I think a good source of data could be the population of retired people. I'm pretty sure if I could afford to be retired, I could easily keep busy the rest of my life.
Some stay busy napping. Some stay busy zoning on TV/internet. Some stay busy actually creating stuff.
All of them may believe themselves to be "busy"
That's a big part of what I wish I had more time for. My list of things I want to watch is long and growing all the time. If I were retired, I would love to be able to sit down and finally watch The Wire or Sopranos.
[1] http://freakonomics.com/2012/05/17/retirement-kills-a-new-ma...
It's actually true only for men.
I never said all people would suffer early deaths from retirement. For all I know, some people's lives may be prolonged.
some people. Do not generalize.
I would hope that this is not relevant to people who just want to be financially independent at an early age, and never really "retire". Maybe a lot of people just don't know what to do with their time, so they turn to unhealthy activities like drinking and sitting on the couch all day watching TV.
In this case the person doing the work might both derive self-worth and view the basic income as being 'earned' .. and hence value it as much as a traditional salary [ and not 'waste' it ].
I think basic income could fill a lot of little niches where the market economy is not perfectly efficient in allocating money to value - some of these are being explored thru approaches like Patreon and IndieGoGo and freelancer sites.. but maybe Basic Income is an even better way to reach more of these niches ?
You should Google "emotional labor metafilter". A lot of "caring" work has traditionally been done by women and we are expected to do it for free, out of the goodness of our hearts. If we expect to get compensated for it, we are taken to task as harpies, gold digging whores, etc.
I was one of the top three students of my graduating class. I have done many things that enhanced the lives of other people. I have struggled with trying to figure out how to monetize my work. The main thing I need is work that pays adequately and doesn't keep me sick. A lot of people who have benefitted from my volunteer work, public writing, etc. are offended and outraged that I desire financial compensation.
I have been homeless for just over four years. The people who expect me to do nice things for them because I "care" generally do not give a damn about that. Plenty of people have made it abundantly clear that I should shut the fuck up about how poor I am and how hard my life is. They seem to think that telling people I am homeless amounts to trying to panhandle them.
I am pretty pissed off about it because I am not a beggar. I have only ever asked for help in trying to figure out how to turn the work I do that benefits others into an income source for me. The idea that I deserve compensation gets pissed on, often by the very people who seem to think I am after their money as a beggar.
We need to pay for these jobs if we want them done. No one should be expected to live in poverty on an allotment of Basic Income while taking care of others. It is a shitty, shitty expectation.
"Fuck you, pay me" should apply equally to the kinds of work you describe. If society NEEDS this work done and it doesn't pay adequately when handled by the private sector, then create a government service. This is why fire and police are public goods, not private sector services.
If there was a basic income, people who do things that currently aren't paid for, like what you mentioned, could be done and "paid for" by the basic income.
If you like the work, but just want to be paid, that should solve your problem.
If you don't like the work, don't do it. The basic income would mean that jobs that people don't like doing would have to increase what they pay until someone is willing to do it. Nobody would be forced to do work they don't like for a barely or non-livable wage.
Nope. To my mind, Basic Income = permanent slavery for women, with no hope of getting free as the expectation that we should "care" out of the goodness of our hearts will just become more entrenched and more doors will close to us.
If women want male privilege, they need to take the entire deal, including the risks of failure.
“Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.” -- Benjamin Franklin
You were very vague about what this "care" work is. For child care, as in your own children, somebody has to do it. It shouldn't be assumed to be women but it makes no sense for this to be a paid thing.
If you mean something like elder care, for example, and you don't feel it's worth doing it for free, then just don't do it. I don't know why you feel (or you feel anyone else) would be expected to do this work
With a basic income, if you think elder care is important and/or something you want to do, you can afford to do it for free. Because you have a basic income. If you want more than a basic income you have to do something that people want to pay for. But you have the freedom to walk away from any job without fear of homelessness and poverty.
