Hacker News Reader

Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

A year ago, I would have agreed with this in its entirety. Today, I still agree with most of it, but I disagree with the last paragraph. If basic income isn't enough to survive on, then you'll still need some other services and so you'll still have the funding cliff. But if it is enough to survive on, then too many people who are capable of working will choose to instead just survive on it indefinitely.

View on HN

> But if it is enough to survive on, then too many people who are capable of working will choose to instead just survive on it indefinitely.

So what? I would argue that most people want to feel purpose in life. If they don’t work, they want to do something else to feel fulfilled, something to be looked up to for, something to feel good about doing. It could be art, a sport, maybe just gardening, picking up trash in their neighborhood or organizing local events/classes. Most retired people don’t just sit in front of the tv waiting to die, or become criminals because they don’t have a job.

I think it would be amazing if most people didn’t have to work for a living. And only the people that want to work did so.

> So what?

This is how the poor stay poor, and those who are "just broke" become poor. In fact, people who are working are much more likely to engage in other community activities and volunteer.

>In fact, people who are working are much more likely to engage in other community activities and volunteer.

I can definitely say that people who are forced to work with capricious scheduling, or those that have to work more than one job just to survive are a lot less likely to do that.

People stay poor because there is no opportunity for them to stop being poor by working. If they were poor voluntarily then we wouldn't have to give a damn about them as we already did everything possible.

If you gave a poor person the opportunity to become rich through work, would they still decide to stay poor?

When you are being rewarded for hard work it is hard to grasp the concept that some not all people are being rewarded for hard work. Pretty much every entrepreneur falls into that trap. Everything they do can have a direct impact to their bottom line so they work hard and long hours. Meanwhile they wonder why their employees with low wages that are often below planned minimum wage increases do the bare minimum to not get fired. It is pretty obvious. They are going on a silent strike as that is the last drip of their bargaining power. We then get lessons that the poor are poor because of laziness.

What you're describing isn't real life.

Living as a species takes work - granting a portion of the population to essentially become dead weight, with entitlement to being able to live off the fruits of other peoples labor won't end well.

Our species wears pants, flies airplanes and invented cocaine. The argument about what's natural and what isn't is rather ridiculous to make.

i didn't say natural, i said real life. Those things are all products of labor, without that labor they wouldn't exist.

This is what we have now, is it not? The ultra-rich aren't numerous and many of them hide well, but this is what they're doing and the amount of wealth they seem to hoard (and be continually acquiring) is a lot more than the wealth needed to provide for the bottom. The less rich (but still very rich) who do still choose to work are similarly siphoning off large amounts from the backs of others. They are very skilled at getting the majority of the population to look the other way and blame poor people (and the other usual suspects), but as you suggest, they can't hide forever.

If that won't end well, I genuinely look forwards to seeing how we deal with them.

the ultra-rich built amazon, made very profitable trades, or inherited the labor of the ancestors. Also, you seems to be applying that there is a fixed pie wealth. The rich can create wealth where there wasn't before. Rob the rich and give to the poor is also a terrible strategy.

inherited the labor of the ancestors

Bingo. They didn't do shit to deserve it, they didn't work hard, and there's an entire industry of smart, morally ambiguous people dedicated to helping them hide it and keep it, and (as Abigail Disney discusses) convincing them that they deserve it, that poor people would simply waste it.

granting a portion of the population to essentially become dead weight, with entitlement to being able to live off the fruits of other peoples labor won't end well Well, there they are, doing just that.

Once you get to a certain amount of wealth, you don't need to do anything. Smart trades? None of that's needed. I'm a tiny little part of it; I work full-time, but once my personal wealth reached about six times my salary, it made more money each year than I did. Six times [0]. That is pennies in the big scheme of things. There's nothing smart about my trades; dull funds and diversity. Piketty was on to something; Bill Gates made more money from being rich than he ever did from Microsoft. Maybe he deserved all his riches from Microsoft, but does he now also deserve to sit back, do nothing, and perpetually watch his wealth grow more and more obscenely by taking a part of the wealth generated by people actually working? How about his Grandchildren? Do they deserve that? Young was right; meritocracy is what we've got, and this is what it does - the rich shall inherit the earth.

Also, you seems to be applying that there is a fixed pie wealth.

I disagree. I made no such "application", as you put it. Implying, I guess you mean, but I still disagree. There is not a fixed pie wealth. Every day, a lot of people are creating more and more wealth, and the very wealthy every day sit back and rake in a nice helping of it for themselves. As I also do, and I'm not remotely near very wealthy.

Rob the rich and give to the poor is also a terrible strategy.

How about "make them at least pay taxes like the poor schlubs generating the wealth they're perpetually helping themselves to?" Is that a better strategy? How about "alter the system a bit so that labour pays better than simply being rich, or at least benefits the labourer ahead of the rich?" That one probably sounds like batshit crazy communist land.

