Why do we assume everyone should be working?
wilsoniumite.com
wilsoniumite.com
This sounds like the type of thing you hear from a person sipping a rare single-origin pour-over after their pilates class in Palo Alto.
In the real world, the average person would probably tell you something like "of course everyone should be working, I mean, I need to pay my rent, electricity bill, buy food, etc.".
Most people in this world work because they need to earn money to pay for basic necessities of life, not because they want to buy more stuff.
> Here is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate.
The economy is not society, though, and having a bunch of unhappy people who are poor and have nothing to do is probably not good for a country's well-being.
Until there's an alternative system that allows people to have their basic needs met without working, unemployment is a problem, and even if you had that system, we have no idea whether or not the masses will be content enough to stay sane and peaceful.
Imagine there’s a ratio of that category of people that’s a more optimal ratio than zero.
At least in the US, given how many people complain about the "welfare state", it seems like there's bound to be resentment on both sides.
And that still leaves the question of whether people will feel good enough about the situation to accept it. I could imagine a world in which some segment of the population has sufficient UBI to live a decent life and you'd still lots of people who felt something was missing. Especially in a world dominated by social media, I just don't see large numbers of people on UBI sitting around and writing novels, painting beautiful pictures, making music, etc. I see a lot of people who are restless and unfulfilled.
I read the author's post as a paean to letting people who can't contribute above the ever raising bar just exist securely as they please, rather than make whole countries suffer in the attempt to employ them.
You didn't get the same thing? Let me reread it
Belgium, the Netherlands and a lot of European countries, have a "leefloon" or "bijstand". It is a monthly payment from the government if you have no other sources of income or wealth. The name means it is "pay to stay alive". It's not a lot (1518.29 dollars today for a single person), but allows for the necessities.
So what happens is not _really_ unknown.
> In Belgium, roughly 4.35 million adults (aged 18 and older) are not working out of an adult population of about 9.5 million, around 45%.
Of those, roughly 3.95 million or 40% receive government income above the leefloon.
Do note that in the US (and loads of countries) people save for their own retirement, whereas in Belgium the government pays the retirement in a "workers today pay retirees today" system.
I'm not sure what you're aiming at with this question.
- a worker taking a few weeks of paid rest as a compensation for working several months,
- and a worker taking a few years of paid rest as a compensation for working several decades.
Whatever practicalities you may invoke to make them seem different, these situations are in essence the same.
For two, in context of the original article, what matters is "are they working" which the author clarified to "having a job". A person during the weekend has a job, a retired person does not. Again, no confusion.
For three, in the context of minimum guaranteed wage: a person during the weekend is not paid by the government, but by his employer. A retired person is paid his pension by the government. So one can go in the bucket of people that is actually receiving a minimum income already, the other one does not. So within the context of my first post, they also don't look the same.
If there is a parallel you are seeing and I'm missing, feel free to point it out. What I agree with is that from the person's perspective, they are both not working (in a sense not meant by the OP) and both receiving an income (though from a different source). But after that all similarity stops as far as I can tell.
Focus on this part. (Edit: I consider the choice of words either clumsy or insensitive)
"Wage to live on" is perhaps a more euphonic translation then.
Why? A few conditions to getting leefloon:
1) you have to rent (officially) and pay your rent (we'll start of easy)
2) you do not get enough money to pay rent in any of the big cities. Oh and the city and police will hate you since OCMW eats out of their budgets
The amount depends on your circumstances, but minimum wage in Belgium (which you won't get on "interim" jobs, btw) is 2200 (after tax).
Leefloon is: 800 if sharing an apartment, 1300 if you live by yourself, 1800 if you provide for at least one child.
3) you must give FULL insight to all your finances to the OCMW. If you have savings you are not eligible (and if you don't they can reclaim up to 10 years of benefits)
If you own a house you have to sell that and live off the proceeds until they run out before you become eligible for leefloon.
