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Comment by andrepd | Hacker News Reader

Well yeah it's the exact same thing except... given to people when they're 67, i.e. after a lifetime of working and about 10 years from the mean age of death.

Gee why would they stop working, you think?

> And if people don't work, or don't work nearly as much as they did before, then how is the system going to be sustained?

Technology gives us massive gains in productivity; we could reasonably reduce working hours to <20/week in the developed world. We might have less business dynamic analysts or scrum masters or social media coordinators. We'll be fine.

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> Technology gives us massive gains in productivity; we could reasonably reduce working hours to <20/week in the developed world. We might have less business dynamic analysts or scrum masters or social media coordinators. We'll be fine.

> beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!

Unfortunately the governments and the wealthy looked at Hayek and decided they much preferred the idea where they could continue to abuse the workers.

> Well yeah it's the exact same thing except... given to people when they're 67

Have you met any people who were eligible for a pension at e.g. 50? I know a few, they all retired. Not because they couldn't continue to work, but because with the pension they were finally able to quit.

"We might have less business dynamic analysts or scrum masters or social media coordinators."

Do we have any guarantees of this? Couldn't we equally have way less Nurses, Doctors, ER Techs, Construction Workers building homes, Teachers.

Feels like all the stressful, back-breaking jobs will be quitting first?

> Do we have any guarantees of this? Couldn't we equally have way less Nurses, Doctors, ER Techs, Construction Workers building homes, Teachers.

No, because we actually need those things, so we would keep hiring people to do them, whereas useless makework jobs are the obvious thing to cut if there is less labor available.

Someone is paying scrum master and social media coordinators now. I doubt that they’re being paid because their employers hate money.

They're being paid because of the principal-agent problem, the inefficiency of large bureaucracies and the Red Queen's race created by the attention economy.

Work expands to fill all available time. Make less time available and there will be more pressure to stop doing useless work.

You think UBI will reduce the attention economy? We already ran that natural experiment. COVID. Screen time exploded. You're gonna need a lot more social media managers, and nursing will be a lot less appealing, no matter what you pay them.

You think COVID was a relevant experiment for that? Sure, if you close every physical gathering place then people spend more time on computers, but what does that have to do with a UBI?

Meanwhile the reason that people become nurses instead of social media managers is that nurses are paid more than social media managers and simultaneously attract people who want to feel like they're doing something meaningful instead of something useless, both of which would continue to be the case.

I'm sorry but if I have to convince you that the last 15 years have been a serious continuous backsliding of physical connection and physical spaces towards online spaces and algorithmic feed, this is not a fruitful conversation. This is obvious to me from all the data.

It's also obvious to me, that anytime any worker feels financially comfortable to stay home, a huge chunk of them will inevitably be hijacked by algorithmic feeds. Everything else is just some version of "pick yourself up by the bootstraps".

I am expecting Social Media Managers to be paid hand over foot to handle this transition even though they might find other work more meaningful (much like Real Estate Agents now, who would rather be doing something else, but the money is too good).

These are not reasons not to do UBI, but if there is economic devastation after, you can expect a quick reversal and a generation-wide flopping of the idea. So might as well fix these underlying issues as you do UBI.

Or it could give those people a reasonable bargaining position for their labor and they will be able to demand better wages or hours which would attract more people into those industries.

Nurses deserve more money than we can give them but their salaries are around $100K and Hospital Margins are 5%. So yea, UBI-style, the government pretty much just has to print the money to hand to the nurses to get them more money.

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