Yes, we still have to work

> Working-class people are undoubtedly annoyed by low wages, despite the fact that real wages have been rising at the bottom of the distribution for a decade now. Working for $16 an hour is better than working for $12.502, but it’s still not amazing, and low-paid workers still tend to get treated poorly in many workplaces. I’m sure that fuels plenty of online complaints. Most of those workers would probably rather just get paid more and get treated better, but I’m some would accept a UBI-supported life of leisure as an alternative.

This is often the retort of certain types of privileged people have when you bring up the fact that wages across the board have historically in the last ~30 years severely lagged behind inflation, especially at the lowest levels. It's like telling someone who just got in a horrible car accident that involves the amputation of a limb and the death of a child "hey but you're not dead, right?" It's little consolation. Go look at rent to income ratios in practically any US city or state and tell me how much of the country you can live and meet your needs on $12-$16 hourly wages, let alone the federal minimum wage. It is seriously depressing.

The author's premise is wrong. The real question is, how much work is there to do? Thanks to automation and other factors we only need a certain number of people to work. At some point, more people helping doesn't actually increase productivity.

If you believe there is work that needs doing and isn't getting done, then train and hire people to do it until everyone who is ready, willing, and able to work is doing so.

If there is a surplus labor force, don't doom them to die homeless in a gutter. Don't ask them to waste their lives doing undignified pretend-work. Guarantee for them the basic human rights of clothing, food, water, shelter, health care, and education. Whether you do that directly with taxation and government services, or indirectly, by handing out money that can be used to purchase those things, doesn't much matter either way.

And those people who aren't officially working jobs with wages, how many of them will truly not work at all? Sure, some will sit in front of the TV the rest of their lives. But many or most will find the freedom to still do valuable things without profit motive. I predict there would be an explosion of artistic production that would enrich our entire society even though it wouldn't show up on any balance sheet.

260 ish million adults in the US. 1000 dollar each would be 260 000 000 000 per month which is quite ambitious. Some how the author wants me to believe the 2% not working is a significant amount? More than half the population currently doesn't have a job. That makes it 1% as you need a job in order to quit it.

not significant

I forget where I read this, but one of the key differences between German and English (and later American) socialist thought in the pre-WWI era could be summed up as:

In England: in the future, nobody will have to work. In Germany: in the future, everyone will do their duty and work (at whatever they want).

Glad to see people talking about this. I am afraid I have a busy day and only scanned the article, but indeed many people have fantasies about UBI and automated socialism that I think are unrealistic.

I am a robotics engineer and I believe very strongly that we can and must build a world where people do not have to work for their survival. I don't think UBI could ever achieve that. As I have seen it pitched, UBI would be attached to our current system, with elite control of the means of production, and those elites would be taxed very high amounts to fund the UBI (along with some MMT goodness sprinkled in). The primary issue is that if elites control the means of production and have more wealth than everyone else, then they hold the real power, they will control the political system, and they will ensure that whatever UBI existed would be far too little to live on - just like minimum wage is today in the USA.

We do still need people to work too.

One important principle I have found is that many important industrial machines are extremely patent encumbered and overpriced. My go-to example is 3D printers. They were $50k in 1998 and $25k in 2008, all patented. Then the patents expired and by 2011 they were under $2k. By 2018 they were $250. This happened because thousands of people all over the world built open source versions, experimented on cost reduction, and shared their designs for others to build off of.

My theory is that we can do this with all machinery and other vital equipment. Cut costs by 100x through open source and a wind-down of the power of IP restrictions which keep costs high [1]. I wonder how bloated and overpriced medical scanners are for example, and how that keeps our healthcare costs high. Perhaps we need open specifications and open designs, with verified manufacturers who are paid for their production time, with innovation done in the open through grants and community funding.

Simultaneous to cost reduction efforts, we should encourage community-ownership of the means of production through cooperatives and collective ownership agreements.

People can achieve freedom when they own the means of production which they depend upon for their own survival. Now its not quite so simple as different regions have different resources and specialization can be a very good thing, but put simply I think we can reduce the actual cost of reproducing society by reducing the cost of machines, and simultaneously stimulate community ownership of these machines, and in doing so people can actually directly receive the benefits of automation, critically without laundering profits through some massive federal political system where people who know nothing about you and don't care about you have impossible to avoid temptation to serve themselves first.

In such a system, some work still needs to be done. Things would need to be arranged to that what work does need to be done is minimal, and can either be done by bored volunteers or by setting up additional compensation for people who do more work, with careful limits on accumulation of extra resources.

Some of this is fanciful too and long term, but the status quo is miserable people working long hours with little freedom to speak of. Perhaps the next step is a community owned system where everyone must work 30 hours a week, with four weeks paid vacation. When that is achieved, perhaps it could be further automated so that work hours can be reduced further, and vacation extended, etc.

[1] Many people take issue with this claim, but every time I discuss problems with IP restrictions with those people, they provide me with economic models which are unable to explain how open source works. I believe those views are based on received wisdom which is false, and must be updated to account for the fact that people absolutely will work for free if they enjoy it. The root of my theory lies in building a system that puts qualified people in a position to work on what they love for free, maximally sharing their work with others who in turn do what they love with it, creating a collaborative economy of expert volunteers.