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>WE SHOULD ALL REDUCE WORK. >Sorry for the caps but we need to collectively get into this mindset. We're more productive than ever with very little to show for

>WE SHOULD ALL REDUCE WORK. >Sorry for the caps but we need to collectively get into this mindset. We're more productive than ever with very little to show for it. We've been having labor outright stolen from us for decades. Speak for yourself. Not everybody's comfortable spending most of their time lounging around doing nothing that anybody else even values enough to pay for.

aahhahahaaa 6y ago
The thing is... you can have the choice. Sometimes you need the choice, things can go south for any of us. The choice can also free you to take risks... it makes it easier to start a business, it makes it easier to fail. I've been literally working without an unemployment gap since I've been 14. I worked 60+ hours a week through most of my 20s. I didn't have a choice. It took me half of my life to reach financial stability and normalcy. I still get stressed about healthcare costs despite being healthy. It doesn't have to be this way for anyone. Even if you want to work all the time, most people aren't being paid appropriately for the time they put in. None of us are really experiencing the benefits of society's dramatically increased productivity.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  > None of us are really experiencing the benefits of society's dramatically increased productivity. You're just not seeing it. I remember the days of manual typewriters. Make a mistake, type it over again. Put in an envelope, mail, wait weeks for a reply. Write the letter by hand, even worse. Today, shoot off a text or email with automatic spellchecking. Cars need far less maintenance. TVs are practically free. My microwave greatly reduces meal prep time. I could go on and on.
  - robertpateii 6y ago
    Those examples save us minutes but don’t make humans more free or happier or safer. Better examples would be increased lifespans and lower infant mortality. Stuff that ties into the standard of living definition. Which is the point: our standard of living has not increased at the same rate as productivity.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      Modern cars are a heluva lot safer. Expected lifespan is quite a bit higher. You can't expect it to increase at the same rate as productivity, because it asymptotically approaches a limit. Whether you're happy or not is up to you, not society. People, regardless of their status, tend to be at about the same level of happiness.
      - robertpateii 6y ago
        Are you saying that right now the quality of life for all Americans has reached a its asymptotic limit in regards to productivity?
        WalterBright 6y ago
        Lifespan asymptotically approaches biological limits, i.e. the rate of progress inevitably slows. > all I wish people would stop adding such qualifiers to construct strawmen.
        robertpateii 6y ago
        Ohhh by “it” you mean lifespan not quality of life or standard of living which are the relevant measurements of what we should be gaining from productivity. I didn’t realize you were going to nit pick a couple of very specific examples among many. p.s. also didn’t expect you to nit pick examples I gave that I thought would better serve your original point: big life changing stuff has improved. I expected us to move on to discuss what is of major value that we should expect from productivity.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    I remember my mom helping my dad write his book. She did a lot of the typing. Make revisions, retype the whole book. I thought that was hell even as a child watching her work. Today, just do the edits, hit [print]. Hours, hours, hours saved. Ironically, my dad told me in the 70s that the two greatest inventions would be a TV you could hang on the wall and a typewriter where you could edit without retyping the whole thing. To think some people think we don't live in a wonderland! (He missed the calculator. What a marvelous time saver that was!)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- aahhahahaaa 6y ago
  Walter You can go on and on, but you're talking about an illusion. You are literally working more and getting paid less than previous generations. It's objective data. People had cars and televisions. Your cellphone doesn't cost the lifetime of productivity gains that are being stolen from you.
  - dbsmith83 6y ago
    Stolen? Please, spare us the hyperbole. How is it stolen?
    - aahhahahaaa 6y ago
      You're working more and getting paid less than people did, 10, 20, 30 years ago... meanwhile the wealth gap has increased dramatically. Where do you think it's going? It's not hyperbole whatsoever.
      - dbsmith83 6y ago
        Sure things have changed and the wealth gap is a problem, but it is not stealing. If it were, you could take them to court for paying you only min wage and making you work 40 hours.
