4 ms·

>What cozy games are showing us is that a world with tons of “free stuff” — universal basic income, universal health care, free education, free housing — will n

>What cozy games are showing us is that a world with tons of “free stuff” — universal basic income, universal health care, free education, free housing — will not result in a breakdown of our society because “no one wants to work”. People love to work. This is dumb and wrong. People love to work, as long as the work is not smelly, or painful, or difficult. And as long as you can quit when you want, and do it in your own time, and you have no boss giving you feedback. I'm all for universal healthcare, education, housing, and disability and unemployment benefits. But a basic income, if large enough for somebody to live comfortably _will_ result in huge numbers of people dropping out of the work force. They will just play these cosy games rather than go out in the world and do hard things. But I don't believe we could ever make a basic income comfortable because I think inflation will instantly gobble up any increases we make. If you increase the ubi by $50 bucks a month, the cost of beer and rent will increase $50 in the same month.

Pet_Ant 3y ago
We can easily produce a surplus of all the beer we need. We have to tax it to limit consumption. We have a surplus of labour. That is the problem. We need some people to work, but we really don't need everyone to. If you need proof look at all the people doing bullshit jobs and working at startups that just burn cash before dying. Nobody has starved to death because Flooz failed to turn a profit.
no_wizard 3y ago
>But a basic income, if large enough for somebody to live comfortably _will_ result in huge numbers of people dropping out of the work force. They will just play these cosy games rather than go out in the world and do hard things. Few things here I want to point out that I find problematic with this. One is, perhaps we should let go of the idea that everyone needs to work. There will, simply put, be a % of people who given the choice, would rather opt out of this and do something else with that time. It may be playing games and doing other things that generally aren't considered productive. Perhaps forcing these types of people into the workforce isn't good for the workforce in the first place. Perhaps there is a reason these people feel demotivated to participate in the labor market. Its worth considering the idea that perhaps these are not people who are generally going to be value add, and perhaps serves everyone better by allowing them to opt out of the workforce in the first place. Second, its not all that binary. People may well be that they opt to do something that at the time doesn't have a lot of traditional monetary value but instead social value, like murals, public art etc. It may be something else entirely that does manage to move society forward, it just wasn't obvious at the time, who knows. Its not binary, like everyone who opts out of the traditional workforce in this paradigm will only engage in self gratifying behavior. Humans are complicated, and all of us respond to new paradigms differently. Third: by guaranteeing a "floor" of failure to which someone can fall back on, it becomes infinitely easier for the "little guy" to take more risks without requiring someone to seek outside capital in the beginning (or perhaps at all), or otherwise take on debt (such as a business loan). We know in software that businesses can start small, but often pressures of needing funding force businesses that perhaps should have grown more organically to seek VC funding, dooming them to the VC treadmill that could just as well kill the business due to outside pressures. By having a livable floor you reduce alot of personal risk when you gotta think about your family and health insurance over starting a business, because starting a business is the bigger risk. Fourth: Human nature isn't this binary at all. Lots of people would still choose to participate in higher rungs of society. We are talking about a minimum here, and if human nature has proven anything, its that people will always be striving to be above the minimum of anything. Smaller scale studies in Canada where they implement UBI in a whole town as an experiment have proven this to be true: The overwhelming majority of participants still kept working, even though they explicitly had the option not to. Many used it to improve themselves through education, investing leftover portions for the future etc. People still want to be rich, if you will. Five: Ultimately, the labor market will simply have to evolve to be more palatable in attracting people to do the work. What that looks like would vary, but it would have to happen, and I think this is a good thing. And finally, those with disabilities and other things that prevent them from participating in the labor market as it exists today would be able to live more comfortably, and that shouldn't be overlooked. >But I don't believe we could ever make a basic income comfortable because I think inflation will instantly gobble up any increases we make We'd need to try it on some scale to see if that assumption is true. Given the scope of social programs in Western Europe, I don't think its this simple.
- jay_kyburz 3y ago
  Thanks for your reply, I agree with almost everything you said. I think perhaps the only place we might disagree is our estimate of number of people who would continue to be productive, and those that would not bother. I _did_ say we need both disability and unemployment benefits to support people who can't or choose not participate in the workforce for whatever reason. I agree that we should support somebody who might want to drop out and write the nest great novel. But I don't think its unreasonable for those people to feel like they have to go without some luxuries. I think it's OK to choose to be poor in exchange for total freedom, and we should insure that even the poorest of us have food, shelter, education, and health care. UBI experiments that don't don't guarantee the income for life are obviously not going to induce people to quit a job. UBI says we need to give everybody the same amount of cash to be fair, I just don't agree that we need to give it to everybody, and perhaps that giving out lots of cash will have unintended consequences.
mempko 3y ago
Inflation is not a natural law. Business leaders make a decision to raise prices. Prices don't automatically go up. If you say 'but that's what the market bears', then I will ask, when was the last time you really interacted with a market? You go to work, which often doesn't have any market elements (most companies are command control economies, weird right?). You go to a store, which is a distribution center, not a market. Markets are actually very rarely interacted with where the buyer and the seller negotiate a spot price. In fact, most people don't like markets. Markets are never something a society chooses without coercion. Anthropologists have never found a market economy that didn't involve conquest. Even in the Cozy Games, it's about collecting things and customization, the market aspect is never really that liked. You can get rid of it and still have a cozy game.
- djur 3y ago
  Have anthropologists found any economies that don't involve conquest that aren't subsistence hunting + gathering?
  - mempko 3y ago
    Yes, read Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
wharvle 3y ago
People already do shitloads of unpaid work. I expect there’d be even more of that, under basic income. I could definitely be doing a lot more of that if I didn’t need a paycheck—there’s demand for a lot more of it than I do. Though, sure, inability to account for how much that’s worth might make our productivity metrics go nuts.
- ertian 3y ago
  Some people would. The percentage of users who actively contribute to open source, or readers who contribute to Wikipedia, or players who create mods or levels for their favorite games gives a pretty solid hint what the share would be. It's pretty consistently somewhere well south of 5%. And those jobs are about as close to the idealized work of Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley as it's possible to get: clean, standalone, simple, and doable from the comfort of your chair.
  - wharvle 3y ago
    Childcare, elder care, home improvement, picking up a piece or two of litter while on a stroll, cooking & cleaning, gardening. These don't contribute to GDP, but if all this unpaid work halted and the people doing it suddenly demanded payment, the economy wouldn't exactly be in for a good time—we do need some amount of this, and it's not clear the amount people have time for is optimal, rather than just an accident. Regardless, I don't think a ton of people would be content with UBI money and would probably do at least some paying work anyway. People want to live a certain place, have a certain lifestyle, provide for a family (have a family!), send the kids to good schools, have nice stuff, have some pocket money for doing stuff with friends, et c., and none of that goes away just because everyone's getting enough money to scrape by. Concerns about an epidemic of people declining to do anything productive because they won't literally starve on the street if they don't, seem like fantasy to me, and I've yet to see any remotely-serious proposal for UBI that pays out enough that people wouldn't still want to double, or triple, or quadruple that amount, by also having a job. I know some folks who are probably in the category of people that some worry would stop working entirely (low-paid, not-great prospects, drug enjoyers to a greater degree than is probably, ah, healthy) but guarantee they would not. They'd still want to have money for, like, all the stuff you can spend money on that's not barely-scraping-by, and they'd want it enough to keep working. Now, they might put up with a little less bullshit at work, and employers & managers that can't seem to help treating everyone terribly may have to adjust, or else suffer, if being unemployed isn't quite as bad as it is now....

