Time to rethink the meaning of work?
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> I believe in a future where the value of your work is not determined by the size of your paycheck, but by the amount of happiness you spread and the amount of meaning you give.
Yeah I believe in paradise and utopia as well. Unfortunately, for the unforeseeable future, people who create value will be the ones getting paid.
The time has come to stop sidestepping the debate and home in on the real issue: what would our economy look like if we were to radically redefine the meaning of “work”? I firmly believe that a universal basic income is the most effective answer to the dilemma of advancing robotization. Not because robots will take over all the purposeful jobs, but because a basic income would give everybody the chance to do work that is meaningful.
As with most things finding a balance is key.
Take the US, and instead of giving everyone in the country 10,000 USD/year in UBI, take 10,000 USD away: add a new 10,000 USD/year flat tax.
Do you still think all prices will re-stabilize, and everyone will end up _exactly_ the same as before? Or, isn't likely that taking 10,000 away from a poor man will hurt more than taking 10,000 away from a rich man?
So, intuitively, wouldn't giving every person in the US 10,000 USD help the poor more than the rich? Where's the evidence to suggest all of that money would immediately be swallowed up by cost inflation?
Of course, the effect in reality will be a little more complex, and hard to measure, but I'd argue that intuition suggests UBI, by nature, _has_ to help fight inequality, just like free education, free healthcare, nationalized insurance, and any other progressive services that give equal benefits to all citizens. The question isn't if we should try it, but how much should we give.
Until we have unlimited resources, resources will, by definition, be limited, and they’ll be distributed by some form of money/credits/whatever.
If UBI was 40k/yr, and your current job gives you 80k/yr, suddenly you're... still making 80k/yr.
Only 40k of that is from your job and 40k is from just existing. Do you still want do your job with that much of a paycut? No? You're probably not alone there.
Tons of people would rather not do their job for such little money.
Suddenly, it falls on society to create meaningful jobs without coercing people with bankruptcy or starvation.
It only means that the primary basis of the value of work __is man himself, who is its subject__. This leads immediately to a very important conclusion of an ethical nature: however true it may be that man is destined for work and called to it, __in the first place work is "for man" and not man "for work"__.
Through this conclusion one rightly comes to recognize the pre-eminence of the subjective meaning of work over the objective one. Given this way of understanding things, and presupposing that different sorts of work that people do can have greater or lesser objective value, let us try nevertheless to show that __each sort is judged above all by the measure of the dignity of the subject of work, that is to say the person, the individual who carries it out.__
On the other hand: independently of the work that every man does, and presupposing that this work constitutes a purpose—at times a very demanding one—of his activity, this purpose does not possess a definitive meaning in itself. In fact, in the final analysis it is always man who is the purpose of the work, whatever work it is that is done by man—even if the common scale of values rates it as the merest "service", as the most monotonous even the most alienating work.
Laborem exercens, 1982
2. Yes, that's just one of the other good things about it.