6 ms·

You'd get both the UBI + wage/salary, I'm not quite sure how that translates to "basically paying the company to work".

by qwytw 5y ago

jokethrowaway 5y ago
If I get enough money with ubi I won't waste my life working on something I don't care about. The amount of people who would continue their job if it wasn't for the money it's slim I definitely wouldn't waste my time building someone else product and creating value for society. I'd likely build something fun I want to build which is unlikely to be useful for society or make money. A large part of the populatin on would happily paint, cook, read books, watch movies, play videogames until they die - if they had the money.
- danShumway 5y ago
  You'll still get paid for your normal job. It's not like that money would be thrown away, you're not working for free. You go to your job and work because you want more money. I think UBI is largely untested and its proponents should proceed with caution. But I also think people are overconfident in assuming that people wouldn't work; the reality is that we don't have a ton of data in either direction. If the 20th-21st century has taught us anything, it's that consumerism is a very powerful motivator. People like to have money to buy luxuries, most people don't want to sit on subsistence levels of income their entire lives. People want things. They want to buy videogames, and XBoxes, and nice houses, and cars, and iPhones, and to go to fancy restaurants. Whether consumerism is a powerful enough motivator... I just think people are very over-confident talking about what is definitely going to happen in a system that has basically never been tried before.
  - prepend 5y ago
    > If the 20th-21st century has taught us anything, it's that consumerism is a very powerful motivator. Or, perhaps, that there is much attention on consumers who spend significantly as they have “louder” lifestyles that are easy to show. Poverty rates are high with 14% of the US under the poverty line [0] and I don’t think consumerism is motivating them very much. And I think it’s risky to equate considering as a large scale motivator based on extrapolating mass consumer behavior to all. [0] https://www.prb.org/usdata/ https://www.prb.org/usdata/
    - danShumway 5y ago
      Well, yeah, like I said: > Whether consumerism is a powerful enough motivator... I just think people are very over-confident talking about what is definitely going to happen in a system that has basically never been tried before. People are really eager to look at populations and make very strong assertions about what their intrinsic motivators are with (in my mind) little evidence. > and I don’t think consumerism is motivating them very much. Are 14% of the population below poverty levels because they like living there? Because our systems discourage saving money once you're on wellfare? Because of market pressures? We have basically zero large-scale experiments, but people on both sides of the UBI test seem really confident that they know what everyone will do.
  - smaryjerry 5y ago
    Today’s stimulus is a perfect example of UBI. 33.8% of all personal income in the last year came from the government. It results in everyone having more money to spend but eventually as we see now shortages in just about everything, those shortages cause prices to rise and soon even though everyone has more money, everything costs more. The market settles prices in the end and trying to control the market by pumping cash only works for a short term. Take an example of say Las Vegas limit surge pricing limit for Uber’s. They said we don’t want Uber’s to be expensive so we’ll limit how much they can charge. So what happens, prices are low, great! But.... now drivers don’t make what they are worth and no one wants to drive uber. Now uber in Vegas wait times can be hours longs making the service essentially useless. Many would gladly pay more to actually get an Uber, but they can’t even if they wanted to. Giving everyone more money is the same as trying to lower the price of everything. It just can’t happen from an economic standpoint without unintended consequences.
    - danShumway 5y ago
      > Today’s stimulus is a perfect example of UBI. > eventually as we see now shortages in just about everything This is a pretty big jump in logic. We've had a ransomware account that shut down a gas pipeline, we've had mass business shutdowns in multiple countries that affected the entire economy, we've had a large shipping block. It's pretty hard to blame the current chip shortage on the stimulus. I do not understand how people get so wildly confident about this stuff whenever UBI comes up. I would not be so confident to claim that supply shortages for materials/foods from other countries are being caused by a stimulus in the US, particularly during a period where our government policy was to specifically tell people that the responsible, social thing to do not to go into their jobs.
      - smaryjerry 5y ago
        I’m not even talking about gas. I’m taking about chips, lumber, chicken, and much much more. All of them are having shortages and it has nothing to do with randomware but it is important to recognize that using stimulus is like using a budget, spending money in one spot means you can’t spend it in another, while we have gone all in on the pandemic we forget that other problems like ransomware and whatever else comes up still need to be addressed and take money to correct.
- Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
  Sounds like your work is worth more than you get paid for, then. You are only accepting to do it because you don't want to starve, i.e., it's a decision where one of the parties is under coercion. A really free labor market would be one where your life is not at risk if you refuse the job offer (as with UBI). In that situation, how much money would convince someone to accept your job? That's the real value of your job.

