Comment by hueving | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hueving | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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