“As income rises, people’s time use does not appear to shift toward activities that are associated with improved affect.” We are so dumb
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Replying to @literalbanana
Seems to me that all the time saved by mechanization has been taken up with administrative negative externalities. Everyone spends 20 hours/week dealing with dysfunctional institutions that demand form-filling and phone calls with low-level bureaucratic staff
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Replying to @Meaningness
yeah trying to isolate what things about “administrative negative externalities” precisely make them so joy-killing
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Replying to @literalbanana
I think it’s: (1) they are mostly obviously pointless, (2) they take much longer than they need to, (3) outcomes are unpredictable and out of your control, and (4) they can impose vast arbitrary costs. Everyone is doing taxes now, which is an obvious case.
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Replying to @Meaningness @literalbanana
(I’m STILL working full-time to sort out my mother’s health insurance, health care, taxes, financial accounts, legal messes, … This has taken a full year out of my life so far. Ranty blog post will probably appear eventually)
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Replying to @Meaningness @literalbanana
This is 100% solvable too. Here in Aus you can just get your taxes assessed automatically by the tax dept.
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Interesting question at a national level: where does your system send your smartest people? USA seems to be to be entrepreneurs, and civic service suffers. I’m sure in some countries smart people end up in civic service.
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Replying to @josephgentle @literalbanana
Apparently the US sucks most of the smartest people into zero-sum finance games. The smartest became entrepreneurs in the 80s but that has not been true in decades. Innovation has suffered along with civic service.
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imo this is outdated (as someone who went into finance in '13 and left after ~2 years). Finance is suffocating if you're actually smart, and since the crisis there's been a sustained shift to tech (and for the more confident entrepreneurship)
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That is good to hear!
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