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I very, very strongly disagree with this. In the last Industrial Revolution, they introduced the 40 hour work week. We need the burden of work to be lighter for

by Mz 9y ago

I very, very strongly disagree with this. In the last Industrial Revolution, they introduced the 40 hour work week. We need the burden of work to be lighter for all people. But we all still need access to the option to work. Accepting that jobs will simply vanish and those who don't already have massive amounts of wealth will just get a UBI is a horrendous dystopian nightmare. If we can all work 20 hours a week and adequately support ourselves, awesome. But the current position is that the 99 percent have no inherent right to access the means to create wealth. They are merely mouths to feed, consumers who can add nothing. This is incredibly problematic and I dearly hope we get a clue before natural consequences inform us catastrophically that this simply does not work.

zem 9y ago
a ubi needn't stop you from working. what it will stop, or at least sharply reduce, is low-paying jobs that are low-paying simply because everyone has to either work or starve, and because the job involves easily-replaceable skills. for example, being an amazon warehouse worker is, from all accounts, highly unpleasant, way more so than being an amazon developer. and yet the developers are paid a lot more. why? amazon absolutely needs warehouse workers; its business would collapse without them. but the price for the job is set by how easily they could replace those workers, and that in turn is set by the fact that there are more people who need jobs than there are jobs available. also, look at it this way - there are lots of people who would find it satisfying and fulfilling to be painters, or gardeners, or heck, even nursery school teachers. the only problem is that those jobs don't pay as well as less fulfilling but more valuable to the "owner" class. why is your (and many other people's!) vision of basic income a bunch of zombies sitting around as "mouths to feed", when no one thinks that about people with inherited wealth?
- Mz 9y ago
  No, what will stop people from working is that the people currently in charge of creating jobs will not bother to create jobs for everyone because "you have your UBI." That's the problem. http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/05/ubi-is-pc-way-for-tech-giants-to-tell.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/05/ubi-is-pc-wa...
  - zem 9y ago
    the idea that a job is something someone has to "bother to" create and hand to you already buys into the same sort of stratified inequality that you are complaining about with charity. if either way you have to depend on the people with capital and ownership to get money, how is being made to do something for it any better than being given it via the government taxing them and paying you a basic income? also i'm afraid i had to stop reading that blog post at "poor women cranking out babies", because i seriously cannot engage with that sort of thinking right now. however, i will address your earlier point about ubhc being better than ubi - why are you framing it as an either/or thing? ubhc is absolutely the end goal of a civilised society, but it doesn't obviate the need for a basic income, nor does a basic income presuppose the rest of the existing setup continues unchanged.
    - Mz 9y ago
      I am a homeless woman right now. My alimony is roughly the amount of money being batted about as a figure for UBI. I have spent literally years on HN trying to network and figure out how one makes money in earnest on the internet because the only thing I need to make my life work adequately at this point is sufficient online income for supporting a middle class lifestyle. I face enormous obstacles in trying to get taken seriously and trying to get traction for my writing and trying to find out how in the hell you make money online while surrounded by endless men who know how to do exactly that. So I feel pretty strongly that the people currently being left out will just be left out all the more if they have a UBI. Maybe both of those problems can be solved. Maybe it doesn't have to be an either/or thing. But replies like yours in no way inspire me to believe that we can intentionally create a permanent underclass and still give them access to the means to create wealth. I have six years of college and I am finding it a huge uphill battle, in part because I am a woman. And poor women would start cranking out babies if you posit that we give everyone in the nation a check from birth, a thing I have written about before: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/09/it-was-obsolete-before-we-opened.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/09/it-was-obsol...
      - zem 9y ago
dragonwriter 9y ago
> But we all still need access to the option to work. UBI makes work more attractive and available, not less, compared to the things it is generally proposed to replace (means tested benefit programs and minimum wages)—by replacing means-tested benefit programs it means people don't lose money for finding work, and by replacing minimum wages it means work with a positive, but low, value per hour can still be offered that would otherwise be forbidden.
- Mz 9y ago
  and by replacing minimum wages it means work with a positive, but low, value per hour can still be offered that would otherwise be forbidden. So your utopian ideal for ending poverty is UBI plus slave wages for the 99 percent. I fail to see how this is in any way better than minimum wage jobs. At best, it is a new variation of minimum wage, only you don't make minimum wage by getting a minimum wage, you get it by having a UBI plus below minimum wage pay. That proposition only makes me feel even more opposed to a UBI.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > So your utopian ideal I've never mentioned a utopian ideal. I addressed the false implication that UBI was somehow opposed to the availability of work. > for ending poverty Poverty can be mitigated, but not ended. > is UBI plus slave wages for the 99 percent. No, "slave wages" makes even metaphorical sense only in the sense that unmitigated capitalism provides economic coercion to work; a system with UBI doesn't share that features of unmitigated capitalism. Further, while replacing the minimum wage with UBI reduces the minimum value of jobs that can be offered, it reduces the pressure to accept low wage jobs, so low wages jobs are likely to accepted for experience or other reasons, but not economic coercion,

