That's because most measures of the "health of the economy" give a very strong weight to the number of unemployed people
No. The point remains true if you use a measure that doesn't.
And status is affected by a lot of things beside how hard one works.
Indeed. The non-worker Paris Hilton is much higher status than the average unemployed person,, which would motivate the average unemployed person to take up jobs where they are available.
Indeed. The non-worker Paris Hilton is much higher status than the average unemployed person,, which would motivate the average unemployed person to take up jobs where they are available.
Why? If your point is that they'll be motivated to work so that they can earn enough money to be as rich as Paris Hilton, then my point is precisely that redistributing wealth from those who work to those who don't makes this motivation less effective. If your point is something else, could you spell it out in more detail.
I've seen several people on Less Wrong recommend Mencius Moldbug's writings, and I've been curious about how he became so popular here. He's certainly an interesting thinker, but he's rather obscure and doesn't have any obvious connection to Less Wrong, so I'm wondering where this overlap in readership came from.
[EDIT by E.Y.: The answer is that he's not popular here. The 2012 LW annual survey showed 2.5% (30 of 1195 responses) identified as 'reactionary' or 'Moldbuggian'. To the extent this is greater than population average, it seems sufficiently explained by Moldbug having commented on the early Overcoming Bias econblog before LW forked from it, bringing with some of his own pre-existing audience. I cannot remember running across anyone talking about Moldbug on LW, at all, besides this post, in the last year or so. Since this page has now risen to the first page of Google results for Mencius Moldbug due to LW's high pagerank, and on at least one occasion sloppy / agenda-promoting journalists such as Klint Finley have found it convenient to pretend to an alternate reality (where Moldbug is popular on LW and Hacker News due to speaking out for angry entitled Silicon Valley elites, or something), a correction in the post seems deserved. See also the Anti-Reactionary FAQ by Scott Alexander (aka Yvain, LW's second-highest-karma user). --EY]