The biggest sticking point I see here is care work like childcare, elder care, nursing, and preschool teaching. The unusual thing about this work is that for many (most?) people it is a considerable fraction of *both* the most fulfilling *and* the most disagreeable work they do in their lives, and the fulfillment and disagreeableness are hard to separate. It's definitely not leisure, but it's often not market-compensated work either, and when it is, the wages are typically relatively low; and it's some of the most difficult work to automate. And the more you automate and lower the cost of everything else in life, the more you get an incentive to lower fertility, because the opportunity cost of spending years of one's life on that care work goes up and the benefit-- financial and nonfinancial-- does not.
I don't have a good sense of how this work fits into an optimistic future, but I do think any realistic futurism has to consider it and face its difficulties.
It's an important topic, but I also wonder whether childcare and whatnot will feel like less of a burden when we're working less overall. If I could work less, I would be happy to spend a good chunk of that time with my daughter. So the effect of more automation may go in a different direction than your hypothesis.
I believe that there is great variation in human flourishing, that what works for some people doesn't work for others, that there is no one best way that all should strive for. That said, I've come to the conclusion that a healthy, thriving society is one where most children aren't warehoused off-site for much of the day and most old people aren't warehoused off-site till they die. As human beings, our deepest responsibility is to take care of the people we love, and I don't see how we can "live wisely and agreeably and well" by outsourcing those responsibilities as thoroughly as we do now. Please check out the next essay in the series.
Brink, I agree that housing is a huge factor here. I subscribe (almost) to the "Housing Theory of Everything" that suggests that economic and productivity growth, as well as the high cost of things like childcare, all ca be traced back to the high cost of housing.
I think the solution is twofold. First, as you identified, rolling back restrictive zoning regulations to allow supply to meet demand. Second, to remove property taxes and tax land value instead. By taxing land value, we would eliminate the implicit "punishment" that currently comes with land development. We would also improve the allocation efficiency of land. It would not longer make sense to hold vacant land speculatively, or to use it unproductively for golf courses or parking lots.
Third, we could optionally take the dividends from the Land Value Tax and redistribute them as a UBI-like instrument, replacing some of the existing welfare state. All three of these ideas feature prominently on Risk+Progress as I think they underpin the fastest route to be more productive and prosperous humanity.
Georgism has made a major comeback via the YIMBY movement, and that's a good thing! I don't think land value taxes are a panacea, and I think there are better alternatives to a UBI (see the next essay and the ones that follow), but I agree that housing is at the heart of a great deal of our dysfunction and that land value taxes have much to recommend them.
If anti-aging therapies do pan out, perhaps the best way to continue reducing average hours worked per year would be to hold the line on the Social Security retirement age, so that a constantly rising share of lifespan was spent in retirement.
There would be predicable demands from conservatives to let the retirement age rise with average lifespan, because the alternative would require constantly increasing the payroll tax rate. But especially in the US, where the political system has so many veto points, this seems like an ideal way to introduce UBI via the back door.
I'm a fan of anti-aging, but I suspect it will at least somewhat be a complement to expensive healthcare for the elderly, not a substitute. My 90-year-old self may not be hospitalized with congestive heart failure, but even I'm not optimistic enough to think I won't have more health problems than a young person. I'm not sure we can afford widespread life extension yet, so we need to get to work on those other sectors!
It's certainly true that we are not reliably well off. An expensive adverse event would crater all but the most wealthy.
The other thing I wonder about is what's going to happen to decrease the need for the nastiest jobs: the ditch diggers, septic tank cleaners, etc. are these going to disappear; be automated away somehow?
We'll see how far robotics can take us in automating away nasty jobs. What's left, in a world where full-time employment isn't the unquestioned norm that it is today, would have to command a fat pay premium to attract workers.
I work with a small business finance expert, Greg Crabtree, who has been tracking the financial metrics of 100 of his clients from all types of industries across the US. It’s clear from the model that we basically ran out of labor in 2019. The pandemic altered that temporarily but as of 2022 we were right back at almost zero marginal labor. This is a huge problem for business short term. He shows labor cost escalating past revenue growth as of Q1 2023 so profits will decline. In a longer term sense, that lack of labor will force progress on technologies to replace labor. It’ll also help break through union and other interest group resistance to innovation. I was also thinking on Bryan Calpan’s book Build Baby Build about the panacea of housing deregulation.
One way you could actually try and quantify the next level rich is to look into how many people are retiring early and how many people have enough money to stop working. This was called F-you money in tech circles.
Have you looked into the Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) movement much?
