So we are saying that most of the people out there are of no use to the economy and thus, most probably, to society. Well, welcome to fascism 2.0, this vision is elitist, it creates a huge power lobby (the entity paying up the basic incomes...), and it sees people as sheep with no brains.
The indignity of no work
11–20 of 268 posts
Re: The indignity of no work
#12> A world in which a healthy adult has the reasonable expectation of earning a decent living while working full-time at a market wage is absolutely a world in which the dignity of work is a useful social value to cultivate. In a world in which that is not a reasonable expectation, the dignity of work can be a harmful concept. Interesting times ahead. It's going to be painful getting there, if we get there at all, but…
Here's a simple if perhaps naive question. Suppose UBI is $x/yr. What's going to stop every apartment complex owner and every rental landlord from raising the cost of living on that property by $x/yr/tenant? Will the government start fixing prices? (I imagine that slightly more realistically all owners of physical resources, not just land owners, would raise prices as much as they can while still maintaining roughly the same profit percentage in order to compete with other owners to capture the new income, and so no single group of actors is likely to capture it all with one type of product.)
Re: The indignity of no work
#13> A world in which a healthy adult has the reasonable expectation of earning a decent living while working full-time at a market wage is absolutely a world in which the dignity of work is a useful social value to cultivate. In a world in which that is not a reasonable expectation, the dignity of work can be a harmful concept. Interesting times ahead. It's going to be painful getting there, if we get there at all, but…
The idea of a basic income is still sci-fi. There just isn't that much money. Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean no one will ever wash dishes at a restaurant, no one will pick up trash, no one will spend time wiring your house for internet, or fix your computer, or do a large swath of jobs. The argument that with UBI people will still do that only for more money is crazy, since the taxes would hav…
Washing dishes is so incredibly dumb. What should have been done long ago is standardising plates, cups and cutlery and creating integrated dish cabinet/washer that can wash those standardised items and store them.
The fact that in 2014 we still rely on manual work to wash the dishes is a disgrace perpetrated by oversupply of cheap human work.
Re: The indignity of no work
#14> A world in which a healthy adult has the reasonable expectation of earning a decent living while working full-time at a market wage is absolutely a world in which the dignity of work is a useful social value to cultivate. In a world in which that is not a reasonable expectation, the dignity of work can be a harmful concept. Interesting times ahead. It's going to be painful getting there, if we get there at all, but…
The idea of a basic income is still sci-fi. There just isn't that much money. Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean no one will ever wash dishes at a restaurant, no one will pick up trash, no one will spend time wiring your house for internet, or fix your computer, or do a large swath of jobs. The argument that with UBI people will still do that only for more money is crazy, since the taxes would hav…
The idea is that technology makes doing anything undesirable totally optional.
We made horses obsolete for transport, and now nobody HAS TO ride a horse (99%). You can do it for fun.
I would argue that today, most people who ride horses enjoy doing so, where the same could not be said for times before modern transportation.
Re: The indignity of no work
#15There are these interesting developments that I noticed and I'm interested to see how many others noticed that: (1) Polarization of left vs right views among people in both US and EU (2) Sudden drastic turn to the right in many places in the EU while at the same time turn to the left in the US. It seems to me that since 1945 the US has been mostly right wing and is turning left radically, while the opposite is true i…
False dichotomy. There is more than one dimension. For starters, see the Nolan chart:
Re: The indignity of no work
#16> A world in which a healthy adult has the reasonable expectation of earning a decent living while working full-time at a market wage is absolutely a world in which the dignity of work is a useful social value to cultivate. In a world in which that is not a reasonable expectation, the dignity of work can be a harmful concept. Interesting times ahead. It's going to be painful getting there, if we get there at all, but…
The idea of a basic income is still sci-fi. There just isn't that much money. Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean no one will ever wash dishes at a restaurant, no one will pick up trash, no one will spend time wiring your house for internet, or fix your computer, or do a large swath of jobs. The argument that with UBI people will still do that only for more money is crazy, since the taxes would hav…
The idea of a basic income is still sci-fi.
That's untrue. Switzerland is having a national referendum on whether to offer one, and stipends from oil or casino money, while not enough to live on at this point, already exist in a few places. You may be correct that there's not enough money to give everyone enough to live on, but it's far from sci-fi.
(There is plenty of money in the world, it's just tied up in things like insane finance industry salaries, or $500k/yr/person for imprisonment, etc.)
