7 ms·

'Jeremy Rifkin, author of “The Third Industrial Revolution,” said a basic income would enable people to volunteer their time in areas like elder care, child car

'Jeremy Rifkin, author of “The Third Industrial Revolution,” said a basic income would enable people to volunteer their time in areas like elder care, child care, culture and the environment.' This seems like the most important sentence in the article. Raising children, caring for the elderly, editing Wikipedia, free software, &c. creates huge amounts of unremunerated value. If people were freed from economic drudge work, they would have free time not only for leisure, but that kind of valuable work as well. Japan for example has a time-based currency to coordinate elder care, but that sort of thing will always be an issue of sharing volunteer labor. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11657006 http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11657006

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Cynical me. I don't see people who've never had to work, doing more than watching the latest Reality TV program and complaining about the quality of the free food. Doing those other things is all about cultural values, and nothing about free time.
- vijayr 12y ago
  try watching TV non stop for a week or two - it gets boring and annoying, real fast. there will be people who will watch TV all day when they don't have to work, but there will also be people who would spend their time doing useful things. Even if the latter group is just a fraction, it would benefit everyone immensely in the long run. After all, only a few thousand people edit wikipedia out of 7 billion of us, only a few thousand people write open source software but all of humanity benefits from it, right?
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Pollyanna. Think about a generation of teenaged boys with nothing to do but watch television. The carnage!
- iamthepieman 12y ago
  Selection bias right there in "people who've never had to work" What if you took people who have always had to work/chosen to work and give them resources to free up their time. Of course, you'd probably get a lot of bad things as well as good since sudden changes will always generate some churn and chaos short-term. Think about this for yourself. If you didn't have to work, or only had to work 25-30 hours a week what would you do with the extra time? Now apply that to every middle class individual. Sure some would spend the time in less productive or even harmful ways. But others would spend it even more wisely than you imagine yourself spending it.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Sure. But steady state, nobody's working. Us old guard will die off and leave just young'uns that never had to work. That was the idea I was getting at.
    - fown9 12y ago
      If you old people would stop working and retire, the young people would have work to do. What's that? you didn't save anything after the best financial boom time in history? You have to work until you're 80? Well, then stop complaining.
      - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
        The topic was of a Basic Income that meant no one has to work any more unless they want to.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      - bmelton 12y ago
        To be fair, a lot of market-based savings schemes were wiped out in 2008. My in-laws, who diligently spent their entire lives working boring jobs in banks (as accountants and such, not wall street), who prepared for their retirement by paying off their modest $250,000 home (in Nashville, it's nicer than the dollar amount makes it seem), found themselves screwed when they went to retire, as their 401Ks were now worth fractions of what they'd expected. So they're still working, extending their retirement in the hopes that their portfolios will recover, or that they can continue earning enough while they're healthy that they can offset it. It literally never occurred to me until your comment that someone might resent them for trying to earn a living for themselves without burdening the rest of society.
- panglott 12y ago
  I work, I watch TV, I play with my kid and help him with homework, I make some edits to Wikipedia, I study stuff online, &c. &c. When I was between jobs recently I did more of all of those things—except TV. I don't know many people in the rentier class that have never had to work, but my understanding is that the status quo already allows them to spend all the time they want watching reality TV ;)
- pjc50 12y ago
  I don't see people who've never had to work Other than the idle rich, I don't see many people who've never had to work either. I've seen people unable to work, and I've seen people denied the opportunity to work, but the idle poor are really not as prevalent as people seem to think.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    The topic was of Basic Income and the utopian future where nobody has to work if they don't want to. Some writer painted a bright picture where everybody would be volunteering at the senior center. I disagreed.
jes 12y ago
Who are the people to be freed of the economic drudge work? How will the economic drudge work then get done, and by whom?
- panglott 12y ago
  Note that this comment was in response to an article about automation causing a fall in the labor share of the economy.
  - jes 12y ago
    Thank you for that clarification. As I understand it, the increased productivity resulting from increased automation will reduce the need for human beings to engage in economic drudge work. That seems entirely reasonable to me. However, it sounds as if the benefit from the increased productivity is to be taken from the person who produced it, and redistributed to others. In other words, if I own a factory, and I install some robots to paint the cars, and thus no longer need to hire people to paint cars, the economic benefits from the increased automation are to be used to help provide others with a guaranteed income. Is this roughly accurate?
