I've been literally working without an unemployment gap since I've been 14. I worked 60+ hours a week through most of my 20s. I didn't have a choice. It took me half of my life to reach financial stability and normalcy. I still get stressed about healthcare costs despite being healthy. It doesn't have to be this way for anyone.

Even if you want to work all the time, most people aren't being paid appropriately for the time they put in. None of us are really experiencing the benefits of society's dramatically increased productivity.

You're just not seeing it. I remember the days of manual typewriters. Make a mistake, type it over again. Put in an envelope, mail, wait weeks for a reply. Write the letter by hand, even worse.

Today, shoot off a text or email with automatic spellchecking.

Cars need far less maintenance.

TVs are practically free.

My microwave greatly reduces meal prep time.

I could go on and on.

Expected lifespan is quite a bit higher.

You can't expect it to increase at the same rate as productivity, because it asymptotically approaches a limit.

Whether you're happy or not is up to you, not society. People, regardless of their status, tend to be at about the same level of happiness.

> all

I wish people would stop adding such qualifiers to construct strawmen.

p.s. also didn’t expect you to nit pick examples I gave that I thought would better serve your original point: big life changing stuff has improved. I expected us to move on to discuss what is of major value that we should expect from productivity.

Today, just do the edits, hit [print].

Hours, hours, hours saved.

Ironically, my dad told me in the 70s that the two greatest inventions would be a TV you could hang on the wall and a typewriter where you could edit without retyping the whole thing. To think some people think we don't live in a wonderland!

(He missed the calculator. What a marvelous time saver that was!)

People work tirelessly to create & improve that, and you can see that society is improving bit by bit. That's not an illusion.

Stagnant wages likely signify an actual problem in valuation worth fixing, but it's silly to solve that by being less productive. Lowering total productivity may generate lower surplus value for greedy employers, but it's a weak revenge. You still earn less than you should, and society is poorer for it. There are many other ways to address the root issue.

One could read as many books as they like. Learn to play an assortment of musical instruments. Learn woodworking. Sailing. Write novels. Compose songs. Complete their magnum opuses. Master languages. Study art. Create art. Improve their athleticism. And so on.

The list is near endless of things to do.

Those would all be very fun things to do, but very self-focused. I'd love to spend my life writing a novel, except it'd probably be a pretty shitty novel, and it'd be hard for me to find satisfaction in having spent my life on something that contributed very little value to anybody else in society. At least with work I know somebody values what I'm doing.

And you're making the argument that the effort of aspiring novelists is wasted. It's not. Or else we would have no novels.

Also, I think you missed the point about novelists. It is more about if you suck at writing novels, sitting around and writing one for yourself isn't very valuable for society. There are some people who have natural talent, but the average Joe sitting around not working and instead writing a novel for fun will likely not be producing much value--at least, not as much as if he were working.

How do you know you suck at writing novels until you try?

For the writers, I didnt say dont try. There is a difference between trying during spare time while off work vs. doing it as a hobby while not working and thus not contributing to society yet taking money from it.

Sure there are issues with the rules of the markets like anything--but markets in general are pretty good for determining value.

It should be very obvious that raising children well or taking care of the elderly are hugely valuable activities, yet the market almost completely ignores them.

And yeah, raising children and taking care of the elderly are certainly important. I know that in tech cities that childcare can be very hard to find and incredibly expensive, so maybe it is becoming more valued? But the key is that the value of the service itself is not based solely on how 'important' it is, but also how many people are performing it and how much is needed (supply&demand). Or maybe a better way to say is that importance is also a function of supply and demand. Take oxygen, for example--super important, but I'm not buying tanks of it.

Software development is pretty hot right now, but if almost everyone in the world were trained to do it, the price of that labor would be quite low. This is another feature of markets--it helps to allocate resources (jobs) to what is needed at the moment. With UBI, I think you would be missing out on that to a large extent.

...have you talked to your sales guys?

They won't pay you enough to buy a Ferrari. But it will be enough money to spare time to cook well, exercise and spend time on relationships. Or do whatever you want to do.

Different people want different things. Surely your choice of tech work will be very different when you know losing your job won't starve you to death.

In such a scenario, to what extent does working involve the creation of value? Would you, and should you, find satisfaction in performing this labor? And in what ways is it different from working on the next big social media app to dethrone TikTok?

The people on space ships all have a form of UBI and choose a profession so that they can accomplish something of meaning. Space exploration is one of those.

But others turn to art, literature, etc.

I know which I would rather do.

Your always welcome to work harder for more.

The problem is, there is quite literally not enough valid, useful, and productive work to go around.

We've reached a point there isn't enough work for everyone to do. What does that mean if you want to work full time?

It means you're taking work away from someone else.

I don't think anyone minds that, what they mind is that you're also taking their livelihood away.

If there isn't enough work, but there is enough resources, what does that tell you about the system?

Either those who can't secure work will suffer, or we need to redistribute the outputs of those who can secure work.

Its a really basic question whether you agree with ubi or not:

Do you want people to suffer so you can work full time? Or would you rather everyone gets what they need, and we work for what we want.

People always want more, and you can always find work fulfilling those wants. There's always demand for stuff. Can you honestly look around you right now and think "there isn't much room for improvement"? Well, people need to work to improve stuff, that's useful and valuable work. Do you really think "welp, my life doesn't have any more problems to solve". Well, people need to work to solve those problems, that's useful and valuable work.

Whether or not people are given what they need to survive is irrelevant to UBI. Welfare does that. What makes UBI worse is that it provides no incentive to work and create value, and that's a tremendous waste of human capital and it worsens inequality.

But this is a point the article somewhat addresses - the graph for marketing-budgets shows that pretty nicely in my opinion.

At some points, its just easier to make more money/profits by trying to increase demand for your product than by improving it (or reducing costs of its production). And I think that's what we're seeing more and more on an ever increasing scale right now: "Actually productive" jobs (e.g. manufacturing) are already outsourced, and the gains from the cost-savings are spent on e.g. marketing.

This might make sense economically (in terms of profits, emplyoment), but arguably less from a "benefit-for-society" point of view.

I think David Graeber adresses this quite nicely (but rather aggressively) with his 'Bullshit Job'-theory.

I have heard about the Bullshit Jobs theory and I find it unconvincing (I admit I haven't read the whole book). The meaningfulness and value of a job is not determined by the laborer - as suggested by the "do you think your job makes a meaningful contribution to the world" surveys he cites - but by the employer.

The value of something has always been determined by other people who want it. It doesn't matter what David Graeber and his unhappy laborers think or say, something isn't bullshit just because they say it is. Many of the examples he mentions (doormen, content curators, PR) are valuable things that people want enough to pay for, yet his opaque judgment deems them "bullshit" simply because he or someone else thinks they're worthless.

History shows us economies that failed because some people thought they could plan them with isolated judgments of what society should value. UBI as a solution for Bullshit Jobs follows in the same tradition by personally judging whole swaths of jobs to have no value, then proposing a plan to get rid of them.

Thats why the definition is what it is. He knows it's a subjective phrase that means many different things to many different people. He also admits there will be some people who find value in the same job someone else does not.

I think it's a bit strange to hinge your opinion on this definition though, its really only defined that way so it doesn't piss people off, the book isn't about how you define bullshit jobs, the book is about what we should do now we know they exist.

Which you're sort of ignoring.

What do you think we should do since we do know bullshit jobs exist.

Look at a basic case, a single farmer is able to produce enough food for 100 people.

There is no need for 99 people to work for there food in this simplistic case.

Yes, these people may want iPhones, and maybe they need to work for them, but the basic income component is covered by a single farmer.

I'm not saying there is some static pool of work available.

I am saying there is a static pool of life sustaining work available.

This is why ubi works mathematically, and people not working are not a problem, for the maths.

> Whether or not people are given what they need to survive is irrelevant to UBI. Welfare does that.

What are you talking about, this is the point. And no, welfare does not do that adequately. Welfare is an incredibly inefficient means of wealth distribution.

> What makes UBI worse is that it provides no incentive to work and create value, and that's a tremendous waste of human capital

I have zero concerns about the incentive to work, that is a fud argument that doesn't hold up when looking at the studies we've seen. Work is meaningful in and of itself, you don't need to be paid to receive reward from it.

> and it worsens inequality.

This is what I'm afraid of too and have not heard any ubi proponents address this in any meaningful manner.

Ubi would quite likely create a proletarian class.

On the flip side, I'm not really sure how this is very different from what we have with capitalism right now.

At least with ubi welfare is adequately taken care of.

From my POV having job as au pair for example is still better than working hard in the field.

IMO we should focus on reducing much duplication od work, so I am happy that OSS, Wikipedia, SciHub, KhanAcademy, MIT, translations services, open hardware design and similar efforts are in progress.

IMO more focus should be shifted into education. I guess education problem isn't solved in western rich countries only because it's easier to brain drain from less developed ones, so people don't feel the pain.

When this will start I hope they start taxing more at very top and shift economy to more valuable stuff than zero-sum Tinder clones.

BTW in my country(Poland) they introduced small version of UBI (like 500$ per child per month for family). It cost 5% of whole country budget. It's quite controversial but IMO it was good move but we still need to see long term impact.

Caring about the elderly is entirely besides the point I'm making

Building the #1 best economy obviously shouldn't be one's sole purpose in life. But if you really think it doesn't matter at all, why not leave the developed nation you probably live in and find happiness in the third world. Or just ask one of the many people who seek a better life in the first world every year.

There's a troubling number of people in this thread who seem think that wealth creation and strong economies is some pointless goal that we've been tricked into caring about. Let's not forget that we work to build wealth for ourselves and our children. We've already worked so hard to build wealth into our buildings and streets and health and technology and culture. Apparently that's why you can dismiss the value of a strong economy from the comfort of your laptop/desk in the first place.

So you’d need to prevent that, but in order to prevent it you’d have to become somewhat isolationist, right? Sounds bad.

Though I’m curious if anyone has thought about how to prevent all of the expensive skilled jobs from leaving.

Have you played Civilization? If you don't strive to be "the best", eventually you're the guys with spears or even muskets being bombed by F-15s. In other words, lag behind the leaders for long enough and you can say goodbye to your freedom. That's basically how the XVI-XIX century colonization happened.

This is where you are completely wrong. I'm not even going to bother explaining, because there are too many obvious counter-examples.

Do you feel a need to control him because his values apparently differ from your own? Fortunately there is no one right way to live, no singular correct set of values.