UltragigagiganticLife doesnt have to be this way
PugJesusWoah, that’s dangerous thinking! Why don’t we bring back house-servants instead to give all of these filthy poors Gainful Employment™?
SouthEndSunsetOr…we could say “fuck the poors, my house servant will be a robot”.
To be fair though I think that the really rich will find another way to use us for their amusement.
Well, they have robots for the actual tasks, the human employees are just there so they have someone to lord over.
Servants? That’s bourgeois-adjacent (/s). The reality is 80 % of people used to be farmers until the industrial revolution, so if we want to undo AuTOmAtiOn, in all likelihood your ass is either going to be wielding a hoe all day long or if you’re lucky you’ll be hand-spinning loom. Or to be even more pendantic, we’ll be starving to death because pre-industrial and pre-fertilizer agriculture cannot possibly provide enough calories for the current world population by a very long shot.
Or maybe the wannabe communists in this thread should remember that Marxism is about the value of labor and (this is where communists disagree very hard on the specifics) distributed capital so that advances in (e.g.) automation benefit the many instead of the few. The idea that “communism = no need to work anymore” is some new-age bullshit perpetuated by an illiterate disillusionment with capitalism coupled to a very incorrect perception that we live in (or close to) a post-scarcity world and the related tech-bro propaganda that “AI is going to replace us all” (it’s not, not in its current form nor the one after that, but it makes for a nice narrative to pitch to venture capital investors).
Gradually_AdjustingYay, a robot took over my job! Now I am free to closely monitor it until I stop caring about the mistakes!
Edit: And get fired!
Closely monitor it for less pay!
To be the devils advocate here, how would that system be fair to workers not replaced by robots? Like if im a plumber i still gotta put in my 40+ hrs/week but a factory worker just gets UBI now?
To be another devil’s advocate here, who’s paying for all the free shit these people are getting while they’re not working?
TequilaMockingbirdTax companies a % of what they save by reducing head count. Salary, benefits, insurance, everything. They still save $, but not as much - they pay into a fund for UBI. And eliminate loan interest tax deductions for loans (totalling) over $X (some reasonable threshold that doesn't penalize middle class mortgage holders).
And to the poster above, UBI is for everyone, so those still working get UBI plus a paycheck - that's how it's fair.
We are NOT economically prepared for the renaissance coming. And our octogenarian leaders don't even understand how to set up a printer. Something's gotta give or the economy will collapse. Some estimates are up to 25% of jobs in the next 10 years.
The folks that don't want them building guillotines in their spare time. Remember kids, guillotines cure economic anxiety.
The basics of Supply and Demand. If automation means more consistent and bigger Supply, then prices will* come down and more of the Demand will be able to afford the goods and services in the Supply. Larger supply means cheaper prices, possibly to the point where value becomes basically meaningless.
*assuming that Supply isn’t artificially limited by the owners of industry to protect their own profits. If only someone wrote a series of books and pamphlets about how the owners would do everything they can to protect their profits.
But, you say “afford” like it’s something people will freely be able to achieve. My question again is- if no one is working- nothing is afforded by anyone.
The entitled masses today are the same as they’ve ever been. Ask the one question the refuse to answer, and get drivel and theory in return.
Anti-work is a ridiculous notion that some kids unfortunately took seriously.
I’ll take “How to completely miss the point of what I wrote” for 1000 Alex.
I never said anything about anti-work* and I literally addressed the point about how high production and automation and plentiful Supply drives prices down.
*Which it seems like you’re assuming people won’t do any labor and instead it’s people won’t work bullshit jobs that don’t actually do anything productive and can actually more choose what they work on instead of working for the benefit of the industry owners
Well, the hypothetical is essentially a post scarcity “economy”, if there is zero demand for “work”, then work would have to be uncoupled from livelihood in some way.
A crap outcome would be to meaninglessly keep toiling at work that we could automate because we are afraid of dealing with consequences of a big labor surplus.
However, this is a hypothetical, and even if it starts becoming a reality, it’s going to be awkward when we can’t meaningfully have “work” for everyone but we still need work for some people.
I will agree that the hard core antiwork folks that say today we could get by with everyone only doing what they wanted for fun are unrealistic. However it’ll be… Interesting to see how we might navigate possibilities.
The highly automated factories?
The thing about a UBI is that it’s universal. You’d get a UBI despite still working as a plumber. For you, it would be extra cash - for the factory worker laid off, it would be a lifeline.
DubskeeI want UBI. You think it will ever be a reality?
Everyone would get UBI. Nobody would be forcing you to keep your plumbing job. And even if you stuck around, you wouldn’t have to work 40+ hours plumbing weeks because UBI would give you the ability to chose what dmjobs youd want to take on. And maybe now that those factory workers aren’t stuck in factories, some of them might actually want to learn how to be plumbers, meaning more plumbers to take on jobs.
