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Hmmm... I hate to say it, but spoken like someone who's never been out of work against their will for any length of time.

I realise you're trying to make an argument in defence of the welfare state but you sound like you're suggesting that people should just accept their own obsolescence and be grateful for government handouts. Most people would have a tough time swallowing that and I can't say I'd blame them.

He's saying those people need to find a new socially beneficial purpose, and that having a dole keeps their families from starving while they do so.

It's a fact some jobs will become obsolete over time, and those people should be happy that the dole is there to pay for their retraining rather than letting them starve when their craft becomes obsolete. It sucks for them their trade died, but how is it remotely bad the government helps them stay afloat so they can retrain?

No one is saying they should just linger doing nothing.

You can tell people what they should do until the cows come home. But they may never come around. Worse, if they have greater voting power than you then _you'll_ be the one dragged kicking and screaming into an inhospitable future.

UBI could be great in theory. People _should_ learn how to find purpose in life outside the traditional labor culture. And maybe one day they will. In the meantime we have Donald Trump and Brexit. Neither is the end of the world, but they're strong hints that things can go sideways real quick unless you take political viability seriously.

UBI isn't only great in theory, a number of countries are only a finger's breadth away from having implemented it. I live in Germany.

There's no way for me to not be under health insurance (working without is actually illegal and the state pays it for unemployed people).

If i lose my job the state keeps paying me 70% of my original wage for an amount of time proportional to how long i worked, and after that drops me to a base level i can live on (though possibly i would need to move). The only things i need to do to keep receiving it is to prove i keep applying for jobs by sending them application copies twice a month, and to not reject reasonable job offers the work bureau sends my way. (And yes, people have rejected such and sued and won in court, with no extra cost to them.)

And even beyond that, there's a minimum wage, and even a state income offset program to allow people with extraordinary expenses (caring for sick relatives, etc.) to receive money if their income minus said expenses falls under a certain limit, equivalent to people on long term unemployment aid.

It's implemented in various different programs, and not in one neat bundle, but in terms of real-politik UBI is already here.

Sure, people can still live in poverty even here, but this is not due to a lack of aid, but due to people's own decisions. (Continuing to live in expensive areas, refusing to get aid, etc.)

"Sure, people can still live in poverty even here, but this is not due to a lack of aid, but due to people's own decisions."

really:)? People still make decisions in Germany after all you have described?

A variety of freedoms and rights are enshrined in the german constitution, and still apply even if you're unemployed. ;)

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.h...

Note also that all govt aid (except for paying the rent and health insurance, which is done directly) is in actual money, not vouchers. :)

You're conflating what I said with other social issues and the Democrats failure of messaging (and slide in to racism/sexism).

No one (at least not me) is talking about "find purpose in life outside the traditional labor culture". They should get a job and pay back that tax money!

What I'm talking about is my support for the fundamental tenants of capitalism: creative desteuction and repurposing of capital to more efficient uses. That's going to happen in America and jobs are going to go obsolete. Coal is never coming back.

I just also believe in social welfare for the same reason I put oil in my car: you need lubrication to keep parts from seizing and the whole thing blowing itself apart. Running an ICE without oil is foolish, and so is running an economy without social welfare.

UBI is just a high-grade synthetic that requires less maintenance work to function.

(It actually does more than that, as UBI serves to connect the wealth accumulation at the top with the wealth allocation at the bottom, which I would argue makes the entire system have more bang by easying the flow of wealth through the system and continuing to cycle it, which is the mechanism by which capitalism optimizes. In this sense, it's sort of like sustained fusion: you have to take part of the energy output to sustain the reaction driving the output.)

I tend to agree with everything you said (except the slight against Democrats). The only point of departure for me is that I don't think Americans will give up on the dream of bringing back, e.g., coal jobs--basically, the imagined blue collar work life of 50 years ago. I would expect a simple UBI to only increase resentment. American culture, and especially American political culture, is built around the notion of hard work and independence and the relationship between the two. In the context of American culture, UBI is anathema to that notion.

No amount of finger wagging and intellectual discourse will change that. Heck, we've known for 30 years that with the economic dislocation caused by globalization America (public and private, state and federal) would need to heavily invest in re-education and work training programs. But we failed miserably even though every single economist and business leader, liberal and conservative, substantially agreed on what had to be done. We not only failed miserably, but large swaths of working class Americans literally resented the efforts.

Basically, I am intentionally conflating what you said with other social issues because my point is precisely that they're interdependent. Yes, a UBI is probably necessary to squeeze maximum wealth creation _and_ income equality out of a capitalist system. But because UBI is not tenable we'll have to settle for lesser options. That's called compromise.

