Yes. Taking in more resources necessary for our survival than we consume, is baked into our DNA. Or at least our limbic brain; when *not* taking in more food than needed, is the path to starvation and death. And possibly not just for ourself, but for our family and our entire tribe.
Noah is an extremely prolific writer. And for that I'm grateful, as he addresses important topics in ways that I almost always enjoy. So this rather existential post is quite possibly spurred by his family situation, wherein death or serious illness of loved ones naturally tends to induce a "Why do I work so damned much?" period of reflection.
From what I have seen over my life, what people most need is to feel useful and important to others.
Which others? That is somewhat malleable. Family. Country. Organization. Romantic partner.
For most people, most of the time, the path of least resistance is getting a job, bringing home a paycheck. And very possibly developing a workplace expertise.
Or, similarly, joining the military.
I am not saying that human beings SHOULD be wired this way, but in my experience, they usually are. They want belonging, and they want the security that comes from knowing what they did to gain that belonging, and they want recognition within the group for what they contributed.
Consumption, I agree, gives far more options for self expression. But there are problems here.
First, as much as self expression is good, I question whether it can ever take the place of feeling useful and important to others. Not without a lot of medication, anyway.
Second, although you cite criticism of advertising for getting us to consume things we don't need, I think the real problem is that advertising has a long history of tying everyday consumer products to deeper human needs. Like camaraderie and belonging. People may or may not believe that product X will bring them love or popularity or respect or adventure, but over tens of thousands of ad repetitions, they do come to believe that purchased products in general are the normal route to achieving these highly desirable things. Which -- horribly -- undercuts motivation to come up with more likely strategies for actually achieving these things.
The problem with needing to feel useful and important to others is that it passes the buck. Now the question is, what do those others need? To be useful to more others? That just passes the buck again and eventually it will get passed back to you. It has to stop somewhere. Someone at some point has to live for themselves, just so all those people trying to be useful to others have someone who can use them.
I think what is going on is that consumption for yourself and usefulness to others are both needed. Most of the people you know have too much of the former and too little of the latter, so to you it looks like feeling needed is all they need. But it is fairly easy to imagine an inverted community that is all about meaning and doesn't have enough selfishness and fun. Our stereotypes about the Puritans often evoke a culture like this.
"The problem with needing to feel useful and important to others is that it passes the buck. Now the question is, what do those others need? To be useful to more others? That just passes the buck again and eventually it will get passed back to you. It has to stop somewhere. Someone at some point has to live for themselves, just so all those people trying to be useful to others have someone who can use them."
I may be missing something, but this does not make sense to me. I can be doing things to feel useful and important to others, while those same people are doing things to feel useful and important to others, including me.
In order for something to feel useful and important to you, or for something to feel useful and important to others, people need at some point to have something they value for consumption. If you babysit for your friends so they can go see a movie, that is something meaningful because your friends will enjoy consuming the movie. If your grandma knits you a sweater, that is meaningful because you will consume it by wearing it.
I see your point, to the extent that the need being met leads the other to acquire a material good (a sweater) or perhaps a commercial service (a movie ticket).
It seems to me to push this idea beyond the breaking point if you are meeting emotional needs. Or providing spiritual guidance. Or, like me today, teaching an interested young person how to recognize bird songs.
Your personal experience has a clear and identifiable cultural bias. I have travelled over 50 countries and I can categorically state that there are countries where this works utterly differently.
Especially the link between Belonging and Contribution. In many cultures you simply belong period. There is nothing you could do about it even if you wanted to.
I'm sure you draw your conclusions from a broad sample of countries defying the "contribution drive", but: I would think Bhutan, at the ceiling of the world with a population of 2m is likely not representative of the greater mass of humanity
To quote Ingersoll: "Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now; the place to be happy is here; and the way to be happy is to make others happy."
Sorry to hear about your tragedy Noah best wishes to you and your family.
This reminds me of Iain M Banks Culture ships. The Minds that effectively ran the Culture would have help from humans in assembling new ships. It was only at a basic level, the humans would manoeuvre pre-built building blocks of ship substrate around a low-gravity shipbuilding bay; if ships build themselves they'd do it way faster and more efficiently, but the Minds encouraged it because it gave the Culture humans purpose. It was sort of like a 4 year old helping in the kitchen (holding the wooden spoon - "I'm helping!") - but in an optional and endearing way.
