Hidden Gardens

As you can see the petition created yesterday has gained no signatures, despite having accumulated several hundred views in various places online:

U.S. Politics Online — Endorse a Drama-Free Solution to High Unemployment
US Message Board — Endorse a Drama-Free Solution to High Unemployment
City-Data.com Forum — Endorse a Drama-Free Solution to High Unemployment
We the People: Endorse a Drama-Free Solution to High Unemployment | OccupyWallSt.org
People with strong ideologies are sheep | OccupyWallSt.org


It is possible this is due to the limited input field (800 characters) and the complexity of the underlying situation, but this is unlikely. The main concerns raised by comments on a proposal for the United States to use the same type of government-funded work-share program that Germany does, also known as 'short time compensation' and mentioned in a previous post on this site, were that workers who are currently unemployed tend to not be qualified to do skilled work and people currently working in jobs that the unemployed are qualified for cannot afford to work less in their current jobs; both of these issues were addressed in the condensed description used in the petition.

There are several ways of looking at the social and economic changes which would result from the use of this concept that have not already been mentioned on this site.

The first is why poor people might be able to rationalize not supporting the concept. This would be done by constructing a standard of achievement where being poor is praiseworthy and being rich is a sign of selfishness or otherwise 'bad'. As summarized in this post, people doing unskilled work would unambiguously 'win' from an economic standpoint if this concept was used, but at the same time the lower viability of 'unnecessary skilled work' would mean that more people would assume that income or wealth is an accurate measure of ability, and people would no longer be able to "countersignal" wealth or ignore its relevance in judging value by maintaining an alternative culture in which wealth is not relevant, as described at the end of this post.

So poor people would win in the economic sense, but in the short term would be redefined as losers in the social sense.

The reason people with more money might be able to rationalize not supporting the concept is more simple. They are more likely to 'lose' in the economic sense and furthermore, people they know are also likely to lose in same way. As described in the paper mentioned in this post ("Party over policy: The dominating impact of group influence on political beliefs"), people tend to emphasize the aspects of a situation that support the stance of other people in their social group, while ignoring aspects of the situation that contradict this stance.


As mentioned in the notes for a previous argument, maybe people are hoping they can somehow 'starve' the poor over a historical time period. One example of this might be the situation with Palestine and Israel, but it has been pointed out this is not working and should not be expected to work, due to the simple fact of high birth rates.

But that was just a tangent. The second perspective on this concept is to an analogy of a spinning tire which cannot gain traction, but analogies are frequently misinterpreted to humorous effect. With this view, either the low coefficient of friction is due to people with high incomes working too much and spending their money on luxury goods with high profits for other rich people which causes this circulation to not go to poor people...

Maybe it's like a supercavitating ship propeller! Um, the ones not designed to do so because it makes them less efficient, not the ones that are designed to do so for higher performance.

That, or the "spinning" of the tire is the effort which people put into trying to change the system, and it is prevented from being effective by the inefficiency introduced by wasteful government spending. High unemployment or uncertain expectations cause decision makers in government agencies to authorize wasteful spending since it creates private-sector jobs, but this causes some people to focus on the wasteful spending instead of on ways to create jobs without wasteful spending. Resistance to wasteful spending causes opposition to any increase in government spending, including programs that would benefit society, and so by eliminating job creation as an excuse to wastefully spend this opposition to helpful programs can be removed, making it more likely society can allocate spending in an efficient and proactive manner.

The third way of looking at this idea of working less, and specifically the increased awareness of the inaccuracy of the system, is to look at what people do who are aware of this. It should be clear that the underlying problem of reliance on authority is very real, for people of all political orientations, and even people who are aware of the problem may have to deal with the resulting problems in the system from inaccurate standards. The idea that economists will know how to fix the economy, or will at least support the solution when exposed to it, is one such assumption that many intelligent people probably made.

Currently, people who are aware of the problem are experiencing "task overload". There are so many problems in the world that many people are just "cultivating their gardens" while leaving responsibility for larger problems to those who are interested in them and confident of their ability to identify a correct solution.

There is, then, a vague sense that this would be qualitatively different if the concept described on this site was used.

After all, the first public post describing the idea got over 2000 views, not sure where from, after it was linked to from many places including, for example, a discussion about proper behavior at atheist conferences... so some people must have thought it was worth looking at!