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Comment by tomc1985 | Hacker News Reader

tomc1985

Universal Basic Income could help a lot here. The rise of open-source and volunteer movements shows that a lot of people want to work on what they are passionate about, if only for their jobs and the need to earn money.

UBI may not solve this entirely but if it can free people of the need to worry about their economics whilst simultaneously allowing people to do whatever they want, for a lot of folks that is enough.

Additionally, I don't really see the issue with selling (NOT licensing) something up-front, if there is a culture of setting pricing to be reasonable and fair instead of the current leave-no-money-on-the-table approach.

Those that want to earn above and beyond can still find employment in critical services...banking, healthcare, government, whatever, while those that want to opt out of employment are free to do so on their terms.

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The need to earn money incentivizes people to work on things that are useful to others. If people only followed their passion, and the results of that are of no interest to others, why should others pay them to do that?

The need to earn money also incentivizes people to work on products that are monetiziable. More specifically, it encourages people to move their project in a monetiziable direction which puts the priority on revenue generation over quality.

> which puts the priority on revenue generation over quality.

On the other hand, the need to be able to sell things means the quality has to meet the customer's expectations.

For example, cars produced by free market companies far exceed in quality those produced by socialist operations.

In fact, I suspect you'd be hard pressed to find any examples of anything people made purely for their own amusement being better quality than items they made for sale.

For example, the software I write for my own personal use tends to be pretty slipshod, as it only has to work for my use case. I don't bother with coherent error messages, documentation, a decent user interface, or fixing any bugs that don't directly impede what I use it for. Doing that stuff is simply not worth my time unless I'm planning on distributing it.

> The need to earn money also incentivizes people to work on products that are monetiziable

So, a product for which people are willing to give you money in exchange. People are not likely going to buy a shitty product unless the situation involves monopoly (natural or otherwise) or regulatory capture

That's true physical products. I had software in mind when I made my comment. The need to earn money means testing paywalls and creating subscription features (and then adding nag screens to encourage customers to subscribe).

Does it though? It seems instead the incentive might be to create broad and accessible works that will appeal to the widest audience. Marvel movies are produced and performed with a high level of quality; yet the stories are simple, unchallenging, and easily accessible.

It's also possible to create content that's more experimental and creative, by focusing on more niche audiences. This is evidenced by the current golden age of TV and streaming, with a wide variety of dramas, comedies, documentaries, etc.

Are you willing to pay more money for a better quality product?

> The need to earn money incentivizes people to work on things that are useful to others.

No, it does not. The need to earn money incentivizes people to work on things that allow them to extract money from others. This sometimes happens to line up with "useful", and there's probably even a positive correlation overall, but they're not remotely the same thing.

> The need to earn money incentivizes people to work on things that allow them to extract money from others.

You're talking about things like acquiring money through force or fraud. This is not how free markets work. Free markets work by creating products that people want to buy and freely trade their money for.

If I create a widget and you want it more than the money it costs, I am not "extracting" the money from you.

I like the way CirclesUBI handles it. If you appreciate a craftsman's work you can "trust" them. Trust is a pact to value their UBI tokens as much as you value your own.

So you don't have be in the market for a font to support fontmakers (or anything else).

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