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Comment by Frondo | Hacker News Reader

"Most just piss their life away."

This is totally not snark: how is this different from people without ambition who have a low-end service industry job and no ambition to do more than wash dishes or pump gas?

Why would there be anything more dignified in an old man washing dishes in a restaurant over an old man just drinking his days away? Neither is what I aspire to, but the latter feels more honest to me.

In other words, what I try to wrap my head around is: who cares how someone else wastes their life, if that's ultimately the big-picture goal they choose?

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At what point do you start judging people though? I absolutely do not use 100% of my potential or ambition, and I can be fairly certain most don't.

I piss away countless hours watching Netflix, drinking wine and just being.

But. With a job, or even the desire for a job, even if it's just man-made theatrics, I'm engaging in society. There's an expectation (either knowingly or unknowingly) that you contribute more value than you take when you have a job - whereas if you literally did nothing, you are just extracting value.

Don't misunderstand me, I don't argue we should be optimising solely for "value" (and it becomes tricky with different groups who can't engage with society), but I don't equate "wasting themselves in what they do" with "doing nothing".

Personally though, I do believe in the dream of UBI, for me, I think if I was unshackled by the theatrics of the workforce I'd be more creative.

> Why would there be anything more dignified in an old man washing dishes in a restaurant over an old man just drinking his days away?

I don't know if you've ever seen anyone die of alcoholism, but sadly it's very painful and undignified.

It seems to me that an abstemious old dishwasher would have a much more enjoyable and dignified old age, regardless of any moral judgement about the two.

Most of the old people in my family are dead or dying of alcohol-related things, and I still don't give a shit if people want to do that over working as a dishwasher well into old age. Forced labor isn't dignified because we're calling it capitalism.

To play devil's advocate, people who go to work are very likely to interact with other people, which might help keep our society a little closer together. They might become bitter (since nobody respects low-end service workers), but at least they remember what people are like, and don't turn insane/radical through isolation.

I am not sure if there's data to support this claim, though.

Likewise, people who spend lots of time in bars also interact with people.

Yeah, but they don't remember it the day after.

Good point. I was thinking of drinking alone, because it is usually cheaper, but not necessarily so.

This amusingly would be solved by having more money.

I care because I am made to pay for it. Even with UBI.

Oh. That's a dumb reason. Until this it was sounding like you had an argument against UBI from society's point of view, not just based on your own financial interest.

So it a-ok for me to work more so we can get UBI for them to work less ( pardon me, slave away! ) and will get magically creative?

Dude.

I'm sorry, I thought you were trying to convince people who support UBI.

The context is that people want to redistribute wealth. "But it redistributes my wealth!" is the least compelling possible argument against that.

My wealth is already redistributed by our tax system. It is absurd to claim it is 'the least compelling' if I want to keep my taxes in check.

That is an argument from society's point of view. When people don't work or contribute to the general welfare of society in any way (and they are able to, not talking about people unable to do things,) and they take from the general pool provided by the rest of the social group, they are taking away resources that could be used for other things, things that may further benefit the individuals providing resources for society.

There are arguments to be made about decreasing crime, but most of the most convincing moral imperative arguments are related to religion. The more convincing Keynesian argument is about money going into the economy and driving growth because none of the people dependent on UBI will save anything at all. So from a purely utilitarian point of view, individual financial interest does come into play.

I want people to have an option not to work, because I want an option not to work. Maybe I'd like to use that time to drink myself into a stupor and write a terrible novella and pretend I'm Ernest Hemingway in a house full of alley cats. Maybe I'd like to use that time to consider a startup idea that wouldn't be big enough to pay for everything I need like healthcare and retirement, but would be otherwise an interesting project if it didn't have to meet those financial goals out of the gate in its business plan. Maybe I would like to use that time to teach young kids how to program, not as a trade, but as a means to entertainment.

You want to ascribe morality to those options, but I find the freedom to choose more interesting. It's not my job to judge which is more "productive". Maybe that novella in the end turns out to comment deeply on the human spirit, maybe those kids never use those skills "productively", maybe that startup goes bust and I return to the next plan. The moral imperative is that I should have the freedom to choose outside of the strictures of what the current job market finds productive or what government can legislate to be considered productive.

If that means there are a lot more people following the first idea and drinking themselves to a stupor, then that is a market failure. Surely the labor market can stretch to entice people to such "productive" labor if it actually has to compete for their time and energy? We use a "productive morality" to prop up a market that has never had to truly compete in the entirety of its existence. (Which is to say that labor has never been a free market.)

I find it funny, too, that you bring up religion as providing the most convincing moral imperative arguments for UBI, when in my mind it also religion, the Puritanical Zeal, that so colors the debate against UBI. The Puritans believed that men must work to appease God, that Productivity was an end to itself, a way to measure yourself before God. Why does everyone need to work so? You claim it is "society" that demands productivity and wishes to keep score, but many societies have never kept score, and have no need to keep score. It seems to me that the scars of Puritanical Zeal have simply replaced "God" with an uncaring "society" in a lot of the arguments.