4) you must give FULL insight to your entire situation to the OCMW. If you have any sort of support, even outside of the country, you are not eligible (standard 10 year ...)
5) you must be willing to work, unless you have a recent certification from a Belgian doctor that you are permanently unable to (and you have to get that again, at your expense, every year). Oh and you have to prove this, at minimum once per month, but usually once per year. Going to the OCMW, wait 2 hours, list, with proof, what you've done to get a job since last time
This includes working for free "for the community", which means for city hall.
Oh, there are now several ways for employers to pay you less than minimum wage, as well as make you pay for insurance ("interim" jobs) and you can't refuse those jobs if on leefloon
6) you must let the OCMW do a "social investigation" into you and your entire situation (your home, your friends, your family, ...). This also means you have to accept "social help" (which many people are unwilling to do because, well because it sucks). OCMW wants you to take drug treatment? You have to? OCMW wants you to learn a language course? You have to show up. OCMW wants you to take a plumber course? You have to.
7) you have to justify ALL your expenses (meaning you have to get receipts for everything, down to every drink you buy in the supermarket), and go over them on a monthly basis with an OCMW employee.
8) you're not allowed to do any kind of studying (and can't have done so in the last 2 years)
9) OCMW is known for being very unpleasant to work with, to the point they need police protection in a lot of places (certainly in cities)
This is VERY different from UBI. Very, very, very different.
The way to cheat the system is to "work", but be fake long term ill. You get a job, you get a doctor to declare you long term ill (you know, take drugs before you do or something) and they can't fire you for 2 years. This will generally pay between double and triple leefloon for as long as it lasts.
Needless to say, the government is in a fight with doctors. The government wants to set a quota on doctors for how many patients they can declare long-term ill. And doctors complain, first about patients that are long term ill and patients' existnece doesn't respect quotas, second about patients that threaten (and commit) violence unless they get their long-term-ill certification. Obviously government also demands doctors don't refuse patients and almost never gives any kind of protection even in hospitals (meaning hospitals have to provide private security which is fine for huge hospitals but a problem for small ones. Also, obviously, such security will not protect patients' rights against doctors).
Obviously employers don't want this, since the government has decided they're paying most of the wage in this case. This is so expensive, even just one long term ill employee can make a company go out of business, and even huge companies have a big burden of people who do this.
The number of ex-youth services kids (who were removed from their parents against their will) who have given this system as a reason for their suicide is in the double digits now.
Neither Belgium, nor the Netherlands, have anything remotely resembling UBI. And that people avoid this system has nothing to do with inherent willingness to work.
I made a career change in my 40s into at a small (< 20 persons) company just above minimum wage. Once my employer decided I was worth keeping around, my wages increased. I was living in a cheap 1rm SRO (very hard to find), commuting 1.5h to Manhattan. Now after 11yrs I’ve purchased a coop in Queens. I put my success as due to low cost of living.
A guaranteed income _might_ have helped do this faster. The jobs I had (previous to now) directly lead me to cheap housing owned by that employer. My next 2 years were filled with labor abuse—long hours below minimum wage. But That community took care of its own. I don’t know how that scales up with everyone getting this Guaranteed Wage. Maybe this GW helps you rent at market rates, but I had some rent forbearance in the form of more abusive work in that little community. You can’t have that with government assistance. Work and housing at the bottom are precarious, and you need support which in my case came from the same private source.
I guess what I’m trying to get my head around is the idea government programs are inflationary but in a way that the underground economy are not.
Which I believe lead directly to T in p45.
I have family in WI and it’s about jobs. What’s more, they’re tired of ‘costal elites’ and ‘we live in a global economy; nothing we can do about offshoring.’
Most people make more than subsistence incomes; ergo, they are working for more than basic necessities.
So I think often there is this kinda contempt at someone not having a job.
But what I've often said, and may rephrase after I say it, is that people don't need a job, they need money and something to do.
