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> From my personal point of view, basic income SHOULD disincentivise work; it's a boost for society, health, well-being, children, etc. Somebody has to do the

> From my personal point of view, basic income SHOULD disincentivise work; it's a boost for society, health, well-being, children, etc. Somebody has to do the work though, until robots do everything (and then declare war on us), you need somebody to take away the garbage, pick the fruits and unclog the toilets. Disincentivizing work doesn't make that go away, it just means you'll put that load on fewer shoulders.

bena 7y ago
Thank you. That's the part of automation that no one wants to discuss. What happens when we're like 90% automated and there simply isn't enough jobs for everyone. Who do we force to work and is that ethical?
- I-M-S 7y ago
  loa_in_ just answered that question for you
  - bena 7y ago
    No, they didn't. "Pay more" is meaningless when most of what you want is provided for you. What are you going to use that money for? For some godawful reason people think near to full automation is going to look exactly like today, but without driving or something. It's not. It's going to look radically different. It will be unprecedented. It's very naive to believe the current methods of incentives will work for a society that doesn't need them.
- c22 7y ago
  I don't know who we can force to do the work for us, but if my toilet's backing up, the garbage is overflowing, and my back yard is filled with rotting fruit I guess I'd do those jobs.
loa_in_ 7y ago
But lack of personnel to do jobs would bump the wages due to demand and that would quickly find people ready to fill them in
- megous 7y ago
  Or it would kill the businesses operating at the margin of profitability.
  - BlackCherry 7y ago
    Which leaves room for a more cost effective business to come in and fill the gap in the market left by the inefficient business' death.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    Why do business deserve a level of welfare we're not affording to human beings. Let's feed, house, cloth, educate and provide health care for everyone - then we can start looking at saving unprofitable business. The truth is, a lot of business ventures simply aren't profitable. It isn't profitable for me to start a business where I deliver whitecastle to remote areas by flying couriers there with the food - but it could be profitable if enough market changes occurred. As these bloat businesses die off we'll see a shift in the market - either there will be a surplus of employees (that will drive down the cost of employment and enable more bloat businesses) or those employees will find other businesses to work at that can survive in the margins that exist.
    - megous 7y ago
      I guess parent edited the comment. I don't remember responding to whatever is in that comment now. So you're responding out of context, too. Fun.
- wtdo 7y ago
  And bumped wages means higher costs which are passed on to customers. The higher prices means having to raise UBI, and the only way to afford that is by increasing taxes, and so effective take home pay from those bumped wages isn't as high as everyone thought and now we're back to square one.
  - munk-a 7y ago
xzel 7y ago
A lot of work today is pretty much bullshit/meaningless; I mean look at 85% of the US insurance / medical billing professions are useless and only exist because there is manufactured bureaucracy. Bullshit Jobs is a great book looking into to this. Also UBI shouldn't be disincentivizing work, it should be allowing people to explore more fulfilling pursuits.
- space_fountain 7y ago
  I hear people say this, but I'm never clear on the mechanism by which we A) have bullshit jobs now and B) we will stop having them once UBI is implemented. It seems to me like capitalists pocketing more money is already a compelling reason to labor used efficiently.
- Aunche 7y ago
  I'm sure if you closely examine the bullshit jobs, you'll find they usually exist for a reason. You can't get rid of them unless you tear everything down and rebuild it. If it was so easy, companies would have already laid them off.
  - BigBubbleButt 7y ago
    Lots of bullshit jobs exist for a reason other than those jobs being useful. Politicians want to create bullshit jobs because it helps them get votes. And sometimes bullshit jobs exist to enrich corporate owners for government contracts - just look at almost any military contract where literally billions of dollars go unaccounted for. Or look at most construction jobs in the US that are regularly overbudget, late, and oftentimes not even up to the original requirements. And yet - those people still get paid and the people who created those contracts make lots of money. In fact, they usually make more money by being more incompetent, because they have to ask for more money to finish the job. The question is always: who is benefiting from this?
    - Aunche 7y ago
      I see what you're you're saying, but it's not like UBI is going to eliminate these bullshit jobs.
z3t4 7y ago
The litterally shitty job of manually cleaning toilets would be higher paid, as it should be.
- theklub 7y ago
  Seems like that job will be taken over by robots sooner or later.
  - mwigdahl 7y ago
    Just means someone has to clean the toilet-cleaning robots.
simiones 7y ago
