5 ms·

Interesting theory. That people want to work (more than for just the money) is one of the reasons I am very skeptical of UBI. I think that people want to work,

Interesting theory. That people want to work (more than for just the money) is one of the reasons I am very skeptical of UBI. I think that people want to work, and we apparently don't structure communities very well for people to just pick up meaningful work (or even volunteering) as a hobby.

lightbyte 8y ago
>That people want to work (more than for just the money) is one of the reasons I am very skeptical of UBI. This is interesting, can you elaborate? I would expect most people would continue to work if given UBI and it would even encourage people to do work they like to do instead of what makes them the most money, but it sounds like you are predicting the opposite.
- simonsarris 8y ago
  > it would even encourage people to do work they like to do instead of what makes them the most money But clearly this doesn't play out with the farmers in question here! They are not freed from the shackles of work for a year or three, busily following their passion. They are committing suicide. That isn't to say that the majority go in that direction, but its enough to measure, and should be enough to give us pause I think. The majority of men on UBI-like programs seem to watch TV and take drugs, and not follow passions. I've written a fair bit about UBI and contrasting it with basic jobs, here: https://medium.com/s/story/after-universal-basic-income-the-flood-217db9889c07 https://medium.com/s/story/after-universal-basic-income-the-... Related to this discussion see the section, "The Existential Problem", and if you have the time I suggest you read the two articles (NPR 'unfit for work' and Commentary Mag 'our miserable 21st century') that I link to in that section. Not in the above article but broadly speaking, the work disincentive for UBI tests so far is about 10%. That is, 10% of the people given something like UBI will drop out of the labor force and not do any kind of (measurable) work. Some % of that 10% will go on to commit suicide, I imagine, like the farmers here. Citations for the ~10% figure can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17666307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17666307 Something about being given money and having no work to do, plus no community or purpose, does not cause people to create community or purpose. My fear here is that instead of working towards making sure people can, somehow, create more community and purpose, we're taking the one thing many people find meaning in (work) and pulling the rug out from under them on it, like we are possibly doing to the farmers here. Sorry, having a hard time being succinct. What I am suggesting is that we have got to solve this "no community or purpose" issue before we solve the "money" issue. It's bigger, and if we don't, we might not like the future very much.
  - crooked-v 8y ago
    Describing disability benefits as "UBI-like programs" seems way off the mark to me, starting with "welfare cliff" problems and going from there.
  - rootusrootus 8y ago
    Perhaps a difference with UBI would be the ubiquitousness of it. You'd know way before you even entered the job market what the score was. Thanks for the links in your other post, I will take a look. I admit that I have Star Trek dreams of post-scarcity happiness, but I'm willing to change my mind if there is credible evidence to suggest my hopes are misplaced. I wasn't aware that there were any decent UBI experiments that had been done at scale, lately they all seem to be very limited and aborted early. Maybe I'll just have to scale back and pin my hopes on Medicare For All. Would be nice to detach medical coverage from employment, IMO.
    - simonsarris 8y ago
      > I admit that I have Star Trek dreams of post-scarcity happiness I think a lot of us, here on Hacker News, do. I kinda worry that's part of the problem. But you and me and Sam Altman, etc, are not representative of society at large. I was thinking of the HN crowd (myself included) when I wrote this part: > Just as you can find Silicon Valley techies who think Soylent is the only sustenance a person will ever need, intellectuals tend to think everyone could be as content as they would be living life in their heads or inventing their own destiny. Most people need to be doing something to feel satisfied and a potential UBI system addresses this need just as inadequately as disability checks do now. Cue drug epidemics. I think average people need more direction than that. I don't think that's a bad thing, but I think its a much more serious problem than the average person's relationship with money. Put another way, the problems of today and the near future are not primarily ones of money. They are ones of community and meaning. By most available data, even the poorest in the USA are doing OK on the money front, though its obviously not ideal! Some cites on that claim can be found here: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/937200378919055360 https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/937200378919055360 So I worry UBI is solving the wrong problem first, and might make the real problem a little or a lot worse, depending on how the job landscape changes.
