Isn't this going to happen to a real UBI anyway? The grand idea behind a UBI is in its simplicity. Everyone gets it no exclusion but nobody thinks about the fact that a non distorted UBI is impossible to implement. There are going to be "concessions".
It reminds me of the EU CO2 cap and trade system. In theory it would be a highly effective tool. In practice lots of sectors are excluded, a lot of free CO2 certificates are given away and many to the biggest polluters because they may become uneconomical, which is the entire point of the system in the first place. Basically, the system gets distorted so that the status quo remains. This doesn't mean that the system is not doing something but my point is that you'll have to tone down your expectations.
If we ever see a widespread UBI it will probably be means tested and with a limited duration which is exactly what this experiment is doing. It will probably be more effective and less costly but it won't bring wonders. It'll just be an incremental update to the conventional welfare system many countries have.
I maintain that I would like to see UBE -- Universal Basic Employment.
If you can work, we have a job for you.
Part-time, full-time, your choice. We'll even train you up.
Especially in the US -- there is tons of work to be done on infrastructure, plenty of research to be sponsored with results placed in the public domain, etc.
We derive a large chunk of our personal value, out of what we contribute to our tribes -- our community, our friends, our company, etc. If somebody is willing to contribute to society, we should encourage and enable that.
"we have a job for you". Great, but I'm certain that it means most of the people doing those jobs would not like them and would no work great. Because being forced to do something you don't like/don't want to it not a good idea. For the ones being forced and for the ones working with them but liking what they do.
What is the point of all those inovations if it's not being able to tell to people : you don't wan't to work ? Great, you don't have to !
Today we have smart people doing jobs that give them enough wealth but they hate their jobs and instead they could be artists doing "nothing" but at they end they could be happy and maybe bring to society with their art.
We have no so smart people that do shitty jobs they hate because society needs someone to do it but the salary is shit, and those people are miserable. Instead they could do "nothing" and be happy, while we give real money to people deciding to do shitty jobs, or people creating solutions to avoid other people doing those shitty jobs.
Why having as much people as possible being able to do "nothing" isn't the ultimate goal of humanity ?
I mean, it's exactly what wealthy people want for themselves so...
> It means most of the people doing those jobs would not like them.
There are a lot of jobs that need doing if you want to enjoy things like "running water" and "food".
Many of those jobs are unpleasant. That's why you get money for doing them.
And any job worth doing is worth doing well.
If sewage workers -- people who literally have shit jobs -- can do this, then unemployed people given a job cleaning up local parks or canning food can do the same.
I have done manual labor. And worked in fast food. The work sucked, but I took pride in being good at my job.
I could crack eggs onto that griddle like a machine.
(As an aside, I have very little patience with people that are rude to fast-food workers, janitors, and the like. Those people make your life possible. You can be polite to them and treat them with respect.)
> Because being forced to do something you don't like
Who is forcing anybody?
Take a different job. Or start a business. Or don't work.
> Why having as much people as possible being able to do "nothing" isn't the ultimate goal of humanity?
No.
> I mean, it's exactly what wealthy people want for themselves so...
It's the nature of our existence that work has to be done. At minimum, we die if we don't gather food and water, find and maintain shelter, and prepare to defend ourselves against a variety of dangers.
Social advances and technological progress haven't eliminated that burden, they've increased it. Now we also need to maintain complex infrastructure, educate the young, care for the elderly and disabled, and create entertainment to ease the psychological stress of a life so far removed from our basic instincts.
And at this time, very little of that work is done by robots and AI. Asking not to work is just expecting other people to provide all that for you.
Sorry but I don't see how a software engineer (as me) is doing any work that is in the nature of human beings.
There is more and more people doing less than needed jobs while there is less and less people doing useful jobs.
The Covid crisis showed this to us (at least in Europe) : the people doing the real work are the people with the lowest incone and the lowest social protections.
So instead of giving good incomes to guys like me faking being useful to society, I'd prefer we give real incomes to useful people and let other doing "nothing" instead of having jobs with no "natural" purpose.
If we were in a society like that, I would have never chose being a software engineer, I'd rather be in the fields, growing food. But I'm a coward so I picked the salary instead of the meaning.
Some jobs are further removed from the end product, and therefore less visible, but society depends on them. The people doing what you call the "real" work depend on a lot of support (including software) to do their jobs.
What use is a grocery store cashier without the whole supply chain that brings products to the stores? What would happen to that supply chain without modern infrastructure and the government that maintains and defends the infrastructure? What becomes of that government without elections and the information infrastructure that keeps voters informed?
Presumably someone pays for the work you do, so they find it useful. Even if you can't see it's ultimate purpose, it probably does contribute to society.
> Sorry but I don't see how a software engineer (as me) is doing any work that is in the nature of human beings.
The simplistic answer is: you do work that is required (in some form, on some level) for "everything" or nobody would pay you to do it. You might be a few hops away from "putting food on the tables of people", but your work is somewhere in the network that supports society. Yes, there are some exceptions, some negative side-effects of the market approach, but they seem to be too small to make the whole system less effective than a carefully planned non-market system.
> The Covid crisis showed this to us (at least in Europe) : the people doing the real work are the people with the lowest incone and the lowest social protections.
That's mostly because that "real work" is usually work that you can easily train for. I still think we should pay better (and pay more people) to work e.g. in health care, but the reason why we don't is that it's easier to train a software developer to work in nursing than training a nurse to work in software development.
> So instead of giving good incomes to guys like me faking being useful to society, I'd prefer we give real incomes to useful people and let other doing "nothing" instead of having jobs with no "natural" purpose.
I know the feeling, but I don't think it's accurate or helpful. If you hate your job, find another one. Especially in software, there are plenty of jobs where you can very directly see the positive impact of your work on people.
