[Mz]

I often talk about the need to preserve the right to work for the masses. Many people rebut this with the idea that work is coerced for the masses and that it should not be. These are actually essentially unrelated issues. Wanting to not coerce people into working is not at all incompatible with my position. In theory, they both advocate greater choice.

Unfortunately, in practice, people who are pro UBI are often taking a position that is highly likely to deny people choice rather than grant them greater choice. When Elon Musk and Sam Altman talk about creating a UBI, they talk about the need for it due to the expectation that robots will displace people and there will be widespread, permanent unemployment. The articles with interviews from them then tell glowing, affectionate stories of how UBI can supplement your current low wage job and make your life better. They never actually write about the scenario being proposed: A world in which large numbers of people have no hope of getting paid work.

This scares me because people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk are job creators. And their vision of the future is "We eliminate your jobs, cut you a check for a pittance and call it even, then wash our hands of your pathetic future. Not our problem. You have your UBI." In the last Industrial Revolution when automation was threatening to eliminate jobs, we created the 40 hour work week to redistribute work more evenly and raise quality of life for the masses. We need the next step in the evolution of work here.

I find it frustrating that this seems to be so hard to get across to people. But, earlier today, I left a comment elsewhere on HN* in which I noted that some quadriplegics can work and that I was mentioning this because new quadriplegics are often suicidal, feeling like life is over. Maybe think of it in those terms. For many people, UBI in a world with drastically fewer jobs would be like a tragic accident cutting you off from the ability to work. People seem able to understand how horrifying it is to be quadriplegic and feel completely useless. Why can't you understand how horrifying that would be if you are "the wrong kind of employee" and your job has been eliminated and now you are being handed some check for less money than you made previously and basically being told "Fuck you. You are useless and don't deserve a job."

UBI and preserving the right to work are not necessarily antithetical. The problem is that most people who talk about UBI don't see that preserving the right to work is not going to just happen. It needs to be made to happen. And when job creators like Sam Altman are all "meh, you have your ubi, you don't need access to paid work" you are talking about a horrifying dystopian future which will almost certainly end in bloody revolution. Large numbers of unemployed people who have no hope of getting a job, time on their hands and just enough money to keep themselves fed but no hope of ever returning to a middle class lifestyle would make for a scary army.

I would be suicidal in that situation. But quite a lot of people would be homicidal, in part because it would be legitimate to feel this had been done to them. This is really not a scenario we need to create in the world.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14606810

[kavalg]

Well said. I will now try to look from the perspective of a business owner, that has automated everything and doesn't need employees anymore. Let's look at the extreme case, where suddenly (e.g. in 10 years) all business in the world is 100% automated and owned by a handful of people and there is no UBI for the rest. As you rightly pointed out, a kind of revolt is to be expected, which however would be suppressed by the 100% automated police, which would place those poor rebels in a 100% automated jail or just get rid of them in some other 100% automated way. In the end all that's gonna remain is the handful of businessman, who only produce and trade goods between themselves. The amount of goods produced and traded will decrease drastically, which will be detrimental to the government (tax income), which by that time will probably be 100% automated as well. At this point in time, an optimist would inevitably notice that carbon footprint and pollution will also be drastically reduced. However, as business usually goes, those handful of businesses will compete with each other until there is eventually only one business left. There would inevitably be a moment of immense happiness and satisfaction for the one and undisputed winner of this game, but then life will just become boring. The guy will wander around, discuss this with his 100% automated personal assistant, think about it, maybe meditate a bit and would eventually decide look for fun at some other place (e.g. Mars). However, there will still remain some sneaky feeling in the back of his head, asking whether UBI would have actually been a better idea in the first place.

[Mz]

Well, for me, visions of "I, Robot" come to mind while reading through your paragraph. (If you don't know the plot, the robots try to take over.)

[marcosdumay]

Things are not that simple.

When people talk about UBI as a solution for machines taking all the work, they can't be sure the machines will take all the work, but they can be absolutely sure 99% of the people will need to retrain, maybe for years, and try again and again until they find something worthwhile. And our current society simply does not allow that.

Another certainty is that for a long while salaries will trend down. Because machines will displace people faster than those people can move around. Without a support structure, we risk people averaging less than what they need to survive, for a looong while.

Besides, labor that comes with personal realization is rare even now, with plenty of jobs around. If we want people to have personal realization we must set things so that those people don't need their salary to live. At least not every month.

