What are you talking about. People on HN say that all the time; it's one of the core premises underlying the feeling that UBI will eventually be necessary? Indeed, that seems to be the prevailing view even though it flies in the face of the evidence that gains from automation are far away from replacing human workers.
Maybe I'm missing something but I feel like that's what most of us are doing now anyway.
Apart from so-called "bullshit jobs" that are spreading in the richest countries, how much work is mostly unnecessary, easy to avoid or to automate away?
With "unnecessary" I mean that don't add much to the human experience.
My mom is an example. She works a highly menial and thankless job at a rural county courthouse in the Midwest, where she is paid an extremely small salary, given very few benefits, very little vacation time, and has no prospect for retirement, regular raises, career growth, etc. The courthouse could operate with probably 25% of the current staff, but they keep headcount artificially high because state funding and other programs depend on how many employees they have.
Largely, my mom is paid money to endure slight sexual harassment from small town attorneys and judges, and to do a tiny workload of clerical work. And the amount of money is barely enough for basic living in her area, even after accounting for the lower cost of living there.
It seems bang obvious that her employment is inefficient. The same exact thing happens for thousands of people in her area, whether in government, school jobs, private companies. There's just a ton of excessively meaningless work that companies or employers have ulterior reasons to sponsor with a paycheck even fully knowing that the labor itself is not productive or necessary at all.
I think if my mom knew she had a reasonable guaranteed basic income, she would volunteer her time at the local hospital, deliver meals to sick people, do more productive labor around her own home or through child care provided to my siblings and their children, perhaps create craft works to sell online, etc.
The net result could easily be that her overall labor productivity in the big picture sense would go way, way up after she is free to quit the essentially pure loss menial job and focus on things where she knows she can add actual, obvious value for people.
Unfortunately, I think most developed nations suffer this problem. Lots of jobs exist because of weird misaligned incentives on the part of the employer, who could truly not care less about the actual labor productivity of a bunch of employees and has them on the payroll for totally separate reasons.
But I know from hard experience that a lot of people wouldn't. My ex lost her job at some point and was looking for a year for a new one. She became terribly depressed, just staying in bed and crying all day. I'd talk her out of it, she'd be OK for a while, and then get depressed again because she felt "useless" and "like a loser".
I encouraged her, again and again, to go out and get a basic job even if it was menial, like waiting tables, or to volunteer for something, or to learn new skills, so at least she'd have something to do. But she refused to even look for jobs that weren't fancy middle class office jobs, volunteering was out of the question and her attempts at learning new skills were half-hearted at best.
Jobs aren't just a source of money. They're a source of validation, every day. Take away the job and people don't magically become perfect citizens who spend all their time doing generic good. They can become lethargic and depressed. As, in fact, the article articulates w.r.t. the French system.
Long term unemployment creates a type of inaction/depression for some people (this happened to me, and it sounds exactly like what happened to your ex partner). Because so much of my identity was bound up in what job I had, what career goals, how much money, etc., it made the feeling of being unemployed severely distressing. I really wanted to do things like volunteering, or even basic self-care like exercising, but I could not due to the distress of unemployment and the feeling like I absolutely had to find an "acceptably good" job (for social status) and neurotically do nothing but dedicate all my efforts towards that.
If the status of having a basic income is a positive thing, like framing it as an opportunity to pitch in with civic duty and give back, I think it would satisfy the status and "sense of accomplishment" requirements for a lot of people.
But either way, the extremely distressing feeling of long-term unemployment is really not comparable. I would say, for example, that what you observed from your ex partner does not give you any capability of predicting what your ex partner would have done with basic income during that unemployment period. The situations are just too drastically different.
Typical optimistic UBI visions would see a person like that stop looking for a job so hard and start some form of UBI-enabled self employment as the closest simulacrum of that fancy middle class job (that may turn into a full replacement or not, but even just keeping the business net positive could already feel like a small success). Easy to say from a distance, but surely more of an incremental path than job hunting could ever be.
If everybody had a reasonable guaranteed basic income those people would be able to pay her for her services, so it wouldn't need to be voluntary.
We -- you, myself, anybody reading this -- aren't just "creating capital," we are fulfilling our life's ambitions. It just so happens that the free market is the best environment to explore and drive towards something better than what 90% of the other comments are complaining about (reductio ad absurdum lives of complacency.)
Creating capital isn't the end to a means, it is a means to an end.
To your example, a life of complacency is fine. (Edit: I guess you were commenting about someone else, but I still wanted to make the point.)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/04/facebook-...
I'm fond of Zizek's remark that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. It seems apposite, here.
Can you provide a source for that? Only because I'm reading some Zizek books right now :)
I agree with you, at the same time I believe that this is a failure of the educational system. The current educational system is fucked up. One of the main problems is that it creates "good students" as opposed to people who grow up to contribute to society.
