Maybe that's a good thing. It's insane how people in service industries are treated - like they're less than human. Shifting some power to them and giving the job a little more of an air of dignity or status would probably help a lot.

And the pay would obviously go up. People would be willing to do the job if it means life or death, but not for minimum wage - and that's a good thing.

For example janitorial workers. At an old workplace of mine there were three shifts of at least two workers three during the day. Then they were cut to just one worker per day and evening no nights. One person frantically running from bathroom to bathroom not even getting to the other tasks that had to do like vacuuming.

Then they cut their hours to part-time for all but two workers. At minimum wage it was barely livable on 40 hours per week.

They also ask the night worker to come in the next day with less than a seven hour gap from the previous shift.

Even at the punch clock they were scolded for punching in or out a mere 1 minute off from the time to work or end.

I could tell when talking to the staff many of them felt defeated and this was the only job they could do. They just had to sit there and take it.

Guaranteed income (GI) would at least buffer some of the anxiety. I could also see businesses knowing it existed would cut worker hours to part-time. But if part-time plus GI was enough then the worker has the power.

This is the biggest advantage I see, and shows why you wouldn't even need a living wage. You need a sufficient amount of money so that if a worker is being abused they can say "fuck it, I quit" and be able to live until they find another job. Being able to do that should prevent a fair amount of abuse in the first place.

Because it impacts all of us. Imagine the impact on crime and homelessness if there were UBI. Quality of life would improve for everyone. I'm happy to pay my taxes if it goes to that.

How? Why would it not just inflate us like all these payments during COVID?

Take housing for instance: rent would rise a lot when people suddenly get x more. People pay because they have no choice so the x transfers directly to the controlling third party in the end, completely negating any possible benefit but for those already in a non-vulnerable position.

Same with the telecommunications pseudo-monopolies: you really think they won't try and tap into that resource even if a little? Communications has become almost as vital as housing the last decade.

Companies will do everything they can and the public is capable of paying to increase their revenue.

Also: depends on how you define 'rent control'

One of the reason some people do not move is due to being comfortable and at travel distance to their job.

Under this light you can see what happened to several European cities with high rent due to University: as soon as Covid made students go home to their parents as classes were online, there was a huge drop in rent prices.

It will fail unless the government gets easy money from eg producing oil like Emirates. Otherwise someone needs to produce stuff. We already have a big inflation problem that is directly related to policies that rain money on those not working. Let's not make things even worse, please.

We have inflation because of sustained fiscal and monetary stimulus through a period of sharp restrictions on economic activity being sustained after most of the restrictions ended; the fiscal stimulus has already been withdrawn, and monetary stimulus is slowly unwinding.

But that really doesn't have much bearing on a tax-funded UBI, which—unlike deficit-funded airdrops—is redistribution, not general stimulus.

Do we have any sort of evidence for that claim?

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/business/corona...

ometimes first order approximations (or "basic principles") lead you in the wrong direction. My understanding is that economics is full of pitfalls like this.

So yes. We do the same for non-wage slavery. We do the same for any bad thing that trades off against a different bad thing.

[1] https://www.ajc.com/news/this-has-been-happening-for-a-long-...

[2] https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/migrant-worker-lured-to-...

[3] https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/usadom/usadom0501-04.htm#P3...

We should get rid of wage slavery. We can then work on the economic consequences.

You have that luxury because of savings.

One example is delivery workers. Everyone expects their packages to be tracked which resulted in total surveillance of delivery workers with extremely tight time slots. Competitors that didn't expand here were soon left behind because the profit margin of that industry is extremely low.

Janitors are similar. People will take the cheapest option and the companies that exploit the best with prevail.

This is a selfishness that cannot be denied and in my opinion would make a basic income impossible. Prices would just soar to a level where this income is of little consequence.

Sensible laws for worker protection to restrict selfishness can better the situation more efficiently.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2021/10/14/employ...

Also isnt there some possibly-not-totally-fantasy narrative where at least some of these jobs become automated in response to workers not wanting them and its maybe a good thing?

While we have automated things, we are nowhere close to that today. A lot of current menial jobs CAN be automated today, but the cost of labor is cheaper than designing and deploying automated solutions.

Having higher cost of labor will incentivize more capital solutions to menial jobs (automation, substitutions), which will change societal patterns a lot (maybe you should expect a machine to take orders at every restaurant) but could certainly lead to a happier 'steady state' long term.

From that moment on it was very clear to me what my value to the company was. Combine that with the long hours, low pay and constant watching over my clock in times made it very easy to just "walk" from that job with no notice.

The worst part was knowing that there were people who had been there 20 years and had (seemingly) no upward mobility during the entire time. After 6mos I was moved up to QA (with an insignificant pay increase) and I realized that I was as high in the company as I was going to get without someone dying.

I have no issue working...but if I am going to be poor while working 56hr weeks...why do it?

"Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?"

[1]https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/

Well that's not the outcome automation is having but quite the opposite. Automation means fewer jobs for some, meaning those left without those jobs have to compete for a brutal job market to make rent when unemployment runs out, it doesn't mean they get to prop their legs on the table and pursue arts and other hobbies.

The automation utopia where everyone is free from most work cannot and will not happen under the current economic model where all the benefits of automation are vacuumed by the private companies developing them and the governments have to deal with those left without a job and support them with taxes taken from those who still have a job.

Now we have 40 hour 5 day weeks as standard - already a utopia compared to before automation started with the first industrial revolution. People are even talking about 32 hours. These tiny work hours buy us a king’s ransom of goods, and probably half of us are either retired or too young to work.

Added to this, we’re seeing the best job market in history.

If you can find the cloud inside this silver lining, your eyesight is to be applauded. Perhaps you had modern eye surgery giving you 20/20 vision.

I think it's likely a universal basic income (small at first --- not a "living wage" yet, but enough to provide everyone with more security and to eliminate some conditional benefits programs, EITC, etc) would be a good thing. But it's really fairly unprecedented, despite efforts at research.

A big question to answer is about paternalism in benefits-- what's the right amount?

We have a big contingent of people angry when other people buy luxury goods or candy with SNAP. We're also worried that if we don't provide housing or food assistance to the poor-- putting strings on the money ensuring it's used for those purposes-- they wouldn't eat. We end up with this wacky system where there's restrictions on the money that are ineffective at preventing abuse but also strikingly effective at preventing poor people from using it to systematically improve their situation. We also incur massive costs for these administrative controls compared to just giving money out, and create benefits "cliffs" where improving your income reduces your net resources.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Fewer workers means fewer goods and services. If demand remains constant or increases, you get inflation. The pandemic caused supply chain issues, but this wouldn't have been as big of an issue had demand been artificially pumped with the stimulus. In many places, such as the ports, productivity is at an all-time high, but they're still bottlenecking consumers.

The more power you give to employees the faster people will jump ship from bad bosses to good ones - and the awful ones will have a harder time keeping their positions.

Maybe. Many jobs can be automated, but it was cheaper to just hire minimum wage people to do a job. If the pay required to find people got to be too high, automation would happen more rapidly.

Private property can coexist with government supplied housing for instance.

In the "capitalist" USA a lot of the military industrial complex lives off government handouts. Why not the people too? The cakes and cookies we should earn ourselves, the meat and potatoes (and housing) should be a right for every citizen

Really, you'd just want to tax corporations over a certain size that are both highly automated (i.e. high revenue per employee), and have lopsided compensation structures (which could be measured by CEO to median worker pay). If a company successfully automates a bunch of jobs, and then makes that money rain equally on all their remaining employees, I'd have no problem with it. I only think they should be taxed if they try to distribute those gains exclusively to the executives and shareholders.

why would the remaining employees, who have no invested capital into the business (with which the automation is driven by), receive any of the gains from said automation?

The people who invested the capital into the automation reaps the profit. In this case, it's often the shareholders in the end.

Yes, that's how it works today. That's not how I'd like it to work.

