New Work, New Culture

[senecando]

I was listening to a podcast about Philosophy called the Partially Examined Life and they had on a guy named Frithjof Bergmann talking about his project: New Work, New Culture.

The podcast is here, and is a better introduction than I can give: http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2013/10/10/ep83-frithjof-bergmann/

Here is a very short text introduction: http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2011/01/25/more-on-bergmanns-new-work/

But the general idea is this:

Can we do away with the job system? Work can be fantastic and energizing but jobs almost always are not. How would we do that?

Bergmann imagines a world where people want less and are more able to make the things that they do want. They've become much closer to being self-sufficient than job-reliant. Growing veggies is only the first step. Changes in technology are allowing us again to start reclaiming the production of more and more of what we use every day.

It's a bit pie-in-the-sky, but not as much as this post might make it seem. Not everything made sense to me, but it was a really fascinating discussion. Some common tenets:

* Jobs are often shitty; Hard work can be pretty awesome.
* Learning to do things yourself, or with people close to you, will make you happier and more powerful.
* He's all about side hustles.

I'd be interested to hear what you all have to say about this.

[galaxie]

Back in the day, we specialized into individual jobs because it was more efficient to get things done that way.  I suppose that these days we have enough surplus production that specialization is no longer necessary...

[the fixer]

I think there's just too many inefficiencies with specialization: taxes, transportation, recordkeeping, liability, regulations, transaction fees, and probably others I haven't thought of. People nowadays treat these as just "costs of doing business" but they don't exist if you insource. That sets a high threshold for an outsourced service provider to exceed if they are to deliver better value than you can make yourself. As an example, I can make alcohol for myself much cheaper than anyone else can make it for me, mainly because I don't have to pay alcohol and liquor taxes when I make my own. I can cook my own food cheaper than anyone else can cook food for me because I'm not subject to food safety regulations, sales taxes, payroll taxes, minimum wage, commuting costs of employees, and other things that restaurants are subject to.

It would be interesting to look at the above inefficiencies and see if these costs have been increasing or decreasing over the past ~200 years, and if they have become more pervasive (for instance, the national income tax in the US shifted the tax burden from a few industries to everyone, how did that change things?)

[mpbaker22]

I think there's just too many inefficiencies with specialization: taxes, transportation, recordkeeping, liability, regulations, transaction fees, and probably others I haven't thought of.

And profit in cash transactions.  Working fro a government contractor, I can tell you that we get profit on both labor and materials.  So if you have raw material in the ground that goes through 5 different companies before the government, you can end up paying
1.1^5*x ~ 1.6*x if x is the original 'value' and 10% is the profit at each level.