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> there are plenty of jobs where you absolutely will quit And so what if people refuse to do shitty jobs? Perhaps we as society can do without those jobs. And
by tda 5y ago
> there are plenty of jobs where you absolutely will quit
And so what if people refuse to do shitty jobs? Perhaps we as society can do without those jobs. And if we can't, we should value them more
- bruce343434 5y agoexactly. Sometimes you need to give the market a hand to set it free.
- pc86 5y agoWhich is exactly what will happen. The pay for those jobs will increase, until such a point where it becomes cheaper/easier to just not have the job in the first place. I don't honestly know why whether or not people will work even factors into one's support for UBI. Some people will keep working, some people won't. Nobody will starve so that seems like something in the "pro" column at least.
- jacobn 5y agoThose who work and thereby pay for the UBI may feel that freeriding is actually unjust, and not the hallmark of a glorious new post-scarcity society?
- pc86 5y agoI'm sure some will. Some won't. So what? I'm not trying to be dismissive, but this strikes me as a "but some people will be upset!" argument, which seems irrelevant to whether the policy achieves its stated goals or not.
- respondo2134 5y agothen why are so many UBI proponents surprised when those who would bankroll this experiement fight it so hard?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoIt is expected, just disappointing. "I got mine, fuck you" is not exactly the kind of thinking we wish our fellow citizens engaged in. And for the record, I would appear to be in the group bankrolling it rather than receiving from it, and I'm completely cool with it.
- throwawayboise 5y agoI don't think that's the mindset. The mindset is, "I worked for what I have, you can do the same"
- seba_dos1 5y agoPeople with that mindset usually greatly overestimate the influence their work has on what they have and underestimate external factors, so pushing them to reevaluate may be a good thing.
- tekknik 5y agoSo, people that worked and earned what they have and are compensated accordingly don’t deserve it?
- seba_dos1 5y agoDo such people even exist? Being a programmer, what I earned is a result of several factors - most importantly investments made into me by my parents and by the society (with schools, infrastructure etc. mostly funded with taxes); and also plenty of pure luck and sheer coincidence. Only afterwards comes a lot of hard work I've put into learning what I know. Without the former, I would probably earn only a small fraction of that (and/or under much worse conditions) even assuming that I'd be putting the same amount of hard work. Alternatively, with more dumb luck I could be earning much more while putting less work into achieving that. Of course, this is just barely scratching the surface, as there are also other ways to get rich than working hard or being lucky; mere ability to invest your time and effort into "working hard" is often filled with external factors as well; and "being (un)lucky" itself contains so many factors to consider that I wouldn't even know where to start.
- roamerz 5y agoSo what? Sounds like you should be part or a dictatorship rather than a democracy. If you support this idea then feel free to donate to the cause. Not trying to be an ass but the so what attitude does not tend to further constructive discussion.
- Dylan16807 5y ago> Sounds like you should be part or a dictatorship rather than a democracy. What a weird claim. Decisions in democracies upset some people too. That's the whole point of voting on things, to resolve conflicts. > If you support this idea then feel free to donate to the cause. Donate to what? > Not trying to be an ass but the so what attitude does not tend to further constructive discussion. "Some people will complain" isn't constructive by itself either.
- tekknik 5y ago> That's the whole point of voting on things, to resolve conflicts. It doesn’t resolve the conflict, one side is just forced to accept something they don’t want. The hatred, and therefore the division, builds regardless.
- pc86 5y agoI would love to know what democracy you live in where nobody is ever upset by democratic decisions.
- ipaddr 5y agoWould those people have extra means to influence political laws to be more in their favor?
- edmcnulty101 5y agoMost of the productivity gains go to the top percentage of people. Despite massive gdp increases in 20 years wages havent budged. If all the work was automated/outsourced those people would still make the same money. These are the people who ostensibly will pay for UBI and automation/outsources is one of the cases for UBI.
- qwytw 5y agoIf we take out the period between around 2000 and 2010 they have been growing continuously since 1980 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Real_Median_Personal_Income_in_the_United_States.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...) of course it's not at the same rate as GDP (5x vs 1.5x for personal income).
- edmcnulty101 5y agoIt's kept up with inflation. But that's about it. Which means real wage growth is minimal.
- sidibe 5y agoIt's their choice to work. Might take a generation or two to not be outraged based on how we were raised, but that would seem to make it not unjust.