The biggest sticking point I see here is care work like childcare, elder care, nursing, and preschool teaching. The unusual thing about this work is that for many (most?) people it is a considerable fraction of *both* the most fulfilling *and* the most disagreeable work they do in their lives, and the fulfillment and disagreeableness are hard to separate. It's definitely not leisure, but it's often not market-compensated work either, and when it is, the wages are typically relatively low; and it's some of the most difficult work to automate. And the more you automate and lower the cost of everything else in life, the more you get an incentive to lower fertility, because the opportunity cost of spending years of one's life on that care work goes up and the benefit-- financial and nonfinancial-- does not.
I don't have a good sense of how this work fits into an optimistic future, but I do think any realistic futurism has to consider it and face its difficulties.
Ah yes, the women's work problem, existentially critical work that traditionally pays next to zip.
It's an important topic, but I also wonder whether childcare and whatnot will feel like less of a burden when we're working less overall. If I could work less, I would be happy to spend a good chunk of that time with my daughter. So the effect of more automation may go in a different direction than your hypothesis.
I believe that there is great variation in human flourishing, that what works for some people doesn't work for others, that there is no one best way that all should strive for. That said, I've come to the conclusion that a healthy, thriving society is one where most children aren't warehoused off-site for much of the day and most old people aren't warehoused off-site till they die. As human beings, our deepest responsibility is to take care of the people we love, and I don't see how we can "live wisely and agreeably and well" by outsourcing those responsibilities as thoroughly as we do now. Please check out the next essay in the series.
Brink, I agree that housing is a huge factor here. I subscribe (almost) to the "Housing Theory of Everything" that suggests that economic and productivity growth, as well as the high cost of things like childcare, all ca be traced back to the high cost of housing.
I think the solution is twofold. First, as you identified, rolling back restrictive zoning regulations to allow supply to meet demand. Second, to remove property taxes and tax land value instead. By taxing land value, we would eliminate the implicit "punishment" that currently comes with land development. We would also improve the allocation efficiency of land. It would not longer make sense to hold vacant land speculatively, or to use it unproductively for golf courses or parking lots.
Third, we could optionally take the dividends from the Land Value Tax and redistribute them as a UBI-like instrument, replacing some of the existing welfare state. All three of these ideas feature prominently on Risk+Progress as I think they underpin the fastest route to be more productive and prosperous humanity.
Georgism has made a major comeback via the YIMBY movement, and that's a good thing! I don't think land value taxes are a panacea, and I think there are better alternatives to a UBI (see the next essay and the ones that follow), but I agree that housing is at the heart of a great deal of our dysfunction and that land value taxes have much to recommend them.
I look forward to reading and sharing those. Always looking for revolutionary ideas to make the world a bit better.
If anti-aging therapies do pan out, perhaps the best way to continue reducing average hours worked per year would be to hold the line on the Social Security retirement age, so that a constantly rising share of lifespan was spent in retirement.
There would be predicable demands from conservatives to let the retirement age rise with average lifespan, because the alternative would require constantly increasing the payroll tax rate. But especially in the US, where the political system has so many veto points, this seems like an ideal way to introduce UBI via the back door.
I'm a fan of anti-aging, but I suspect it will at least somewhat be a complement to expensive healthcare for the elderly, not a substitute. My 90-year-old self may not be hospitalized with congestive heart failure, but even I'm not optimistic enough to think I won't have more health problems than a young person. I'm not sure we can afford widespread life extension yet, so we need to get to work on those other sectors!
It's certainly true that we are not reliably well off. An expensive adverse event would crater all but the most wealthy.
The other thing I wonder about is what's going to happen to decrease the need for the nastiest jobs: the ditch diggers, septic tank cleaners, etc. are these going to disappear; be automated away somehow?
We'll see how far robotics can take us in automating away nasty jobs. What's left, in a world where full-time employment isn't the unquestioned norm that it is today, would have to command a fat pay premium to attract workers.
You will like this book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
Thanks!
I work with a small business finance expert, Greg Crabtree, who has been tracking the financial metrics of 100 of his clients from all types of industries across the US. It’s clear from the model that we basically ran out of labor in 2019. The pandemic altered that temporarily but as of 2022 we were right back at almost zero marginal labor. This is a huge problem for business short term. He shows labor cost escalating past revenue growth as of Q1 2023 so profits will decline. In a longer term sense, that lack of labor will force progress on technologies to replace labor. It’ll also help break through union and other interest group resistance to innovation. I was also thinking on Bryan Calpan’s book Build Baby Build about the panacea of housing deregulation.
This is a really interesting piece.
One way you could actually try and quantify the next level rich is to look into how many people are retiring early and how many people have enough money to stop working. This was called F-you money in tech circles.
Have you looked into the Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) movement much?
The revolutionary growth of tenting on some of the highest value real estate shows our ability to balance the incredible growth of the 1%.