Many people here get a significant portion of their compensation via RSUs, ESPPs, and other profit-sharing initiatives, and any company that decides to extend these benefits to lower level workers should be treated favourably by the tax system.

Maybe we should leave terms like capitalism and socialism out of the discussion because no one can agree on their meanings so they just become fighting words and their usefulness to the conversations are less than meaningless.

Though that said, I remember not too long ago a lot of people saying "oh if minimum wage goes over $15 we'll just automate the jobs" and now the McDonalds by my house is offering $23/hr for entry level work and robots are nowhere to be seen.

Who's pouring the drinks at your McDonalds? Over the past five or so years, the robots have taken that over. McDonalds has never been a stranger to labor savings, although I don't think they use burger conveyors like other chains, they do lots of little things. They've also been putting in two lane ordering all over the place, which increases throughput.

All these things work together to reduce the people hours to put together an order. Sometimes that means one less person on a shift.

Generally, prior to COVID-19, the customers themselves.

At least 10 years earlier. Probably more but that's outside my memory range.

https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mcdonalds-refill-policy-in...

There are a few companies working on automated meal makers and they are slowly being rolled out.

It is just going a bit slow right now.

Or like shifting from having workers fetch items for you to modern-style stores where you have to find everything yourself (that change was long enough ago that the idea that you should feel put-out at having to do this part of a store's job is lost to time). Or filling your own drinks, which is at least semi-compensated by being able to refill as much as you want or even "steal" an extra cup, but since a large soda costs the store pennies that's not much of a benefit.

I'm struggling to think of a consumer-facing "automation" that wasn't actually just making consumers do more work. It's bad enough that we have to do the work of regulating prices (think of the time and brain-space you devote to figuring out whether the sale price on, say, apples is actually a decent one, keeping that figure/heuristic up-to-date, et c., now multiply by your entire shopping list, now multiply by the entire population)

Ahh yes, as the AI marketing department always says, we're 99% of the way there, it's just that the last 1% is the hardest!

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-17/waymo-s-s...

Still, it seems that even those that clearly are solved problem can be done badly. Recently KFC rolled out here. And their kiosk seem to miss the basic options to customize the meals. Like just removing things. Can't do that with meals... Have list of extra options of stuff possibly not even in the product... Actually they don't even tell anywhere what is in their burgers. But I digress. All other chains including the local one manage to have these options present...

So in the end automation won't always solve everything immediately...

https://misorobotics.com/flippy-2/

Looks like it's a work in progress.

It’s all happening in Asia and we outsource our manufacturing to them. This won’t end well for America.

I started working my freshman year in high school in 2008 as a busboy at a local restaurant making $4.50/hr + tips from the servers working that night. I couldn't even drive yet so I pocketed most of that money and was grateful for the opportunity. (This ultimately allowed me to build my first PC and I allowed me to get into programming.)

I moved from there to another local restaurant with a similar job title, but quickly moved up into working in the kitchen as a line cook. I think I made $8 or $9/hr when I got the "promotion". After graduation I wandered around some and eventually ended up as an asst. manager at a Burger King.

Now, over a decade later, I can sometimes look back nostalgically at my time in food service, but I don't know that I would ever go back, for any amount of money.

The things I am nostalgic for are structure, a defined start/end time, and being able to leave work at work. The pay was awful, the people were generally nice enough, but there's always a rude customer at some point or a manager with a power trip. I don't miss waking up at 5am to man the drive-thru, or going home after midnight smelling like grease.

If I woke up tomorrow with no qualifications to write software, I would sooner go into a back breaking trade than go back to retail.

I think we will see automation really start to take over these retail spaces in 2022. In my city (Dallas), pretty much every single fast food restaurant has mobile ordering or a kiosk available. My local Kroger expanded their self checkout lines and after 10pm, there are no more manned checkouts open. I've frequently had to scan and bag a full cart of groceries using self checkout (which sucks).

The past two years have opened up a lot of time for these giant corps to invest in R&D as the labor pool shrinks. Through the perfect storm of chip shortages and labor shortages, we haven't seen a large scale roll out, but I'm confident it's coming as soon as parts and installers are available.

Full time WFH since significantly before covid, it's B2B so even though I'm nominally on call, that's just a nice chunk of extra pay for maybe 1-2 calls a year. I do work hard when required, but it's not as required any longer, so I end up with a lot of free time when there are no issues to solve and I use that to go the extra mile to keep my customers happy.

You haven't really debugged things until your tests involve forklifts and 10t cranes. O:-)

Fortunately people are working to make that kind of thing less necessary (though it can't be eliminated completely of course; someone still needs to watch and maintain the machines).

If the worker gets X from the state, they employer can pay them X less for status quo, which obviously was an amount of money that worked out earlier.

I.e. the cost of living in cities is what prevent workers from undercutting each other in cities.

The worker would only continue a "shitty" job, if they get a better deal than before. So it makes sense to conclude that wages would cost more to entice a worker if said worker was able to obtain a UBI.

Jobs that would be popular and enjoyable, would be sought after - and those wages would drop.

With a UBI there is less incentive due to hunger but those same wages look much more attractive. There is still an incentive to work.

The money for the UBI does imply that profits go down, taxes go up (a mixture).

But importantly those workers, previously on the edge of starvation, will start consuming services initiating a virtuous cycle. That is the theory.

But a sensible housing policy (hello San Francisco) is very important or landlords will simply hover up all the surplus.

Wait until you hear about healthcare. Not sure how you would staff an hospital floor once UBI is introduced.

I agree, but is this feasible or wishful thinking?

As a society, we’re decidedly split on whether we should wear masks or should or should not get vaccines, despite the science or despite whatever seems like a rational decision. (Admittedly I’m introducing my bias here).

Would raising pay for retail workers or people acknowledging that we need to treat them with respect - would either of these actually lead to the right outcome? Or would it fuel another voice that vehemently sees these jobs as a stepping stone and not entitled to respect and dignity?

But I think the overall idea that companies would have to put a little more effort into their employee’s well being would be borne out if a country could commit to a basic income for long enough for the effects to shake out.

This is good behavior that companies would be forced into, not because of morals like respects and dignity, but because a mass exodus of employees would eventually hurt profits more than keeping unreasonable customers around.

Hell, we have professions now that demand respect (cops) and magically, the vast majority of the population seems to be able to grow up and not act like a child when confronted with an undesirable situation.

I don't think anyone in retail is asking for an undo burden by the rest of society when demanding humane treatment in their workplace.

By law in most situations you must comply with the police officer. Not really the same.

If we always chose not to do something because it would be met with resistance, then nothing would happen ever. The US passing the civil rights act was met with vicious resistance as it was happening, should it not have happened because there were critics of the law? Ultimately, I think we do need to raise pay and facilitate a higher level of discourse in those kinds of environments., regardless of what detractors will say.

In the Nordics, there are no manual car washes, yet life goes on. Economically it doesn't make sense because of the high labor costs, and realistically it is a menial job that can be for the most part automated.

If you want to live in a world where you can have a cheap hand wash in your back yard, then you have to also admit to wanting structural inequalities to keep people trapped in those carwash jobs. It's delusional to believe that the people washing your car have a path out through hard work alone; my observation is that they already work pretty hard.

UBI is much more about giving workers power than giving them free money. And yes, there will be dole bludgers. Unfortunately any system is going to have inefficiencies, you just have to pick which ones and live with it. Alternatively, you can get tough on crime and house a prison population.

This is simply not true, at least in the more densely populated parts of Norway. They are simply very expensive.

In the US, you can drive up and pay $1~/min and spray your car yourself w/ soap and water. You can also do the drive-thru option for about $10. On the upper end, you can pay $50~ for what might start as a drive-thru, but then someone comes out and does a manual touch up where the machine might have missed a spot, and then they will vacuum and wipe down the interior.

