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>He sees “transferring money to people who are unproductive” [universal basic income, UBI] as less optimal than finding a way for them to be productive. Why ca

>He sees “transferring money to people who are unproductive” [universal basic income, UBI] as less optimal than finding a way for them to be productive. Why can't we let the individual find a way to make themselves productive? And, why do they need to be productive? Some of my best times in life are watching and playing games with my friends. Socializing. Loving people. I, and most people I know, can look around and see things that need to be done. If our lives aren't so focused on paying the bills all the time, we can relax a bit and be creative. I remember I used to get great school lunches. I knew the cafeteria staff by name and they knew me because I went back for seconds and thirds and fourths... skinny as a bean pole. Lunches were made fresh every day. The staff were there at 6am cooking for the kids. Fresh bread. I used to love watching that dough bounce around in the industrial mixer. It was bigger than I was. A decade after I was out of school, I saw one of the ladies and asked how the school lunches were. She said they don't get to make them anymore. The menus are decided in Washington DC now and they have very little control over what is cooked or eaten. Kids don't come back for seconds and thirds and fourths anymore. The federal government took local control away from the schools and homogenized everything and basically ruined it from what I remember. Why do we think the federal government knows better how to manage our day to day lives than we do ourselves? Get out of our kitchens and homes. The government doesn't need to find a way for me to be productive. People who need to be productive to keep their sanity will find a way. They'll clean their bedrooms, volunteer in their communities. They won't be judged by what their job is, but rather, what they do for themselves and the people around them. The need to grind out a day at the office or the shipyard or in the truck hauling cargo saps a person's freewill. We need more freewill in the world.

