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Comment by thorncorona | Hacker News Reader

This is the exact same answer every leftist I've talked to says when I ask them who will run the garbage system, and who will clean the sewers.

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The obvious answer is "pay people more".

If we had UBI, for instance, and people did not have to work in order to have basic needs (food and shelter) met, then the willingness to do unpleasant jobs like sewer cleaning will go down, and it'll be necessary to pay people more to do that work.

And the need to pay people more will then drive technological innovation that may today not be worthwhile because "just hire someone" is less expensive. And in a world with UBI, automating away unpleasant jobs becomes more of an unmitigated win.

(In case it isn't clear: I think "UBI plus a free market" is a much better system than "don't pay people but magically hope all the work gets done anyway".)

> UBI plus a free market

If there's a ubi, then there's price floor that is higher than a non ubi price floor, meaning that the median prices of goods go up, less taxes to find the ubi, and the ubi must then increase to meet the increased costs for a basic standard of living.

Well done you invented inflation.

Maybe, maybe not. It does depend on how efficient we could make basic necessity items, and those are only a tiny portion of the modern economy, I suppose. Though I don’t trust the government to not simultaneously screw with the incentives for producing those items, whether by accident or not, which would make a situation like the one you describe more likely. Also it’s not at all clear how housing would work— I’m guessing people would complain about the sort of housing you could get for a workable UBI amount (i.e. one that is actually in equilibrium with the rest of the economy, as in being a tiny rider-on). This would realistically politically cause the amount to keep going up (and thus cause inflation).

> basic necessity items, and those are only a tiny portion of the modern economy

If housing/shelter is a necessity, it might not be cheap. I think housing projects aimed to do exactly this. You'll eventually find 'poverty' redefined to those receiving UBI only, stuck in undesirable locations, who don't consider it true that "work is optional".

Another issue is policing, which is also increasingly expensive, and has all sorts of issues in the US. People like to just shout "fix the police", but have no answer as to how you can recruit for such a job.

This aspect of UBI is functionally equivalent to the generous unemployment + other benefits that exist in many developed countries. The accelerating inflation hypothesis is easily empirically disproven there.

(There's of course normal inflation in these places, like everywhere else, it's a by-design feature of most monetary systems)

The UBI argument seems fundamentally flawed - things like food-stamps or free social housing make more sense.

Let me give you an example: If the government offers anyone buying a house an incentive of $10K, every house asking price will go up by $10K and wipe out the discount. The relative/competitive nature of the market opposes many en-mass pay-outs.

I know it seems crazy on its face. And I'm sure those leftists you refer to didn't have a coherent concept of how such a system would actually work. There's no way we could just replace paychecks today with rations and social credits and have a functioning system. It'd be an extreme destabilizing change to a system we built incrementally over a long time to be self reinforcing. But I also have the view that people are very malleable and can conform to all sorts of social structures and belief systems.

>"But I also have the view that people are very malleable and can conform to all sorts of social structures and belief systems."

This is another view common to most (Marxist) communists, the belief in society's ability to cultivate the 'socialist man'.

Okay, so are you disputing what I said? Various disparate religions and ideologies have cultivated adherents with notable success across history -- not least among them is free-market capitalism.

It's less of a belief and more of an emergent property of liberty and maths

I like to think about how this works at smaller scales. When there is an office full of people all being paid about the same and (critically) where they all want and care about the same outcome, the shit jobs will get done. I have often called myself a "code janitor" since I clean up shit that was left behind. It's not because I didn't want to be working on fun greenfield projects but because it was shit that just needed to get done. So I did it. And so did others.

Another example to play around with is when you go camping with friends. There's some shit work that just needs to be done. People pitch in. The same with staying at a friends house or a vacation rental with friends. Or cleaning leaves off of the storm drains. We all do this sort of work because it makes our lives better. If literal shit was piling up in front of my house I would probably shovel it even if it took 8 hours.

Natural disasters are also examples where people do work for free without expectation of compensation. I think people are more like that than what happens in apocalyptic novels (even though I love reading them).