(From a purely utilitarian point of view, the more people with an option not to labor under someone else's mandate, and truly choose their own path in life, presumably the greater the well being of those individuals and the overall more well being across the spectrum of that society. Individual financial self-interest is never utilitarian, you can't maximize others' happiness thinking only of your own.)

Fine and dandy. And I want to have the choice not to pay for it.

You currently already have the option not to work. The problem is that since we are not post-scarcity by any definition, there is a negative impact of your choice on other people. That is the case even with UBI. The question for me is if that negative impact is outweighed by the positive impact of UBI, most of which I think has nothing to do with choosing not to work but instead is about propping up an economy based on labor when we're shifting away from the labor coming from people.

I wasn't ascribing morality to your freedom to choose to be entirely dependent on society, I was saying that the moral argument that people are important and that socially we should care about, feed and clothe the needy is mostly grounded in religion. Your use case, where a person intellectually chooses to be dependent on UBI because they don't really like working very much, is very different from the one I envision: robots take your job and you have nothing and so are forced into dependency.

The problems this will cause a consumer driven economy are fantastic, and the easy way to prop up said economy is to simply give people money to spend - not too much, or they’d save it. Just enough so that they spend everything you give them, sustaining the cycle. That's the convincing Keynesian argument.

> Your use case, where a person intellectually chooses to be dependent on UBI because they don't really like working very much, is very different from the one I envision: robots take your job and you have nothing and so are forced into dependency.

I think that happened already 20 years ago, though not just robots but also centaurs (in the chess sense of people using computers/working in tandem with machines) have taken most of the jobs, even accounting for globalization.

I think the reason we aren't talking about it, in that way, is that it's still too easy to sweep the problems under the rug. It's still too easy to blame the people that are out of work rather than the labor market that doesn't need people.

A society is people. People being dependent on their society is somewhere between an oxymoron and baseline assumption. Everyone is dependent on the day to day cooperation of their society, in one way or another, even if it is "just" roads, and breathable air, and a political reality in which they can live their day-to-day.

I think we are far too stuck on "someone not working is taking away from me", because we see it as some zero-sum game, but robots and centaurs have changed the equations. The labor market is unfair and neither free nor liquid, and yet we are letting it ascribe morals to people, looking down on people working multiple jobs to make ends meet (because the labor market has no incentive to offer a fair price) or who can't find work because there isn't enough work to go around.

I think it is far past time to stop judging our neighbors by their position in the labor market. For me, a part of that is realizing that a global and broad option to leave the labor market is important, that we should celebrate that as a right. If capitalism needs more hands on deck, it can pay for them. It's time to stop assuming everyone should work, and let the market tell us why we should work (and how much it is willing to pay to let that work get done).

We don't really have an option not to work so long as our basic subsistence is tied to how we spend our labor. But companies don't have to do right by us, because they aren't our societies, they don't need us, they don't depend on us. The basic problem is that we are post-scarcity in the labor market, and companies have a "free lunch" by this "morality" that basic subsidence should be tied to some nominal value of productivity that they decide based on a quarter-to-quarter bottom line.

Why should society continue to give capitalism this free lunch? I think society should invest more directly in its people. I think this zero-sum mentality that to invest in a person who chooses not to work has some "negative impact on other people" hurts us as people, and is a bad excuse for society in general. The fact that there may be some people who decide to spend that investment solely on shortening their life with as much alcohol as they may acquire doesn't mean that a society investing in people has a net negative impact on everyone else.

>A society is people. People being dependent on their society is somewhere between an oxymoron and baseline assumption. Everyone is dependent on the day to day cooperation of their society, in one way or another, even if it is "just" roads, and breathable air, and a political reality in which they can live their day-to-day.

In some sense, people depend on society to maintain their quality of life and provide for a subset of their needs; people also contribute to society and maintain it in turn. You're talking about cutting out the latter and keeping the former without replacing it with anything to support yourself with, which makes you completely dependent on society to provide everything for you, not just some things.

I didn't and I don't think most people do look down on those that cannot find work because there is no work to be found. Your 'I want to be able to choose not to work despite having the opportunity to work' perspective, though - that I look down on.

By the way, if you decided to work for yourself - to grow your own food, live off the land, and trade your labor specifically for your own sustenance, you could probably do it. That's a choice you continuously make.

>If capitalism needs more hands on deck, it can pay for them. It's time to stop assuming everyone should work, and let the market tell us why we should work (and how much it is willing to pay to let that work get done).

It already does do that. I don't volunteer at my job, I'm paid for my labor. The market tells you why you should work by pricing goods. You should work so that you can afford goods and services that improve your life. If you don't want any of those things, that's fine, but there's an argument to be had about whether my labor should subsidize your lack of it.

