Re:Can Universal Basic Income Transform Society?
by antisthenes on Wednesday July 17, 2024 @02:22PM
(#40988787)
There's been no shortage of navel-gazing techno-optimists throughout recent history, that's for sure.
Re:Can Universal Basic Income Transform Society?
by ryandrake on Wednesday July 17, 2024 @02:32PM
(#40988879)
Without navel-gazers, we'd still be farming our feudal lord's land and sending our 4 year old children to work in coal mines. If anything, progress requires navel-gazing, and we need more of it.
Re:Can Universal Basic Income Transform Society?
by throwaway22032 on Wednesday July 17, 2024 @08:48PM
(#40991602)
I think that you're getting stuck on bullshit jobs.
There are real things that need to be done. As I mentioned - sweeping the street, pruning the shrubs, painting the fence. Care work. Childcare. Helping people navigate the metro. In my country there are huge shortages of police, military, and so on and so forth.
There are many many more examples.
The idea of giving someone money to do nothing is absurd in this context. Far better to just fund more paid work.
This is not a universally held belief, although I'll admit that (at least currently) a great majority still do think this way. I am hoping we one day evolve past this idea that one's existence must be justified through arbitrary toil. We shouldn't have to invent hole-digging jobs and hole-filling jobs purely so people can "do something" to pull their weight.
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller