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Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

> The absolutely fucked up thing is that everyone I've met in this space seems to have totally given up on doing anything meaningful at work. The goal is to get paid, not stress out, have a happy office where everyone can collect their strange handout, and not think too deeply about how unfulfilling is it to produce nothing for forty hours a week.

this is why i think its kind of funny that people object to the idea of Universal Basic Income, when it's already being experienced in so many aimless offices. I do think this is a gross misallocation of resources, but insofar as moral judgment goes it's not obviously less moral than many other inequities in society.

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UBI would just socialize the cost which at least now, the private sector partly pays.

UBI is a yearly recurring expense in the trillions.

Lots of people would work less, (remember COVID?) lowering tax revenue.

This means higher demand for workers, who will require even higher pay because of supply constraints and high taxes.

Unlocked demand, decreased labor supply and higher taxes means inflation. Lots of inflation, specially in services.

Businesses will offshore or automate to try and reduce cost, but that will push even more workers onto UBI.

What will the new equilibrium be? Nobody knows. It could stabilize with extreme income inequality creating a permanent underclass, It could drive the United States into hyperinflation, creating civil unrest and destabilizing world security. Nobody knows. It would be a society wide experiment that would be politically impossible to undo democratically.

If you think BS jobs are bad, how about no jobs in a bankrupt United States, sliding into Venezuelan hyper inflation?

Imagine China, Russia, and North Korea undeterred and the death and human suffering that would follow.

The US may not be perfect, but the world is a harsh harsh place and people have no idea how good they have it right here, right now.

So good that professionals not only demand high pay from their employers, but think it's totally reasonable to require "meaning" as well.

Were he still alive, I would pay good money to see the author try and read his essay out loud to Victor Frankel.

Ok, but that just means the UBI will be very small. Nothing you said goes against the concept.

Lol, wow.

I just experienced something like a flashback, I was in debate club, listening to yet another kid claim that social change X would lead inevitably to global nuclear annihilation. Strongest case possible, right?

We can't possibly re-allocate the trillions of dollars the federal government spends, or the more trillions the collective states spend, because it would lead inevitably to mass die-offs comparable to soviet-era famine conditions.

Existing UBI programs don't directionally move that way? Pandemic productivity actually rose, despite a couple of quarters of setbacks? The actual evidence doesn't support gloom and doom? Just make the claims of potential harm bigger! Nobody can counter hyperinflation, civil unrest, or world war!

Debate clubs always lead to global thermonuclear war.

>Pandemic productivity actually rose, despite a couple of quarters of setbacks?

Covid did not create Universal Basic Income. Everyone knew that Covid money will run out, so most people didn't quit their jobs (although still many did, which was GP's point). Also, the amount of debt raised during covid was no joke, and we don't know the long term effects. But even disregarding that last point Covid isn't a useful datapoint for disproving GP's claim. The fundamental issue is with UBI is people will not want to work and that is GP's central claim.

So GP using involuntary unemployment numbers in support of an anti-UBI case didn't trigger your alarm, but me using voluntary employment numbers to demonstrate the falsity of the original claim did?

If Covid isn't a useful datapoint for disproving GP's hysterical claims, then it definitely isn't a useful datapoint for supporting them.

The number of people who quit their jobs to depend on "Covid money" rounds down to zero. There just wasn't enough "Covid money" for that. Many people were unemployed during the early days of the pandemic, but not voluntarily.

Your "fundamental issue" lacks evidence and the counter-evidence from limited trials of UBI points the other way. But carry on. Civil unrest and a world war await.

>So GP using involuntary unemployment numbers in support of an anti-UBI case didn't trigger your alarm

Obviously, becasue the cause is unemployment, not whether it is voluntary or not.

>but me using voluntary employment numbers to demonstrate the falsity of the original claim did?

Yes, because it is a logical error, as I explained above.

>Your "fundamental issue" lacks evidence

The evidence is that most people don't like working. I've never met anyone who went to work on a day off; I've seen countless people to get out of it.

>counter-evidence from limited trials of UBI points the other way.

They are as you say: limited. We would only see the effects after UBI becomes "a thing" that allows people to slack off, not a trial. And then children won't take eduaction seriously as there is no more carrot.

Hahahahahaha! I had no intention of replying at all, but this, this is so outrageous I laughed out loud:

> And then children won't take eduaction seriously as there is no more carrot.

From the misspelling of education to the apparent breathlessness with which this prognostication is offered up as a fait accompli, it's perfection itself!

We live in a world in which for some strange reason people try to educate children and work at jobs making more than subsistence wage, and even try to get raises and promotions, and even when they get a job making six times the average, they keep working and advancing, but no, if UBI is enacted, civil unrest and world war will be the least of our problems. CHILDREN WILL CEASE TO LEARN!

Hahahahahahahaha! Okay, NOW carry on.

