Enthusiastic Reader > Recent Status Updates

216 - "Oddly enough, the world is wide open for everything but people. Goods, services, and stocks crisscross the globe. Wikipedia is available in 300 languages and counting, and the NSA can easily check which games John in Texas is playing on his smartphone."

211 - "As it happens, cash handouts may be the most extensively studied anti-poverty method around. RCTs (randomized controlled trials) across the globe have shown that over both the long and short term, and on both a large and small scale, cash transfers are an extremely successful and efficient tool."

200 - "French economist Thomas Piketty had people up in arms with his contention that if we continue down our current path we'll soon find ourselves back in the rentier society of the Gilded Age. People who owned capital (stocks, houses, machines) enjoyed a much higher standard of living than folks who merely worked hard."

199 - "If we want to hold onto the blessings of technology, ultimately, there's only one choice left, and that's redistribution. Massive redistribution. Redistribution of money (basic income), of time (a shorter working week), of taxation (on capital instead of labor), and, of course, of robots."

199 - "The scenario of radical inequality that is taking shape in the US is not our only option. The alternative is that at some point during this century, we reject the dogma that you have to work for a living."

185 - "The reality is that it takes fewer and fewer people to create a successful business, meaning that when a business succeeds, fewer and fewer people benefit."

184 - "By now, inequality is ballooning in almost every developed country. In the US, the gap between rich and poor is already wider than it was in ancient Rome—an economy founded on slave labor."

172 - “In the end, it’s not the market or technology that decides what has real value, but society.”

170 - "Instead, we should be posing a different question altogether: Which knowledge and skills do we WANT our children to have in 2030? … If we restructure education around our new ideals, the job market will happily tag along.”

170 - “Education is consistently presented as a means of adaptation… Invariably, it all revolves around the question: Which knowledge and skills do today’s students need to get hired in tomorrow’s job market?"

160 - “Of course there were problems. Take the guy who bought a racehorse on credit and then paid the debt with money he won when his horse came in first—basically, gambling with another person’s cash. It sounds an awful lot like what banks do now, but then on a smaller scale. And, during the strike, Irish companies had a harder time acquiring capital for big investments.”

160 - “In no time, people forged a radically decentralized monetary system with the country’s 11,000 pubs as its key nodes and basic trust as its underlying mechanism. By the time the banks finally reopened in November, the Irish had printed an incredible £5 billion in homemade currency.”

"The Irish started issuing their own cash. After the bank closures, they continued writing checks to one another as usual, the only difference being that they could no longer be cashed at the bank. Instead, that other dealer in liquid assets—the Irish pub—stepped in to fill the void… Everyone—and especially the bartender—had a pretty good idea who could be trusted."

‘The main reason I cannot recollect much about the bank strike,’ an Irish journalist reflected in 2013, ‘was because it did not have a debilitating impact on daily life.’

159 - “In the end, the strike would last a whole six months—twenty times as long as the NYC sanitation workers’ strike. But whereas across the pond a state of emergency had been declared after just six days, Ireland was still going strong after six months without bankers.

155 - “A strike by, say, social media consultants, telemarketers, or high-frequency traders might never even make the news at all. When it comes to garbage collectors, though, it’s different. Any way you look at it, they do a job we can’t do without. And the harsh truth is that an increasing number of people do jobs that we can do just fine without.” (See also BS Jobs)

149 - “‘Wouldn’t everybody just be glued to the TV all the time?’ … In overworked countries like Japan, Turkey, and, of course, the US, people watch an absurd amount of television.”

148 - “Currently it’s cheaper for employers to have one person work overtime than to hire two part-time. That’s because many labor costs... are paid per employee instead of per hour. And that’s also why we as individuals can’t just unilaterally decide to start working less. By doing so we would risk losing status, missing out on career opportunities, and ultimately, maybe losing our jobs altogether.”

147 - “It’s time that women, the poor, and seniors got the chance to do more, not less, GOOD work.” (Emphasis mine.)

141 - “Research suggests that someone who is constantly drawing on their creative abilities can, on average, be productive for no more than six hours per day.” THAT DOES NOT MEAN WORKING ANOTHER SIX HOURS AT HOME FOLKS.

136 - “In the US, working mothers actually spend more time with their kids today than stay-at-home moms did in the 1970s.”

135 - “With women storming the labor market, men should have started working less [at least in employment] (and cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the family more).” SOUNDS GOOD TO ME.

133 - “Pulitzer Prize-winning political scientist Sebastian de Grazia told the AP, ‘There is reason to fear… that free time, forced free time, will bring on the restless tick of boredom, idleness, immorality, and increased personal violence.’” Why? Why wouldn't boredom lead to creativity & innovation? Unless it’s not TRULY free time but time where you’re forced to do nothing. That'd suck. But then… that’s not FREE.

128 - “Keynes was neither the first nor the last to fosses a future awash in leisure. A century and a half earlier, American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin had already predicted that four hours of work a day would eventually suffice. Beyond that, life would be all ‘leisure and pleasure.’”

128 - “By 2030, Keynes said, mankind would be confronted with the greatest challenge it had ever faced: what to do with a sea of spare time. Unless politicians make “disastrous mistakes” … he anticipated that… the standard of living would have multiplied to at least four times that of 1930. The conclusion? In 2030, we’ll be working just 15 hours a week.”

UGH. I'm not even going to bother typing out the analogy. Like, the point he gets to is good, but the idea that the only way to make a violin more efficient is "play a little faster." Like... what... no. No. Efficiency does not just mean getting things done faster. That's literally not what the CONCEPT means. I don't care if this was translated. No.

This has NOTHING to do with the assertion he makes at the top of the paragraph, that we NEED misery in order to incentivize us to do stuff. Plus, it’s easy to find counterexamples: white dudes didn’t need to protest to gain enfranchisement. Had Jim Crow NOT been the law of the land, there might not be need for African Americans to rebel. Author is just SO WRONG here.

118 - “Had women never protested, they would never have gained the vote; had African Americans never rebelled, Jim Crow might still be the law of the land.”

117 - “we NEED a good dose of irritation, frustration, and discontent to propel us forward.” Um. Source? There is no source for this. Nor any support for it beyond the author’s assertion. I call baloney.

107 - “The CEO who recklessly hawks mortgages and derivatives to lap up millions in bonuses currently contributes more to the GDP than a school packed with teachers or a factory full of car mechanics. We live in a world where the going rule seems to be that the more vital your occupation (cleaning, nursing, teaching), the lower your rate in the GDP.” (If that seems familiar, it's also said in BS Jobs)