Just as any other job, we make alot of people push different kinds of dynamos or any other device capable of generating energy out of movement, like a stationary bike attached to a battery and instead of per-hour making we pay them as they generate energy? how would this work in our society?
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The amount of energy a human produces per-hour doing this is wayyyyyy lower than the amount of money a human would want as pay for an hour’s work. 1 horsepower is nearly 1kW or 1kWh per hour. Electricity is like $0.15 per kWh so assuming the average human is not a literal workhorse the value of the energy a human could produce per hour is like $0.04
Also, you need to feed people for them to exercise which requires energy and other resources to produce the food and bring it to them… likely more energy would be consumed keeping humans pedaling than they generate by pedaling.
The amount of power a human typically consumes to keep their lights on, electronics running, house heated/cooled etc, is also huge compared to what a human could produce by pedaling a dynamo. So you’d take humans *away* from useful necessary work like producing and transporting food and building houses and other things that pay money… to have them produce *less power than they need to live*, which isn’t worth much economically, so they need to rely on other people to provide them with food and electricity beyond what they can produce themselves, but they also are not making a significant amount of *money* to pay for those things.
If you want to pay people to do something not-very-useful to keep them busy and give them a paycheck, this is a valid form of economic stimulus that has been done in the past. I guess some people might see this as better than handing out checks or lending money at lower rates when the economy needs a boost. But as actual work that helps society function? Not a good idea. If you really wanted to pay people just to keep them busy and make sure they get a paycheck, repairing old roads and bridges and things is the more popular way for governments to “hand out money to workers” while also getting something useful in return.
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