Comment by vannevar
6 days ago
The article's central premise is based on a false assumption, which is that people taking UBI will be idle. There is no significant evidence to support that claim. The scant evidence we have so far on UBI is largely limited to relatively small numbers of people in poverty given small amounts of money insufficient to provide any opportunity for savings, and even that evidence is at best mixed. On the other hand, there are many people who receive an inheritance large enough that they never need to work again, yet the vast majority of those people are not idle but actively create new businesses and take on other projects or hobbies.
And the reason that our infrastructure is crumbling is not some social problem, nor some intrinsic "undervaluing of the future," but something simpler and more pragmatic: our taxation has not kept up with our necessary spending, particularly taxation of the wealthy as wealth has concentrated at the top. Everyone's talking about abundance as if it is something that is yet to come, but we've had rapidly increasing abundance for 50 years, as technology has made the individual worker more productive. And the vast majority of that increase in productivity has been turned into increased wealth for the top 10%. UBI would be the first reversal of that trend, requiring a massive tax on the productivity of AI and robotic infrastructure that in all likelihood will be 90% owned by the wealthiest top 10%. Naturally, they are concerned about that prospect, and so we see articles like this one.
> The article's central premise is based on a false assumption, which is that people taking UBI will be idle. There is no significant evidence to support that claim.
Absolutely true. Even meta-analyses of all UBI experiments to date - encompassing tens of thousands of adults - shows an increase in labour participation, not a decrease.
And if formal, capitalistic, profit-based jobs are no longer available, what barrier do we have against creating social jobs that need doing? Just because the Parasite Class cannot extract obscene amounts of wealth from those jobs doesn’t mean they don’t need doing. It just means there is no profit angle to have in doing them.
If I had no worries about my needs, I would love to work on open-source projects. Failing that, it would be ecosystem restoration or bioremediation. All jobs that can be free of government and capitalism, but which desperately needs bodies to yeet ant the issues at hand.
There is much work to be done in society that needs doing.
Some of it can be new jobs, and some of it can be done by making the existing jobs have less hours freeing people up to do more meaningful things.
Being less efficient is also a problem, because if majority becomes less efficient (lower productivity), the overall wealth and economic growth of that society are going to decline significantly.
We do have evidence that when money is not a problem, we become less efficient. For example, monopolies or state run companies.
Just the first result from google: https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/11/3/657
Another problem with UBI is that, if we want for UBI to cover basic costs of living, these expenses are actually quite big as UBI essentially would need to cover things like rent, food and health services. Otherwise we will still have plenty of homeless people with UBI.
Exactly - when UBI is tried people tend to be busy.
The super rich are often idle and project that onto everyone else we should not take the idle richs word as gospel.
> The article's central premise is based on a false assumption, which is that people taking UBI will be idle. There is no significant evidence to support that claim.
You really think there would not be a massive increase in the number of coach potatoes, watching netflix and doomscrolling tiktok all day long? Where do they make such optimists? It's almost as if this very website has a strong selection bias, congregating people with higher than average drive, who would never, who just can't imagine not having it. And even if they won't be technically idle, you can bet your ass that the total supply of labor would drop like a rock, and many jobs that are generally beneficial to the society but not glamorous wouldn't be done. You also completely ignore the massive problem which is the shift in the society's collective psychology in regards to work, which the article did mention. Quote:
The problems are significant, however. First, all existing pilots are small in scale, temporary in duration, and limited to populations already experiencing poverty or precarity. None of them test the psychology of a society in which nobody is economically compelled to contribute. Temporary income relief and permanent unconditional income are fundamentally different phenomena — the first is a cushion, the second is a permanent reorientation of the relationship between individuals and economic necessity. The pilots tell us nothing useful about the second.
Currently we collectively derive personal worth from work etc, and the society applies significant pressure on individuals "incentivizing" them to work even if they can't have a dream job, increasing the aggregate amount of work done. We just don't know and can't really imagine what it's like to live in a world where you are entitled to money for existing, no strings attached, pretty much from cradle to grave. Imagine being a kid who grows up in such a world with no real responsibilities, playing vidya all day long, who knows that once he formally reaches adulthood, he can just continue doing nothing. The model of family life is falling apart as we speak, so why bother chasing it? Just lower your expectations and desires - and you are set for life.
>We just don't know and can't really imagine what it's like to live in a world where you are entitled to money for existing, no strings attached, pretty much from cradle to grave.
Sure we can. As I noted, wealthy people live in this world already. And we don't see all of them turning into couch potatoes once they have passive income equal to UBI. Sure, there's a human tendency to enjoy leisure. But there's also a human tendency to enjoy work. And a human tendency to project negative attributes onto others we don't know. ;-)
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