by Mz 9y ago

zem 9y ago

a ubi needn't stop you from working. what it will stop, or at least sharply reduce, is low-paying jobs that are low-paying simply because everyone has to either work or starve, and because the job involves easily-replaceable skills. for example, being an amazon warehouse worker is, from all accounts, highly unpleasant, way more so than being an amazon developer. and yet the developers are paid a lot more. why? amazon absolutely needs warehouse workers; its business would collapse without them. but the price for the job is set by how easily they could replace those workers, and that in turn is set by the fact that there are more people who need jobs than there are jobs available. also, look at it this way - there are lots of people who would find it satisfying and fulfilling to be painters, or gardeners, or heck, even nursery school teachers. the only problem is that those jobs don't pay as well as less fulfilling but more valuable to the "owner" class. why is your (and many other people's!) vision of basic income a bunch of zombies sitting around as "mouths to feed", when no one thinks that about people with inherited wealth?

Mz 9y ago
No, what will stop people from working is that the people currently in charge of creating jobs will not bother to create jobs for everyone because "you have your UBI." That's the problem. http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/05/ubi-is-pc-way-for-tech-giants-to-tell.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/05/ubi-is-pc-wa...
- zem 9y ago
  the idea that a job is something someone has to "bother to" create and hand to you already buys into the same sort of stratified inequality that you are complaining about with charity. if either way you have to depend on the people with capital and ownership to get money, how is being made to do something for it any better than being given it via the government taxing them and paying you a basic income? also i'm afraid i had to stop reading that blog post at "poor women cranking out babies", because i seriously cannot engage with that sort of thinking right now. however, i will address your earlier point about ubhc being better than ubi - why are you framing it as an either/or thing? ubhc is absolutely the end goal of a civilised society, but it doesn't obviate the need for a basic income, nor does a basic income presuppose the rest of the existing setup continues unchanged.
  - Mz 9y ago
    I am a homeless woman right now. My alimony is roughly the amount of money being batted about as a figure for UBI. I have spent literally years on HN trying to network and figure out how one makes money in earnest on the internet because the only thing I need to make my life work adequately at this point is sufficient online income for supporting a middle class lifestyle. I face enormous obstacles in trying to get taken seriously and trying to get traction for my writing and trying to find out how in the hell you make money online while surrounded by endless men who know how to do exactly that. So I feel pretty strongly that the people currently being left out will just be left out all the more if they have a UBI. Maybe both of those problems can be solved. Maybe it doesn't have to be an either/or thing. But replies like yours in no way inspire me to believe that we can intentionally create a permanent underclass and still give them access to the means to create wealth. I have six years of college and I am finding it a huge uphill battle, in part because I am a woman. And poor women would start cranking out babies if you posit that we give everyone in the nation a check from birth, a thing I have written about before: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/09/it-was-obsolete-before-we-opened.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/09/it-was-obsol...
    - zem 9y ago

dragonwriter 9y ago

> But we all still need access to the option to work. UBI makes work more attractive and available, not less, compared to the things it is generally proposed to replace (means tested benefit programs and minimum wages)—by replacing means-tested benefit programs it means people don't lose money for finding work, and by replacing minimum wages it means work with a positive, but low, value per hour can still be offered that would otherwise be forbidden.

Mz 9y ago
and by replacing minimum wages it means work with a positive, but low, value per hour can still be offered that would otherwise be forbidden. So your utopian ideal for ending poverty is UBI plus slave wages for the 99 percent. I fail to see how this is in any way better than minimum wage jobs. At best, it is a new variation of minimum wage, only you don't make minimum wage by getting a minimum wage, you get it by having a UBI plus below minimum wage pay. That proposition only makes me feel even more opposed to a UBI.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > So your utopian ideal I've never mentioned a utopian ideal. I addressed the false implication that UBI was somehow opposed to the availability of work. > for ending poverty Poverty can be mitigated, but not ended. > is UBI plus slave wages for the 99 percent. No, "slave wages" makes even metaphorical sense only in the sense that unmitigated capitalism provides economic coercion to work; a system with UBI doesn't share that features of unmitigated capitalism. Further, while replacing the minimum wage with UBI reduces the minimum value of jobs that can be offered, it reduces the pressure to accept low wage jobs, so low wages jobs are likely to accepted for experience or other reasons, but not economic coercion,