How To Make Earth's Population Sustainable?

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Human No More

I wouldn't. Completely truthfully, if I could get by on an easy job the same as a harder one, I wouldn't have any motivation to do the harder one.

Ah but the question here is what is the harder one? For me, the harder one would be the simple labourers job. I would not like this at all, it would be boring and I would really do it only for more money than if I can work the same time in a lab or do engineering. For others it may be different, that way, each position is filled. Obviously some positions will be harder to fill, so for these, one would need a motivation in form of a bit higher income or other benefits, but these jobs would likely not be bankers or managers. Maybe the guy who cleans the sewers would earn more than the person doing accounting, simply because it is a job that needs additional motivation.

The bigger problem is lack of incentive to do anything if everything is handed out to everyone, and if every single person gets the same, so the work is never actually done and the whole system collapses. It has happened in every single attempt at communism to date.

Well - this is partly true. So there has to be a motivation for people do do some things, but as I said, it is enough to give people some bonuses for extra work, not dangle a carrot in front of them that says "if you are really really good you get 100 times more", so everybody works harder but only one of them gets the carrot. This is an unjust system. One thing that went wrong with communism attempts is in my opinion, that it was too early. I believe even Marx said, that Capitalism has to reach its limits before any change will happen.

The basis of some communist theories is indeed, that automation and technology would make much of human work easier and reduce the overall workload, so that people would have to work less. Everybody could work 2 or 3 days a week or even less in the future. Right now, I believe over 60% (I cannot quote this correctly as I have lost the source) of the Americans work in the "financial industry" - a sector that does produce zip - it is a big balloon created by capitalism. So maybe one day it will burst and people will realize that if all these people work in jobs that actually do something reasonable, all people could work half-time for the same money. Ok, this is a very simplified way to but it to make the point