Pet_Ant 3y ago

We can easily produce a surplus of all the beer we need. We have to tax it to limit consumption. We have a surplus of labour. That is the problem. We need some people to work, but we really don't need everyone to. If you need proof look at all the people doing bullshit jobs and working at startups that just burn cash before dying. Nobody has starved to death because Flooz failed to turn a profit.

no_wizard 3y ago

>But a basic income, if large enough for somebody to live comfortably _will_ result in huge numbers of people dropping out of the work force. They will just play these cosy games rather than go out in the world and do hard things. Few things here I want to point out that I find problematic with this. One is, perhaps we should let go of the idea that everyone needs to work. There will, simply put, be a % of people who given the choice, would rather opt out of this and do something else with that time. It may be playing games and doing other things that generally aren't considered productive. Perhaps forcing these types of people into the workforce isn't good for the workforce in the first place. Perhaps there is a reason these people feel demotivated to participate in the labor market. Its worth considering the idea that perhaps these are not people who are generally going to be value add, and perhaps serves everyone better by allowing them to opt out of the workforce in the first place. Second, its not all that binary. People may well be that they opt to do something that at the time doesn't have a lot of traditional monetary value but instead social value, like murals, public art etc. It may be something else entirely that does manage to move society forward, it just wasn't obvious at the time, who knows. Its not binary, like everyone who opts out of the traditional workforce in this paradigm will only engage in self gratifying behavior. Humans are complicated, and all of us respond to new paradigms differently. Third: by guaranteeing a "floor" of failure to which someone can fall back on, it becomes infinitely easier for the "little guy" to take more risks without requiring someone to seek outside capital in the beginning (or perhaps at all), or otherwise take on debt (such as a business loan). We know in software that businesses can start small, but often pressures of needing funding force businesses that perhaps should have grown more organically to seek VC funding, dooming them to the VC treadmill that could just as well kill the business due to outside pressures. By having a livable floor you reduce alot of personal risk when you gotta think about your family and health insurance over starting a business, because starting a business is the bigger risk. Fourth: Human nature isn't this binary at all. Lots of people would still choose to participate in higher rungs of society. We are talking about a minimum here, and if human nature has proven anything, its that people will always be striving to be above the minimum of anything. Smaller scale studies in Canada where they implement UBI in a whole town as an experiment have proven this to be true: The overwhelming majority of participants still kept working, even though they explicitly had the option not to. Many used it to improve themselves through education, investing leftover portions for the future etc. People still want to be rich, if you will. Five: Ultimately, the labor market will simply have to evolve to be more palatable in attracting people to do the work. What that looks like would vary, but it would have to happen, and I think this is a good thing. And finally, those with disabilities and other things that prevent them from participating in the labor market as it exists today would be able to live more comfortably, and that shouldn't be overlooked. >But I don't believe we could ever make a basic income comfortable because I think inflation will instantly gobble up any increases we make We'd need to try it on some scale to see if that assumption is true. Given the scope of social programs in Western Europe, I don't think its this simple.

