[santiagogo]

Number of hours worked is not equal to production or richness of a society.

Productivity equals production.

A small team of engineers who design and create a machine to build brick walls en masse, could have the same productivity as hundreds of thousands of bricklayers working 16 hours a day.

A good example of this are Silicon valley, Singapore or New York, which are small social groups that have more economic and social output than most countries with a much larger population.

To be more productive and have a richer and better quality of life (richer is not necessarily more quality of life), it's generally more efficient and sustainable to have better education and social conditions for workers, than to exploit them.

[mola]

What makes the people in Singapore New York and silicone valley more productive? The fact that they work in successful businesses and earn lots of money? So what? Tobacco is a successful business. How can you even define more economic output? You can't, you just use a very flawed proxy for economic value, money exchange.

I believe a good teacher is 100 times more productive than a software engineer. But that guy that wrote some tracking code earns a boat load more money. So you consider him more productive. That's just a huge fallacy. Value cannot be fully quantified, we use proxies for that reason, but we should always remember that.

[Der_Einzige]

It's funny because the post you responded to would be better as a refutation of this post rather than the other way around

OP just explained why people (or rather, the upper middle class tech workers) of these two cities for out produce potentially thousands of people. A team of software engineers who can nail software for flipped classrooms will replace thousands of teachers AND improve educational outcomes

[ChrisLomont]

> Productivity equals production.

Yep, and when significant numbers of people simply stop working, as has been demonstrated in every experiment on basic income, production drops similarly. 0 work * any finite rate of production = 0 output.

Recessions/depressions are caused by smaller drops in production than those seen in basic income. Production includes food, medicine, services, and things that make life better for all.

>A small team of engineers who design and create a machine to build brick walls en masse, could have the same productivity as hundreds of thousands of bricklayers working 16 hours a day.

Then let them do it. That they have not done so thus far is not because we didn't have basic income. Postulating this mythical event as a counter to the empirical evidence that production did drop significantly during actual basic income is not compelling.

>generally more efficient and sustainable to have better education and social conditions for workers, than to exploit them

Then start such a company, and your better, happier, more efficient workers should beat out those other inefficient companies.

Again, this hasn't happened, despite many people trying to make such companies, only to realize that things don't work this way for valid reasons.

[refurb]

The people in Singapore, NY and SF usually represent a very small slice of a given industry.

NY for example has lots of high paying finance jobs, but without all the industries those bankers serve, those finance jobs wouldn’t exist.