It's a shame he's no longer with us I would loved to have heard his take on *waves hands*. Man, if humanity ends up looking like the Culture we could do a lot worse (dystopian sci-horror elements aside!)
Loved all the fiction writing of Iain M Banks (and Iain Banks), yet in some way my favourite of his books was "Raw Spirit", using his love for Scotland and single malts to be autobiographical.
I love the essence of what Noah is saying with this piece; what we are passionate about says far more about us and who we are than what we are good at and get paid for.
I am a host of one of (currently) 37 "Walkabouts" around the world. A simple concept, we meet at the same place at the same day of the month and time each month, we gather, then walk for a bit, then stop in a circle and each share something. The "newbies" tend to do the "name, job, company" bit, but the more people come month after month, the more they talk about what matters to them, what (in a Quaker circle way) comes to their mind in the moment. One favourite for me was when a regular said: "Hi, I'm (x), this week I became a grandparent for the first time".
Let's focus more on what matters to us, it builds richer human lives and richer human relationships and yes, including those at work.
I have implicitly held this mindset my entire life. I have always regarded working as some annoying thing that I have to do so that I can afford to do the things that actually matter to me. Even in school the reason I excelled at school work was that being good at it let me get it done fast so the teacher would leave me alone and let me read.
I think overall this attitude has steered me right more than it has steered me wrong. How happy I am in life has been fairly unmoored from my career success. My therapist told me once that this was because I had a very strongly formed identity and didn't need work to give me an identity like other people did. I have led a very happy and meaningful life, for the most part.
The one thing I do occasionally wonder about is if my attitude led me to be too conservative when job-seeking. I decided early on that aiming for a job that I might find fun and meaningful was a bad gamble, such jobs were rare and competition for them is cutthroat. Maybe if I had been more proactive I would have a more fun or meaningful career. But on the other hand, maybe aiming high would have just led to failure and frustration. It's hard to know.
1. Noah writes that “Your decision of what to produce is not fully your own; the market gets to decide”, but you can substitute “consume” for “produce” in that sentence and it would be no less true. The market is quite powerful in deciding both what we produce and what we consume.
2. A society whose members value production over consumption seems to me as (economically) healthier than the converse. The first is characterized by surpluses and a general sense of “wealth”; the second by scarcity.
It’s possible I’m oversimplifying, and I’m aware that my #2 doesn’t consider mental health.
"you can substitute “consume” for “produce” in that sentence and it would be no less true. The market is quite powerful in deciding both what we produce and what we consume." <-- That's not true. Consumption decisions are made at the individual level. The market does NOT get to decide what you consume. You do.
"A society whose members value production over consumption seems to me as (economically) healthier than the converse." <-- Why?
Example 1: I own/ manage a housing company, and something we go through a lot of is snow shovels. I like the ones with plain plastic blades (no metal edge) because they slide better over the concrete and don’t catch/ hang up as easily. But those plastic blades wear down quickly— a couple of big storms and a shovel is done. I’d like to be able to just replace the blade (and reuse the shaft plus handle), but you cannot buy the blade alone.
Example 2: Did you ever notice in the bathroom that when you move the lever to activate the shower, a stream of hot water just keeps dribbling out of the spigot? What a waste! As someone who pays for the hot water for several dozen apartments, I sure notice that. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have a spigot diverter that closes all the way? (I realize I am way down in the weeds here, but you asked, and I’m gonna give you a real answer). This item, which would be technologically trivial to make (and which would save hundreds of millions of gallons of heated water across the USA) cannot be purchased.
Example 3: Any appliance/ automobile/ piece of tech with modular parts that are designed to easily be replaced (like bicycles historically were). You essentially cannot buy something like this.
I could go on, including with non-work related examples.
"Consumption" - you look for the money you have, the prices, and your preferences and choose the option that maximizes your utility
"Work" - you look for the money you already have (or your debts...), the wages of several jobs and your preferences and choose the option that maximizes your utility
Seems almost the same thing - you choose your desired option within the constraints that, in a society with division of labor, the preferences of other people impose on you
"Consumption decisions are made at the individual level. The market does NOT get to decide what you consume. You do."