You'd get both the UBI + wage/salary, I'm not quite sure how that translates to "basically paying the company to work".

by qwytw 5y ago

You'd get both the UBI + wage/salary, I'm not quite sure how that translates to "basically paying the company to work".

If I get enough money with ubi I won't waste my life working on something I don't care about. The amount of people who would continue their job if it wasn't for the money it's slim I definitely wouldn't waste my time building someone else product and creating value for society. I'd likely build something fun I want to build which is unlikely to be useful for society or make money. A large part of the populatin on would happily paint, cook, read books, watch movies, play videogames until they die - if they had the money.

danShumway 5y ago
You'll still get paid for your normal job. It's not like that money would be thrown away, you're not working for free. You go to your job and work because you want more money. I think UBI is largely untested and its proponents should proceed with caution. But I also think people are overconfident in assuming that people wouldn't work; the reality is that we don't have a ton of data in either direction. If the 20th-21st century has taught us anything, it's that consumerism is a very powerful motivator. People like to have money to buy luxuries, most people don't want to sit on subsistence levels of income their entire lives. People want things. They want to buy videogames, and XBoxes, and nice houses, and cars, and iPhones, and to go to fancy restaurants. Whether consumerism is a powerful enough motivator... I just think people are very over-confident talking about what is definitely going to happen in a system that has basically never been tried before.
- prepend 5y ago
  > If the 20th-21st century has taught us anything, it's that consumerism is a very powerful motivator. Or, perhaps, that there is much attention on consumers who spend significantly as they have “louder” lifestyles that are easy to show. Poverty rates are high with 14% of the US under the poverty line [0] and I don’t think consumerism is motivating them very much. And I think it’s risky to equate considering as a large scale motivator based on extrapolating mass consumer behavior to all. [0] https://www.prb.org/usdata/ https://www.prb.org/usdata/
  - danShumway 5y ago
    Well, yeah, like I said: > Whether consumerism is a powerful enough motivator... I just think people are very over-confident talking about what is definitely going to happen in a system that has basically never been tried before. People are really eager to look at populations and make very strong assertions about what their intrinsic motivators are with (in my mind) little evidence. > and I don’t think consumerism is motivating them very much. Are 14% of the population below poverty levels because they like living there? Because our systems discourage saving money once you're on wellfare? Because of market pressures? We have basically zero large-scale experiments, but people on both sides of the UBI test seem really confident that they know what everyone will do.
- smaryjerry 5y ago
  Today’s stimulus is a perfect example of UBI. 33.8% of all personal income in the last year came from the government. It results in everyone having more money to spend but eventually as we see now shortages in just about everything, those shortages cause prices to rise and soon even though everyone has more money, everything costs more. The market settles prices in the end and trying to control the market by pumping cash only works for a short term. Take an example of say Las Vegas limit surge pricing limit for Uber’s. They said we don’t want Uber’s to be expensive so we’ll limit how much they can charge. So what happens, prices are low, great! But.... now drivers don’t make what they are worth and no one wants to drive uber. Now uber in Vegas wait times can be hours longs making the service essentially useless. Many would gladly pay more to actually get an Uber, but they can’t even if they wanted to. Giving everyone more money is the same as trying to lower the price of everything. It just can’t happen from an economic standpoint without unintended consequences.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    > Today’s stimulus is a perfect example of UBI. > eventually as we see now shortages in just about everything This is a pretty big jump in logic. We've had a ransomware account that shut down a gas pipeline, we've had mass business shutdowns in multiple countries that affected the entire economy, we've had a large shipping block. It's pretty hard to blame the current chip shortage on the stimulus. I do not understand how people get so wildly confident about this stuff whenever UBI comes up. I would not be so confident to claim that supply shortages for materials/foods from other countries are being caused by a stimulus in the US, particularly during a period where our government policy was to specifically tell people that the responsible, social thing to do not to go into their jobs.
    - smaryjerry 5y ago
      I’m not even talking about gas. I’m taking about chips, lumber, chicken, and much much more. All of them are having shortages and it has nothing to do with randomware but it is important to recognize that using stimulus is like using a budget, spending money in one spot means you can’t spend it in another, while we have gone all in on the pandemic we forget that other problems like ransomware and whatever else comes up still need to be addressed and take money to correct.
Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
Sounds like your work is worth more than you get paid for, then. You are only accepting to do it because you don't want to starve, i.e., it's a decision where one of the parties is under coercion. A really free labor market would be one where your life is not at risk if you refuse the job offer (as with UBI). In that situation, how much money would convince someone to accept your job? That's the real value of your job.