11 ms·

People have different definitions of UBI, but in my mind 'basic' doesn't translate to quitting your job and not working. People in a functioning society still h

by beejiu 2y ago

People have different definitions of UBI, but in my mind 'basic' doesn't translate to quitting your job and not working. People in a functioning society still have to work.

dataflow 2y ago
> People have different definitions of UBI, but in my mind 'basic' doesn't translate to quitting your job and not working. There's nuance worth teasing apart here. The only definition I've ever heard is that UBI allows you to lose your job and still be able to pay for the basic necessities (food, water, shelter, transportation, etc.). Anything less misses the whole point. However, just the basic necessities would make for a pretty dull and repetitive life, which most people hate. And so the idea (as I understood it) is that it's not supposed to go beyond that, so your incentive would still be to keep your job if you at all can, not quit it.
- astromaniak 2y ago
  > The only definition I've ever heard is that UBI allows you to lose your job and still be able to pay for the basic necessities (food, water, shelter, transportation, etc.). Anything less misses the whole point. Excellent. Now open the border and hang out citizenship, or other form of voting rights. Does your definition require having a job once in a life time at least? > However, just the basic necessities would make for a pretty dull and repetitive life, which most people hate Oh no, many people would love it. Hundreds of millions for sure, if not billions. I think it's called dystopia, and cannot last long.
BobaFloutist 2y ago
I read it as all the human essentials are covered without work (sufficiently nutritious food, safe, clean, shelter with sufficient heating and water for basic needs, basic healthcare, basic internet, and a small extra for discretionary spending) with the assumption that most people will happily do some work to upgrade their circumstances and get more fun and interesting food/entertainment/shelter. If quitting your job doesn't put your life or your ability to get another job (because you're not capable of maintaining basic grooming, for example) at risk, then the "free market" model of employment can actually work, and people can opt out of jobs that treat them poorly or underpay them. At that point all the most essential/difficult/unpleasant jobs would actually have to pay the most, and cushier jobs with more reasonable hours could pay less, and people could do the amount of work it takes to get the amount of money they want. Think of how hard people work just to make a bit more money even when they're financially stable, just because they want a house or a cool car or a nice vacation. Why would that change if you didn't have to bleed yourself dry just to eat and sleep under a roof?
- ssl-3 2y ago
  There's a mindset that I often run into with IRL discussions that revolves around the premise that if a person has some minimal essentials met by doing nothing, then they will have no motivation to ever improve their situation at all. That if a person can afford to accomplish nothing but still have enough money to smoke weed and play video games, then all anyone will ever do is smoke weed and play video games. I don't subscribe to that mindset: I want a nice place to live, with room for all of my hobbies and for guests to comfortably visit overnight. I want a good car and a nice place to park it and to work on it. I want to be able to afford a glorious steak dinner out or an amazing gyro without having to sacrifice. I want the best tools to create my own food in my own kitchen. I want the fastest internet and an ample homelab to do stuff with it. I want to make an annual thousand-mile pilgrimage to hang out with some friends for a week doing cool shit together (which requires real money), and I want to be able to take an actual-vacation some other time in the year where I can afford to go camping or something. I want to be able to provide thoughtful and useful gifts to my people, even if they happen to be expensive. (And if I were allowed to smoke weed [my job doesn't permit it and testing is both thorough and regular], I'd want the best weed.) I wouldn't be able to accomplish these things with UBI, so even in a hypothetical future where UBI is a thing: I won't want to sit around and do nothing: So far in life, I want quite a lot more more than the basic essentials and I'm willing to work for those things. (I do know some people who don't seem to be capable of more than nothing, due to mental and/or physical conditions, and it's likely that all of us know someone like this -- and these folks will have a rough time with life with or without UBI. But I firmly believe that most people would prefer staying in the rat race, because most people who are capable of work also have some fondness for whatever they consider to be *nice* things. But I might fall down in the future; it's happened to me before for a variety of reasons. And it'd be nice to be able to afford to fall down without becoming homeless when my income drops from something useful to near-zero.)
  - stubish 2y ago
    One thing that I haven't seen discussed is retirement. When you have a high paying job, you can retire early and still maintain your desired standard of living (and most people do, because most people don't enjoy their job and that is why we call it work). So a pretty uninspiring job like plumbing would end up paying a very high salary. Or stressful jobs like nurse or doctor. What happens when people doing these critical and now highly paid jobs retire to their yachts at 40? Will the market balance things, and did enough apprentice plumbers get trained to take over? Or will things spiral out of control and collapse? And how does the extremely high wages of critical jobs affect the level of UBI? If it is set to meet minimum essentials, then the UBI too can spiral up as the cost of those essentials such as the plumbers wage goes up. I tend to think that without a lot more automation, then a UBI cannot cover the minimum essentials/poverty line, because of the large amount of work required to support society that is only done because people are forced to do it, to the point that we cannot sustain bribing people to do it. But maybe it will work if we are able to replace every barista with a vending machine, have the trucks load and drive themselves, and build robotic assistants to allow 1 plumber to do the job of 10.
rbanffy 2y ago
> People in a functioning society still have to work Why?
- throwaway22032 2y ago
  Have you ever interacted with a free rider? You know, those guys who always dodge their round at the pub, they never pay you back that fiver, they always need somewhere to crash? Hell, have you ever dated someone like that, or known a friend that has? One person goes to work, cooks, maintains the home, the other just spends their time on highfalutin' ideas like their photography project? UBI to me sounds like a way of hiding that behind bureaucracy. I don't want to support people who don't do anything useful and purely consume resources.
  - gwd 2y ago
    You can see that they exist already, without UBI. So the question is, what effect will UBI have on freeloading if introduced? Will they contribute even less than they do now? Will there be more of them? Or will they stop free-loading off companies and individuals? If UBI means everyone at the place you work is actually motivated, and you never have to watch your friend support a free-loader again, I think we're probably better off as a society.
