When I see someone mention human nature in some blog, I stop reading...
Human nature is our species ability to transform nature. A cat, for example, is only doing hunting for immediate consumption. A pet cat is even more limited, just a furrring biological shell, he does not hunt.
So when a human is limited in all his potentials, thinking, planning, building, etc to something like a tool on the market, optimized for some task, when human relations limited to objects of consumption... this will reduce human to just one sided being.
May be this optimization was once necessary some time ago, since labor productivity was low and this high division of labor allowed optimized production, to feed everyone.
At the moment, the labor productivity is so high, that only 10-20% working on something necessary for living. But all work is still done as this optimized instrumental labor, as life depends on it. This is not required anymore.
The solution is obvious.. build more not as an optimized one sided "worker", but as an universal human being, as a free time activity.
Which politically means that the work day should be reduced.. and this is not easy to implement. But if you really want a social change, this is the way to go.
I agree specialization has allowed the expansion to other fields. Fields like microcontrollers, biological development, energy research, etc.
This is why we see an exponential growth in development of new products and new science. If those same people were required to work in the fields to eat, we wouldn’t see the expansion.
... now ... how does this work In practice? How do we get these efficiency gains in agriculture and other necessary parts of life?
Cheap and transportable energy. Fuel, gas, etc. if we want to reduce the work week we need exponentially cheaper energy OR research into new forms of energy production. The later is currently happening and needs to continue to happen. In the mean time, we also need cheap and transportable energy.
For reference, I own a farm. I code professionally and as a hobby raise cattle and food. I can do that only because I have the fuel to run a tractor and the wireless internet provided from the satellites. To your point, in a 50-60 hour work week I can produce enough food for 20-30 families for the year AND be a highly skilled tech worker AND raise a family. All because of fuel.
Now to my point, in my opinion, specialization has less to do with it. Cheap energy is what allows it. Anyone could raise cattle or grow food with minimal training. But without fuel you can’t produce food for more than a few families per year.
Indeed. A rather curious difference between the Anglo-Saxon and Latin work ethic (and of course I'm painting a picture here, this blunt generalisation is meant only to propose an argument), is that: For the former, your job is who you are - the second question out of anyone's mouth in the UK is 'what do you do?'. Whereas, for the latter, who you are in society determines your job.
Hopefully we can reach beyond both these erroneous socialisations.
You can reduce work right now if you'd like. Live like the 1920's. No access to modern medicine, no automobile, no internet, no antibiotics. Grow your own food.
Only if you already own your own housing or live somewhere where that is already covered for you. Even then it's not like the job market is bursting with opportunities where you can take a decent FT position and earn the same pro-rata at lower hours.
Except that's the healthcare industry including large swathes of money going to parasites like student loan providers and opiate pushers as a whole, not 'modern medicine' or 'antibiotics'.
Cuba's standard of healthcare is a reasonable compromise, and their total spending per capita is 2% of the USA's gdp per capita.
The internet as a tool for sharing information rather than an endless red queen's race of scammers is similarly cheap.
And yes please, let's get rid of the private automobile. Without it we can build dense enough that walking (or transit or bikes) will get you where you are going far faster than driving 5x as far at an average of 30km/h does now.
It's really hard to get a job with such nonstandard hours, and also the housing market is extremely screwed up, and wages haven't risen enough with productivity gains, among other things.
But my choice isn't what's important here. What's important is that you don't have to give up the vast majority of modern amenities because those are usually very cheap.
Considering health is quite literally the most important thing in your life (can't spend it when you're dead anyway unlike the Egyptian pharaohs) I do not understand why so many complain about the cost of healthcare.
But when you are twenty I suppose one sees health differently. When you are 60 and take a bunch of pills to keep yourself from dying it suddenly all makes sense...
At a certain point... how many hours of your life are you willing to spend working to extend your life by an average of 1 month / 500 waking hours?
If almost all of GDP was healthcare, with costs dramatically increasing with age, then that number climbs for each additional month and reaches into the thousands. I wouldn't make that trade, especially because I'd be spending so many of those hours in my early to mid life.
Cash spent on an activity does not reflect the time that it takes, doubly so if you were able to reduce the administrative layers involved in eg health insurance.
Human nature is our species ability to transform nature. A cat, for example, is only doing hunting for immediate consumption. A pet cat is even more limited, just a furrring biological shell, he does not hunt.
So when a human is limited in all his potentials, thinking, planning, building, etc to something like a tool on the market, optimized for some task, when human relations limited to objects of consumption... this will reduce human to just one sided being.
May be this optimization was once necessary some time ago, since labor productivity was low and this high division of labor allowed optimized production, to feed everyone.
At the moment, the labor productivity is so high, that only 10-20% working on something necessary for living. But all work is still done as this optimized instrumental labor, as life depends on it. This is not required anymore.
The solution is obvious.. build more not as an optimized one sided "worker", but as an universal human being, as a free time activity.
Which politically means that the work day should be reduced.. and this is not easy to implement. But if you really want a social change, this is the way to go.