Long-term strategy for young people

People within the established system are mostly discussing the crushingly boring political situation. So mostly this older post applies.

The various reasons why serious people™ might not want to support this idea of working less to fix unemployment:

• they are staying in the 'safe zone' of arguing for maximum GDP, and while working less might lead to higher GDP at the margin we could easily end up with most people working and therefore spending less, which means lower GDP.
• it is not coming from someone with the proper credentials.
• the US would stop getting free wealth from printing money.
• fear and uncertainty towards change.
• they are bad at economics and assume that if "skilled" people work less, we will end up with less money in circulation, fewer jobs, and a lower standard of living for those who are working. The 'lack of wealth' idea.

This last should be explained in more detail. People are used to the idea of "roles" that people have, which has only gotten worse with the greater diversity of jobs and increase in knowledge in society which means more specialization. As a result, they tend to think of other people in a specific role, and see their relationship with other people as that of customer and seller.

In this view, if other people work harder, this helps customers.

This is a little bit right but mostly wrong, and reflects poor people's thinking. Employees may work long hours, but there is absolutely no need for this to be reflected as lower prices for customers. Just look at Apple.

So in concentrating on this relationship, people disregard a different one which at many times, including now, has a more important effect on society: that of competitors for a limited amount of paid work. The lower share of national income going to wages is a symptom, not the cause, of this insufficient amount of work.

Some people say that if we just give people money, we will have plenty of work to do even with the available diversity of products. This is of course what some countries do, but many of them still have high unemployment because while it means more poor people buying whatever, the higher taxes that are usually required also mean fewer rich people buying yachts and financial market advice from thousands of analysts. Since there is no strong support in the US for more welfare, we have to admit that there are not enough things being invented that rich people want to buy.

Since many rich people don't want to spend their money, and some live famously frugal lifestyles, this failure in the creative capabilities of entrepreneurs is expected.

Discussions like the recent one about "having it all" show that there are many serious people who would like to work less, they just can't imagine how to get society to reach that state. The type of publications that such people read use reputation in their selection criteria for guest posts though and no one with a reputation seems willing to support this idea, so those people will just have to accept that their prejudices are causing them to harm society by working too much and not questioning their assumptions ("lack of wealth") about why they should do so, and that this contributes to higher crime rates, a decline in human intelligence from downward evolutionary pressure, unnecessary poverty, high financial sector profits, etc.

So finally, what we can do in this situation.

First, the idea of reputation is one reason this problem continues to persist despite the solution having been found. The potential for it to cause problems is not exactly a new discovery but this point must be mentioned.

The actions we can take consist of avoiding wasteful spending that just goes to corporate profits, while still earning as much as you can except if you choose to work less. This applies to all types of spending, including health care and education.

More important though is promoting these values of working and spending less, as the understanding that this is the "right thing to do" is essential for anyone on a career track to be able to work less without sacrificing anything. Since this is not fundamentally very different from other flexible work policies, it shouldn't be too hard to get business leaders to accept the idea but it won't happen effortlessly either.

The younger generations have already been establishing ways of judging success that don't involve money. We just need to counter the wave of stupidity that results from people thinking that economic problems, or the US national debt, are due to a lack of wealth.

Condensing the important points into a sharable form will take work and depends on how people think about things and so on, maybe someone can do this later. Something similar for business leaders to refer to might also help, but I have even less of an idea of what form this would take for them. Marketing organizations find that social contacts are a trusted source of information compared to, say, advertisements or discussion forums but resources still need to be available in case of gaps in knowledge or questions about why it works.

Oh, and this: people think that by working harder, it gives them resources to help anyone they know who needs help. Or alternately, it causes people to have a good impression of anyone with similar characteristics. In both cases, the specific benefit is seen as more important than giving a random person the opportunity to do paid work, and people see this as justified since they think that the average competence or moral virtue of people they know is higher than for the entire population—the "we are awesome" effect, which I guess should exist no matter what the cultural bias is for one's self-perception of performance compared to the average. But this probably isn't as important as the "lack of wealth" idea.

Stating the obvious, problems exist in the world and these contribute to people feeling that the world is unfair or that people cannot be trusted. Many of these problems have an economic origin; many others are the result of inaccurate metrics or signals. In this environment, outcomes are uncertain and it can sometimes be difficult to judge someone's intentions when they do not act as we expect.

I was going to link to the song "Barbie Girl" by Aqua but decided not to before posting this. As an edit, instead I will link to/mention the song Nessaja by Scooter, and the anime Mahoromatic which I never watched but did read the description of.

Thinking about the future

Someone made a post on "how to fix the economy in one simple chart": http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-fix-the-economy-in-one-simple-chart-2012-8

Tangent, relevant links:
http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/how-does-education-help-great-recession
http://lifeinc.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/17/12773836-fewer-people-see-college-as-good-financial-investment?lite
http://www.businessinsider.com/corporate-profits-just-hit-an-all-time-high-wages-just-hit-an-all-time-low-2012-6
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/trading-caps-and-gowns-for-mops-2012-08-22

For the 'one simple chart' above, the person suggests that corporations should be nicer and give people higher wages. According to their logic, this would increase their spending and create jobs.