I hated this about high school and university. You are forced to regurgitate what someone said as opposed to developing your own opinions.
Someone still has to do the jobs. The sanitation workers, the McDonalds employees, the truck drivers, the waiters, the cooks -- they all have a role in society and are economically worthwhile -- it's just that nobody has had a raise since the 90's and income inequality is the highest it has ever been in history while the cost of essential needs for humans continues to rise. When's the last time you've seen rents go down?
In my opinion, UBI is a band aid on the problem of late capitalism. Simply guaranteeing health insurance, implementing full employment, would raise the country economically (but not for the poor shareholders!) enormously but our current corrupt system of crony deregulating late capitalism won't allow this at the expense of the middle & lower classes. I keep saying this here: workers really need to see the surplus value they create instead of just their wages; the surplus value goes into the pocket of the shareholder and benefits absolutely nobody.
Those jobs are going away.
Cooking is a sequence of steps, just like programming.
I think GP's argument is that we won't need them too much longer. The jobs you mention don't need to disappear completely for there to be problems; if the demand for that class of fungible unskilled labor drops by 20% (not hard to imagine in the next decade or so), what happens to those tens of millions of people who have no way to provide for themselves and their families?
Curious to know what you mean by "implementing full employment", given we're about as close to that now as anyone has ever been.
In our current system of late capitalism, they probably get told to pull up their boot straps and work more/different jobs with no help at all. You won't hear about it on the news, you won't see it in the paper, you won't see it on TV because there are only 5-6 corporations that own almost all media, but people will be struggling and in poverty no doubt. We've been continuously taking away SNAP benefits, taking away medicaid benefits, adding work requirements, and now HUD wants to raise rent on people receiving federal rent assistance. I have absolutely no faith USA will do anything beneficial for its people anymore, only for the benefit of corporations and now with full Republican control we're probably going to see a Lochner Era 2.0.
>Curious to know what you mean by "implementing full employment", given we're about as close to that now as anyone has ever been.
Wages aren't rising because 4.0% unemployment[1] is still 15 million people unemployed, and not all people out of work are included in the official US unemployment numbers. That's a huge reserve of employment that doesn't allow workers to really have any control in their workplace because they have absolutely no job security, and it doesn't allow them to bargain for higher wages. It turns the tables and gives workers control instead of bosses & corporations, it gives the power to the people who do the work.[2]
Wages are actually falling. This shouldn't happen if unemployment is extremely low.[3]
[1]https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000
[2]http://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf
[3]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/15/for-t...
So, tax capital income at non-preferential rates and use the funds as part of the funding stream for UBI.
Alternatively, mandate labor cooperatives as the exclusive form of business entity granted artificial personality with liability protection, but UBI is probably an easier political sell and less risky.
They and their skillsets must evolve or perish.
This is nothing new, ever since at least the Industrial Revolution.
I view society as "spending" people, rather than "employing" them. We used to spend a huge chunk (35%?) of our population on agriculture. Then we industrialized agriculture, and now we spend something like 2% of our population on it. The rest could go make that farm equipment, and washing machines, and thousands of other things. Society as a whole became better off.
As a society, we need to find useful things for these people to do. Maybe we'll have to train them. But just leaving them where they can't do anything useful is a huge waste. We're leaving an enormous amount of progress on the table here.
Those are the difficult questions that are most deftly answered by the Dead Hand when we grant each "35-percenter" the responsibility for their own retraining; they either retrain ("evolve"); figure out how to stay relevant in their old field (also "evolve"); or fail, and in doing so, demonstrate that they were unwilling to be "spent" in any way that society was willing to spend them ("perish").
Which is to say, I do not quite understand how you are disagreeing with me.
Write a nice letter to the Gates Foundation? Steal from the productive and call it "taxation"?
How do we decide? The process wasn't specified. (How does society as a whole make decisions? These kind of decisions it makes through the political process.) The point wasn't the mechanics of the decision-making process. The point was that we should view these people as an under-utilized asset rather than a liability, and figure out how to use them for the progress of our society.
> Steal from the productive and call it "taxation"?
You want to let people starve (judging by your posts in this thread) rather than pay taxes, which you regard as theft? You need to replace your moral compass; it's a bit defective...
Do you feel the same way about taxes to pay for, say, highways and airports? Or do you give those a pass because it's infrastructure, from which you benefit?
If we can get these people able to contribute to society, we'll benefit, in at least two ways. One is that they'll pay more taxes, which could lower yours. Second, they'll do things that are useful, and some of it we'll personally use.
I don't give them a pass. Not by a long shot.
Right now I'm only benefiting from one particular nearby highway, and even then only a few miles of its vast length. Of the two nearest airports (both of which are at least an hour's drive away), I have never used one, have not used the other in at least a year, and have no intention of using either for at least a couple decades; yet I am still forced to pay for them, beyond the length of any "professional's retainer" term that I might have voluntarily chosen. (I correctly predicted which airport usage would be my last, several years prior to it.)
