this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
284 points (99.7% liked)
196
16563 readers
1595 users here now
Be sure to follow the rule before you head out.
Rule: You must post before you leave.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Right limited time and resources. You get more time and resources by earning more, quicker. You typically do that by becoming more skilled. You do THAT by... Specializing in one sphere of activity.
You absolutely can do whatever you want in a capitalist society, but let's not pretend there's no incentive to stick in one lane and specialize.
That's just kind of how labor intrinsically works though. It's not a capitalist thing.
No, it's how specialization works. True, as you do one thing more, you get better at it. This inherently disincentivizes jumping around and learning multiple skills, if we tie that to earning ability within capitalism. This does not have to be how we assign value, or earning, however. We could do any number of things differently, to incentivize different things.
One radical idea just off the top of my head would be pegging earning to age. Specialists get to specialize if they love a particular thing, and it won't hurt their earnings. Jack of all trades still finds earnings more aligned to their actual worth to society - flexibility. Right now, being an okay person at everything is pretty crappily rewarded, because you only earn more by doing something REALLY well.
Again, this is just off the top of my head. I don't think it's necessarily the way to reorganize earnings in our society. It's just an example of how labor doesn't necessarily intrinsically have to lead to specialization earning more.
But society already values flexibility as well. As a basic example, I was hired in my current job in large part because I have a relatively broad range of skills within my field, rather than being hyper-specialized in one particular thing. Sure, in an abstract world where replacing employees is frictionless and firms are all megacorps with tens of thousands of employees (or more), tremendous specialization would probably be more commonplace. But in our real world, companies value flexible employees who can respond to changing projects, requirements, conditions, etc., because just firing and hiring a new specialist costs times and money, and many companies (startups especially) can't afford having thousands of specialists in every niche they touch upon.
Further, even specialists have to communicate and collaborate with other specialists, and they need to be able to understand each other well enough to do so. If you wanted to build robotics to pick tomatoes automatically, for instance, it would be ridiculous to hire one tomato farmer and one roboticist who know nothing about each other's respective specializations. If neither has any flexibility or breadth of knowledge, it will be very difficult for them to communicate and collaborate to get the project working.