coldfish wrote:SensiBull wrote:A couple of observations:
1. The counter argument against Universal Basic Income that I most often hear is that it amounts to 'paying people to do nothing.'
https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/y-combinator-basic-income-study_us_56aa2b04e4b05e4e37036c34This is more of a confession than arguers supporting the view seems to realise it is, rather than the stunning, argument-ending critique its supporters imagine it to be.
It's basically an admission that what we currently do is non-mandatory 'busy work.' It implies that paying people to do nothing is an option that is unwise to choose, not the necessity and source of self-worth that workplace roles are routinely marketed (even to extremely young, pre-pubescent children) as being.
It validates perceptions previously dismissed as conspiracy theories, such as:
- 'Planned obsoleteness' or [the deliberate disabling of a product to prevent it from working, thus requiring the buyer to purchase a replacement.
[For example, inkjet printer manufacturers employ smart chips in their ink cartridges to prevent them from being used after a certain threshold (number of pages, time, etc.), even though the cartridge may still contain usable ink or could be refilled (with ink toners, up to 50 percent of the toner cartridge is often still full). This constitutes "programmed obsolescence", in that there is no random component contributing to the decline in function.]
- 'Perceived obsoleteness'
[Obsolescence of desirability or stylistic obsolescence occurs when designers change the styling of products so customers will purchase products more frequently due to the decrease in the perceived desirability of unfashionable items.]
These are things that are designed to keep people employed and, therefore, occupied. Without it, government's role in managing society would change to being primarily a social function, with health and law enforcement picking up the pieces. How many domestic disputes only end because one partner or the other has to go to work, and/or the kids have to go to school?
Keeping people occupied is part of government's peace-keeping role, not necessarily the essential function that people are encouraged to see in even quite meaningless roles.
2. Ben Franklin is attributed with the quote:
"If every man and woman would work for four hours each day on something useful, that labor would produce sufficient to procure all the necessaries and comforts of life."
Whenever I've heard the quote mentioned, it was in the context of what that person could produce for sustaining himself or herself, not others.
Instead, we work 8-10 hours per day, with commutes that require paying what is typically six or seven 'suppliers' (gasoline, registration, insurance, maintenance and fluids, an auto manufacturer, a finance company, tolls, roadside assistance, etc.) to get there.
Is it any wonder that people feel so unfulfilled when so much of their limited years of life are dedicated to earning the money to maintain a life that distracts people from the things that really matter to themselves, and the economy DEPENDS on that?
#dontquityourdayjob
At the end of the day, we can only consume what we produce as a society. When I say consume, people often think of flat screen TV's but the luxury items are a small part of our economy. Its the truck drivers that bring food to the grocery stores and those that stock the shelves, the doctors that give us health care, the people that maintain our roads, the workers behind the scenes making it so that you have electricity 99.9% of the time without thought, etc.
All of that is value added work. Its stuff that we gladly pay for. Its true that there is a lot of non value added work. Jobs just pushing around paperwork no one really cares about.
If you pay people not to work, some of them . . . will not work. If it reduces the amount of stuff we have to consume, our standard of living goes down. In the process, the people who do work will charge more for their time, which adds to income disparity.
I really don't have a good solution. There is no system where you can have a relatively equal distribution of goods and services with only some of the people providing them. Humans simply aren't wired that way. What's fair to one person is unfair to others.
The big change would be a massive increase in productivity through automation. Then, effectively we could consume far more than what we produce. If that happens, we can spend a lot less of our time doing menial jobs as long as we figure out how to distribute the gains fairly. Regardless, I'm not afraid of automation or AI. I can't wait for it.
I am aware of the knife's edge that this conversation sits on in terms of the indulgence the moderators are showing in allowing these respectful comments and observations.
I don't want to do anything to upset that. So, I don't mean to start a 'tennis match' but there have been other times that a similar perspective has been offered to me in response to the views I offered that were similar in vein to this comment above.
To be specific, I once had someone say, "How does that (cashless society/UBI) help me pay my orthodontist for my daughter's braces?"
There tends to be a dependence on something well beyond basic needs used to justify the inevitability of the need for vast employment systems.
I didn't suggest that people shouldn't work. I suggested that more of their work should be for their own benefit. Clearly, there are impracticalities, based on a grid system, to everyone having their own electricity (to borrow the electrician reference above), but, I happen to live in South Australia, the state with the highest per capita cost of electricity in the 'developed' world.
Ironically, this is where Elon Musk, an advocate of Universal Basic Income (UBI) built a battery to show that household batteries could replace a grid system, allowing everyone to have their own power source, rather than sharing a communal one.
Ironically again, even as we speak, there is a challenge to who the Prime Minister of Australia will be that took place in the last 24 hours, where the current Prime Minister only avoided being replaced by 7 votes out of 83.
The key issue? Not an election. His party is in power and is dissatisfied with his position on developing a 'National Energy Policy.'
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/malcolm-turnbull-removes-all-climate-change-targets-from-energy-policy-in-fresh-bid-to-save-leadership-20180820-p4zyht.htmlThere is a whole generation that was born with the promise that electricity would be so cheap that it would essentially be free. The country tried to roll out an 'Insulation Scheme' that would help insulate homes to reduce household power costs. Several unlicensed people got in on the jobs opportunity that this presented and wound up burning down homes and killing people. Now, no one will even talk about insulation because it has become a political third rail, all to create jobs.
Australia also is experiencing a budget blowout because of the rollout of a fiber-netowrk throughout the country, which has a land mass the size of the lower-48 states of the U.S., but, only about 8% of the U.S.'s population. That's a lot of fiber, and, despite all of the contracts and 'jobs for the boys' and employment and jobs that make governments sound invested in people, the network is already becoming obsolete because of the presence of wireless towers.
It might not be ideal for avoiding lag time when I'm playing Fortnite, but, the point is, for all of our inventions, the human endeavour remains the same.
Marry. Have children. Raise, feed and educate them. Rinse and repeat.
Everything else is a reflection of our cosmetic values and preferences and are, accordingly, optional. What is represented by the visual appeal of braces in one culture could be tattooing in another culture, or a giant frisbee inserted into the bottom lip in yet another culture beyond those.
I mean, American society tends to put the British on a pedestal, and it certainly isn't because of their fantastic teeth.
These also are things that can be addressed through the sharing of information. If you can put blueprints to instructions to have a 3D printer build a gun on the internet, you can reduce anything to a set of instructions or, better yet, a patch that will build it for you.
However, often, if not always, money incentivizes people to over-complicate true needs (bride-zilla) and to invent false ones (injure-and-rescue sales tactics).