[0] It's ridiculous, but it's true. I don't do calls, I don't do puts, most of it is in dull index funds and a big chunk of the rest is in slightly less dull fund offerings from Baillie Gifford and the like. Once you get some capital, it will happily act like a leech on society, siphoning off wealth generated by other people's work into your own pocket. I ride on the very, very long tail of this system set up to benefit the rich; I only hope that I die before their endless squeeze catches up with me as well.

you're right, wealth creates wealth. You lending money in the form of investment allows companies to borrow at better rates, expanding production and prosperity. & you're right, at a certain point when you have enough capital it doesn't make sense to be a laborer anymore as you can move markets enough with your cash to be an 'Investor' instead of a laborer.

Granted, obviously the current system is not perfect and does need a mechanism to make the rich pay their fair share in the economy. But saying all the rich just inherited their wealth and they did nothing to deserve it is plain incorrect.

> Most retired people don’t just sit in front of the tv waiting to die

Citation? I'd like you to be right, but my subjective experience is that a lot of them pretty much do.

I had a great-grandmother that kept very, very busy after retiring until dementia took over: The other great grandmother complained at 95+ that her knees wouldn't work well enough to keep busy. And this is how folks that feel fairly healthy tend to be, as long as they have enough money. Don't get me wrong: Pretty much everyone slows down when they age, and a lot of mundane tasks can easily get more difficult or take more time - but folks are still busy with a full life.

And then you start hitting a sliding scale, and poor health, poverty, lack of transportation and/or wheelchair access, and a slew of other things makes it really easy to wind up being the person that sits at home. The other unfortunate reality is that some of the folks are sitting because they are dying. I've not yet died, but I suspect it tires you.

I also don't think this is a trend that will stay: I'm 42, and I have a completely different relationship to television than my mother. Unlike her, I rarely sit down and simply watch a show - and I know lots of folks like this. Games and hobbies and communication with others and all this other stuff is going on. And assuming we can still use our fingers and wrists well enough, I think this will stay.

I appreciate the moonshot thinking, but I don’t think this is a realistic framework for human civilization. We already live in a society in which not everyone contributes (rich and poor), and it’s problematic. Inequality and resentment are inevitable when some contribute (or feel like they contribute) more than others. I think humans are generally not evil, but we are also quite fickle. I think you’re describing the dystopia of The Hunger Games from the perspective of a Capitol resident. :)

>I appreciate the moonshot thinking, but I don’t think this is a realistic framework for human civilization. We already live in a society in which not everyone contributes (rich and poor), and it’s problematic.

That's right - "the idle rich" is not just a saying.

> We already live in a society in which not everyone contributes (rich and poor), and it’s problematic.

There is more than enough wealth to feed and house everyone, so the issue is not of contribution, but distribution.

And boy oh boy, are things badly distributed. Look at the graphs of worker productivity compared to average wage for the last hundred years - they are staggering.

> I think it would be amazing if most people didn’t have to work for a living.

Who doesn't? But we are not in a post-scarcity economy.

We aren't. We are merely in a buyers market for labor and a sellers market for housing which is squeezing workers.

"Enough to live on" isn't a great way to live, and I think people are plenty motivated by wanting a bit of discretionary spending.

That said, there are other potential problems with UBI, like incentivising anyone on it to move to the most affordable cities, which are often already suffering from unemployment and underemployment.

Well isn't the point of ubi that people less people could work. Productivity with automation has never been higher and we still work ourselves to death for less pay. We need to take the path of increased automation anyway since we've got some sort of ubi for the elderly population already. Now it's a burden for the young people. If we could automate a lot of basic needs like food production and processing, construction, transport etc you would have unlimited near costless basic needs met and provide for the elderly. Then it would just be panem et circenses but a bit more advanced and without the slavery and the need for empire building like the romans but just technological advancement and automation.

Yes, if we could automate away all of our low-skill jobs, then UBI would make more sense. But we haven't done that yet, so it doesn't yet.

There is an argument that low wages hold automation back by reducing cost pressure to automate, therefore UBI, since it would increase the cost of low-skill workers, would spur automation in that sector.

I think it's a simple, logical argument, but I'm not sure if it would survive a collision with reality^^

You've got it backwards - low-skill jobs are done manually because low-skill labour is cheap. Low-skill labour is cheap because most people in it literally can't afford to not work.

We don't need to automate away all our low-skill jobs: we could just pay the workers more. Most workers are paid well below the actual value of their productivity because they have a crappy BATNA, and there's no need for employers to pay much higher than the worker's BATNA.

The more you pay the workers, the more profit in a machine that can replace min-wage workers, and the sooner a machine will be cheaper than the well-paid workers.

You've got it backwards.

At the risk of sounding dumb: I agree fully with UBI and automating away menial jobs that don't bring people fulfillment. But what happens once we've done that? Do the top .1% just own all of the automation equipment and thus most of the industries? Do we need some way to commoditize that aspect then, (seize the means of automation?)? It's super hard to wrap one's head around this future where we have the challenge of preventing a few very rich from owning literally everything IMO

> But if it is enough to survive on, then too many people who are capable of working will choose to instead just survive on it indefinitely.

If this turned out to be true, perhaps this says more about contemporary society than human nature. The tendency to offer low wages to replaceable workers, to force people into taking multiple jobs in order to survive, and to dictate a lower social status to some of the most essential roles in human society is bound to taint some people's impressions of work.

