6 ms·
This will be unpopular, but: what if an uncomfortably large part of the population just really doesn't have anything economically worthwhile to offer in the mod
by bandrami 8y ago
This will be unpopular, but: what if an uncomfortably large part of the population just really doesn't have anything economically worthwhile to offer in the modern context? Nobody wants to say that, but if it's true, then something like a UBI or dole (even granting the author's problems with it) is all we can do short of mounting a massive Plato's Cave-like conspiracy to convince people they are doing something useful.
- RodericDay 8y ago"This will be unpopular..." the opening salvo of fascists everywhere
- zqfm 8y ago> mounting a massive Plato's Cave-like conspiracy to convince people they are doing something useful Maybe I'm missing something but I feel like that's what most of us are doing now anyway.
- theothermkn 8y agoThere's another way to frame that: What if it's a coincidence that the rent of labor has afforded a tolerable lifestyle for the masses and lavish lifestyles for capital owners for nearly 200 years? And, what if this coincidence that has supported a social order (explicit or de facto capitalism) is coming to an end? I'm fond of Zizek's remark that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. It seems apposite, here.
- prolikewh0a 8y ago>I'm fond of Zizek's remark that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Can you provide a source for that? Only because I'm reading some Zizek books right now :)
- theothermkn 8y agoHe's said it a number of times. Googling "zizek easier" yielded a ton of autocompletes, and then a ton of hits. :)
- prolikewh0a 8y agoThank you!
- rayiner 8y ago> what if an uncomfortably large part of the population just really doesn't have anything economically worthwhile to offer in the modern context? Nobody wants to say that What are you talking about. People on HN say that all the time; it's one of the core premises underlying the feeling that UBI will eventually be necessary? Indeed, that seems to be the prevailing view even though it flies in the face of the evidence that gains from automation are far away from replacing human workers.
- roflc0ptic 8y agoDecent comment, good point about the evidence. I downvoted this because it opens with “what are you talking about.” In spite of being reasonably insightful, the presentation makes the comment negative value add IMO. Being nice makes these discussions much more productive.
- jjoonathan 8y agoWe can either ask people with money/power to support those without -- which I don't think will ever be a good or even stable solution -- or we solve the hard technological problems currently preventing self-sufficiency. The difficulty in the latter is not to be underestimated, but there's also more potential upside if we figure it out.
- afpx 8y agoI don’t think it’s unpopular. That’s part of the reason why people like me support things like UBI. I mean, let’s be real here. I’m a mid-40s, above-average-IQ nerd millionaire, but if I graduated college today, I’m pretty certain that I wouldn’t make it as well economically. And, I’m really certain that if I was born less-lucky in mental capacities (or other factors) I’d be pretty screwed, no matter how hard I worked.
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoWe also have the problem that people are forced to evaluate what activities would be productive for them in terms of the money paid to them, but it's debatable whether the aggregated signals of demand in a given economy truly reflect what people would believe are "important" or "needed" or "valuable" activities (using scare quotes specifically because obviously the whole debate revolves around how to determine the meaning of these types of terms). My mom is an example. She works a highly menial and thankless job at a rural county courthouse in the Midwest, where she is paid an extremely small salary, given very few benefits, very little vacation time, and has no prospect for retirement, regular raises, career growth, etc. The courthouse could operate with probably 25% of the current staff, but they keep headcount artificially high because state funding and other programs depend on how many employees they have. Largely, my mom is paid money to endure slight sexual harassment from small town attorneys and judges, and to do a tiny workload of clerical work. And the amount of money is barely enough for basic living in her area, even after accounting for the lower cost of living there. It seems bang obvious that her employment is inefficient. The same exact thing happens for thousands of people in her area, whether in government, school jobs, private companies. There's just a ton of excessively meaningless work that companies or employers have ulterior reasons to sponsor with a paycheck even fully knowing that the labor itself is not productive or necessary at all. I think if my mom knew she had a reasonable guaranteed basic income, she would volunteer her time at the local hospital, deliver meals to sick people, do more productive labor around her own home or through child care provided to my siblings and their children, perhaps create craft works to sell online, etc. The net result could easily be that her overall labor productivity in the big picture sense would go way, way up after she is free to quit the essentially pure loss menial job and focus on things where she knows she can add actual, obvious value for people. Unfortunately, I think most developed nations suffer this problem. Lots of jobs exist because of weird misaligned incentives on the part of the employer, who could truly not care less about the actual labor productivity of a bunch of employees and has them on the payroll for totally separate reasons.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- repolfx 8y ago
- prolikewh0a 8y ago>uncomfortably large part of the population just really doesn't have anything economically worthwhile to offer in the modern context? Someone still has to do the jobs. The sanitation workers, the McDonalds employees, the truck drivers, the waiters, the cooks -- they all have a role in society and are economically worthwhile -- it's just that nobody has had a raise since the 90's and income inequality is the highest it has ever been in history while the cost of essential needs for humans continues to rise. When's the last time you've seen rents go down? In my opinion, UBI is a band aid on the problem of late capitalism. Simply guaranteeing health insurance, implementing full employment, would raise the country economically (but not for the poor shareholders!) enormously but our current corrupt system of crony deregulating late capitalism won't allow this at the expense of the middle & lower classes. I keep saying this here: workers really need to see the surplus value they create instead of just their wages; the surplus value goes into the pocket of the shareholder and benefits absolutely nobody.
