this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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The question comes down to this. How do you incentivize work other than with money?
The same way arts and crafts were invented - humans want to do things whenever they aren't stressed out of their minds.
Capitalism isn't "when people get paid for working." And people getting paid for doing a job isn't the problem highlighted in this post. In any case, there are any number of ways people might be motivated to do something useful.
This problem goes beyond capitalism. Even in a communist, socialist, anarchical, or whatever system you have to figure out a way to get people to spend a good portion of their lives doing things they don't typically want to do.
In this case how do you get hundreds of people to continue working at these power grid companies if they're in the red and eventually run out of money? People won't stay around without a paycheck.
Historically, people have worked due to real scarcity in order to meet their basic survival needs. We don't face such scarcity in the modern, developed world.
I've often conceptualized UBI or other such schemes (e.g. negative income tax) to provide a basic, spartan standard of living. If you want luxury, you need to work for it. Of course what constitutes "luxury" might fluctuate over time. And in times of greater abundance, UBI might be more generous while being scaled back in times of scarcity. If too many people opt out of working and only collect UBI, then real scarcity may indeed become and issue requiring such programs to be reduced.
But the point here is that we produce FAR more than what people actually need. This "must work and produce for the sake of it" leads to a lot of make-work in the form of things like artificial scarcity, planned obsolescence, or people producing and selling solutions in search of problems. The amount of actual fucking trash produced is mind-boggling. Something like fast fashion that produces low quality apparel only intended to be worn a few times has an enormous impact on our environment.
Imagine a world where we worked towards quality and making sure that actual needs were being met rather than being fixated on highest profitability at the exclusion of everything else. A more collaborative society instead of a hyper-competitive "winner take all" freak show.