[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Shortness-Life-Seneca/dp/1941129420/
[2] - https://tripinsurancestore.com/4/on-the-shortness-of-life.pd...
"It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it... Life is long if you know how to use it."
Sure, there is a lot of menial work, but society has been on a trend of automating that away for decades. No matter the field, there are things which can't be automated away and those are also things which someone somewhere is bound to find deeply interesting.
I argue people will be more willing to take menial work with a UBI. Because with UBI people will move from working to survive to working for luxury. Ie the UBI won’t buy them a nicer apartment, but the UBI plus a cruddy but simple job will.
UBI may be a good thing (if we can work out the economics of it), but people will still do the menial and risky jobs out of need, not to end up in the penthouse of a high-rise luxury building unless the pay is damned good.
The economics are sound so long as it’s a simple income. Economists have argued for simple payments to decision makers instead of regulations many times and different contexts.
Then there are sewage workers. I recall on “Dirty Jobs” the divers that have to work on submerged pipes make large amounts of money (six figures iirc).
I advocate for UBI because we really do have enough to feed and house everyone. The UBI isn’t a quota system - merely a per deim to purchase the bare minimum. That won’t place artificial prices on commodities nor force labor. People will still purchase goods and services on a relative, trade-off basis. The current system forces labor.
As for whether people will then decide to not work for burger joints: if a business needs to resort to the business practices I mentioned earlier in order to operate then maybe that business isn’t needed by society. Further, people with a UBI will see the minimal hours scheduled as a bonus - they’re just adding another income stream to their UBI at that point. And yes, the line for cutting off either should not exist or be high enough to be negligible at the trade off point.
There are lots of people that take pride in being grave diggers and morticians. It's also a cool job for anyone with gothic tendencies...
At best, they'd doing SIMILAR work for free -- but not the work itself, with the commercial and organizational constraints it has.
E.g. even if some people love programming and would still program for free, they wouldn't really want to program the features some bozo PMs have decided, and in the timeline they provided, and with meetings and other baggage that comes with it being a job.
So, one might love the field/domain, but loving "the job" itself is far less common (if it exists).
Sure, though I contend we ought to see much further than this. We need infrastructure in place, when the time comes, to allow citizens to collaborate efficiently on large projects as without income and access to capital, loafing around only gets you so far.
Lower-income/no-income citizens in the West rely on welfare, low-income housing as it is but that doesn't dispel the "impoverished" status despite being fed and housed; it mostly stretches beyond homelessness. And by extension ubi won't turn everyone into middle-class citizens. It doesn't address the issues of drug and crime microcultures in the ghetto either.
eta: in support, not against the post I'm replying to.
Many forces add up and keep people in inefficient situations. In China, there’s a sort of majority dictatorship holding people down. In the US, there are local, state, and federal forces at play - from things like living in “the wrong” zip code to outsized rent, poor pay, lack of healthcare, through to national competition for scarce, good career options, racism, sexism, many other-isms, and so on.
>ONCE UPON A time, artists had jobs. And not “advising the Library of Congress on its newest Verdi acquisition” jobs, but job jobs, the kind you hear about in stump speeches. Think of T.S. Eliot, conjuring “The Waste Land” (1922) by night and overseeing foreign accounts at Lloyds Bank during the day, or Wallace Stevens, scribbling lines of poetry on his two-mile walk to work, then handing them over to his secretary to transcribe at the insurance agency where he supervised real estate claims. The avant-garde composer Philip Glass shocked at least one music lover when he materialized, smock-clad and brandishing plumber’s tools, in a home with a malfunctioning appliance. “While working,” Glass recounted to The Guardian in 2001, “I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him that I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.”
from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/22/t-magazine/art/artist-day...
The key point of poor time boundaries, and losing one's time on tempting-but-non-fulfilling pursuits, are strong (and valid as much, or even more, in 2018).
Yet, I was disappointed that after beating around the bush of all pointless activities he tells that philosophy is the only worthwhile activity. (But some coincidence, Seneca's stuff... I expected a bit more of self-distance from a stoic.)
[0] - https://www.amazon.com/Daily-Stoic-Meditations-Wisdom-Persev...