At $100+, you're looking at a hand wash and detail, potentially going up to hundreds of dollars for different aftercare options. Detailing can be very lucrative if you get a good referral network established.

It's also worth mentioning that you've jumped from menial to skilled labor at this point. There's a big difference between hosing off a Prius for the owner's commute and detailing a McLaren for an auto show. The latter is far more satisfying work.

Those polishing cars for auto shows are quite a bit in a different realm and not what’s being discussed here.

I agree that detailing supercars is a different league.

But yes, I doubt an American full-service car wash would recognizable in the Nordics.

And of course we have the kind where you wash the car yourself using a high pressure water jet in addition to the drive through kind (both those with and without brushes).

To me, your argument says that UBI will cause a re-evaluation of the income market, where undesirable jobs will have to be priced higher so that employers still can find the employees they need (and the services will have to be priced accordingly). I'm okay with that outcome.

(in this particular case: I suspect that private companies will very quickly add language to their contract that being abusive to their employees will void the contract -- I'm okay with that outcome as well. In the case of government services, that could mean that the person would be required to only interact through an intermediary, like a legal guardian or social worker)

So I’m in this weird limbo that I think could be solved by a customer rep chat in minutes.

Just an example of automated chatbots being only programmed for a couple common situations and not things like, “I’m a pseudo Verizon customer who is receiving bills but has no phone number with Verizon.”

In some businesses the margins are so tight that increased CS costs will put them under - the answer for those businesses is, unfortunately, to go under. However, everyone that's left should be held to a reasonable standard - maybe companies will start levying "Abusive customer" charges on especially painful support calls and piss off a small portion of their customer base while keeping the vast majority happy and well served - maybe they'll just up their charges across the board (or cut the costs into their profits) - that's up to them. What's up to you is the choice to cease being a customer[1] you can chose to discontinue your services with them - and if they have difficulties closing your account or continue to charge you erroneously for services... then you can reverse charges and report the behavior to whatever passes for a better business bureau in your neck of the woods.

Dealing with crap CS is a cost that companies are currently levying on customers because they can - but you can refuse to play their game.

1. Unless you're living in a service monopoly in which case - shake your fists at the heavens, bend over, and consider moving to some country with sane anti-monopoly laws.

I'm not arguing either side of this, just that there are very real impacts. It's not a situation where every entry-level job is going to be floated by a rising tide, some people will drown.

Under UBI, a government could do away with minimum wage completely because there is no coercion by necessity. The employer only needs to pay enough to make it worthwhile for the employee to show up.

Using UBI to eliminating minimum wage, government unemployment insurance, and other problematic/expensive programs is one of my favorite parts of UBI.

If there is a delay in UBI increases, or if the UBI is not properly matched to the COL, there will still be pockets of people who must work by necessity.

That's exactly my point—why would you show up to a job that pays you less than you receive by default? It doesn't make sense to go from working 0 hours to working 40 for a less than 50% increase in income.

Your point still stands for the professions for which abuse is part of the job by definition. However, I get the idea that too many industries are tolerating it while it could go away by having a culture change.

Another reason why one could argue it’s not the same as willingness to work is because if one is willing to work a job where abuse isn’t really common then you could say that person does have a willingness to work.

And so what if people refuse to do shitty jobs? Perhaps we as society can do without those jobs. And if we can't, we should value them more

I don't honestly know why whether or not people will work even factors into one's support for UBI. Some people will keep working, some people won't. Nobody will starve so that seems like something in the "pro" column at least.

If you're paying large numbers to do nothing, the value of that money plummets and people will starve.

Recall: 50% of the country make less than the median wage... UBI is going to have to be way below this to preserve the very wealth which UBI redistributes

I expect that UBI could start off very small and still have huge impact. A quick search shows that median income can range from ~40k-80k state to state. I'd bet you could radically change this country for way less than that.

Absolutely not. Having a large fraction of population being unemployed is not good but this is not the point of UBI. Also, this is completely disconnected from inflation/deflation.

Furthermore, deflation and "people will starve" are very much disconnected. Many countries devalued their money on purpose to be more competitive on international markets.

There are many stages between "people will starve" and having access to high quality food (and high QOL in general). For example if UBI is sufficiently high to allow most people currently employed in the food and service industries to not work (or to invest their time into gaining new skills etc.) I think a massive increase in food prices is unavoidable, at least in the short term until automation catches up. While basic foodstuffs would still remain affordable to all/most (the government would be forced to subsidize them if not), eating out and high quality, labor intensive products would likely become unaffordable to most people.

No I'm not.

> so export plummets, which will bring down the value of the $

No, if anything, it's the very opposite.

How?

The trillions of dollars printed by the Federal Reserve in the past two years beg to differ.

Honestly, if the country is going into deficit, you might as well give it directly to people instead of injecting it via financial institutes.

Society in general may greatly benefit from having people not HAVING to work.

What if we printed the same amount and gave it directly to people? the $6T/year could yield ~$40K to each of the ~150M working-age Americans.

The biggest impact is to give employees more power in the negotiation with employers: currently, employees are far more pressed to find work than the employer needs to fill in a position (if the employee fails to pay rent, they are evicted; if an employer fails to meet a deadline, nothing happens immediately), and have the inherent disadvantage of having orders of magnitude more employees than employers.

UBI will help the public by reducing the pressure on employees to find job, thus improving the negotiation power and conditions for all other employees. Even the slight help during COVID created the best conditions for working people in decades. Seems to be worth the inflation IMO.

those trillions were swapped, not given, to the financial institutes, in return for the bonds and treasuries they held.

It isn't the same sort of printing that you hear about in Zimbabwe or Venezuela.

If the gov't really printed trillions and gave them to people like you described, you'd get major inflation. Oh wait, that's already happening...and it's only a couple thousand for some people, and it's not printed, it's borrowed. Imagine the effects, if it was truly printed like you described!

The inflation we’re experiencing now wants to have a word with you.

Some things will become expensive. Some might be balanced. Construction cost will increase, but land value may decrease (since there is no necessity to crowd in job hubs).

Taxis and Uber will probably increase as people are not forced to work at all costs, but people might find this trade-off favorable: unemployment is far more painful than having to take the bus.

And everyone could still work to afford expensive things, if they chose so. They will also have much better working conditions, since they will have much more negotiation power.

We already pay large numbers of people to do nothing, retirees.

I'm not trying to be dismissive, but this strikes me as a "but some people will be upset!" argument, which seems irrelevant to whether the policy achieves its stated goals or not.

And for the record, I would appear to be in the group bankrolling it rather than receiving from it, and I'm completely cool with it.

What it too to get mine, required very hard work and literally signing my life away for 4 years. Then, when I started gaining, I got fined for not having health insurance. Now that I can comfortably afford my health insurance and am starting to look at buying a house, here’s the left again saying I should help others, when I received no such help, and taking away the money I worked hard to earn. Imagine not having a degree in the software engineering field. The struggle is real, and if I can do it then what are others excuses?

No, I’m sorry, I will fight to force others to follow my path (albeit in a different field should they choose). I will not willingly pay for others to have an easy life unless they are related to me.

Also I’m a Navy veteran. I can’t tell you how many times I can back from deployment to see actual hatred from these people I had never met, who I was defending their freedom for. The idea of helping others is gone after 1) I already did by defending their freedom and 2) most people here are assholes only thinking of themselves, so i joined them.

Being a programmer, what I earned is a result of several factors - most importantly investments made into me by my parents and by the society (with schools, infrastructure etc. mostly funded with taxes); and also plenty of pure luck and sheer coincidence. Only afterwards comes a lot of hard work I've put into learning what I know. Without the former, I would probably earn only a small fraction of that (and/or under much worse conditions) even assuming that I'd be putting the same amount of hard work. Alternatively, with more dumb luck I could be earning much more while putting less work into achieving that. Of course, this is just barely scratching the surface, as there are also other ways to get rich than working hard or being lucky; mere ability to invest your time and effort into "working hard" is often filled with external factors as well; and "being (un)lucky" itself contains so many factors to consider that I wouldn't even know where to start.

