The idea that the labor share of income has been historically stable is often taken as a given, but it’s more of a “stylized fact” than an unchanging law. Measuring non-wage compensation, like healthcare and retirement benefits, is notoriously tricky, which makes it hard to get a clear picture. And if capital—like machines and software—ever becomes a perfect substitute for human labor, that historical stability could completely fall apart.
On top of that, even though GDP and worker productivity have risen over the decades, many workers, especially those in low and middle-income jobs, haven’t seen their wages keep up. Since the 80s, a bigger share of the productivity gains has gone to capital owners, executives, and highly skilled workers, leaving others behind and deepening income inequality. Declining union membership, globalization, and shifts in labor markets have further eroded workers’ bargaining power, lowering their share of income—even in industries where technology is designed to work alongside people.
Rationalists seem to like to experiment on themselves, and that's easier to do in a supportive structure of some kind. cf Sangha
If you want to succeed, you need to find the Right Conditions to do so.
Good questions. This was not intended as the Open-Source Guide, but more of an introduction or an outline of what's possible. My own understanding of How to Run a Monastery (Without Religion) is pretty shallow still, so I'm hoping to connect with others that are thinking about these things. I have some other blog posts that I might bring over that get to some specifics, based on personal experience or historical sources, but the Guide is yet-to-be.
"My first impressions on the hardest parts of making a "rationalist monastery": be getting people to voluntarily unplug from all of their input streams, and agreeing on how to run things.
Completely! The coolest... (read 550 more words →)
[I originally wrote most of the strings of text below for the online Art & Monasticism Symposium in 2012 through Transpositions, a collaborative effort of students associated with the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts at the University of St Andrews. What follows has been edited since it was first published, for tone as well as content. I used to write a lot about this topic on my blog (RIP otherhood.org). So I may be porting some old posts to this new version of LW.]
Assertion: Monasticism is a recurring pattern in the world's religions. Looking at the things that different monasticisms have in common can teach us how (and how not) to live in communities... (read 1088 more words →)
Just brainstorming: Some portion of the karma for an edit could be added retroactively by the % of page likes that happened after the edit. This would mean that (part of) karma is not a fixed thing, but sort of like dividends for the investment of time and energy in an edit.
Why can’t this too be a trope: having had the thought “I’m a writer and can write myself; I can write internal scripts for what I do and how I react,” the character believes he has near-perfect agency over how he feels, thinks, and acts, until one day a particular stress test (in an accelerating series of increasingly rigorous stress tests) suggests that he doesn’t.