  - themacguffinman 6y ago
    Money isn't wealth, money is just a common & convenient representation of wealth. You don't need to look into people's paychecks to see wealth. You can see wealth in the buildings and streets, in health and technology and culture. People work tirelessly to create & improve that, and you can see that society is improving bit by bit. That's not an illusion. Stagnant wages likely signify an actual problem in valuation worth fixing, but it's silly to solve that by being less productive. Lowering total productivity may generate lower surplus value for greedy employers, but it's a weak revenge. You still earn less than you should, and society is poorer for it. There are many other ways to address the root issue.
abootstrapper 6y ago
Then get a job, a hobby, or volunteer. Contribute to open source projects. Create a startup. Spend more time with your kids. Take care of your aging parents. Sit around and play video games. UBI creates so many opportunities.
- airstrike 6y ago
  ...And get outcompeted by the next country over
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    "Caring for the elderly is a weakness."
    - themacguffinman 6y ago
      No, but a massive, disproportional share of your population caring for the elderly is a real weakness. A market economy would weigh and value "caring for the elderly" in balance with other priorities, whilst UBI volunteers are free to care for the elderly too much, sacrificing limited resources that are needed to keep a society competitive in other areas.
    - airstrike 6y ago
      "Putting words in people's mouths is fun" Caring about the elderly is entirely besides the point I'm making
  - Bootwizard 6y ago
    Isn't it better to be happy than to be "the best"? Would you really rather draw meaning in life from your country's position in the global economy than from your own happiness? Do you even matter at that point as a human being or are you just a gear in the machine to crank up the economy of your country. You're disposable.
    - themacguffinman 6y ago
fountainofage 6y ago
Who said anything about lounging around? One could read as many books as they like. Learn to play an assortment of musical instruments. Learn woodworking. Sailing. Write novels. Compose songs. Complete their magnum opuses. Master languages. Study art. Create art. Improve their athleticism. And so on. The list is near endless of things to do.
- logicchains 6y ago
  >One could read as many books as they like. Learn to play an assortment of musical instruments. Learn woodworking. Sailing. Write novels. Compose songs. Complete their magnum opuses. Master languages. Study art. Create art. Improve their athleticism. And so on. Those would all be very fun things to do, but very self-focused. I'd love to spend my life writing a novel, except it'd probably be a pretty shitty novel, and it'd be hard for me to find satisfaction in having spent my life on something that contributed very little value to anybody else in society. At least with work I know somebody values what I'm doing.
  - kamaal 6y ago
    You will have option to do what you want. That's the whole point. They won't pay you enough to buy a Ferrari. But it will be enough money to spare time to cook well, exercise and spend time on relationships. Or do whatever you want to do. Different people want different things. Surely your choice of tech work will be very different when you know losing your job won't starve you to death.
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    > At least with work I know somebody values what I'm doing. ...have you talked to your sales guys?
  - albatruss 6y ago
    Suppose that automation has greatly advanced, and our material needs are fulfilled as a given, as if Earth were now our own Eden, tended to by robots. About the only work left for humans to do, that is to say producing goods and services that other humans deem valuable, is researching and developing heroin. The robots don't do this because they know that heroin use is quite harmful to human well-being, but of course we find great value in being high and are willing to pay for the experience, thus creating a market. In such a scenario, to what extent does working involve the creation of value? Would you, and should you, find satisfaction in performing this labor? And in what ways is it different from working on the next big social media app to dethrone TikTok?
tropdrop 6y ago
You can work as much as you'd like. But which would you rather - being obligated to work 80 hour workweeks as an "integrations architect" for a shadowy .com company that will sell and gut its workforce (including you) in a couple of years so that each VC gets a nice payload from the sale? Or would you rather choose to work 80 hour workweeks on your very own homesteading project, building your house from scratch while not having to worry about the cost of food, receiving just enough for basic sustenance all the while? I know which I would rather do.
