> People in a functioning society still have to work
Why?
Why?
Can we assume a fraction of people would still be doing these relevant things and that it'd be enough to maintain a functioning society? If not, wouldn't that point towards the directions we need technology to evolve? Would paying more to the people who now don't need to work, but are willing to, suffice?
One thing I would bet on is that, in that scenario, degrading working conditions (as we frequently see in agriculture, transportation, etc) would make it harder to find people willing to subject themselves to them.
> Would paying more to the people who now don't need to work, but are willing to, suffice?
This is not possible because you cant simultaneously pay workers more (as a whole) and have them subsidize the non-working.
I admit it may be possible to reallocate compensation among the workers so that some get more, while collectively they get less.
I don't disagree, but aren't you implicitly admitting here that the vast majority of people don't want to spend their lives doing work? We get a few laps around the sun, once, before we return to oblivion. It seems a tragedy to me to force almost everyone into spending that brief spark of life on the drudgery of increasing shareholder value.
If you agree, would you then also say that it would be in humanity's interest to work toward a situation where people can lead happy, fulfilling lives? I'm not saying I have any answers, but I am saying that implicit in your own assumption is a problem that needs solving.
people dont want to spend their lives doing work, but they do want to spend their lives consuming. If you eliminate the shareholders and shares, it still take the same amount of work to produce what we consume, so this wont help reduce work.
In the 1930s, Keynes imagined that humans would live lives of leisure as productivity doubled every 20 years. However, the human hunger for material comforts is bottomless.
The only offramp from work is reducing consumption or 2) freezing consumption (assuming productivity increases)
Does it? Seems like if we don't have excess value going to shareholders, less work could be done to provide the current level of value for things people are consuming.
A restaurant needs X hours of labor to make Y hamburgers. This is true if all the money goes to workers, or just a fraction of it.
You could pay a worker more, but that doesn't increase the supply of hamburgers.
Inversely, any value tied up in the share price is not being spent on hamburgers.
The best you can hope to do is shift some consumption from investors to workers, but consumption differences are as great as wealth/value differentials. e.g. Musk & Bezos might have 1 million times as much value to their name, but they don't consume 1 million times as many hamburgers. The vast majority of excess value held by investors is not directed towards consumption.
So why does it need to be created in the first place then? That takes work that apparently does not need to happen for any other reason than economic, not because it is valuable in and of itself.
Value =/= Work.
no extra work is happening at the burger shop. you still need X hours to make Y hamburgers. If anyone works less, fewer people eat.
The extra value is extracted from the buyers (many of whom are workers elsewhere).
>So why does it need to be created in the first place then?
In theory, the utility of investor profit serves as a market signal for what goods are desired, when things should be produced, and what should no longer be produced. Markets determine this through trial and error with thousands of participants simultaneously acting.
In theory, people have proposed doing away with the profit signal, but the only alternative is trial and error from a political process.
for the last 150 years, it has been understood that neither process is perfectly efficient. For most goods, it is conventionally understood that inefficiency of the profit signal is less than the inefficiency of political process.
By way of analogy, Walmart has a 2% profit margin which is a cost consumers bear for Walmart curating the selection of goods they want in the quantities they want. In terms of efficiency, I think it is unlikely a panel of government politicians (with their own motives and biases) could run a store and decide on the types and quantity of goods that people will want in a more efficient way.
Who could, in turn, work less if burger prices didn't reflect the need to pay investors more than they invested.
> In theory, people have proposed doing away with the profit signal, but the only alternative is trial and error from a political process.
You can always measure by actual consumption.
> By way of analogy, Walmart has a 2% profit margin which is a cost consumers bear
Note Walmart is subsidised by government programs that pay their employees because the wages Walmart pays are considered too low for survival.
>Who could, in turn, work less if burger prices didn't reflect the need to pay investors more than they invested.
This then invokes the problem that if everyone works less, less is produced. Even if you raise salaries, the options are the same. A) Same hours, same amount of goods to buy, or B) fewer hours, fewer goods to buy.
This is why I am saying "value" is entirely besides the point. What matters is production and consumption. you could cut salaries by 99%, and if production is the same, prices go down 99%. You can double salaries, and if production is the same, prices double.