While the final 'decision' might rest with you (in most liberal capitalistic economies) it is highly influenced by the market for establishing desirability, availability, price, urgency etc. In end you will have a certain amount of surplus income beyond basic needs (and even those can have highly variable costs). How you spend it will be a 'free' choice but one steered a lot by marketing, peer groups, signalling to others your status etc. If you don't believe that you can ask the question 'would I want this product if I lived alone on a island'. Alternatively there are some 'products' that government or markets don't (legally) provide despite obvious demands from consumer side - illegal drugs, sexual 'services' etc
Conversely the argument that the production side is determined by the market is true but not the whole picture as clearly people make sub-optimal economic decisions about what career or job to take based on their preferences - up to a point.
A society that values consumption over production won't be full of scarcity if its members exercise basic prudence. If you produce a lot of wealth, you can afford to buy more goods and services to consume.
In the Soviet Block societies, they valued production over consumption and people were very poor because of that - I grew up there. Thus, production does not equal wealth and production does not always generate wealth.
Well, to be absolutely fair, production in Soviet block societies DID generate plenty of wealth; the problem was that most of it was stolen (through graft or government control) by a handful of people in power (the hidden elite) while the regular worker remained poor.
AI doesn't just remove work friction, it removes friction from the consumption activities too. Trust me, people aren't gonna be sitting in the park reading Shakespeare.
Contrary to the last assertion, this is a version of a consumption society that's even less meaningful and more empty. It's a call for total capitulation of society to the worst mores of social media. Deriving self-worth from one's consumer choices, particularly possessions, is utterly hollow.
The less people identify with their stuff, or what they consume, the healthier they tend to be. I am even less interested in your pride or showmanship in your consumer choices. People are their personalities, their principles, and of course their actions. Except for externalities, the actions of consumption are far less salient than actions of production (including 'doing' in the largest sense). So of course this includes hobbies and childrearing, but not what they buy or own.
Sadly, most people are owned by their possessions. I suffer from that too e.g. maintenance of a couple family homes, which I prefer to do mostly myself. Filling homes with people animates me, but not filling them with stuff.
Arguably, I'm more defined by what I don't consume. And I don't care to virtue signal about that either.
This thesis does not ring true to me. Instead, mastering a task, doing it well, being recognized for it by others, is far more important. Having good relations with other s and feeling needed by others is far more important. If this is not possible with AI, then AI is useless.
I imagine that many people who despise consumption (and specially the "consumption society") split "consumption" and "play" (the implicit difference between the two things is probably the ration money/time that an activity requires), and say exactly that one of the problems of "consumption" is that you end up with less time to "play" (both because the time you spent in "consumption", and because to buy things you have to earn more money, then more time you need to spent working, then less time to play). But much of your post is treating "consumption" and "play" as more or less synonymous.
Now, how we identify more with your job than with our spending habits? Look for the movies that are usually champions of sales (even if not of prizes) - most are action movies; is an indication that compulsion of human nature is to DO things, to use our physical and mental skills to achieve a goal (and that we feel realized doing things, or at least watching people pretending that they are doing things); or look for schoolchildren at a recess - if they have enough time, most will do something that reassembles "work" - play some game, build some pseudo-fortification, etc.
And, ofc, most of your own examples of "consumption" are hobbies, who are in many ways a kind of quasi-work (there are also activities where you use your sills to achieve goals
«The “degrowth” movement is all about reducing Westerners’ so-called “overconsumption”; it’s hard not to hear a moralistic message in addition to the environmental one. Production is virtuous, consumption is wicked.»
After all, degrowthers want to reduce consumption AND production (the point is largely to reduce production; the reduction in consumption is a way to achieve that). If anything, is in the anti-environmentalist wing that we find the biggest glorification of production
“The problems start when "Dr. Who fan" comes before "person," when they start to think that liking that show is in and of itself a meaningful definition of their whole person. When the morals and lessons of narrative art cease to be fodder for exploration of one's deeper self and instead a proxy for a missing self.”
