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Comment by drodgers | Hacker News Reader

The government could achieve full-employment by drafting everyone or paying them to dig ditches then fill them in again, but that would be really wasteful. If there's actually nothing useful for some people to do (they can't find a job that supports them) then we should stop thinking of employment as a requirement for survival.

If the economy can't find full-time roles for some people, then we as a society — though the state — can just give them money to survive (a 'basic income') and let them do whatever they want with their time (including working part time jobs that wouldn't be able to sustain them on their own). It would be a much more productive and enjoyable use of their time than digging ditches :p

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If there's actually nothing useful for some people to do (they can't find a job that supports them) then we should stop thinking of employment as a requirement for survival.

They could fix our crumbling infrastructure, provide child care for working women, in-home care for our elderly, reduce overcrowding by making prisons larger, build community gardens, or a hundred other popular left wing causes.

The claim that we couldn't get productive labor by drafting the unemployed is also the claim that there is nothing else useful that the government could do even if the cost is $0. Do any basic income proponents really believe this?

> They could fix our crumbling infrastructure... reduce overcrowding by making prisons larger

Unskilled people make crappy engineers and construction workers.

> provide child care

These days, child care workers need a lot of paperwork and a bit of training. Not to mention that you kind've have to be good with kids; it's not really a job just anyone can do.

> in-home care for our elderly

And this is in the same bucket. Forcing people into a caring role makes for bad carers.

> build community gardens

This one could work... but then again, how many gardens can you have, and how many folks would they support the work for?

Throw in also that all of these things are not 'free labour'. You still need to manage and train that staff, and you're going to have higher overhead costs because you'll have higher turnover. It's not as simple as just saying "labour = free, so go do something".

> build community gardens

This one could work... but then again, how many gardens can you have

When I hear this, I immediately think of Great Cultural Revolution in China, and Pol Pot in Cambodia. Also there the joys of gardening and agricultural work were supposed to cleanse the bourgeois people.

And while we are there, let's shoot anyone with eyeglasses for trying to be too intellectual.

Unskilled people make crappy engineers and construction workers.

We did this and it worked. I believe some elements of training were provided.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps

But suppose you are right - there are no unemployed people out there capable of fixing our crumbling infrastructure. Suppose we were to just throw money at the problem via ordinary government spending. How would the work actually get done, i.e. who would do it?

Forcing people into a caring role makes for bad carers.

No one is forced into anything. You do work and you get money, same as any other job. In any case, the folks who make bad carers can do other things, e.g. pick up trash in the park or work as janitors in government buildings.

Unbalanced comparisons.

Basic income frees people to do private work. Government projects, to be comparable, would have to pay people for their work, as you know,and also add a premium to cover the time spent.

Basic income and government spending on projects are separate ideas that are only related because they compete for budget.

The point is that if BI people also work, BI and fixing infrastructure are not competing for resources. We can have our cake and eat it too.

> If there's actually nothing useful for some people to do

then those people who cannot be useful will not survive - it's as simple as that. It takes resources to keep someone alive, and that resource must come from somewhere.

I'd live for basic income to be viable, but i highly doubt it's viable, given that it amounts to altruism (from those people who own the means of production/automation). We'd have to have free or near-free energy.

What is the difference though between them being paid for unproductive work for the sake of having a job or being paid a basic income?

but that's the thing... they most likely wont be paid for unproductive work or given a basic income they will simply be let to starve as has ALWAYS been done historically.

This is the key point that always perplexes me in these discussions of automation, the belief that somehow a fully automated society is going to lead to large swaths of the population not doing work and somehow being given basic income and being left to chase 'loftier pursuits' instead of 'wage slavery'...

its not a logical expectation based on past human history...

One could hope that we aspire higher than killing people or allowing people to dies because they have no use to you. It's psychopathic and values people as nothing expect for their use to you, the same way a rapist doesn't give any value to their victims lives, just what they can get from them. Anyone suggesting that unemployed people don't get paid are on the same boat, because they do not value those lives at all, unless it gets them something.

Human history has always been dominated by scarcity. Fully automated production would by definition be a repudiation of all economic theories built upon a foundation of scarcity, so we can't really use them to guide us in devising a solution.

The closest humans have ever come is the indiginous potlach societies of Papua New Guinea where scarcity wasn't an issue and people lived fairly idle lives (and substituted physical scarcity with societal scarcity).

It's like there are extremists on both side of this conversation. :)

To say those people that cannot be useful will not survive is sort of despicable and naive. Someone on the other side made a point about revolts and if we carried this view so far, I guess something like that would happen and make normal economic activity untenable.

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