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by mgrpowers 3685 days ago
When I ask my peers (mid-twenties) about the concept of basic income they freak out at the concept of people not working. Unfortunately it's going to take a few more generations to understand we need to rethink the next steps of someone entering adulthood.
2 comments
snuxoll 3685 days ago
It doesn't help that capitalism is so ingrained in our culture. Go to good school, get a worthwhile degree to make yourself a valuable commodity (don't ever pretend you aren't a commodity, that's all labor is) and if you're lucky you will live a good life. The thought of not having to WORK, to be BETTER than the competition just doesn't make sense to a lot of people. While I just made a comment on reddit not more than an hour ago that humans are a naturally cooperative species, ultimately our base instincts are still to compete for resources to rise above our peers (even if we may help our own in the process).

It's going to take a lot of social training to make people comfortable with the fact that we are rapidly approaching a post-scarcity world where the traditional model of growth-fueled capitalism falls apart (and it will happen, Earth can only sustain so many humans at a time).

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icebraining 3685 days ago
It doesn't help that capitalism is so ingrained in our culture.

On the contrary, capitalism is all about owning and deploying capital (including assets like robots) to produce an income beyond one's own labor. UBI is essentially a plan to eliminate the working class, turning everyone into capitalists :)

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ThrustVectoring 3685 days ago
They're arguably right to freak out. It takes a certain kind of life experience to think about, build, and maintain the systems we rely on to provide the necessities of life. It's probably not a great idea to destroy our society's ability to create adults without some kind of replacement path.

As an aside, I'm tentatively in support of basic income. This is one of the two major points that I worry about, along with rent-seeking behavior. The tl;dr of that argument is the mechanization of agriculture has already freed up tons of man-hours of labor, and the end result of that was systematic reaction that made living in a developed country approximately as expensive as poor people can afford if they work as hard as they have been.

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