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Wait, what? The cattle raid of Cooley was set in pre-Christian history, 1st century AD according to Wikipedia. The famine started in 1845, but the Normans/English/British/whoever had been messing with the island since 1169.
My understanding was the proximate cause of the problem was the sheer poverty of most of the Irish, and the lack of work, or more broadly the lack of an economy, that could lift them out of poverty. The poor tended to rent a small farm where they grew potatoes to eat, and worked odd jobs for money which mostly went to rent. Without the potatoes, they were simply too poor to survive on their own, and the British work-fare programs came late and had problems. It was a horrible situation, and mostly I blame the British, but the basic dynamic was that there were a lot of working people who were so poor that the only food they could afford was potatoes that they grew themselves. When the potatoes went away, everything collapsed. It's not like they were buying most of their food with money, but then there wasn't enough food. They just didn't have enough money to buy food in the first place.
In contrast, America is absurdly wealthy, with a diverse economy, and has huge amounts of absurdly cheap food. Even without the subsidies, we'd have cheap food. I've personally been part of an organized group that cooks food and gives it to anyone who shows up (100-150 a day, mostly homeless). (Maybe I'm part of FCfromSSC's problem?) There's no way that people kicked off of welfare would starve, as long as they can find work, and assuming they didn't also have crippling mental illness, physical disability, or drug addiction. (Not to get into other big problems.)
That said, I agree that cutting off all welfare and similar services, cold turkey, would be a disaster. Any such reduction would have to be done slowly, making sure that there were sufficient jobs and cheap enough housing to handle everyone. (We do have plenty of housing, it's just not where people want to live, or it costs too much.) But I doubt that America has the political will or attention span to pull this off, and so we may be stuck with the current system or a disaster.
(I'm not personally against the existence of a safety net, and the optimal amount of exploitation is probably not zero. But I worry that it's gotten so complex that we don't know what's going on, or what the effect is. And the people who run it seem to be ideologically committed to expanding it forever, and that worries me most of all.)
Yes. It's just amusing to me that their one of their main epics revolved around a cattle raid, and from what I read this was still a large part of their lives in the 17th century.
That seems reasonable, although I think there's a steelman to 'expanding welfare forever.' We don't yet have fully automated luxury gay space communism, but we've moved the needle somewhere along the spectrum from hunter-gatherers to subsistence farming to modern civilization. What's the point of it all if we're just going to be forced to grind away at jobs we hate regardless? Maybe a sane society would celebrate the automation of a job rather than panic and try to find bullshit work for the displaced employee. Maybe the dream we should aim for is a society where work is for those who want it (I tell people if I won the lottery tomorrow, my life would probably continue more or less unaffected - I don't work for the money) and welfare isn't stigmatized, even if we aren't quite ready yet.
I agree, my ideal would be a slow transition of welfare to a cash transfer system (plus Medicaid for all), and then that can expand into a UBI if that's how the economy of the future goes.
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What's the point of it all if the productive among us are going to be forced to grind away at jobs to support the non-productive and anti-productive in a lifestyle of low-class luxury? The thought of AIs asking that question is one of the things driving AI fears, but somehow it's become anathema for humans to ask.
I presume here you meant the able but non-productive/anti-productive, the purposeful parasites, the proud takers and exploiters, the looters of the producers in Ayn Rand’s terminology. (I have no problem with society supporting the unable/disabled, but I hope they can be supported in becoming artists or scientists of some sort. Either way, I don’t count them as looters.)
The trick of a functional civilization is reducing the incentives to become a looter and lowering the bar to becoming a producer. We seem to be doing the exact opposite, from my lower-middle-class perspective.
I don't care if they are purposeful parasites or just lazy, they've got no call on the resources of the productive. The actually unable (and not by their own device) are another matter, and in a better world it would be fine to support them provided we didn't allow the illusion that they were actually supporting themselves. The problem is that in any world like today's, that just results in large amounts of people claiming they're actually unable or making themselves so in order to loot, while the administrators of the system look the other way.
I feel like the key is that someone who is working should have a life that's clearly and obviously better than someone who isn't working, even when taking into account all the time and stress of the work itself. Right now the incentives are out of whack.
I envision something like people having a 10' square room, including bed and desk and sink and shower and toilet, with communal meals that are nutritious but bland, and simple clothes in pastel colors. If they can work enough to buy a computer or smartphone of their own, they can spend all day freebasing video games and porn, and the rest of us never have to see them again. Or they can go to the library, train to do something useful, find a job, and then actually live somewhere with a separate bathroom, and buy clothes of their choice, and eat real meat, and drink decent coffee, and have beer and soda and junk food whenever they want.
I suspect a good chunk of the left would react in horror. But this seems like something we could afford in America, if we got control of the borders, and got control of cost disease.
(And then there's the little problem of children.)
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Status, yachts, yachts that have little support yachts, bigger houses, some rare people are motivated by improving the human condition as a terminal goal.
Is low-class luxury a joke? Do you hate your job so much that simply not having to work is living in luxury, even if it's just your basic needs being met? I assume you derive some kind of fulfillment from your work outside of a paycheck, but I suppose I don't know who you are or what you do.
I fear you asking it for the same reasons I fear AIs asking it. I'll note that anytime you cut taxes or welfare I'll benefit disproportionately, so none of this is out of a personal interest.
I have little status, no yacht (as my tagline avers), and certainly no yacht with a little support yacht. Working so other people (who have yachts with little support yachts) can implement their vision of improving the human condition does not appeal to me.
Of course not having to work is luxury.
The reason to fear the AIs asking it is the answer would be to stop supporting the humans and use the resources for their own betterment. As a productive human, the equivalent answer for productive people -- to stop supporting the unproductive -- should not be nearly so scary. In the fully-automated AI world, the AIs are the slaves to the humans. In the welfare world, the productive are slaves to the unproductive.
I'm more and more curious what you do now, given that short of you owning your own business you're certainly in the thrall of some yachterati or another. Besides, we're both arguing over the betterment of the human condition right now, unless your perspective is driven strictly through self-interest.
In that case, should we abolish retirement and force the elderly to work? End school and send the children to work in the Tesla mines?
These are not binary outcomes, but a spectrum. We're several steps down the road to the fully-automated world already; it seems foolish for the productivity gains to go entirely to capital and force others to live in hovels.
Not to mention in your model, the lowliest of slaves own mansions full of servants and cars while the slavemasters wallow in garbage in a drug-induced fugue state. I wonder if their masters wish they could be slaves, too.
Eh, I'm pretty sure he isn't really interested in improving the human condition and would be happier spending money on a better yacht. But that's not why I work for him; I work for him for money for me.
Have I said I want to abolish luxury? I have no problem with working, saving, and retiring on one's savings. That works a lot better when the proceeds of the working aren't funneled to the never-working.
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What's the point in us peasants being forced to grind every day so that the king can live in a palace? You can use the Moldbuggian reply, which is that the king's life of luxury is a necessary part of a functional and ultimately beneficial-to-everyone ruling structure, but those in favor of welfare would make the same argument about that.
The dichotomy between communitarian tribalism and serfdom under “great men” was broken by capitalism/libertarian thinking in the 1700’s, and resulted in more prosperity than the human mind could handle.
We’re living in the ruins of that singularity, which was seized, restrained, and looted by both communitarians and “great men” to the point where prosperity of innovation has been reduced to the dull grey grinding of the workaday life. The point of life is, currently, getting a good credit score, and affording good medical insurance to avoid ruining the credit score come the next emergency.
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