They don't explain why a higher percentage of national income going to wages did not create enough jobs during the 1970's in the US. This is an important difference: while working less to create jobs will lead to higher wages, higher wages will not necessarily lead to enough jobs being created; it is just as likely to lead to inflation or people buying more brand goods meaning higher profits for the corporations that do not 'cooperate' by giving employees greater than market wages. This possibility was explored in a post responding to frequently asked questions for this idea.

___

The answer to the first question in the previous post is that "economists encourage governments to go into debt because they observe that inflation leads to more spending, and they do not know how to get the private sector to create enough jobs without the wasteful spending caused by inflation."

The answer to the second question is that "printing money steals wealth from other countries that have collected US dollars, so the US can buy things without paying for them." Economists are understandably reluctant to explain this to people who do not understand it.

As I see it, society does not place value in ensuring the accuracy of the 'signal' afforded by the various levels of educational certification. People assume that a wage premium is enough to get most smart people to go to college; people also assume that being rich makes you happy. Someone with green eyes told me that they thought that greediness and the desire to earn money was one of the reasons for problems in the US—as it is said to also be a problem in other countries like China right now.

So we have all these young people who are aware that the system is broken. People in the established system, including the academic system and the social hierarchy of those who like money, do not seem to want to admit this. They are in a reality bubble with many other people who have the same attitudes, but the bubble is steadily shrinking. As has been said with science, sometimes the 'paradigm' will only change with new generations, but it is clearly in the interests of many people—including those who feel that events like the Aurora shooting are important and should be avoided—to cause change to happen more quickly.

___

As I see it, Japan's culture and obsession with brand goods is to adhere to the dominant culture's definition of being "nice". While Japan may have thought that its diplomatic and military activity in the first half of the 20th century was the best way to help the world, the events leading to its defeat in WWII showed that the US did not think that Japan had been helping the world. When the first US submarine surfaced off the coast of Japan shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor (where the declaration of war was not delivered in time but the US government had already translated it due to having cracked the codes used), the Japanese people did not bother to react to it. The later submarine blockade which sank most of the Japanese civilian fleet, and was of the same type used by Germany which was publicly denounced by the US, suggested that Japan had misjudged the extent to which the US would go to win a war. The nuclear bombings of two Japanese cities were further proof of this.

Therefore, while I feel this idea would help Japan or any other developed country with economic problems, I don't see it likely that Japan will make a concerted effort to adopt (!) this idea because it would be a sort of insult to the United States, in that Japan would be presenting itself as the world's cultural leader despite having previously been defeated in a war which it had started.

Young people in Japan, of course, might disagree since the "lost decade" showed that Japan's leadership does not really understand economics any more than US leaders do and this leads to harmful effects.

So, given the reluctance of even poor people to admit that their "work hard due to lack of national wealth" understanding of the economy is wrong, instead of a 'unite to help the poor people of every country' perspective it might be more effective to use a 'help the young people in every country' perspective instead. Young people can become rich by working in the financial industry, but the message of OWS is that this is not a socially acceptable thing to do, and that we should be able to create a society where doing "unethical" things is not necessary to survive.

This reluctance to betray the concept of educational certification is something I have been trying to avoid mentioning. I do not feel it helps society to avoid supporting this idea for that reason, but someone with prior social commitments might find it difficult to extricate themselves morally and yet might have some strange rationalization for not promoting this idea without mentioning its apparent originator.

As stated in previous posts, it should not be important who thought of an idea if there are enough jobs for someone to accomplish their goals without creativity/reputation capital.

So what this post hasn't done: expand on how to get young people to support this idea, when everything up to now has failed to win support.

On the use of real names: one of the persons I have mentioned before on this site, I am not sure of their last name. This seems like a selfish thing to mention though.

However, this site has implied, and maybe even directly stated that it is possible, just maybe difficult, to act "ethically" while also only doing things that directly benefit you. Much of this has to do with costs to memory as an excuse to do things that might otherwise be perceived as altruistic.

I dislike the idea that anyone might do something because of how it would affect me (the person typing this), maybe mostly because I am not sure I would still exist at that moment in time. As in, if anyone had that goal, it would seem to be in conflict with anyone who would benefit from me not existing.

...how lame, I think the video I was going to link to is not available on Youtube anymore. It is the part in the first episode of the anime 'Angel Beats!' where "Crow Song" by Girls Dead Monster is played while there is an encounter in the vicinity of a bridge. The lyrics for that... but it also seemed a little similar to an event on January 1, 2009, when an Iraqi female person was shot near a bridge in Baghdad. It is in the list of significant actions for that day in the database released by WikiLeaks, and there was at least one news story in local media.