    - panglott 12y ago
      No, thank YOU for the clarification. ;) I see your point, this is a hard question. Automation here is making production a function of capital rather than a function of labor. Certainly legacy property rights would be with the idea that the owner of capital would have all rights to the benefits of the productivity improvements in this case. Maybe this is a fallacious slippery slope, or projecting too far forward as a means of deflecting your point, but if this process can be extended indefinitely, you might have a small rentier class who have inherited their unearned wealth/capital and a large mass of displaced workers whose labor is obsolete in the scarcity economy. If your factory is the whole economy, it sounds like a massive decrease in utility to throw all those workers on the street when robots have taken all their jobs. Besides, I don't know who you'll sell your cars to if you fire all your workers. Redistribution seems like a less-bad option. There's a deeper level, I think, where those legacy property rights are built upon a certain kind of social compact. And if the owners of capital make large numbers of the population economically obsolete, then the social compact has got to change. If the ethical basis of the law is built upon preserving property rights rather than human flourishing, it seems like we'd all be replaced by robots in the end.
Shivetya 12y ago
Likely you will end up with people with free time doing what a good number who have no real jobs do, sit on their ass and watch tv or surf the net. Nothing currently today prevents any person unemployed and receiving assistance from doing what he claims people would do IF ONLY except society does not penalize sloth and laziness. Before we get onto the give everyone an income train we need to do some work getting people back into the idea of contributing whether they are compensated directly or not. The idea of take take take without doing giving of your own should gradually moved into the idea of simple repulsiveness. This is where the internet/tv come into play.
- zanny 12y ago
  That culture only exists today because if you ever live in poverty you develop a mindset of a vulture. You need to seize opportunity and give nothing to maximize your position because you are so far behind. It is socially toxic, and only exists because you can fall through the bottom of society and become forgotten and discarded. It is treading water just to survive. It makes people hostile, selfish, and bitter. Plenty of studies show how poverty will change your brain chemistry for the worse. Of course the first generation of UBI would be a trying time. It is correcting so many social wrongs at once it upsets your worldview completely. But I cannot imagine anyone beyond the first batch ever having anything but significantly increased happiness, social cohesion, voluntarism, and enterpenurism, because once you can (hate to say it) cull the damaged goods, you have a society where everyone can take risks but always keep a roof over their heads and food in their bellies, and be as generous as they want while always having a bed to sleep on. That is such a huge psychological advantage for society. Which is kind of why I find UBI such a no brainer nowadays. You can approach it from so many angles - cultural, microeconomic, macroeconomic, social, psychological, and every one of them in and of itself has so many benefits it seems insane not to implement it at almost any cost just for those benefits alone. But they are not alone, it helps in almost every problem center of the modern world.
- ddod 12y ago
  I couldn't really disagree more. In the US, the lower economic rungs are either working incredibly hard for little gains (try making a livable wage when most employers only offer part time hours that are constantly changing, preventing you from getting health insurance or secondary jobs), living off of welfare, or some combination thereof and also working in the drug/sex/theft trade. That to me shows that most people have a natural interest in gain above the minimum for survival and an interest in working for it. Unfortunately, most of that work isn't really benefiting society or the people doing it, and it creates a poverty loop. Even if you believe humans are naturally lazy, what is the takeaway? When their labor value decreases to next to nothing, what value is all their willingness to work for survival?
Roboprog 12y ago
Or, perhaps some of those "volunteer" activities could become actual jobs???
- IndianAstronaut 12y ago
  Actually, in a sense it is a job. The author and probably most people here are unfamiliar with the concept, but the idea of "maximizing utility" is a major theme in economics. The whole goal of automation and productivity increases is to enable that.
mason240 12y ago
>would enable people to volunteer their time in areas like elder care, child care, culture and the environment.' We recently went through a several year period of mass unemployment where many people had free time and those things didn't happen.
- Xylakant 12y ago
  people did not have free time, they were scrambling to get the bills paid.
  - derekp7 12y ago
    Personally, I was unemployed over the summer in 2008 (four months). Now I had a good severance package, and there were very few job interviews, so overall I think I spent maybe a few hours a week on looking for work. But I didn't really accomplish much during that time (I was much more productive writing open source over a 1.5 week holiday break a year or two back). I guess that must have been because I was so burned out from not having any real vacation for 10 years, that 4 months of downtime (without scrambling to pay bills, etc) caused me to just zone out at the camper and sleep most of the time.
- jordan0day 12y ago
  That seems a bit glib, seeing as how many of those people were probably spending a great deal of time worrying about keeping their home and trying to find new employment.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago

Cynical me. I don't see people who've never had to work, doing more than watching the latest Reality TV program and complaining about the quality of the free food. Doing those other things is all about cultural values, and nothing about free time.

vijayr 12y ago
try watching TV non stop for a week or two - it gets boring and annoying, real fast. there will be people who will watch TV all day when they don't have to work, but there will also be people who would spend their time doing useful things. Even if the latter group is just a fraction, it would benefit everyone immensely in the long run. After all, only a few thousand people edit wikipedia out of 7 billion of us, only a few thousand people write open source software but all of humanity benefits from it, right?
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Pollyanna. Think about a generation of teenaged boys with nothing to do but watch television. The carnage!
iamthepieman 12y ago
Selection bias right there in "people who've never had to work" What if you took people who have always had to work/chosen to work and give them resources to free up their time. Of course, you'd probably get a lot of bad things as well as good since sudden changes will always generate some churn and chaos short-term. Think about this for yourself. If you didn't have to work, or only had to work 25-30 hours a week what would you do with the extra time? Now apply that to every middle class individual. Sure some would spend the time in less productive or even harmful ways. But others would spend it even more wisely than you imagine yourself spending it.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Sure. But steady state, nobody's working. Us old guard will die off and leave just young'uns that never had to work. That was the idea I was getting at.
  - fown9 12y ago
    If you old people would stop working and retire, the young people would have work to do. What's that? you didn't save anything after the best financial boom time in history? You have to work until you're 80? Well, then stop complaining.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      The topic was of a Basic Income that meant no one has to work any more unless they want to.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - bmelton 12y ago
      To be fair, a lot of market-based savings schemes were wiped out in 2008. My in-laws, who diligently spent their entire lives working boring jobs in banks (as accountants and such, not wall street), who prepared for their retirement by paying off their modest $250,000 home (in Nashville, it's nicer than the dollar amount makes it seem), found themselves screwed when they went to retire, as their 401Ks were now worth fractions of what they'd expected. So they're still working, extending their retirement in the hopes that their portfolios will recover, or that they can continue earning enough while they're healthy that they can offset it. It literally never occurred to me until your comment that someone might resent them for trying to earn a living for themselves without burdening the rest of society.
panglott 12y ago
I work, I watch TV, I play with my kid and help him with homework, I make some edits to Wikipedia, I study stuff online, &c. &c. When I was between jobs recently I did more of all of those things—except TV. I don't know many people in the rentier class that have never had to work, but my understanding is that the status quo already allows them to spend all the time they want watching reality TV ;)
pjc50 12y ago
I don't see people who've never had to work Other than the idle rich, I don't see many people who've never had to work either. I've seen people unable to work, and I've seen people denied the opportunity to work, but the idle poor are really not as prevalent as people seem to think.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  The topic was of Basic Income and the utopian future where nobody has to work if they don't want to. Some writer painted a bright picture where everybody would be volunteering at the senior center. I disagreed.

jes 12y ago

Who are the people to be freed of the economic drudge work? How will the economic drudge work then get done, and by whom?

panglott 12y ago
Note that this comment was in response to an article about automation causing a fall in the labor share of the economy.
- jes 12y ago
  Thank you for that clarification. As I understand it, the increased productivity resulting from increased automation will reduce the need for human beings to engage in economic drudge work. That seems entirely reasonable to me. However, it sounds as if the benefit from the increased productivity is to be taken from the person who produced it, and redistributed to others. In other words, if I own a factory, and I install some robots to paint the cars, and thus no longer need to hire people to paint cars, the economic benefits from the increased automation are to be used to help provide others with a guaranteed income. Is this roughly accurate?
  - panglott 12y ago
    No, thank YOU for the clarification. ;) I see your point, this is a hard question. Automation here is making production a function of capital rather than a function of labor. Certainly legacy property rights would be with the idea that the owner of capital would have all rights to the benefits of the productivity improvements in this case. Maybe this is a fallacious slippery slope, or projecting too far forward as a means of deflecting your point, but if this process can be extended indefinitely, you might have a small rentier class who have inherited their unearned wealth/capital and a large mass of displaced workers whose labor is obsolete in the scarcity economy. If your factory is the whole economy, it sounds like a massive decrease in utility to throw all those workers on the street when robots have taken all their jobs. Besides, I don't know who you'll sell your cars to if you fire all your workers. Redistribution seems like a less-bad option. There's a deeper level, I think, where those legacy property rights are built upon a certain kind of social compact. And if the owners of capital make large numbers of the population economically obsolete, then the social compact has got to change. If the ethical basis of the law is built upon preserving property rights rather than human flourishing, it seems like we'd all be replaced by robots in the end.