- inglor_cz 5y agoDepends. If a minority of voters are dependent on the UBI and a majority decides that they do not like the system, or a politician persuades them so, they will vote against it. ("Working your ass off on lazy strangers" is a huge boon for populist politicians.) If a majority of voters depends on the UBI and a minority is compelled to provide it to them, they basically have no recourse but to emigrate. At which point you lose their tax money, unless you impose draconic measures on emigration.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoI don't see why they shouldn't be free to. Yet, weirdly, we don't see a lot of people renouncing their rich-socialist-nation citizenship to run off to some other libertarian paradise.
- nec4b 5y ago>> rich-socialist-nation Which nation is that?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoAll of the ones providing single payer healthcare, if you need a more precise target.
- nec4b 5y agoCould you be more specific? Single payer healthcare does not make a country socialistic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
- tamaharbor 5y agoWhen did hard work (or any work for that matter) to move up the skills/pay ladder become obsolete?
- Sohcahtoa82 5y agoAs more jobs become automated, UBI will become a necessity to prevent the collapse of civilization. Imagine something as simple as burger flipping became completely automated. There would be a million fast food workers suddenly unemployed. Add making espresso to the mix and half a million baristas lose their job. There won't be a million new jobs created to maintain the automation to pick up the slack.
- mongol 5y agoGo back all the way back to the industrial revolution and you will find that automation creates new jobs, just other kinds.
- qwytw 5y agoThe industrial revolution replaced a smaller number of high (kind of) skilled jobs with a large number of low skilled jobs. This time it seems that it's the other way around.
- xyzzyz 5y ago> The industrial revolution replaced a smaller number of high (kind of) skilled jobs with a large number of low skilled jobs. No, it replaced large number of medium and low skilled jobs too. Before industrial revolution, more labor hours were spent on working distaff and spindle than probably any other single job. Industrial revolution reduced number of spinning jobs to roughly zero. The same happened to many other low skilled jobs, like weaving, mining, digging, and many more.
- qwytw 5y agoYes you're right, now that I read it doesn't make sense.. I guess what I wanted to say is that is that at least initially it replaced a huge number of medium paying jobs with a large number of low paying and a small number of extremely well paying jobs. Due to the massively the increased efficiency the industrial revolution created many many of them low skilled new jobs which couldn't have existed earlier. An average person in the 19th century probably consumed significantly more textile and other manufactured products than someone in the prior centuries. However in the beginning this increase in efficiency led to large decrease in incomes due to the surplus in labour and in part because efficiency increases in agriculture were trailing behind other areas. E.g. an unskilled worker in the UK could only purchase about 60% of the amount of bread in ~1800 compared to what he could in 1750 (real earnings only started to grow significantly between 1850 and 1875. Modern automation on the other hand seems to mostly just replaced many low and medium paying jobs with a smaller number of high paying ones.
- mjburgess 5y agoIt depends if you just end up paying people not to work. Money doesnt just have some "value" you can share like a pie. The value in money is just the productive capacity of an economy. If you're paying large numbers to do nothing, the value of that money plummets and people will starve. Recall: 50% of the country make less than the median wage... UBI is going to have to be way below this to preserve the very wealth which UBI redistributes
- staticassertion 5y agoOne thing that's been made clear in the last two years is that even a very very measly increase to unemployment can have huge impact. And unemployment runs out after a while, and the increases have been tiny. And unemployment makes you jump through hoops, is very stressful, and wastes a lot of your time. I expect that UBI could start off very small and still have huge impact. A quick search shows that median income can range from ~40k-80k state to state. I'd bet you could radically change this country for way less than that.
- tekknik 5y agoIf people are getting paid $80k a year to do nothing Im quitting my job and living in the woods. 1 less software engineer.
- staticassertion 5y agoThe point was to pay less than median income. So you're looking at closer to 30k at the high end.
- tekknik 5y agoSo those in high cost of living areas are still just screwed? $30k/yr isn’t even enough to pay rent.
- staticassertion 5y ago
- godelski 5y agoThere's a clear difference between "some people won't work" and "some jobs won't be able to hire people." Just to be clear.
- pc86 5y agoYou're absolutely right and I did conflate them a bit here.
- bitshiftfaced 5y ago> And so what if people refuse to do shitty jobs? The "so what" is that basic income doesn't change the ordinal ranking of how much people prefer to do different jobs. Neither does it change people's ability to get those jobs. Better qualified applicants will always have better options. So while basic income might increase the nominal pay of the least preferable jobs, it wouldn't mean you suddenly get to skip over the "shitty jobs" and suddenly get access to the better ones.