Your worries about permanent slavery seem to have very little to do with basic income. In fact, the main reason for basic income is to free people from the wage slavery we have now. People are stuck in barely livable wages because they don't have the time away from work to get into a better paying career.
Annotated version: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0UUYL6kaNeBTDBRbkJkeUtabEk...
I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class. I am a woman and 50 years old. This is a problem space I have studied for decades because of my own personal frustrations with the fact that people expect a great many things from me, those things improve their lives, and I am not supposed to want compensation for them. I don't know how to make that any more clear to you. I think a Basic Income will make this a more entrenched problem. It will not alleviate it. Men already are nigh impossible to talk to about this, even with measurable negative impacts on women's lives that we can point to.
The fact that you can't see it just makes me feel all the more strongly that your idea that Basic Income "pays" women (for basically being society's slaves) is just going to make things worse.
Unpaid house work isn't going to get worse if women get the (new) option of leaving situations they previously were stuck in.
The problem of unpaid "emotional work" is caused by a sexist society. More social safety net either does nothing to alleviate that problem, or it helps. It makes no sense to argue it makes things worse. Unless you provide even a shred of an argument for how it could make things worse, it sounds like you're just yelling into the void of the internet. Unless by "men are impossible to talk to about this" you really mean "men don't accept my assertions on faith".
Edit: Also, it sounds like possibly you don't know what basic income is. Or you mean something different by it. This[1] sums it up neatly in the first paragraph. I'm not trying to be insulting, it just sounds like you're talking about something different.
It makes it worse by making it less painful for the status quo to continue forward. Currently, women are making a great many hard choices in order to stop the pain of being poor because society does not want to hire them, promote them, etc for "men's work" while expecting us to continue to "care" without compensation. Give women what amounts to permanent welfare and a lot of them will not make the hard choices involved in questioning the status quo and trying to find another answer.
There are plenty of examples of populations given some kind of permanent welfare. They never result in some sort of golden era. They result in people who are overweight, out of shape, demoralized, with no goals or aspirations.
I read a lot of that discussion on meta filter, and it was extremely unconvincing. I empathize with women who marry crappy people who expect them to stay at home and don't want to listen to their problems and want them to send birthday cards to their family. But the whole conversation was about a non issue. Basically like the argument any roommates would have about who has to do the dishes. Or who left the toilet seat up. It was complaining about personal things that they really just need to deal with themselves. And maybe they need help learning to do that, but "emotional work" isn't a thing. It isn't, it shouldn't be compensated, it doesn't exist. These aren't big societal dilemmas. Women aren't perfectly equal now but it is perfectly acceptable in most of the western world for women to get real jobs.
Or maybe it would help to hear an example (any example, you still haven't given one). What is one hard choice a woman might have to make to escape the pain of being poor? The hard choice not to have children? How is that a hard choice and how could it possibly go away in any imaginable future without the reality of biology being worked around with external wombs and robotic child care? And what, please tell me, could that have to do with a basic income?
UBI could serve to further entrench an existing exploitative pattern, which currently exists because some things are "paid" work and other things are not.
Fascinating.
I could foresee lots of people quitting to learn skills for more rewarding jobs. You might see that jobs like a janitor, garbage man, and service reps at abusive companies start commanding higher wages since people don't want to do them.
Now workers have the leverage to decide not to work doing something they hate unless they are paid enough for it.
Creating free education programs for careers in demand would really strengthen this effect and I think would improve society as a whole. People will be rewarded for doing menial or dirty jobs rather than looked down on by society.
Jobs that are currently mostly done by people with no other choice, and hence can pay as little as they want, will have to pay better or be part time or some other benefit if they really need to get done.
And then, if a crappy or mindless job ends up paying $30/hour, people might do it because they want the extra money, not because they need it to survive.
Yes, as a society we don't value that kind of work that traditionally women have done the majority of - child rearing for example. Maybe as a single dad I can now have some empathy or appreciation of that, that I wouldn't have otherwise as a middle class white male.
