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Specialization is dividing responsibility to multiply productivity.
Too little, and you get bands of self-sufficient foragers living in caves with 30 year lifespans.
Too much, and you get lonely billionaires who can't tie their shoes, cook a meal, or talk to a girl.
We've seen 100+ years of specialization's productivity benefits in North America, but I fear we haven't really dealt with the side effects of atomizing people and limiting their life's work to pressing buttons or staring at screens all day.
Curious to hear whether you think we should have more or less specialization, and under what circumstances specialization is more likely to be good or bad.
I don't have a "more or less?" answer for you, but this is something that's fascinated me since I first read Adam Smith.
Highly specialized tasks so obviously underutilize human abilities. For instance, I'm specialized into analyzing data, which requires precisely zero of my physical ability. But, I'm a lot smarter than I am athletic, so my time is most productively spent on purely thinky stuff.
Maybe in a sufficiently specialized and wealthy economy there would be jobs that require my full set of abilities and pay even more. Tasks have been getting increasingly complex since the assembly line days of people literally doing the same single motion over and over again.
There's also a tie-in with your post about whether we have enough already. Job satisfaction and work-life balance probably deserve more consideration than people give them. Most of us can probably afford to accept less pay and may find more benefit from a more fulfilling job than we get from the extra consumption.
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Maybe one day you'll be able to do data analysis while on a treadmill that mines bitcoin haha
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That's all I want. Is it really too much to ask?
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @kr OP 5h
Good points all around.
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Anything that is too extreme is never good, and right now we are swinging hard towards an extreme of specialization, so in this context, specialization is bad and is adding into the extremities.
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