[losvedir]

I was formerly a UBI proponent but I think, at least, in the near to medium term, it's too much of a cultural shift about the role of work in life. That's why these days I'm more a fan of a negative income tax coupled with a repeal of the minimum wage. Consider if the "tax brackets" were something like:

    * 0   - $2k  : -1,000%
    * $2k - 4k   : -500%
    * $4k - 6k   : -100%
    * $6k - $8k  : 0%
    * $8k - $15k : 5%
    * ...
    * $10M+      : 40%

(Something like that, exact numbers to be fiddled with.)

What it essentially does is it provides a government money multiplier on low wage jobs. A company could offer $1/hr jobs, which the employee would perceive as $10/hr. That is, $1/hr = $2k/yr = $20k, after taxes. The negative income tax benefit decreases steadily, until eventually you start paying taxes, but there's always an incentive to work more or get a raise.

Just think of it! At $1/hr there would be a gazillion jobs for things like greeters at every store, crosswalk guards, picking up trash at the park. And people would be motivated to work for them because they're actually making $10/hr.

I think this is more politically palatable than UBI as well, too, since it avoids the issue of "moochers who will just sit around and collect their checks". Since with a NIT, if you don't work, you don't get anything.

I do foresee some issues making this actually feasible. For example, it certainly won't work for the employee to just receive $1/hr and then a big payout on tax day. I think we could adjust "withholding" to actually pay out what the employee will receive as part of their tax benefit, but it will be important to get it right or else they could be hit with a bad tax bill.

[dragonwriter]

> I was formerly a UBI proponent but I think, at least, in the near to medium term, it's too much of a cultural shift about the role of work in life. That's why these days I'm more a fan of a negative income tax coupled with a repeal of the minimum wage.

As usually defined, negative income tax (in an otherwise progressive income tax system) is the same as UBI in a progressive income tax system, but possibly with a range of regressive treatment (the simple credit form is isomorphic to UBI, the more common “deduction with proportional refund of unused deduction, usually at a high fraction like 50%”, has the regressiveness feature.

Unless the credited (or refundable proportion of the deduction) amount is greater than the annualized pre-policy-chnage minimum wage, it's also a decrease in the wage+credit income floor for full-time employed workers, so you risk pitting the unemployed against the working poor with this approach. A better approach, IMO, at plausibly-viable initial levels of the credit (effectively, the UBI level) is to index minimum wage to inflation, but reduce it, as an hourly wage (after applying the index) by the amount of the credit, divided by 2000.

(I'd also prefer tying the credit to a defined calculation based on a revenue stream, preferably a capital-income-heavy one, so it doesn't get reduced with automation, with a ratchet to prevent cuts in recessions.)

What you actually describe is progressive system where the bottom marginal rate is a large negative value, which isn't a typical NIT, but sort of like a super-EITC. This provides no benefit to those absolutely displaced from work, but maximum benefit to those employed at a rate which exactly exhausts the negative marginal rate brackets.

[barrkel]

What's wrong with moochers collecting cheques? Is there some inherent value to you in there being no moochers out there? Or to put it another way, is it necessary to monetize all valuable interactions and behaviours so that we can reward them with our negative income tax? Is monetisation itself a good thing? Or is it sometimes a bad thing, but a tool, possibly not always appropriate?

[shkkmo]

I see this as merely a more complicated type of messaging and find the math of it to be... weird.

If I make no money, what stops me and a friend from starting two poem writing companies. He pays me 2k a year to write him a couple poems and I pay him 2k a year to write me a couple poems. Both of us end up making 18k a year profit and neither of us has to work.

It's a silly example, but the point is that not providing UBI to people who don't work... just means you create corruption to provide just enough work to get past the bar. So why bother?

Yes, we do want to incentivize productive behavior but denying UBI won't work and the harder you try to make rules as what qualifies as productive, the more you end up distorting the labor market.

[barrkel]

How about caring for your elderly parents? Or a mother looking after 3 children at home? Or cleaning up the common areas on the estate where you live? Are these worthless because they're unpaid?

[Applejinx]

What you call moochers, I call customers: please don't ignore the value of consumption in a market capitalist system. If I intend to prosper I need to come up with a way to sell those people something, and your 'moochers' might be the only people with time on their hands to investigate value and serve as watchdogs for abuses. Also, they'd have time to learn new things and invent new stuff. Don't underestimate the ingenuity of moochers! People get bored and think up things when they're left just sitting around. Perhaps not all of them, but it's still an important mechanism.