Your're right that "And then children won't take edu[ca]tion seriously as there is no more carrot" is wrong. It's more accurate to say there is less incentive to learn, and education will be taken less seriously. But the main point still stands that when work is optional it will be taken less seriously. 13% of people are on SNAP already,[0] and a large percent of those people are not actually looking for a job or only work part time. The idea that this number will increase as a result of UBI is obvious. Claiming that it won't is not, which is why you need to resort to high school debate team tactics of taking your "oppenent" in bad faith and ignoring their points. Grow up.

[0]https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/05/who-is-receiv...

Why does everybody who earns above ~$30K/yr go to work? They could retire after a few years if UBI would suffice.

Well, Chicago started a trial program of it recently. Doubt that would have come out if it weren't for the pandemic.

>The US may not be perfect, but the world is a harsh harsh place and people have no idea how good they have it right here, right now.

Amen.

That's a very slippery slope you got there!

A slightly different version of the arguments you write here could have been made against pensions or a 40h work week when they were introduced. I'm not saying UBI would not massively change society and potentially include risks, I am just questioning your certainty that implementing it would lead to disaster.

Oh, and it's Viktor Frankl by the way.

Costs don't disappear just because it's the private sector that has them. On the national economic level, waste is waste.

But I agree that with UBI people who have actually important jobs might also quit, or demand higher salaries.

Some would say that sounds fair and sensible compared to the current status quo.

About software development specifically: Note how many of the most valuable software projects have grown not from profit driven corporations, but from open source maintainers working in their spare time.

this is actually not supported by any data. its pure speculation. plus the handful of UBI trials don't show the catastrophic breakdown of labor supply you claim to inevitably happen... the reality is until a proper ubi trial is done with actually livable wage we don't know what would happen...

A lot of your reasoning requires a big [cite needed] - specifically the "lots of people would work less". UBI pilot programs have proved the opposite. Also several states cut unemployment benefits to goose their active worker numbers and the opposite happened - less people working.

I'm not saying that nationwide UBI would be a good thing but your logic isn't clear.

> It could stabilize with extreme income inequality creating a permanent underclass

That should would be a frightening and radical departure from today.

> people object to the idea of Universal Basic Income, when it's already being experienced in so many aimless offices

Private money being wasted due to inefficiencies at the office (as you say, a misallocation) is surely entirely different than a government-granted right to not produce anything yet still be supported.

Ultimately, these systemic inefficiencies are financially supported by people, the public at large.

At different rates though. You can absolutely choose not to pay the lazy-tax and buy from a different vendor that doesn't employ an army of people who do nothing, you can even build whatever it is you need, but you can't easily choose to not pay the taxes that the government collects for the same purposes.

Pretty sure Atlassian has a lower per-employee efficiency than what a smaller startup providing a product in the same market would have, but there might be specific sticky features in the Atlassian product that make it difficult for one to migrate. The effective market hypothesis is great at finding local maxima.

Likely, yes, but it's "do I want to work around this", not "there's no way". There's enough people getting fed up with Atlassian that "Like Atlassian X, but sane" could be a category.

There's basically no way you can start a new state if you'd want to opt out of the existing ones, and even moving from one to another is quite the undertaking. Imagine Atlassian saying "sure, you're free to stop working with and paying us, but we believe that we've been instrumental in building your company, and we believe that entitles us to 20% of your company if you want to work with someone else".

You might find it ethical to not use a superior product to try and force the world to be more like the one described by the efficient market hypothesis, but I definitely don't believe this is on the to-do list of people who get stuff done and get promoted to make impactful changes in their organization.

Can you really? Are you sure? I sincerely doubt it.

Even if that were true, and I don't think it is, there are millions of jobs that are subsidized with public money and the public has no meaningful choice in them. Think defense contractors, public sector consultants, etc.

"Jobs paid for by public money" and "completely unproductive jobs paid for by public money" are not the same though.

But even if it actually was millions of completely unproductive jobs, I fail to see how that would be an argument for adding a few dozen millions more and not a reason to get rid of the ones that exist and cost us money that we could otherwise invest into important things that are currently underfunded.

Because they are not jobs. They would free up people to other pursuits, in the hope at least a few of them would be useful. It would also be a massive boon to those who cannot make ends meet.

I wasn't making the argument that every government job is useless, I was simply reminding that it's not true that unproductive private jobs can be weeded out simply with competition or customer care.

> Private money being wasted due to inefficiencies at the office is surely entirely different than a government-granted right to not produce anything yet still be supported.

Why?

If you are in the camp that think companies sole purpose is shareholder profit then this is perverse.

If you are not in that camp you can probably agree that we should aspire to the best life for most people.

(As a European this comment really dissonates. I do realise that it does not for Americans)

Private money wasted usually leads to that entity dwindling away from competition, with the end result (of efficiency) that benefits society at large. Public money wasted takes a much longer time to dwindle away and the end result is usually catastrophic for society at large, i.e. a revolution.