The amount of "value" an investor has locked up doesnt change this. all that matters is the consumption of investors. If Investors are buying and eating all the hamburgers for themselves, yeah, that impacts workers. If they stick it a locked box of reinvested stocks, it has exactly zero impact.
>You can always measure by actual consumption.
Yes, this has been proposed in the last 150 years of economic literature. The challenge is who measures it, and who controls it. Remember, we already no that the market isnt perfect. The question is if it is better than a realistic alternative. Do you think a panel of elected republicans and democrats, with all their campaign promises, lobbyists, and personal product desires would do a better job of keeping the super market stocked?
>Note Walmart is subsidized by government programs that pay their employees because the wages Walmart pays are considered too low for survival.
Lets be honest about what is happening here. Voters feel bad and want people to have more money than Walmart needs to pay them to secure their work.
Calling this a subsidy is rhetoric. Walmart doesn't need the programs. Walmart will have enough workers either way, or even raise the wage to secure workers if they need to.
Because they are sure (rightfully so) the owners of said automation will not pay them enough to offset their lost jobs.
In both the US and UK over 30% of households are owned outright with no mortgage.
The economy is made up of us, it's not (predominantly) a downtrodden serving a tiny elite.
Most people work and do useful stuff for each other. Yes, there are bullshit jobs, but it's a huge exaggeration to pretend they all are.
What I'm not saying is all work is horseshit and let's all party.
You cant have the fruits of labor without the labor.
People make this calculus every single day, and nearly unanimously decide that it would be more detrimental to go without the fruits of labor (especially those that must be incentivized).
It is obviously worth exploring how to make work less miserable, or better fit the interests of a worker, but that is a genuinely difficult matching an allocation problem.
A "do what you want" policy would not result in the tasks people want done getting done.
The closest equivalent to a system without transactional incentives is individual subsistence farming where one has to work for oneself so they don't die.
That sounds weird to me. If people want it done, they would get it done, wouldn't they? Can you maybe expand with an example?
(Well, I guess if you're american you don't have fresh produce in your supermarket, but the point stands.)
If you don't get in the tractor and plough the field you don't get the wheat.
Economic value is no less real. If anything, it's much more real at the low end in fast food, the supermarket, labouring jobs etc than it is in Uber for dogs.
That excess time could be spent on leisure, instead the insatiable hunger for more is driving us to drudgery.
On one hand, I think this is an interesting question to put the value of work into context.
On the other, I think most of society would fight tooth and nail against it.
That said, I do know people who do live pretty simply, no electricity, healthcare, or fancy food.
It kind of reminds me of an old miner that would periodically ride into town on a donkey when I was growing up in the 90's. He was about 150 years out of place.
...why?
We'd still have modern computers and stuff. Dropping productivity wouldn't revert technology itself. So if you ask people "Do you want the same amount of housing and clothes and cars and services you could get back in 1994, but while working 4 days a week instead of 5?" what's the horrifying factor that makes them say no?
Most people wouldn't want to because they would have to cut 40% of their spending across the board.
there are a lot of people today that can already have the option to work less for less money but dont choose to do it.
People like to have more stuff, bigger houses, better cars, air conditioning, whatever.
I think people would fight tooth and nail.
- People that plant things
- People that harvest things (may be the same people, but maybe not)
- People that a order things to be planted (seeds)
- People that order/plan short term things to facilitate planting (fertilizer)
- People that make those short term things (who other industry, lots of people)
- People that order/plan long term things to facilitate planting (tractor)
- People that maintain long term things to facilitate planting (repair men)
- People that build systems to allow ordering of short term things
- People that build systems to allow ordering/renting/use of long term things
- People that build systems to allow finding people that maintain long term things
- People that handle making sure those ^ people have the infrastrucure they need (government + industry)
- People that handle making sure those ^ people get hired and paid
We are WAY beyond "in order to get food for people, we need Doug the farmer". So yes, a LOT of the people participating in this thread are in the set of people that are responsible for making sure people, as a whole, have access to food.
And food is only _one_ of the things needed for a society to function
You know, those guys who always dodge their round at the pub, they never pay you back that fiver, they always need somewhere to crash?