[ant6n]

They have "1 Euro jobs" in germany, where people are allowed to work for 1 Euro/hour and keep their welfare benefits.

The moochers in this system are the companies who employ 1 euro-jobbers.

[dragonwriter]

> This scares me because people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk are job creators.

No, they aren't. “Job creators” aren't a thing. They are labor purchasers, but that's only incidental and to the extent that labor has no cheaper substitute for their commercial users.

[astrodust]

The true job creators are the people buying their products. The factories are just arbitrage between demand and raw materials.

[PeterisP]

The true job creators are the people who fill whatever is the bottleneck for demanding new jobs.

For industries and products where capacity exists but production is limited by demand, more people buying their products create jobs (and more capitalists won't).

For industries and products did not exist despite people wanting it, R&D who create those products create new jobs, and people wanting such products don't - the jobs won't ever happen unless/until the particular product gets developed.

For industries and products where volume is limited by outside competition, local jobs are created by effective management and capital investments that make production more effective and bring/keep the jobs locally. In any case, the main initiative for change and the possibility for action comes from the factory, and not from the consumers.

Statement "The factories are just arbitrage between demand and raw materials." has truth only for pure commodity industries - and is not at all true for companies like those built by Sam Altman and Elon Musk given as examples above.

[astrodust]

If nobody wanted cars then Tesla would be bankrupt. People wanting cars creates jobs for those in the car manufacturing business. If Tesla makes a better car, they might have more people working for them over time.

It's hard to say if that creates any jobs at all, or simply shifts jobs from other companies that make cars. A lot of the companies in the Sam Altman portfolio are involved in "disruption", which is to say, shifting jobs from one company to another. They're not net creators. In many cases these companies succeed because they require fewer people to operate, so they're job destroying by nature. Wether or not that's a bad thing is irrelevant here, it's just a fact.

The only thing that actually creates jobs is demand, and the only way to create demand is to radically reshape what society is. The automobile created a huge shift in demand: Many people wanted a car because of the economic opportunity it brought, and with the car came other opportunities, like owning a house in the suburbs, owning a cottage, travelling more, and so on. It encouraged people to take on debt, to spend money they normally wouldn't spend, and to work harder to afford it.

There hasn't been anything quite as profound as that in the last century. The introduction of the internet has, if anything, eliminated demand for many things previously taken for granted like print media.

[dv_dt]

I'd agree with the suspicion that UBI alone is not sufficient to handle our future economy. Though I'm not sure you have the right breakdown with what might be needed beyond UBI.

I've been feeling that in order to really accelerate/maintain a future economy beyond our current stagnation, some improved capital circulation mechanism is needed to release huge accumulations of capital from essentially centralized controls. This could be accomplished via multiple methods on a spectrum of compulsory / voluntary scale. From proposed taxes on capital or enticements to apply capital in non-traditional/higher-risk paths. If you can cause mega-accumulations of capital to actually circulate, I think that there would basically be no problem for people looking for work to find it.

[Mz]

Though I'm not sure you have the right breakdown with what might be needed beyond UBI.

My comment was in no way intended to be comprehensive. A more comprehensive picture includes a need for universal basic health coverage and real solutions to the huge affordable housing crisis that has been going on for decades and only getting worse.

I write about my views on what I see as The Second Industrial Revolution and try to gather related posts here:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/ir2.html

[dv_dt]

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that it was. I'll give that link a read as it seems we're somewhat on the same page in this area.

With respect the the housing affordability crisis: One symptom of capital accumulation is that competes with regular people for housing. Capital accumulation hurts housing prices to the extent that parking capital in housing that is being used by no one, or being used to just own housing and provide landlord income with a low positive benefit to society. As long is it's cheaper to buy existing houses and rent them vs deploying that same capital to building houses and selling them we will have an affordable housing crisis. And that is just one aspect of stagnant capital accumulation.

[Mz]

One of the problems is that average house size has more than doubled since the 1950s. Meanwhile, average number of people living in houses has shrunk, from about 3.5 to about 2.5, iirc. We also eliminated a lot of SROs and other housing well suited to single adults and childless couples. This occurred at a time when such housing wasn't really needed, but it was not brought back as demographics changed.

[michaelmrose]

Maybe as the true wealth of the world grows massively due to productivity provided by automation the check we cut people shouldn't be what current people consider a pittance enough to live a waste of a life.

