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Comment by panglott | Hacker News Reader

'Jeremy Rifkin, author of “The Third Industrial Revolution,” said a basic income would enable people to volunteer their time in areas like elder care, child care, culture and the environment.'

This seems like the most important sentence in the article. Raising children, caring for the elderly, editing Wikipedia, free software, &c. creates huge amounts of unremunerated value. If people were freed from economic drudge work, they would have free time not only for leisure, but that kind of valuable work as well.

Japan for example has a time-based currency to coordinate elder care, but that sort of thing will always be an issue of sharing volunteer labor. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11657006

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Cynical me. I don't see people who've never had to work, doing more than watching the latest Reality TV program and complaining about the quality of the free food. Doing those other things is all about cultural values, and nothing about free time.

try watching TV non stop for a week or two - it gets boring and annoying, real fast. there will be people who will watch TV all day when they don't have to work, but there will also be people who would spend their time doing useful things. Even if the latter group is just a fraction, it would benefit everyone immensely in the long run. After all, only a few thousand people edit wikipedia out of 7 billion of us, only a few thousand people write open source software but all of humanity benefits from it, right?

Pollyanna. Think about a generation of teenaged boys with nothing to do but watch television. The carnage!

Selection bias right there in "people who've never had to work"

What if you took people who have always had to work/chosen to work and give them resources to free up their time. Of course, you'd probably get a lot of bad things as well as good since sudden changes will always generate some churn and chaos short-term.

Think about this for yourself. If you didn't have to work, or only had to work 25-30 hours a week what would you do with the extra time?

Now apply that to every middle class individual. Sure some would spend the time in less productive or even harmful ways. But others would spend it even more wisely than you imagine yourself spending it.

Sure. But steady state, nobody's working. Us old guard will die off and leave just young'uns that never had to work. That was the idea I was getting at.

If you old people would stop working and retire, the young people would have work to do. What's that? you didn't save anything after the best financial boom time in history? You have to work until you're 80? Well, then stop complaining.

The topic was of a Basic Income that meant no one has to work any more unless they want to.

To be fair, a lot of market-based savings schemes were wiped out in 2008.

My in-laws, who diligently spent their entire lives working boring jobs in banks (as accountants and such, not wall street), who prepared for their retirement by paying off their modest $250,000 home (in Nashville, it's nicer than the dollar amount makes it seem), found themselves screwed when they went to retire, as their 401Ks were now worth fractions of what they'd expected.

So they're still working, extending their retirement in the hopes that their portfolios will recover, or that they can continue earning enough while they're healthy that they can offset it.

It literally never occurred to me until your comment that someone might resent them for trying to earn a living for themselves without burdening the rest of society.

I gotta wonder, what were they invested in? I just checked my records, and my investments went down about 35% in 2008, and have long since recovered. I'm not a particularly good investor or anything. How do they manage to have their investments drop to fractions, implying much greater than 50% loss, and still have not recovered in 2015?

Not trying to judge or anything, just wondering what the deal is, because from everything I've seen around me, that is far from typical.

In the case of my dad's 401k: The company's fund manager actively traded shares on the way down, repeatedly moving the balance from declining symbols to those that seemed more stable but were really just slightly behind the curve. ...Then did the same thing when things started recovering, trying to target the stocks that seemed to be going up the fastest. Quite literally decimated their retirement.

Thanks for clarifying. Do you think that people will sit listlessly in front of their televisions if they don't have to work to provide for basic necessities? Even if not everyone would do that do you think that the majority, or a even large minority would?

I work, I watch TV, I play with my kid and help him with homework, I make some edits to Wikipedia, I study stuff online, &c. &c. When I was between jobs recently I did more of all of those things—except TV.

I don't know many people in the rentier class that have never had to work, but my understanding is that the status quo already allows them to spend all the time they want watching reality TV ;)

I don't see people who've never had to work

Other than the idle rich, I don't see many people who've never had to work either. I've seen people unable to work, and I've seen people denied the opportunity to work, but the idle poor are really not as prevalent as people seem to think.

The topic was of Basic Income and the utopian future where nobody has to work if they don't want to. Some writer painted a bright picture where everybody would be volunteering at the senior center. I disagreed.