    - throwaway22032 2y ago
      You're forgetting about the bit in which you've literally given the person thousands of dollars. They use that free money to get you to do things for them. It's hidden behind bureaucracy but it's the same thing. Worse, even, because you don't have a choice. It's like the nonsense solutions the left propose for tackling crime. "If we give people X, they won't have to steal X". I mean, sure, because they have already gotten it from me for free...
      - gwd 2y ago
        Right, but there are situations where you will pay for something one way or another; we'd like "not paying" to be an option, but trying to take that option causes you to pay in the most expensive way. If you have a piece of industrial machinery, you will have down time for maintenance: you can pro-actively schedule planned maintenance when it's less disruptive, or the machine itself can schedule unplanned maintenance without regard to the disruption; "not having maintenance" isn't an option, and trying to take it is actually taking the "expensive unplanned maintenance" option. If you're the parent of a toddler and that toddler wants your attention, they will get it one way or another: you can pro-actively make time for them, or you can re-actively make time when they act out, perhaps destroying something in the process; as frustrating as it is, "not making time" is simply not an option, and trying to take it is actually taking the "expensive re-active to acting out" option. Here in the UK several years ago they cut back severely on social services to people with low-grade emotional problems. So instead of calling the social workers, they started calling emergency services, who are required to send someone out. The result was that much more more money was spent on emergency services. One could of course jail people who falsely call 999, but then that's pretty expensive too. For better or for worse, "not paying for people for them to talk to" isn't an option; it turns into "pay expensive EMTs to talk to them". So, maybe there are these people who are just freeloaders; they get jobs and then do the minimal amount of work possible, they get boyfriends or girlfriends or spouses who will support their freeloading lifestyle. That cost is being paid right now, but in a damaging way: they're dead weight in companies and vampires on romantic partners. It would be nice not to pay that cost at all, but that doesn't seem to be an option. Maybe if we just explicitly paid them to freeload, then at least we'd have the benefit of not having them hurt our friends and our companies.
wnc3141 2y ago
I always interpreted the point of the programs as by taking immediate insecurity off the table, you are allowing people to make more long term decisions for their well being.
- fellowniusmonk 2y ago
  Growing up I was in a negative leverage situation, even though I was smart and hardworking I was bled financially and I had to spend effort to layer contingency after contingency before I could even drive. This gave my life negative torque, the moment I got a little leverage, I stacked up roommates and basically lived like a digital ascetic for 12 years. I ended up in the top 1% of earnings for my starting co-hort not because of my fairly average intelligent but because of my nearly 100% openness, insane resilience and way above average mental health game, and a decade of luck. I spent all that time and energy getting out of poverty and by the time I bought a house and stabilized I was worn out. The really shitty part is that all along the way I had chances and risks that I couldn't take, companies I couldn't start, etc. because while any one of those chances was a play money/time opportunity for others it would have been a bet the farm, burn the ships, might have to squat with a bunch of homeless dudes (again) risk for me. Anything that gives a person the breathing room to stop the frantic hunter gatherer subsistence doom spiral and build skills is amazing. Let's let other countries play the economically wasteful poverty game, let's let people in other countries die deaths of despair during their prime production years but if we want to be an advanced technology powerhouse we can't keep wasting the potential of all these poor but intelligent kids.
  - literallycancer 2y ago
    Are you gonna give everyone a national ID and wall up the border first? Or just let everyone come and get the free money?
    - fellowniusmonk 2y ago
      People really do love to take imperfect solutions to tractable problems and deceptively expand them into something intractable so they can continue to sit on their hands. "How can I tie real solvable issues to some kind of thought stopping meme", it's a fun game politicians and and other disingenuous people play. Every pundit buzzword you've injected is orthogonal to the point and the issue. You can personally pursue those plans if you want, they have nothing to do with what I am discussing. Worse, everything you've raised is irrelevant to all the little american kids getting screwed right now. But better America and Americans suffer and decline than having measurable but marginally imperfect solutions right? Perfection or nothing right? Iteration, measurement and incremental improvement isn't real so we shouldn't try? Defeatist attitudes didn't make this country.
mandmandam 2y ago
> in my mind 'basic' doesn't translate to quitting your job and not working In society A, machines and clean energy allow the population to work an average of 20 hours a week. Some, even many people choose not to work at all, but still get access to a basic apartment and have their basic food, social and education, etc, needs met. In society B, machines and dirty energy allow a tiny segment of the population to live on super-yachts, replete with airstrips for their private jets. They hire people who hire people to convince the majority of the population they must work at least 40 hours a week (preferably 80). Which society would you say is "functioning" better? Why blame the unemployed for the functioning of a society, when record inequality and the policies that allow it are so much more responsible? Look at this graph, and explain to me how unemployment is the problem here: https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/23410.jpeg https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/23410.jpeg
- renewiltord 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - mandmandam 2y ago
    Have you forgotten the context of the conversation? (Reminder: "in my mind 'basic' doesn't translate to quitting your job and not working") If you think that full employment is the barrier we're facing to society A then you're living in a logical wasteland.
    - renewiltord 2y ago
      In my mind, society C is the basic standard. Anything less is living in a late-stage capitalistic dystopia that is inherently anti-human. All progress depends on the unreasonable man. And I am more unreasonable than everyone.
      - mandmandam 2y ago
        I'll take that as a 'yes' then. It's not that utopian to want a society where people aren't made homeless if they don't work. Finland did it - it worked great. It wasn't even that hard. Also in a society where just eight people own as much as 4 billion. Maybe making 'jokes' denying that we're in late stage capitalism is an odd choice? Like, yeah, we're headed for destruction.. It's funny the way Ralph Wiggum's "I'm in danger" line is funny.