And historically? People looked after their own menial tasks, where they were small enough, and where the tasks were too big for individuals (like roads, or building a town hall) the community got together and did it.
Re: The indignity of no work
#17> A world in which a healthy adult has the reasonable expectation of earning a decent living while working full-time at a market wage is absolutely a world in which the dignity of work is a useful social value to cultivate. In a world in which that is not a reasonable expectation, the dignity of work can be a harmful concept. Interesting times ahead. It's going to be painful getting there, if we get there at all, but…
Here's a simple if perhaps naive question. Suppose UBI is $x/yr. What's going to stop every apartment complex owner and every rental landlord from raising the cost of living on that property by $x/yr/tenant? Will the government start fixing prices? (I imagine that slightly more realistically all owners of physical resources, not just land owners, would raise prices as much as they can while still maintaining roughly…
That's the only thing I can see that can go wrong with basic income. I'd counter that with progressive property tax. So that if you own 5 accomodations, of which each can house a family, you might be better off with selling the sixth one than holding it, paying exorbitant tax and risking it might stay empty for too long. I would pump money earned from this tax back into basic income.
Such tax might be beneficial even now in some places. In Japan and Italy so many properties were bought out by people intending to profit from the rent that price of accomodation rose to the point that most young people can't afford to live alone and stay with parents instead.
Re: The indignity of no work
#18> A world in which a healthy adult has the reasonable expectation of earning a decent living while working full-time at a market wage is absolutely a world in which the dignity of work is a useful social value to cultivate. In a world in which that is not a reasonable expectation, the dignity of work can be a harmful concept. Interesting times ahead. It's going to be painful getting there, if we get there at all, but…
Here's a simple if perhaps naive question. Suppose UBI is $x/yr. What's going to stop every apartment complex owner and every rental landlord from raising the cost of living on that property by $x/yr/tenant? Will the government start fixing prices? (I imagine that slightly more realistically all owners of physical resources, not just land owners, would raise prices as much as they can while still maintaining roughly…
An alternative to fixing prices would be just to compete. The government could start building its own housing, recouping the costs straight back from UBI rents, and simultaneously holding privately-owned market prices to a more reasonable level.
Re: The indignity of no work
#19This is slightly off topic. Work is rather a vague term. If you break it down into it's components: effort, compensation, social-benefit, etc. then you can start to assign relative merit to different kinds of work. For example financiers which might be categorised as: high compensation, low to moderate effort and low social benefit and janitors: low compensation, moderate effort, low compensation. Now you can start t…
If you allow competition the market will do this. Compensation also takes into account the joy the job provides, some jobs are relatively pleasant and thus pay less than some that are much worse. As for automation, I completely disagree - we automate where we can get the biggest gain on output. So if something costs a lot or has high social benefit we should automate it as much as possible so that it can provide more…
There are many types of job where market forces cannot solve the problem. (Within the context of the Universal Basic Income) there may entire categories of types of job that could be created to solve social (in the most general sense) or civic problems. For example charitable or education related activities are low to no profit - or at least it is not easy to measure their benefit directly or immediately, but high social value in the sense that they mitigate future problem that result in increase expenditures or taxes and so have long term value. Since the market uses money and direct profit as a means to measure everything it simply cannot deal with this.
Re: The indignity of no work
#20This is slightly off topic. Work is rather a vague term. If you break it down into it's components: effort, compensation, social-benefit, etc. then you can start to assign relative merit to different kinds of work. For example financiers which might be categorised as: high compensation, low to moderate effort and low social benefit and janitors: low compensation, moderate effort, low compensation. Now you can start t…
If you allow competition the market will do this. Compensation also takes into account the joy the job provides, some jobs are relatively pleasant and thus pay less than some that are much worse. As for automation, I completely disagree - we automate where we can get the biggest gain on output. So if something costs a lot or has high social benefit we should automate it as much as possible so that it can provide more…
Compensation also takes into account the joy the job provides, some jobs are relatively pleasant and thus pay less than some that are much worse.
That's not generally my observation of the world. No-skill-required jobs pay less, skill-required jobs pay more. There's a slight bonus for dangerous jobs, but not a heap, relatively speaking. Pleasure derived or not only appears to have an effect on income levels outside of traditional employment and into freelancing territory, for example with starving artists and writers.