We are either feel a moral duty to keep those who don't contribute in poverty or believe we need to incentivize the rest of the slackers to keep their noses to the useless grindstone.

We can either keep both the useless moralizing and the social carrot long after they cease to make sense or we can recognize that sharing the wealth of the world makes increasing sense and lift each other up in lives where we make the meaning rather than finding it in doing pointless work.

[Mz]

Let me briefly restate the gist of my point above:

UBI or no UBI, we need to preserve access to paid work for everyone to the best of our ability. We need to recognize a right to work that is not being discussed by most people who are pro UBI.

The value of the benefits granted by welfare programs are always eroded over time by inflation. What sounds like a lot of money today will become a pittance over time. These feel good, idealistic ideas touted by so many people seem to never recognize that if you have a UBI and no means whatsoever to improve your income beyond that because the tech giants have no plans to redistribute work, then you are pretty well fucked and your life is hopeless.

People like you seem to be big on the idea that people should not be compelled to work. I am not talking about compelling people to work. I am talking about not actively denying them the right to access paid work. There is a difference between the two, and it is actually quite large.

[vkou]

> UBI or no UBI, we need to preserve access to paid work for everyone to the best of our ability.

No - we don't need to preserve access to paid work.

We want to enable people to work to benefit themselves, rather then their employer.

> The value of the benefits granted by welfare programs are always eroded over time by inflation

Governments can set both inflation, and benefits. Not increasing the latter to keep pace with the former is a deliberate political choice, primarily for the benefit of the rich.

[Mz]

My phrasing does not presume the individual is an employee per se. Paid work also includes contract work, freelance work and owning your own small business.

[PeterisP]

Can you elaborate on what exactly do you mean by "right to paid work" in a world where a true market price for the work of many people will be approximately zero?

UBI is a solution for the problem where for a large part of society a honest full day's work is economically worthless, the society has no real need for their labor. If this wouldn't be expected to happen, then we wouldn't have to discuss UBI as much, but that's where we're heading.

I can even imagine a not-so-far future where the value of most work would be negative; i.e. we might involve people in producing some item, but it would be cheaper and more effective if they stayed away and didn't try to help; so all such work would be in essence a glorified crafts hobby with no practical purpose, and it would result in costs instead of payment.

[Mz]

I probably cannot do it justice in a comment here, but, in a nutshell, there is a lot of unpaid work in the world. As one example, women's work is often unpaid. When it is turned into a paid job, it often pays really poorly.

Historically, women's work was compensated by a strong sense of family obligation. Men were expected to marry and/or support women they had sex with, especially if they got them pregnant. There is less and less expectation that a man is obligated to support a woman. There is more expectation that she can also go out and get a job, which sort of works if there are no children, except that very often due to social expectations, a lot of her time and energy still goes into traditional women's work. The social contract has become broken in a one-sided manner.

On Hacker News, you see people routinely say that content creators on the web are not entitled to be paid for their work, yet they expect there to be good, high level content readily available. And they expect fresh content to be constantly produced. A very high percentage of people on HN use adblockers and then say 'Not my problem" about how that is destroying the income of not just small time operators, but even long standing, established and respected publications. They often say things like "get a real job" when I comment on "So, how are writers supposed to get paid?" They expect writing to be done for free on a regular basis, basically.

There is plenty of work happening right now that isn't getting compensated and that people who make a far better than average hourly wage don't seem to think deserves compensation. So, I see a future in which people with UBI are doing valuable work like content creation while not being paid for it. I would much rather we figure out a better means to monetize work being done right here, right now instead of acting like "work is simply going the way of the dinosaur." No, it isn't. But many people simply don't want to pay the people doing the work.

In a tribal culture, if the tribe makes a big kill, everyone eats. The high ranking people may get the better cuts of meat, but no one goes hungry. They are considered part of the extended family in some sense. This sense of obligation has eroded and an awful lot of people simply seem blind to the many things that must happen that are needed in this world and are valuable, but that they don't want to pay for.

There was a discussion on HN recently in which someone said that the US has 5% of the world population, but 22% of the world's prisoners (IIRC). And it is not illegal in this country to treat prisoners as slave labor. So there is apparently a vast prison industrial complex churning out cheap products using slave labor where the workers are not paid. There is insufficient hue and cry over this situation.

