2 ms·

There's plenty of resources to go around to make UBI (the "unconditional" is baked right in) make sense. There's plenty of work that people want to do, that's

There's plenty of resources to go around to make UBI (the "unconditional" is baked right in) make sense. There's plenty of work that people want to do, that's otherwise unprofitable, that UBI would enable. The barrier to UBI is not that we don't have enough to go around if not everyone is doing "productive work". It's that we're stuck on a model of human value that only considers productive work, and that we're stuck on a model of resource ownership that gives everything to the people at the top. "Guaranteed jobs" is certainly better than what we have today, but it seems stupid to tell someone who's got an amazing artistic talent, "Nope, you don't get to do the thing you're great at that gives you fulfillment in life and brightens other people's lives with your work. You have to clean the streets."

ndriscoll 1y ago
We value productive work because there's always so much of it to do. We have programs to fund the arts already. If we want to expand those programs, we should just do that. At some point though we will have enough artists (especially since ML models can now generate soulless corporate art). Given that we're currently relying on an underpaid foreign underclass for basic needs like food, and every developed country has a policy of leaning on large amounts of immigration to fill in gaps in the workforce, it seems to me that we haven't demonstrated that we have enough to go around to then support people doing nothing.