As a European, odds are that you're used to a monoethnic country where "most people", "society", and "government" are kind of interchangeable, and people find it easier to sacrifice themselves for the greater good -- as you say, aspire to the best life for most people, even if it might mean that the decisions being made are not optimal for one's own circumstances.

I myself hail from such a country (though outside of Europe), and you are right that the American viewpoint, or that of any other large, multiethnic country, is quite different. Implementing policies that require taxpayers to support others that are culturally different and therefore harder to empathize with is an order of magnitude more difficult; and it is becoming yet more difficult in America as time goes by, due to the reduced emphasis in assimilating to the mainstream ("white") culture.

we already have that.

go buy treasury bonds, they pay almost 5 percent. ibonds pay more. why? they just do. and companies and rich people buy them all the time.

From a society point of view, it doesn't really matter "who" wastes it. Ultimately, the outcome is the same: Someone spends time on something that society does not benefit from.

... sidenote; I personally think that something completely inefficient "is not that bad". Much worse is work that is directly detrimental for society as a whole, even if it does make a few people rich. Now that is terrible.

Someone does something that society does not benefit from and earns a paycheck.

They then buy food, housing, medical, transportation, fuel, entertainment, (optionally) raise kids, by things kids want, take vacations, have hobbies

They're still most likely a net positive to the economy.

businesses fail, government programs are forever.

I think this discussion rather gets to the bottom of the objection to UBI: nobody objects quite so strenuously to wasted work as they do to "idleness". In the view of these people, it is morally superior to pay people to dig holes and fill them up, or the white collar equivalent of digging holes in spreadsheets and filling them up again, than it is to just give them money with no strings attached.

The important thing is that people are prevented from enjoying themselves for at least eight hours a day.

No, not at all. The important thing is that the person making poor choices bears enough of the cost of those choices.

Otherwise, they will not grow.

True UBI would create the largest, most indolent, and most socioeconomically isolated consumption class the world has ever seen — until it collapses under its own weight.

The people "making good choices" here being the unproductive office workers?

No, the people making poor choices are the managers wasting the work output of their office workers.

They're not usually bearing the cost, though? In a lot of places it's better to have hundreds of unproductive staff than a few productive ones, it inflates your standing and pay. It's ultimately the investors who bear the cost, but they also deem it not worth their time to try to manage the managers.

Sorry to just jump in here, but growth isn't for everyone. If some people don't want to work, I'd rather pay them to get out of the way than risk the chance of them adding negative net value.

That’s the other major issue of UBI — it’s an ideal tool for ghettoization, if those in power decide it’s more profitable to give “undesirables” just enough that they’ll get out of the way — and stay there, quietly.

The wealth and culture gap would become nearly insurmountable for anyone otherwise capable of upward mobility out of the UBI class.

People don't object to UBI because they don't like the idea of people getting money for no work.

They dislike UBI because either

a) It's financially impossible. Assuming the basic income is "enough to live a basic life", say £1500/month in the UK, that is totally impossible.

b) They don't like the idea of people getting free money and not having to work when they do work. I mean you see that already with benefits/welfare, but UBI makes it more extreme.

Although obviously with UBI the people paying lots of taxes have the option of stopping work and moving somewhere cheap. Which is what a huge number of people would do, and the whole system would collapse.

But yeah, nobody is against a magical utopia where nobody has to work. They just know it can't exist.

Everyone I know who works in these kind of jobs are financially secure but extremely depressed.

One of the mistaken beliefs underlying the UBI argument is that the fulfillment part will come automatically for most people. Who wouldn’t want to spend every day painting, writing, or playing music? The problem is that most people who are not ideologically self-motivated are unable to find sources of fulfillment without some sort of economic influence.

Are the workers depressed because they are "not ideologically self-motivated", or because they must spend time doing something they don't see the point in doing?

It’s not because they didn’t see the point in what they were doing. These people had a lot of free time and only worked a couple of hours per week.

The late David Grabber had a great book about this - Bullshit Jobs. And when you draw the line, we do keep a lot of work and a lot of jobs around purely because if we don't a lot of people are going to have a lot of free time to ask a lot of questions about the way that the world works. And the very foundation of our system is that you have to go work, sell your labour to make someone else rich, then buy things to make someone else rich and eventually die.

> this is why i think its kind of funny that people object to the idea of Universal Basic Income, when it's already being experienced in so many aimless offices. I do think this is a gross misallocation of resources, but insofar as moral judgment goes it's not obviously less moral than many other inequities in society.

Absolutely. I've worked in multiple different companies, of different sizes, since about 2011 with breaks in between. One common theme was the amount of pointless work going on, stuff that could've been streamlined or automated, or manual reports that no-one reads or acts upon.

I agree with you, but it's not like you can wave a wand and trade UBI for bullshit jobs. The bullshit will persist.

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