2 ms·

I think the situation today is that many of us do waste time with unproductive distractions in the workplace. It's my observation that if you monitored people i

by motters 12y ago

I think the situation today is that many of us do waste time with unproductive distractions in the workplace. It's my observation that if you monitored people in offices much of the time what they're doing is not actually "working" in any meaningful sense, and when they are working the kinds of output which they're producing are not useful to many people. That kind of situation was of course famously satirised in the TV series "the office". So I don't think it's a clear cut situation that wage labour automatically means a good and productive society and that BIG means a bad and unproductive one.

S4M 12y ago
I totally agree with you that many of us could be more productive at their workplace, but they still could be less productive. In fact, let's say that someone productivity goes between 0 and 1, productivity 0 means that you don't do anything at all and just waste your time. Productivity 1 means being as efficient Carmack. I would say that the current productivity is quite low for the employed people, maybe 0.1 in average, and follows some kind of log-normal distribution (all of this are super rough approximation). If we adopt BIG, we would have lots of people who will have 0 productivity (maybe 95% of the population, much more IMHO), and the rest will have a higher productivity. Would we be better off? It's not clear to me, especially at the beginning - maybe after one generation people will get used to work on what they really like - but I would really like to see some experimentation in that direction.
- motters 12y ago
  Another thing to keep in mind is that BIG would be basic, and living on it would not be particularly luxurious. Unless you did things to supplement the basic income then you probably wouldn't be able to afford to buy or run a vehicle, go on foreign holidays, have the latest fancyphone or anything of that sort. So financial incentives would still exist for most people.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  I think you are assuming a much higher BI than many of us would propose.

by motters 12y ago

S4M 12y ago

I totally agree with you that many of us could be more productive at their workplace, but they still could be less productive. In fact, let's say that someone productivity goes between 0 and 1, productivity 0 means that you don't do anything at all and just waste your time. Productivity 1 means being as efficient Carmack. I would say that the current productivity is quite low for the employed people, maybe 0.1 in average, and follows some kind of log-normal distribution (all of this are super rough approximation). If we adopt BIG, we would have lots of people who will have 0 productivity (maybe 95% of the population, much more IMHO), and the rest will have a higher productivity. Would we be better off? It's not clear to me, especially at the beginning - maybe after one generation people will get used to work on what they really like - but I would really like to see some experimentation in that direction.

motters 12y ago
Another thing to keep in mind is that BIG would be basic, and living on it would not be particularly luxurious. Unless you did things to supplement the basic income then you probably wouldn't be able to afford to buy or run a vehicle, go on foreign holidays, have the latest fancyphone or anything of that sort. So financial incentives would still exist for most people.
dllthomas 12y ago
I think you are assuming a much higher BI than many of us would propose.