Hell, have you ever dated someone like that, or known a friend that has? One person goes to work, cooks, maintains the home, the other just spends their time on highfalutin' ideas like their photography project?
UBI to me sounds like a way of hiding that behind bureaucracy. I don't want to support people who don't do anything useful and purely consume resources.
If UBI means everyone at the place you work is actually motivated, and you never have to watch your friend support a free-loader again, I think we're probably better off as a society.
They use that free money to get you to do things for them.
It's hidden behind bureaucracy but it's the same thing. Worse, even, because you don't have a choice.
It's like the nonsense solutions the left propose for tackling crime. "If we give people X, they won't have to steal X". I mean, sure, because they have already gotten it from me for free...
If you have a piece of industrial machinery, you will have down time for maintenance: you can pro-actively schedule planned maintenance when it's less disruptive, or the machine itself can schedule unplanned maintenance without regard to the disruption; "not having maintenance" isn't an option, and trying to take it is actually taking the "expensive unplanned maintenance" option.
If you're the parent of a toddler and that toddler wants your attention, they will get it one way or another: you can pro-actively make time for them, or you can re-actively make time when they act out, perhaps destroying something in the process; as frustrating as it is, "not making time" is simply not an option, and trying to take it is actually taking the "expensive re-active to acting out" option.
Here in the UK several years ago they cut back severely on social services to people with low-grade emotional problems. So instead of calling the social workers, they started calling emergency services, who are required to send someone out. The result was that much more more money was spent on emergency services. One could of course jail people who falsely call 999, but then that's pretty expensive too. For better or for worse, "not paying for people for them to talk to" isn't an option; it turns into "pay expensive EMTs to talk to them".
So, maybe there are these people who are just freeloaders; they get jobs and then do the minimal amount of work possible, they get boyfriends or girlfriends or spouses who will support their freeloading lifestyle. That cost is being paid right now, but in a damaging way: they're dead weight in companies and vampires on romantic partners. It would be nice not to pay that cost at all, but that doesn't seem to be an option. Maybe if we just explicitly paid them to freeload, then at least we'd have the benefit of not having them hurt our friends and our companies.
> they're dead weight in companies and vampires on romantic partners
This is trivially avoidable in both cases. The Offspring have a song that comes to mind.
And I hope two things are clear:
1. I don't like freeloaders either. I don't ever plan to be a freeloader, and I don't like the idea of paying taxes to enable people to choose a lifestyle of taking and not giving. (Obviously there are people who create value for society that's harder to "capture", like working on open-source software or making art; and there are people who have a harder time contributing because of other limitations, not because of choice; we're not talking about those people here.)
2. I don't claim to know that giving free money to people will help. It's possible freeloaders will take money from the government and companies / individuals; it's possible that having free money available will significantly increase the number of freeloaders. We don't know because we haven't tried it.
What I'm asking you to consider, however, is the possibility that 1) the overall benefits to society of UBI are greater than the harms caused by enabling freeloaders; and 2) there's no way to have UBI without enabling freeloaders.
If that's the case, then our options are:
1. Take UBI and its benefits, gritting our teeth at the necessity of enabling freeloaders
2. Miss the benefits of UBI on principle to avoid enabling freeloaders.
If UBI is a net benefit to society, in spite of freeloaders, I'd have to go with #1 instead of #2.
Consider that our current capitalist system enables lots of other types of freeloaders: people who have inherited enough capital that they can live off the profits without doing any work whatsoever, companies or people who have patented something simple and obvious and are then able to extract rents from the people actually making things, people who buy things and sell them milliseconds later. We put up with this kind of freeloading in capitalism because it's hard to prevent it without damaging the benefits that capitalism brings. The same might end up being true for UBI.
This is one. We should go deeper into this question. I most certainly would continue doing a lot of the things I do now, but for fun and to progress the state-of-the-art in my field of work. I'd accept higher taxes in compensation for the assurance I will always be able to do what I do best, instead of what someone would pay me to do.
.. to pay taxes for social services.
> I'd accept higher taxes ...
how do you pay for these taxes if you have no job/income?
Nobody is saying that the carrot (personal financial gain) needs to be removed from the equation. Just that everyone is guaranteed some basic level of financial support.