But of course there are others who feel differently - they'd like to have a different stretch of that highway, a different highway, an airport with nonstop roundtrips to Podunk, Alabama, you name it. And I do not wish to quarrel with them.
In a properly-functioning free market, when there is a selection of alternative goods available and different people have different preferences, the result is that the people who prefer one good purchase it, and the people who prefer another good purchase it instead of the previous. Both goods end up being sold to the people who prefer them.
The anomalous situation in any of certain markets (e.g. infrastructure of a given kind; security; morals; laws) wherein people must coercively prohibit the sale of all goods except one, the one to be chosen by all manner of unpleasant quarrels - be they the heated vitriol before an election, or the cold hard bullying might of dynasties and coups d'etat ... it only results when there is a localized monopoly on the use of unprovoked force - also known as a government.
In places where there is not only a monopoly on the use of unprovoked force, but where the same entity also monopolizes everything else, there is another collection of people who eloquently state why that was a bad idea.
If you're wondering what is the difference between an area with all markets free; and an area whose governments merely don't call themselves as such, and tend to compete via (expensive) violence instead of advertising - then this tome should provide a much more eloquent description (albeit as theoretical as ever) than I could ever hope to achieve: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf
The government monopoly on violence has problems (much worse when the government goes off the rails), but in the absence of that monopoly, anyone who wants to do violence can. As that strategy turns out to work against those who would prefer not to do violence, more people turn to violence either for gain or for defense against the violence of others.
You only really consider what you personally, directly use, but seem to be ignoring all of your indirect use.
Those other miles of highway are used by the transportation to deliver goods to your town. That benefits you. Those airports are also used in such a manner.
There's also the twice removed use. In order for your community to function, you need a certain population density. Providing service to just you is cost prohibitive for any utility. The last mile is a bitch when it's really the last 100 miles. So, all of those other people in the nearby towns also need to be able to subsist in the area. In order to provide you with service, in order to make it cost effective to run shops, etc.
The way I've begun to see it, the government is like a buffet or club and taxes are what we pay for access.
Sure, you may not like crab legs, but some portion of what you paid is going to those crab legs. Or maybe you use the pool at the club every day, but Joe can't swim so he never uses it. But the same percentage of your dues go to paying for it. It all comes down to the fact that in order to make the things you want accessible and affordable, you will have to kind of pay for things you don't want.
Taxes are the dues you pay to be in the club that is the U.S.A. (or whatever country you're in, but it rhymes with U.S.A.).
Everything would have to use those separate streets. All of the customers couldn't use the "competing" store's highway. The two distribution centers have to use only the highways "owned" by the respective store. It gets to the point of the absurd. There must be some property shared by the two stores and the community surrounding them.
They couldn't sell the same products because there would be no way to isolate all of that. At some point, there will be a convergence.
If you want to pay the "true" price of your goods, you can't use anything that uses a common good for any part of the supply chain. Which is basically everything.
And you aren't really subsidizing anything. You are getting a deep discount by virtue of leveraging economies of scale. This is a case where cooperation makes things better for all involved. It's not a zero-sum game. Sometimes trying to be cheap costs you more.
Personally, I suspect that one day, unlikely within our lifetime, ethics will evolve to the point where it becomes acceptable to pay people for getting sterilized. This could turn into the biggest boost to average education since mandatory schooling.
If a given person is smart enough, they will see that their strategy isn't working, sell their tools and use their remaining resources to learn something new. Not-so-smart types will try out crime; that's what police, courts and prisons are for. Even-less-smart types will indeed starve.
Thing is, anyone who reaches this point is clearly incapable or unwilling to perform any valuable task.
(Or in the meta-sense, to learn how they can perform a valuable task... w.l.o.g.)
At which point the obvious question arises: what is gained by doing anything more than getting such people out of society's way as efficiently as possible?
Or: why are you loading your question in exactly the wrong direction? The obvious answer is "whatever method is most efficient". Perhaps whoever runs an arena can collect enough admissions fees to offset cleanup, land, and other expenses. But it's all - as are so many things - a question of facts-we-don't-have.
> Personally, I suspect that one day, unlikely within our lifetime, ethics will evolve to the point where it becomes acceptable to pay people for getting sterilized. This could turn into the biggest boost to average education since mandatory schooling.
I already hold these beliefs; I merely lack the resources to do this and everything that is more important. (Which is quite significant, really; "improve society-at-large, effective after I am dead" is about as far down the priority list as I can think of.)
Provided that the exchange is voluntary, mind you - if this scheme were to be conducted via government then dystopia could easily follow suit.
But in the absence of such a downfall, this is the only form of "danegild" that I think is really feasible.