4 ms·

So why would anybody bother to put themselves through school to become something like a doctor or an engineer to build the robots that do all of the work?

• coryrc 10y ago
  Some of us enjoy building robots and having more than a basic standard of living.
• true_religion 10y ago
  People are geared to competing with one another in the social domain. In order to maintain status, people will continue to get well educated and 'contribute to society' in some way rather than simply sit and be mediocre. Granted, if you have a UBI, lots more people can maintain their status by say.... becoming top ranked at a video game, but even then so long as it doesn't lead to societal collapse... does it really matter how fast we are improving our civilisation? I'm willing to allow us to improve slower if it means we grant everyone freedom from worrying where their next meal is coming from.
  • hueving 10y ago
    >does it really matter how fast we are improving our civilisation Yes, when you consider the global problems we have with energy, climate, food supplies, water supplies, and general poverty it's pretty selfish to just stop pushing forward.
• michaelchisari 10y ago
  The major reason people work low skill, minimum wage jobs is to be able to afford basic survival. A basic income is never going to stop someone passionate enough to be an engineer or a doctor. In fact, it would only help them.
  • tertius 10y ago
    * in theory.
  • Omniusaspirer 10y ago
    This really, really, is not true at all. Only people who aren't doctors tell themselves it's all about passion. If you remove the financial motivation you will have far less people going through the rigorous schooling and sacrifice of youth required to become a physician. I would also argue that the vast majority of engineers became so because it was a "good job" not because they're fueled by some extraordinary passion.
    • j_jochem 10y ago
      The point you're missing is that a lot of people cannot even attend medical school because their parents are too poor to support a child which could be working an underpaid job at mcd instead. And I'm only taking about cost of living, not tuition.
      • hueving 10y ago
        Too poor to attend medical school is not an excuse. If you have the aptitude for medical school there are plenty of scholarships available for people that poor. There are also student loans, which a doctor will be able to pay back without much difficulty.
    • hx87 10y ago
      > rigorous schooling and sacrifice of youth required to become a physician Which wouldn't be such a barrier to entry if medicine were an undergraduate degree (i.e. an MBBS) as in the rest of the world, instead of a graduate one, and residents and fellows were paid market wages instead of government-depressed ones. Creating skilled and knowledgeable doctors does not require stacking a 4 year degree on top of another 4 year degree--a single 5 or 6 year program should be enough.
    • Daishiman 10y ago
      There's a lot of countries where financial motivation to become a doctor is far lower, yet people keep doing it. Don't assume your own drives are shared by others to the same extent.
    • ryankey721 10y ago
• fsloth 10y ago
  Because of the psychological joy of self expression doing work like that entails (see Maslows hierarchy of needs). Some people like helping people, some people like the prestige of being a doctor. Besides, it's ones family background which predicts ones future career path far more than economic insentives. I would imagine the social strata that is now educated will prefer to have their offspring educated in the future. Human culture is often a far greater determinant of behaviour than any economic cost-benefit analysis done at an individual level. I would also point out that in the 17th century there was very little financial insentive to pick up natural sciences and people did just because they could and because they were interested. I for example would gladly work in my current field (software engineering) even if it did not grant financial benefits because I like it so much. I think americans are so preoccupied with money because everything is so expensive there. There are far more interesting ways to spend ones life than by surviving (if one goes to a job just to survive - i.e. to get shelter and food, one really is just satisgying ones lower needs on the maslows hierarchy of needs).
  • hueving 10y ago
    Maslows hierarchy of needs is mostly garbage. There is not really any evidence to support those rankings being innate to humans (other than basic survival being top priority). There is little psychological joy in collecting garbage, cleaning gutters, and shoveling manure. It seems to me that all of the arguments for UBI are predicated on ubiquitous automation of every mundane job, which is a long ways out of reach from where the most advanced countries are (let alone the whole world).
    • dragonwriter 10y ago
      > There is not really any evidence to support those rankings being innate to humans (other than basic survival being top priority). There's actually considerable evidence that even "basic survival being top priority" doesn't reflect actual human behavior in some important ways. > There is little psychological joy in collecting garbage, cleaning gutters, and shoveling manure. It seems to me that all of the arguments for UBI are predicated on ubiquitous automation of every mundane job Well, that depends what you mean by UBI: a mature UBI that can afford to pay a high standard of living will require phenomenal productivity which requires a level of automation which would go far beyond ubiquitous automation of every mundane job. OTOH, the basic idea of a universal unconditional grant as a replacement for some subset of the existing social benefit system reducing the administrative costs to benefits ratio of the replaced programs and eliminate the adverse incentives of the means-tested programs replaced obviously doesn't require any additional automation than we have now.
• HeyLaughingBoy 10y ago
  I have a friend who lived in the USSR and I asked him the same question. In a world where everyone is paid the same, why become a physicist when you could just be a cab driver? His answer was pretty much what you'd expect: different people aspire to do different things. It's not about the money (physicists were working multiple jobs to make ends meet), it was about what they wanted to do with their lives.
  • hueving 10y ago
    And how did that work out for the USSR? An unfortunately small minority of people are driven by enough passion to ignore how they are being screwed by society (sacrifice all of your 20s to go through med school to get the same compensation as a high school dropout that sweeps floors).
  • charlesdm 10y ago
    But not everyone had the same amount of privileges. People in politics often had bigger apartments, for example. So if you wanted "more" in a communist state, you went into politics.