by beejiu 2y ago

People have different definitions of UBI, but in my mind 'basic' doesn't translate to quitting your job and not working. People in a functioning society still have to work.

dataflow 2y ago

> People have different definitions of UBI, but in my mind 'basic' doesn't translate to quitting your job and not working. There's nuance worth teasing apart here. The only definition I've ever heard is that UBI allows you to lose your job and still be able to pay for the basic necessities (food, water, shelter, transportation, etc.). Anything less misses the whole point. However, just the basic necessities would make for a pretty dull and repetitive life, which most people hate. And so the idea (as I understood it) is that it's not supposed to go beyond that, so your incentive would still be to keep your job if you at all can, not quit it.

astromaniak 2y ago
> The only definition I've ever heard is that UBI allows you to lose your job and still be able to pay for the basic necessities (food, water, shelter, transportation, etc.). Anything less misses the whole point. Excellent. Now open the border and hang out citizenship, or other form of voting rights. Does your definition require having a job once in a life time at least? > However, just the basic necessities would make for a pretty dull and repetitive life, which most people hate Oh no, many people would love it. Hundreds of millions for sure, if not billions. I think it's called dystopia, and cannot last long.

BobaFloutist 2y ago

I read it as all the human essentials are covered without work (sufficiently nutritious food, safe, clean, shelter with sufficient heating and water for basic needs, basic healthcare, basic internet, and a small extra for discretionary spending) with the assumption that most people will happily do some work to upgrade their circumstances and get more fun and interesting food/entertainment/shelter. If quitting your job doesn't put your life or your ability to get another job (because you're not capable of maintaining basic grooming, for example) at risk, then the "free market" model of employment can actually work, and people can opt out of jobs that treat them poorly or underpay them. At that point all the most essential/difficult/unpleasant jobs would actually have to pay the most, and cushier jobs with more reasonable hours could pay less, and people could do the amount of work it takes to get the amount of money they want. Think of how hard people work just to make a bit more money even when they're financially stable, just because they want a house or a cool car or a nice vacation. Why would that change if you didn't have to bleed yourself dry just to eat and sleep under a roof?

ssl-3 2y ago
There's a mindset that I often run into with IRL discussions that revolves around the premise that if a person has some minimal essentials met by doing nothing, then they will have no motivation to ever improve their situation at all. That if a person can afford to accomplish nothing but still have enough money to smoke weed and play video games, then all anyone will ever do is smoke weed and play video games. I don't subscribe to that mindset: I want a nice place to live, with room for all of my hobbies and for guests to comfortably visit overnight. I want a good car and a nice place to park it and to work on it. I want to be able to afford a glorious steak dinner out or an amazing gyro without having to sacrifice. I want the best tools to create my own food in my own kitchen. I want the fastest internet and an ample homelab to do stuff with it. I want to make an annual thousand-mile pilgrimage to hang out with some friends for a week doing cool shit together (which requires real money), and I want to be able to take an actual-vacation some other time in the year where I can afford to go camping or something. I want to be able to provide thoughtful and useful gifts to my people, even if they happen to be expensive. (And if I were allowed to smoke weed [my job doesn't permit it and testing is both thorough and regular], I'd want the best weed.) I wouldn't be able to accomplish these things with UBI, so even in a hypothetical future where UBI is a thing: I won't want to sit around and do nothing: So far in life, I want quite a lot more more than the basic essentials and I'm willing to work for those things. (I do know some people who don't seem to be capable of more than nothing, due to mental and/or physical conditions, and it's likely that all of us know someone like this -- and these folks will have a rough time with life with or without UBI. But I firmly believe that most people would prefer staying in the rat race, because most people who are capable of work also have some fondness for whatever they consider to be *nice* things. But I might fall down in the future; it's happened to me before for a variety of reasons. And it'd be nice to be able to afford to fall down without becoming homeless when my income drops from something useful to near-zero.)
- stubish 2y ago
  One thing that I haven't seen discussed is retirement. When you have a high paying job, you can retire early and still maintain your desired standard of living (and most people do, because most people don't enjoy their job and that is why we call it work). So a pretty uninspiring job like plumbing would end up paying a very high salary. Or stressful jobs like nurse or doctor. What happens when people doing these critical and now highly paid jobs retire to their yachts at 40? Will the market balance things, and did enough apprentice plumbers get trained to take over? Or will things spiral out of control and collapse? And how does the extremely high wages of critical jobs affect the level of UBI? If it is set to meet minimum essentials, then the UBI too can spiral up as the cost of those essentials such as the plumbers wage goes up. I tend to think that without a lot more automation, then a UBI cannot cover the minimum essentials/poverty line, because of the large amount of work required to support society that is only done because people are forced to do it, to the point that we cannot sustain bribing people to do it. But maybe it will work if we are able to replace every barista with a vending machine, have the trucks load and drive themselves, and build robotic assistants to allow 1 plumber to do the job of 10.

rbanffy 2y ago

> People in a functioning society still have to work Why?

throwaway22032 2y ago
Have you ever interacted with a free rider? You know, those guys who always dodge their round at the pub, they never pay you back that fiver, they always need somewhere to crash? Hell, have you ever dated someone like that, or known a friend that has? One person goes to work, cooks, maintains the home, the other just spends their time on highfalutin' ideas like their photography project? UBI to me sounds like a way of hiding that behind bureaucracy. I don't want to support people who don't do anything useful and purely consume resources.
- gwd 2y ago
  You can see that they exist already, without UBI. So the question is, what effect will UBI have on freeloading if introduced? Will they contribute even less than they do now? Will there be more of them? Or will they stop free-loading off companies and individuals? If UBI means everyone at the place you work is actually motivated, and you never have to watch your friend support a free-loader again, I think we're probably better off as a society.
  - throwaway22032 2y ago
    You're forgetting about the bit in which you've literally given the person thousands of dollars. They use that free money to get you to do things for them. It's hidden behind bureaucracy but it's the same thing. Worse, even, because you don't have a choice. It's like the nonsense solutions the left propose for tackling crime. "If we give people X, they won't have to steal X". I mean, sure, because they have already gotten it from me for free...
    - gwd 2y ago
      Right, but there are situations where you will pay for something one way or another; we'd like "not paying" to be an option, but trying to take that option causes you to pay in the most expensive way. If you have a piece of industrial machinery, you will have down time for maintenance: you can pro-actively schedule planned maintenance when it's less disruptive, or the machine itself can schedule unplanned maintenance without regard to the disruption; "not having maintenance" isn't an option, and trying to take it is actually taking the "expensive unplanned maintenance" option. If you're the parent of a toddler and that toddler wants your attention, they will get it one way or another: you can pro-actively make time for them, or you can re-actively make time when they act out, perhaps destroying something in the process; as frustrating as it is, "not making time" is simply not an option, and trying to take it is actually taking the "expensive re-active to acting out" option. Here in the UK several years ago they cut back severely on social services to people with low-grade emotional problems. So instead of calling the social workers, they started calling emergency services, who are required to send someone out. The result was that much more more money was spent on emergency services. One could of course jail people who falsely call 999, but then that's pretty expensive too. For better or for worse, "not paying for people for them to talk to" isn't an option; it turns into "pay expensive EMTs to talk to them". So, maybe there are these people who are just freeloaders; they get jobs and then do the minimal amount of work possible, they get boyfriends or girlfriends or spouses who will support their freeloading lifestyle. That cost is being paid right now, but in a damaging way: they're dead weight in companies and vampires on romantic partners. It would be nice not to pay that cost at all, but that doesn't seem to be an option. Maybe if we just explicitly paid them to freeload, then at least we'd have the benefit of not having them hurt our friends and our companies.