jay_kyburz 3y ago
Thanks for your reply, I agree with almost everything you said. I think perhaps the only place we might disagree is our estimate of number of people who would continue to be productive, and those that would not bother. I _did_ say we need both disability and unemployment benefits to support people who can't or choose not participate in the workforce for whatever reason. I agree that we should support somebody who might want to drop out and write the nest great novel. But I don't think its unreasonable for those people to feel like they have to go without some luxuries. I think it's OK to choose to be poor in exchange for total freedom, and we should insure that even the poorest of us have food, shelter, education, and health care. UBI experiments that don't don't guarantee the income for life are obviously not going to induce people to quit a job. UBI says we need to give everybody the same amount of cash to be fair, I just don't agree that we need to give it to everybody, and perhaps that giving out lots of cash will have unintended consequences.

mempko 3y ago

Inflation is not a natural law. Business leaders make a decision to raise prices. Prices don't automatically go up. If you say 'but that's what the market bears', then I will ask, when was the last time you really interacted with a market? You go to work, which often doesn't have any market elements (most companies are command control economies, weird right?). You go to a store, which is a distribution center, not a market. Markets are actually very rarely interacted with where the buyer and the seller negotiate a spot price. In fact, most people don't like markets. Markets are never something a society chooses without coercion. Anthropologists have never found a market economy that didn't involve conquest. Even in the Cozy Games, it's about collecting things and customization, the market aspect is never really that liked. You can get rid of it and still have a cozy game.

djur 3y ago
Have anthropologists found any economies that don't involve conquest that aren't subsistence hunting + gathering?
- mempko 3y ago
  Yes, read Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

wharvle 3y ago

People already do shitloads of unpaid work. I expect there’d be even more of that, under basic income. I could definitely be doing a lot more of that if I didn’t need a paycheck—there’s demand for a lot more of it than I do. Though, sure, inability to account for how much that’s worth might make our productivity metrics go nuts.

ertian 3y ago
Some people would. The percentage of users who actively contribute to open source, or readers who contribute to Wikipedia, or players who create mods or levels for their favorite games gives a pretty solid hint what the share would be. It's pretty consistently somewhere well south of 5%. And those jobs are about as close to the idealized work of Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley as it's possible to get: clean, standalone, simple, and doable from the comfort of your chair.
- wharvle 3y ago
  Childcare, elder care, home improvement, picking up a piece or two of litter while on a stroll, cooking & cleaning, gardening. These don't contribute to GDP, but if all this unpaid work halted and the people doing it suddenly demanded payment, the economy wouldn't exactly be in for a good time—we do need some amount of this, and it's not clear the amount people have time for is optimal, rather than just an accident. Regardless, I don't think a ton of people would be content with UBI money and would probably do at least some paying work anyway. People want to live a certain place, have a certain lifestyle, provide for a family (have a family!), send the kids to good schools, have nice stuff, have some pocket money for doing stuff with friends, et c., and none of that goes away just because everyone's getting enough money to scrape by. Concerns about an epidemic of people declining to do anything productive because they won't literally starve on the street if they don't, seem like fantasy to me, and I've yet to see any remotely-serious proposal for UBI that pays out enough that people wouldn't still want to double, or triple, or quadruple that amount, by also having a job. I know some folks who are probably in the category of people that some worry would stop working entirely (low-paid, not-great prospects, drug enjoyers to a greater degree than is probably, ah, healthy) but guarantee they would not. They'd still want to have money for, like, all the stuff you can spend money on that's not barely-scraping-by, and they'd want it enough to keep working. Now, they might put up with a little less bullshit at work, and employers & managers that can't seem to help treating everyone terribly may have to adjust, or else suffer, if being unemployed isn't quite as bad as it is now....