I don't get it. Why the concern about what other people decide to do? They already get to live their lives without consulting us.

The biggest roadblock to improving the standard of living of most people in America, is this suspicious impulse folks have of suspecting somebody might 'get away' with something. It's time to recognize this unworthy impulse and discard it.

The thing that bothers me is the presumption of laziness. There are plenty of people who are willing to work long and hard, yet are disenchanted with the exploitative nature of work as it stands today. Just think of all of the people who would like to start their own businesses or work for themselves[0], yet cannot afford to do so or cannot afford to absorb the risk.

Part of the reason may be the implicit lessons we receive from a very young age. We must always be cautious of people who try to take advantage of us. It is a valuable less, because it is true, yet we seem to take it the wrong way. Rather than dealing with the criminal, the people who would defraud us, we treat everyone as criminal.

[0] There is a particular group of peoples in my country who are often portrayed as being lazy or exploiting the system. In many, if not most, cases this prejudice is just plain wrong. Since many of those people live outside of the system, they perform types of work that many of us would not even consider: hunting for their own food (and everything that involves), cutting their own fuel wood, hauling their own garbage to the dump, and much more. None of that work involves a paycheck, so it doesn't count. That attitude is just plain wrong. (Not to mention the other problems with prejudices, such as it discounting those who do function within the rest of western society.)

> too many people who are capable of working will choose to instead just survive on it indefinitely

So? We should have make-work jobs and force people to do them as punishment for being poor? Forcing people to go and do a menial job that doesn't really need doing just because you think it's character building is not a good way to run a healthy society.

Most unskilled jobs today are not "make-work" and do need doing.

In India, there's a job creation program that guarantees a paid job to anyone who wants it:

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

Unsurprisingly, most of the job is the "dig a ditch today, fill it in tomorrow" variety.

If there's so few real jobs in India that that program actually makes sense to have, then maybe UBI does make sense there. But there's plenty of unfilled jobs in the US, so UBI doesn't make sense here.

> there’s plenty of unfilled jobs in the US, so UBI doesn’t make sense here.

The point of UBI is to make it easier to fill productive jobs by (1) reducing the marginal disincentive to work posed by the funding structure of means-tested welfare, and (2) putting a bunch of people back into looking for productive jobs who are currently working in government welfare bureaucracy doing jobs that duplicate functions performed in the tax bureaucracy and/or serve the nonproductive purpose of maximizing the disincentive to additional work by welfare recipients.

We could let them build housing like the Chinese do but houses need more than just labor. They need materials. Wasting the materials to build a ghost town can backfire.

Subsidizing salaries for private jobs may backfire through corruption.

So digging the hole and filling it back it is.

The rapidity with which they're being replaced by stupid kiosks and robots in countries with strong minimum wage laws says otherwise.

> But if it is enough to survive on, then too many people who are capable of working will choose to instead just survive on it indefinitely.

This is one of the main benefits, if not the main benefit, of UBI. Someone’s survival is finally not dependent on working!

Right now, shitty jobs pay crap, because people have to take some job or starve. If you took away the starve part, millions of people no longer have to put up with a shitty job. If it really had to be done, the employer would be forced to raise the wage in order to attract people to voluntarily take the job. If UBI took care of everyone’s basic needs, then wages would have to rise to make it worth it to do a now-optional job. Would you flip burgers for minimum wage if UBI allowed you to live in an apartment and eat? I wouldn’t, but I might do it for $40k/yr extra over UBI.

This is a major goal of UBI, not a failure case.

>But if it is enough to survive on, then too many people who are capable of working will choose to instead just survive on it indefinitely.

And why is that a problem? I see it as a net benefit. The only people working will be those that want to work, and in my opinion it will reduce all the posturing and politics that go on in a workplace because people don't want to be there.

> The only people working will be those that want to work

and there wouldn't be enough of them to support the remaining.

The "funding" of UBI have to come from a technological advance, such as effectively free energy, which powers automation in such a way that owners of these resources would not miss a small tax to pay for the bare minimum UBI.

> then too many people who are capable of working will choose to instead just survive on it indefinitely.

Is this actually true? I feel like the research I've seen about this is mixed at best, and we really don't know if (meaningfully) fewer people would work if they didn't have to just to get by.

Intuitively it may sound nice, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a counterbalancing force at play, namely human curiosity and desire to do more than just, "get by".

> If basic income isn’t enough to survive on, then you’ll still need some other services and so you’ll still have the funding cliff. But if it is enough to survive on, then too many people who are capable of working will choose to instead just survive on it indefinitely.

If it maxes out approximately where current means-tested welfare does, then it will be at a place where you wouldn’t need additional programs to acheive the same level of living possible for those with no outside income under current means-tested welfare. If, as UBI rather than means tested welfare, it also didn’t face the strong disincentive to additional income posed by the current “funding-cliff” effect of means-tested welfare, the obvious effect would be more people working who would under the current system be welfare-dependent, not less.

Your analysis seems to be comparing it to a no-welfare position, but that’s not the system it is replacing.

Survive. Not thrive. If someone is inclined to make it work on so minimal an amount even when able to make more, they won't be useful at a job anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com