Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea but I doubt this will be sustainable long-term. There is already a lot of pressure to reduce the social safety net and to have more tax cuts for the "job creators". Why would this be any different with UBI? The people who work full-time jobs will complain about the slackers who do nothing. Maybe once almost everything is automated there is a better chance to do this.

Personally I think it would be better to reduce working hours.

I think many people view UBI as transformative (as you suggest), though they don't always talk about it in those terms. Increasingly, production and services will be automated leaving fewer and fewer jobs for people. In a far off dystopian future, there will be some Ubercorp that does everything, controls all production and services leaving no paid work for people. UBI is simply a means for smoothing out the transition for people to new careers or a world where fewer jobs exist. Obviously, as things become more automated, taxes on these corps will have to increase. There has to be a cash flow cycle, otherwise money will pool at the top among the shareholders of the companies that won the automation race. Thus, as long as there is cash flowing from the bottom to the top (thanks to UBI) it is sustainable. Otherwise, the economy will be broken; it already is for some now.

" Otherwise, the economy will be broken; it already is for some now."

If we introduce UBI it would probably be one of the first times in history that society addresses major changes without war, revolution or other upheaval. My prediction is that inequality will grow, a lot of people will lose their jobs, but nothing will change fundamentally without a major conflict.

We see that already with climate change. There clearly is no will to really address the issues. We'll have sea levels rising, millions of refugees and somehow deal with that. We will not prevent that.

I think you are correct. Typically, there needs to be pain before there is action that is human nature. That pain traditionally has come in the form of epidemics, famine, and war.

A large part of climate change denial is driven by economic forces. The oil and transportation industries have built an economy that relies on fossil fuels. As soon as alternatives are cheaper, there will be a transition. We are seeing that in the energy sector now where solar has gotten cheaper than coal. Power companies are starting to make the transition to wind and solar. IMO, the best thing we can do to solve the climate crisis is to make the economics of non-fossil fuel energy sources impossible to compete with OR close the loop on CO and CO2 emissions (converting atmospheric carbon back into fuel).

You are talking about the tragedy of the commons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Unfortunately, capitalism is one of the primary drivers of this. But it's also correlated to any authoritarian system, as well as deregulated systems that use Social Darwinism.

The heart of the problem is an inability for people to organize and address societal problems in a non-reactionary way by means of central planning. Which means that the solution is inherently leftist politically. We can pretend that there are rightist solutions (the invisible hand of the free market, unfettered capitalism, etc) but there is ample evidence that those don't work in practice and are even accelerating global climate change and the collapse of ecosystems.

War is always about money. If we flatten wealth inequality via UBI, that suggests that the impetus for war may be diminished. So expect backlash from those in power or whose wealth is derived from armed conflict.

You bring up a very good point about the time value of money and how that could be manifested by reducing working hours.

When we say that we want to provide a UBI to all citizens, that could be looked at as an equivalent number of hours. Giving someone making $10/hr a $10,000 UBI would be the equivalent of 1000 hours freed of a 2000 hour work year. It would increase their quality of life by 50%. A $50/hr worker would get a 10% quality of life increase on a $10,000 UBI.

So for example reducing work hours by 1 hour per day on tech workers would be comparable to a $5-10,000 UBI. Which I think is what we're really talking about here. Providing alternative subsistence so that workers can someday get off the workaday world treadmill/rat race and go invent the things that will automate our economy and improve quality of life for everyone, regardless of income. Right now we have a system where some people live extremely comfortably while half the country has no economic stability or quality of life to speak of, and what's worse is, they currently have no hope for improvement no matter how high the gross national product (GNP) grows because politics has been coopted by lobbyists and special interests.

> The people who work full-time jobs will complain about the slackers who do nothing

Shouldn't they?

Not with UBI or it can't work.

If that is the case I would be inclined to think that it cannot work then.

That’s what I am thinking too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com