- philwelch 8y ago
  Work has a lot of satisfying features above and beyond simply keeping people busy. Creating value for yourself and others is what’s fulfilling. A lot of people take pride in the fact that they pull their own weight: that their ability to provide for themselves and their families comes from their own work. You can still do work with UBI, but if you don’t need to, you don’t necessarily derive the same sense of accomplishment. This is a problem even for people on disability, many of whom could do at least some work, but can’t work as much or as reliably as they’d need to replace their disability benefits. Upper-middle-class folks seem to think that work is rewarding to everyone for the same reasons that upper-middle-class work is rewarding to them: some combination of status and enjoying the work itself. And upper-middle-class people can easily imagine sources of those rewards that don’t entail employment. The problem is that you can’t fulfill everyone with status and enjoyment because status is a zero-sum game and not all work is enjoyable. There's something deeply fulfilling and honorable and worthy of pride in doing work, like farming, that is completely diminished if the work turns out to be completely unnecessary. Unnecessary farming is basically just gardening. Someone whose sense of worth and meaning and purpose in life comes from feeding their communities won't be satisfied with a world where their communities are just as well fed with or without them and they're just gardening.
rootusrootus 8y ago
I am an optimist. UBI doesn't mean you can't work. I hope that UBI gives people the freedom to do work they really enjoy without as much anxiety about failing. I imagine how much more productive and happy our society could be if people were able to be more mobile and follow their dreams.
- simonsarris 8y ago
  Please see my reply to the sibling comment. I think with the data we have so far, we have reason to be very concerned that this freedom from failure will be the defining characteristic of UBI. People need to find meaning, and with the very badly designed communities we have now (atomized, far apart, unable to bump into even your friends walking around, if you can walk anywhere at all), trying to substitute "cash" for the one meaningful thing left (work) may make things worse. The optimistic take in that scenario is that it really brings to surface what society's real problems are (they are not 'not enough money', they are 'not enough community', etc)
- spullara 8y ago
  The cynic in me is worried that maybe a lot of people don't really enjoy doing anything besides idle entertainment and don't have dreams to follow.
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    Do they have no desire for vacation travel, or consumer goods, or days at the spa? Those motivate work too.
  - rootusrootus 8y ago
    I think there are definitely some people like that. I would make the UBI level low enough that you'd have to have roommates if you wanted to sit on your butt. Enough money to keep you from living in a tent or under a bridge, and fed, but austere enough that you ought to feel motivated to earn something. I would go insane without something meaningful to do, but I have to recognize that not everyone feels the same.
pjmorris 8y ago
I agree, and I'd go further: A Job Guarantee type program would work better than UBI. Have the government provide a 'minimum standard job', available to any worker who wants one. Beyond economic benefits similar to UBI (but probably at lower cost), people who want to work can have the dignity of doing work.
- zie 8y ago
  That's what prison is. Well it's not supposed to be that, but it's sort of ended up that way, if you look at it from a certain perspective. see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17812292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17812292. Doesn't seem to be working out very well.
  - pjmorris 8y ago
    I'd argue that a forced living situation, a forced job, and a below-minimum wage are very different from an optional job with a minimum wage and no constraints on living situation, and that the two systems work differently.
Alex3917 8y ago
> I think that people want to work UBI would make it easier for people to work, so if you think most people want to work then shouldn't you support UBI?
coolaliasbro 8y ago
I think that people want to be productively occupied without all the baggage that "work" entails.