I highly doubt most people are just going to pick up a trade as if it is a hobby if they are getting a UBI
No, but plenty would pick up a trade to get more money, for the same reason that people accept full-time jobs instead of only part-time jobs in areas with low CoL.
BakkodaI’m probably a minority but i would in a heartbeat. I stopped doing residential AC because the bills didn’t get paid that often (people just don’t like paying bills) and honestly i couldn’t compete with larger companies while still having to maintain my epa certs, gas reclamation charges and the cost of refrigerant alone .
UBI is to cover the basics, its not going to let everyone live in luxury, you’d still want for extra cash, you just wouldnt NEED it. Thus people would still be willing to work
I know this is a popular perception, but it doesn’t allign with the results of experiments where random citizens where granted an UBI.
www.givedirectly.org/2023-ubi-results/
Huh would you look at that, in the UBI experiments it actually gave people more freedom to do the kind of work they wanted to do. My God if you’re gonna make claims lime that don’t make them so easy to disprove.
A monthly universal basic income (UBI) empowered recipients and did not create idleness. They invested, became more entrepreneurial, and earned more. The common concern of “laziness” never materialized, as recipients did not work less nor drink more.
Mein gott, such a terrible policy.
Well, no, we’ve never been able to test UBI. That would require the entire population of significant geographic areas to receive UBI levels of income in a way they start believing it’s a safe thing to expect for the foreseeable future, and to model how it’s funded rather than just how it pays out.
What we’ve done is frequently means test the experiments, deliberately select low income people, but only a tiny portion of a larger low income population. Also, the participants know very well that the experiment might be a few months or a year, but after that they’ll be on their own again, so they need to take any advantage it gives them. So all the experiments prove is that if you give some, but not all, low income people a temporary financial benefit, they can and will out compete others without the benefit.
UBI might be workable, or it might need certain other things to make it workable, or it might not be workable, but it’s going to be pretty much impossible to figure it out in a limited scope experiment.
The Alaska permanent fund is about as close to UBI as we’ve gotten, but the amounts are below sustenance living so it’s not up to the standard either.
What we’ve done is frequently means test the experiments, deliberately select low income people, but only a tiny portion of a larger low income population.
So what you’re saying it we explicitly looked at the most extreme examples and seen how UBI has greatly benefitted the people in those extreme situations, and every single time the experiments are conducted the results are pretty consistent, but we can’t extrapolate that it won’t work in less extreme situations because… reasons…
Because you still have the element of differential compared to others. In true UBI, the UBI recipient would represent the ‘low point’ for any citizen. Let’s take Seattle for example as they recent had an ‘experiment’ about UBI. If you had true UBI, then 750,000 people would all get same benefit, of which 75,000 were unemployed. In the UBI experiment, 100 of that 75,000 people had the benefit temporarily, and have an advantage over 74,900 people without that benefit, and the experiment only influences 0.01% of the population in general and then only by a meager amount, so the general local economy won’t even register the activity as a blip. Those 100 people can have a breather but know that time is short. So they take advantage to maybe take a class, get nice interview clothes, and show up better prepared for a job than maybe the other dozen applicants that couldn’t afford to buy the clothes, take time off for the right interview, or take that class. They might not have any particular advantage if everyone had UBI, and the experiment measured success in terms of relative success over those not in the cohort.
So you are missing: -What is the behavior if UBI is taken for granted as a long term benefit for the forseeable future, rather than a temporary benefit. -What is the competitive picture if 100% of the population have the same benefit rather than 0.01% -What is the overall economic adjustment if 100% of the population has this income and participants in the economy may adjust
Just like all sorts of stuff in science, at scale does not necessarily map to small scale observations. Especially in economic and social science.
I’m gonna need citations if you’re going to make claims about the data of experiments.
Well, here is the Seattle one: businessinsider.com/seattle-ubi-guaranteed-basic-…
It’s pretty typical, select a few people out of thousands to receive a temporary benefit and extrapolate to UBI. Sure they didn’t talk about the other population, but Internet search does generic demographics for the city (750k total/75k on unemployment).
Cool. And here are 150+ other experiments and program of varying sizes and time frames.
Global Map of Basic Income Experiments | Stanford Basic Income Lab
This geospatial map presents UBI-related experiments, pilots, programs and policies throughout the world, some past and some ongoing, and enables the user to compare them across a range of designs and implementation features.