(There’s also the problem of fans presuming they *own* the story, and make creators’ lives miserable when they don’t tell the story they want. This reveals the error: If you internalize that you *are* what you consume, and what you consume changes without you wanting it to, it’s logical to resist that change By Any Means Necessary, instead of just going “nah, not for me, thanks”)
There’s elements of who people are that go deeper than consumption. Even “taste”, which is clearly related to consumption, is more than just acquiring experience in the act of consuming: Good taste brings out something in others who observe (and yes, consume) it that is activated, but outside of the consumption, can be held as a feeling of its own, even if the consuming was a catalyst.
I also notice that there’s a middle “producing but also consuming” that you put yourself in, and that I’m doing right now (a formative experience for me in college was posting and responding to others on Usenet). When you observe children making things (even making things within video games), it’s pretty clear that the act of making things, ideas, art is not just “producing” for income. Maintaining and cherishing that act of creating is what has to survive (and that “if we redistribute well” is carrying an Atlas-level amount of weight to this argument)
Can't help pointing out that only few people can write like Noah Smith but any fool can love his pet rabbit. Your high IQ isn't everything but it determines most of your life. Your quirky tastes and hobbies get you excited but they don't determine that much. And "what do you do" is a question asked by people who relate to other people who also identify with what they do for work because they're part of an elite.
' . . . as countries grow richer, they become more individualistic'. I think it's probably the other way round: societies which value the individual more highly tend to be richer. The hidden causal step is that individuals are more valued in less familial cultures and less familial cultures are higher trust - i.e. they have greater ability to form political and economic institutions made up of unrelated individuals. It's true that as a society gets richer, the latent individualism of non-familial cultures gets expressed more. But I'm not sure that familial cultures like Saudi Arabia become more individualistic as they get richer, or at least not noticeably so.
I think the bias toward production is right. You can't consume what has not been produced. Even when on your university vacation, someone had to teach the course.
These ideas have been fiddled about for a long time. Prevailing opinion shifts with other changes to society. Here is Burnet on pre-Socratic values among Greek speaking people:
“In this life, there are three kinds of men, just as there are three sorts of people who come to the Olympic Games. The lowest class is made up of those who come to buy and sell, the next above them are those who compete. Best of all, however, are those who come simply to look on.”
Wild for a typical modern American to imagine, say, professional athletes to be less admirable than the spectators!
The distinction between production and consumption is an artifactual one. It’s all consumption- just of different service flows. The carpenter consumes the services of a hammer no less than the writer consumes the services of a light bulb. Just because the carpenter works at a factory or you at home does not make consumption any less. It’s still consumption just under a different context. So the latter is what makes all the difference? Just as devouring that cheese platter on your own versus sharing it with friends.
Many people spend a large part of their working (producing) time doing activities they don't enjoy, actively resent or even feel repulsed by in some cases.
Then there is the issue is what you consume - broadly material goods or experiences. Much of the earlier part of article seems to frame consumption the former. For sure there isn't a completely clear cut separation but generally if you are spending a large amount of time focussed on possessions then this might not be much compensation. It also tends to be an area where the 'tyranny of choice' problem kicks in - spending 10 mins deciding what brand of peanut butter to buy etc. Much of my objection to advertising is that it's often generates a lot of noise/distraction for these very marginal decisions.
Personally the most satisfying activities are where I'm both producer and consumer. For example cooking a meal for my family, or at larger scale when I took a sabbatical to build a house. Some of these decisions are sub-optimal economically but again the ability to make that kind of choice is true freedom in my view.
Time will tell but if we can end up either making or buying products made like this Japanese guys shoes then it will be pretty nice:
"A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions." John Kenneth Galbraith
Yes. Taking in more resources necessary for our survival than we consume, is baked into our DNA. Or at least our limbic brain; when *not* taking in more food than needed, is the path to starvation and death. And possibly not just for ourself, but for our family and our entire tribe.
Noah is an extremely prolific writer. And for that I'm grateful, as he addresses important topics in ways that I almost always enjoy. So this rather existential post is quite possibly spurred by his family situation, wherein death or serious illness of loved ones naturally tends to induce a "Why do I work so damned much?" period of reflection.
I think you are on the wrong track here, Noah.
From what I have seen over my life, what people most need is to feel useful and important to others.
Which others? That is somewhat malleable. Family. Country. Organization. Romantic partner.