lovegoblin 6y ago
My god is "work" really the only way you can think of to spend your time?
- adventured 6y ago
  Why does his choice for how to spend his time offend you so much that you need to directly, overtly insult him for it? Do you feel a need to control him because his values apparently differ from your own? Fortunately there is no one right way to live, no singular correct set of values.
  - Chinjut 6y ago
    The ire is because they are saying this in a context where they are implicitly talking not just about their personal preferences, but furthermore about the opportunities that should or should not be made available to others. They are saying this in a context where it functions as an argument against Basic Income, on the grounds that leisure is bad and everyone should be made to work as much as possible, to provide as much for society as possible.
- logicchains 6y ago
  "Work" means we know we're doing something valuable to society because someone in society is willing to pay for it. If we're doing something nobody values enough to pay for then we may well be contributing nothing of value to society.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - 3131s 6y ago
    > we're doing something valuable to society because someone in society is willing to pay for it This is where you are completely wrong. I'm not even going to bother explaining, because there are too many obvious counter-examples.
waheoo 6y ago
If you were steelmanning the argument you would understand they mean reduce required work. Your always welcome to work harder for more. The problem is, there is quite literally not enough valid, useful, and productive work to go around. We've reached a point there isn't enough work for everyone to do. What does that mean if you want to work full time? It means you're taking work away from someone else. I don't think anyone minds that, what they mind is that you're also taking their livelihood away. If there isn't enough work, but there is enough resources, what does that tell you about the system? Either those who can't secure work will suffer, or we need to redistribute the outputs of those who can secure work. Its a really basic question whether you agree with ubi or not: Do you want people to suffer so you can work full time? Or would you rather everyone gets what they need, and we work for what we want.
- themacguffinman 6y ago
  This is not how a market economy works. There's no preordained pool of work that you can run out of. It's practically nonsense to say there's not enough work to go around. People always want more, and you can always find work fulfilling those wants. There's always demand for stuff. Can you honestly look around you right now and think "there isn't much room for improvement"? Well, people need to work to improve stuff, that's useful and valuable work. Do you really think "welp, my life doesn't have any more problems to solve". Well, people need to work to solve those problems, that's useful and valuable work. Whether or not people are given what they need to survive is irrelevant to UBI. Welfare does that. What makes UBI worse is that it provides no incentive to work and create value, and that's a tremendous waste of human capital and it worsens inequality.
  - waheoo 6y ago
    I'm sorry but this is simply not true. Look at a basic case, a single farmer is able to produce enough food for 100 people. There is no need for 99 people to work for there food in this simplistic case. Yes, these people may want iPhones, and maybe they need to work for them, but the basic income component is covered by a single farmer. I'm not saying there is some static pool of work available. I am saying there is a static pool of life sustaining work available. This is why ubi works mathematically, and people not working are not a problem, for the maths. > Whether or not people are given what they need to survive is irrelevant to UBI. Welfare does that. What are you talking about, this is the point. And no, welfare does not do that adequately. Welfare is an incredibly inefficient means of wealth distribution. > What makes UBI worse is that it provides no incentive to work and create value, and that's a tremendous waste of human capital I have zero concerns about the incentive to work, that is a fud argument that doesn't hold up when looking at the studies we've seen. Work is meaningful in and of itself, you don't need to be paid to receive reward from it. > and it worsens inequality. This is what I'm afraid of too and have not heard any ubi proponents address this in any meaningful manner. Ubi would quite likely create a proletarian class. On the flip side, I'm not really sure how this is very different from what we have with capitalism right now. At least with ubi welfare is adequately taken care of.