- CraigJPerry 5y agoThat doesn’t ring true. If you had the capital to make the decision not to work a crap-corp and instead pursue your dream “job” of being painter, musician, rock climbing explorer, artisanal fisherman, etc etc
- bitshiftfaced 5y agoWhat about everyone else who now also has the capital to pursue their dream job? Just as before basic income, there's many people competing for a finite number of dream jobs.
- CraigJPerry 5y agoWhat about them? Comparatively enjoyable jobs will pay less, horrible jobs will pay more. Want to “work” as a golfer? Cool, enjoy living on UBI because no one will be topping up your salary for that. The person who cuts the greens earns wayyyy more than you though. Want to play lots of golf? You’re going to run out of UBI to pay for all those greens fees. Maybe you need to think about taking on a side gig in a comfortable back office worker role (salary $1k/year), or a refuse collector (salary $130k/year).
- bitshiftfaced 5y ago> Comparatively enjoyable jobs will pay less, horrible jobs will pay more. Why? Golfing is a poor example because you can already lose money trying to be a pro. Or, you could become world famous and make millions. What's more is that you don't need to be "hired" to become a golfer. When we talk about jobs that firms pay salaries to fill, then I don't see why the supply of those jobs would change, whether they're enjoyable or horrible. Since the supply would still be in the same ratio as before basic income, I'd think that doctors would still make more than the hospital janitors, even though the janitors would make more than before on a nominal basis.
- inglor_cz 5y agoCustomer facing jobs are precisely the ones that are shitty. Some people are really entitled and awful. But you can basically only get rid of them by automating the process and disconnecting human workers from complaintants. How well does it work? Ask anyone who lost a YouTube channel without learning the real reasons and has no path to appeal to a human. HN hates whenever this happens.
- JoshTriplett 5y agoYou can also make higher-quality products that require less support, and then have a smaller number of high-quality well-paid support for the fewer customers who still need it.
- inglor_cz 5y ago... for a higher price. And we may have a long discussion about "how to engineer software so that it doesn't need as much support". Theoretically, it can be done; practically, we have all been astonished by Ways of the Common User that no one anticipated, plus you always hit the problem with diversity of hardware. Apple seems to be pretty user friendly, but Apple products are expensive to boot and Apple does not support their OS on non-Apple hardware.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoPretty much no one today builds software with the intention that it doesn't need support. In fact, the entire hybrid-FOSS ecosystem is perversely incentivised towards exactly the opposite. It won't be as hard as people think it will be when we stop cramming features and GUI changes in to appease some manufactured need to sell the new version.
- glogla 5y agoSo you're basically arguing that abuse and exploitation is necessary.
- 5y ago
- thegrimmest 5y agoThe "So what" is that if pay for waiters and labourers has to compete with UBI, the cost of service, food, and housing increases significantly, putting it out of reach of more people, and contracting the entire economy as a result. You can postulate about how much we should value these jobs, but the reality is that most people wouldn't be able to afford a meal at a restaurant where all the staff make 50k, or a packet of strawberries picked by pickers who make the same.
- CraigJPerry 5y agoWho would pay the multi-million dollar salary of the top footballers if that came to pass? If people were suddenly paying a LOT more for strawberries and garbage collection, would they have disposable left over for footballers? There’d still be footballers - the person who was picking fruit left that role to follow their UBI funded dream of being a footballer. They’re just not going to make the same amount of money. Same goes for CEOs and other roles with comparatively enjoyable execution vs high pay. Every man and their granny will be a CEO of a one person company when you take all the risk out of the system by giving everyone a safety net. Enjoyable jobs will pay less, hard jobs will pay more.
- thegrimmest 5y agoBelieve it or not, poor people generally don't buy football tickets. If their TVs were made by UBI workers, then they wouldn't be able to afford those either. Material things would become scarce again due to the artificially inflated cost of labour. You're basically rewinding all of the gains in productivity we've made by imposing a high floor. CEOs aren't paid a lot because the assume risk, they're paid a lot because business leadership is hard, and good leaders are scarce. I also don't know of many CEOs at large companies whose job I would classify as "enjoyable". > Every man and their granny will be a CEO of a one person company Then we'll need a new word for "company" as it's meant today. Also no one is stopping anyone from being an independent contractor, which is basically this. I'm not sure I'm following.
- tremon 5y ago
- agumonkey 5y agoEven if shitty jobs still exist, at least nobody is "forced" to. We can redistribute or change the way it's done. I can clean the walkway, or toilets.. granted i don't spend my whole month on it with shoddy equipement.