[dragonwriter]

> Why wouldn't I just let someone else figure out how to automate jobs? I've got my income.

Empirically, people often expend effort to increase their income when there are opportunities available, even if their current income meets basic survival needs. I don't see why that wouldn't continue to be the case with basic income. What, people are going to stop wanting luxuries?

[ultramancool]

> What, people are going to stop wanting luxuries?

Not sure about you, but most of the luxuries I own, I've basically only bought because I had money for them. If I didn't have money to blow on them, they really don't bring me that much joy, relatively basic items would suffice.

So many things I think of as the real luxuries these days are free or basically free. I can spend hours watching youtube or playing games for extremely little cost.

I would not exert extra effort to buy better phone or a 4k monitor and a 980ti instead of settling for a weaker setup. Instead I only have these things because the money was there already and I had nothing better to do with it.

Basically, I'd drop out of the workforce in a heartbeat if I could afford living and a few minimal luxuries. $15-20k/year would do the job to split a cheap apartment with a friend and keep the rest under control. This is half of what some people have proposed as a UBI.

[dragonwriter]

You might accurately describe what you would do, but I think the evidence from the world around us is that most people in the US do see sufficient marginal utility in things beyond what it takes $15K-$20K -- or even $30K-$40K -- to afford to exert additional effort to earn beyond that level given the opportunity. So even if we could somehow establish a UBI that would (after accounting for whatever inflationary effect the UBI itself had) provide a standard of living comparable to $30K-$40K in current dollars (which I don't think we can come anywhere close to today), I don't think you'd see a whole lot of people who were had job prospects not working.

[ultramancool]

> I think the evidence from the world around us is that most people in the US do see sufficient marginal utility in things beyond what it takes $15K-$20K -- or even $30K-$40K

Do we actually have evidence for this? If you're comparing working a skilled vs unskilled labor I think there's a lot more difference than just pay there that must be considered. In a lot of ways the skilled job is lower effort, even if the up front effort requirement was higher, the daily effort requirement is often lower.

You also have to consider than even a relatively low effort job 8 hours a day is a massive effort difference from zero, which is the alternative you're actually comparing to. Basically, if you need to exert several hours a day worth of effort to get by, you better optimize the value you get back from them. But if you don't need to exert any at all to get by, that's a very different situation.

But maybe I'm just an uncommonly lazy turd. It's possible. I just don't have evidence to say it for certain.

[maaku]

> Basically, I'd drop out of the workforce in a heartbeat if I could afford living and a few minimal luxuries. $15-20k/year would do the job to split a cheap apartment with a friend and keep the rest under control. This is half of what some people have proposed as a UBI.

By the way this might be very doable for you on a short timescale, if you pull in the kind of salary most people do on HN. Studies show that if you retire and pull only <4% of your starting balance each year to live off, you can live off it for 30+ years, if not indefinitely. If you were earning $120k, but only spending $20k/yr, you'd have enough wealth to live off after only 7.5 years.

[home_boi]

>What, people are going to stop wanting luxuries?

Yes, check out /r/financialindependence

There's thousands of people living frugally to retire early with ~1-2 million which is basically UBI over a lifetime

[dragonwriter]

"Thousands of people" isn't a very large portion of the population.

[aninhumer]

Wanting to be financially independent doesn't necessarily mean you want to completely stop working. It just means you want to choose how you spend your time.

[maaku]

The point is if you sum up what people would want to do with their time, there's no reason to expect that in any way corresponds with what the allocation of resources should be to keep the engines of the economy moving / achieve maximal societal benefit / whatever. It's a classic tragedy of the commons situation.