> beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
Unfortunately the governments and the wealthy looked at Hayek and decided they much preferred the idea where they could continue to abuse the workers.
Do we have any guarantees of this? Couldn't we equally have way less Nurses, Doctors, ER Techs, Construction Workers building homes, Teachers.
Feels like all the stressful, back-breaking jobs will be quitting first?
No, because we actually need those things, so we would keep hiring people to do them, whereas useless makework jobs are the obvious thing to cut if there is less labor available.
Work expands to fill all available time. Make less time available and there will be more pressure to stop doing useless work.
Meanwhile the reason that people become nurses instead of social media managers is that nurses are paid more than social media managers and simultaneously attract people who want to feel like they're doing something meaningful instead of something useless, both of which would continue to be the case.
It's also obvious to me, that anytime any worker feels financially comfortable to stay home, a huge chunk of them will inevitably be hijacked by algorithmic feeds. Everything else is just some version of "pick yourself up by the bootstraps".
I am expecting Social Media Managers to be paid hand over foot to handle this transition even though they might find other work more meaningful (much like Real Estate Agents now, who would rather be doing something else, but the money is too good).
These are not reasons not to do UBI, but if there is economic devastation after, you can expect a quick reversal and a generation-wide flopping of the idea. So might as well fix these underlying issues as you do UBI.
Have you met any people who were eligible for a pension at e.g. 50? I know a few, they all retired. Not because they couldn't continue to work, but because with the pension they were finally able to quit.
Gee why would they stop working, you think?
> And if people don't work, or don't work nearly as much as they did before, then how is the system going to be sustained?
Technology gives us massive gains in productivity; we could reasonably reduce working hours to <20/week in the developed world. We might have less business dynamic analysts or scrum masters or social media coordinators. We'll be fine.