See my reply to your other reply. That the programs are all limited in scope and duration and thus cannot possibly speak to scale. The meta analysis says the data that is available is appealing, but acknowledges that almost none of them really hit the criteria for a real UBI in terms of scope, scale, and duration. Particularly:
Only a handful of the interventions covered by this review are truly unconditional and universal. In an exhaustive review, Gentilini and colleagues21 identify only a small number of schemes that reach everyone within a geographic region without meansbased or demographic targeting, and regardless of work history. These included national schemes in Mongolia and Iran, dividend transfers in Alaska and the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation, a one-off transfer to all citizens in Kuwait, and pilots financed by private contributions and the non-governmental organizations in Kenya and Namibia, and by the national government in India. Several of these programs are either short-term, or not set to a level that would meet basic needs
I don’t know that any of them manage to hit both long-term and enough to meet basic needs. Alaska is long term, but it’s well below basic needs, for example.
We still do not have data that would speak to a whole society with UBI.
It seems like we’re in a Catch 22 scenario. Models and experiments only give so much information by the very nature of models and experiments simplifying much more complex problems, and in order to collect the kind of holistic data that would speak to a societal level would require an experiment that is functionally identical to just full implementation. Like experiments can only get so big or go on so long before it just becomes the actual thing itself and is no longer an experiment.
With respect to formula, one aspect that proves difficult is that as you derive the right number, the right number changes. Since currency is kind of a synthetic mathematical trick we play on ourselves to “do economy”, the things being modeled change when we try to force the numbers to be pleasant. Psychology plays a role to potentially make people feel better even with objectively similar circumstances (eg getting a 2% raise along with 2% inflation the person feels like they made some progress despite sitting still.
In any event, I don’t have data either, but I just strongly suspect a numerical manipulation of money balances won’t suffice and we will have to intervene with things like universal healthcare, housing initiatives, labor regulation, and some means of mitigating the phenomenon of billionaires. Easier said than done, but broadly just thinking we have to mind the details explicitly.
Or maybe Meta Analysis is more convincing.
…stanford.edu/…/Umbrella Review BI_final.pdf
Page 15 is rather quite enlightening.
I appreciate the thoroughness and acknowledgement about limitations:
There is an obvious research evidence gap in the evaluation of an experimental, sustained UBI, which is considered the ‘gold standard’ for evidence. There is a shortage of evidence that meets most or all of the definitional features of a UBI, and the interventions covered by this report vary significantly. To arrive at conclusions at what may occur if all core features were unified into UBI policy, reviews have synthesized evidence from interventions that may not meet the most stringent definitions of universality or unconditionality.
But even with the gaps of experiments missing some pieces, the meta analysis still has a really strong positive outlook on UBI despite the imperfections of the numerous studies.
The problem is that the imperfections are systematic and the same imperfections inflict every experiment.
To use an extreme, let’s say you just up and gave someone 10 million dollars. Would they do pretty well? Probably would live it up pretty well or die trying. Assuming they avoided vices that would kill them, they would probably have whatever sort of house they want, any sort of car they want, and so on. They might engage in some noble occupation now that they don’t care about money that sounds nicer than most jobs to make money. You could repeat this same experiment dozens and dozens of time and come away with the same conclusion, that giving people money without conditions improves their situation. At 10 million, you probably wouldn’t see the same data about ‘gainful employment’ as you do with $5,000 dollar experiments, where they know that won’t get them going, but other facets should reproduce.
What if you gave 340 million people 10 million dollars? Well, the economy would adjust to deal with that new normal. You would have massive inflation to compensate for the glut of cash. The market for Ferrari’s jumps a thousand-fold, but they aren’t going to be making a thousand-fold more cars, they’ll just price them up to the point where even millionaires can’t afford them anymore.
What if you gave 340 million people 4 dollars a month? Nothing would happen, it’s too meager to move the needle.
So a UBI would be somewhere in the middle. Now the question is whether there is a sweet spot with the right impact. Economically, it’s likely that their opportunities in ‘objective’ terms may be about the same before and after, but they might feel less crappy about it. Though over long enough time they might get pissed that their UBI payment isn’t going to be even sustenance income even if it started that way.
The other common trend in these is some romanticism of some jobs over others. He was stuck mowing public parks, but with the UBI experiment, he was able to better himself and get a more respectable job. Good for him, but who is now mowing those parks? Oh someone who wasn’t in the UBI experiment. So if everyone has UBI, you can’t have that nice story for everyone, someone is still going to be doing that “lame” mowing job.
UBI might be a part of dealing with a hypothetical labor surplus when we just don’t know what people should be doing, but it’s going to be rough. If it’s too low, you’ve doomed people relying on UBI to forever be stuck with crappy standard of living because there would be no jobs for some of them to have the chance to supplement the income. If it’s too high, then why would anyone ever mow that public park?
