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Comment by jkarneges | Hacker News Reader

If nobody is required to do the "shitty jobs", I wonder if those jobs would increase in value as less people do them? Maybe having a waiter at a restaurant would become a luxury.

Perhaps all the jobs would continue to exist but there'd be some very interesting rebalancing.

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Robots and automation. I think in near future (put your number here) only cool jobs will be available for humans and shitty jobs will be done by robots. So, we need to find a way how to feed and entertain let say 90% of population.

Very likely. Think of how uncommon household servants are today compared to before the industrial revolution. Now only the super-rich have them, as a rule. The rest of us get by with automation (washing machines, vacuum cleaners), with the occasional hiring of a temporary "servant" when neccessary (e.g., calling a cab compared to having a dedicated chauffeur, or having a landscaper or cleaning service come in once in a while).

I'm almost certain household servants have always been for the rich.

I'm curious what makes you think otherwise?

No, middle-class people had servants back then. It wasn't just the rich.

The lower class, of course, largely were servants.

The industrial revolution opened up other avenues for employment.

Edit: see, for example, http://www.bl.uk/victorian-britain/articles/the-victorian-mi...

"A middle class woman was entirely dependent on a supply of domestic servants, ranging from the untrained ‘slavey’ to a staff of several highly trained specialists."

> I wonder if those jobs would increase in value as less people do them?

Sure. Although technically it's not that the value of the job changes (to the employer, the value of the job is basically the same), it's that wages go up due to the decrease in the labour supply.

yeah what I fear it would happen is either all wages go down of an equivalent amount, or an inversion of wages according to job satisfaction, or a cycle on inflation with prices surging and minimum wages following

in this experiment they can test the latter, since the scale is too small to affect global pricing.

I wonder how far the 'unregulated' goes: could one pocket the monthly allowance and then live on a cheap city abroad while maintaining citizenship and privileges?

at the very least this should promote entrepreneurship: given social security that what I'd do. I can't risk anything now as I have no savings and live in a country that offer zero (monetary) supports to startups via neither private nor public capitals.

Just go to a country with really high labor costs. This is exactly what you'll see. Lots of work goes undone because people just don't care enough to pay for it. Usually just cosmetic or convenience stuff.

Actually, that happens in the United States.

I read an article a while back that some types of manual labor are having a really hard time filling positions because nobody wants to do them for what they can afford to pay, and IIRC, they were already paying significantly higher than minimum wage.

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