And while it may not be those exact two things, perhaps it's different ones or more, I think a job is a compressed object that we assume needs to exist. And when we decompress it, we can see what people might actually need from it and provide those things in different ways.
So I'm excited to see you questioning the "job" object and curious to see how we might pull it apart and how that might actually solve some of the underlying problems that we can't seem to address.
Economics itself is the enemy. It is the source of that statement. It's so ubiquitous that we cannot even conceive of a life without it. The friend wanted scarce things, so naturally she wanted everyone in society working to produce those things for her.
Economics arise out of scarcity. There is not enough for everyone, therefore we must economize, we must decide who gets the limited amount of goods and resources.
We assume everyone should be working because if they aren't they are getting resources without contributing back their own resources, such as their limited time, body and cognition. That's an inherent unfairness, and is the "they're getting a free pass" sentiment that's all too common. I'm working, why aren't they?
To fix this, we must somehow achieve the fabled post scarcity society. Automate everything so thoroughly the price of everything becomes literally zero. This destroys the economy. It doesn't matter anymore whether people are working. There is no further need to economize if everything is abundant.
"I mean, I’d like to be able to buy more stuff" must still be satisfied, except she doesn't even need to buy it any longer, it just sort of materializes like it grows on trees. That is the dream.
Necessary technological upheaval aside, the one major roadblock to achieving the dream is artificial scarcity. We've got corporations conjuring up scarcity where there is none. The internet is the closest to artificial scarcity we've ever been, and it is so subversive it destroys their business models. The entire intellectual property industry must be wiped out if the dream is to be achieved.
sure but the people opposing automation are the people on the left - the socialists and neo-luddities. the ones that are for automation are the billionaires - this makes your class warfare rhetoric more complicated..
Every socialist wants post scarcity deep down. In fact, it's what Marx promised them since the beginning.
Socialism is an ideological and practical dead end. They must be resisted at all costs. It's still an economic model. They won't destroy the economy, they will centralize it in the hands of the state.
Don't seize the means of production, distribute them. Give everyone an AI and a replicator.
Personal manufacturing capabilities. We must attack things like the very concept of trillion dollar semiconductor fabs. Everybody should be able to make their own things. Just like we can magically conjure up free software on a laptop at home.
> neo-luddities
Don't know enough about this to write coherently about the subject.
> the ones that are for automation are the billionaires
Contemptible, but I believe we have better chances of success if we try to collapse capitalism from within.
Computers used to be the size of these fabs. Now we have them in our pockets. Not because we need to attack or rebel or something. It's because a lot of people worked very hard over many decades to make it possible. And it wasn't out of the goodness of their hearts -- it's because they had bills to pay and mouths to feed.
No matter how smart you are, it is not possible to create a GPU in one's basement. And no matter how holy you think you are, you need incentives to invest the time and effort to make this happen.
Is this really such a law of the universe or just insufficient technology?
Don't believe that even for a second.
> move towards communism
Has never happened, and I don't believe it ever will.
We have better chances of collapsing capitalism from within.
Isn't that what Marx says? Capitalism is unstable and collapses from within. He identifies socialism as the next stage (seizing the means of production) that then leads to communism (fully distributed ownership and no real state).
We may of course disagree that these stages are what would actually happen. So far when the state seizes the means of production, it becomes highly authoritarian and doesn't want to relinqish power and move towards actual communism.
I'm deeply suspicious of any socialist or communist who desires to implement a socialist state, however. His prophecy must come true naturally, it cannot be forced via government mandates.
Socialists want to get rid of capitalism as the economic model and then transition to post scarcity. I want to keep capitalism until it destroys itself by making everything abundant and automated.
There is no need to "seize" anything. We merely need personal manufacturing technology.
Still need food, water, energy and raw materials though. Some kind of collective action seems needed, however that is arranged politically.
Scarcity is a timeless fact of life in a finite world, it's not some abstract invention by "economics".
