61–70 of 187 posts
I really enjoyed reading this article. I've been thinking quite a bit about work recently. I'm just about to turn 29, and by all accounts I'm fairly successful: I graduated college with a worthless liberal arts degree just as the Great Recession was beginning. After an unsuccessful attempt at copywriting for a couple years, I managed to learn programming. A few years after that and I'm the leader of the engineering t…
I find it presumptuous that the authors lay depression and so forth at the feet of unemployment and not the obvious: poverty. If folks could live, unemployed, receiving mincome that supported a reasonable quality of life, is there a reason to believe these various effects would still be a major issue?
I am not a sociologist or psychologist, but I do not belive humans can handle significant idle time in a socially productive way. Look at the disaster zones that are most public housing projects. Humans evolved needing to work to survive. It's in our nature to become restless and sociopathic if we have nothing to do.
With mincome, if the basic needs are paid, then people could do other non-economic activities, such as more dedication to arts and culture, develop studies, etc...
For example, I believe a lot of people would increase participation on open-source projects in internet
While this is a very interesting and insightful article, it might be useful to add a broader historical/anthropological perspective. I'm not qualified to do that. But it's my understanding that development of agriculture and animal husbandry, and much later industrialization, drove huge increases in human population. In part, of course, that was driven by the abundance of food and so on. But there was also the need f…
Also increase in comfort and development is correlated with smaller children number, so an hyper modern world may have smaller population "momentum". There's a statistician with a TED talk about that. Maybe that one http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y... I cant recall.
Cultural observations: Lots of people currently believe in the idea of go to school, get degree, get great job, and work hard, get ahead or at least don't get downsized. Today we laugh at people in my grandfather's generation who had weird employment ideas like lifetime employment at one firm, college isn't necessary, and no women allowed (well, we laugh at dinosaurs like that outside silicon valley where its still p…
The Valley has its own social obstacles to women's employment...
I find it presumptuous that the authors lay depression and so forth at the feet of unemployment and not the obvious: poverty. If folks could live, unemployed, receiving mincome that supported a reasonable quality of life, is there a reason to believe these various effects would still be a major issue?
I am not a sociologist or psychologist, but I do not belive humans can handle significant idle time in a socially productive way. Look at the disaster zones that are most public housing projects. Humans evolved needing to work to survive. It's in our nature to become restless and sociopathic if we have nothing to do.
Additionally, I don't think the idea here is to encourage idleness. It's about people not needing to either beg an existing profitable business to take them in or create one ex nihilo in order to survive.
Just the idea that the alternative to jobs is idleness shows a strange conflation of ideas. We define "work" as that which we hope will earn us money — we know an activity is work because of a totally extrinsic factor. There are people in our society who are paid a king's ransom to literally play games, and there are people who do back-breaking labor without anywhere close to fair compensation, and this is all work because they make their living doing it. But if somebody (say, a painter) doesn't have customers or an employer, that's not work, and thus it looks like idleness, no matter how engaged they are in the activity.
For years we've claimed that we're on the brink of a world without work. However I believe that this claim is fundamentally flawed because it goes against Parkinson's law, which we've seen to be consistently true. We naturally try to gather more material wealth, and this involves having a system where we give bigger rewards to those who work harder and smarter. No matter how much we eliminate menial tasks, we will al…
This is true in *today's culture of work. Unemployment, even if a person was laid off due to their employer going bankrupt, is still seen as a personal failing. And unemployment for most people means a race against the clock before savings dwindle (if they are lucky enough to have been able to save for such an emergency). And prolonged unemployment and the uncertainty and drop in status that comes with it can be demoralizing and depressing, especially for people who have little prospect of finding a satisfying or at least decent paying job. The people that sleep and watch TV are likely doing so because they are under psychological stress. Our culture fetishes work to a degree that would make a Marxist blush and unemployment and not working is punished by society on many levels.
But if the culture of work changes over time and not working in the traditional sense no longer means destitution, stigma and loss of status, well, who can say for sure not working at an unsatisfying job will result in misery and lazing around doing nothing.
I really enjoyed reading this article. I've been thinking quite a bit about work recently. I'm just about to turn 29, and by all accounts I'm fairly successful: I graduated college with a worthless liberal arts degree just as the Great Recession was beginning. After an unsuccessful attempt at copywriting for a couple years, I managed to learn programming. A few years after that and I'm the leader of the engineering t…
Basic income would pay for basic needs, and let people devote "free time" to more personally-satisfacting-activities: open-source programming, studiyng new interesting fields, etc...
The mere fact that in today's professional career there is little oportunity for a 40-50years to work on a completely-new-unexperienced-field is an clear example. There is a point in time after which a job converts from ilusion-and-motivation into delusion-and-economic-compromise. And that's blocking people from growing and fully apply their capabilities to reach higher achivements
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you a eugenicist and human depopulation advocate?
Nope, I'm an anarchist and transhumanist :) I am concerned that the human population may crash after nuking too many ecosystem services. However, I'm not a biodiversity freak, but rather take a broader evolutionary perspective.