We need very much to design a world in which more people have access to the means to create wealth for themselves. If we are going to displace our historical practice of feeling familial or tribal obligation to take some minimum level of care and provisioning of everyone, then, no, just giving money is not enough. We need to give the means to make money.

Most wealthy people who get called millionaires or billionaires do not actually have a checking account with a million or a billion dollars in it. They have assets like stocks and bonds and land. These constitute a means to make money. When you give poor people money, but you deny them the means to make money, you are in no way giving them the life that rich people have. Rich people can get more if they want it or need it. UBI would be a fixed amount. And if it wasn't enough, well, fuck you.

[PeterisP]

The type of work that you list is work where it won't be paid work - I mean, whatever system you create so that people get paid for it is in some way UBI in disguise; the market value for that work is near zero (as you say, people simply don't want to pay the people doing that work), so you may get paid "for" that work, but de facto you'll get paid just because. No matter if you frame such transfer payments as charity or as forced redistribution, it's not payment for the work, it's paid because the society decided to pay you despite the work having no economic value - as in the principle you mention, that the tribe gets a big kill and everyone eats; just because they're part of the tribe and not because of the work they do.

I understand your arguments of going above and beyond that, having much more than UBI - however, as you can see in this thread, even that level is quite contentious, a large jump from the current situation and not guaranteed to happen. Going beyond that is, obviously, even less likely to happen. If/when we'll see a realistic support for UBI, then we may start discussing about maybe implementing what you state, right now it's just wishful thinking.

[Mz]

Currently, UBI is also wishful thinking. So why not wish for something that doesn't disempower the masses instead of something that does?

The world does not have to bend to my will. But I also do not have to bend to its. I can continue to desire a better system for how we treat people, no matter how ridiculous that seems to so many people.

[shkkmo]

Work != Jobs

I'm all for the right to work, I just really don't think jobs are at all necessary to provide that right.

> people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk are job creators. And their vision of the future is "We eliminate your jobs, cut you a check for a pittance and call it even, then wash our hands of your pathetic future. Not our problem.

People are quite capable of finding something to do on their own without being forced into by the necessity of earning a wage. People write blogs, build cars from kits, maintain gardens, volunteer, raise kids, make youtube videos, play in bands, perfect recipes, etc... frequently for little or no monetary compensation.

To presume that people need Sam Altman and Elon Musk to make jobs so that people can leading fulfilling lives is incredibly dismissive of people's capabilities.

> For many people, UBI in a world with drastically fewer jobs would be like a tragic accident cutting you off from the ability to work.

Our present alternative to UBI is the idiotic combination of unemployment/welfare and a minimum wage. We either pay you to not work (distorting the labor market), or we force employers to provide a basic income at an above market rate (also distorting the labor market). Any jobs that don't provide enough value to the employer don't exist.

By gradually decoupling jobs from providing a basic standard of living to our citizens, we allow them to choose what type of work to occupy themselves. If they wish to occupy themselves with something we can automate at an equivalent quality level for a certain price, they simply need to beat that price. They can do this because they receive UBI and any further income provides an improved quality of life.

> Why can't you understand how horrifying that would be if you are "the wrong kind of employee" and your job has been eliminated and now you are being handed some check for less money than you made previously and basically being told "Fuck you. You are useless and don't deserve a job."

Someone should not have a right to force other people to pay higher prices just because someone thinks they should be paid a certain amount to do their job. Many of my friends who graduated from college in 2008 and 2009 struggled to find decent paying jobs. Why should they have to pay higher prices so that someone who does have a decent paying job can hold onto it?

> In the last Industrial Revolution when automation was threatening to eliminate jobs, we created the 40 hour work week to redistribute work more evenly and raise quality of life for the masses.

I'm pretty sure supporters of the 8hr day were primarily concerned with the health and well being of workers, not with reducing unemployment. Given that the process of implementing the 40 hr week took almost 150 years, it's pretty hard to tie it to automation eliminating jobs.

> you are talking about a horrifying dystopian future which will almost certainly end in bloody revolution. Large numbers of unemployed people who have no hope of getting a job, time on their hands and just enough money to keep themselves fed but no hope of ever returning to a middle class lifestyle would make for a scary army.

While idle peasants certainly scare the capitalists, I think that the threat of violent revolution has been radically diminished by our unprecedented success in inventing new forms of entertainment. Violent revolution is also no longer practical in developed countries given the governments surveillance and military capabilities

Our current situation where people do pointless, mind numbing and demeaning work just to survive leads to plenty of depression and suicidality.