I upvoted for the detailed reply, but I disagree with one of your premises: I think Americans are willing to give up specific jobs like coal, they're just not willing to shift in to entirely service and "whitecollar" based jobs. The struggle comes from poor communication about why.

That vision is a failure of a dream pushed primarily from urban centers, simply trying to replicate themselves in more of the country rather than take a more holistic view of the economy and regional needs. I personally don't agree with it, and think that "bluecollar" work is vital to economies.

What troubles me is that proponents of UBI (such as yourself) conflate UBI with the end of "bluecollar" work, when the two aren't related.

You're arguing, in essence, that UBI need to be part of a whole package of social change, or not happen at all.

I agree we need to compromise: detach the notion of UBI from the death of "bluecollar" work! UBI is an enabler of the "bluecollar" work those people want -- not its enemy!

Why are you surprised people reject UBI when you tacitly assume it destroys rather than enables their goals?

That's the root of my frustration with you conflating the issues: you're projecting the failure of the messaging with some kind of fundamentalist intransigence, then throwing your hands up and going "well screw the whole thing!"

I haven't been out of work against my will, but I have been without pay against my will, so I can relate.

Still, the point of welfare is to let people survive and retrain if that's what needed to find a new job. Job obsolescence is only going to be a fact of life now, and I can't see fighting it as something good. Jobs are means to an end.

I believe society will need to redefine its attitude towards jobs; UBI is meant to let people survive that process.

Still, regardless of my arguments, facts on the ground are that it really sucks to find oneself obsolete and unemployable. I understand that. But I believe that trying to prevent it by inventing more bullshit jobs is a solution worse than the problem itself.

> I haven't been out of work against my will, but I have been without pay against my will, so I can relate.

No you can't. The whole discussion here is around the impact of _not working_ on one's self-esteem, not the impact of not being paid. Unless you've spent considerable time with nothing productive to do, you really can't relate. You may have an image in your head that with all that spare time you'll complete your side projects or do that DIY project you've been putting off, but the reality is that you stay productive for a few weeks to a month and then sink into a rut.

Are you talking from your own experience here, I can't see the sort of person who can take initiative to complete a programming project or start a business being able to come to a position where they can't find something productive to do?

Really? I know lots of people who start but don't finish side projects. I also know a few people who've been jobless for longer periods and many of them start to lose their drive and initiative. The longest I've been out of work was 6 weeks between contracts and by week 4 I was starting to get into a rut.

While I agree that having productive work is good for one's self esteem, I'm not sure you can say the same about explicitly unproductive work.

Imagine a job where people were paid to fold letters and put them into envelopes.

If there was no affordable, reliable automation that would be productive work, good for self-esteem. But if the company had automated all the real mailings, and out of charity the boss kept humans folding blank pages that were tossed in the trash? I doubt that job would be as good for the self esteem.

Yeah I think one of the important things is that the work is genuinely necessary.

I guess the thing I don't understand is, if we gave e.g. coal miners UBI, wouldn't that enable them to continue mining coal for fun? We could just get rid of the using it for energy part.

the self-esteem value in work isn't necessarily just in the doing. It's knowing you're providing a service to society (and more importantly, your family and local community), that you're working as part of a team who support each other, the social aspects of shared experiences and probably many other reasons I can't think of right now. I can't imagine mining coal to be independently fun in the way that programming or design can be.

You can provide a service to society without traditional work paid for by a company - many do. And UBI would not prevent people from seeking out traditional work.

Lol, I think an important part of the coal issue is that those who were employed as miners were comparatively very well paid, like around twice a teacher's salary (anecdotally: dad was teacher, football coach was miner). Those that could get jobs were often taking a hefty pay cut too, and a cut in social status.

Mining had a romantic "powerful men working against nature, and amidst untold dangers, to 'keep the lights on' for every home and industry" ethos that cleaning dishes in a pub kitchen doesn't.

Having UBI should mean people have some money to live on but we can't then be complacent with our resources and waste them mining for a hobby. We need to redirect people to find esteem in useful work (building community, reducing waste, generating value).

> We need to redirect people to find esteem in useful work (building community, reducing waste, generating value).

I think this is the most important revelation. While I'm a proponent of the UBI as well, I think this is the harder part which we need to find a good solution to; it seems likely that if you give free money to all the opiod addicts, its only going to make their problems worse (making a really huge generalization here; not suggesting all unemployed people are addicts).

That would be UBI plus increased healthcare costs for lung diseases.

> it's probably the single most common argument people bring up against UBI.

