Comment by rubenflamshep
18 days ago
Pretty good article until the bizarre post-script where they fall back on the tired "people derive meaning from their work" for why UBI is bad.
18 days ago
Pretty good article until the bizarre post-script where they fall back on the tired "people derive meaning from their work" for why UBI is bad.
Meaning or not, UBI doesn't work because the math doesn't work.
> bizarre
It isn't bizarre at all. Without work people devolve into playing video games and smoking pot in their mom's basement.
I remember summer vacations from school. It was great for a while, but soon I was looking forward to getting back to school.
I have been off work for over 6 months now. I have been doing so many projects, and exploring so many places, working out, eating healthy, learning, and spending very little money doing so. I actually even quit smoking pot after doing it daily for 10 years. It's been amazing, and I'd rather never go back to work. I don't get how people can get so bored. There's so much to do and see.
From my lived experience you are an outlier. Potentially an extreme one at that.
Where I grew up the people who didn’t work almost universally turned into consumers of everything and creators of basically nothing. The exceptions were retirees who had a lifetime if work experience prior to their idle years. For those folks it was gardening and other similar hobbies that provided meaning but not much output for society as a whole.
I think if you offered the entire population the ability to do no work other than what they felt like doing, exceedingly few people would be motivated to do the needful. A few more would be motivated to do things like create art and otherwise contribute back to other people but I am thinking along the lines of the 80/20 rule here.
I think our future if we ever figured out automation and UBI looks a lot like Wall-E vs some sort of utopia. In fact I believe that sort of setup is as close to a utopian society as I can imagine being realistic.
I did apartment maintenance for a place where about half the recipients had paid for rent, utilities, and bare necessities provided by the government. It was easy to play the odds and know which apartment was which the moment you stepped foot into one. It’s not a perfect correlation to what UBI would look like for many reasons, but it’s closer than the average upper middle class suburbanite imagines people will act like if given the opportunity.
What projects? You are starting from a completely different baseline than the average hypothetical UBI recipient.
I think UBI advocates may have a point once you're 2-3 generations into some sort of UBI system. But bootstrapping that system is not possible, most people will revert to do nothing of value to society, no projects, nothing.
I generally agree, but I think for some of the most interesting problems in computer science you need resources that only companies can provide and thats basically work.
1 reply →
Best wishes to you! I'm retired myself, but I work full time (on D). Yale is hosting a symposium on D in April, and I'll be a speaker at it.
3 replies →
> Without work people devolve into playing video games and smoking pot in their mom's basement.
I have no problem finding fulfilling and meaningful projects outside of my work! There are many people like me :)
> There are many people like me
I'm sure there are. Doesn't mean most people are like that. Consider retirees. Some find meaningful activities, many just rot away out of not having a purpose.
What percentage of people currently living off of welfare are doing meaningful work?
8 replies →
Always such glowing recommendations of human kind from techies.
People devolve like that when they have no purpose or opportunities. Which I’m sure would happen with the real goal of UBI: barely subsistence support in order to grow a larger pool of reserve labor while the rich (who are not degenerate at all[1]) live large.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46929869
America offers a free education for all. People are free to move to anyplace in the country. Historically, people migrated to where the opportunities were. Americans are free to start a business any time.
Purpose, though, comes from within.
Your anecdote is not compliant with reality. Every test of UBI so far shows that people continue to work.
There’s no way to test UBI without implementing it fully. Any experiment that gives people a no-strings-attached stipend isn’t accounting for the fact that the money has a negligible impact on the economy and produces no meaningful change in the workforce. Plus, all of these experiments are time-bound. Participants know the payments will stop.
I also get the feeling that such experiments just prove that giving people money makes them happier. But there’s nothing to account for the fact that prices in the market haven’t changed, the tax structure hasn’t changed, and no goods or services experienced any shortages.
> Every test of UBI so far shows that people continue to work.
I'm not aware of any realistic UBI tests. Could you point me to any?
The ones I'm aware of were either or both:
1. Time limited, so participants were aware that they needed to still have a job or at least be employable after the experiment has concluded.
2. Were funded externally, so participants only reaped the benefits of UBI but didn't incur the drawbacks (i.e. didn't have to fund the program by much higher income taxes) which could have discourage them from working.
It was basically a supplementary source of income - money for nothing for a limited time period, not an actual UBI program.
A test of UBI is not UBI. It's not possible to show how UBI works in a isolated test.
1 reply →
I suspect it was because the UBI wasn't enough to live on.
3 replies →
> Without work people devolve into playing video games and smoking pot in their mom's basement.
Skill issue
>Without work people devolve into playing video games and smoking pot in their mom's basement.
Some people might, others wouldn't. Not everyone is a pot-smoking teenager.
People like ice cream, too. But not everyone.
Yup, there are adults and alcohol too.
It's universal basic income, not universal extensive income. If someone is a minimal drain on society, so what? We have lots of stuff.
Hard working billionaires famous for succesdully working devolved into abuse island, real saltiness over anyone saying sexual harrasment is wrong and basically conspiracy to end democracy.
UBI guy playing games in moms basement comes accross as harmless in comparison.
UBI doesn’t mean people don’t work. It means work is partially decoupled from basic needs.
People would work for two reasons. One is to make extra money and afford a lifestyle beyond what UBI provides. The second is to… do things that are meaningful. If people derive meaning from work then that’s why they’ll work.
Some people will just sit around on UBI. Those are the same people who sit around today on welfare or dead end bullshit jobs that don’t really produce much value.
I’m not totally sold on UBI but there’s a lot of shallow bad arguments against it that are pretty easy to dismiss.
governments will collapse before we are at a moment where UBI is needed. Billionaires and companies hardly pay any tax and if white collar jobs die down, there is no guarantee that government will even have money to wipe their butt.