Unseemly

I think people are not getting the point of my last post.

Everyone is putting forward their ideas for the "moron problem" as Jim Donald puts it.

Honestly I don't think that's rocket science. We know what to do. We do what we have been doing for centuries. Ask Gregory Clark for details.

But that's not the thing. Nobody gives a shit about the long term sustainability of society. What people care about is feeling good about themselves.

Now imagine there's a choice between:

1-Being part of a tribe/thede/country in which the low-skilled are put to work in coal mines and worked to death without leaving descendants.

2-Being part of a tribe/thede/country which is so fucking awesome that poverty doesn't exist because we take care of everyone!

Well obviously 2 is a superior choice. And that's because people don't want to see poor people around. They don't want to be reminded of the existence of poverty. Lest their become poor themselves.

What's the point of being rich if there are poor people around in the same country? What's this, India? Not even Indians like India.

And that's why everyone likes the minimum wage.

If someone really is incapable of producing more than 8 bucks an hour, and doesn’t have family or friends to give them a black market job, I’d rather not have him in the workplace. I just don’t want to see the guy. So, put him on welfare? Well that would be OK if we shipped everyone on welfare to the ghetto and forbade them to vote and gave them a hard time should they wander out of the ghetto, or gave them amphetamines and made them dig makework tunnels in the mountains. What do you want to do with him? If you are against the libertarian solution, need another solution.

Personally I'd put him on soma and sterilize the guy. I wasn't making a rational case though, just channeling my gut feeling which is what I think most people feel inside. People in general don't want to think deeply about it, they just want the guy out so they aren't reminded of how nasty life can be. So on welfare he goes, or to jail trying to get some dough by dealing with crack or raping some sassy bitch. The tunnels aren't makework btw.

It isn't a conspiracy, but what Moldbug describes as distributed Machiavellianism. Also, it is telling that you chose as examples the Amish and Hasidic Jews. Tight-knit, ossified religious communities are able to withstand social engineering, but they are a small minority of Westerners.

Whatever the solution is to the "very low skilled people" problem we're going to need it soon. I now routinely have to tell cashiers how much change I'm owed. They've got a digital cash register, but for some reason go into a panic. And these are the people who beat out the unemployed for the spot. This is why there are hordes of J1 visas working low end jobs around here. The native unemployed are just useless at any wage. It's not a matter of driving down the price.

Is it that hard to help out your uncle for free? Are the Feds asking for papers for every single employee in the country? The US is swarming with weird cults of every kind and I don't see the government doing much about it, besides the most egregious cases. The fact that people don't work for free/peanuts is because they don't want to.

The rest of your argument rests on the idea that minimum wages do cause unemployment and distort the market. So yes, informal and under-the-table employment does not entirely compensate for labour market interventions.

Yes, and my point is that that's a good thing. I get more hedons from being able to pretend that poor people don't exist in my country, than I do when I read of some greedy old fuck working a bunch of bums to their deaths in some coal mine by promising money he never gave them.

All societies have people like this, the West has a lot more due to a combination of third world immigration and material abundance. The Christian values adds to the problem. What to do with them? There is only two thing to do, you either put them in welfare or you put them to work. I think putting them to work is the better solution. It reduces the free time on their hands and puts more pressure on their lives. They commit less crime and reproduce less. I think that is an outcome that we all are striving for, no?

Create something like the old Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps but make it an auxiliary branch of the USMC so they don't go around starting fires and other mischief. Similar to the Japanese solution. Anyone who gets eaten by a grizzly bear is a bonus.

"Anyone who has been in business for any amount of time knows that wages, like any other prices, have nothing to do with productivity or cost. " " If someone really is incapable of producing more than 8 bucks an hour," ... sigh

What, pray tell, do you do for humanity that is so fucking useful? Are you personally curing cancer or writing the next search engine algorithm that's going to kill google? News flash: you're very low skilled too.

Not meant to be a personal attack, I'm saying we're all "very low skilled".

Ok now stop being an ass. The fact that wages don't depend on productivity doesn't mean that productivity doesn't exist.

I'm sure he can operate a digital cash register. Surely there is a difference between those who can and those who cannot.

John you make everything sound so easy.

"2-Being part of a tribe/thede/country which is so fucking awesome that poverty doesn’t exist because we take care of everyone! " This is what leads civilizations to destruction. The history of the past is periods where heavy genetic selection results in a superior group of people. This group then conquers, kills, and enslaves all the groups around them (Mongols, Bantu, Romans, Chinese, ect). Eventually that civilization softens and picks option 2. The society is then eventually overwhelmed by worthless people at every level. It then either dies or enters periods of extreme genetic cleansing that restores the stock. Worthless people are not just the under class either. The upper and middle classes produces a lot of worthless people as well. It's just easier to push those people into the under class than to worry about eliminating them.

I don't blame them though. It's a very natural way to think. Natural selection isn't fun when it happens to you.

Suppose we have a minimum wage. But some people are not worth that, perhaps because they are stupid and lazy, perhaps because they are feckless, dishonest and destructive, and therefore need a lot of expensive supervision So, what do you do with those people? If you subsidize them, you get the problem we have now, which is that you get more of what you subsidize, and less of what you tax..

Jim, I know. See above: I don’t think that’s rocket science. We know what to do. We do what we have been doing for centuries. Ask Gregory Clark for details. What I'm talking about is what *people* want. And people don't want to live the Farewell to Alms. Downward mobility is unseemly. There may be a lot of ruin in a nation but not in *my* nation. My nation is cool.

Is it even possible for a high technology human society to sustain itself in a meaningful way, or will the cognitive biases of people always result in societal suicide? We know that people prefer pretty lies to truth. Presumably this was just as true in the past as it is today. So why is our society so uniquely stupid? Is it that technology has sufficiently insulated us from the short-term consequences of societal stupidity? That seems to me the only logical explanation, in which case it is a problem that will solve itself when the long term consequence of collapse is finally realized.