I authorize anyone who reads this site (there are at least a few I think) to use my name in connection with this idea, and even to link to this site. Of course, due to my physical situation I might not be able to reply in a timely manner or participate in a conversation.

Documenting Crazy

It doesn't seem likely that anyone forwarded the previous message to the intended recipient.

I don't know what my situation has to do with this apparent effort to... as someone said, haha... "take over the world". The same person also said I should just get an economics degree, I "would be done in like a minute", but that was [four] months ago—remember, no one's talking to me!

Honestly, can't people just use this idea and fix most of society's problems! So we can get on with more important things.~

Still since I have basically admitted that I would probably die if my goals were accomplished I don't know if it's reasonable for me to complain about the lack of support. No, I don't know why... and it isn't nice to blame people for being stupid when they aren't trying to be.

It is also possible that if I had 'pushed harder' this idea might already be in use. But I didn't feel it was appropriate when no one seemed like they fully understood how or why it works.

So, backing up. The actual solution was discovered during a period of posting on the World of Warcraft forums. Generalizing between the two situations, it seems that the misunderstanding is of how goals relate to actions taken to achieve those goals, and how incentives should prevent harm during progress towards the goal.

Further back, the idea of 'flows' of money were explored in order to arrive at an explanation for why my investments of a certain type of good in the MMO Aion were not as profitable as someone else who just invested in high-quality end products prior to an increase in demand. Furthermore, to reach a conclusion on the effects of spending money earned on other, high-quality products. This was around November 4 or 5, 2010, and was because someone wasn't talking to me and I hadn't emailed someone else and as a result I didn't feel it was appropriate for me to be studying Japanese, so I got distracted by this issue.

So the economy of Aion was, and maybe still is, greatly distorted by people "buying gold" with real money from other people in the game, and using that money to purchase high-end products. Sometimes this money, or the items sold to make money, were farmed by computer-controlled bots, and sometimes it was done by real players—stereotypically Chinese players who had obtained an account for the North American or European realms.

One of my favourite random legion names for a Chinese gold seller was "Wooden fish and goldfish". Others that I recorded were "Writing poetry for you", "Legacy of Flower", "hero is tears".. there was one couple that I thought was very cute, it seemed like they were always together. Maybe not all Chinese players sold gold, but unfortunately it was the stereotype. One person I confronted expressed amazement that I had found out what they were up to, but they were nice so I ended up giving them food. Bots were a different matter but in one case I discovered that a bot's movement program would stop working if I initiated a trade request. This allowed me to take before and after screenshots explaining what I was doing, with the after consisting of the bot having ran off of a cliff.

After thinking about it, it didn't seem it would help the economy to sell one type of high-quality product at high prices to people who had bought gold—which was against the rules of the game and could lead to a ban, as well as being an insult or provocative thing to accuse another player of having done, even if it was true—and then use that money to buy other high-quality products at similarly high prices. All it did was encourage more people to buy gold, and people were very aware of this when considering prices things were sold for.

However, it also seemed there was no effective way to use large amounts of money that had been obtained in this manner. Giving it away would be pointless. In the real world, money that is 'destroyed' allows the government to print more, but the government is not exactly known for its efficient allocation of spending.

The conclusion was that there is little one can contribute through buying and selling decisions in an economy with efficient determination of prices. Unless there is a clear direction that society benefits from progressing towards, the most important influence is on the norms through which society judges success, or on the 'story' of how that success was reached.

The story of Aion, or at least the parts of which I was able to experience, was of two groups of people whose existence was threatened by the other due to a deterioration of the physical world. However, the development progress of the game Aion in North America and Europe was a story of two groups of people, hardcore players and casuals, whose choices for enjoyable play were threatened by the other due to bad game design.

This is another case of incentives not supporting goals. Eventually it became clear that working less was how to fix economic problems in the real world, where unlike in games it is actually somewhat difficult to find tasks to do that will earn you 'money'. But the reason that people had not already adopted something like this was not clear until later on, maybe as a result of the lack of positive feedback toward solutions that would fix problems that people on the World of Warcraft forums said they had in the game.

It was clear then that there were two different attitudes toward problems experienced in the Looking for group system. Some people thought that if everyone was just nicer, everything would be fixed. Other people had no interest in being nice, or had gotten fed up with incompetent people who felt that a desire to be nice should excuse their poor performance, often didn't want to be in the situation at all but felt forced to, and thought that being 'meaner' would discourage incompetent people from joining groups and improve average performance.

I am not sure how the solution I suggested would have worked in practice, or whether it would have been necessary or helpful at all if other previous suggestions had been adopted, but the end result was as one might expect—people were forced to be 'nice' by not being given an option to be mean (mostly), while performance also became almost irrelevant by lowering difficulty so that incompetent nice people would not hold back groups. This result could be described as 'less reliable metrics or signals'.