hectorr1 7y ago
> And, why do they need to be productive? Because the entire global economy is premised on having enough growth to pay off the debt incurred by previous generations. If people choose to be less productive the whole edifice comes crashing down.
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  Given the things GP described as being unproductive, things that almost all of us find humanly valuable at a very basic level, perhaps the edifice needs some serious refactoring if that's the case. I love life, I don't love work. Work is part of life, but I can't love life fully if I don't love my work. A system based on the idea that every member of society must be productive is so hideous and inhuman to me it makes me angry to think of someone seriously propounding this productivist dogma. Why, exactly, is society structured in such a way that most of my waking hours are spent getting ready for work, commuting and working? It's a tragedy to be born, grow up, and spend your days grinding away just to stay alive. That's the one life you have, and I'm wasting it just for the fact of staying alive? It's no surprise that young people aren't happy with this.
  - DubiousPusher 7y ago
    Maybe the key is to change what we consider productive. Our main measure of productivity is GDP and it has some really perverse methodology. If a defense manufacturer builds a bomb and sells it the government, that is considered positive GDP. If next year that bomb is taken and dropped on one's own country thus destroying value is it considered negative GDP? No, again it's positive production because the pilot and bombadeer sold their services to the government too! Meanwhile, if one parent in a relationship stays home to care for the couple's children thus rendering a highly valuable service to the family, it is not counted! Only academics who have furvent faith in the dogma they've been handed down can see such a contradiction and maintain their faith. Recently we have been seeing economists trying to augment gross measures like GDP. And we've seen the rise of behavioral economist who are trying to better integrate human factors into economics.
- onion2k 7y ago
  This is true if human productivity is the only thing driving growth. The suggestion here is that automation replaces that human input as most jobs are actually more about supporting the innovation rather than innovation itself - if you remove the need for those supporting jobs many, many more people can work on the innovation bit instead. Society would benefit greatly. Some people, maybe even most, won't actually achieve much or contribute anything to the furthering of the human race, but that cost is worth paying for if enough actually do. We probably have hundreds of Einsteins, Turings, and Musks working in the roles supporting the innovators because they can't get out of those roles. That's bad for all of us.
tarr11 7y ago
> Despite the sharp wrangling that the National School Lunch Program often stirs up, the meals coming out of it are more nutritious — and a lot more adventurous — than they were 10 years ago. “It absolutely is a brighter day for school foods,” says Bettina Elias Siegel, a lawyer turned advocate and author of the book “Kid Food.” > A major federal study recently came to much the same conclusion, finding that school lunches have improved significantly since implementation of the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. And the schools with the healthiest menus have the greatest rates of student participation. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/food/school-lunches-in-america/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/food/school-lun...
- thatfrenchguy 7y ago
  As a french person who's been to a few schools in the US, the US has such a long way to go it's almost non funny. I would never subject my kids to the food the local super-rich-tech-company daycare gives to toddlers.
- maxaf 7y ago
  I don’t care what anyone says; in NYC school lunches are basically inedible. Having been exposed to the public school system here for over six years, I can say with confidence that no one who has any choice will allow their kids to eat the garbage that schools put out during lunch. My kid tells me that she’d rather go hungry than eat lunch at school. I’ll be packing lunch for another six years as needed, and that’s okay by me. I just wish we weren’t wasting all this money to haul garbage to schools on a daily basis.
- nitrogen 7y ago
  Lunches might be better on average, and still in some places worse than they used to be.
hos234 7y ago
"Productive" is code for obedience. When ever someone talks about Productivity they are measuring how many people in the population are obedient and fit into domination based hierarchies. Those that don't throughout history are unproductive. Now the problem is "Productivity" is stagnating since the 80's[1]. Why? Because most people learnt they don't like being obedient or dominated and there are better and newly available routes to meet ones needs and values. We don't need to prop up a Mark Zuckerberg or Ray Dalio or the Queen of England to live a decent life anymore. You can even do it without exploiting someone else. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workforce_productivity#/media/File:US_productivity_and_real_wages.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workforce_productivity#/media/...
- icotyl 7y ago
  > "Now the problem is "Productivity" is stagnating since the 80's" This is the exact opposite of what your chart shows. Productivity, in the economic sense, is growing since the 1980s. It's wages that have stagnated. The wealth generated by increased productivity is all flowing to top. Dalio recognizes this: "Increased productivity will also substantially increase the wealth gap." He knows this trend is not sustainable.
  - hos234 7y ago
    It is the same damn thing. Wages is proxy for WORKER productivity. Go and ask Dalio why wages/worker productivity has stagnated while sector(factory/org) productivity has increased. Listening to him is like listening to some member of British Royalty while Empire winds down having no clue why the colonies want independence. They too will say the British Empire's increased productivity will increase of the wealth gap. That's just another way of saying nobody wants to work to prop up the British Empire. People have found better things to do in life. The only thing under threat is their model of reality. And there is no point paying attention to them about what comes next, because they can only see the empire based on obedience and domination as the best model.
trpc 7y ago
>transferring money to people who are unproductive says the professional unproductive hedge fund manager. The parasite billionaire who spent his life capturing the profit made and value created by companies
friedman23 7y ago
> And, why do they need to be productive? Why do I need to give them money?
- trianglem 7y ago
  The unfortunate answer here is because you choose to be productive.
zozbot234 7y ago
>He sees “transferring money to people who are unproductive” [universal basic income, UBI] as less optimal than finding a way for them to be productive. ¿Por qué no los dos? One of the issues with the current system is that it does not serve people who are only somewhat productive, if only for the time being. We expect that every job (more generally - every production opportunity, at the margin) will pay for itself, but there's no law of economics that says this has to happen.
Upvoter33 7y ago
Seems like you mixed up a bunch of stuff, like cost cutting vs. federal government overreach. Lunches are bad today at schools because no one wants to spend any money on anything in the public sector.
SubiculumCode 7y ago
This is why I support UBI over a Federal Jobs Guarantee. UBI doesnt tell individuals how to spend their money or time.
mc32 7y ago
>”The need to grind out a day at the office or the shipyard or in the truck hauling cargo saps a person's freewill.” I’m not sure of that. Couple of things. I’ve worked with working class people. They may complain about the job or the boss, but if they didn’t do one of those jobs, they’d feel less empowered. I’ve heard people essentially say I don’t want to be on welfare but I can’t get a job. So they'd prefer a job to being on the dole. Two, people with lots of time and nothing to do tend to just while away time, either in the form of any kind of entertainment or some times in counter productive activities. Doing “make-work” actually gives people some purpose. I’m saying UBI will bring other unintended problems. I think UBI could be like people who have dogs and give them all they need [like UBI] but don’t take them out for walks. Work, any kind of work is like taking the dog out for a walk.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  People having "nothing to do" is a self-inflicted problem of modern societies. There's plenty of stuff to do, all over the place. Just because it might not meet some wholly-arbitrary standard of a 'living', 'sustainable' level of productivity doesn't mean it's "make-work".
  - iknowalot 7y ago
    People will leave the mundane and repetitive to automation and focus on what they find truly fulfilling, utilizing "creative intelligence". Creative intelligence involves always striving for the new thoughts, fresh ideas, novel ways to solve problems....repetition makes people mentally weak and depressed. Many of the problems we discuss today about humans in the era of automation have already been addressed in ancient Indian philosophy (many millennia ago). This isn't new....
- fierarul 7y ago
  > I’m saying UBI will bring other unintended problems. I think UBI could be like people who have dogs and give them all they need [like UBI] but don’t take them out for walks. Work, any kind of work is like taking the dog out for a walk. I like what you are saying and thought that perhaps this is why politicians seem to be so hyper-focused on jobs. They may realise better than most people jobs have other roles except producing an income.
RickJWagner 7y ago
If everybody got to do what their freewill told them to do, pretty soon we'd have lots of artists but no plumbers. Or butchers, or morticians, or laborers. It's so much better being artistic. I fear it wouldn't end well.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > but no plumbers. Or butchers, or morticians, or laborers The market takes care of that problem quite nicely. Lines of work which are less comfortable or appealing should pay more in the first place.
  - trianglem 7y ago
    Not really, it would make no sense to acquire advanced skills if menial unskilled labor that no one wants to do pays more.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      The kind of menial unskilled labor that we're discussing here is far less appealing than any work involving advanced skills - that's what the higher pay would be compensating for. It all works out.
    - croon 7y ago
      Think further a few more steps. There will be an equilibrium around a pay where there is a long enough line for unskilled labor to fill all demand. Assuming an Econ 101 efficient transparent market.
      - littlestymaar 7y ago
        > Assuming an Econ 101 efficient transparent market. Which is basically “assuming a flat earth and atmosphere approximate to vacuum”. You can't get many useful insights from that.
- Arbalest 7y ago
tracer4201 7y ago
The elites will go to great lengths to ensure you work hard so they can profit and keep the status quo. I’ve presented similar arguments and have had the VP of a FAANG (a friend of mine) argue that working is in people’s better interests, that it actually empowers them, etc etc.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  I wonder if that VP even knows a single person who would be a net recipient under a UBI-like arrangement. It just sounds like the kind of comment that reveals a severe lack of understanding wrt. what UBI would actually be like.
  - jcranmer 7y ago
    To be fair, I don't think that most advocates of UBI know of such a person themselves.
roenxi 7y ago
> And, why do they need to be productive? Because every day a typical person needs to consume about 9kJ worth of food We need a system that produces 9kJ food x number of people reliably and accurately. Food is somewhat metaphorical here, there are a bunch of other things that are needed. Also, that system needs to be fair. The people responsible for producing the food are taking on extra hardships or risks and won't do it if they don't think they are getting a net-good deal. And there is also the issue of taxes. We need people to be productive to support the institution of government which has become large end free-spending.
trianglem 7y ago
Let me preface this by saying I agree with you in spirit but your first and second paragraphs have a contradiction in them. How are you going to get people to come in and cook meals for kids at 6am because that's almost certainly something people will not do unless coerced by circumstance.

