Problem Solving Framework - Work in progress

Yargh... I'm tired but I'll post up the work I've done for this so far. So much work to do and so much to fix up and organize and... eurgh.

A Concept of Concepts: Introduction

There's right and left buttons on the bottom corners of the screen.

Why do we live the way we do. A simple economic explanation for why life seems to get harder and harder.

You would think that with first world countries the way they are, where nearly everyone has cars, computers, internet, and countless other excesses that we could at least stop people around the world from dying of hunger and curable diseases. You would think that all the inventions like the tractor, electric tools and computers that have been made over the course of history would be making life easier.  Yet the facts would point contrary to that. 70% of the world lives on less than $10 dollars a day and we have gone from majority of comfortable single income families to struggling two income families.

This paradox stems from two things that by themselves seem reasonable yet together are the cause of needless pain and suffering. The first cause of the problem is that we like things fair. We believe that we have to do something in order to get something. We believe in equal pay for equal work. It means that everyone needs a job in order to live. The second cause is we like getting as much as we can for their effort. In other words we like getting things cheap and free.

Because we like things as cheap as possible, efficiency kills jobs. For example, a tractor can help create food much faster and cheaply than person can. However since people like things as cheap as possible, the owner of a farm will choose to use the tractor instead of hiring people do the work. Consequently people lose jobs. However since people have to work in order to gain something, these people have two options. The first option to change jobs where they can still produce things most cost effectively. When that isn’t an option, they have to work for less. The cost of living however doesn’t suddenly disappear. In order to earn the same amount of money that people has to work more hours. Most people end up taking the first option and this has allowed society to function and grow. However slowly but surely every market will become more and efficient. Without the option to change, everyone will have to work harder and harder. In short, increasing efficiency reduces the value of human work. Because we make money based on the amount of value we can bring, people have to work harder in order to make a living.

(This is obviously a simplification and there are obviously more complexities)

Society has needlessly made people work far harder than is required. If you want a measure of how efficient markets have become, 1 farmer feeds on average 500 people. Imagine that most of society had 50 needs.(food, sewerage, police and fire services, medicine, etc) If we were all working at that sort of efficiency, 9 in 10 people wouldn’t have a job! However if you think hard about it 9 in 10 jobs could be removed. Most retail shops could be replaced by a single shop. If there weren’t multiple companies creating the same product, you could streamline the production… We could make use of the 90% of wasted work and help provide food and services for those who need it. We could reinvest our time into family, friends and hobbies that we have left to gather dust.

The problem is more difficult that just saying that people don’t have to work as hard to earn what they have. If we people don’t have to work as hard, what would they do? How would we choose to distribute good? Why would people work at all? How would we transition? But regardless of these other issues, this is still something to think about and something definitely worth looking deeper into.