You’re talking to one. I have no degree, am self taught and a software engineer. The most help I got was reading open source code, which was pretty difficult to do when I started. My parents had no money for school for me, and I joined the military to try to get some education. That still wasn’t enough to actually get a degree so I had to work low paying jobs knowing I could do better while working side projects to improve my skill. I just recently caught up to what I should be making.

It’s common for those that took the standard path to think nobody works for what they got.

I don't even have a degree, by the way; I'm mostly self-taught too.

I knew you were going to fixate on that, as you’re grasping at straws, which is why I put it in there. The amount of source code I read was one project, a php web framework. Yea I learned about 2 things from it back then, which I’ve long forgotten now.

Since I didn’t earn what I have, call your school, revoke your degree, quit your job and start over again with only unskilled jobs on your resume. Until you do that you won’t understand.

I already said that I don't even have a degree. All you did in this thread was proving the point of my original comment.

They do. I learned a lot thanks to them.

> What you’re saying is essentially that your degree was free.

My degree that does not exist?

Since you’re still not following, why do people post blog articles? Why do people write research papers? Just to get the info out there? No, they do it because it gives them some advantage over others. FAANGs won’t hire you without proof of knowledge. The other side of it is SEO. You want to exist on google you have to look like an expert, so you write a lot of articles to increase your score. Both of these situations are driven by money, not by some desire to help others.

> My degree that does not exist?

Fine, then you’re essentially saying that all the learning you did was free for you. It required no effort at all, all you had to do was read. If your self taught, or went to school, you know this is just dumb.

So back to the point, did you or did you not work for the knowledge you have? Or did it just get matrixed into you?

I've learned a lot from pseudonymous or even anonymous people with no money or fame involved. And helped others this way too.

> Fine, then you’re essentially saying that all the learning you did was free for you. It required no effort at all, all you had to do was read.

That's not what I'm saying at all and you would have known that if you would read what I wrote with comprehension. It took a lot of effort, but I recognize that this effort alone is just a single factor that influenced what I earn, and not even the most important one. Other factors outside of my control could have easily ruined (or boosted) it all, and it's true for everyone.

I haven't "got mine" yet and tend to disagree when people propose to lock me out of upper-middle class lifestyle by taxing the hell out of my income. It is more like people like you who "got theirs" want to pull the ladder up.

Not trying to be an ass but the so what attitude does not tend to further constructive discussion.

What a weird claim. Decisions in democracies upset some people too. That's the whole point of voting on things, to resolve conflicts.

> If you support this idea then feel free to donate to the cause.

Donate to what?

> Not trying to be an ass but the so what attitude does not tend to further constructive discussion.

"Some people will complain" isn't constructive by itself either.

It doesn’t resolve the conflict, one side is just forced to accept something they don’t want. The hatred, and therefore the division, builds regardless.

Imagine something as simple as burger flipping became completely automated. There would be a million fast food workers suddenly unemployed. Add making espresso to the mix and half a million baristas lose their job.

There won't be a million new jobs created to maintain the automation to pick up the slack.

Both of these are completely automated already.

https://newsexaminer.net/food/mcdonalds-to-open-restaurant-r...

I can’t find a link for the espresso machine but many FAANGs have the ones you can place orders through a website then go to the lounge to pick it up.

No, it won't. It might be the best way forward but it's not the only option. You could:

1. Give people free housing and food

2. Allow people to work other jobs, even if they're marginally as productive as automation (sweeping the floors, picking up trash, etc)

3. UBI

4. Give people welfare/foodstamps as we currently do in many countries

No, it replaced large number of medium and low skilled jobs too. Before industrial revolution, more labor hours were spent on working distaff and spindle than probably any other single job. Industrial revolution reduced number of spinning jobs to roughly zero. The same happened to many other low skilled jobs, like weaving, mining, digging, and many more.

Due to the massively the increased efficiency the industrial revolution created many many of them low skilled new jobs which couldn't have existed earlier. An average person in the 19th century probably consumed significantly more textile and other manufactured products than someone in the prior centuries. However in the beginning this increase in efficiency led to large decrease in incomes due to the surplus in labour and in part because efficiency increases in agriculture were trailing behind other areas. E.g. an unskilled worker in the UK could only purchase about 60% of the amount of bread in ~1800 compared to what he could in 1750 (real earnings only started to grow significantly between 1850 and 1875.

Modern automation on the other hand seems to mostly just replaced many low and medium paying jobs with a smaller number of high paying ones.

> Modern automation on the other hand seems to mostly just replaced many low and medium paying jobs with a smaller number of high paying ones.

Modern automation created so much prosperity that we now have significant portions of the population doing things that 19th century people would scarcely call "jobs" -- Tyler Cowen, an economist, collects many of those on his blog, see https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=new+service+sector+jobs . Additionally, many jobs that would be recognizable to them are now done by greatly increased number of people. Consider, for example, a job of university administrator: as such, this job would make sense to 19th century people. However, the idea that university employs more administrative than research or teaching staff would seem rather ludicrous to them. The reason we can do it is that the productive sector of the economy creates so much surplus, that we can through regulation, taxation, and social custom funnel so much of it to people doing jobs that are not by any means crucial to the functioning or prosperity of the society.

If all the work was automated/outsourced those people would still make the same money.

These are the people who ostensibly will pay for UBI and automation/outsources is one of the cases for UBI.

of course it's not at the same rate as GDP (5x vs 1.5x for personal income).

If a minority of voters are dependent on the UBI and a majority decides that they do not like the system, or a politician persuades them so, they will vote against it. ("Working your ass off on lazy strangers" is a huge boon for populist politicians.)

If a majority of voters depends on the UBI and a minority is compelled to provide it to them, they basically have no recourse but to emigrate. At which point you lose their tax money, unless you impose draconic measures on emigration.

Which nation is that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

Otherwise, I can simply point out that many almost all the countries with single-payer health care are still plenty enough peopled to be able to pay for it and don't have to have any draconian policies against leaving. As I understand it, even residing outside of them often exempts you completely from taxation, which even the 'can't afford single-payer!' US doesn't do.

The "so what" is that basic income doesn't change the ordinal ranking of how much people prefer to do different jobs. Neither does it change people's ability to get those jobs. Better qualified applicants will always have better options. So while basic income might increase the nominal pay of the least preferable jobs, it wouldn't mean you suddenly get to skip over the "shitty jobs" and suddenly get access to the better ones.

Want to “work” as a golfer? Cool, enjoy living on UBI because no one will be topping up your salary for that. The person who cuts the greens earns wayyyy more than you though. Want to play lots of golf? You’re going to run out of UBI to pay for all those greens fees. Maybe you need to think about taking on a side gig in a comfortable back office worker role (salary $1k/year), or a refuse collector (salary $130k/year).

Why are there no golfers? If everyone has basic needs met, shelter, basic food, healthcare, you’re telling me no one is going to make use of some time to go play some golf? Why?

>> why are the groundskeepers making so much?

Golf courses dont magic out of thin air, ubi can do a lot but it’s not magic. You’re going to have to pay someone enough that they choose to specialise then take on that career. They’re going to need capital for equipment etc etc but there’s a lot of people would like to play golf. A golf club won’t look anything like those of today though. Ubi would have such a drastic change in society given sufficient time that perhaps even the game of golf itself would change.

I explained why, read it again. And golf is not a basic need, it’s entertainment. Which in hard times nobody pays for. You’re gonna choose golf over eating?

>> You’re gonna choose golf over eating?

Why?

Why? Golfing is a poor example because you can already lose money trying to be a pro. Or, you could become world famous and make millions. What's more is that you don't need to be "hired" to become a golfer.

