What about game theory in that situation, tit-for-tat prisoners dilemma? Why should I produce when almost all of it will get taken as tax to support the folks not working? Am I not better off sucking the UBI tit?
Somewhere out there there are hundreds of thousands of people who could be force-multipliers working as mentors to students. Instead they're working for $20/hour doing rote work that has only marginal or even negative utility.
Alright fine, in the world where we have infinite energy and resources yeah sure everyone can go off and do whatever the hell they want.
Think horses in the 1900s (ubiquitous) vs now (rare pets mostly, may be used for some farm work). The utility as dairy or meat producer gives them life. Are you sure that they’d be better off not living at all?
And what do you suppose those people would be doing that’ll be better off than being a productive member of the society making dark chocolate?
I am sure you meet a ton of people like me every day - even kids. I am surprised you’re coming away with the assumption that they’re are all full of drive to do something worthwhile and are being oppressed by the world into a day to day job: I think the job provides a lot of structure and purpose for many.
If your assertion is we’d be better off leisuring away our lives like wall-E people rather than working towards a productive albeit excess world, I wouldn’t consider it better off.
Tying this back to my first argument, In asking for a life of leisure + no excess, ironically and contradictorily - you are denying chicken et al the life you seem to want for the people :). Just live it out pottering around until death come.
And then you seem to go all in and level the same baseless accusation about everyone(?) on this planet. That is pretty egotistical don't you think? Perhaps you should try for some humility and perspective before you start demanding that everyone should switch to your values and distorted ethics.
The meme that springs to mind is Cartman screaming "RESPECT MAH AUTHORITIE"
you were handed knowledge and opportunity early in your life. you were gifted opportunity to compute and to learn how to program, and probably some priceless mentorship along the way.
from that, with your own hard work and perserverence, standing on the shoulders of giants, you built yourself a nice little career, and now make a good living putting digital cogs together.
based on a limited viewpoint of a 1x1 gameboard square, ignoring the bigger picture, like a child who just learned to put the A block on top of the B block, you cry out, "all by myself! it was all me!"
and, of course, ignoring all the other contributions to the picture, that statement true.
but from the perspective of someone who grew up without any of those opportunities, without someone else to provide the building and the carpet, and the A and B blocks themselves, it would seem privileged and ignorant of others' lack of opportunity.
of course, maybe i'm just projecting? i've certainly been there.
It is not right to characterise that form of making a living as being handed anything. To achieve that is hard work and just as much a form of trade. The voluntary nature of payments for the objects implies they are more valued by others than ordinary trade where payments are mandatory and creators can "coast" with lower quality products.
Arguably the person doing a regular job for pay is being handed more, as almost anyone can work a basic job for pay and gets the fruits of everyone else's labour. It's almost a freebie in modern society: Do some work get vastly more of what you need for a good life given to you while you produce maybe 1% of it yourself.
From this perspective, a job is 99% handout from the collective to you, 1% contribution from you to the collective.
For example caring for people who need caring for (elderly, children, disabled) is essential work that is mostly done for free. This is a lot of work collectively.
In a system that properly values essential work it would be paid, but it isn't paid because those needing care cannot pay for it, and other people and "the system" are not willing to.
But even if "the system" started targeting all forms of care work, there are countless other things which are valuable but unpaid. It seems utterly implausible that we would ever devise a system that pays for all work that is valuable, if only because people disagree about what is valuable and all the power dynamics that result in the emergent properties we see as capitalism, "the economy", etc.
In your idea, increasing the tax threshold does not solve this problem or even begin to address it. So it's not an equivalent result.
UBI does address it, by removing the power dynamics and gate-keeping for basic resources, letting people figure out themselves what is the best use of their time in each individual circumstance. The very concept of "what is valuable" gets a refresh, away from the systematic biases that emerge from centralised rule-making, power-law power structures, and the error of conflating money-value with human value when humans do not have evenly distributed access to money with which to signal what they value.
The fact a very large number of people put so much time into tiring unpaid work (such as caring), often on top of their paid jobs (if they have any time left for paid jobs, some don't and it sucks), shows that the "UBI fear" that everyone people would sit around idling their whole lives is very unlikely.
It's likely some people would still call it "doing nothing", as they do currently, but they would be wrong.
Not some altruism they would start doing in a hypothetical system.
It's already being done in large quantities, often in addition to having to work to survive. My argument is that since people already do a large amount of unpaid work (in addition to a paid job often), they won't stop doing it on UBI.
That you feel the need to put care work in scare quotes says to me that you probably live in something of a filter bubble about this, because when I think about this issue with regard to the people I know or have met over the years, it seems to be obviously a very large number of people.
However, since you asked for statistics, here are some reports:
> https://www.nice.org.uk/news/article/unpaid-carers-need-more...
> Approximately 6.5 million carers in the UK are unpaid with 3 million balancing work with caring responsibilities.
> It’s estimated that unpaid care saves the UK £132 billion a year in care costs but a recent report by Carers UK found that more than two thirds of carers are using their own income and savings to cover the cost of care and two in five say they struggle to make ends meet.
That's 6.5M out of approximately 40M working age population. I can say from experience and familiarity with the field that it's not trivial amounts of time and labour either. If it were paid, it would be a significant second job.
Those figures are pre-Covid. Since the start of the pandemic they have increased:
> https://www.carersweek.org/images/CW%202020%20Research%20Rep...
> There are an estimated 13.6 million unpaid carers in the UK today. Most of these unpaid carers, 9.1 million, were already caring before the coronavirus outbreak. A staggering 4.5 million people have started providing unpaid care since the outbreak. This represents nearly a 50% increase in the number of unpaid carers since the crisis began.
> An estimated 26% of the UK adult population is providing unpaid care to an older, disabled or ill relative or friend – that is equivalent to one in four adults.
The above figures refer only to caring for the ill, disabled and elderly (generally called "carers").
It does not count caring for children which is, of course, also unpaid but valuable work that presumably would continue in a UBI system and is also done by a large number of people.
Based on the above I estimate (very crudely) that the number of people engaged in significant time performing unpaid but valuable labour in the form of care for children, ill, disabled or elderly people is on the order of 30-50% of the adult working-age population in the UK.
I would expect them all to continue doing so under UBI... And the ones who are currently conflicted by insufficient time to do both a paid job and sufficient care work for the perceived needs (there are many people in this tight spot) would, of course, increase the latter form of labour under UBI.
We already live in a version of this world, minus the leisure. An enormous portion of economic activity is redistributive, shifting wealth from one person to another but not creating it.