aahhahahaaa 6y ago

The thing is... you can have the choice. Sometimes you need the choice, things can go south for any of us. The choice can also free you to take risks... it makes it easier to start a business, it makes it easier to fail. I've been literally working without an unemployment gap since I've been 14. I worked 60+ hours a week through most of my 20s. I didn't have a choice. It took me half of my life to reach financial stability and normalcy. I still get stressed about healthcare costs despite being healthy. It doesn't have to be this way for anyone. Even if you want to work all the time, most people aren't being paid appropriately for the time they put in. None of us are really experiencing the benefits of society's dramatically increased productivity.

WalterBright 6y ago
> None of us are really experiencing the benefits of society's dramatically increased productivity. You're just not seeing it. I remember the days of manual typewriters. Make a mistake, type it over again. Put in an envelope, mail, wait weeks for a reply. Write the letter by hand, even worse. Today, shoot off a text or email with automatic spellchecking. Cars need far less maintenance. TVs are practically free. My microwave greatly reduces meal prep time. I could go on and on.
- robertpateii 6y ago
  Those examples save us minutes but don’t make humans more free or happier or safer. Better examples would be increased lifespans and lower infant mortality. Stuff that ties into the standard of living definition. Which is the point: our standard of living has not increased at the same rate as productivity.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    Modern cars are a heluva lot safer. Expected lifespan is quite a bit higher. You can't expect it to increase at the same rate as productivity, because it asymptotically approaches a limit. Whether you're happy or not is up to you, not society. People, regardless of their status, tend to be at about the same level of happiness.
    - robertpateii 6y ago
      Are you saying that right now the quality of life for all Americans has reached a its asymptotic limit in regards to productivity?
      - WalterBright 6y ago
        Lifespan asymptotically approaches biological limits, i.e. the rate of progress inevitably slows. > all I wish people would stop adding such qualifiers to construct strawmen.
        robertpateii 6y ago
        Ohhh by “it” you mean lifespan not quality of life or standard of living which are the relevant measurements of what we should be gaining from productivity. I didn’t realize you were going to nit pick a couple of very specific examples among many. p.s. also didn’t expect you to nit pick examples I gave that I thought would better serve your original point: big life changing stuff has improved. I expected us to move on to discuss what is of major value that we should expect from productivity.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  I remember my mom helping my dad write his book. She did a lot of the typing. Make revisions, retype the whole book. I thought that was hell even as a child watching her work. Today, just do the edits, hit [print]. Hours, hours, hours saved. Ironically, my dad told me in the 70s that the two greatest inventions would be a TV you could hang on the wall and a typewriter where you could edit without retyping the whole thing. To think some people think we don't live in a wonderland! (He missed the calculator. What a marvelous time saver that was!)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
aahhahahaaa 6y ago
Walter You can go on and on, but you're talking about an illusion. You are literally working more and getting paid less than previous generations. It's objective data. People had cars and televisions. Your cellphone doesn't cost the lifetime of productivity gains that are being stolen from you.
- dbsmith83 6y ago
  Stolen? Please, spare us the hyperbole. How is it stolen?
  - aahhahahaaa 6y ago
    You're working more and getting paid less than people did, 10, 20, 30 years ago... meanwhile the wealth gap has increased dramatically. Where do you think it's going? It's not hyperbole whatsoever.
    - dbsmith83 6y ago
      Sure things have changed and the wealth gap is a problem, but it is not stealing. If it were, you could take them to court for paying you only min wage and making you work 40 hours.
- themacguffinman 6y ago
  Money isn't wealth, money is just a common & convenient representation of wealth. You don't need to look into people's paychecks to see wealth. You can see wealth in the buildings and streets, in health and technology and culture. People work tirelessly to create & improve that, and you can see that society is improving bit by bit. That's not an illusion. Stagnant wages likely signify an actual problem in valuation worth fixing, but it's silly to solve that by being less productive. Lowering total productivity may generate lower surplus value for greedy employers, but it's a weak revenge. You still earn less than you should, and society is poorer for it. There are many other ways to address the root issue.

abootstrapper 6y ago

Then get a job, a hobby, or volunteer. Contribute to open source projects. Create a startup. Spend more time with your kids. Take care of your aging parents. Sit around and play video games. UBI creates so many opportunities.

airstrike 6y ago
...And get outcompeted by the next country over
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  "Caring for the elderly is a weakness."
  - themacguffinman 6y ago
    No, but a massive, disproportional share of your population caring for the elderly is a real weakness. A market economy would weigh and value "caring for the elderly" in balance with other priorities, whilst UBI volunteers are free to care for the elderly too much, sacrificing limited resources that are needed to keep a society competitive in other areas.
  - airstrike 6y ago
    "Putting words in people's mouths is fun" Caring about the elderly is entirely besides the point I'm making
- Bootwizard 6y ago
  Isn't it better to be happy than to be "the best"? Would you really rather draw meaning in life from your country's position in the global economy than from your own happiness? Do you even matter at that point as a human being or are you just a gear in the machine to crank up the economy of your country. You're disposable.
  - themacguffinman 6y ago

fountainofage 6y ago

Who said anything about lounging around? One could read as many books as they like. Learn to play an assortment of musical instruments. Learn woodworking. Sailing. Write novels. Compose songs. Complete their magnum opuses. Master languages. Study art. Create art. Improve their athleticism. And so on. The list is near endless of things to do.

logicchains 6y ago
>One could read as many books as they like. Learn to play an assortment of musical instruments. Learn woodworking. Sailing. Write novels. Compose songs. Complete their magnum opuses. Master languages. Study art. Create art. Improve their athleticism. And so on. Those would all be very fun things to do, but very self-focused. I'd love to spend my life writing a novel, except it'd probably be a pretty shitty novel, and it'd be hard for me to find satisfaction in having spent my life on something that contributed very little value to anybody else in society. At least with work I know somebody values what I'm doing.
- kamaal 6y ago
  You will have option to do what you want. That's the whole point. They won't pay you enough to buy a Ferrari. But it will be enough money to spare time to cook well, exercise and spend time on relationships. Or do whatever you want to do. Different people want different things. Surely your choice of tech work will be very different when you know losing your job won't starve you to death.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  > At least with work I know somebody values what I'm doing. ...have you talked to your sales guys?
- albatruss 6y ago
  Suppose that automation has greatly advanced, and our material needs are fulfilled as a given, as if Earth were now our own Eden, tended to by robots. About the only work left for humans to do, that is to say producing goods and services that other humans deem valuable, is researching and developing heroin. The robots don't do this because they know that heroin use is quite harmful to human well-being, but of course we find great value in being high and are willing to pay for the experience, thus creating a market. In such a scenario, to what extent does working involve the creation of value? Would you, and should you, find satisfaction in performing this labor? And in what ways is it different from working on the next big social media app to dethrone TikTok?