When we talk about jobs that firms pay salaries to fill, then I don't see why the supply of those jobs would change, whether they're enjoyable or horrible. Since the supply would still be in the same ratio as before basic income, I'd think that doctors would still make more than the hospital janitors, even though the janitors would make more than before on a nominal basis.

Are you not underestimating just how radical a change UBI would be? You’re going to radically change which jobs are viable.

For example, if you pay every teacher UBI, is it a stretch to imagine more than half decide not to go into work tomorrow? It’s not just a case of paying teachers more when they can afford to say no to your job. You’re talking about completely changing the role.

There’s going to be zero room for unruly kids in that classroom. Suddenly the teacher flips from being one of the least powerful professions to being up there with doctors and lawyers (im aware in some societies this is already the case but not in the US).

How come multiple times now people point out UBI as being a way to deal with the entitled people running around right now? And with more entitlements we’ll have more of an issue with entitled people.

With more money in some cases and less in others. Entitlements, that’s far too broad an umbrella.

What exactly would you be entitled to beyond sufficient money to make a basic living and pursue the free pleasures in life (which are generally among the best available in life).

What’s more fulfilling, spending $130k to ride the vomit comet for a couple of hours - i say this as someone who would LOVE to do that - or hiking to the top of a local mountain with a loved one to watch a sunrise? Vomit comet is COOL but it’s not fulfilling. Not in the meaningful way that time spent with a loved one enjoying the beauty of life is.

But back to the entitlements - why is a teacher going to agree to teach an unruly kid? They don’t need this job. They’re here because it’s a passion in life, they’ve chosen a career not of necessity but of interest.

You missed my point, the kid is unruly because of the entitled attitudes running around this country. If you pay people UBI, it doesn’t fix this, it exacerbates it. Fix the entitled attitude by making people earn what they get instead of handing it to them and maybe we’ll fix that attitude and not have to destroy our economy?

If you're behaving in an entitled way, and you're told - i'm sorry you're not welcome here. Having sufficient dollars is not enough for entry to my classroom - then what's the problem with them continuing to be entitled off on their own elsewhere?

When society is no longer driven by profit, then other forms of exchange become relatively more important again. It'd be no bad thing if basic decency to other humans was a requirement to access services you'd like to consume.

>> Fix the entitled attitude by making people earn what they get instead of handing it to them and maybe we’ll fix that attitude

If this idea were true, it would have happened already.

And this requires giving everybody money instead of just fixing the entitled attitudes by kicking them out of your store? Why are we choosing the most expensive path?

> If this idea were true, it would have happened already.

Because we have actually addressed the entitlement and not fed it right?

I can’t wait to see the GDP “growth” charts…

E.g. instead of “grow” - which is inherently unsustainable, you run out of materials and labour to feed the economy - i mean we can continue to kick the can down the road for a few generations yet and pretend we don’t understand what “grow” means in the context of finite resources. Instead of “shrink” which is also unsustainable. Is there some other viable point?

The reason most currencies are worth anything are because you get thrown in jail if you fail to pay tax levied upon you denominated in that currency.

You can postulate about how much we should value these jobs, but the reality is that most people wouldn't be able to afford a meal at a restaurant where all the staff make 50k, or a packet of strawberries picked by pickers who make the same.

There’d still be footballers - the person who was picking fruit left that role to follow their UBI funded dream of being a footballer. They’re just not going to make the same amount of money.

Same goes for CEOs and other roles with comparatively enjoyable execution vs high pay. Every man and their granny will be a CEO of a one person company when you take all the risk out of the system by giving everyone a safety net.

Enjoyable jobs will pay less, hard jobs will pay more.

CEOs aren't paid a lot because the assume risk, they're paid a lot because business leadership is hard, and good leaders are scarce. I also don't know of many CEOs at large companies whose job I would classify as "enjoyable".

> Every man and their granny will be a CEO of a one person company

Then we'll need a new word for "company" as it's meant today. Also no one is stopping anyone from being an independent contractor, which is basically this. I'm not sure I'm following.

A UBI would be more efficient than the extensive patch-work of policies and regulations that we use today to artificially redistribute income. There would be a lot more work happening on material things, not less - especially when adjusted for productivity. Minimum wage work today is some of the least productive.

Who will do all the hard, unpleasant work then? Who will pick strawberries, work retail, or do hard labour, for anything less than a fortune? What substitute to the current "don't starve/end up homeless" incentive structure will motivate people to do these jobs?

Productivity improvements aren't universal, they're specific. We've not improved productivity for strawberry pickers because we've not come up with a way to automate the picking of strawberries. The least productive work tends to pay minimum wage.

That’s an easy yes.

The people who are currently not able to make ends meet are suddenly succeeding. So not everyone is poorer.

You’re confusing “things will be vastly different” - which is not disputed. The richest today will be relatively less rich.

How are you quantifying this success? If people have "more money" but are suddenly unable to afford things they previously could (those same strawberries), wouldn't they be worse off?

> The richest today will be relatively less rich.

Isn't this just communism with extra steps? Why do you think these things have always worked out poorly, economically speaking, triggering runaway inflation and material scarcity?

My thesis is that the the threat of abject poverty is the only thing keeping much of our economy functioning. If we remove this threat, then the economy shrinks significantly and we all end up in poverty anyways.

By the lack of:

>> threat of abject poverty

>> Isn't this just communism

Where would a planned economy come in?

Surely UBI results in something more like an-cap? You collect your ubi payment in exchange for agreeing to live in the area serviced by the United States corporation.

UBI wouldn’t be a small tweak around the edges of the current system. It’d be fairly radical.

By redistributing the amount of money in question, you are effectively planning the economy. You are writing into law the idea that everyone should be able to afford to eat, with no means to contend with the fact that there may not be enough food.

I don't think you're addressing my core thesis. When I worked in a restaurant, I did it to maintain myself - to pay primarily for rent and food. My coworkers were much the same. If I was provided these things, I wouldn't have applied at the restaurant. Multiply this by every tedious or difficult job and you'll find that many of them just wouldn't get done. People will avoid them, and pursue other fields. This sort of thing has actually happened in places like the USSR. Loads of highly educated, trained specialists, talented (or not) artists, shortages of farmers and labourers. Breadlines.

Anarchist capitalism is probably the closest as far as i can see so far.

(see in broad lines eg. US North (machines) vs South (slavery) in first half of 19th century)

If we increased the minimum wage 10x and somehow that policy was binding, there would be a whole lot of involuntary unemployment, workers' overall income would plummet and we would have a deep economic depression. But there's nothing that suggests such effects from an economically viable UBI. Such an UBI would barely be enough for subsistence, possibly not even that, so people would still choose to work if only to acquire some disposable income. For every single thing that 'ceased to be done' because of increased expenses, there would be growing employment in some other, higher-productivity sector.

(In fact, I would argue that high-paying manufacturing jobs have always required some degree of skill, even when this kind of manufacturing work was especially common in the West.)

The ones I've met are intelligent, though their locus of intelligence is in their thumbs. Someone on a project needs to have it there, so that's just fine by me!

Last time I did a robot project, the people who would ultimately be the machine operators were involved every step of the way, learning and building together with the team.

I'm not sure how installing a handful of machines in one small corner of a huge factory that's already full of machines would somehow change someone's entire life. Hopefully it does make it a little easier though!

I have never worked in robotics, save for hobby drones and hexapods. The question is not whether we would enjoy it, it’s whether someone else will. You seem very convinced that you should decide what people do for work. That’s the part I’m trying to get across to you, you should not have that power for anybody but yourself.

I don't think that I've ever decided what people do for work. I unsure if that that is a thing. As far as I (can/do) know, they decide internally and then hire me to help.

I'm not sure how to proceed. Could you unpack your assumptions for me?

If you increase the minimum wage by 10x, well... quite some low wage work wouldn't actually cost 10x a single person's wage to automate. Depending on the nature of the good or service, the price might go up a bit at first to recover development costs, and later it might go down drastically once those costs are recovered.