I disagree with this statement. The most common argument I see is that it's prohibitively expensive (e.g. we would have to triple our GDP while simultaneously dealing with the fact that we would lose a significant chunk of the labor force).

> endless invention of utterly nonsense jobs (dig a hole, fill it up, dig a hole, fill it up...)

You are going to need a citation for this being the obvious outcome. Every advancement that has wiped out massive amounts of industries has just resulted in an increase in expectations for quality of life for members of society and subsequently demand for new things creating more jobs.

Heavy machinery wiped out a massive chunk of the labor force a long time ago, yet they moved onto to other jobs providing products/services built on top of the new wealth created by the machinery.

If everyone took your view of replacement jobs being pointless, we would have never advanced once we reached the point of having the technology required to feed people consistently.

> I disagree with this statement. The most common argument I see is that it's prohibitively expensive

My impression is that costs are second most common argument against; usually, people point out that a decent UBI could probably be covered solely from dropping all other forms of welfare and simplification of bureaucracy that follows.

> You are going to need a citation for this being the obvious outcome. Every advancement that has wiped out massive amounts of industries has just resulted in an increase in expectations for quality of life for members of society and subsequently demand for new things creating more jobs.

Start with CGP Grey's "Humans Need Not Apply", then continue to every single topic about automation on HN in the past few years. It's a pretty well-discussed issue.

> If everyone took your view of replacement jobs being pointless, we would have never advanced once we reached the point of having the technology required to feed people consistently.

Being a replacement job doesn't make it pointless; being pointless makes it pointless.

My argument is that the market is entirely able to provide pointless jobs - especially in aggregate, where one person's job cancels out results of another. As an example, one could point to a big part of advertising industry. The problem with such jobs is that they're zero-sum games, capable of wasting ever-increasing amounts of resources.

As for stopping advancement - fortunately, sustenance is not the only motivation leading to progress, so I think we totally should stop forcing people to work once we can reliably feed and shelter them.

I don't know about in the US, but in the UK when the Green party attempted to propose UBI they were ridiculed because it would be so expensive. Apparently even the average person can see there are orders of magnitude between the cost of bureaucracy and the cost of UBI.

This argument is nonsense because the costs of not having UBI are much higher.

They include lost economic opportunity, crime, lost productivity, extra healthcare spending, and others.

Unfortunately they're second order costs, so they're invisible to people who take a simple moral view of unemployment and can't think beyond that to a place where they can make realistic predictions of economic cause and effect.

It's true that a lot of people will waste their time on UBI.

So what? A lot of people are wasting their time now.

The difference is that UBI vastly lowers the risks and costs of starting new businesses, pursuing original research, and doing creative work of all kinds.

Even if only a small percentage of the population is interested in those things, you're still going to get an economic explosion. At the very least there will be plenty of new jobs, and it's not impossible there will be whole new classes of jobs that aren't available now.

Combine UBI with some gentle nudges towards self-education through free or low cost online resources and you have the potential for a new post-industrial revolution.

>usually, people point out that a decent UBI could probably be covered solely from dropping all other forms of welfare and simplification of bureaucracy that follows.

Not even close, not even the right order of magnitude. Current welfare only applies to a tiny percent of the population (low income), and it's not even the UBI amount. Once you give it to everyone (you know... "universal"), the costs absolutely explode.

I think everyone agrees that when UBI is introduced the minimum wage should be removed. Hopefully this will allow everyone to do a job that produces a little bit of value to the world.

> I think everyone agrees that when UBI is introduced the minimum wage should be removed.

Everyone does not agree! Dropping minimum wages would mean UBI becomes a wage subsidy for employers.

Do you really think people are stupid enough to work menial jobs for little money when they can sustain themselves on an alternate source of income? Employers would have to increase their wages/benefits to a point where people would want to work.

This has already happened with the UBI tryout in Finland. You'll get a basic income but will want to improve on that. Employers have suggested lower salaries for persons they know are participating for, you know, "since you have this additional income anyway".

At least in this one case the employee didn't accept the lower offer, thankfully.

I guess you can look at it that way. But the point is that we want to produce employment. So yeah, subsidise away.

I think this is one of the most interesting areas for debate. Presumably if UBI was high enough employers would have to set wages high enough to get people to do them. If all of my basic costs were met, I could motivate myself to work 40 hours cleaning offices to pay for a holiday, but I'm not sure I would do it if all I could buy was a couple of beers.

I'm not sure about this one, but maybe cutting minimum wage is how you sell it to business?

But might you not work just for the satisfaction of producing something of value to the world?