On Sun, 20 Jan 2002, Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
> since much such work is fairly unpleasant, it wil face the same problem as
> any sort of unpleasant work, namely the free rider problem. My examples of
> idle drones were people like me who'd rather be boulevardiers, Malibu
> surfers and the like.
>
I agree with Carl and Kel about this: if we know that unpleasant work needs to be done for our mutual benefit (e.g., hauling garbage), and everybody does a bit of it, it wouldn't be that onerous. The biggest problem with the unpleasant work in our society is not the nastiness but rather the fact that workers spend most of the day producing wealth for others.
Call me utopian, but I think human beings are capable of cooperating in their mutual benefit rather than sneakily taking advantage of each other all the time. The tricky thing is developing social institutions that encourage the "cooperate and take care of each other" mindset and discourage the "free-rider" mindset. I think the market socialism stuff is relevant here.
Miles