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Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

I find the obsession with "jobs" to be one of the most sour elements of the corportocratic dialogue of the political and economic systems.

Many people, including most professional drivers, will be happy not to have to do the chore anymore. They don't want or need jobs, they want and need fulfillment of their wants and needs.

Stood next to the monumental task of actually automating the matter around us to please us (which, if our purpose in doing so is good, is a mitzvah), the creation of a system which fulfills these wants and needs without regard to any connection to a "job" seems straightforward and doable.

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The problem is that our society typically thinks of "jobs" as "contributing to society". Hence, there is a stigma against being unemployed. Furthermore, the more hours you work a week the more "respectable" you typically seem, especially in North America (I believe, in contrast to Europe). We need to realign our thinking to better accommodate the impending reduction in jobs.

This is not true. "more hours" does not make you more respectable. Contributing more value makes you more respectable. In some cases, contributing more value requires more hours. In other cases, this is not the case.

This may be true, but average people often struggle to understand the "more value" that a certain job creates, especially in science and IT. The definition of "more value" is also contested. For example, I would argue that most bureaucracy is creating negative value, even though the people working in these bureaucracies may be very respectable individually.

It almost seems as if the definition of value has changed dramatically. Before it was quantifiable, now it seems to be way more abstract. I blame corpspeak.

We all tend to over value ourselves. That's probably not a bad thing if it has healthy limits. I have seen people convinced they "add value" when I can find no quantifiable way to justify the cost for the "value" they bring.

Work is power.

Having a paid job means you don't have to rely on the goodwill of someone or something else to get fed.

Automation is stripping the masses of the last speck of power they had.

Just give them a basic income guaranteed by law.

That's not unlike building a really comfortable guillotine.

Please, lie down, make yourself at ease...

On the other hand, it may be the most humane way to deal with the fact that the economy has reached peak human.

How did we deal with horses in the beginning of the 20th century?

It's a lot easier to stop horses breeding.

If automation ever gets to the point where a law guaranteed basic income is required, there's no reason that incentivized or mandatory sterilization can't be required as well, especially if made a prerequisite for said basic income.

We shot them, butchered them, and turned them into cat and dog food. That's how the pet food industry got its start.

Good example for your argument, maybe, but I doubt it's going to win you many converts.

Any ideas on how to promote self-actualization and self-improvement in the masses when UBI takes hold? Sounds like a project that must go hand in hand with UBI experiments.

Basically all of Economics and Psychology would say that you don't have to do anything. So long as people have options for those things that they believe will actually improve their situation, they will take them once they are not spending all of their time just trying to stay sane while providing for the basics.

There are many many things people could be doing better with their time than sitting working for someone else for 7.5 hours per day.

You assume because people don't have to do what other people tell them to do to survive (i.e. work for pay), they will do nothing? Sure some will just sit and watch TV, others will build things, study things, make youtube videos, put on shows, travel, and generally do the things that make them and others happy.

UBI, at any level reasonably sustainable with modern or near-future technology and achievable productivity, isn't comfortable, its at best an alleviation of severe poverty (and a mitigation of some of the harms induced by means-tested social benefit programs in pursuit of alleviating severe poverty) for those who can't find a way to make more, as well as boost to those who can but who are still net beneficiaries after considering whatever tax or other mechanism is used to fund the UBI.

Are you talking about a global UBI? That might be true.

A UBI in Europe could mostly just replace current spending at similar levels, and thus would be comfortable enough in eg Germany or Scandinavia.

> A UBI in Europe could mostly just replace current spending at similar levels

While UBI is more administratively efficient than means-tested benefit programs, it also inherently reaches a lot more people with its maximum benefit. I don't think there is any major country (there might be some small ones with a lot of money flowing in from the outside) that could sustainably keep UBI at any comfortable level rather than an alleviating severe poverty level at this time.

Of course, on average you'd need to recover the full UBI from the average (not median) person via taxes.

Some work is power, other work is neigh slavery.

>Having a paid job means you don't have to rely on the goodwill of someone or something else to get fed.

I'm pretty sure relying on your bosses to pay you a livable wage is precisely relying on good-will. If you're not able to strike or walk away, they've got no actual reason to do that.

Companies pay employees out of self-interest, not benevolence.

I don't see a system where some people don't work as doable.

