Assume that all workers are underpaid and overworked. (This is not true for skilled workers but let's assume it is true.) One reason might be that everyone has bought into the idea that "The US is lacking in wealth, as evidenced by the national debt" and this is why they are willing to take a pay cut ... and I just randomly discovered that many people would accept a reduced salary in exchange for more flexibility.
Now let's ignore other implications this would have, like how it would lead to most prices and rents falling so that US workers were competitive with China...
And only examine the conclusion we would reach that "no one can afford to work less since everyone feels they need all the money they are currently earning." Note that you can maybe arrive at this mental model of the economy by assuming that all 'good'/moral people use the assumption that lowering their prices is good for the economy (poor people's thinking). Someone might think that if the idea on this site helps society, then only 'good' people have a reason to support it and they also might think that all 'good' people already give away their extra money to charities, or something.
So if people do not have the time to think about complicated arguments, the only way to quickly disprove the idea that all workers are underpaid is... to show that there exist people who would be willing to support this idea and work less.
This post is to acknowledge that if lower-income people would be willing to support this idea, it will only be if rich people have poor intentions (they don't want inequality or unemployment to be fixed) or there is a problem of capabilities in that I am not able to convince rich people that setting an example by working less would be good for society due to their existing prejudices.
This site has asserted that there is no problem with intentions of the wealthy, but has also not stated that I have failed to convince the rich to support this idea. Most of the arguments have been addressed to the typical person or activists like OWS... or to the President of the US, or experts on the economy or politics.
Why is this? A number of reasons.
1) At first, it was not clear that people in the US were really interested in helping the world, or that people who understood negative externalities would be willing to support changes if inequality and unemployment were fixed. This tendency was demonstrated most recently in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
2) I felt my older brother's decision to join the military was evidence of trust in the intentions of the US public, instead of 'accumulating wealth' to keep inequality high and limit the consumption of resources like gasoline. The first public message was to test whether other people felt the same way.
3) Due to a later event... actually someone text messaged me... I felt it was appropriate to assume that the first attempt might have failed due to people's inability to understand it, instead of that it wouldn't work, and so sent two copies of a letter to Berkshire Hathaway based on the idea that wealth was an accurate measure of ability, and so one of the richest people in the world should have hired people who were able to identify correspondence with potential value.
4) Since no one really seemed to be willing to admit they understood it, and how many people base their decisions on common standards of achievement despite their inaccuracy, it seemed possible that the letters sent to the White House might have been ignored because experts on the economy did not have a sufficiently advanced grasp of the subject. This resulted in the second public message (the second half of which came later on as a result of reading about countersignalling and the nerfing of raid content in the World of Warcraft) which explained this.
5) ... most of the rest has already been documented on this site. It just seemed like people with reputations were not willing to support the idea without knowing at least a little about me, but I felt like this conflicted with my benefit in a way I was unable to resolve. Since the economic effects of the idea are the most certain and easiest to describe, I felt that change should be possible by convincing people who stood to benefit economically from this idea.
It is commonly understood that money does have some influence in politics. Certain corporations profited greatly from the recent military adventures of the US, the duration of which might at least have been shortened if the outcome of the 2004 US Presidential election had been different. If people had gathered support for this idea which promised to fix many fundamental problems with society, it would have implied that inaccurate metrics were the reason for previous problems and that, for example, the influence of money in politics was not important because people could accomplish a goal regardless of the actions of the rich.
So, convincing rich people to work less.
Also, considering that I don't have any credentials, if it had been important for anyone to know more about me and they rejected the idea due to lack of credentials that would have implied a mistake had been made in the past regarding why I never really went to college. Unless, of course, the results of using the idea on this site aren't really all that important and someone rejecting this idea due to my lack of credentials does not really imply any conflict with society and no 'knowledge cost' for this prejudice. So far no such determination has been made though.
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