Comment by conception
6 months ago
This is what I think the biggest benefit to having a significant UBI. Sure, lots of folks who currently are in “bullshit jobs” would sit around and watch one screen or another but! A lot, probably more than we imagine, would get bored and… do something. Often that something would be amazing.
But lizard brains gotta keep folks under their thumb and horde resources. Alas.
I'm of the same belief. We're too antsy of creatures. I know in any long vacation I'll spend the first week, maybe even two (!), vegging out doing nothing. But after that I'm itching to do work. I spent 3 months unemployed before heading to college (laid off from work) and in that time taught myself programming, Linux, and other things that are critical to my career today. This seems like a fairly universal experience too! Maybe not the exact tasks, but people needing time to recover and then want to do things.
I'm not sure why we think everyone would just veg out WALL-E style and why the idea is so pervasive. Everyone says "well I wouldn't, but /they/ would". I think there's strong evidence that people would do things too. You only have to look at people who retire or the billionaire class. If the people with the greatest ability to check out and do nothing don't, why do we think so many would? People are people after all. And if there's a secret to why some still work, maybe we should really figure that out. Especially as we're now envisioning a future where robots do all the labor.
Music is always something that comes to mind for me; in the UK there's a long history of excellent music with strong working class roots, but as the economy becomes more precarious in the UK (housing costs are insane here) music has increasingly turned into the province of people who are more well-off because they have to worry less about their daily bread. As a result a lot of it gets a bit homogenised and predictable in my opinion.
I think people are drawn to labour but not drudgery, and a lot of jobs don't really do much to differentiate between the two. I reckon if less people had to worry about putting bread on the table what we'd see is a massive cultural revival, a shot in the arm to music and the arts.
>Firstly, you must be skint and on the dole. Anybody with a proper job or tied up with full time education will not have the time to devote to see it through. Also, being on the dole gives you a clearer perspective on how much of society is run. If you are already a musician stop playing your instrument. Even better, sell the junk. It will become clearer later on but just take our word for it for the time being.
- The Manual, by the KLF
UBI isn't going to get us there. Give everyone more cash and the rent-seeking _WILL_ suck harder. Same problem with blindly raising the minimum wage and not instead addressing the root issue.
Basic econ 101: inelastic demand means supply can be as expensive as the limited number who are lucky enough to get it are able to afford.
Bell Labs, generally think tanks, they work by paying _enough_ to raise someone to the capitalist society equivalent of a Noble.
Want to fix the problem for everyone in society, not just an 'intellectual elite'? Gotta regulate the market, put enough supply into it that the price is forced to drop and the average __PURCHASE POWER__ raises even without otherwise raising wages.
This has been tried, very honestly, and it mostly sucked, then crashed. The calculation argument [1] kills it. The optimization problem which the market solves in a chaotic and decentralized way through price discovery and trading is intractable otherwise, not with all the computing power of the planet. It also requires prediction of people's needs (ignoring desires), and it's a problem more ill-posed than prediction of weather.
The market of course needs regulation, or, rather, stewardship: from protection of property rights all the way to limiting monopolies, dumping, etc. The market must remain free and varied in order to do its economic work for the benefit of the society. No better mechanism has been invented for last few millennia.
Redistribution to provide a safety net to those in trouble is usually a good thing to have, but it does not require to dismantle the market. It mostly requires an agreement in the society.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
That’s the advantage to UBI.
A revenue neutral UBI check at some subsistence level and killing all other government assistance including lower tax brackets would in the short term significantly lower the standard of living for many low income Americans and boost others. However people would try and maximize their lifestyle and for most people that would be through working. Others would opt out and try and make being really poor work for them.
Essentially you remove central planning around poverty and as the government stops requiring rent stabilized apartments etc. Which in the short term pushes a lot of poor people out of major cities but simultaneously puts upward pressure on wages to retain those workers and pushes down rents via those suddenly available apartments. It doesn’t actually create or destroy wealth directly, you just get a more efficient allocation of resources.
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> and it mostly sucked
Citation needed. If you're referring to the USSR, please pick an economic measure that you think would have been better, and show why the calculation problem was the cause of its deficiency. USSR was incredibly successful economically, whether it was GDP growth, technological advancement, labor productivity, raw output, etc. Keep in mind all of this occurred under extremely adverse conditions of war and political strife, and starting with an uneducated agrarian population and basically no capital stock or industry.
The Austrian economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe writes of Hayek's calculation problem:
> [T]his is surely an absurd thesis. First, if the centralized use of knowledge is the problem, then it is difficult to explain why there are families, clubs, and firms, or why they do not face the very same problems as socialism. Families and firms also involve central planning. The family head and the owner of the firm also make plans which bind the use other people can make of their private knowledge […] Every human organization, composed as it is of distinct individuals, constantly and unavoidably makes use of decentralized knowledge. In socialism, decentralized knowledge is utilized no less than in private firms or households. As in a firm, a central plan exists under socialism; and within the constraints of this plan, the socialist workers and the firm’s employees utilize their own decentralized knowledge of circumstances of time and place to implement and execute the plan […] within Hayek’s analytical framework, no difference between socialism and a private corporation exists. Hence, there can also be no more wrong with the former than with the latter.
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Concepts like this would definitely be in play and misguided UBI could result more in preservation of status quo than allowing abundance to spread.
That's why experiments need to be made.
Now with research pay Bell was right up there with other prestigious institutions, elite but not like the nobility of old.
I would say very much more like a "Gentleman" scientist of antiquity, whether they were patrons or patronized in some way, they could focus daily on the tasks at hand even when they are some of the most unlikely actions to yield miracles.
Simply because the breakthroughs that are needed are the same as it ever was, and almost no focused tasks lead in that direction ever, so you're going to have to do a lot of "seemingly pointless" stuff to even come up with one good thing. You better get started right away and don't lift your nose from the grindstone either ;)
> Basic econ 101: inelastic demand means supply can be as expensive as the limited number who are lucky enough to get it are able to afford.
In the same basic econ 101, you learn that real estate demand is localized. UBI allows folks to move to middle of nowhere Montana.
To do what? People want to live near three sorts of things:
Social connections like family / friends / potential mates
Livelihood needs like education / jobs / foods (1st world, the food they like is fresh / better; historic / other food exists!)
General QoL climate / beauty / recreational opportunities
Many big cities cost more because it's where the opportunity is, or where their family that previously/currently prospered from that opportunity resides. For many of us on HN it's where the sort of jobs we'd be good at contributing to society exist. Even if some corp opened an office in the middle of Montana there wouldn't be anything else there as other opportunities. Heck given UBI, I'd rather join Star Fleet with awesome healthcare for all, cool technical challenges, and anything other than Starbase 80.
UBI might work in the short-term, but as more and more people are having kids (and learning from parents on UBI, to also get UBI), we would run out of people actually working and paying the taxes to support it.
Which is exactly the thing they tested multiple times and found to be wrong.
People get bored doing nothing, and enjoy contributing to their community.
No, they're not going to go get shitty factory jobs. But that's OK, because all those jobs are now automated and done by robots.
But they are going to go and do something useful, because that's what people do. The anti-UBI trope that "given basic income, everyone will just sit around on their arses watching TikTok videos" has been proven wrong in every study that measured it.
> No, they're not going to go get shitty factory jobs. But that's OK, because all those jobs are now automated and done by robots. Nonsense. There are tens of millions of jobs that cannot be automated in the near future, which people would certainly never do if they had UBI. America just outsources them to poorer countries, so you're clueless.
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This assumes that most people would be satisfied with UBI and not attempt to make more money.