The indignity of no work
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The indignity of no work
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Re: The indignity of no work
#2> 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 Universal Basic Income seems to be getting more popular. (It wasn't so long ago it was pretty much pure sci-fi.) Particularly I guess as it begins to look like modern capitalism may not actually be good at providing jobs for everyone who needs one.
Potentially UBIs could be very good for the world, freeing people to work on things they personally desire and value, and in some ways redistributing the 'means of production' back to the little guy.
Re: The indignity of no work
#3This 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 to make value judgements about how different types of work are rated or (should be) valued by the general public or society as a whole. You can also factor out the ideological or moral components attributed to work by various political factions and start to answer interesting questions such how much should teachers be paid and what jobs which are low compensation, low social benefit should we be automating as fast as possible.
Re: The indignity of no work
#4> 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 have to be so high to support UBI that the costs would dwarf what people could afford.
As these services collapse so to will higher paying ones; lets see a doctor get up early to wash the floors of her practice since she can't afford to hire a cleaning staff and still charge patients a reasonable rate.
Re: The indignity of no work
#5There 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 in the EU.
Re: The indignity of no work
#6I'm a cynical ass, but whenever I hear the phrase "the dignity of work" I can't help but sarcastically mentally add "yeah, work will set you free".
Re: The indignity of no work
#7This 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 benefits to more people.
Re: The indignity of no work
#8> 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…
No. It does not mean no one will ever work as a dishwasher/etc. It just means that the market rate for dishwashers/etc. will be higher. This would be due to the supply curve for labor shifting.
Certainly, some businesses will not be able to hire as many (or any) dishwashers/etc, but those that they do hire will have to be paid more. But that is a natural extension of decreasing the supply of labor.
The higher price that businesses will pay for labor will also push them to invest in capital (automation).
Re: The indignity of no work
#9Everybody in the USSR had job. But these jobs didn't produce any (usually) value to the society. Who wants to have a job like this? You want to do something valuable so you know that what you produce people are willing to pay for (vs. being forced to pay for it). It just seems much more healthy too.
Re: The indignity of no work
#10> 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…
"Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean no one will ever..."
Unless they want more money, of course. Hands up everyone who might want more money than the minimum needed to survive.