> you need somebody to take away the garbage, pick the fruits and unclog the toilets So your plan is to make sure some people will die of starvation unless they accept to do these jobs? If no one is willing to do these critical jobs voluntarily, perhaps we should either pay them large amounts of money to convince someone to do them, or spread the work between more people - perhaps on a rotational basis.
- munk-a 7y ago
  If jobs are critical and unappealing, then we should pay large amounts of money for them to be done... Right now those critical and unappealing jobs are quite undervalued.
  - qvrjuec 7y ago
    The examples specifically used above (garbage removal, plumbing) pay very well. I'd say they're valued appropriately for how little training they require.
- eanzenberg 7y ago
  No one (in US or CA) is dying of starvation.
  - heavyset_go 7y ago
    Having worked with them in the past, there are plenty that are one Meals on Wheels delivery away from being hungry and unable to buy food. Hunger rate in the US is 12%.
munk-a 7y ago
And maybe if those jobs are as unattractive as you imply they should come with higher pay checks. I work in software and love the work that I'm doing - if I was a janitor I'd be miserable and be paid less, so where is the incentive for anyone who can do something else to be a janitor... and the answer is, it isn't there.
- luckylion 7y ago
  Sure, so ... who do we force to do the janitorial work once nobody has to work anymore? Or does the need for it magically vanish? If the answer is "we pay them more", great. We're paying more to janitors, janitorial work gets more expensive, we need to make more to afford it, we need more UBI, janitorial work becomes unattractive. You'll have to give up a significant part of your (real, not nominal) income to make a difference there. You might be happy to do that, my guess is that most of your peers are not.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    If I give you 1k, you get some amount of spending power x, if I give everyone 1k and you're on the lower end of the income scale then you've got an additional spending power y. 0 < y < x - getting UBI offers an absolute and definite increase in spending power to those in need, it doesn't give them that spending power at 100% efficiency though, it just shifts some spending power from the richest to the poorest. The reimbursement of janitors might go up with UBI, that's fine, if it's going up then it means that something in the current market situation was artificially holding back their reimbursement. The market can correct pretty easily for UBI and make sure that the jobs that need to be done are indeed done (or else they aren't jobs that need to be done) and maybe janitor, as a profession, is scaled back to just waxing the floors and we discover that people working in an office should, once a week, empty their own trash cans - it's a very plausible outcome from UBI and one that will happen naturally if it'll happen at all.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      If you let the market respond, it will just price in the UBI, and you'll end up with pretty much the situation we have today, only with prices increased by some amount and some added bureaucracy. > maybe [...] we discover that people working in an office should, once a week, empty their own trash cans They can do that today, it's just more efficient to pay somebody else to do it than to have you, a highly-paid software developer, do it. It's more efficient to have you do complicated software things than mopping floors and emptying the trash can. I'm all with you that there's a disconnect in today's wages where high-skill knowledge workers get out-of-proportion amounts of money while low-skill manual labor is basically priced at the minimum amount you need to survive. I don't believe that UBI will solve that if you keep everything else (that is: markets) the same. And I don't see any compelling argument that some (new or old) alternative system that you or I or some people that are way smarter than us could come up with would work more efficiently than our largely-self-optimizing market system. So I'm not a fan of "well, out with the markets if they are what's holding us back", because the risk of it failing catastrophically are just too high to go "well, maybe it'll work this time". I'm happy to be wrong, and I'm far from an expert on any of this, but there's too much hand-waving in UBI suggestions for my taste. Some proponents seriously claim that "doing away with be bureaucratic overhead" would be enough to finance UBI, and I'm dumbfounded that they haven't even done any rough guesstimates of the numbers to realize that they are wrong by orders of magnitude. Controlling inflation will be a massive issue, and I don't haven't heard any convincing answers. If you find a way to convince the super majority that "more more more for me me me" isn't going to make them happy in the long run, that more cooperation etc will benefit everyone (including themselves), the chances are certainly better, but let's find a way to convince them first and then change the system and not change the system and pray to any and all gods that they will become convinced to avert a catastrophic failure.
pnutjam 7y ago
Sounds good for workers.

bena 7y ago

Thank you. That's the part of automation that no one wants to discuss. What happens when we're like 90% automated and there simply isn't enough jobs for everyone. Who do we force to work and is that ethical?