>companies don't have to do right by us, because they aren't our societies, they don't need us, they don't depend on us. The basic problem is that we are post-scarcity in the labor market, and companies have a "free lunch" by this "morality" that basic subsidence should be tied to some nominal value of productivity that they decide based on a quarter-to-quarter bottom line.

This is a weird argument to me, because companies absolutely depend on their workers. There are deficiencies in the labor market that cause certain labor to be valued at a higher rate than others; companies routinely hire from their competitors and give their workers raises or better offers. That's the labor market at work. It's not a free lunch.

>I think society should invest more directly in its people.

I agree. I think subsidized education is a pretty good thing, and it has positive impacts on society which is why we continue to do it. 'Investing in people' doesn't mean paying you to do nothing, though; that'd be a pretty terrible investment.

> In some sense, people depend on society to maintain their quality of life and provide for a subset of their needs; people also contribute to society and maintain it in turn. You're talking about cutting out the latter and keeping the former without replacing it with anything to support yourself with, which makes you completely dependent on society to provide everything for you, not just some things.

Sorry, no, that's not what I'm talking about.

I am saying that I'd like to see the notion of "contributes to the labor market" entirely disentangled from the notion of "contributes to society". Those are very separate concepts, but today everyone talks about the morality of the first as if it is the morality of the second.

Consider it moral relativism if you will, but I think "contributes to society" is and should be a very low bar. Existing as a law abiding member of a society alone is a contribution.

Child care is extremely undervalued by the labor market, but hugely valuable to society. Child care raises the next generation of that society, after all.

In the case of the "town drunk", making transactions to buy a legal vice is a contribution, keeping the money circulating in that town. That "town drunk" may even contribute directly to the well being of people directly in the way that they brighten people's days.

The lower the bar we set as a society, the greater the safety net, the larger the trampoline. Yes, that's a bit selfish to want, but a large safety net, a giant trampoline lets you take huge risks in the labor market, lets you take huge risks undervalued by the labor market.

I got laid off in a terrible state once, where to collect the unemployment insurance money to which I contributed, almost all of which came out of my premiums, I was treated as a guilty, negligent individual that needed constant supervision to keep from a life of crime, I was micro-managed in how I could use my money, and my unemployed time. Every form was designed to infantilize me, and possibly also designed to humiliate and judge me and guilt me, for daring to make use of the insurance product for which I had greatly contributed in a time when it was decided it would be nice to "cut overhead this quarter to bring shareholder value up for a buyout". That's not a society I want to live in.

We are post-scarcity in the labor market for all unskilled and easily trainable jobs. We are dangerously close to post-scarcity for a lot of skilled labor. That scares me. I want to selfishly redefine what "contributes to society" means because I fear we need to do that sooner rather than later. We don't all want to be standing in lines in government offices, for the rest of our days, filling out forms demanding us to prove our worth as people. It would be better if we could assume people are worth something as a baseline.

> You want to ascribe morality to those options, but I find the freedom to choose more interesting. It's not my job to judge which is more "productive". Maybe that novella in the end turns out to comment deeply on the human spirit, maybe those kids never use those skills "productively", maybe that startup goes bust and I return to the next plan. The moral imperative is that I should have the freedom to choose outside of the strictures of what the current job market finds productive or what government can legislate to be considered productive.

There is a moral aspect to this whether you like it or not. If you aren't living off your own money and resources, you are living off money and resources that have been taken from others and given to you. Those others might not want to give money they worked for to people who could work but choose not to. What right do you have to force them to give it to you?

I'm able to do some types of work, even though all my attempts so far have been torturous for me and subpar for the employers.

And I'm certainly able to work according to society, in particular the doctors who have found me mentally and physically healthy.

And yet instead of working, I'm taking resources away from others while contributing nothing. I consider this a better ethical outcome than making my life even more intolerable in the name of fairness. I would vote for a feasible basic income in a heartbeat.

I'd also vote for legalising suicide as an arguably more moral alternative to both leeching off of society and living lives not worth living.

Anyone outraged by the prospect of paying for others' laziness has yet to agree with me that forcing people to contribute to society while depriving them of legal access to safe and comfortable means of exiting society is unfair, too.

If you're talking about an opt-in system (like the one described in this article) then the opinion of those who'll be net contributors matters a lot - if they choose not to join, the whole system has no value; for someone to get UBI, someone else has to create and provide this value.

Something I've come to realize: I don't care what greedy people want for society. I think their ideas are seldom any good, because personal greed is sort of the polar opposite of what society is all about, in a fundamental way.

The discussion of society is all about, "how do we work together?" and this guy's just thinking about his pocketbook. Wrong priorities. Figure out what we want everything to look like, and figure out how to pay for it as the last stage. Looking at your wallet now is, to use the parlance of this site, premature optimization.

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