Society already produces enough wealth to cover the expense of UBI. Remember it would replace any other welfare systems in place today.
Personally I think I might take a bit more risk, and choose to do something that I personally believe is of actual value to society rather than please some corporation or VC.
I’ve never seen this math worked out.
Also, some benefits are inherently lumpy. A special-needs or chronically-ill person needs (and receives) resources that wouldn’t be covered by a broad-spectrum UBI.
In both the US and UK over 30% of households are owned outright with no mortgage.
The economy is made up of us, it's not (predominantly) a downtrodden serving a tiny elite.
I agree it would be nice to weight 300 pounds and float around on a levitating lounge all day doing nothing but sadly we're just not at that point yet.
Yes, it IS a provocation. Let's go deeper into this question.
More simply, value production is needed because value consumption is occurring.
How much value is needed is determined by the society through a free market.
What if they're not a veteran, but just an unfortunate soul with a disability that provides "zero" value?
If you do this you stop getting new veterans. Functionally speaking this is why every society with armies has veteran benefits.
It’s reasonable to assume that the powers that be may find themselves in situations politically precarious if veterans aren’t able to provide for themselves and those they ostensibly fought for. Veterans know where real and metaphorical bodies are buried, they also know that at a nation scale, the internal problems that face first world nations are usually not logistical, but political. If not for fear of disrupting business interests, UBI in the form of food stamps, housing, and Medicare for all is possible. The veterans know this, because they are fed and housed and medically treated at scale during and after service. However, if everyone receives these same benefits also without service obligations, the ability to offer incentives to service is limited.
UBI is a thorny issue due to the complexities of implementing it piecemeal alongside the already-existing status quo. In some ways, a greenfield solution would be easier, but they call those revolutionary changes revolutions rather than evolutions for good reasons.
Some stray links for food for thought:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_to_ploughshares
Oh, I always thought it was a reference to the Roman practice of settling veterans on farmsteads [1].
> if everyone receives these same benefits also without service obligations, the ability to offer incentives to service is limited
I'm not sure we could offer VA benefits to every adult without massively raising taxes. (Also, we treat our veterans quite poorly.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38586918
> I'm not sure we could offer VA benefits to every adult without massively raising taxes.
If we eliminated waste and slippage/loss and gained efficiencies of scale by eliminating private health insurance obligations except for high net worth, like is done in some countries like Australia, I think we could come out ahead actually, due to reducing the cost of employment borne by businesses, while maintaining or increasing health outcomes for those on public healthcare rolls.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(Australia)
> (Also, we treat our veterans quite poorly.)
To our great collective shame. That being a veteran is essentially a greater risk factor for peacetime structural violence in the form of homelessness, food insecurity, and lack of health care is a travesty only eclipsed by the how commonplace these issues are among fellow countrymen who are merely civilians.
What is this grand democratic experiment even for, if we still suffer from the same failure modes as that which we originally fought to save ourselves from?
We treat our veterans poorly, but let’s not lose perspective, that’s still far better than most countries today or in history.
I do take your point, though, and don’t protest too much. It’s less a matter of how much is enough for our veterans, but rather, how far we have left to go, one and all. In many ways, veterans simply arrived at the limits of political capital before the rest of us, and now that the problems veterans face are similarly butting up against many if not all in some form or fashion, we have economic capital concerns in the form of UBI that has become the stalking horse for larger structural issues largely left unaddressed facing us all.
Education assistance is more substantial maybe, but then again that’s something much of the civilized world enjoys without the threat of being blown up by ieds far from home in a pointless conflict.
Indeed though, let’s not lose perspective, let’s take a hard honest look at things and ask ourselves whether we’re doing better or worse.
The military is one of the best available options to lift people up out of poverty and give them a better chance at life, and it always has been. but it’s also a chance at no life at all, and so if people are forced into making this desperate bargain then it is disgraceful and reflects badly on what we’ve actually accomplished with all the time since antiquity.
The value that any person can create is principally limited by imagination, not the free market. The wonderful thing about a moderately regulated free market is that the imagination of more people can be used to engage the value creation inherent in every person.
As much as people want. A subsistence lifestyle is incredibly cheap and accessible; most of us just don't want it.