This is highly speculative, and almost certainly false. The requisite developments in chemistry and metallurgy were nowhere close to realized during classical antiquity.

> quite some low wage work wouldn't actually cost 10x a single person's wage to automate

What about the rest of it?

For example, the Netherlands started out industrializing on wind power using wood and rope and cloth, ...actually they still use a lot of wind power today, though now with exotic composites. (At some point in between there were traditional windmills that were still being updated with odd things like aviation leading edge slats made of aluminium up to something like the 1950s! )

So -while speculative and certainly open to discussion- in some alternate history Romans could have had some sort of industrial system, though it might not look like something we would immediately recognize.

I'm trying to convey the intuition that if you have a perfectly workable society based on slavery (the cheapest form of labor), you don't have as strong an incentive to start using machines instead. Conversely, I have the impression that the abolition of slavery in the 19th century is one of the big contributors to our modern industrial society.

I'm just being cautious wrt saying that most low wage work wouldn't cost 10x to automate. One can never be sure one hasn't missed an example somewhere.

Of course, if we find some examples of low wage work that really do cost more than 10X the cost of the work needed to automate it, possibly we've been under-valuing those tasks all along.

Emerging global trade networks incentivized producers to scale up indefinitely. The resulting innovations transformed the textile industry. Textiles are always in demand, and their non-mechanized production is extremely labour intensive. The lessons learned from mechanizing this industry were applied everywhere else. It's true that competition with cheap Indian labour was a major factor in textile automation in the UK, but these global trade networks could not have been sustained without massive advancements in stellar navigation provided by the invention of the telescope. This in turn was only made possible by advancements in chemistry that enabled the production of clear glass.

All of these processes were well underway before the abolition of slavery in the US. It should be noted that innovations such as the cotton gin were eagerly adopted by the slave-powered US cotton industry. There's nothing like efficiency for an industrialist.

With regards to automation, I think all of the low-hanging fruit has been picked. We're left with things that seem simple, but are in fact horribly difficult, and require near-human levels of dexterity and situational awareness, such as driving or construction work or food handling. That however doesn't mean that our society would be just fine if we provided workers in these industries an alternative to their jobs.

WRT windmills, don't take my word for it.

Already ahead of you: a one-person company is called a ZZP'er here in NL. ZZP = zelfstandige zonder personeel == self-employed without employees.

This is not my experience at all. I once had a job setting up home PCs and internet for low income people in my community. Almost every single home had a projection TV (the top of the line at the time) and a recent mercedes in the driveway. They’re able to afford these things because they are actually receiving income, it’s just not reported (and therefore also not taxed)

Everyone’s a drug dealer? Doesnt sound plausible. Or at least They’re getting so much income they can afford to run a fancy car (debt free because who’s lending to a person with minimal documented income).

I mean is that a poor person when they have $50k laying around to go buy a fancy car outright?

Something about your proposition doesnt add up in a really basic obvious way.

Where did I say drug dealer? Or is this the first time you’ve heard of jobs getting paid under the table?

And yes some of them had much more than $50k judging by their things. But hey, make them more wealthy. Some people are really good at gaming the system.

Pay for waiters and labourers, like pay for everyone else, is on top of UBI. There's no particular reason it would have to rise by 2x or 3x—unless the industry is categorically unwilling or unable to ensure that their workers are treated well enough that they just don't see it as being worthwhile for less.

If the industry is dying out because we introduce universal basic income, then the poorest people will still be at least as well off as they are now, and in many cases much better, because they are guaranteed to continue to be able to pay their bills, no matter what happens with their employment status.

> guaranteed to continue to be able to pay their bills

This all depends on how well your UBI keeps up with inflation. If you trigger runaway inflation, then you won't be able to buy bread with a wheelbarrow full of cash. Fundamentally, it's not about how much money people have, but about how much work they do. If UBI reduces the amount of work done overall in the economy, it will contract said economy and make everyone poorer as a result.

Another study discussed here showed only a mild net reduction in amount of paid work being done on the short term; and arguably the unpaid work being done instead was also beneficial to society.

Interestingly, in general, UBI studies don't show really alarming reductions in amount of work done. Sadly they also don't show hoped for amazing increases in productivity either. It seems like the advantages and disadvantages of UBI for stimulating work seem to balance each other out. I think people's arguments don't need to be about the work aspect so much.

UBI is basically communism lite - with all its flaws. People who are provided for tend to behave just like animals who are provided for - after all, people are animals - they mainly lounge around and try to amuse themselves. This isn't a moral judgement, just an observation. I've not seen any study that has conclusively refuted this.

It is the rare, exceptional, person that will spend their free time on something truly productive and constructive. We can see examples of this already - we've made it very easy to get a loan and go to college, partially socializing college education. As a result, we have a surplus of college graduates and a shortage of labourers and trades. Introducing UBI would simply magnify this effect. When people have alternatives, they don't tend to want to go work on farms, construction sites, or in restaurants or shops. People work these jobs primarily because they would otherwise be destitute. I know that's why I did.

Since HN discussions tend to be short and fleeting; I think the point to focus down on would be "free time". Just because you take (some of the) money out of the picture, doesn't mean that there still isn't a lot of work to be done. And it doesn't mean that all the other motivators to do that work aren't still present.

Instead of or in addition to money: people work for power, prestige, recognition; but also for love, honor, duty, "FOR SCIENCE", beauty, tradition, for personal satisfaction&improvement, and many other reasons.

With all these different reasons to want to work, and all kinds of different people and professions, (eg. politicians, artists, homemakers, soldiers, police officers, doctors, nurses, scientists, students, artists ), you might imagine that taking money off the table might not actually have such an influence on these people's desire to work.

If you think back, surely you'll recognize these motivations showing up everywhere; including in stories, newspapers, citations, history books, holy books, and surely even scientific studies. They're all part of the human condition, after all.

The examples you give of farming, construction, hospitality and retail are often mixed motivation. Some people (like you?) only work in those jobs because they need the money. And without further motivation, then surely one won't like the work.

But many people who work in these sectors actually do so because they believe in their job, because they want to build something, and/or because they see it is valued and helps the community. When they are down and demotivated, this is where they draw their strength to carry on.

This is especially true in SME's, which is where I've had a lot of my experiences.

Overall, I don't think the "human condition" is much of a thing. People are marginally more clever than apes on average, and that small margin pushed us past a tipping point into civilization. Give a chimp a smartphone and they start to behave remarkably like people (or is it vice versa).

However, even if you're right, and most people would find humanistic motivation to work, my point is that we just can't have all the people who do menial, necessary, jobs pursue careers motivated by higher values. If all baristas were suddenly free to pursue their dream art careers, who will pour the coffee?

More in general: I think that Maslow's hierarchy of needs [1] has a quite a lot of levels between "basic physiological needs" and "transcendence". I think that as long as people need to fulfill needs anywhere on that ladder, they'll be willing to do work. If people are lucky and/or smart, a lot of their needs will be immediately fulfilled by their work; other times things may still need to be covered by money and/or free time.

I think it'd be strange if people would only have boolean motivation (either 100% staying alive, or 100% enlightenment). I think in real world people, it's often going to be some mix of motivations, with all sorts of levels in between. Sometimes more towards one side, sometimes more towards the other.

So that's my theory anyway.

Here's some examples of anecdata I have:

* An electrical technician I met at $factory. Possibly they'd work somewhere else if not for money, but on the other hand they do get a kick anytime a machine they fixed starts working again.

* An industrial programmer who got to play with $MM worth of robots and computers and lasers. They outright forgot to bill me and needed to be reminded. (oops)

* An awesome Barista who made coffee into an art form indeed; A lot of deep knowledge and skill and creativity went into it. They charged me about 2-4x what it would cost out of a machine, but it was worth it!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

> very few kids say they want to stay at home and sit on the couch all day

You will notice however that, in absence of intervention, most kids do sit on the couch all day, especially in the digital age. We also observe that this behavior continues as long as it is materially supported. Countless articles have been written about the increasing numbers of seemingly-functional adults who live under the care of their parents and don't do very much at all. UBI will enable more people to adopt this lifestyle, to become starving (read: non-productive) artists, man-children or hikikomori. Why don't you think they'll take the opportunity?

