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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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Big Yud recently posted an interesting thought, The Poverty Equilibrium. The most brutal possible summary is: despite an insane amount of technological progress over the last centuries, some people still toil all day in miserable jobs to provide for some urgent need and it's not clear why this is happening and therefore it's not clear that another 100x increase in utility will make it any different.

For those who can afford to retire but choose to work, work is about social class, about control of one's time, about creating boundaries.

As for those who need to work to live, some jobs are impervious to automation or it's cheaper to hire workers than automate such jobs. Or that work provides more choices and higher standard of living than the alternative of post-scarcity subsistence living. Some peopel want nice thing like trucks and homes instead of living in government-subsidized cube farms.

Another part of the answer is status.
While smartphones may be counted as a necessity, you will be perfectly fine getting a $200 Chinese phone, yet iPhones have a huge demand. Same pattern with many, many other goods.