Looking after my kid and making paintings have probably been the most useful things I've ever done - neither of them paying anything, unlike programming work which does provide an income. I have to wonder what more useful things I could have spent my time doing, rather than some projects which paid ok, but were unlikely to be of much use to anyone.
I can relate to some of your comments - when I see people who want an Uber clone developed, or who think programmers should get 5 bucks an hour because they enjoy their work anyway.. or who dont understand how much skill it takes to draw a plausible figure, who think a one off oil painting should cost 70 bucks. But then these people are using apps that cost 20 million bucks to develop but are free to use, or they can buy a print for 30 bucks and a chinese replica for 150..
There are some economists and even politicians who have been talking about the value of all the work that is done which is not paid for - value and money don't match up, in many cases. I hadnt seen the term 'emotional labor metafilter' but I'd heard of the concept [ as I listen to people like Piketty, Paul Krugman, Elizabeth Warren and lately Bernie Sanders ]
My hope is that a Basic Income might be a way of partly fixing this flaw [where real work is undervalued], rather than entrenching it - if the free market is not efficient enough to pay you for the useful work you are doing, basic income might at least cover the cost of living.
Its not a solution to every ill.. teachers will probably still be paid less than their true worth, stay at home parents will probably still have to sacrifice a lot of income. It wont solve sexism, racism, ageism .. but it might alleviate some of the worst symptoms, some of the current pain ?
Maybe the government service is in fact BI, because it covers so many special cases where individuals can do useful work, that the government wont ever be able to implement an overall program ?
> No one should be expected to live in poverty on an allotment of Basic Income while taking care of others. It is a shitty, shitty expectation.
I agree.. but I assume the Basic Income is more than being poor, that it was high enough to cover living expenses so that you are free to function without stress.
So the question is how much should BI be - equivalent to 15 bucks an hour ? 25 an hour ? Should the minimum wage be set at the same level as BI ? Location dependent on average rent ?
Many years ago, I saw a study that asked people in different countries to define poverty in terms of things like how many meals per day a person ate, what kind of shelter they had, etc. The study concluded that less than 0.5 percent of Americans were poor by the standards of people in India at the time the study was conducted. Meanwhile, Americans routinely conclude that 12% to 14% of us are living below the poverty level.
As a homeless American, I have regular access to electricity via a public library. I have access to public toilets. I have access to cheap goods. My quality of life is likely higher than that of many people in the world who live in countries without consistent supply of electricity and other basic infrastructure that I take for granted. There are countries where women are fairly routinely raped and sometimes murdered while attempting to relieve their bowel or bladder in an open field because there is insufficient infrastructure.
My quality of life is likely higher than that of kings of old, who had no electricity or Internet or antibiotics etc.
Humans are a social animal. If you eliminate physical hunger but cut us off from freedom of choice, social connections and a great many other things that money cannot buy, you do us egregious harm.
We need to invent the 21st century's version of the 40 hour work week. I believe the answer here is currently being called The Gig Economy. We need to make sure the Gig Economy empowers ordinary people to work when they want, as much as they want. We need to make sure "gig" work can create a middle class lifestyle if you do it decently for about 40 hours a week.
This will empower homemakers, single parents, etc to create a comfortable life that works for them without being cut off from Society and the halls of power.
We need to worry about empowering people to readily and easily make the money they need. Giving money to people will never provide the same quality of life as earned income. It is qualitatively different. It will always be qualitatively different. You cannot change that fact.
Hopefully, merely collecting a universal/basic income will not be similarly stigmatized.
And is this a problem? Societally speaking, shame and stigma are great motivators. If we remove them as motivation for work, will society really be better off?
I daresay society's great achievements are not derived from shame and stigma. What real benefit does society derive from meaningless jobs [1]? We've tried shame and stigma. We should see whether society is better off when the thinkers and doers are free to use their time thinking and doing what they feel called to think and do.