I suspect shorter and shorter work weeks has to be a mandated solution, rather than some fixed money amount injected per capita. Spread those crap jobs over more people. Instead of unrelenting 40 hours of landscaping a week, a couple hours a week and surplus labor means you get 20-fold more people doing the job. Though first we have to actually have an obvious labor surplus to get that going.
Swedneckhave you like, ever seen people in retirement? they start doing labour just to entertain themselves.
UBI is generally proposed as a basic sustenance income, a fairly austere lifestyle that is “enough” but likely not fulfilling.
Of course if you don’t have enough “work” to go around, that vision of UBI becomes pretty dystopian, as some people are stuck with bare bones living with zero opportunity for better. If we do get there, then that sort UBI isn’t going to be enough, but as you say it it’s too much and you still need human work some, well, is a tough question…
I would love to learn to weld, be a mechanic, electrician… basically all the things I’ve had to pickup up in a triage capacity. I would love to give up my 9-5 rat race job and learn to do something beneficial well. I can’t justify the current expense of taking 18-24 months off to go back to school though when I make enough to stay alive at this point.
You are probably right, but at the same time we might be surprised. UBI becomes the catalyst for this experiment to take off though.
can != got to
I want fewer don't wish to be there workers, not more.
I want fewer don't wish to be there workers, not more.
Or you put in 16 hours a week, and some other people do the rest of the hours.
On the other hand, we could also train the factory workers to become assistant consultants, or give them some other bullshit job...
Please, no more bullshit jobs, we have enough of those to untangle
the devil’s* advocate
The Menemen!40+ hrs/week
Isn’t that the thing? We automatize so much and instead of getting the 20hrs/week, we struggel so much to improve efficiency. But for what? There are sectors I agree with that approach (like medicine, climate impact and so on). But if I have to use the same smartphone technology for 10 years or don’t upgrade to an 8k TV in the next 20 years, that is utterly fine by me, if that means that I’ll have to wrk 20hours less per week.
deegeeseThis assumes workers own the means of production.
Under capitalism, boss tells all the workers to get fucked.
Leate_WonceslaceThat which ought to be is not influenced by what is. It’s true that worker control over the means of production is preferable to capitalism, but neither scenario here actually requires it. In fact, if the economy is fully automated, it would imply that the means of production couldn’t be owned by the workers, since there wouldn’t be any. That’s how you get post-scarcity space communism. Socialism would ensure the longevity and existence of an arrangement that results in automation leading to better lives for everyone rather than human extinction. However, I’m beginning to suspect that with the time frame we’re working with, aiming for socialism to the detriment of achieving any such arrangement might be a serious misplay on our part. Of course, that opens the possibility for humanity to be subjugated by an oppressive regime of immortal cyborg oligarchs. Even so, this horrifying possibility still preserves the opportunity for rebellion and revolution to set things aright whereas extinction would be ultimate defeat.
You just accidentally described both The Dune Universe, and The Warhammer 40K Universe.
If corporations cared more about people and less about money this may just work.
nexguyI believe AI will lead to more competition which will drive prices down for industries that require far fewer actual people. When an opportunity to make money presents itself, competition will thrive.
Selling to whom?
We talk about workers and customers and tax payers like they’re all different sets of people. They’re not.
so, workers and taxpayers are separate people, taxpayer is coded language for capitalist, because any time people mention taxpayer it’s always in relations to things concerning almost exclusively the rich
It may be used as coded language, but it doesn’t match reality.
The top 50% of taxpayers pay in 97.7% of the total taxes in the US. To be in the top 50%, you only need to make $40k. Full time at $20/hour will get you there.
Sources:
I can’t access the USA Today article, sadly, but I can tell you how you got hoodwinked by the literal rich people think tank that is Taxfoundation, whose purpose is to try and fight taxation on the rich.
they obscure and heavily cherry-pick the datapoints they present, no, they actually did not state that “The top 50% of taxpayers pay in 97.7% of the total taxes in the US”, they said that “The top 50% of Income taxpayers pay in 97.7% of the total taxes in the US”, something that makes sense when you understand that almost half the nation earns below the poverty line and tax credits literally make them not have to pay taxes.
Secondly, it also completely ignores money you make outside income, stuff like the whole unrealized gains backing functionally zero interest loans, meaning that the wealthy aren’t even on that list to begin with
also, coded language doesn’t have anything to do with reality, that’s why it’s coded language, people seldom speak what they mean, especially those tasked with sellin’ you their snake oil.
Until there is no longer a massive bill to start a company this is a pipe dream.
Who’s name is the mortgage under is all you have to ask before the model breaks down…
Gotta look into robot maintenance now.
🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 🏆Don’t give me that do-goody-good bullshit!
If I have no job, I have no money.
Who’s going to buy the stuff these robots are building?