FreeLunch
Wie machst du das an den Dachschrägen? Sollen die auch gedämmt werden?
I tried not to only focus on economic value in my counter arguments. I just wanted to use monetary value as a proxy for general value for society.
Regarding the transition to research and policy my argument would be that you will have more impact when taking a full time research position instead of retiring from the working world. I would still consider most research positions a part of the working world.
With a competitive society I actually meant that there are groups that will not support early retirees. These groups will dominate society after some time. An example might be China vs US. If many people in the US retire early, the US will not be able to compete and in the long run will stop existing together with all its values.
I did not assume that the output for society only happens through capitalistic endeavours. You are right that it is important to think about what is a contribution to society.
But in my -admittedly fuzzy- definition, and I think this is also the one most people really would apply, is that retired people usually will have less contributions even when considering time with family.
As an example you are saying growing your own produce is an enormous benefit. But in my opinion this is a really small contribution. Farming, even organic, is really cheap and decentralising on the scale of individual households is extremely inefficient and probably not even environmentally friendly due to the increased space and resources used by the inefficiency. It would be better to take a job at a company or NGO trying to improve the sustainability of current farming methods. Your work will impact millions of people and not just a few.
Taking care of your fitness, also won’t have a clear and big benefit for society. You might save the healthcare system some money per year lived, but you also won’t immensely change your fitness level just because you retire early. The money saved here might be optimistically 2000$ per year. 14000$ is the average cost in the US and you need to subtract everything that you can not prevent by your probably small change in fitness (inheritance, age, bad luck). Additionally most benefits here will be by living longer with the same total healthcare cost (with age you will get similar diseases). Therefore the benefit will be mostly reaped by yourself and not the others in society (but you are a part of society so it counts a bit).
Taking care of family might actually convince me :). In a utopian world I would also like everyone to work less and take care of family. But again the question here is how much value does this exactly give to society.
Is it really enough to compensate for the missed work contributions? Does it allow the society to still compete on a global scale so that it will not lose its values over time?
Did you think about if the decentralised applications will have an impact as high as you are currently providing for society? I would be really careful when evaluating if something does have an impact. If your decentralised platform never has any realistic chance to be adopted by mainstream the impact might be really low. Even for lemmy the impact might not be enough, as it might be too complicated for a normal person.
Making video games and helping small business by investing also seem like they have a low benefit for society and are more to be psychologically fulfilling for the early retiree.
Why is it not possible to think outside of the capitalistic system? Do you think we do not have enough data? I guess even observing the capitalistic system can show you that it is not just, by observing that there are unjust aspects in capitalism that an early retiree is abusing.
But I think most people will greatly reduce their output for society. Do you think that on average there will be an increase? I could imagine that some projects might only be realisable by retired and independent people, so that might actually outweigh the decrease. There could be a really fat tailed distribution that makes this good.