Let's say we institute a UBI and 50% of jobs are eliminated through automation. Everyone has a basic standard of living, but those who still have jobs (who designs the robot?) have a much better standard of living (they would have to or why work?). Now you have a huge amount of income inequality and 50% of the population can't do a dam thing about their situation because there are no jobs.

The only way to fix that is to redistribute so much wealth that the incentive to work is basically eliminated. I think that's been tried before and it failed horribly.

I would see it as you aren't working for anyone but yourself. You working for your own meaning, your own purpose, with your own drive and abilities. You completely own your success or failure. Work would become it's own reward and would be similar to volunteering.

Sounds like the Star Trek universe

Now one must understand why it must be like the movie elysium. Just without a happy end.

The point isn't to eliminate income equality. That's next to impossible in a capitalist society with a relatively free market and wealth ownership.

The point is to raise the level of the bottom to something people can live on safely and with some level of dignity.

And with UBI in particular, it's to shift the impetus of your efforts from basic survival to improving your lifestyle from the lowest common denominator. People make shitty decisions with a gun to their head--with some room to experiment they'll usually be more successful.

Further, they might find other ways to individually create societal value (art, science, invention, philosophy) than just simply making their employer money. The only way you can do that right now is if you're already well-off or if some committee somewhere agrees what you're doing is valuable and subsidizes it. That's not a great way to innovate.

And they might not create value. Some people will sit at the bottom. But that needs to be OK--they do that now anyway while being a distinct drain on a society that wasn't built to accommodate that basic human nature. Nothing is perfect.

Most people work for their own self-validation if you give them a chance, though. Think we've all had that experience during time off where you're eventually compelled to do something productive just so you can know you did something.

I think the parent's point is that if you assume a UBI at just above the poverty line, many people will be automated out of jobs that pay more than that right now. So they'll be forced to a lower standard of living, and because there won't be jobs available for them, they will be stuck there.

So while some people might have their standard of living brought up, many (possible many more than would be brought up) will be forced down with the inability to pull themselves back up because of lack of jobs.

The UBI doesn't cause that, though. Progress causes that. I don't think a strategy of "let's not automate so we have busy work for everyone" really cuts it.

The best people, at least in industries where it fits, will move on to consult on the proper operation of the automation and others will become artisans doing highly crafted versions of what otherwise is mass-automated.

And some might move to other localities where the automation is too expensive to create or support. Automation has a cost relative to the market in which it's created and requires highly skilled people to create and maintain, whereas labor can be paid on a sliding scale based on their local cost of living and usually cost less than automation maintenance. That scales to low budgets better, especially if you don't produce quite so much of something as to hit the break-even point for automation.

UBI, in this context, is a mitigating strategy to keep the rest from becoming welfare recipients while they retrain or retire early. That would be a hell of a lot worse stigma than simply having a lower standing of living.

> 50% of jobs are eliminated through automation.

Automation mostly doesn't "eliminate jobs" (numerically; it certainly might eliminate job categories), it reduces the market clearing price of labor by providing a competing alternative.

Among the features of a mature UBI is replacing the combination of minimum wage and means-tested benefit programs as a means of ensuring that the "fully employed" and the less-fully-employed, respectively, are adequately supported. By displacing minimum wage, it actually reduces the degree to which reducing the market value of labor results in lost jobs.

Now, it doesn't eliminate income or wealth inequality, which is essential to maintain some incentive to engage productively with the economy for those who can, but its not a matter of nobody working, its a matter of mitigating the cost of a narrower class of people having high-value labor while the labor of the masses is increasingly low-value given the alternatives available.

> fulfillment of their wants and needs

But what if these wants and needs include contributing to society but there are not enough opportunities to do so?

While many people do jobs out of necessity, they also get an amount of satisfaction out of doing something with a purpose.

Assuming automation meets greater than 100% of material needs, people could serve society by creating funny GIFs and sharing vacation photos.

That's funny, because creating GIFs is what 9Gag does, and it requires very few humans. Actually admins create most gifs, give them 300 points, and reissue them every 3 months.

Nothing will require any humans at that point. But an economy can still form. Read "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Ki...

Bollocks. They were talking about computers taking our jobs 30 years ago when I was in School. Everyone seems to be working more hours these days rather than less.

> Everyone seems to be working more hours these days rather than less.

At lower real hourly wages. Which is the effect of automation competing with human labor, it doesn't outright destroy jobs, it just reduces the market-clearing price of the forms of labor it is able to compete with.

You could equally argue that it was down to women entering the workforce.