But since the game's recent changes had shown that this situation was exactly what many people did not want, it was very significant that people were not willing to support a suggestion that should have prevented this. It cannot, of course, be said that people should have supported the suggestion, but the company developing the game clearly stood to lose from this lack of feedback on the specific suggestion.

And if uncertainty about supporting a change caused harmful errors in that case, it was reasonable that a solution to employment could also exist without having received enough support to already be in use. In both cases, people were just construing resistance to "being nice as the solution to everything" as an actual intent to allow harmful situations to exist. The reality is that when people want to accomplish a goal, they don't want their actions in doing so to harm society; but if people are not willing to design a system to avoid these harmful externalities, it means that either these externalities are not as important as people say they are or the people affected by them are too stupid to align their intentions with effective results.

Since incentives are important in determining the intermediate steps toward goal completion, this meant that incentives about work in the real world just have to encourage people to work less, so that people can participate in those types of goals without feeling like they are contradicting the system. When people accuse someone of being selfish or 'mean', it is important that the target of accusation is able to verify that the set of options which society presents to someone in their situation includes the choices they have decided to make. As pointed out in previous posts, people who are aware of the problems which over-reliance on authority leads to will often conclude that confusing behavior that seems to contradict such assumptions is one of the available ways to help fix that problem, and will therefore often not deny accusations of being 'mean' because they are unable to conclude whether their strategy is the one that most helps society.

However, while awareness of the fallibility of authority might make people respond differently to the idea on this site, this is a false hope if the solution is not actually adopted. (I have been trying to avoid that word due to overuse but already the third time in this post!)

Just for the record, the inaccurate ways people think about the economy, which is reinforced by misunderstandings by political leaders and economists:

1. ALL DEBT IS EXTERNAL: the government is "rational", so if it takes on debt it's only because we don't have enough wealth to raise taxes to pay for that spending. Government debt is like a company investing in capital or a household taking out a loan to buy a car. Foreign countries, mostly China, own all U.S. government debt and receive interest payments on it. Please explain in one or two sentences why the assumptions leading to this understanding are wrong.

2. ONLY TRADE CREATES WEALTH: in a global economy, especially one where the US gets much of the critical "oil" resource from other countries, we only get 'value' when we sell stuff to other countries. The US government doesn't sell stuff, it just buys stuff, so all it can do is dilute the value created by companies and workers in the private sector. Please explain in one or two sentences why the assumptions leading to this understanding are wrong.

Errors of Democratic Party Supporters

I wanted the previous post to be the final one (as with many other posts) but it looks like people are continuing to ignore this idea.

As has probably been mentioned before on this site people make simplifications about the world. Recent posts by various people make it clear that our political parties are using these assumptions:

Democratic party: Wall Street is bad, its profits are immoral.

Republican party: inflation is bad.

As any moderately intelligent person should be able to understand, higher efficiency without more products or a reduction of average hours worked will lead to unemployment. Much of our current economic problems come from economists who have been trained to assume that the 'efficient' choice is always the correct one, anyone who chooses the inefficient choice is stupid or even immoral, and yet any situation which seems to include inefficiency or unnecessary outcomes like poverty and unemployment is due to 'rational' choices where only the government can cause further gains in total benefit.

Anyway, the current situation: by introducing inefficiency, the government could lead to higher employment with everyone working full-time. Since it is somewhat dishonest to do this, some people are willing to support a presidential candidate they see as being dishonest. No one should be surprised if people make a choice which leads to higher employment, instead of the choice which would lead to the greatest 'efficiency' in one aspect of a situation... since unemployment is not efficient in many significant ways.

People do not know if there exists a solution to unemployment that does not involve higher government spending. Generally, if something seems like it should be possible, its absence is either due to a problem with intentions or a problem with capabilities. But most people aren't very good at thinking about this.

So as previous posts have pointed out, most of Wall Street's profits follow directly from the existence of inflation and 'stupid money' entering the financial markets. The result is more economic activity and higher employment for an economy compared to if the financial sector was smaller or less complicated with higher apparent returns for investors. But Democratic party supporters are not willing to accept that this 'unethical' situation leads to positive results, and so they try to pretend that the economy or society would be better without Wall Street.

Neither party really has an idea of 'step two', as they are both unable or unwilling to try to comprehend the complexity of the economy and the implications of their ideological errors. Instead they just use a simple plan of 'winning' the current battle, and then they will decide what to do after that is done. Since both parties, it seems, assume that the middle class is either selfish or stupid and unwilling to support things without obvious direct economic benefit to them, neither is willing to suggest higher taxes on the middle class and so the economy will not really be fixed through their strategies.

But in the short term, again, the Republican party's chance of winning elections increases if unemployment remains high.