Shivetya 12y ago

Likely you will end up with people with free time doing what a good number who have no real jobs do, sit on their ass and watch tv or surf the net. Nothing currently today prevents any person unemployed and receiving assistance from doing what he claims people would do IF ONLY except society does not penalize sloth and laziness. Before we get onto the give everyone an income train we need to do some work getting people back into the idea of contributing whether they are compensated directly or not. The idea of take take take without doing giving of your own should gradually moved into the idea of simple repulsiveness. This is where the internet/tv come into play.

zanny 12y ago
That culture only exists today because if you ever live in poverty you develop a mindset of a vulture. You need to seize opportunity and give nothing to maximize your position because you are so far behind. It is socially toxic, and only exists because you can fall through the bottom of society and become forgotten and discarded. It is treading water just to survive. It makes people hostile, selfish, and bitter. Plenty of studies show how poverty will change your brain chemistry for the worse. Of course the first generation of UBI would be a trying time. It is correcting so many social wrongs at once it upsets your worldview completely. But I cannot imagine anyone beyond the first batch ever having anything but significantly increased happiness, social cohesion, voluntarism, and enterpenurism, because once you can (hate to say it) cull the damaged goods, you have a society where everyone can take risks but always keep a roof over their heads and food in their bellies, and be as generous as they want while always having a bed to sleep on. That is such a huge psychological advantage for society. Which is kind of why I find UBI such a no brainer nowadays. You can approach it from so many angles - cultural, microeconomic, macroeconomic, social, psychological, and every one of them in and of itself has so many benefits it seems insane not to implement it at almost any cost just for those benefits alone. But they are not alone, it helps in almost every problem center of the modern world.
ddod 12y ago
I couldn't really disagree more. In the US, the lower economic rungs are either working incredibly hard for little gains (try making a livable wage when most employers only offer part time hours that are constantly changing, preventing you from getting health insurance or secondary jobs), living off of welfare, or some combination thereof and also working in the drug/sex/theft trade. That to me shows that most people have a natural interest in gain above the minimum for survival and an interest in working for it. Unfortunately, most of that work isn't really benefiting society or the people doing it, and it creates a poverty loop. Even if you believe humans are naturally lazy, what is the takeaway? When their labor value decreases to next to nothing, what value is all their willingness to work for survival?

Roboprog 12y ago

Or, perhaps some of those "volunteer" activities could become actual jobs???

IndianAstronaut 12y ago
Actually, in a sense it is a job. The author and probably most people here are unfamiliar with the concept, but the idea of "maximizing utility" is a major theme in economics. The whole goal of automation and productivity increases is to enable that.

mason240 12y ago

>would enable people to volunteer their time in areas like elder care, child care, culture and the environment.' We recently went through a several year period of mass unemployment where many people had free time and those things didn't happen.

Xylakant 12y ago
people did not have free time, they were scrambling to get the bills paid.
- derekp7 12y ago
  Personally, I was unemployed over the summer in 2008 (four months). Now I had a good severance package, and there were very few job interviews, so overall I think I spent maybe a few hours a week on looking for work. But I didn't really accomplish much during that time (I was much more productive writing open source over a 1.5 week holiday break a year or two back). I guess that must have been because I was so burned out from not having any real vacation for 10 years, that 4 months of downtime (without scrambling to pay bills, etc) caused me to just zone out at the camper and sleep most of the time.
jordan0day 12y ago
That seems a bit glib, seeing as how many of those people were probably spending a great deal of time worrying about keeping their home and trying to find new employment.