Who are the people to be freed of the economic drudge work?

How will the economic drudge work then get done, and by whom?

Note that this comment was in response to an article about automation causing a fall in the labor share of the economy.

Thank you for that clarification.

As I understand it, the increased productivity resulting from increased automation will reduce the need for human beings to engage in economic drudge work.

That seems entirely reasonable to me.

However, it sounds as if the benefit from the increased productivity is to be taken from the person who produced it, and redistributed to others.

In other words, if I own a factory, and I install some robots to paint the cars, and thus no longer need to hire people to paint cars, the economic benefits from the increased automation are to be used to help provide others with a guaranteed income.

Is this roughly accurate?

No, thank YOU for the clarification. ;) I see your point, this is a hard question.

Automation here is making production a function of capital rather than a function of labor. Certainly legacy property rights would be with the idea that the owner of capital would have all rights to the benefits of the productivity improvements in this case.

Maybe this is a fallacious slippery slope, or projecting too far forward as a means of deflecting your point, but if this process can be extended indefinitely, you might have a small rentier class who have inherited their unearned wealth/capital and a large mass of displaced workers whose labor is obsolete in the scarcity economy.

If your factory is the whole economy, it sounds like a massive decrease in utility to throw all those workers on the street when robots have taken all their jobs. Besides, I don't know who you'll sell your cars to if you fire all your workers. Redistribution seems like a less-bad option.

There's a deeper level, I think, where those legacy property rights are built upon a certain kind of social compact. And if the owners of capital make large numbers of the population economically obsolete, then the social compact has got to change. If the ethical basis of the law is built upon preserving property rights rather than human flourishing, it seems like we'd all be replaced by robots in the end.

I appreciate the thoughtful discussion. Thank you for that.

In your second paragraph, I'm going to suggest that automation is a function of capital, intellectual effort, personal will and the freedom to act in one's self-interest. Remove any of these and I don't think automation is likely to occur.

Thank you for the comment about the rentier class and inheritance.

If a person owns a certain amount of wealth, and he gives it to someone else, should anyone else somehow obtain title to some or all of it? I say no, on the basis that this undermines property rights.

If I own a gold coin, and give it to my daughter, by what justification does anyone else claim even a fraction of that coin?

I recognize that many people will have a different view. I'm genuinely interested in the logical basis for different views.

As regards the large mass of displaced workers, whose labor is said to be obsolete in the scarcity economy.

I wish to ask, is it really, absolutely, the case that these men and women, if they are free to use their minds, and do choose to use their minds, cannot be productive in a changed economy?

I don't know a lot about it, but I'm wondering if the idea that these people will necessarily be unemployed forever, because "all they have to offer is their labor" (quotes mine) is a projection of the mind-body dichotomy?

I have to get back to work, but in closing, your comment about utility catches my eye as well. For the record, I'm not an advocate of utilitarianism, if that's part of this discussion.

In closing, thank you for a thoughtful reply.

Interesting discussion indeed. Personally I think past some point of automatisation and concentration of production means, these means will need to be made a public resource in some way.

Ideally the owners of the factories/robot armies will have an upside to that deal, but I think once a huge proportion of the population cannot produce and the basic goods are completely delivered by a few private parties,the social balance would collapse and could lead to a revolution.

About employment, I think the notion of work would change, and we'get back to a concept of occupying people. Of course entertainment would be of super high value, but one could imagine that fields with very low return on time invested like research, social care, artisanal craft or art/monuments building would also raise in popularity, with some additional sense of urgency so people emotionaly engage with their 'work'.

In that system people still get value from their work, don't need to feel assisted under a 'basic income' banner. What they do just doesn't affect production of basic goods anymore.

Also religion and gambling and cruel games would be on the rise.

It depends how UBI is funded. If it's based on consumption then the people buying your cars end up paying more (say 20%), the additional amount goes to fund UBI. When you buy raw materials and machinery for your factory you pay more (just as the consumers do) which goes to fund UBI. So instead of 10 robots maybe you can only purchase 8 for your factory, initially.