So a vote for the Republican party is a vote for the idea that "economists and government leaders are immoral and cannot be trusted to suggest or advocate workable solutions". As evidence, economists are not willing to support the idea that the United States has enough wealth to tax the rich and middle class to create jobs without deficits despite that Wall Street's profits are very high and have not announced that they have found a way to fix unemployment without higher taxes or inflation.

Anyone who has read this site and found the idea on it convincing will have asked themselves a question: why have economists not supported the idea? The President cannot be expected to evaluate every suggestion regarding the economy and even the people who review correspondence with the White House or the offices of other government leaders do not expect anything revolutionary in what they read. When someone wanted to inform Franklin D. Roosevelt of the possibility for creating a nuclear bomb, they did not write to him using public channels but instead gave a letter to Albert Einstein who in turn entrusted it with someone who spoke to the President directly. Given that this site, and previous messages on pastebin.com, have demonstrated that certain economists should be aware of this idea there are two possibilities that someone who thinks that unemployment is an important national concern will be led to: that the idea would not work for some reason, or that economists are 'evil' or in some way benefit from not supporting the idea.

The mental cost thus incurred is unavoidable as long as there are economists who seem to be supporting any goal that this idea would accomplish, such as lower unemployment and inequality, lower Wall Street profits, a more ethical society, less crime, or the Democratic party winning in the upcoming elections.

So, as the first message on this subject implied but did not openly state, if anyone wants any of these results to occur please forward this message or the idea on this website to the President of the United States for his consideration.

Opportunity for Everyone and a Chance to Fail

Who stands to gain from the current situation? As previous posts have shown it is not really the human race. To the extent that people don't want to be killed, it is not the middle class. Some wealthy people might prefer the current high inequality for some reason, but others think it isn't healthy for society and reduces their own opportunities to associate and identify with other people. The middle class benefits to an extent from inequality but there are social stigmas that make it difficult to exploit this for things like child care.

When it comes to politics, the Democratic party does not benefit from continuing high unemployment. In the short term, the Republican party of the United States is much more likely to win in elections if unemployment is high with the Democratic party controlling the executive branch of the federal government.

Republican party members say they want to fix high unemployment, but also seem willing to take advantage of the desire of the average citizen to avoid additional taxes by pretending that higher spending would not create more jobs. No one seems interested in sharing the ideas on this blog... so anyway while the idea on this site satisfies all major demands of the conservative movement, by creating jobs without more government spending, they have not been willing to support it.

The logical conclusion is that either people who have been exposed to this idea do not care which party wins the upcoming US Presidential election, or they do care and think that high unemployment will help the Republican party win, or they just don't understand this idea despite wanting to.

There are quotes about the Republican party's primary goal being to prevent our current President from being elected which supports the second possibility above. Anyone in the third category has made themselves irrelevant as of now. If there is anyone in the first category they are implicitly authorizing people who understand this idea to ascribe harmful or deceptive intentions to anyone who opposes measures that would create jobs, such as higher taxes and spending or using the idea on this site.

More links:
The President usually has very little effect on the economy but still takes responsibility for it.

We don't buy that much from other countries, but it includes foreign luxury goods and since the bottom 80% of income only make up 40% of all spending, it's reasonable that so many things seem to come from overseas.

The wealthy were not taking OWS seriously. I also like the quote about how making money is just a game, and it's more fun if you win.

I could link to stuff about flexible work policies attracting talent, that many people would be willing to work less if it seemed like there was a realistic option for doing so, or positive reactions to the assertion that inaccurate standards have made people feel more special than they really are... but anyone who could use that information productively doesn't need those links.

I think that's about it. Thank you to everyone who argued with me. As it turned out I didn't really use the notes attached to the image at the end of this post. The ending is a bit lame but I have no idea how to get people to use social media for constructive change; I think I created a page to contact a creative designer for an MMO that ended up failing, but I used a picture of a kitten, licking itself, when one was requested and did not take it very seriously.

Let's get this straight: smart people are to blame for high unemployment because they have too much confidence in the current economic system.

The weak labour markets over the past few decades have led to a decreased share of national income going to wages. If, say, the top 20% of income worked half as much, this would instantly eliminate our unemployment problems and give employees enough bargaining power to raise wages for the 150 million workers in the United States by 10%. One person doing this might not have much of an effect, but this is because they would be influencing prices for the entire nation.

If it takes 12 million new job openings to go from 8.3% unemployment to nothing, this means a single new job that is created by employees at a company working less raises everyone's wages by 10%/12,000,000, or 0.000000833%. But since it affects 150 million people, the total increase is 125% of the average wage rate, while the business that does this pays essentially the same rate for the work that is done.

Since flexible work policies attract talent, individual companies have every reason to support this too. The only question is how to get people to work less without changing payroll costs, but this has an easy solution.

Think of what happens when someone works less with the current systems of monthly salaries or hourly wages and overtime. If someone takes a day off with the salary system, they're generally expected to make up for it another time or else it forces someone else to do the extra work. With hourly wages, if someone can't work it might force the company to pay someone else overtime wages and a higher total cost of the work.

