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Comment by overton | Hacker News Reader

Authors like this frame the UBI/minimum wage debate as if we just haven't figured out the right policy mix to fix poverty or precarity -- as if it's a problem of ideas. I propose that it's in fact a question of power -- 1) who benefits from people being poor and how much 2) power do they have?

1) Owners of capital, who don't want to see their labour costs escalate and use firing/the poverty gun as a disciplinary tool.

2) Overwhelming power, channeled through vectors such as billions spent in lobbying or campaign contributions or threats to take their capital to friendlier jurisdictions.

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That's a very narrative driven world view. The problem with UBI is that some jobs suck but need to be done, and if you set a guaranteed income for doing nothing the incentive for doing that job suddenly needs to be a lot higher to compete. Saying that it's just the capital owners is ridiculous - consider for eg. elderly care - good luck living in with your demented mother who needs assistance to perform even the basic tasks - you think capital owners are the ones unable to afford elderly care ? And so on and so forth.

So poor people need to exist because otherwise we wouldn't be able to force people to do things we ourselves wouldnt want to do? And if they are not poor they would stop being in awful servitude jobs noone wants? I guess it just sucks to be born poor then, too bad we can't help them

At the end of the day most people don't want to work, but the option to be paid for not working isn't available. We all dislike working to some extent. Otherwise we would do it for free, as a hobby. There are some low paid jobs people choose out of passion or interest.

There are also bottom rung jobs that beginners with no job skills can enter. Think about people with no language skills, don't they deserve a chance to be productive?

Even some of the lowest paid workers take pride in their work. Some of the savoir-esque rhetoric here borders on condescension.

> At the end of the day most people don't want to work [...] We all dislike working to some extent.

Where did you get that from? I really think the opposite is true.

Why not work for free as I suggested above? Why do employers compete for labor by providing incentives?

Do you want to work for free then?

I understand money is used for supporting yourself, but do you honestly work for free after-hours? Everyone has better things to do than work. Travel the world, make businesses, and spend time with family. You'd rather work?

Sir, this is a Wendy's

>Where did you get that from? I really think the opposite is true.

Have you ever worked in a factory, on a farm, etc. on bottom level positions ? Most people would take the money and do nothing without blinking. Hell even a bunch of my college friends would skip years of their life playing games and acquiring 0 life experience if someone gave them this option the only thing that forced them to go out in the world was existential need (as demonstrated by two guys I know who are well off and their parents allowed them to do nothing - one guy has 0 days working experience at 30, he was a top tier COD gamer)

People don't want shitty jobs != people don't want to work

Hint: The difference is within "shity" Hint: Jobs don't have to be shity

Poor is a loose term.

Someone working basic job in a nursing home isn't necessarily poor - in the sense they can afford some standard of living on their income. If you add the option for them to receive 1/2 or even 1/3 of income but have to do nothing - now doing the job they would do previously to avoid poverty would probably take more money to do. And the people who get screwed are the ones who were barely able to afford their services before.

Every job I needed to do in my early life sucked and I would do none of them if someone gave me 1/3 of the income and stay at home with my parents and play video games and code for leasure. I would probably never even take that level of job (factory line work, industrial work, farm work, entry level sales shit). Multiply that by a huge fraction of the population and you seriously destabilise the economy.

Some jobs can be outsourced (like manufacturing) so it's not that big of a deal - but some jobs like for eg. elderly care, etc. are labor intensive and not easily outsourced. And everyone needs them.

Do you see the irony in that the shity jobs that noone wants to do are the ones that pay less? There is another solution to give incentive there, raise the salaries for these shity jobs to attract people. It is very convinient that this shityjob-noincentive argument is being propagated by the same people who will never have to do these jobs or live by limited money.

>argument is being propagated by the same people who will never have to do these jobs or live by limited money

How were you able to determine this from across the Internet?

> How were you able to determine this from across the Internet?

Who told you my source is the internet? :) we all live irl and discuss with people. I never heard a low-paid worker throw this argument. It always comes from people who have better jobs and more stable income

It appears as a variant of the 'check your privilege' argument. Everyone who disagrees with UBI, minimum wage increases is privileged and lacking empathy according to this generalization.

While the actual thread appears to be about incentives.

There are many who have worked entry level jobs who would object to UBI or minimum wage price fixing on purely economic terms.

There are also those who are unable to afford the current cost of living or gain employment due to interventions in the market. It wouldn't be difficult to unfairly characterize interventionists as insensitive to the plight of the poor.

> Everyone who disagrees with UBI, minimum wage increases is privileged and lacking empathy according to this generalization.

First, I didn't make such a generalization and second, even if I did, you would have inverted the logic.

I said argument X comes only from people of category R, who are not affected by a problem.

This doesn't mean all people in R agree with argument X. It means That I've never heard argument X from people outside R

> I never heard a low-paid worker throw this argument. It always comes from people who have better jobs and more stable income

I grew up in dirt poor family of 6 in a post civil war country and my mother is a nurse - I'm very familiar with the realities of these jobs. I just know for a fact that if a nurse would start making 2x her salary a lot of people would suddenly not have access to assisted care. It's a shitty situation - but supply of cheap labor solves the problems of poor people - if you can't see that you're out of touch.

Rich and well off people will always have access - they already pay more anyway for quality.

So your mother said that she wanted this low paying job because noone would do the job otherwise? I am trying to figure out how you are contradicting my argument that only people with better jobs propagate these things

I recently went through my mothers health failing and then subsequent death. If I didn’t have to work, I absolutely would have cared for her myself.

However, there is no way I could have quit working and keep the house in a relatively expensive area that I bought to be close to job opportunities.

