Depends if you need to work or not. Plenty of people don't need to work, they can live off their capital returns indefinitely.
replyFor the upper crust of our society, work is entirely optional. Presumably people therefore continue to work for the process or the reward of the doing.
It’s not ‘of course false’, and, to be honest, I can only assume you have little idea what mathematicians actually do.
replyMost pure mathematicians are no more interested in ‘producing commodities’ than any other academic is. That’s not what the subject is about — at all. The confusion arises because mathematics turns out to be extremely useful (no surprise; it’s quite useful to have a detailed understanding of the basic principles of reality).
Again, this seems to be an alarmingly common fallacy here on HN. As a commenter above observed, pure mathematics (and that is what we’re talking about here) is in important ways closer to the humanities than it is to other sciences.
I was talking primarily about the majority of people who study mathematics, or anything else, who don't end up full-timers at it. I think we'd live in a better society if there was a serious possibility that everyone who studied math in undergrad could actually go on to be a mathematician if they wanted.
replyNot exactly. The input to produce commodities is labour-power (the potential to perform labour). Education or study is the process of producing the commodity of labour-power, the potential labour of a mathematician who can do some sort of specific work.
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