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?
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 =)
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.
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