For most people, most of the time, the path of least resistance is getting a job, bringing home a paycheck. And very possibly developing a workplace expertise.
Or, similarly, joining the military.
I am not saying that human beings SHOULD be wired this way, but in my experience, they usually are. They want belonging, and they want the security that comes from knowing what they did to gain that belonging, and they want recognition within the group for what they contributed.
Consumption, I agree, gives far more options for self expression. But there are problems here.
First, as much as self expression is good, I question whether it can ever take the place of feeling useful and important to others. Not without a lot of medication, anyway.
Second, although you cite criticism of advertising for getting us to consume things we don't need, I think the real problem is that advertising has a long history of tying everyday consumer products to deeper human needs. Like camaraderie and belonging. People may or may not believe that product X will bring them love or popularity or respect or adventure, but over tens of thousands of ad repetitions, they do come to believe that purchased products in general are the normal route to achieving these highly desirable things. Which -- horribly -- undercuts motivation to come up with more likely strategies for actually achieving these things.
The problem with needing to feel useful and important to others is that it passes the buck. Now the question is, what do those others need? To be useful to more others? That just passes the buck again and eventually it will get passed back to you. It has to stop somewhere. Someone at some point has to live for themselves, just so all those people trying to be useful to others have someone who can use them.
I think what is going on is that consumption for yourself and usefulness to others are both needed. Most of the people you know have too much of the former and too little of the latter, so to you it looks like feeling needed is all they need. But it is fairly easy to imagine an inverted community that is all about meaning and doesn't have enough selfishness and fun. Our stereotypes about the Puritans often evoke a culture like this.
"The problem with needing to feel useful and important to others is that it passes the buck. Now the question is, what do those others need? To be useful to more others? That just passes the buck again and eventually it will get passed back to you. It has to stop somewhere. Someone at some point has to live for themselves, just so all those people trying to be useful to others have someone who can use them."
I may be missing something, but this does not make sense to me. I can be doing things to feel useful and important to others, while those same people are doing things to feel useful and important to others, including me.
In order for something to feel useful and important to you, or for something to feel useful and important to others, people need at some point to have something they value for consumption. If you babysit for your friends so they can go see a movie, that is something meaningful because your friends will enjoy consuming the movie. If your grandma knits you a sweater, that is meaningful because you will consume it by wearing it.
I see your point, to the extent that the need being met leads the other to acquire a material good (a sweater) or perhaps a commercial service (a movie ticket).
It seems to me to push this idea beyond the breaking point if you are meeting emotional needs. Or providing spiritual guidance. Or, like me today, teaching an interested young person how to recognize bird songs.
Your personal experience has a clear and identifiable cultural bias. I have travelled over 50 countries and I can categorically state that there are countries where this works utterly differently.
Especially the link between Belonging and Contribution. In many cultures you simply belong period. There is nothing you could do about it even if you wanted to.
Id be very surprised if being useful to the group is not an evolutionary adaptation and required in someway to feel secure.
Kids appear to want to be useful even though they may not yet comprehend what other people around them say.
I believe both the need to belong and the need to contribute have deep evolutionary roots, but I see no reason why they should be connected.
If you ever have the time, I'd recommend you a holiday in Bhutan, you might find it more exotic and weird than a holiday on Mars.
I'm sure you draw your conclusions from a broad sample of countries defying the "contribution drive", but: I would think Bhutan, at the ceiling of the world with a population of 2m is likely not representative of the greater mass of humanity
To quote Ingersoll: "Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now; the place to be happy is here; and the way to be happy is to make others happy."
Sorry to hear about your tragedy Noah best wishes to you and your family.
This reminds me of Iain M Banks Culture ships. The Minds that effectively ran the Culture would have help from humans in assembling new ships. It was only at a basic level, the humans would manoeuvre pre-built building blocks of ship substrate around a low-gravity shipbuilding bay; if ships build themselves they'd do it way faster and more efficiently, but the Minds encouraged it because it gave the Culture humans purpose. It was sort of like a 4 year old helping in the kitchen (holding the wooden spoon - "I'm helping!") - but in an optional and endearing way.
Banks was quite prescient...
