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Comment by beat | Hacker News Reader

Why do we need to work?

edit: I am 100% serious about this. It is already economically viable, if society chooses to do it, to simply guarantee food, decent housing, and health care to everyone, whether they work or not. At that point, what we do with our time becomes a choice, more than the choice of "work or go homeless and starve". People could still choose to exchange their time and skills for money, and most would, I think. But the coercion of the current system, and the "safety net" holes in that coercion, would disappear.

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Why should people who work support those who choose not tow work (as opposed to people who cannot work)?

Work is an important value. Whatever economic viability the U.S. has to experiment with weird social ideas, it's because of generations of people who believed in work as a moral imperative.

This is the trap of equating "work" with "make money". Not all work is economically lucrative, even if it may provide real human value. Consider artists, for example. The arts don't pay very well, to the point that lots of people who would like to be full time professionals cannot afford to do so. But it adds tremendously to our social wealth.

>But it adds tremendously to our social wealth.

All art adds to our social wealth?

Like anything else, some art does, lots probably doesn't. And how do we decide what is bringing us value? Which art should be promoted and which is just a scam, a big pile of poop put in a mason jar?

We circle right back to capitalism. Giving the populace a mechanism to vote for what has value and what doesn't. Money. Attention. Time. Esteem. Fame.

Capitalism has a built-in failure mode. As Peter Thiel (not exactly a commie, him) points out, capitalism only functions in its failure mode. The ideal world that all the economists and conservative politicians argue for, where pure competition sets the price, is a race to zero. In ideal capitalism, profit is impossible. Profit only happens where there is friction that prevents the market from working fully.

And that friction is innovation.

Something that adds value. That isn't a commodity. That would be hard to copy.

Innovation's biproduct is profit.

Friction isn't necessarily innovation. When you pay $6 to get popcorn at a movie, it's not because they've created better popcorn. It's because they've created a local monopoly where you have no choice but $6 popcorn or nothing.

Really, the vast majority of profit is from non-innovative friction.

You do have a choice - the choice not to go to an overpriced theater. People vote with their dollars all of the time.

And yet advertising works. If we really believed people have free choice, there would be no uproar about Russian interference in elections, or political advertising on Facebook and Twitter, because it wouldn't sway people's behaviour in any way. Certainly you aren't ordered around in total, but you are a finite amount of brainpower with well known biases and failure modes, and Capitalism is rewarding those who exploit them and condition people's behaviour most effectively.

There is no one group "supporting" another group.

I'd like to see a source for "It is already economically viable...". Maybe at current levels of production, but you can't just assume current levels of output in every sector while removing incentives.

Why do you think incentives are removed? Is "work or starve" the only incentive?

I'm not talking about a beachfront mansion and a Ferrari in the driveway for everyone. I'm talking about not starving. Want to be more than the bare minimum? Then choose to work. Don't care? Then don't work - not that people who don't care are effective employees anyway.

Have you tried purchasing health care before? It's not inexpensive. There's no way we could guarantee food, health care, and housing for everybody with no work requirement. Only a really stupid person would believe this could work.

You're really stupid.

Money is an artificial construct used by humans to facilitate trading their labor amongst each other in order to get what they need to survive.

Arguments about how expensive things are make no sense if we restructure our society where money is only half the equation. The labor required to provide food, health, and housing is incredibly small compared to the overall economy.

People want to be useful, and people want more than just a place to live and food to eat.

The real danger would be in creating a system that stifles the free market side of the economy and leaves people stuck in basic assistance hell with no way of working to improve their lives. Worrying about the costs of providing basic assistance to all is actually the least important bit.

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If everyone stopped working, who would grow the food, build the houses or go to medical school? I do absolutely agree with the concept of a UBI but there has to always be people that work otherwise everything collapses.

Why would everyone stop working? If you were given the choice, would you just sit around and eat M&Ms and watch tv all day? Or would you work anyway?