hectorr1 7y ago

> And, why do they need to be productive? Because the entire global economy is premised on having enough growth to pay off the debt incurred by previous generations. If people choose to be less productive the whole edifice comes crashing down.

claudiawerner 7y ago
Given the things GP described as being unproductive, things that almost all of us find humanly valuable at a very basic level, perhaps the edifice needs some serious refactoring if that's the case. I love life, I don't love work. Work is part of life, but I can't love life fully if I don't love my work. A system based on the idea that every member of society must be productive is so hideous and inhuman to me it makes me angry to think of someone seriously propounding this productivist dogma. Why, exactly, is society structured in such a way that most of my waking hours are spent getting ready for work, commuting and working? It's a tragedy to be born, grow up, and spend your days grinding away just to stay alive. That's the one life you have, and I'm wasting it just for the fact of staying alive? It's no surprise that young people aren't happy with this.
- DubiousPusher 7y ago
  Maybe the key is to change what we consider productive. Our main measure of productivity is GDP and it has some really perverse methodology. If a defense manufacturer builds a bomb and sells it the government, that is considered positive GDP. If next year that bomb is taken and dropped on one's own country thus destroying value is it considered negative GDP? No, again it's positive production because the pilot and bombadeer sold their services to the government too! Meanwhile, if one parent in a relationship stays home to care for the couple's children thus rendering a highly valuable service to the family, it is not counted! Only academics who have furvent faith in the dogma they've been handed down can see such a contradiction and maintain their faith. Recently we have been seeing economists trying to augment gross measures like GDP. And we've seen the rise of behavioral economist who are trying to better integrate human factors into economics.
onion2k 7y ago
This is true if human productivity is the only thing driving growth. The suggestion here is that automation replaces that human input as most jobs are actually more about supporting the innovation rather than innovation itself - if you remove the need for those supporting jobs many, many more people can work on the innovation bit instead. Society would benefit greatly. Some people, maybe even most, won't actually achieve much or contribute anything to the furthering of the human race, but that cost is worth paying for if enough actually do. We probably have hundreds of Einsteins, Turings, and Musks working in the roles supporting the innovators because they can't get out of those roles. That's bad for all of us.

