.
Or the local powers that be sink their teeth in and the project isn't lucrative enough for its backers to let them just leave with a pound of flesh so progress stalls.
That's not a satisfactory explanation, because you're saying that the owner of the land can't make use of it and should have given it to someone else, but they don't actually care what the best use of the land is, so they take the slow way.
The reason simply is late stage capitalism, there's not enough upside anymore, so why bother do a good job? That's how I explain it. I noticed that as well with almost all employees, there was a shift. And it feels like it's got to do with misaligned incentives. Why bother working yourself stupid if you'll never own a house if you don't become a slave to the loan? There's no upwards movement/middle class anymore.
I don't want to put quite that fine a point on it, but generally I agree. I think people see that wages have been stagnant for a long time and spending power has gone down. Working harder gives them marginal, if any, life improvement. I'm reminded of the Lithuanian immigrant character Jurgis Rudkus from Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle", whose response to continual setbacks was "I will work harder", only to ultimately be ground down and devoured by a job and life circumstances that could never be sated no matter how hard he worked.
My employer has no bonus system whatsoever for regular employees so even if I did put in extra effort and the company made more profits, all of that would go into management's pockets.
And as you said, even if I miraculously made 20% more, I still wouldn't be able to afford a house.
So why bother? Of all the things I can do with my energy, making management richer is very much not a priority.
Yup, and even that is way harder nowadays. I feel like the VC backed startup thing is dead and there are no big moonshots anymore from underdogs having a big idea.
Everything capitalism, especially of the American variation, promised us isn't being delivered anymore. The numbers are pretty clear, so I don't understand how anyone in their right mind can argue against that.
It's precisely because of the VC backup startup thing that capitalism isn't delivering. VC startups only exist if there's a bunch of people with a lot of money who don't care about anything except making more money. What we need is lots of businesses succeeding on a small scale rather than failing on a small scale while burning VC cash in the hope that they can become big enough to succeed.
I agree with this. It's a slight shift in perspective from the article: it's not just "Who cares" but "Nothing matters". It's not so much about people not caring as about people feeling that caring is pointless because everything that happens is outside their control. Even quite local dimensions of life that used to be more controllable are becoming corrupted by giant corporations, rampaging politicians, etc.
In this environment, caring becomes not just "not worth it" but can be actually detrimental, as it opens you up to a lot of pain. To pick a random banal example, if you care what you eat, you'll be disappointed when the local tasty restaurant is replace by a McDonald's, but if you don't, you won't.
I have to add that the author's exhortation at the end still strikes me as a bit tone-deaf. There are plenty of people who want to care, and even still do care, about things. We don't need to tell people to care. What we need to do is take a sledgehammer to everything and everyone that makes not-caring the easier choice.
> a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs
A lot of this derives from people not respecting what they do. We're too elitist as a society to care about the quality of what most people consume and experience on a daily basis.
I've never worked at a newspaper, but I went to college with journalism majors for four years, and I know that 98% of a newspaper consists of content that journalism students consider worthless trash. Knowing that it's trash was a measure of everything important about them: their intelligence, their knowledge, their taste, and their moral character. Seeing the lesser parts of a newspaper as worthy of effort and attention would call every single one of those desirable personal qualities into question. Given that, they all aimed to put themselves in a position to write the 2% that isn't embarrassing to write, but most of them, perhaps all of them, ended up writing the other bits of the newspaper, most likely embarrassed about it, most likely putting as little of their life energy into it as possible, while hanging their sense of self-worth on hobbies or a novel that they'll never publish.
I can see this in the personal arc of virtually everyone I know. The happiest people I know are the ones who have escaped this and still manage to respect the importance of their work, but the vast majority have given up on their jobs as a way of expressing who they are in a positive way.
You can see some regret about this, some desire for a different approach, in the fascination with physical craftsmanship, which can be made compatible with our elitism. There's cultural cachet in being a fanatically obsessed craftsman who makes highly priced boutique goods desired by all the Ivy League grads in Brooklyn or the Stanford grads in San Francisco. From another angle, we see it in the fascination with people in other societies who dedicate their lives to a craft, like in "Jiro Dreams of Sushi." But again, we can't imagine doing that and being second best, because we don't live in a society that values doing your best, only being the best. Dedicating yourself to something and being okay at it, serving not the elite but the dumb gross masses who don't know any better, is humiliating. The high school instinct to distance oneself from stigma, the primal instinct that it's best to be as far away from a social target as possible, has been elevated to a sophisticated vocabulary of complicity, where everybody is guilty of not fixing a problem, and the most guilty of all are those closest to it. If you're producing listicles for a newspaper, you are guilty of perpetuating the intellectual laziness of all of humankind, guilty of electing Donald Trump, unless you can distance yourself with disdain and cynicism, and plead economic necessity for taking a shit job.
In a society like this, how can we expect someone to care? It's shit, so it might as well be botshit.
If you haven't already read it, you might enjoy Neil Postman's Amusing ourselves to Death. I'm about half way through it myself and it has already changed how I look at some things.
He wrote it from the point of view of television destroying our society, but as you can imagine, the internet is so much worse.
> 98% of a newspaper consists of content that journalism students consider worthless trash
In the book, Postman makes the case for the value of news being related to how actionable the information is. The weather report is valuable because I might change my plans if it's going to rain. The story about a mass stabbing attack in Germany (which I bet your journalism friends do not consider trash) has little value to me, a person living in Austin, TX.
If there were ever to be a HN Book Club, I think Amusing Ourselves to Death would be a great selection for it.
Most people would probably like to contribute something good to the world, and make it a better place in some way or another. A lot of folks are forced to produce things they hate because otherwise they have no health care and may not eat. All so somebody else can take most of the profit and leave them with a pittance.
People would like to do their best to make their impact on the world as positive as possible, but they also care about showing they have the critical ability to notice everything wrong about the system they exist in, and we don't give them permission to do both. Wouldn't it be nice if we did?
I think there are many people who don't care about that at all. Plenty of people are happy to exist in a system and not criticize it. But it's getting hard even for those people because the system is making it so hard to extract the things they do want (e.g., enough money to live a satisfying life).
>We're too elitist as a society to care about the quality of what most people consume and experience on a daily basis.
Eh, I disagree with elitist...
We're too capitalist. Lines must go up, that is all that matters. Well, lines for the capital holders, paying the workers less to the point they don't care is fine.
Labor rates where I am are among the highest in the nation. People in the trades largely live in the outlying suburbs and pick up the lucrative work in the urban core.
A lot of the companies I deal with will jerk you around, not return your calls, not show up to do the work etc. etc..they're busy and can ask a lot of money, and there's no fear of being out of work. I think that affects the work product quality more than anything else right now right here.
A bit much to say society did that, they have forced this due to their very well organized and connected unions and the power they have to cause the population to fear for their safety if the "cops are on strike".
The only way to end the power they have is to work towards a prosperous society where it doesn't make sense to be a violent criminal.
The utility tech who turned my tiny gas leak into a larger gas leak and left.
The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?)
Cops who have decided it's their job to do as little as possible.
Where I live, it seems like half the streets don't have street signs (this isn't a backwater where you'd expect this, it's Boston).
I made acquaintance to a city worker who, to her non-professional friends, is very proud that she takes home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans.
There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal?