Comment by porridgeraisin
6 months ago
> 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.
The key to universal basic income is that it is basic. There are many jobs that cannot be automated but with the right incentive even under UBI people will do them.
What incentive exists for someone to work in a coal mine - which is both physically taxing and guarantees lung problems by 40 - other than earning enough money so that their kids do not have to do the same thing?
You can replace coal mines above with a million other things, I chose a dramatic, niche example.
The fact is that in recorded history, there have been almost no instances of economic setups without the downtrodden. I like efforts like UBI being made to address that, but it is important to address the fact that UBI itself is not the final solution. It is still possible that we reach a working solution eventually(who knows when?) by exploring things like UBI though. A lot of online discourse simply lies in a narrow band of "UBI = communism which didn't work in the specific instance of the soviet union" and on the other side "opposing UBI = oligarch".
So you're saying that shitty, dangerous, or unpleasant jobs would need to be paid a high enough wage that doing them is a valid option for people? I totally agree.
And that in turn, would drive the economics of building robots to replace the people because the people are so expensive.
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In recorded history there have been plenty of economic setups that have very few or no downtrodden. You just gotta go and read anthropology. Another thing to take into account is where we are as a society - and where we can go. Both with automation and gear we can make such work easier, and in a society where we have more control where to direct research (as opposed to VCs seeking maximum profit) we can focus on solving bad jobs like that. Finally - incentives. Why have someone be a coal miner so that their kids do not have to starve, when we can have it be an exclusive and hard workplace, that is both celebrated in public and comes with the pay package of a director or executive. The coal miner certainly does more and more useful work than the average tech founder.
But I agree UBI is not the final solution. The final solution involves stuff like abolishing wage labor, circular economies, non-transferable labor-time tokens and democractic management.