10% will be creating indie games, 80% will be doing "let's plays".

But seriously, if we have too much people to work why not make scientists from all of them?

1. Change education system with the assumption that the default career is experimental science.

2. Change the workflow so that you don't need to be incredibly smart to prove you can be allowed to measure stuff and write the results down.

3. pay all these people to do science instead if of paying them the guaranteed income.

If we have to waste money at least "waste" them on something useful. Imagine the progress we could make if 50% of population worked as scientists. Imagine how different a society would look.

Because the average IQ is, by definition, 100.

Irrelevant. Society made up by Einsteins would have average IQ 100 as well.

The problem would be real if society was mostly people that can't have any positive impact on science, but I don't think it's true, especially if we trained everybody with the listed assumptions.

> Society made up by Einsteins would have average IQ 100 as well.

Irrelevant. Which kind of "positive impact on science" would you expect from somebody with an IQ of 100 in the real world, as opposed to your hypothetical "society made up of Einsteins"?

I would expect them to carefuly do the assigned experiments and record the results. If they can be trusted with mounting cars they can be trusted with reading and writing.

Assign same experiments to 10 different teams all over the world to be sure. Would be actually better than unmotivated incredibly bright people hastily doing these experiments once.

Yes the way we do science would need to change but I think it's for the better. It's not like most of the work post-docs do isn't menial.

I think the words you are looking for are "lab technician".

Lots of people with IQs of 100 do science. Science is really simple. You can explain it in a single sentence. Children do science all the time.

There are (marketing) interns in my company who's work isn't far off doing that.

Tons of people today contribute to society without having a job pay them to do it. It's called volunteering, parenting, caring for sick/elderly family members, organizing community events, running for local elections, etc. etc. etc.

The biggest lie of our job-based corporate society is the belief that, unless you're doing a "job", you're not working.

Right, let's stop talking about jobs. Who's gonna give to today's truck drivers the money to pay the mortgage they have to keep paying for the next 20 years?

I'm not saying we need to "stop talking" about the current economic configuration, including asking the very well-put and timely question in your second sentence.

But the constant drone of "create jobs" at every political debate? The yardsticking of every public policy measure against how many "jobs" it will "create" or "destroy"? A central bank with a mandate not to simply implement fair and simple currency regulations, but to actually manipulate the money supply so as to "create jobs"?

This is not just a discussion; it's an obsession. And I posit that it's as much about a moralistic work ethic (and a bunch of other things) as it is about any sound economic theory.

We need to move on to new ideas about automation, economics, and sustainability.

That may be question of national security i.e. ability to defend against adversary. Let's imagine 30 years from now. World is not yet united and peaceful place. Nation focusing on social nenefits, leisure time, innovation and freedom could be as economically and technically advanced as other nation focusing solely on full employment.

But they will be substantially different when facing difficult realities of war: those benefits as well may be cut and those people should go to factories, computers, fields, whatever occupation current war needs.

How do you explain a whole generation of people that their allowance will not be paid? How do you tell them that their occupation will be unpleasant? How do you train millions of people discipline, relevant skills, command-and-control?

No major nation wants to lose next war, so we are locked in full employment race.

(sorry for bad english)

So you're saying that people should do busywork now, just in case we need to go to the factories to support tomorrow's war? Forgetting the fact that the factories are already automated, and going to war won't un-automate them, war is ever less likely and smaller in scale as global prosperity increases.

Which world do you live in? It seems like we are slowly inching closer and closer to world war 3.

Americans are more and more averse to going to war, which is why the USA is sending drones instead of people now. The situation is similar in Europe. Not so much in the other parts of the world, though.

A reasonable explanation could be proximity: When the war takes place in their own country, people are more likely to pick up guns instead of waiting for drones to be sent.

I'm guessing you're young? Seems like we were a lot closer to WW3 in the 1980s, and it's only been getting less likely since then. The US hasn't had a draft since 1973.

Well, that is how we quickly go to the argument of "Lets replace the complicated social security system with basic livable wage being handed out to ever-one." comoonlz known as universal basic income.

If one looks at it from economic-theory or game-theory perspective it sounds like a solution to many problems, nobody knows yet if that would work in practice though, especially on large scale.

