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Comment by tenebrisalietum | Hacker News Reader

Protecting work in this manner exists because the prevailing culture is that jobs solve social issues - we can't give the disadvantaged money directly because socialism, but we can pressure companies to make-work jobs because having a job means you deserve to be human, and it also creates situations where people want to protect their jobs for their income rather than any other reason.

A UBI can possibly help prevent this type of silliness.

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Anyone who wants a job, should be able to get one. Personally, I advocate UBW - Universal Basic Work - A guaranteed living-wage job for any American that wants one.

The failure mode of UBW is having make-work jobs with high oversight, no productive output, and no path forward to a different job. I'd recommend this essay [1], which goes into the topic in more detail than I can in a comment.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic...

Soviet Russia did that by making being unemployed illegal.

The Soviet economy tended to have supply side issues - everyone had enough money but getting things to buy was difficult.

I'm not sure how the two are really related and it's a deep and interesting thing to study which I haven't really done. So I don't know all the nuances but that would be an actual example of it.

I have dealt with unemployment in the Great recession and know how nice that would be but the logistics of it are unfortunately very non-trivial, essentially in having everything already broken down to specified commoditized tasks. Annoyingly much of the work is "contextual" and would take far more effort to specify correctly to arbitrary outsiders and that is before work standards and cost of verification. Which would drive down wages of commoditized and halfway "automated" tasks further.

Ironically the best examples that come to mind are Uber and some other start ups which manage to both pay terribly and be hardly viable businesses.

UBW would probably work best in a productive sense in a massive stack of prespecified mini-jobs that could be done without supervision like "mow this section's grass, paint this fence".

> A UBI can possibly help prevent this type of silliness.

I'm not so sure. That's a handwave past social issues, and sounds like a bandaid-for-a-bandaid.

So if we give UBI out, can I suddenly plug my monitor into a socket without violating a union contract?

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