It's a shame he's no longer with us I would loved to have heard his take on *waves hands*. Man, if humanity ends up looking like the Culture we could do a lot worse (dystopian sci-horror elements aside!)
Loved all the fiction writing of Iain M Banks (and Iain Banks), yet in some way my favourite of his books was "Raw Spirit", using his love for Scotland and single malts to be autobiographical.
I love the essence of what Noah is saying with this piece; what we are passionate about says far more about us and who we are than what we are good at and get paid for.
I am a host of one of (currently) 37 "Walkabouts" around the world. A simple concept, we meet at the same place at the same day of the month and time each month, we gather, then walk for a bit, then stop in a circle and each share something. The "newbies" tend to do the "name, job, company" bit, but the more people come month after month, the more they talk about what matters to them, what (in a Quaker circle way) comes to their mind in the moment. One favourite for me was when a regular said: "Hi, I'm (x), this week I became a grandparent for the first time".
Let's focus more on what matters to us, it builds richer human lives and richer human relationships and yes, including those at work.
I have implicitly held this mindset my entire life. I have always regarded working as some annoying thing that I have to do so that I can afford to do the things that actually matter to me. Even in school the reason I excelled at school work was that being good at it let me get it done fast so the teacher would leave me alone and let me read.
I think overall this attitude has steered me right more than it has steered me wrong. How happy I am in life has been fairly unmoored from my career success. My therapist told me once that this was because I had a very strongly formed identity and didn't need work to give me an identity like other people did. I have led a very happy and meaningful life, for the most part.
The one thing I do occasionally wonder about is if my attitude led me to be too conservative when job-seeking. I decided early on that aiming for a job that I might find fun and meaningful was a bad gamble, such jobs were rare and competition for them is cutthroat. Maybe if I had been more proactive I would have a more fun or meaningful career. But on the other hand, maybe aiming high would have just led to failure and frustration. It's hard to know.
Two quick thoughts:
1. Noah writes that “Your decision of what to produce is not fully your own; the market gets to decide”, but you can substitute “consume” for “produce” in that sentence and it would be no less true. The market is quite powerful in deciding both what we produce and what we consume.
2. A society whose members value production over consumption seems to me as (economically) healthier than the converse. The first is characterized by surpluses and a general sense of “wealth”; the second by scarcity.
It’s possible I’m oversimplifying, and I’m aware that my #2 doesn’t consider mental health.
"you can substitute “consume” for “produce” in that sentence and it would be no less true. The market is quite powerful in deciding both what we produce and what we consume." <-- That's not true. Consumption decisions are made at the individual level. The market does NOT get to decide what you consume. You do.
"A society whose members value production over consumption seems to me as (economically) healthier than the converse." <-- Why?
“The market does NOT get to decide what you consume. You do”
Except when I want to consume (buy) something that the market doesn’t offer.
I can think of multiple examples of this from my own life.
Give some!
Example 1: I own/ manage a housing company, and something we go through a lot of is snow shovels. I like the ones with plain plastic blades (no metal edge) because they slide better over the concrete and don’t catch/ hang up as easily. But those plastic blades wear down quickly— a couple of big storms and a shovel is done. I’d like to be able to just replace the blade (and reuse the shaft plus handle), but you cannot buy the blade alone.
Example 2: Did you ever notice in the bathroom that when you move the lever to activate the shower, a stream of hot water just keeps dribbling out of the spigot? What a waste! As someone who pays for the hot water for several dozen apartments, I sure notice that. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have a spigot diverter that closes all the way? (I realize I am way down in the weeds here, but you asked, and I’m gonna give you a real answer). This item, which would be technologically trivial to make (and which would save hundreds of millions of gallons of heated water across the USA) cannot be purchased.
Example 3: Any appliance/ automobile/ piece of tech with modular parts that are designed to easily be replaced (like bicycles historically were). You essentially cannot buy something like this.
I could go on, including with non-work related examples.
Or that is priced too high.
For me, that's maybe a yacht. For others, a cucumber.
"Consumption" - you look for the money you have, the prices, and your preferences and choose the option that maximizes your utility
"Work" - you look for the money you already have (or your debts...), the wages of several jobs and your preferences and choose the option that maximizes your utility
Seems almost the same thing - you choose your desired option within the constraints that, in a society with division of labor, the preferences of other people impose on you
"Consumption decisions are made at the individual level. The market does NOT get to decide what you consume. You do."