lightbyte 8y ago

>That people want to work (more than for just the money) is one of the reasons I am very skeptical of UBI. This is interesting, can you elaborate? I would expect most people would continue to work if given UBI and it would even encourage people to do work they like to do instead of what makes them the most money, but it sounds like you are predicting the opposite.

simonsarris 8y ago
> it would even encourage people to do work they like to do instead of what makes them the most money But clearly this doesn't play out with the farmers in question here! They are not freed from the shackles of work for a year or three, busily following their passion. They are committing suicide. That isn't to say that the majority go in that direction, but its enough to measure, and should be enough to give us pause I think. The majority of men on UBI-like programs seem to watch TV and take drugs, and not follow passions. I've written a fair bit about UBI and contrasting it with basic jobs, here: https://medium.com/s/story/after-universal-basic-income-the-flood-217db9889c07 https://medium.com/s/story/after-universal-basic-income-the-... Related to this discussion see the section, "The Existential Problem", and if you have the time I suggest you read the two articles (NPR 'unfit for work' and Commentary Mag 'our miserable 21st century') that I link to in that section. Not in the above article but broadly speaking, the work disincentive for UBI tests so far is about 10%. That is, 10% of the people given something like UBI will drop out of the labor force and not do any kind of (measurable) work. Some % of that 10% will go on to commit suicide, I imagine, like the farmers here. Citations for the ~10% figure can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17666307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17666307 Something about being given money and having no work to do, plus no community or purpose, does not cause people to create community or purpose. My fear here is that instead of working towards making sure people can, somehow, create more community and purpose, we're taking the one thing many people find meaning in (work) and pulling the rug out from under them on it, like we are possibly doing to the farmers here. Sorry, having a hard time being succinct. What I am suggesting is that we have got to solve this "no community or purpose" issue before we solve the "money" issue. It's bigger, and if we don't, we might not like the future very much.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  Describing disability benefits as "UBI-like programs" seems way off the mark to me, starting with "welfare cliff" problems and going from there.
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  Perhaps a difference with UBI would be the ubiquitousness of it. You'd know way before you even entered the job market what the score was. Thanks for the links in your other post, I will take a look. I admit that I have Star Trek dreams of post-scarcity happiness, but I'm willing to change my mind if there is credible evidence to suggest my hopes are misplaced. I wasn't aware that there were any decent UBI experiments that had been done at scale, lately they all seem to be very limited and aborted early. Maybe I'll just have to scale back and pin my hopes on Medicare For All. Would be nice to detach medical coverage from employment, IMO.
  - simonsarris 8y ago
    > I admit that I have Star Trek dreams of post-scarcity happiness I think a lot of us, here on Hacker News, do. I kinda worry that's part of the problem. But you and me and Sam Altman, etc, are not representative of society at large. I was thinking of the HN crowd (myself included) when I wrote this part: > Just as you can find Silicon Valley techies who think Soylent is the only sustenance a person will ever need, intellectuals tend to think everyone could be as content as they would be living life in their heads or inventing their own destiny. Most people need to be doing something to feel satisfied and a potential UBI system addresses this need just as inadequately as disability checks do now. Cue drug epidemics. I think average people need more direction than that. I don't think that's a bad thing, but I think its a much more serious problem than the average person's relationship with money. Put another way, the problems of today and the near future are not primarily ones of money. They are ones of community and meaning. By most available data, even the poorest in the USA are doing OK on the money front, though its obviously not ideal! Some cites on that claim can be found here: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/937200378919055360 https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/937200378919055360 So I worry UBI is solving the wrong problem first, and might make the real problem a little or a lot worse, depending on how the job landscape changes.
philwelch 8y ago
Work has a lot of satisfying features above and beyond simply keeping people busy. Creating value for yourself and others is what’s fulfilling. A lot of people take pride in the fact that they pull their own weight: that their ability to provide for themselves and their families comes from their own work. You can still do work with UBI, but if you don’t need to, you don’t necessarily derive the same sense of accomplishment. This is a problem even for people on disability, many of whom could do at least some work, but can’t work as much or as reliably as they’d need to replace their disability benefits. Upper-middle-class folks seem to think that work is rewarding to everyone for the same reasons that upper-middle-class work is rewarding to them: some combination of status and enjoying the work itself. And upper-middle-class people can easily imagine sources of those rewards that don’t entail employment. The problem is that you can’t fulfill everyone with status and enjoyment because status is a zero-sum game and not all work is enjoyable. There's something deeply fulfilling and honorable and worthy of pride in doing work, like farming, that is completely diminished if the work turns out to be completely unnecessary. Unnecessary farming is basically just gardening. Someone whose sense of worth and meaning and purpose in life comes from feeding their communities won't be satisfied with a world where their communities are just as well fed with or without them and they're just gardening.

rootusrootus 8y ago

I am an optimist. UBI doesn't mean you can't work. I hope that UBI gives people the freedom to do work they really enjoy without as much anxiety about failing. I imagine how much more productive and happy our society could be if people were able to be more mobile and follow their dreams.

simonsarris 8y ago
Please see my reply to the sibling comment. I think with the data we have so far, we have reason to be very concerned that this freedom from failure will be the defining characteristic of UBI. People need to find meaning, and with the very badly designed communities we have now (atomized, far apart, unable to bump into even your friends walking around, if you can walk anywhere at all), trying to substitute "cash" for the one meaningful thing left (work) may make things worse. The optimistic take in that scenario is that it really brings to surface what society's real problems are (they are not 'not enough money', they are 'not enough community', etc)
spullara 8y ago
The cynic in me is worried that maybe a lot of people don't really enjoy doing anything besides idle entertainment and don't have dreams to follow.
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  Do they have no desire for vacation travel, or consumer goods, or days at the spa? Those motivate work too.
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  I think there are definitely some people like that. I would make the UBI level low enough that you'd have to have roommates if you wanted to sit on your butt. Enough money to keep you from living in a tent or under a bridge, and fed, but austere enough that you ought to feel motivated to earn something. I would go insane without something meaningful to do, but I have to recognize that not everyone feels the same.

pjmorris 8y ago

I agree, and I'd go further: A Job Guarantee type program would work better than UBI. Have the government provide a 'minimum standard job', available to any worker who wants one. Beyond economic benefits similar to UBI (but probably at lower cost), people who want to work can have the dignity of doing work.

zie 8y ago
That's what prison is. Well it's not supposed to be that, but it's sort of ended up that way, if you look at it from a certain perspective. see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17812292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17812292. Doesn't seem to be working out very well.
- pjmorris 8y ago
  I'd argue that a forced living situation, a forced job, and a below-minimum wage are very different from an optional job with a minimum wage and no constraints on living situation, and that the two systems work differently.

Alex3917 8y ago

> I think that people want to work UBI would make it easier for people to work, so if you think most people want to work then shouldn't you support UBI?

coolaliasbro 8y ago

I think that people want to be productively occupied without all the baggage that "work" entails.