A better way is to pay a lower rate for extra amounts of work so people will agree to do it without feeling that the extra income is required, but also use the same lower rate for decreases in the amount of work done. If employee salaries accurately reflect their productivity, then these adjustments exactly balance out and someone won't feel bad if they need to, for example, leave work a few hours early to attend a parent-teacher conference or go to a doctor's appointment.

Neither should they feel bad if they delegate tasks to other people and focus on their key responsibilities, because the system would recognize that no special privilege is involved and fairly decrease their compensation to match the lower contribution to the company.

This would end up helping workers in low-wage countries around the world while harming countries that sell luxury goods to the rich, but this is a feature, not a bug. It would also mean fewer people on food stamps or other types of welfare in the United States, and therefore lower government deficits and inflation, but this is also intended even if some people think that deficits lead to higher growth.

Copy and share this message. We create the story.

The Logic of Moral Judgements

The general purpose of this post is to explain why it was maybe not ethical to support this idea before, but it is now.

Before I forget, I should say that I still don't know what a political leader might say as an explanation for what some people might see as a major change in culture except the one offered in the one-step plan to eliminating unemployment: "demand is low so companies should reward people who accept a smaller work load". I read a few transcripts of political speeches last year but I do not believe I have ever seen a video of one on an important topic.

So to return to the idea of a way of categorizing people as either "nice" or "mean"; or "selfless" and "selfish"; or "the strategy of prioritizing the goals of other people when a conflict is encountered" vs "the strategy of completing your own goals". It is not really possible for the poor to oppress the wealthy in the normal sense, since a rich person can instantly become poor if they choose to but the reverse is not true.

If "mean" people are seen as harmful to others, "nice" people cannot directly confront mean people. Other mean people can, and nice people could choose to become mean in order to do this, but if they do this it might be difficult for them to become nice again. So nice people will often try to act as if mean people do not exist by avoiding them.

However, it can be difficult to determine if someone is mean or nice because naturally, mean people have no incentive to reveal this information and one theme this site has frequently returned to is that problems result when too many people agree on correct standards of behavior without an awareness of the inaccuracy of even seemingly obvious standards. This means some nice people will deliberately present themselves as what people assume mean people will be like. In some cases the only way to determine the strategy used is how someone reacts upon learning they have made a mistake and are not sure whether people are aware of this.

This probably has to do with communicating the degree of 'control' one has over a situation but this is getting off topic.

Situations without clear information about whether someone is nice or mean do not result in definite 'ethical' conclusions, which for this purpose can be defined as whether it results in a knowledge cost for nice people who are exposed to the situation. Since we can assume that every person has a finite memory and decision-making capabilities that only synthesize a limited pool of relevant information, we are not able to ignore situations that seem like they are important.

This means that while someone can choose to do something that seems like it would help mean people, nice people are not morally obligated to support that choice or make the same decision. Since nice people cannot directly challenge mean people, someone who is nice might even feel morally obligated not to do anything to help someone they feel is mean.

With basically any conflict, people on each side feel that their own team is nice and the other team is mean. This conclusion logically follows from thinking that the people on one's team have good intentions and also thinking that they are competent in their evaluation of the possibilities of the situation and the value of each outcome. So to the extent that poor people and wealthy people see each other as being in conflict, poor people will think that rich people are "mean" and rich people will think that poor people are "mean"—in the form of wanting and accepting welfare at the very least, or maybe in convincing people that it is the opposing team that has nice people and not one's own team.

The result would be that poor people think it is unethical to do anything that would help the rich, while rich people think it is unethical to do anything that would help the poor if it imposes any additional cost on the rich. The idea on this site is meant to help both groups of course, which might be why people are as apathetic about supporting it as they are toward any other change.

But proving that the concerns each group has about why the other group is 'mean' takes time to do and is not a trivial effort. Without explaining these attitudes, assuming they existed, it was not possible to say that supporting this concept was an ethical thing to do.

Admitting that there were unmet goals, and that the existence of a group of mean people was preventing fulfillment of one's own goals and the goals of many other people, would have been contrary to the culture of the United States which embraces conflict and would have also implied the use of the 'selfless' strategy regardless of whether it was in accordance with cultural norms. Few people are willing to admit this, and so it is difficult to confirm the perception that mean people exist. This means it is also difficult to determine how people would have reached that conclusion except through very indirect methods and the patterns of mistakes that people make, in things like pointing out dishonesty which does not imply that the person making this accusation is 'selfless'.

This indirect method of analyzing a situation also makes it difficult for someone of normal ability to present evidence of mistakes, because everyone seems to stop talking when they learn that people they know are wrong.

(I am not sure if this post has any original material.)

