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Is busywork really that much less humiliating? I'm not going to dig ditches so that someone else can come and fill them up in time for me to dig them again. W
by michaelchisari 10y ago
Is busywork really that much less humiliating? I'm not going to dig ditches so that someone else can come and fill them up in time for me to dig them again.
What if we create factory amusement parks, where people go to build things for a wage that nobody will ever buy? Does that seem any less patronizing?
Everybody is going to have to shift their sense of identity, self-worth, ambition, etc. in the years to come. I don't see any way out of this.
If the problem is that there are no jobs, then "faking it" seems so much worse than simply providing a basic income, and encouraging education, non-profits, civil service, startups, etc.
- Kalium 10y agoMyself, I don't see a good answer. Busywork isn't going to cut it. Workers are harder to fool than many give them credit for. Plus, this approach yielded Saudi Arabia, and it's not going well for them right now. Attitudes are going to need to shift, but that doesn't happen overnight. That happens over the course of multiple generations... which is the issue, because economic shifts are much faster now. The populations we're discussing don't want either of those. They want to have back what their culture remembers as... not glory days, but days when hard work was valued and was enough.
- L_226 10y agoI've always thought that ecological conservation work might be a decent solution (to redundant mine workers and the like refusing welfare/UBI). Reclaiming former mining land for forests via tree planting and land stabilisation etc is an important job that will pay dividend in the future. Not really hard to re-skill for that, it's still hard manual labour, and it's a positive for the environment. There's also forest fire mitigation/fighting work, volunteering and so on.
- Kalium 10y agoThat sounds like the Civilian Conservation Corps.