I-M-S 7y ago
loa_in_ just answered that question for you
- bena 7y ago
  No, they didn't. "Pay more" is meaningless when most of what you want is provided for you. What are you going to use that money for? For some godawful reason people think near to full automation is going to look exactly like today, but without driving or something. It's not. It's going to look radically different. It will be unprecedented. It's very naive to believe the current methods of incentives will work for a society that doesn't need them.
c22 7y ago
I don't know who we can force to do the work for us, but if my toilet's backing up, the garbage is overflowing, and my back yard is filled with rotting fruit I guess I'd do those jobs.

loa_in_ 7y ago

But lack of personnel to do jobs would bump the wages due to demand and that would quickly find people ready to fill them in

megous 7y ago
Or it would kill the businesses operating at the margin of profitability.
- BlackCherry 7y ago
  Which leaves room for a more cost effective business to come in and fill the gap in the market left by the inefficient business' death.
- munk-a 7y ago
  Why do business deserve a level of welfare we're not affording to human beings. Let's feed, house, cloth, educate and provide health care for everyone - then we can start looking at saving unprofitable business. The truth is, a lot of business ventures simply aren't profitable. It isn't profitable for me to start a business where I deliver whitecastle to remote areas by flying couriers there with the food - but it could be profitable if enough market changes occurred. As these bloat businesses die off we'll see a shift in the market - either there will be a surplus of employees (that will drive down the cost of employment and enable more bloat businesses) or those employees will find other businesses to work at that can survive in the margins that exist.
  - megous 7y ago
    I guess parent edited the comment. I don't remember responding to whatever is in that comment now. So you're responding out of context, too. Fun.
wtdo 7y ago
And bumped wages means higher costs which are passed on to customers. The higher prices means having to raise UBI, and the only way to afford that is by increasing taxes, and so effective take home pay from those bumped wages isn't as high as everyone thought and now we're back to square one.
- munk-a 7y ago

xzel 7y ago

A lot of work today is pretty much bullshit/meaningless; I mean look at 85% of the US insurance / medical billing professions are useless and only exist because there is manufactured bureaucracy. Bullshit Jobs is a great book looking into to this. Also UBI shouldn't be disincentivizing work, it should be allowing people to explore more fulfilling pursuits.

space_fountain 7y ago
I hear people say this, but I'm never clear on the mechanism by which we A) have bullshit jobs now and B) we will stop having them once UBI is implemented. It seems to me like capitalists pocketing more money is already a compelling reason to labor used efficiently.
Aunche 7y ago
I'm sure if you closely examine the bullshit jobs, you'll find they usually exist for a reason. You can't get rid of them unless you tear everything down and rebuild it. If it was so easy, companies would have already laid them off.
- BigBubbleButt 7y ago
  Lots of bullshit jobs exist for a reason other than those jobs being useful. Politicians want to create bullshit jobs because it helps them get votes. And sometimes bullshit jobs exist to enrich corporate owners for government contracts - just look at almost any military contract where literally billions of dollars go unaccounted for. Or look at most construction jobs in the US that are regularly overbudget, late, and oftentimes not even up to the original requirements. And yet - those people still get paid and the people who created those contracts make lots of money. In fact, they usually make more money by being more incompetent, because they have to ask for more money to finish the job. The question is always: who is benefiting from this?
  - Aunche 7y ago
    I see what you're you're saying, but it's not like UBI is going to eliminate these bullshit jobs.

z3t4 7y ago

The litterally shitty job of manually cleaning toilets would be higher paid, as it should be.

theklub 7y ago
Seems like that job will be taken over by robots sooner or later.
- mwigdahl 7y ago
  Just means someone has to clean the toilet-cleaning robots.