While the final 'decision' might rest with you (in most liberal capitalistic economies) it is highly influenced by the market for establishing desirability, availability, price, urgency etc. In end you will have a certain amount of surplus income beyond basic needs (and even those can have highly variable costs). How you spend it will be a 'free' choice but one steered a lot by marketing, peer groups, signalling to others your status etc. If you don't believe that you can ask the question 'would I want this product if I lived alone on a island'. Alternatively there are some 'products' that government or markets don't (legally) provide despite obvious demands from consumer side - illegal drugs, sexual 'services' etc
Conversely the argument that the production side is determined by the market is true but not the whole picture as clearly people make sub-optimal economic decisions about what career or job to take based on their preferences - up to a point.
A society that values consumption over production won't be full of scarcity if its members exercise basic prudence. If you produce a lot of wealth, you can afford to buy more goods and services to consume.
In the Soviet Block societies, they valued production over consumption and people were very poor because of that - I grew up there. Thus, production does not equal wealth and production does not always generate wealth.
Well, to be absolutely fair, production in Soviet block societies DID generate plenty of wealth; the problem was that most of it was stolen (through graft or government control) by a handful of people in power (the hidden elite) while the regular worker remained poor.
Love your work Noah but you have this very wrong.
A world where AI removes struggle doesn't free us to become ourselves, it just removes the resistance that was building us in the first place.
Friction is a key ingredient to growth and, ironically, happiness.
AI doesn't just remove work friction, it removes friction from the consumption activities too. Trust me, people aren't gonna be sitting in the park reading Shakespeare.
Anyone who thinks the newer generations lack the strength of character to handle adversity has never tried playing Dark Souls.
Come on Doug you know they're all summoning and using mimic tear 😉.
😆
Contrary to the last assertion, this is a version of a consumption society that's even less meaningful and more empty. It's a call for total capitulation of society to the worst mores of social media. Deriving self-worth from one's consumer choices, particularly possessions, is utterly hollow.
The less people identify with their stuff, or what they consume, the healthier they tend to be. I am even less interested in your pride or showmanship in your consumer choices. People are their personalities, their principles, and of course their actions. Except for externalities, the actions of consumption are far less salient than actions of production (including 'doing' in the largest sense). So of course this includes hobbies and childrearing, but not what they buy or own.
Sadly, most people are owned by their possessions. I suffer from that too e.g. maintenance of a couple family homes, which I prefer to do mostly myself. Filling homes with people animates me, but not filling them with stuff.
Arguably, I'm more defined by what I don't consume. And I don't care to virtue signal about that either.
This thesis does not ring true to me. Instead, mastering a task, doing it well, being recognized for it by others, is far more important. Having good relations with other s and feeling needed by others is far more important. If this is not possible with AI, then AI is useless.
I imagine that many people who despise consumption (and specially the "consumption society") split "consumption" and "play" (the implicit difference between the two things is probably the ration money/time that an activity requires), and say exactly that one of the problems of "consumption" is that you end up with less time to "play" (both because the time you spent in "consumption", and because to buy things you have to earn more money, then more time you need to spent working, then less time to play). But much of your post is treating "consumption" and "play" as more or less synonymous.
Now, how we identify more with your job than with our spending habits? Look for the movies that are usually champions of sales (even if not of prizes) - most are action movies; is an indication that compulsion of human nature is to DO things, to use our physical and mental skills to achieve a goal (and that we feel realized doing things, or at least watching people pretending that they are doing things); or look for schoolchildren at a recess - if they have enough time, most will do something that reassembles "work" - play some game, build some pseudo-fortification, etc.
And, ofc, most of your own examples of "consumption" are hobbies, who are in many ways a kind of quasi-work (there are also activities where you use your sills to achieve goals
And these passage makes very few sense:
«The “degrowth” movement is all about reducing Westerners’ so-called “overconsumption”; it’s hard not to hear a moralistic message in addition to the environmental one. Production is virtuous, consumption is wicked.»