As far as I know, open questions that remain are:

- Will we be able to afford it? Sort of back-of-the-napkin calculations can show, that if we introduced i.e UBI in Germany for everybody (80 mil) on a level of minimum wage (1473 E ?), it would eat their federal budget for Ministry of Health and Social Security and Ministry of Economics and Labour

- What would be the unintended consequences? (i.e on small scale uneployment rose by single digits, but we can't really tell what will happen on country scale)

We could raise taxes much higher with less economic impact, by solely taxing land rents.

(Land prices go up, as other taxes go down, as you can see on the Swiss/German border. Taxing land rents has no economic deadweight loss, since the supply of land is fixed.)

Not entirely true; the disadvantage to land taxes is that they discourage prospecting and finding things like oil. You can ameliorate that in a number of ways, but land taxes aren't entirely without their problems.

That's an interesting point. And yes, it's entirely fixable.

At the most crude, you could separate natural resources from the rest of the land rights, people already do that.

By the way if memory serves right Germany, which doesn't have general land taxes, already doesn't let you own mineral resources below your land by default. Would be interesting to see what effect that regulation already has on people prospecting.

>As far as I know, open questions that remain are:

>- Will we be able to afford it? Sort of back-of-the-napkin calculations can show, that if we introduced i.e UBI in Germany for everybody (80 mil) on a level of minimum wage (1473 E ?), it would eat their federal budget for Ministry of Health and Social Security and Ministry of Economics and Labour

In what way is that an unanswered question?

Every single debate about this has any number of people pointing out that you would adjust taxes so that for most people the UBI + tax increases would be net neutral with perhaps slightly higher marginal taxes at the top.

Every single discussion about UBI also somehow has any number of people pretending this point has never been raised and insisting that the cost of UBI will be UBI_Amount * Population.

This isn't even taking into account the reduction in existing social programs which would presumably be replaced by UBI.

That is the right question to ask. You don't have to stop talking about jobs but whether or not you do, they will be gone. And we have to deal with it. I love these discussions about basic income and 'my tax moneyz' and 'I work for people who don't' (can't should be the word here but people always say don't) and all that other stuff, but give solutions then; how do you solve that given those jobs are gone and the people doing that kind of jobs cannot be 'reschooled' to other jobs (those jobs are gone too)?

It doesn't really matter what you 'think' about things; they'll happen and there is not very much to do about it; we (humanity) have to come up with a way not to let these (most?) people die in the streets while there are no jobs. And of course, once that is accepted, make sure not everyone hangs themselves or others out of boredom. Not saying this will happen next year, but within 100 years for sure.

Some things, like trucks, will happen faster than others and that's why (parts of) this needs to be fixed now instead of when it already happened.

I for one would be happy when this 'stress of needing to have a job' goes away for future generations: I like what I do and i'll do it forever, but the stress to 'have a job' was pushed way too hard by parents, schools, university and society as a whole. And the 'failure' of not having a job too.

Increasingly, "short term" disability is the stopgap for displaced blue collar workers. SSDI is rapidly becoming secret Welfare/the new deal:

http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/disabili...

States love it because it comes out of federal budgets, and feds love it because it's a social security net that doesn't have the pejorative inklings of "welfare."

I find the obsession with "jobs" to be one of the most sour elements of the corportocratic dialogue of the political and economic systems.

Umm -- what these people are "obsessed" with is feeding their families, paying for their mortgages and their children's education, and perchance, scraping together some semblance of a soft landing for when they hit retirement age (approaching for many of them like an... oncoming truck).

If you have (realistic) proposals for how they're going to manage this (forced) transition, by all means please come forth with them. Portmanteau words aren't going to help.

> seems straightforward and doable.

Of course it is. Just like not exploiting people was always straightforward and doable, just like feeding and clothing the poor of the world is doable. Something being doable isn't enough for it to be done, sadly.

While I agree that "chores" are not an end of itself, and think we will always (have to) find things to be creative and skillful about, even if food, shelter and medicine grew on trees, I think everything else staying the same increased automation alone will not lead there. Why would it?

> Let's take robots on assembly lines: If it's used to free up the workforce for more creative work, say, controlling production, making decisions about it, finding creative ways to act and so on, then it's to the good. If it's used as a device to maximize profit and throw people into the trashcan, then it's not good.

-- Noam Chomsky ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kICLG4Zg8s&t=14m49s )

> If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

-- Stephen Hawking ( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama... )

This is essentially what Jacque Fresco had in mind when he designed the Venus Project. Very interesting read. Will it work? I wish it would but not likely in a capitalist system.

https://www.thevenusproject.com/

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