I do know that asking people if their job is bullshit is not a good way to truly understand. It’s natural to hate many jobs, that’s why I’m paid to do them.
I once shoveled horse stalls. I hated it. It was. Horseshit job. But if the job stopped existing, it would have negative impact.
I think it will be cool when we have the luxury of working only fun, happiness creating jobs. But someone has to shovel out the stalls.
Under this definition, a lot of dirty or otherwise maligned jobs are still essential to society (including stall cleaning, depending on your perspective of how essential having horses is) and are thus not bullshit jobs, but a lot of others (rubber stampers, make workers, flunkies) are bullshit jobs.
If people were not in desperate need of a paycheck and were able to negotiate/hold out for better jobs, or spend more time on career training, then a lot of the business would not exist, or would be forced to treat their employees better.
I remember years ago I was talking with a friend of a friend who worked for a small 3-4 person software company. In the same conversation ve said ver job was bullshit because the software was written years ago by the two owners, who did nothing now, leaving all customer service to the friend of friend. So the argument was that ve should be paid more since ve creates all the value. So the argument was that the owners had bullshit jobs. There was a counter argument that small bugs had to be fixed, not by owners, but by the friend of friend who thought vis job was bullshit because the owner should fix it since the owner knows the software well.
I think it’s hard to get a straight answer because of this limited perspective as well as the natural falseness in responses to “is your job bullshit and we’ll pay you UBI so you can do something cool?” Or “is your job bullshit and we’ll fire you?”
In the case of horse shit, for sure it is better if someone cleans it, but that someone can also be the person that trains or rides the horse.
There isn't an intrinsic need for a job that performs only that task.
So I think a job is just a task that involves payment. It doesn’t change the argument. Someone has to do the task. If you give the horse owner UBI to free up more time, it’s unlikely to be spent shoveling horse manure.
The question is always: who is benefiting from this?
If people had more "disincentive to work" then getting people to work would require paying them more money. Jobs that self-cancel their own profession could then hire fewer people industry-wide and result in a net productivity boost, since whatever they do in the alternative can't be more useless than what they were doing.
As far as I can tell, none of these lesser programmes has had any effect above and beyond inflation on cost of living. Wasn't the sky supposed to fall when Washington State passed that ballot measure for a graduated minimum wage increase back in 2016?
Meanwhile, there are plenty of examples of awfully expensive large scale "back to square one" experiments that have been undertaken by other political ideologies with little to no opposition—where is the economic growth that was supposed to have happened as a consequence of the Ryan/Trump tax cuts in 2017?
The truth is, a lot of business ventures simply aren't profitable. It isn't profitable for me to start a business where I deliver whitecastle to remote areas by flying couriers there with the food - but it could be profitable if enough market changes occurred.
As these bloat businesses die off we'll see a shift in the market - either there will be a surplus of employees (that will drive down the cost of employment and enable more bloat businesses) or those employees will find other businesses to work at that can survive in the margins that exist.
You'll have to give up a significant part of your (real, not nominal) income to make a difference there. You might be happy to do that, my guess is that most of your peers are not.
The reimbursement of janitors might go up with UBI, that's fine, if it's going up then it means that something in the current market situation was artificially holding back their reimbursement. The market can correct pretty easily for UBI and make sure that the jobs that need to be done are indeed done (or else they aren't jobs that need to be done) and maybe janitor, as a profession, is scaled back to just waxing the floors and we discover that people working in an office should, once a week, empty their own trash cans - it's a very plausible outcome from UBI and one that will happen naturally if it'll happen at all.
> maybe [...] we discover that people working in an office should, once a week, empty their own trash cans
They can do that today, it's just more efficient to pay somebody else to do it than to have you, a highly-paid software developer, do it. It's more efficient to have you do complicated software things than mopping floors and emptying the trash can.
I'm all with you that there's a disconnect in today's wages where high-skill knowledge workers get out-of-proportion amounts of money while low-skill manual labor is basically priced at the minimum amount you need to survive.
I don't believe that UBI will solve that if you keep everything else (that is: markets) the same. And I don't see any compelling argument that some (new or old) alternative system that you or I or some people that are way smarter than us could come up with would work more efficiently than our largely-self-optimizing market system. So I'm not a fan of "well, out with the markets if they are what's holding us back", because the risk of it failing catastrophically are just too high to go "well, maybe it'll work this time".
I'm happy to be wrong, and I'm far from an expert on any of this, but there's too much hand-waving in UBI suggestions for my taste. Some proponents seriously claim that "doing away with be bureaucratic overhead" would be enough to finance UBI, and I'm dumbfounded that they haven't even done any rough guesstimates of the numbers to realize that they are wrong by orders of magnitude.
Controlling inflation will be a massive issue, and I don't haven't heard any convincing answers.
If you find a way to convince the super majority that "more more more for me me me" isn't going to make them happy in the long run, that more cooperation etc will benefit everyone (including themselves), the chances are certainly better, but let's find a way to convince them first and then change the system and not change the system and pray to any and all gods that they will become convinced to avert a catastrophic failure.
That's the part of automation that no one wants to discuss. What happens when we're like 90% automated and there simply isn't enough jobs for everyone.
Who do we force to work and is that ethical?
"Pay more" is meaningless when most of what you want is provided for you. What are you going to use that money for?
For some godawful reason people think near to full automation is going to look exactly like today, but without driving or something.
It's not. It's going to look radically different. It will be unprecedented. It's very naive to believe the current methods of incentives will work for a society that doesn't need them.
So your plan is to make sure some people will die of starvation unless they accept to do these jobs?
If no one is willing to do these critical jobs voluntarily, perhaps we should either pay them large amounts of money to convince someone to do them, or spread the work between more people - perhaps on a rotational basis.
Somebody has to do the work though, until robots do everything (and then declare war on us), you need somebody to take away the garbage, pick the fruits and unclog the toilets. Disincentivizing work doesn't make that go away, it just means you'll put that load on fewer shoulders.