Seems like the key shared characteristic of these examples are small communities where people care about each other. As you say, it works at smaller scales. But free rider problems are a lot tougher in a community of millions or more.

I live in one of those communities (eco village in Australia) and all it takes is one old haggard lady to reduce the workforce to nothing, as no one wants to put up with her abuse.

I think one thing people keep forgetting is that all these problems have already been solved for hundreds and thousands of years. You will never reduce inequality, abuse, pain, suffering. It's much better to contribute and improve what we already have rather than to rip it out and try "yet another variation of the same utopia that we've all been thinking about".

Build towards it, not "start again "

You seem smart and it always amazes me how popular communist concepts are with smart people on HN.

Didn't you have some assigned group projects in school? Perhaps some people are easily satisfied by carrying the burden of other people who they don't know and who don't appreciate them, but I'd wager a ridiculously high majority of value producers would not be. Humans are social animals, but we're individuals first and foremost and self-interest will always be the best motivator.

Is there some future where humans are engineered to be satisfied with a predefined role and purpose, amongst other traits? Sure. But until we get to that point, commune-style living is an absolute dud.

By the way, I recommend you visit and try living in an actual commune. My girlfriend told me it was the most disgusting living situation she's ever seen.

I think people misunderstood where I was coming from a bit. To be clear, I wasn't commenting in support of communism, or against rewarding merit, or against rewarding merit with money. Status in life and legacy in death are still motivators that matter, though, and with the right set of shared values, they are powerful.

We still generally have a culture in the US of respecting our veterans and service members, for example. There is some social value in serving that's not material. If there wasn't, the material benefits would need to be more substantial.

Respect for military is probably well aligned with instinct though— I’m guessing most tribes have respect for their warriors. Can we repeat this for an arbitrary behavior that is not so aligned? Maybe, maybe not?

Even this is not a fair comparison IMO because even people who don’t mind carrying the majority of the work eventually often get tired and frustrated with this and in my experience this tends to happen at a similar rate to when they enter their most productive years.

There's lots of kibbutz (communes) in Israel. Apparently most aren't too bad. The one I visited seemed decent. But Jewish culture has a pretty strong community ethic which is key.

I also visited a couple of Greek Orthodox monasteries and they were not just nice but beautiful. So for small scale communities with a strong cultural binding "communes" can totally work. It doesn't scale though.

For some issues around this, also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz_crisis and the "Decline and restructuring" section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz

Umm running the garbage system sounds rad?? I currently design open source farming robots but I would absolutely love designing open source garbage robots. Of course what’s better is community level management of waste production so we don’t even have a lot of garbage to deal with! Reusable washable containers for food, etc.

C'mon, robots obviously! Cleaning sewers doesn't sound like any fun, but designing or remotely piloting a fatberg-blasting sewer shark bot? That sounds kickass!

But it the meantime while there exists no such robots, or while the prototypes get stuck downthere. Someone has to manually fetch them, and do the job. It's not very enticing and I don't think there will be many software engineers ready to suit up, to dig one out.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. You iterate, as with everything.

It took/is taking a long while to develop self-driving cars, despite the money and big players chasing it. How long will a fat-berg shark take-a-to-make-a?

Also, think of the people who might help you with this - sewer-diving experts! You are essentially collaborating with them to displace their own roles.

I used to work in retail stocking shelves. 1000% I would have happily collaborated on developing a shelf-stocking robot... if I got paid something for it.

Running the garbage system is a desk job largely I would expect. It might not be the most stimulating subject matter to you, but I think it's within the realm of possibility that you'd find people who found it an interesting system to manage.

Cleaning the sewers sounds objectionable. I think you shouldn't discount the idea that in a societal structure that's different from ours you'd remove some of the social stigma that comes from such a job. But at the same time, if you observed that very very few people wanted to clean sewers for whatever reason, and there wasn't enough supply to meet demand, then you invest more in technology that reduces the shortfall. As others suggested, automation.

"But at the same time, if you observed that very very few people wanted to clean sewers for whatever reason"

The reason might be, most people do not like to be in the literal shit of others? It comes with actual health hazards btw.

