Comment by lesuorac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lesuorac | Hacker News Reader

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Most work is worthless for progress though.

No matter how many janitors, cooks, etc you have you'll never invent a rocket. Most hard working people are just doing societal plumbing not inventing. So losing a bunch of them won't impact the technological advancement of your society.

But, I still think there's a flawed premise here. Loosing a janitor to UBI means that they can occasionally help their friend with rocketry or some other pursuit they have interest in. Providing UBI means that geologists don't need to hoard data because they won't starve if they don't get a cut from it's usage. The people involved in technological break through are often doing it for self-interest or fame and don't stop once they've hit some financial breakpoint.

We're long past the point where we barely need anybody to work to actually feed/house everybody and at this point it's all gravy. For obvious reasons we couldn't feed/house everybody if they wanted to solely live in NYC but IIUC no UBI proposal is about that; UBI lets you live in below median-desired places without additional income.

But knowledge and academic research and industry R&D are key for progress though. All of which require hard work.

You also don't balance equations in your examples. Your janitor goes to help a friend with rocketry, which seems like a net gain, but someone else now needs to stop helping a friend to replace that janitor's position. Otherwise researches at that facility where janitor had worked will have to do janitor's work instead of doing their own. You call work cooks and janitors are doing worthless for progress, but researches (or children in school) need to eat, need to have functional workplace/classroom, etc. While they might not make progress directly, they enable other people to make progress.

> We're long past the point where we barely need anybody to work to actually feed/house everybody

Why would we need UBI then? The price of food and of housing everybody would be dirt cheap, if that were really true. Value of anything is completely relative (which I find that many people have trouble grasping). If something requires very little work, then it will be very very cheap in an ideal free market.

> But knowledge and academic research and industry R&D are key for progress though. All of which require hard work.

Do you think that the people who do valuable research are doing it purely because of financial motivation, or is something else going on there? The point I was trying to make is that giving people a basic income so that they won't literally starve if they don't work isn't going to completely eliminate all motivation to work. Some people will be motivated because they want more money than what UBI provides (as I think there's pretty ample evidence that desire for more money is something a lot of people seem to have independent of how stable their situation is), and plenty of people will be motivated to work for the myriad of other reasons that already motivate them. There's an argument you can make that the money from UBI will be enough to change the decision some people have, but exactly how many people that will be and the effects that have on society will depend quite a bit on how much money is being given. To me, that means the question isn't a binary question of "would UBI be good", but a spectrum of potential amounts of money (with $0 being the choice of "no UNI" that's presented as half of the original binary). Maybe there's a compelling argument that the value should be $0, but I've yet to see an argument for it that actually engages with it as a spectrum in the first place, which is why none of those arguments end up seeming particularly compelling.

Of course money is not the only thing that motivates people. But there's a lot of empirical evidence that it matters. A lot, unfortunately. And I say unfortunately as I would rather have it matter less. But me whishing it doesn't change the data.

UBI is a high concept pitch, that is memorable and catchy, but AFAIK it's not well supported either by psychological models or by empirical economics data. It gives some social safety net. Problem is that it gives a rather weak safety net. We can actually do better.

Can I ask you why exactly does it need to be UBI? If another system (more complex, with less sexy pitch) could provide a bigger safety net and have a more positive economic impact, wouldn't you rather choose that?

> Otherwise researches at that facility where janitor had worked will have to do janitor's work instead of doing their own.

Or facilities optimize to produce less trash so they can handle the newer trash load with less staff instead of paying extra.

> The price of food and of housing everybody would be dirt cheap ... then it will be very very cheap in an ideal free market.

We don't live in an ideal free market.

Food is extremely cheap to the point that the USG (effectively) sets price floors which prevents it from falling further. People do live on $3/day.

SROs not in say NYC are cheap as well. Everybody trying to live in the same major cities will never be cheap.

> Why would we need UBI then?

Activation Energy - Many people have no choice to work a dead-end or low-paying job because they cannot afford to take a break to find higher paying work more suited to their skills.

Opportunity Cost - The geologist example from above where you need to hide information from others so you don't suffer.

Societal unrest - Literally right now there's a president in the US whose base is upset about how the technological progress was not shared with them to the point they want to throw away any current advantages to go backwards in time.

> Or facilities optimize to produce less trash so they can handle the newer trash load with less staff instead of paying extra.

You are breaking the principle of keep all other conditions constant. If it's possible to optimize, why didn't they do it before? They were already motivated to maximize profits. Optimization is also an additional work which you are conveniently ignoring.

> Food is extremely cheap to the point that the USG (effectively) sets price floors which prevents it from falling further. People do live on $3/day.

Food prices sometimes fall below costs because agriculture is volatile. It's not proof that food is inherently "extremely cheap" to produce. Also, absolute prices cannot be easily compared between countries and low quality food has negative health effects.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-gd...

> Activation Energy - Many people have no choice to work a dead-end or low-paying job because they cannot afford to take a break to find higher paying work more suited to their skills.

If basic needs are so cheap that UBI can cover it, then doing low-paying job part time should also cover these basic needs. Something in your logic is not adding up.

> Opportunity Cost - The geologist example from above where you need to hide information from others so you don't suffer.

Opportunity cost is the loss of other alternatives when one alternative is chosen. Geologists not needing to hide information, because they don't need that money to survive is opportunity cost how? And even with UBI they would still benefit, if they get that additional money.

> Societal unrest - Literally right now there's a president in the US whose base is upset about how the technological progress was not shared with them to the point they want to throw away any current advantages to go backwards in time.

UBI fixes that issue how exactly?

> You are breaking the principle of keep all other conditions constant.

We've added a change; of course the world will change! But yeah sure if we introduce UBI and hold the rest of the world the same then UBI will have an unobservable effect.

> If it's possible to optimize, why didn't they do it before?

I mean people aren't actually rational so there's a million angles there. However, the cost of a janitor is going to go up with UBI as the opportunity cost has increased.

> then doing low-paying job part time should also cover these basic needs. Something in your logic is not adding up.

No, I just don't think you understand the world around you. Have you never heard of remote nomads? Plenty of people work full-time for parts of the year or part-time all of the year.

> Geologists not needing to hide information, because they don't need that money to survive is opportunity cost how?

Giving the information away for free costs you the money that you could've gotten for charging for it. When you need that money to survive then you have to restrict access. When you don't then you're able to volunteer it.

If we want to have any meaningful debate on what effect something has, we need to try to separate what are the reactions/side effects caused by it and to try to avoid additional confounding changes that were not caused by it. Trying to undo the negative side effect you don't like by, for example, introducing new technological innovations, or in your case a new optimization even though there is no increase in anything that would help do develop this new optimization, is making a confounding change.

While speculating what might happen in some particular cases can be fun, the real questions that need to be answered are regarding the macroeconomic effects of UBI. Starting with what % of GDP will be needed for UBI that will cover all the basic needs (food, housing, healthcare, etc.)? And then focus, not just on what few good Samaritans might do, but on how households, firms, and governments would respond at scale: labor supply, wages and prices, inflationary pressure, taxes, effects on productivity, growth, etc.

But I think our discussion has run its course. While we clearly have different opinions, it was still fun and I hope we both learned something. Be well!

> So losing a bunch of them won't impact the technological advancement of your society.

This reminds me of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide, where a civilization decides that phone sanitizers are useless, until removing them quietly collapses everything else. Declaring work “non-essential to progress” usually just means we don’t understand its role.

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