The problem isn't that more people want more things than they can have. The hardest possible life is that of a single human alone on a planet abundant in all natural resources. People and our inventions and our work and our ambitions to improve things for the next generation are the very things that reduce scarcity for other people we share this planet with.
I agree, and I think the rest of your post contains the key idea:
> reduce scarcity
Scarcity will never be zero, and it doesn't need to be. It just needs to be infinitesimal, close enough to zero for economics to become irrelevant.
Yet we still have political arguments about healthcare and I get irritated when my AI service says I'm out of quota, two things that didn't exist 4 or 5 generations ago. Unless you consider whiskey and opium to be healthcare. It's amazing what we've adapted to.
Typos like this (it's instead of possessive its) used to be bother me but now it's a hint that it might be human-authored, which is quaint, so it's stopped bothering me as much.
I haven't seen them in Dutch, so I wonder what the languages that do have typos have in common.
There's a widespread assumption that you should eventually save enough money to retire, which divides life into phases: working and retired. That's one reason behind feeling like you should accumulate more money: not so you can buy more stuff, but because you're not done building your retirement fund yet.
There are plenty of people who do not accept this.
We had to outlaw child labor because lots of people thought children should work. Students are shamed for taking on debt to pay for their schooling. People think they should have to work their way through school. Retirement is coming to be seen as a luxury. A great deal of jobs in America don't provide any kind of parental leave, so clearly some people think new parents should work. Same thing with sick leave. People go to work sick every day because that's what the system demands of them.
The only category that is even close is disabled people, but even then it's not universal. Goodwill thinks disabled people should work, and they have a legal exemption from minimum wage so they can employ them. There are also lots of people think the disabled should just be exterminated because they can't work.
- Arthur C. Clarke
And while there's plenty of push about lowering unemployment and so on, I don't think the concept of getting more people into the labor force, or back into it, is pushed by any group at all. On the contrary the push for immigration is largely shrugging our shoulders at the fact half of society isn't in the labor force.
Of course if somebody isn't in the labor force they still need to find some means to provide for themselves, but I think that's quite different than the assumption everybody should be working.
Taxes themselves are the hurt. You're ignoring that the taxes are collected from that person and that they could be spend on something that person would want more.
We need taxes, don't get me wrong, but it's entirely reasonable for people to have an opinion on what's done with the money they worked for.
As for everyone needs to work because "I want to get more stuff", well I guess we'll need a leap in human thinking. We once evolved from hunter gatherers into growing our own food, so it might not be hopeless. I think this is an important topic for the future of the world.
> ere is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate.
Well, if they don't put in effort, however small, and get resources, others will try to be stupid too. Or, they would not get enough resources, starve and those with empathy will be very vocal and use shame.
If more people were employed during less time, we would also need more administration.
Not to mention that there are at least two sectors where there can never be enough employees: medicine and education.
So I can see how naturally the system has prioritised this way of working, but despite the efficiency I think we need to do something to normalise 20-30 hours as full time. Give people less iphones and more hours in their life.
This combined with doing something about housing prices seems like it could work.
That's also why building homes is so costly. Transporting non-local materials costs more than making them near. Then you need to support builders, plumbers, electricians...
That's not the world our Overlords want for us. They want us to literally work ourselves to death making them richer than Gods as cheaply as possible, and then fall over into a convenient nearby pit and bury ourselves for their convenience.
Same thing was also happening in Gulags.
This is assuming that the purpose of "job creating" policies is to create jobs, as opposed to more abstract economic stimulus while trying to win the votes of people who happened to get a new job around that time. It helps if the unemployment rate goes down, because that generates positive reporting, but it's not required. People find new jobs all the time, after all, even when unemployment is rising on net. Without the economic stimulus, most of them would still have a job, though maybe a slightly different one.
> Labor is a resource, like water, and yet we do not drain the oceans with the same fervour as we employ people, trying to find a job for every drop.
This analogy doesn't make any sense! It is fake-poetic nonsense.