tarr11 7y ago

> Despite the sharp wrangling that the National School Lunch Program often stirs up, the meals coming out of it are more nutritious — and a lot more adventurous — than they were 10 years ago. “It absolutely is a brighter day for school foods,” says Bettina Elias Siegel, a lawyer turned advocate and author of the book “Kid Food.” > A major federal study recently came to much the same conclusion, finding that school lunches have improved significantly since implementation of the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. And the schools with the healthiest menus have the greatest rates of student participation. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/food/school-lunches-in-america/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/food/school-lun...

thatfrenchguy 7y ago
As a french person who's been to a few schools in the US, the US has such a long way to go it's almost non funny. I would never subject my kids to the food the local super-rich-tech-company daycare gives to toddlers.
maxaf 7y ago
I don’t care what anyone says; in NYC school lunches are basically inedible. Having been exposed to the public school system here for over six years, I can say with confidence that no one who has any choice will allow their kids to eat the garbage that schools put out during lunch. My kid tells me that she’d rather go hungry than eat lunch at school. I’ll be packing lunch for another six years as needed, and that’s okay by me. I just wish we weren’t wasting all this money to haul garbage to schools on a daily basis.
nitrogen 7y ago
Lunches might be better on average, and still in some places worse than they used to be.

hos234 7y ago

"Productive" is code for obedience. When ever someone talks about Productivity they are measuring how many people in the population are obedient and fit into domination based hierarchies. Those that don't throughout history are unproductive. Now the problem is "Productivity" is stagnating since the 80's[1]. Why? Because most people learnt they don't like being obedient or dominated and there are better and newly available routes to meet ones needs and values. We don't need to prop up a Mark Zuckerberg or Ray Dalio or the Queen of England to live a decent life anymore. You can even do it without exploiting someone else. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workforce_productivity#/media/File:US_productivity_and_real_wages.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workforce_productivity#/media/...

icotyl 7y ago
> "Now the problem is "Productivity" is stagnating since the 80's" This is the exact opposite of what your chart shows. Productivity, in the economic sense, is growing since the 1980s. It's wages that have stagnated. The wealth generated by increased productivity is all flowing to top. Dalio recognizes this: "Increased productivity will also substantially increase the wealth gap." He knows this trend is not sustainable.
- hos234 7y ago
  It is the same damn thing. Wages is proxy for WORKER productivity. Go and ask Dalio why wages/worker productivity has stagnated while sector(factory/org) productivity has increased. Listening to him is like listening to some member of British Royalty while Empire winds down having no clue why the colonies want independence. They too will say the British Empire's increased productivity will increase of the wealth gap. That's just another way of saying nobody wants to work to prop up the British Empire. People have found better things to do in life. The only thing under threat is their model of reality. And there is no point paying attention to them about what comes next, because they can only see the empire based on obedience and domination as the best model.

trpc 7y ago

>transferring money to people who are unproductive says the professional unproductive hedge fund manager. The parasite billionaire who spent his life capturing the profit made and value created by companies

friedman23 7y ago

> And, why do they need to be productive? Why do I need to give them money?

trianglem 7y ago
The unfortunate answer here is because you choose to be productive.

zozbot234 7y ago

>He sees “transferring money to people who are unproductive” [universal basic income, UBI] as less optimal than finding a way for them to be productive. ¿Por qué no los dos? One of the issues with the current system is that it does not serve people who are only somewhat productive, if only for the time being. We expect that every job (more generally - every production opportunity, at the margin) will pay for itself, but there's no law of economics that says this has to happen.