wnc3141 2y ago

I always interpreted the point of the programs as by taking immediate insecurity off the table, you are allowing people to make more long term decisions for their well being.

fellowniusmonk 2y ago
Growing up I was in a negative leverage situation, even though I was smart and hardworking I was bled financially and I had to spend effort to layer contingency after contingency before I could even drive. This gave my life negative torque, the moment I got a little leverage, I stacked up roommates and basically lived like a digital ascetic for 12 years. I ended up in the top 1% of earnings for my starting co-hort not because of my fairly average intelligent but because of my nearly 100% openness, insane resilience and way above average mental health game, and a decade of luck. I spent all that time and energy getting out of poverty and by the time I bought a house and stabilized I was worn out. The really shitty part is that all along the way I had chances and risks that I couldn't take, companies I couldn't start, etc. because while any one of those chances was a play money/time opportunity for others it would have been a bet the farm, burn the ships, might have to squat with a bunch of homeless dudes (again) risk for me. Anything that gives a person the breathing room to stop the frantic hunter gatherer subsistence doom spiral and build skills is amazing. Let's let other countries play the economically wasteful poverty game, let's let people in other countries die deaths of despair during their prime production years but if we want to be an advanced technology powerhouse we can't keep wasting the potential of all these poor but intelligent kids.
- literallycancer 2y ago
  Are you gonna give everyone a national ID and wall up the border first? Or just let everyone come and get the free money?
  - fellowniusmonk 2y ago
    People really do love to take imperfect solutions to tractable problems and deceptively expand them into something intractable so they can continue to sit on their hands. "How can I tie real solvable issues to some kind of thought stopping meme", it's a fun game politicians and and other disingenuous people play. Every pundit buzzword you've injected is orthogonal to the point and the issue. You can personally pursue those plans if you want, they have nothing to do with what I am discussing. Worse, everything you've raised is irrelevant to all the little american kids getting screwed right now. But better America and Americans suffer and decline than having measurable but marginally imperfect solutions right? Perfection or nothing right? Iteration, measurement and incremental improvement isn't real so we shouldn't try? Defeatist attitudes didn't make this country.

mandmandam 2y ago

> in my mind 'basic' doesn't translate to quitting your job and not working In society A, machines and clean energy allow the population to work an average of 20 hours a week. Some, even many people choose not to work at all, but still get access to a basic apartment and have their basic food, social and education, etc, needs met. In society B, machines and dirty energy allow a tiny segment of the population to live on super-yachts, replete with airstrips for their private jets. They hire people who hire people to convince the majority of the population they must work at least 40 hours a week (preferably 80). Which society would you say is "functioning" better? Why blame the unemployed for the functioning of a society, when record inequality and the policies that allow it are so much more responsible? Look at this graph, and explain to me how unemployment is the problem here: https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/23410.jpeg https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/23410.jpeg

renewiltord 2y ago
[flagged]
- mandmandam 2y ago
  Have you forgotten the context of the conversation? (Reminder: "in my mind 'basic' doesn't translate to quitting your job and not working") If you think that full employment is the barrier we're facing to society A then you're living in a logical wasteland.
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    In my mind, society C is the basic standard. Anything less is living in a late-stage capitalistic dystopia that is inherently anti-human. All progress depends on the unreasonable man. And I am more unreasonable than everyone.
    - mandmandam 2y ago
      I'll take that as a 'yes' then. It's not that utopian to want a society where people aren't made homeless if they don't work. Finland did it - it worked great. It wasn't even that hard. Also in a society where just eight people own as much as 4 billion. Maybe making 'jokes' denying that we're in late stage capitalism is an odd choice? Like, yeah, we're headed for destruction.. It's funny the way Ralph Wiggum's "I'm in danger" line is funny.