> If we were in a society like that, I would have never chose being a software engineer, I'd rather be in the fields, growing food.
Who did more for society, the person growing food or the person developing a tractor?
Sidebar:
Don’t be so hard on yourself, not a day goes by that I don’t think to myself “Man, I could walk away from all of this and my family and I could be happier, more fulfilled doing X” where X is a grab bag of moving to smaller towns and picking up baking/farming/local business’ing. It might be true, but it also might not be and picking a known quantity of good/bad over an unknown is not cowardly, it can be your gut telling you “this probably isn’t the right thing”.
This was already done under socialism in the eastern side of Europe after the Second World War. Jobs had to be created that were unnecessary, or a single job was split between 2-3 people. Keyword is "full employment" if you want to google it, for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee is closer to what was mentioned here, I believe. Essentially, it's just saying "we don't want people to sit around and get used to it and we also have things that need to get done but aren't crucial to survival, so we can do them when we have lots of people who aren't needed elsewhere, and we can stop doing them when we don't".
The record was made in Nasser's Egypt however. All government jobs were shared with dozens or even hundreds of people. Some worked only few hours once a month and earned reasonable wages.
Looking at history, Socialist economies have a lot of other characteristics, though:
- Starting a business is illegal.
- You are required to work. Not working is illegal.
- Growing and eating your own food is illegal.
Illegal meaning you either go to a forced-labor camp, and are later killed after the State has extracted every last ounce of value, or the State executes you outright to send a message.
I am not proposing full employment. Consent and choice matter. If you don't want to work, don't work. Or start a business. Or be homeless. Your call.
But if you want to work, and can't find a job... let's fix that problem, and in doing so rebuild our infrastructure.
I grew up in socialism and can tell you that things weren't half as bad as you describe them. Sure, everybody had a job (it was the state's responsibility to provide you with one) and people found themselves demotivated because there was little incentive to do a better job. There was a saying "They cannot pay me as little than the little work I can do" (I hope I translated this correctly :) ).
But, being killed for not working? Never. Start your own business? Sure, just pay the taxes and observe worker's rights. Growing your own food? Every rural household had a garden and some had decent sized fields.
I guess you meant communist Russia at some (signifacant but not large) window of history?
> Start your own business? Sure, just pay the taxes and observe worker's rights.
Depends on country. I grew up in socialist Czechoslovakia and private businesses were almost unheard of (there were about several hundreds of small private businesses in country of 15M people). Most private tradesmen offered they services unofficially/illegally (in addition to their regular daily job).
From what i heard, regimes in Poland and Hungary were more lenient in this regard.
> But, being killed for not working? Never.
Killed in work camps? At most in 1950s. But regular prison sentences for not having a work still happened in 1970s and 1980s.
Really depends on the country. And in a country could friend on the city. For example, in the Soviet Union, Moscow was off limits to the people who did not have a permanent place to live (as registered in the internal passport). They were forced out but not necessarily imprisoned, just moved to "the 101st kilometer" (outside the 100 kilometer zone, that is). I think Leningrad was like that too. Even in the USSR it was uneven: Russian and I think Ukraine were like that, the Baltic republics were not, not sure about Central Asia.
These are all historical anecdotes, nothing more. No claim about it being or not being intrinsic to the socialist society etc.
> I guess you meant communist Russia at some (signifacant but not large) window of history?
In terms of "no private businesses" and "from each according to his ability" -- e.g. not working was considered stealing from the state, and thus illegal?
Russia from around 1920-1980, East Germany from about 1949-1980... really, you can look at all of the Eastern Bloc: Poland, Romania, etc. China from 1949-1976, North Korea along the same timeframe, Cambodia under Pol Pot...
To be fair, the executions ramped down a bit after the first 40 years or so, and you'd just be fined and/or imprisoned.
Again, not half as bad as your statements suggest. I have never heard people being coerced to work en masse. Everybody had a job and there were plenty who did very little, as I said in my previous post. In some sense, I guess it was considered bad if you lived in the city and didn't work but plenty of people lived in countryside where they just lived off the land. As far as I know, nobody cared if you had a job or not.
I am not saying it was good. Free political thought was not allowed, speaking against the regime got you into nasty prisons, where, yes, you were coerced to work like a slave. I knew a few people who went through that and that really was bad :( What I am saying is that most people still led relatively normal lives.
Interesting! I did some reading, and it looks like Yugoslavia managed to escape the work camps and genocide thanks to Tito, who split with Stalin early on, and was able to maintain power in Yugoslavia (which was then excluded from the Warsaw Pact).
Also looks like there was US aid involved as well. Interesting. Not sure why the Soviets didn't push for military action, though.
No, it wasn't. Артели and кооперативы (look them up) in USSR were quite popular up to middle of 1950-s and after about 1985. They were supported by government and given preferential treatment.
My Russian is super-weak, but for people here, those are "Artisanal Collectives" and "Cooperatives", respectively (yes?)
Reading through [1] and [2] seems to indicate that you could form state-sponsored groups and engage in labor, but not for profit... which is the point of starting a business.
Done in the west as well, in order to counter the popularity of socialism with the working class. Had similar results. Was gradually wound down in the past few decades.
It reminds me of the EU CO2 cap and trade system. In theory it would be a highly effective tool. In practice lots of sectors are excluded, a lot of free CO2 certificates are given away and many to the biggest polluters because they may become uneconomical, which is the entire point of the system in the first place. Basically, the system gets distorted so that the status quo remains. This doesn't mean that the system is not doing something but my point is that you'll have to tone down your expectations.
If we ever see a widespread UBI it will probably be means tested and with a limited duration which is exactly what this experiment is doing. It will probably be more effective and less costly but it won't bring wonders. It'll just be an incremental update to the conventional welfare system many countries have.