When I visited Kigali for 2 weeks in 2022, I observed a labour-capital ladder:

At the bottom, the poorest workers could earn a living by carrying fuel to and fro on foot.

Next, people with bicycles did the same thing faster.

If you saved enough from cycling, you could buy a motorcycle and become a mototaxi driver, providing transport for the city's middle class.

Taxi car drivers were on the next rung with air conditioning, personal space, and higher profits.

At the top, luxury taxi car drivers serviced the elite.

It struck me that the further up the ladder you went, the less work you had to do. Physical effort was minimized first, then mental.^🏛️

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I befriended some civil engineering students from the US while I was there. They were helping a nearby village build a water tank, and I got to accompany them on one of their daytrips. The elder of the village was a wiry man in his 90s. With a walking stick in hand, he could scale the steep hillside of his land with ease. By comparison, the engineering corps' leader in his 70s was struggling, nearly losing his balance at multiple points.

People with cars walk less than those without, even though daily exercise is important for cardiovascular health. Cab drivers have lower rates of Alzheimer's than the general population, but this effect plausibly reduces if you rely exclusively on GPS to navigate.

The implication of this is that the Mercedes drivers and civil engineers of the world have made a Faustian bargain, exchanging their long term physical and mental health for comfort and status.

But it's not quite that simple, because those boys I saw lugging deadwood up Kigali's roads were effectively smoking ~3 cigarettes a day due to air pollution, on top of the malaria exposure risk.^👷 The 90-year-old is a survivorship bias thing (💀), and the engineer is from a generation that didn't obsess over healthspan, who's saved countless lives by hunching over a desk for most of his life to draw up water systems for refugees.^🤓

I don't think anyone at any rung on that ladder is being irrational. The extent to which you're getting exercise "for free" by carrying jerrycans up hills is offset by the conditions in which you do it. But it does point at a certain kind of preference us humans have to be lazy - which needs to be accounted for once your short-term basic needs are met.

Where I land on this is: it's better to have choice than not^🚴, and society should apply a pressure to those choices with pigouvian taxes and civic engineering, such that the healthiest choices are the easiest and cheapest: bike lanes, water fountains, shade trees, nicotine taxes, etc.^💊

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It's plausible that in our lifetimes we will no longer need to think for money, in the way we no longer need to break our backs for agriculture. We've invented gyms as an efficient solution to the physical health component - what will the gyms of the mind be?