After all, degrowthers want to reduce consumption AND production (the point is largely to reduce production; the reduction in consumption is a way to achieve that). If anything, is in the anti-environmentalist wing that we find the biggest glorification of production
Hegel Activated:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-arent-the-shit-you-like
“The problems start when "Dr. Who fan" comes before "person," when they start to think that liking that show is in and of itself a meaningful definition of their whole person. When the morals and lessons of narrative art cease to be fodder for exploration of one's deeper self and instead a proxy for a missing self.”
(There’s also the problem of fans presuming they *own* the story, and make creators’ lives miserable when they don’t tell the story they want. This reveals the error: If you internalize that you *are* what you consume, and what you consume changes without you wanting it to, it’s logical to resist that change By Any Means Necessary, instead of just going “nah, not for me, thanks”)
There’s elements of who people are that go deeper than consumption. Even “taste”, which is clearly related to consumption, is more than just acquiring experience in the act of consuming: Good taste brings out something in others who observe (and yes, consume) it that is activated, but outside of the consumption, can be held as a feeling of its own, even if the consuming was a catalyst.
I also notice that there’s a middle “producing but also consuming” that you put yourself in, and that I’m doing right now (a formative experience for me in college was posting and responding to others on Usenet). When you observe children making things (even making things within video games), it’s pretty clear that the act of making things, ideas, art is not just “producing” for income. Maintaining and cherishing that act of creating is what has to survive (and that “if we redistribute well” is carrying an Atlas-level amount of weight to this argument)
Can't help pointing out that only few people can write like Noah Smith but any fool can love his pet rabbit. Your high IQ isn't everything but it determines most of your life. Your quirky tastes and hobbies get you excited but they don't determine that much. And "what do you do" is a question asked by people who relate to other people who also identify with what they do for work because they're part of an elite.
' . . . as countries grow richer, they become more individualistic'. I think it's probably the other way round: societies which value the individual more highly tend to be richer. The hidden causal step is that individuals are more valued in less familial cultures and less familial cultures are higher trust - i.e. they have greater ability to form political and economic institutions made up of unrelated individuals. It's true that as a society gets richer, the latent individualism of non-familial cultures gets expressed more. But I'm not sure that familial cultures like Saudi Arabia become more individualistic as they get richer, or at least not noticeably so.
I think the bias toward production is right. You can't consume what has not been produced. Even when on your university vacation, someone had to teach the course.
These ideas have been fiddled about for a long time. Prevailing opinion shifts with other changes to society. Here is Burnet on pre-Socratic values among Greek speaking people:
“In this life, there are three kinds of men, just as there are three sorts of people who come to the Olympic Games. The lowest class is made up of those who come to buy and sell, the next above them are those who compete. Best of all, however, are those who come simply to look on.”
Wild for a typical modern American to imagine, say, professional athletes to be less admirable than the spectators!
Without the audience, a performance is just a rehearsal.
The distinction between production and consumption is an artifactual one. It’s all consumption- just of different service flows. The carpenter consumes the services of a hammer no less than the writer consumes the services of a light bulb. Just because the carpenter works at a factory or you at home does not make consumption any less. It’s still consumption just under a different context. So the latter is what makes all the difference? Just as devouring that cheese platter on your own versus sharing it with friends.
Many people spend a large part of their working (producing) time doing activities they don't enjoy, actively resent or even feel repulsed by in some cases.
Then there is the issue is what you consume - broadly material goods or experiences. Much of the earlier part of article seems to frame consumption the former. For sure there isn't a completely clear cut separation but generally if you are spending a large amount of time focussed on possessions then this might not be much compensation. It also tends to be an area where the 'tyranny of choice' problem kicks in - spending 10 mins deciding what brand of peanut butter to buy etc. Much of my objection to advertising is that it's often generates a lot of noise/distraction for these very marginal decisions.
Personally the most satisfying activities are where I'm both producer and consumer. For example cooking a meal for my family, or at larger scale when I took a sabbatical to build a house. Some of these decisions are sub-optimal economically but again the ability to make that kind of choice is true freedom in my view.
Time will tell but if we can end up either making or buying products made like this Japanese guys shoes then it will be pretty nice:
https://www.youtube.com/@ken.kataoka/videos?view=0&sort=dd&shelf_id=2