Consider your examples. Who would grow the food? Farmers. Because people would grow food anyway (and do), whether or not they get paid, because it's intrinsically rewarding. Building houses? Jimmy Carter is rich and 90-odd years old and builds houses. Med school? Maybe people want to be doctors?

The jobs that are at risk in this model are the jobs that have no intrinsic value to the individual other than the paycheck.

Hobbies are intrinsically rewarding. Once you do it enough, it becomes monotonous. I don't think roofing a house or plowing a field is intrinsically rewarding past the fist few times.

Considering most farm workers are unskilled laborers making at or close to minimum wage, why would they work if they could get a UBI that covers all their needs? Farmers would still farm but that's because they own the land and directly benefit from it, they would not be able to perform all of the unskilled labor on their own. This could perhaps be offset if we drastically changed our guest worker program to allow unskilled labor in from other countries but it would have to be setup in a manner that denies these workers a UBI, otherwise they too would not work.

Same issue with building houses. The number of people wanting to perform unskilled labor would not come close to approaching the required need for unskilled laborers. For example I dont think anyone wants to be a roofer in the summer heat, the do it only for the paycheck.

Doctors? You are probably right, people will do it for the love of the work. I am very much pro UBI but there are still a ton of supporting things that need to be worked out.

They will need to raise wages above what UBI offers (which will be subsistence level to begin with, likely lower than the current minimum wage) or else offer other benefits.

If "they do it only for the paycheck" is necessary for important work, how is it different from slavery? How are we not being coerced to do things that are, at the very least, unpleasant, for the majority of our waking hours?

You wind up in a world where freedom vs slavery is a distinction without a difference.

Have you ever fed yourself completely from your own garden? That is very hard, back-breaking, dangerous (if you use machinery) work (albeit definitely rewarding). My grandfather was a dairy farmer and was missing part of a finger, knew more than one person who rolled a tractor, and at least one person who was pulled into a hay bailer.

I’d wager the marginal returns from moving beyond feeding yourself for free to feeding a nation are slim, to none, and very likely negative.

How many hobbyist sewer workers do you know?

How much would I need to pay you in order to be a sewer worker? Today? Would you be willing to do it under any circumstances?

I think maybe they're suggesting that if you choose to work then you could better your life. If you chose not to work, you'd have some fairly modest no-frills lifestyle. There'd still be a strong incentive to work, but less intense pressure to always be employed. I feel like many people are in a situation where they need to have a job so they end up staying in jobs that they consider BS jobs just for that paycheck.

I think it'd be nice to have the option to not work, because then people could take risks and pursue things they otherwise couldn't... I'd never try to take a risk right now because my family is dependent on my passionless job. However if we could take a lifestyle hit (but still survive) and I could try out some business ideas or other career options that I've been thinking about maybe society as a whole could be better off.

I can't say I've thought this through entirely, but it's certainly an idea that intrigues me.

I agree with everything you have said, as well as everything the OP said. I just think we do need to really sit down and figure out the 'basics' of a UBI. I really like the concept of the Yang style $1,000 UBI as a starting point to essentially take the edge off of basic existence.

"I'd never try to take a risk right now because my family is dependent on my passionless job" - hello me.

We need to work because we're barely at the productivity to sustain ourselves given our current obligations.

For instance, in order to fund CalPers, we need a lot of people to do productive work. That's on a multi-decade timer.

Which is odd, given that we produce more stuff than ever before.

We have a couple of problems - a lot of the things we need most (dedicated time from doctors, teachers, etc.) are affected by Baumol's cost disease and in other categories, like housing, we have legally mandated shortages (it's illegal to create enough homes near transit, amenities, and jobs) so we will, by definition, never have enough.

Doctors also have legally mandated shortages, yes. And cost disease is a characteristic of a system not really something you can treat while retaining the other constraints (no homes, guaranteed pension returns, restrictions on number of workers, etc.)

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