Comment by markus_zhang

You have to do something with your life anyway, right? I always envied people who have a calling they are good at and work on essentially until they die (especially in academia and art), since I'm not sure if I have one and if I do (designing 4x God sim games?) I'm unlikely to be paid for it even if I was good, which is itself also unlikely.

Then there's also the case where following your passion is near impossible without a large organization, anything from space to medicine.

But even forgetting all that, there is no reason engineering challenges, team dynamics and sense of accomplishment at a work project can't be higher than for the personal projects you'd do by yourself. Granted, most jobs aren't like that (for myself or for most people) but some of my most challenging and exciting projects were at work.

If you're gonna spend time until you die doing tech things you might as well get paid for it. The less you need the latter the pickier you can be, with your own thing becoming /another option/ at some point.

A bunch of those things are work for others that's not paid. And that was far from an exhaustive list.

What's confusing to me is this notion that if we ease up a little on the stick of "your life will be ruined and you may actually die", the carrot of more money will stop working because people are just that lazy. No, they're not, they do tons of work for no pay.

> the alternative is basically to impose artificial scarcity to force people to work

No, the alternative is reality: people pay each other to do things they want done and for things they want to buy from them. There's no artificial scarcity. There's a vast amount of intricate, well-priced effort to reduce or remove scarcity.

> Today we effectively have the means to ensure the goods of society are evenly distributed as a baseline and we also have the means to effect that distribution

We arguably had the means even back then, but it obviously still failed and would likely fail again. Even in the west, hyper-rationalists took various forms (Keynesian economics, urban planning, etc), but it mostly ended up in failure.

The main issue is that there was and is not a static distribution or demand of goods. We can't just decide to give everybody 4 apples/week, etc. Even if we could, demands will always shift in unexpected ways. New products can shift demand in ways planners can't possibly foresee. A new apple desert could come, or people could just plain get tired of apples.

Right now the best and most successful mechanism we have is price signals. When it is said that communism failed because there were bad incentives, people assume that it was because there was no incentive to work hard. While this is somewhat true, the main issue was actually that planners and the whole communist economy could never rationalize supply and demand because they ignored price signals, meaning they often actually induced demands with artificially cheap prices, often resorting to rationing (either formal or de-facto in the forms of long lines).

Even worse, people were rewarded for hitting planning targets, even if the results (successful or not) were often not their fault. The result was people lied, making actual planning nearly impossible. A shoe factory would get bad leather, but make the shoes anyways, even though they fell apart sooner and then (outside of the plan) induced demand for new shoes. There are even stories of cab drivers lifting their cars and running it in reverse to continue working because they otherwise hit the "max" driving they were expected to do.

So "human nature" does in fact play a role, but not in the "I'm to lazy to work in communism" that most people think it is. Amazon doesn't evenly distribute anything, they have a highly sophisticated planning system that at the end of the day responds to price signals, either via bringing in more revenue or reducing costs.

>how it is any less of a capitulation to the worse tendencies of human nature (hoarding resources for yourself, imposing destitution upon others to get them to do what you want, believing other people are worthless and lazy and that you alone have the wherewithal to be a true hard working human and thus you deserve the extra capital you extract).

These are almost perfect summaries of how communism was indeed applied by the powerful oligarchy of bureaucrats who ran it with an authoritarian, sometimes even totalitarian fist in the countries where it was the applied form of government.

As a summary of market economics, your breakdown is a grossly misguided caricature on the other hand. While there are exceptions and inefficiencies, most wealth in the market economies isn't created by hoarding anything after having taken it from others, it's instead created by cleverly using limited resources to deliver something to others who want to hand over their money inn exchange for the alternative value you provide, and also finding more capital-efficient ways of doing more of the same on a greater scale.

A market economy doesn't impose destitution on others or force them to do what it wants. The opposite is true, through price mechanisms and mutually advantageous trade, it reduce scarcity while slowly improving options. It has its many flaws, but far fewer of them than the extremely crude and often brutal parodies of the same that were the case under the communist systems (which essentially replicated markets for their subjects, but under a form of central planning that was terribly inefficient and truly subject to the legal whims of a small coterie of oligarchic leaders)

You draw an almost Leninesquely crude image of how markets work despite all their complexity in which you yourself are a participant and a beneficiary.

I was born and lived in USSR for quite a while... life wasn't pleasant there, and technology was not the culprit really. They ran out of carrots a very long time ago, and were left with just the stick to try and enforce the ethics advocated by the communist program.

There was a joke that I didn't quite understand at the time:

    --What are the benefits of group sex?
    --You may slack off.

People who enjoyed their work usually worked outside, or even against the establishment because the system couldn't provide them with adequate reward, not even in a form of recognition.