UBI changes the calculus dramatically. Suddenly you can just do things for yourself .

How would 1,000 a month change this calculus for you?

For the 50% of american paying paying taxes, this means 1,000 less a month.

Unless your job is pointless - you quitting your job to take care of your mother is a net loss for the economy and again makes things less accessible for everyone - nursing homes are an optimisation.

It sounds nice to give people the option but your argument is exactly why substantial UBI is a dangerous concept.

> Unless your job is pointless - you quitting your job to take care of your mother is a net loss for the economy and again makes things less accessible for everyone

Some people prefer to live at home rather than go to a nursing home. What's worthless about giving those people better care that more closely aligns with their preferences?

> is a net loss for the economy

This is such a weird way of thinking about activity that happens outside the market. Should I feel guilty about cooking my own meals because I haven't payed a restaurant worker to do it?

Sometimes people do things outside of the market, and that's OK, they don't have to feel guilty about that. The market exists to help us live our lives, not the other way around. Whether GP watches their parents on their own or hires someone else to do it, the parents are still getting watched, and somebody is still doing that as part of their "job". That's the important part.

You're concerned about prices going up, but what GP is describing would be vastly cheaper than paying for assisted living on the market today. It's making in-home assisted living more available than it currently is on the market. Why would that be a bad thing?

Yeah that's a major issue that I bring up everytime UBI is discussed and that for some reason UBI proponents never address.

If UBI isn't high enough to ensure that welfare as we currently know it isn't needed anymore, then why have UBI at all? It just adds complexity to the system for no apparent gain. On the other hand if UBI is high enough to go by without working there's a lot of things that just won't get done anymore.

On the flip side, UBI will increase the revenue from those jobs. The less desirable jobs will pay more simply due to supply and demand.

And if no one wants to do the job for the given price then it becomes more worthwhile to invest in additional automation.

Possibly - but I doubt it will be proportional for the undesirable jobs. It would be a volatile transition period either way.

Pay like all goods on in a market are not infinitely elastic to just say the pay will simply increase because the supply of workers drop.

For example lets look at janitorial labor, that is a hard job to automate and it is required in every business. So many would think that an increase to say $15/hr would just mean all the companies would just pay the same number of workers $15/hr right? No, what you would find it maybe instead of daily trash pickup it goes to 2 times a week, or employee's are asked to take their office trash themselves to a common trash bin. Common area's are cleaned less frequently, other employee's are asked to pick up some slack, and the janitorial staff will go from 10 workers to 6 , with a responsibility of 4 floors vs 2, or other such adjustments to the "acceptable" level of janitorial services.

The business has a budget of X for janitorial, that will not change very much simply because UBI or Min Wage came into play, they will just have to accept less janitorial services for the same money (aka inflation)

UBI is the wrong tool to solve inequality because there is already an existing tool for that. It's called inflation.

Inflation is the best tool to create inequality - rich people are always closest to the money source.

Why are jobs that are needed the most paid the least? That is some sort of manufactured contradiction. If they are paid low because they are easily replaceable, why are they the most needed jobs? If they are paid low because they aren't needed, then they aren't needed and shouldn't exist.

What could a third possibility be for these jobs being paid so low, i wonder? He said, facetiously knowing the answer

> The problem with UBI is that some jobs suck but need to be done

I'm somewhat skeptical of the UBI train, but this particular objection has always rubbed me the wrong way. Those jobs should cost more.

If the only thing keeping people in a job is the threat of poverty, and they're not being paid enough otherwise to incentivize them to do the work, then that's not a free market. It's not really significantly different from holding a gun to their head or coercing them into doing the work.

What's going to happen if the people stuck in dead-end jobs retrain to work at better jobs? What's going to happen if the economy improves and suddenly they have more opportunities? The problem with underpaying essential jobs is that it forces people to think of those market outcomes as undesirable. I don't like the framing that says that if elderly-care workers retrain and have a choice whether or not to work in nursing homes, that's a bad thing. That seems very, very counter to how we should think about a healthy jobs market.

I don't want a framing that tells me that the economy becoming too good or people having too many job opportunities is a problem because those people need to be financially pressured into working underpaid jobs. To me, that's a very anti-free-market way of thinking about the economy. Jobs that are difficult or undesirable should have more compensation because they have less demand. That is the entire basis of the jobs market and of supply/demand, we shouldn't be trying to undermine those principles.

Indeed you'll find that places with high degree of union power often don't have minimum wage and far less interest in UBI, because there tends to be tariff agreements and welfare systems in place that makes these things seem rather redundant.

The continuation of poverty in most of the developed world is a choice, and one that people keep voting for. As long as people keep voting to maintain poverty, it's a relatively pointless academic discussion.

Lots of fun catch phrases, but unless you also propose a solution, it comes off like someone standing on a soap box in a campus quad preaching to three people.

I wouldn't expect the solution to world poverty to be easily typed up on an internet message board.

I agree, which is why I generally stay out of these conversations.

But I think it's important for people go to beyond "That's not the problem. This is the problem" and on to "But here's something we might think about that could work toward a solution."

All I ever see on HN is the same talking points I've heard regurgitated in the dozen or so union halls I've been in from coast to coast over the last 30 years. Everyone gets a lot of practice shouting the right keywords, but nobody ever says anything new, or even tip-toes near a solution.

I think this is spot on. Wealth gives you power that you can use to protect that wealth and thus the endless cycle begins.

It's not that hard to build a system where everyone benefits. However, it's even easier to build a system where special interests benefit the most because they are the ones who are in charge after all.

You left out a big one.

3) Politicians who view the poor as a voting bloc, who endlessly promise solutions that they never really deliver.

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