Upvoter33 7y ago

Seems like you mixed up a bunch of stuff, like cost cutting vs. federal government overreach. Lunches are bad today at schools because no one wants to spend any money on anything in the public sector.

SubiculumCode 7y ago

This is why I support UBI over a Federal Jobs Guarantee. UBI doesnt tell individuals how to spend their money or time.

mc32 7y ago

>”The need to grind out a day at the office or the shipyard or in the truck hauling cargo saps a person's freewill.” I’m not sure of that. Couple of things. I’ve worked with working class people. They may complain about the job or the boss, but if they didn’t do one of those jobs, they’d feel less empowered. I’ve heard people essentially say I don’t want to be on welfare but I can’t get a job. So they'd prefer a job to being on the dole. Two, people with lots of time and nothing to do tend to just while away time, either in the form of any kind of entertainment or some times in counter productive activities. Doing “make-work” actually gives people some purpose. I’m saying UBI will bring other unintended problems. I think UBI could be like people who have dogs and give them all they need [like UBI] but don’t take them out for walks. Work, any kind of work is like taking the dog out for a walk.

zozbot234 7y ago
People having "nothing to do" is a self-inflicted problem of modern societies. There's plenty of stuff to do, all over the place. Just because it might not meet some wholly-arbitrary standard of a 'living', 'sustainable' level of productivity doesn't mean it's "make-work".
- iknowalot 7y ago
  People will leave the mundane and repetitive to automation and focus on what they find truly fulfilling, utilizing "creative intelligence". Creative intelligence involves always striving for the new thoughts, fresh ideas, novel ways to solve problems....repetition makes people mentally weak and depressed. Many of the problems we discuss today about humans in the era of automation have already been addressed in ancient Indian philosophy (many millennia ago). This isn't new....
fierarul 7y ago
> I’m saying UBI will bring other unintended problems. I think UBI could be like people who have dogs and give them all they need [like UBI] but don’t take them out for walks. Work, any kind of work is like taking the dog out for a walk. I like what you are saying and thought that perhaps this is why politicians seem to be so hyper-focused on jobs. They may realise better than most people jobs have other roles except producing an income.

RickJWagner 7y ago

If everybody got to do what their freewill told them to do, pretty soon we'd have lots of artists but no plumbers. Or butchers, or morticians, or laborers. It's so much better being artistic. I fear it wouldn't end well.

zozbot234 7y ago
> but no plumbers. Or butchers, or morticians, or laborers The market takes care of that problem quite nicely. Lines of work which are less comfortable or appealing should pay more in the first place.
- trianglem 7y ago
  Not really, it would make no sense to acquire advanced skills if menial unskilled labor that no one wants to do pays more.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    The kind of menial unskilled labor that we're discussing here is far less appealing than any work involving advanced skills - that's what the higher pay would be compensating for. It all works out.
  - croon 7y ago
    Think further a few more steps. There will be an equilibrium around a pay where there is a long enough line for unskilled labor to fill all demand. Assuming an Econ 101 efficient transparent market.
    - littlestymaar 7y ago
      > Assuming an Econ 101 efficient transparent market. Which is basically “assuming a flat earth and atmosphere approximate to vacuum”. You can't get many useful insights from that.
Arbalest 7y ago

tracer4201 7y ago

The elites will go to great lengths to ensure you work hard so they can profit and keep the status quo. I’ve presented similar arguments and have had the VP of a FAANG (a friend of mine) argue that working is in people’s better interests, that it actually empowers them, etc etc.

zozbot234 7y ago
I wonder if that VP even knows a single person who would be a net recipient under a UBI-like arrangement. It just sounds like the kind of comment that reveals a severe lack of understanding wrt. what UBI would actually be like.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  To be fair, I don't think that most advocates of UBI know of such a person themselves.

roenxi 7y ago

> And, why do they need to be productive? Because every day a typical person needs to consume about 9kJ worth of food We need a system that produces 9kJ food x number of people reliably and accurately. Food is somewhat metaphorical here, there are a bunch of other things that are needed. Also, that system needs to be fair. The people responsible for producing the food are taking on extra hardships or risks and won't do it if they don't think they are getting a net-good deal. And there is also the issue of taxes. We need people to be productive to support the institution of government which has become large end free-spending.

trianglem 7y ago

Let me preface this by saying I agree with you in spirit but your first and second paragraphs have a contradiction in them. How are you going to get people to come in and cook meals for kids at 6am because that's almost certainly something people will not do unless coerced by circumstance.