simiones 7y ago

> you need somebody to take away the garbage, pick the fruits and unclog the toilets So your plan is to make sure some people will die of starvation unless they accept to do these jobs? If no one is willing to do these critical jobs voluntarily, perhaps we should either pay them large amounts of money to convince someone to do them, or spread the work between more people - perhaps on a rotational basis.

munk-a 7y ago
If jobs are critical and unappealing, then we should pay large amounts of money for them to be done... Right now those critical and unappealing jobs are quite undervalued.
- qvrjuec 7y ago
  The examples specifically used above (garbage removal, plumbing) pay very well. I'd say they're valued appropriately for how little training they require.
eanzenberg 7y ago
No one (in US or CA) is dying of starvation.
- heavyset_go 7y ago
  Having worked with them in the past, there are plenty that are one Meals on Wheels delivery away from being hungry and unable to buy food. Hunger rate in the US is 12%.

munk-a 7y ago

And maybe if those jobs are as unattractive as you imply they should come with higher pay checks. I work in software and love the work that I'm doing - if I was a janitor I'd be miserable and be paid less, so where is the incentive for anyone who can do something else to be a janitor... and the answer is, it isn't there.

luckylion 7y ago
Sure, so ... who do we force to do the janitorial work once nobody has to work anymore? Or does the need for it magically vanish? If the answer is "we pay them more", great. We're paying more to janitors, janitorial work gets more expensive, we need to make more to afford it, we need more UBI, janitorial work becomes unattractive. You'll have to give up a significant part of your (real, not nominal) income to make a difference there. You might be happy to do that, my guess is that most of your peers are not.
- munk-a 7y ago
  If I give you 1k, you get some amount of spending power x, if I give everyone 1k and you're on the lower end of the income scale then you've got an additional spending power y. 0 < y < x - getting UBI offers an absolute and definite increase in spending power to those in need, it doesn't give them that spending power at 100% efficiency though, it just shifts some spending power from the richest to the poorest. The reimbursement of janitors might go up with UBI, that's fine, if it's going up then it means that something in the current market situation was artificially holding back their reimbursement. The market can correct pretty easily for UBI and make sure that the jobs that need to be done are indeed done (or else they aren't jobs that need to be done) and maybe janitor, as a profession, is scaled back to just waxing the floors and we discover that people working in an office should, once a week, empty their own trash cans - it's a very plausible outcome from UBI and one that will happen naturally if it'll happen at all.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    If you let the market respond, it will just price in the UBI, and you'll end up with pretty much the situation we have today, only with prices increased by some amount and some added bureaucracy. > maybe [...] we discover that people working in an office should, once a week, empty their own trash cans They can do that today, it's just more efficient to pay somebody else to do it than to have you, a highly-paid software developer, do it. It's more efficient to have you do complicated software things than mopping floors and emptying the trash can. I'm all with you that there's a disconnect in today's wages where high-skill knowledge workers get out-of-proportion amounts of money while low-skill manual labor is basically priced at the minimum amount you need to survive. I don't believe that UBI will solve that if you keep everything else (that is: markets) the same. And I don't see any compelling argument that some (new or old) alternative system that you or I or some people that are way smarter than us could come up with would work more efficiently than our largely-self-optimizing market system. So I'm not a fan of "well, out with the markets if they are what's holding us back", because the risk of it failing catastrophically are just too high to go "well, maybe it'll work this time". I'm happy to be wrong, and I'm far from an expert on any of this, but there's too much hand-waving in UBI suggestions for my taste. Some proponents seriously claim that "doing away with be bureaucratic overhead" would be enough to finance UBI, and I'm dumbfounded that they haven't even done any rough guesstimates of the numbers to realize that they are wrong by orders of magnitude. Controlling inflation will be a massive issue, and I don't haven't heard any convincing answers. If you find a way to convince the super majority that "more more more for me me me" isn't going to make them happy in the long run, that more cooperation etc will benefit everyone (including themselves), the chances are certainly better, but let's find a way to convince them first and then change the system and not change the system and pray to any and all gods that they will become convinced to avert a catastrophic failure.

pnutjam 7y ago

Sounds good for workers.