- adamnemecek 8y ago> Someone still has to do the jobs. The sanitation workers, the McDonalds employees, the truck drivers, the waiters, the cooks Those jobs are going away.
- greglindahl 8y agoCooking has become vastly more efficient over the past 10,000 years, especially recently with labor-saving kitchen equipment. Yet there are still cooks. And we eat fancier food.
- adamnemecek 8y agoThey will be replaced by machines very soon. I'm pumped for when cooking becomes essentially programming. Cooking is a sequence of steps, just like programming.
- claytonjy 8y ago> Someone still has to do the jobs. I think GP's argument is that we won't need them too much longer. The jobs you mention don't need to disappear completely for there to be problems; if the demand for that class of fungible unskilled labor drops by 20% (not hard to imagine in the next decade or so), what happens to those tens of millions of people who have no way to provide for themselves and their families? Curious to know what you mean by "implementing full employment", given we're about as close to that now as anyone has ever been.
- adamnemecek 8y ago> what if an uncomfortably large part of the population just really doesn't have anything economically worthwhile to offer in the modern context? I agree with you, at the same time I believe that this is a failure of the educational system. The current educational system is fucked up. One of the main problems is that it creates "good students" as opposed to people who grow up to contribute to society. I hated this about high school and university. You are forced to regurgitate what someone said as opposed to developing your own opinions.
- 40acres 8y agoInteresting thought, I'd wager that our economy isn't as efficient as it should be with respect to the labor force. For instance there are tons of men in their prime age working years who are dropping out of the labor force, and the teen employment rate is low compare to previous years. You also have older Americans who may be physically unable to do manual work but could be hired in a sort of a human + software augmentation role (think humans looking at Facebook content that is flagged to double check the algorithm).
- JamesBarney 8y agoThose content monitor jobs sound pretty terrible. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/04/facebook-content-moderators-ptsd-psychological-dangers https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/04/facebook-...
- ghthor 8y agoOnly if you couldn't work remotely and could set your own hours.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- chrischen 8y agoSince most people can be self-sufficient, there shouldn’t be anything stopping a person from being at least worth their own weight unless there is a lack of natural respurces or energy for each person (as of yet not true). AI and robotics will simply make the cost of self sustenance even cheaper, which means at some point literally any contribution a human can make will be a positive one, even if all they do is identify and pick up a piece of garbage the robo trashman missed.
- lvspiff 8y agoI contend its not that there are people "have nothing economically worthwhile to offer" its that the jobs that are being presented are not what they want to do or in their interest (i.e. pay what they think is enough). UBI makes sense if all the jobs are taken or jobs being automated away but if there are jobs that are out there that people don't want to do for whatever reason that shouldn't be an excuse to implement it.
- sp332 8y agoSure but that's dangerous if you skip the step of recognizing that people can have value that's not based on their ability to create capital.
- ihsw2 8y ago"Creating capital" isn't an evil thing -- when provided a free and frictionless economic market to roam, made aware of such opportunities to fully realize their ambitions, and inspired to achieve their wildest dreams, people will surprise you. We -- you, myself, anybody reading this -- aren't just "creating capital," we are fulfilling our life's ambitions. It just so happens that the free market is the best environment to explore and drive towards something better than what 90% of the other comments are complaining about (reductio ad absurdum lives of complacency.) Creating capital isn't the end to a means, it is a means to an end.
- sp332 8y agoOk... back in reality, lots of people are unemployed or underemployed, our markets aren't that free, and again, capital is not the best way to decide whether someone is worth keeping alive (e.g. with universal healthcare). To your example, a life of complacency is fine. (Edit: I guess you were commenting about someone else, but I still wanted to make the point.)
- mmirate 8y ago> what if an uncomfortably large part of the population just really doesn't have anything economically worthwhile to offer in the modern context? They and their skillsets must evolve or perish. This is nothing new, ever since at least the Industrial Revolution.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoIt shouldn't be quite that stark. I view society as "spending" people, rather than "employing" them. We used to spend a huge chunk (35%?) of our population on agriculture. Then we industrialized agriculture, and now we spend something like 2% of our population on it. The rest could go make that farm equipment, and washing machines, and thousands of other things. Society as a whole became better off. As a society, we need to find useful things for these people to do. Maybe we'll have to train them. But just leaving them where they can't do anything useful is a huge waste. We're leaving an enormous amount of progress on the table here.
- mmirate 8y agoBut who is "we", and who is anyone to decide which of the 35% should be retrained, or which new field to retrain them in, or how to allocate resources to such retraining? Those are the difficult questions that are most deftly answered by the Dead Hand when we grant each "35-percenter" the responsibility for their own retraining; they either retrain ("evolve"); figure out how to stay relevant in their old field (also "evolve"); or fail, and in doing so, demonstrate that they were unwilling to be "spent" in any way that society was willing to spend them ("perish"). Which is to say, I do not quite understand how you are disagreeing with me.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoI suggest that we should grant each "35-percenter" (wherever that term came from) not only the responsibility for their own retraining, but the resources to do so, and maybe even some suggestions (not orders!) as to what direction they should go in. Just giving them the responsibility without the resources sounds like the worst kind of "Social Darwinism".