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A coincidental convergence of recent tweets: we are wasting the surplus from technical and economic innovation on mandatory, soul-killing busywork. 1/
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“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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2/ It’s tax season in the US, so everyone in the country is forced to spend a couple days doing administrative work we hate and consider idiotic. IRS official estimate is that for individuals this takes 13 hours on average. Including biz, ~$500 bn/year.
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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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3/ What makes dealing with health insurance, credit card company errors, retirement plan allocation, and taxes so awful?
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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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4/ Mandatory unpaid administrative busywork is mostly new, enabled by innovations in IT. We could use IT to free ourselves from nonsense; instead, collectively, we’ve used it to enslave ourselves.
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Replying to @Meaningness and @literalbanana
I don’t think my parents spent much time on this stuff, and I don’t remember having to do much before ~ the mid-90s either. Cheap mainframe computers have made it possible for govs & cos to impose huge amounts of pointless work on other people
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