"and there wasn't enough supply to meet demand, then you invest more in technology that reduces the shortfall. As others suggested, automation"

But we ain't there yet at all. What do we do, till then?

The sewage needs to run 24 h and not only if someone feels like taking a look eventually.

And as for ordinary garbage: mostly it is not a desk job, but physical labour to touch and move hundreds of different dirty garbage bins every day.

Dealing with that shit, should always come with good compensation. (whether money or social credits or whatever currency is in use)

> What do you do until then?

Sure, but you iterate. We decided as a society that Polio was awful enough that we wanted to eradicate it. If we freed up enough effort that is currently wasted on chasing profits, we could eventually get to solving problems like "shit stinks and it sucks having to clean it".

Absent corruption, profits must by definition come from money paid by people who determined that, according to themselves, the work being paid for has value. This is why capitalism works. It is a mass, distributed, value computation engine.

Considering this, I don’t see how effort is wasted on profit, since the effort produced something that someone considered valuable. Do we have another way of computing value at scale? To date, I haven’t seen any realistic proposals.

> I think you shouldn't discount the idea that in a societal structure that's different from ours you'd remove some of the social stigma that comes from such a job.

I can see you haven't done any of jobs like that ever in your life. "Social stigma", lmao, that shit smells

> But at the same time, if you observed that very very few people wanted to clean sewers for whatever reason, and there wasn't enough supply to meet demand, then you invest more in technology that reduces the shortfall.

It's delusional to think every job that's undesirable but necessary could be automated and that it would be cheaper than ye olde good material compensation for doing something hard/unpleasant.

I mean, I'm all for it, but that won't happen to the level that would eliminate unpleasant jobs

> I can see you haven't done any of jobs like that ever in your life. "Social stigma", lmao, that shit smells

I haven't, but I didn't say that shit didn't smell. My point was that one component of why some jobs are worse than others is social stigma. Working at a fish monger or in a butchers shop stinks, and you probably get way less PPE than a sewer cleaner would. But butchers and fishmongers have less social stigma.

> It's delusional to think every job that's undesirable but necessary could be automated and that it would be cheaper than ye olde good material compensation for doing something hard/unpleasant.

The fallacy here is that it _needs_ to be cheaper. Sewer cleaning is valuable. If it requires more investment to automate so that we have enough supply to meet the demand, so be it. The only reason we haven't already automated this smelly job is because it's easier to turn a profit if you just pay people peanuts. If profit is no longer motivating, you can make vastly different decisions.

Let me analyze your sewage and garbage and sell your consumption habits to the highest bidder, and I might bite. Think of it as a "sump scription" :D

Possible difference is that we may need far smaller number of programmers interested in dishwashers than we need for this jobs.

Why would you be so bothered to just let them? Would you feel embarrassed that "leftists" are nicer? That can be a motivation too! I know some people just show up so they can have someone to talk to for a few hours on a Saturday.

I think if you can't find volunteers, you can have a lottery.

> you can have a lottery

what happens if the lottery "winners" refuse?

Many western countries use a lottery to choose juries.

If the winners refuse, they'll have a chance to explain themselves, and then they'll be judged by those who didn't refuse. Exactly what happens next depends.

Jury duty is one off, and often compensated. It also isn't clearly undesirable - it's a lottery for different reasons.

What would you do in the scenario described for people who refuse any undesirable work?

How often do you talk to people this far to the left? I live in a family full of liberals and none of them even remotely think the world should operate this way. I think you could take every person in the US with ideology this far out to the left and put them in a single medium size stadium.

Presumably they mean "every leftist that holds this opinion, I've talked to", not "every leftist I've ever talked to".

That's a charitable reading given they literally wrote the latter, not the former.

A charitable reading requires fair consideration.

First, they didn't literally write the latter:

A: every leftist I've talked to

B: every leftist I've ever talked to

Second, if true, would imply that every leftist they've ever talked to will always get asked "who will run the garbage system, and who will clean the sewer" which wouldn't make sense outside the context of having given a specific opinion on a specific topic first.

Hence the topic of conversation is implied as context.

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