tropdrop 6y ago

You can work as much as you'd like. But which would you rather - being obligated to work 80 hour workweeks as an "integrations architect" for a shadowy .com company that will sell and gut its workforce (including you) in a couple of years so that each VC gets a nice payload from the sale? Or would you rather choose to work 80 hour workweeks on your very own homesteading project, building your house from scratch while not having to worry about the cost of food, receiving just enough for basic sustenance all the while? I know which I would rather do.

lovegoblin 6y ago

My god is "work" really the only way you can think of to spend your time?

adventured 6y ago
Why does his choice for how to spend his time offend you so much that you need to directly, overtly insult him for it? Do you feel a need to control him because his values apparently differ from your own? Fortunately there is no one right way to live, no singular correct set of values.
- Chinjut 6y ago
  The ire is because they are saying this in a context where they are implicitly talking not just about their personal preferences, but furthermore about the opportunities that should or should not be made available to others. They are saying this in a context where it functions as an argument against Basic Income, on the grounds that leisure is bad and everyone should be made to work as much as possible, to provide as much for society as possible.
logicchains 6y ago
"Work" means we know we're doing something valuable to society because someone in society is willing to pay for it. If we're doing something nobody values enough to pay for then we may well be contributing nothing of value to society.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- 3131s 6y ago
  > we're doing something valuable to society because someone in society is willing to pay for it This is where you are completely wrong. I'm not even going to bother explaining, because there are too many obvious counter-examples.

waheoo 6y ago

If you were steelmanning the argument you would understand they mean reduce required work. Your always welcome to work harder for more. The problem is, there is quite literally not enough valid, useful, and productive work to go around. We've reached a point there isn't enough work for everyone to do. What does that mean if you want to work full time? It means you're taking work away from someone else. I don't think anyone minds that, what they mind is that you're also taking their livelihood away. If there isn't enough work, but there is enough resources, what does that tell you about the system? Either those who can't secure work will suffer, or we need to redistribute the outputs of those who can secure work. Its a really basic question whether you agree with ubi or not: Do you want people to suffer so you can work full time? Or would you rather everyone gets what they need, and we work for what we want.

themacguffinman 6y ago
This is not how a market economy works. There's no preordained pool of work that you can run out of. It's practically nonsense to say there's not enough work to go around. People always want more, and you can always find work fulfilling those wants. There's always demand for stuff. Can you honestly look around you right now and think "there isn't much room for improvement"? Well, people need to work to improve stuff, that's useful and valuable work. Do you really think "welp, my life doesn't have any more problems to solve". Well, people need to work to solve those problems, that's useful and valuable work. Whether or not people are given what they need to survive is irrelevant to UBI. Welfare does that. What makes UBI worse is that it provides no incentive to work and create value, and that's a tremendous waste of human capital and it worsens inequality.
- waheoo 6y ago
  I'm sorry but this is simply not true. Look at a basic case, a single farmer is able to produce enough food for 100 people. There is no need for 99 people to work for there food in this simplistic case. Yes, these people may want iPhones, and maybe they need to work for them, but the basic income component is covered by a single farmer. I'm not saying there is some static pool of work available. I am saying there is a static pool of life sustaining work available. This is why ubi works mathematically, and people not working are not a problem, for the maths. > Whether or not people are given what they need to survive is irrelevant to UBI. Welfare does that. What are you talking about, this is the point. And no, welfare does not do that adequately. Welfare is an incredibly inefficient means of wealth distribution. > What makes UBI worse is that it provides no incentive to work and create value, and that's a tremendous waste of human capital I have zero concerns about the incentive to work, that is a fud argument that doesn't hold up when looking at the studies we've seen. Work is meaningful in and of itself, you don't need to be paid to receive reward from it. > and it worsens inequality. This is what I'm afraid of too and have not heard any ubi proponents address this in any meaningful manner. Ubi would quite likely create a proletarian class. On the flip side, I'm not really sure how this is very different from what we have with capitalism right now. At least with ubi welfare is adequately taken care of.