> people would only have boolean motivation

I agree that it's not a binary motivation. In aggregate however the point stands, removing x% of motivation for work will inevitably result in x% less work being done. Furthermore, any decrease in x represents wealth transfer from those who are motivated to work by higher values to those who are motivated to work by lower ones (in Maslow's hierarchy). All of this raises many moral questions, and I think these are fundamentally worth discussing.

Note: I do appreciate your continued replies =)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Well, sure. That's more or less a given, but it's also an implementation detail, not a problem with UBI as a concept.

The only way an industry "can't survive" is if there is no price for their product/service at which both of these are true:

1) People can afford to pay for it

2) The employees can afford a living wage

If an industry is vital to our modern way of life, but it fails to meet those criteria, there's a third option: government subsidies, ensuring that the price can stay affordable while not shortchanging the employees.

However, as critical as I generally am of market-based solutions, in this case I genuinely believe that at least in the vast majority of cases, the second-order effects of the safety net offered by UBI will not require additional government subsidies for any vital industries. Some things may get more expensive, but overall, life will get better.

But you can basically only get rid of them by automating the process and disconnecting human workers from complaintants. How well does it work?

Ask anyone who lost a YouTube channel without learning the real reasons and has no path to appeal to a human. HN hates whenever this happens.

And we may have a long discussion about "how to engineer software so that it doesn't need as much support". Theoretically, it can be done; practically, we have all been astonished by Ways of the Common User that no one anticipated, plus you always hit the problem with diversity of hardware.

Apple seems to be pretty user friendly, but Apple products are expensive to boot and Apple does not support their OS on non-Apple hardware.

Maybe there is a financial limit of compensation after which dealing with them stops being a problem - I would certainly personally tolerate an onslaught of assholes for a million dollar salary, at least for a few years - but that limit of compensation may be unrealistic to reach.

I am not sure how an utopia where people stop being assholes to one another could be achieved.

I can clean the walkway, or toilets.. granted i don't spend my whole month on it with shoddy equipement.

But I worked with plenty of people in retail and food service who were older and had families to support and mortgages to pay. They didn't have the luxury of putting their self-respect above their paycheck.

It's ironic to think that people put up with that level of abuse for 8 or 10 or $12 an hour. Now that I'm an engineer, he would be unthinkable for anybody to talk to me like that, but in food service I experienced it from both customers and managers on the daily.

If the only way anybody can stand working someplace is if they're so desperate that they can't afford to leave, that's a job that shouldn't exist.

>> ‘It’s sometimes said that people will sit around doing nothing if you give them free money.’

this never make sense unless people have different definition of UBI. You will need to work to borderline enjoy life.

And it also shift the power to workers. No more shitty jobs like what you describe just to put food on table. The level of abuse people will tolerate before they quit will reduce. It will fundamentally shift ( or lift ) the power in bottom half of the society.

But no work on UBI have ever provided a solution how they deal with "living". If I have a small flat of 6m2 ( unless you want to live in a cage like Hong Kong, I think 6m2 per person is bad enough to be the absolute minimum ) , enough for a bed and bathroom, and zero rent. Getting yourself fed is easy enough.

Which shift the question from UBI to something else, our biggest problem isn't UBI, but property. How it is both an investment as an asset as well as a fundamental need by human. You could always pop up the property prices so UBI will never be enough. And every time we have a discussion about UBI, it is always about tax, equality, willingness to work and nothing on actual "living".

UBI would be a major part of the solution, because it would enable people to move to lower cost-of-living areas where their UBI payment would go a lot further. Today this sort of mobility is heavily impeded by the need to be around meaningful job opportunities and all sorts of government services provided in-kind. With UBI, the job opportunities would spring up where people reside and not vice-versa.

Basic income experiments usually game it like this: We will give you x years of payments monthly for just being alive.

Then they see what happens. The problem is, policy has one huge difference. It doesn't end.

The difference between, I'll give you 2 years of payments monthly and then you'll have to take care of yourself the rest of your life is extraordinarily different than, I'll give you monthly inflation adjusted payments for life, there will be no point in the future when you will need to take care of yourself again.

Think about the FIRE movement. People are working to create an early retirement for themselves with the government not offering it. There will certainly be a percent of the population who retires with basic income.

To be more precise, it has no specific end date, but in a democracy, it can be repealed again with every new parliament. Or possibly via a ballot initiative.

At which moment the net recipients are in for a major shock.

If you're living in a country where 50.1% of the population can impose their will on the other 49.9% unopposed, you're not living in a healthy democracy. Regardless of what the media says.

(And yes, the Brexit referendum is a good example of that. All the issues the British government now has in living up to the results of that binary decision are problems of their own making -- on the other hand, one might say that these current problems show that the British democracy is in a healthier state than that referendum made it out to be)

As for the jobs people won't do, those jobs will be higher valued and eventually, when the price is right, people will do them.

The angry people who don't want to work, who cheat the system won't have to (some still will, of course, but since everyone gets the same amount no matter what, there's less incentive and less frustration built into the system).

Finally, people who don't have the means to take risks will suddenly be able to. We will unlock their potential and the future will benefit as a result.

I just think it's a great idea all around.

> The angry people who don't want to work, who cheat the system won't have to (some still will, of course, but since everyone gets the same amount no matter what, there's less incentive and less frustration built into the system).

No need to bring up points like this when the effect on the overall system is small. It’s a great way to continue to demonize poorer people and let the 1% or .1% off the hook.

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overall I agree with your comment. Nice ending.

Not to excuse bad behavior, but one of the arguments for UBI is that it could help streamline the convoluted systems of government benefits; under a simpler basic-income system perhaps those callers would be fewer and less angry.

That implies your job currently doesn’t require those things. Does it mean you would continue to do the work you currently do?

I think a better phrasing to the hypothetical might be: “if my current job requires…”. And sure, you would leave that job, but does that mean you wouldn’t work at all?

Or does it mean you might use that free space to learn the skills to do a different job that wouldn’t treat you like such garbage.

It almost sounds like your conclusion is: “such a program would allow workers to reject abusive workplaces, and require management to ensure people didn’t abuse their workers if they would want any workers”. To which I say, don’t threaten me with a good time.

This feels like a particularly unfair anecdote in the context of what we're talking about. Imagine for a second that the tables were turned and your spouse was disabled and unable to work: Everything is harder – they can't leave the house without someone to give them a ride; maybe they have to use a wheelchair, which makes everything twice as difficult. They're in survival mode every day.

Not only do they rely on the state for money to eat, to pay rent, to keep the lights on, but doing anything enjoyable is challenging. They have to navigate a byzantine system that is DESIGNED to make qualifying for support extremely frustrating, and then have to stay on top of getting their benefits regularly. The system has literally trained them to react to any issue with anger because they know that whenever a problem occurs, it could be weeks or months until they get the money they need to survive.

I'm not saying that your spouse's experience was justified in any way – dealing with that requires a hell of a lot more than minimum wage! – but (theoretically) this particular problem would go away with something like basic income, where most of these people would have their basic costs covered. They might still have "disability" to help pay for all the other stuff disabled people have to deal with, but at least they aren't relying on a sclerotic bureaucracy to eat, yunno?

One of the silver linings for me of the pandemic is how much the Great Resignation is revealing to the general public how much "essential workers" were poorly paid and miserable. Not even in a way that was necessitated by the work itself, but just because their bosses could get away with being jerks.

We literally just did this with COVID checks.

I would vote for the complete opposite of basic income - invest heavily in education, trade schools, colleges and free access to tools for learning, apprenticeships, etc. Give tools to people to become productive and sustain a good life, by also providing value to the society.