> When we have implicit assumptions such as these, it drives our decision-making
The implicit assumption that Labor is like an ocean?
> That if we want more stuff, and better lives, everyone should be working harder?
Every product we see around us, every service provided, is provided by paid or unpaid work. I would rather question that "more stuff equals better lives", but work equals stuff.
> Here is a very simple statement which may sound a bit mean: it is entirely feasible that giving a job to a “stupid” person, regardless of how much we try and train them, might cost the economy more than we benefit, in aggregate. Disagree all you want on the definition of “stupid”, but you cannot deny that such a bar exists,
There is virtually endless work to do. Even a a very stupid (not malicious) person can pick up trash from the street, dog walk doggies, dog sit Alzheimer patients, clean windows, etc. There are sheltered workshops to extract/provide (viewpoints differ) work out of literally intellectually disabled people, even if minimum wage has to be lowered to a single dollar per hour.
It is a valid perspective from the worker to find "stupid" work not prestigious/fulfilling/boring, but it will create economic value.
i'm sure there are a few people like that and they should be in disability or other government programs. but vast majority do provide value and should be working.
Looks shallowly philosophical, based on "me and my friend". Equating "economy" to some small subset of white collar work.
Have to say world is much bigger place and there are other jobs than filling in tables in Excel spreadsheet.
In that sense, not everyone (who is eligible to work or looks like they are working) is working in the first place.
If you don’t want to work, but you are somehow able to get by without having your existence assured by redistributing the property of someone else, more power to you.
So if most people work only to ensure their survivability and having their needs met, is that a high quality resource compared to what the intelligence on tap can accomplish now? Wouldn’t splitting up the workforce into people who care and are driven to solve a problem be more effective in harnessing this tech? I don’t have the answers to those but it’s an idea I find myself coming back to often.
Another hot take only slightly tangential to this is that I think most people are better off honing their craft in the arts and humanities, domains where the multimodality of expression can serve to make the models even smarter and better reflections of ourselves; but that’s its own rabbit hole lol
But to me it’s about you trying to contribute.
I don’t want to give my hard earned tax money to some lazy dude not working and smoking weed all day.
But if said guy worked as many hours as I did, just not profitably but through a sponsored job, I’d be fine with sponsoring him with my money.
Because he’s still contributing. He is still adding value, even if not as much as somebody else could.
Since this sounds very American, I'll assume you're American.
In which case the good news is you don't have to worry about that. More of your hard-earned tax money will go to bombing poor people overseas than will ever go to supporting the weed habit of the lazy poor in your own country.
1. Working gives me satisfaction and money.
2. A lot more people are doing worse things with my tax money.
3. I don't envy that lifestyle in the slightest... if somebody chooses it: ok. Most of the times i pity the fool who thinks such an existence is fulfilling. The ones I know who had the lifestyle in the past were deeply unsatisfied iirc.
Exclusion is a greedy short-term strategy. Are you also against public schools? I mean surely, the conclusion of your reasoning is that a lot of those students aren't going to participate in the labor market. Why bother?
Why you should not be working and i should?
I disagree with almost all is written here, and not because I'm a socialist but because art and poetry and philosophy exist ...
Can you expand your point? I don't see how their existence leads to disagreeing with the author, and in fact I see the opposite.
We can solve #1 by just vetoing the current government and replacing it. But #2 is difficult to solve because we should not be comfortable imposing reproductive control on humans from the government. So popular education may be a good thing to focus on: lower birth rate, lower problems, higher productivity.
Basically we should stop being assholes to people in poor countries and treat them as equals. This would go a long way to solving many problems in the world.
As for #2, as salient as the intro sequence to Idiocracy was, it seems like the only thing I’m hearing about recently is how far under the population replacement rate all developed countries already are. If we can set aside the tribalism long enough to start seeing them as our (society’s) kids, then it just becomes another distribution / investment problem being blocked by #1 (corrupt extractive leadership)