In most places within the US we pay state and local sales taxes today. If we eliminated income tax, AMT, and other taxes on earnings and instead went after consumption, I think it would be a simpler system with fewer loopholes. Obviously transactions between individuals wouldn't be taxed unless there was a way to enforce it (e.g. make eBay capture that 20% consumption tax) but we have that issue today with the states trying to figure out how they can tax online sales.

Or, perhaps some of those "volunteer" activities could become actual jobs???

Actually, in a sense it is a job. The author and probably most people here are unfamiliar with the concept, but the idea of "maximizing utility" is a major theme in economics. The whole goal of automation and productivity increases is to enable that.

>would enable people to volunteer their time in areas like elder care, child care, culture and the environment.'

We recently went through a several year period of mass unemployment where many people had free time and those things didn't happen.

people did not have free time, they were scrambling to get the bills paid.

Personally, I was unemployed over the summer in 2008 (four months). Now I had a good severance package, and there were very few job interviews, so overall I think I spent maybe a few hours a week on looking for work. But I didn't really accomplish much during that time (I was much more productive writing open source over a 1.5 week holiday break a year or two back). I guess that must have been because I was so burned out from not having any real vacation for 10 years, that 4 months of downtime (without scrambling to pay bills, etc) caused me to just zone out at the camper and sleep most of the time.

That seems a bit glib, seeing as how many of those people were probably spending a great deal of time worrying about keeping their home and trying to find new employment.

Likely you will end up with people with free time doing what a good number who have no real jobs do, sit on their ass and watch tv or surf the net.

Nothing currently today prevents any person unemployed and receiving assistance from doing what he claims people would do IF ONLY except society does not penalize sloth and laziness.

Before we get onto the give everyone an income train we need to do some work getting people back into the idea of contributing whether they are compensated directly or not. The idea of take take take without doing giving of your own should gradually moved into the idea of simple repulsiveness. This is where the internet/tv come into play.

That culture only exists today because if you ever live in poverty you develop a mindset of a vulture. You need to seize opportunity and give nothing to maximize your position because you are so far behind.

It is socially toxic, and only exists because you can fall through the bottom of society and become forgotten and discarded. It is treading water just to survive. It makes people hostile, selfish, and bitter. Plenty of studies show how poverty will change your brain chemistry for the worse.

Of course the first generation of UBI would be a trying time. It is correcting so many social wrongs at once it upsets your worldview completely. But I cannot imagine anyone beyond the first batch ever having anything but significantly increased happiness, social cohesion, voluntarism, and enterpenurism, because once you can (hate to say it) cull the damaged goods, you have a society where everyone can take risks but always keep a roof over their heads and food in their bellies, and be as generous as they want while always having a bed to sleep on. That is such a huge psychological advantage for society.

Which is kind of why I find UBI such a no brainer nowadays. You can approach it from so many angles - cultural, microeconomic, macroeconomic, social, psychological, and every one of them in and of itself has so many benefits it seems insane not to implement it at almost any cost just for those benefits alone. But they are not alone, it helps in almost every problem center of the modern world.

I couldn't really disagree more.

In the US, the lower economic rungs are either working incredibly hard for little gains (try making a livable wage when most employers only offer part time hours that are constantly changing, preventing you from getting health insurance or secondary jobs), living off of welfare, or some combination thereof and also working in the drug/sex/theft trade.

That to me shows that most people have a natural interest in gain above the minimum for survival and an interest in working for it. Unfortunately, most of that work isn't really benefiting society or the people doing it, and it creates a poverty loop.

Even if you believe humans are naturally lazy, what is the takeaway? When their labor value decreases to next to nothing, what value is all their willingness to work for survival?

> we need to do some work getting people back into the idea of contributing whether they are compensated directly or not

First thing though, the scenario analysed here is a scenario where there is not enough thing to contribute to.

Let's imagine that everything can be done through a computer and only a few million developers worldwide are required to program the machines. Do you want 10 billion uninsterested people fight to get the job or only the motivated ones ? If there are 2 persons for 1 job, that is stupid to chose the one that hates it and just want to be home doing something else.

Secondly, considering that our whole economy is driven be consumption ( nowadays, there is virtually unlimited amount of money available on the investment side ), so a guy consuming the whole day is playing a bigger part in society than a guy working 12 hours a day and saving his money.

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