I suspect California will try UBI anyways and fail spectacularly. It will be a canary in the coal mine.

> I suspect California will try UBI anyways and fail spectacularly. It will be a canary in the coal mine.

We've already discussed Richmond, CA before.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28420296

The main strenght of the UBI is that it simplifies the bureaucracy: in theory, you just give everyone an income that should cover health insurance, education when needed, food, housing... so if anyone prefers to spend the money on drugs and hookers is up to him: the society already provided with everything he needed. The key is that you can live with the UBI, and if you want recreational drugs you have to find a job for the extra money or sacrifice some of the basics.

UBI + lots of other welfare programs makes little sense.

A lot of shitty jobs out there rely on the fact that people need to settle to pay the bills. There are people with little experience or going through rough times who simply can't afford to wait for a good opportunity to come along, they need something to hold them over for a few months or maybe years. The employers know that these people have few options and will leave as soon as they do, so they offer low wages and overwork their staff and replace them when they are used up. UBI means people don't have to settle for the first low paying, undesirable job that comes along, they can hold out indefinitely for something better. Yeah, people are still going to need to get their foot in the door somewhere, and some opportunities might be too rare to be considered realistic, so we're not all going to be working our dream jobs, but the worst abusive employment anti-patterns will go extinct.

I think there would be a massive pressure to raise minimum wage.

Why would you work for $7.50 an hour and pay $1 in taxes - spending the majority of your day to make ~$50 - that doesn't buy much - and you don't have much time to spend it anyway?

When your options are either do that or be homeless and hungry - most people opt for work.

But when you have other options - spending your entire day to make $50 seems dramatically less appealing.

Also, I think many menial jobs could be made a lot more pleasant with only a slight cut in productivity.

Hurray for qualify of life!

And since after UBI every dollar after taxes goes to luxuries, a low income provides a lot more luxuries than it does before UBI, so it's actually a lot more appealing to work -- you see the benefits directly.

Then people start advocating for universal housing and universal food.

Food: Foods are commodities, meaning that the price is the marginal cost. The price of a bushel of rice is set by the buyer, not the seller.

Which is exactly what has happened (in the US at least) as people received mini-UBI called "stimulus checks" and their bosses got PPP "loans" (that didn't need to be paid back)

People will bid up apartments because they have more money.

Why wouldn't regular minimum wage workers just be homeless and spend their money on luxuries if this was the case?

What use is buying the new video game if you don't have a place to put a TV to play it on?

UBI would be a subsidy to landlords and supermarkets; who would cream off a profit.

One of the problems of those studies are that they are temporal, and everyone involved know it. If I enrole you for two years in an UBI experiment, you'll probably not leave your job, even if you hate it. But if I guarantee you the same income for the rest of your life... well, lets take a look at how many people keep their jobs, and specially their boring/shitty jobs, when they win a huge lottery price. Usually they don't do other productive things, or even other improductive things: they tend to destroy their own lifes.

Another problem is that you have to take into account how slowly people internalize the new situations. E.g. when central banks started to use inflation as a source of government income, in the first decades it was "free". But people adapted and started to track inflation and price indexes to peg the salaries to them, "learning" how to live with the new situation.

I've been following the UBI space for a long time and I've never seen anyone use this as an example - that's just a strawman. What people discuss is the work that is valuable to society but is unpaid such as raising children, caretaking for the elderly, community support, and so on.

A few hundred dollars a month isn't enough to live on, but it moves the needle for those most at-risk for going hungry or becoming homeless. And for everyone else, it gives extra breathing room and negotiating power in the workplace.

What you talk about is not UBI, but other schema of basic income conditioned (thus not fulfilling the U).

enrolling in a study is not at all representative of how people would behave if the same were a permanent

it does need balances tho, to prevent abuse, especially against undeclared workers double dipping the state (not paying labour taxes and getting the income)

basic incomes tho has a series of drawback that current experiment cannot easily handle.

the first one is of principle: it doesn't solve what caused poverty in the population, and unilaterally ties recipient survival to the benevolence of the ruling class - without a strong economy to zero involuntary unemployment, it begins to look a lot like vassalage.

the second one is of application: punctual welfare is inherently less efficient than aggregated action - living universal income + private school and private healthcare is just a way to bleed state resources into private coffers. public school and public healthcare are much more efficient, and then the supplementary income should just cover the remaining quota of needs (housing, food etc)

there's also second order effects tied to basic income inelasticity - if housing or schooling or whatever price raises, it can displace all the recipient from an area. it's not unrealistic to expect basic income city quarters, at which point state provided housing seem a better alternative to prevent basic-slums.

and there's a question about what the long term goal of the society are - given that there will always be premium goods/service out of reach of people living off basic income, I'd wager that while basic income is sure helpful to bring people out of poverty and placing them into the same bucket of the working class, it rarely help bringing such people into middle class, as that would require the saving necessary to bootstrap a private action, which I rarely hear to be the goal of basic income.

If you think that people who are sitting at the bottom wouldn't take a job to ensure that their basic needs are met and they can have something nice for themselves every once in a while, then I don't know what to tell you. People didn't just start working degrading jobs in the 2010s.

As with most things related to worker protection, this presents a trade-offs. Some workers will be better off, whereas the customers that rely on them for services will end up paying more money for the same goods or services, a form of inflation.

I am not judging what is best here, I just want to point out that it's a trade-off.

And one observation: most of the HN audience is pretty well off, definitely middle class or above. So when someone says "Im ok with workers getting paid more and prices being more expensive" they are virtue signaling but forgetting that if you are poor, Walmart prices is what affords your lifestyle and even small increases disproportionally hurt the poor.

A second observation: you can't create wealth by giving everyone more money. To create wealth you need to increase supply and reduce real prices, which means increase productivity. I am not sure why this is not part of the UBI conversation.

Having worked in a factory, there's no way I'd do that for free. Heck, even at my current salary, which is multiple times higher, I wouldn't want to do that again.

I'm neither arguing for nor against UBI here, but from my understanding, you description is not of UBI. Here you are saying income as a substitute for work. Where as UBI as I understand it is provided independent of work. Meaning that by your spouse quitting she would be losing half of her income.

Maybe she still makes that trade off and quits and the program needs to raise wages to keep people. Or maybe she stays in place for the pay (with abuse). Or maybe the programs doesn't raise wages and has worse/fewer employees as a result.

But it doesn't sounds like the situation you describe is UBI.

- if we had guaranteed roof, we'd do different jobs, fill desire, aim at useful. A lot of people go to work with zero benefits being ability to pay rent. They dread it but they have no choice. It's a weird balance

- any task can be done, even being berated or doing petty tasks, you just dont have to do it from 9 to 5, all year long. You can do 2h if that pleases you. And those jobs now being recognized as nasty would be distributed differently or at least valued as such and workers doing it would feel appreciated

ps: our current system makes us angry at each others. very ironic.

Perhaps jobs are scarce and this worker really has no place to go and must endure the abuse. Once BI is introduced, what percent of workers would quit and stop working, vs. quit but find new employment using the BI to bridge expenses in the meantime and be able to make a full time effort of the search?

BI should make employees more mobile and employers with unpleasant work will need to pay more to get those positions filled.

One reason retail workers passively endure being berated by customers is that they are fearful of losing their job. UBI would reduce that fear and increase worker power.

Also, if basic income is good enough then their wouldn't be a need for that kind of job :).

So... to pay for a private apartment maybe that crap retail job would be ok.

You have no personal experience with UBI schemes, yet you think you know what people would do based on what you think you would do. A long time ago people thought that heavier objects fell faster than lighter ones. Then Galileo came along, conducted an experiment, and proved them wrong. It seems something similar is going on here. Peoples intuitions about UBI and joblessness are faulty and researchers are disproving them.

This is basically Plato's Republic 101.