Strategy Against Stupidity

'unique' people working less still promotes the idea that it is socially acceptable to do. signals or rough standards are necessary due to limited information and decision-making capabilities. sauerkraut with voyage of james cook.

too stupid to help themselves. if people won't act, nothing will be fixed. responsibility for own future. people who 'exploit' the system or 'defect' by ignoring society's problems, vs people who put off their own goals waiting for problems to be fixed; second group cannot rely on the first group to help but must reinforce each other. (can link to 'having it all'?)

standard of 'no more government spending' result of 'lack of wealth' and 'subsidizing wall street profits' ideas, both of which are wrong (exception: not lending to banks during crash would have led to higher unemployment). (US Treasury slides again?) people are directly responsible for government's inaction through voting power. political parties just scoring 'points' like being able to appoint Supreme Court justices while ignoring solutions to economic problems.

for most people, only a 'price' for stupidity if other people change their opinions of them. "not wanting higher taxes or inflation" is a valid reason to oppose government spending; "we can't afford to/too much corruption" is not.

occupy corporate profits?

example of jobs created when CEO works less.

image of male leaders associated with high profits and greed, what deters female leaders is also precisely what makes a good target for popular criticism

people who feel guilty sometimes most supportive, but cannot rely on for critical actions or violating convention

opportunity for everyone, not just a select few with connections

Evolutionary Argument for Working Less

The Seattle area had record temperatures yesterday at around 33°C. Meanwhile, it hits 45°C every day in Baghdad... why did we invade that country again?! This morning was cloudy though.

I still have a dozen unread articles from the past few days, but it seemed like I was in procrastination mode and that I had already read enough on the original topic ("having it all").

I might try to contact her but the live chat included this quote:

Anne-Marie Slaughter: Dear Norma,
There are all sorts of things that our government can do - more family leave (maternity, paternity, but also caring for parents, and others), laws preventing discrimination against part-time workers (that's what Britain has and it's made a huge difference), other kinds of policies, but right now given the economic situation and our polarized politics we should focus first on what WE can do -- as individual workers, as managers, as CEOs, as leaders. There's so much change that we can make, and we can start right now.

This seems to exactly follow the idea that the economic problems in the US are due to a 'lack of wealth', which incredibly people still 'believe' in despite the noise OWS has been making about the top 1% and corporate profits.

Everything else in the discussion is consistent with the original assumption regarding the concept on this site: that the tendency for people to work full-time is just due to cultural assumptions, that the only use many people have for more money is to buy 'status', and that by changing cultural assumptions unemployment can be fixed with little or no decrease in material standard of living.

___

The events leading to the discovery of the idea on this site were relatively simple: someone didn't answer an email I sent them. By itself this would not seem a remarkable occurrence, but you could say that the situation was in a state of heightened sensitivity due to previous events which could best be described as entropy leading from inaccurate standards of measurement in society.

As has been said in many of the author Terry Pratchett's books, stories can have many beginnings. One of the questions to be answered was whether inaccurate standards have a harmful effect at the personal level, and not just at the level of society. The basic idea is to construct a model of reality and verify that model by comparing the results obtained by someone else's model in the form of strategies and specific choices. An important implication if models are not found to match is that stupid people are harmful to society even if they have good intentions.

This, by itself, would not be a very useful conclusion but does suggest a hidden undercurrent of support in society for so-called 'social Darwinism', which people might assume is facilitated by unemployment.

Of course, allowing inaccurate standards of achievement to 'squish' stupid people fits reasonably well into the classic definition of "evil" so people are not likely to admit to this, which is why "social Darwinist" is not seen as an acceptable label even when "socialist" is (in some countries).

This means few people are likely to be willing to discuss it, and maybe the only way to confirm there is not a problem is by evolving the situation and comparing models of reality again at a future point in time. In my case, this was not successful.

The result is that I feel I am able to say that a problem exists—that the existence of stupid people does lead to problems at the personal level for even the most intelligent people—but I don't see unemployment as having any useful purpose. This is not only because a low income, or even no income is a way of 'countersignalling' or supporting a different standard of achievement which benefits society in the same way art does, but also because being poor does not really prevent anyone from being happy and it even seems like intelligent people, or educated people with high incomes, are less likely to have children—something which not everyone seems to be aware of.

Now, it is possible that achievement like wealth and education is just a 'trap' for stupid people who think they are more intelligent than they really are, and that allowing these people to spend their lives studying and working will lead to the best future outcomes for society, but this does not appear to be the case either. It would imply that the most intelligent people have decided to allow this deception to continue, when in fact everything points to the real explanation being that everyone is just confused about the reason for problems in the economy, how Wall Street gets its profits, whether people who oppose government spending to create jobs are truly malicious or just stupid, etc.

Similarly, if there was a counter-trap... this is complicated isn't it... where intelligent people thought they could get by without a high income but actually they tend to fail in their goals, then the hypothetical even more intelligent people who allow this situation to continue have not tried to prevent the use of the idea on this site except by ignoring it—which everyone else has also done. As mentioned in notes, 'terrorist'-type events are one argument against this possibility since they are specifically intended to affect people who would not normally be the target of violence due to not being poor. This can be seen as the revenge, or proxy revenge, of the intelligent against the hypothetical more intelligent.

So as is common with these types of situations, the people who are injured often had no ill intent. I just had to include that last paragraph didn't I... the point is that deception is bad! If we are going to have the concept of being 'successful' which is central to US culture, then it should lead to outcomes that people want so that intelligent people do not try to subvert the idea. The discussion on work-life balance is just the latest to show that time does have value and that higher monetary rewards do not make up for a lack of time. This is why the percentage of entry or mid-level male employees who would be willing to advance to a C-level management position such as CEO is twice the percentage of female employees who would be willing to do so. The cultural assumptions leading to this result are precisely what the idea on this site is meant to target by making working less, even at the highest levels of management, a more understandable decision and one which does not harm the organization.

This would have been so much easier if people took blog comments and pastebin seriously. I sometimes wonder if, supposing there are people who actually care about this idea and fixing unemployment, they refrain from saying anything just to see what I will do. Not funny.

Lazy

(With a capital "L")

Greetings,

The subject of this email is fixing unemployment and the economy. Most of you should understand why this is being sent. I feel that you are interested in addressing problems with the economy, and are not afraid of unconventional actions or of promoting an ethical standard which might cause some people discomfort. Introductions for the most part aren't needed, but...

Paul Krugman is best known for being the most followed economist blogger and for recently having won a Nobel prize in economics.

Jared Bernstein has been referred to as the "architect of [the] Obama economy" and was previously the chief economic advisor to the Vice President.

Mike Konczal works for the Roosevelt Institute and has a useful blog.

Robert Reich is the former Secretary of Labor and also maintains a website.

I have also included Dean Baker for his suggestions on work sharing, although I only sent him an email last year which he didn't reply to and that was about it, as well as Nick Hanauer who has promoted the idea that it is the middle class, not the rich who are 'job creators', and Susan Wilson who was the first person who seemed to take the concept seriously.

I have been advised that people are less likely to listen to someone who does not state their name and has no apparent credentials, but I view this as an artifact of the current system and not important in this case.

So the basic idea is that the primary recipients of this email form a 'team' and sort of assure people that if they work less this will help the economy and reduce unemployment.

^ (the point of this email)

This is mainly because no single person, who is in the position to influence others, seems willing to take 'responsibility'. In an interview several months ago Paul Krugman mentioned the characters in Ender's Game influencing world politics using assumed names but it should be clear by now that this is unrealistic—people depend on experts or leaders to make important decisions unless it becomes clear that trust in the system was misplaced.

In this case, there are several reasons why people might be uncertain whether to support the idea of working less. One is people who think that Wall Street's profits are somehow direct evidence of government corruption and that we can make everything better, including unemployment, by identifying specific cases of abuse. Maybe they think that raising taxes to support spending on the poor/unemployed would be the next step after eliminating 'corruption'. A second reason is uncertainty over the amount of wealth the US has—people think that inequality is significantly lower than it actually is and people might think that by working harder we somehow extract wealth from other countries, like the idea that "China owns the US". A third reason is uncertainty over whether more education can fix the problem.

This last reason of education is what could have determined if we could encourage skilled workers to work less, but it has become clear that the US is not lacking educated workers. The evidence ranges from the lack of jobs for scientists to low recruitment intensity by employers to higher unemployment in all or most job categories.

The way to get people to work less, which everyone should be familiar with, is to pay a higher average rate when someone reduces their work hours. In the long run it's possible someone might get pay raises for consistently 'donating' time to the company at a lower wage rate, but there are plenty of reasons someone really would get a higher wage rate for working less. Among other things, doing this allows people to avoid having to make a choice between what helps society (working less) and what helps the individual (monetary and social rewards).

While I don't want to apologize for making this too long, I think this article has a good description of some of the challenges people face in the workplace:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-can-8217-t-have-it-all/9020/?single_page=true

Especially the section titled "Changing the Culture of Face Time", and the contrast between this quote in the first paragraph "And the previous spring I had received several urgent phone calls—invariably on the day of an important meeting—that required me to take the first train..." and the argument that employers should treat having a family as no different from running marathons.

The comments mention this article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/09/educated-women-quit-work_n_1334629.html

Another recent article: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/06/1-percent-wives-are-helping-to-kill-feminism-and-make-the-war-on-women-possible/258431/

In this, as with other issues (global warming, race discrimination in employment, etc) people may express their opinions on issues they feel are important without necessarily being aware of the connection to economic problems that affect all of society. Fixing the economy would lead to progress on these other issues, but people who are interested in these other issues usually do not feel that confirming a solution to economic problems is their responsibility.

Therefore, a team! The primary recipients of this email should already be aware of the following site, which describes the major consequences of fixing unemployment: http://jobcreationplan.blogspot.com/