Many inventions created to “free people” ended up landing them with expectations to work even harder with their newfound “free time”—and they ended up being pigeon-holed into more limited jobs. This is especially true for women as appliances were created to help free them from domestic duties, but they have been landed into still doing those and working full-time or more.
Hard to blame this specifically on Capitalism because it doesn’t force working forever, it just doesn’t have a mechanism to prevent it. You CAN save all your money and retire at 40.
Democratic-Capitalism brings us the social safety net which usually DOES have a specific mechanism to allow for retirement at a certain age. So that proves those things are not incompatible, Capitalism isn’t working against retirement, it’s just not focused on retirement at all.
yes, and no, desire drives a king to attack it’s neighbour, but is it also desire that enlists the soldier? Maybe the soldier has desire for things het could not morally do at home, maybe they had to go to war to got war because he had bills to pay, is it more moral to kill if you think you have no choice? Is it moral to kill if the outcome of not kill would result i that guy still dying but also yourself, 2 ded?
like bro, i agree 100 with your sentiment. But i think that actually people are animals, they will always, on average, do wathever the fuck they feel like doing, good people exist but majority be majoritying. And people who look to please not god(society, thy neighbour, your fellow human, etc) but only seek to please oneselve will always have an advantage in any system.
so basicaly, exactly what you already said. But i hate that it is no fucling nihilstic, so everyone is just shit then? And if i find my supposed counter-jewel in the rough, then run of together and forget about my brother, society, my human kin, then i am literally just as bad.
like i like to believe everyone should have the duty to do all that he can do for anyone. But southpark, society, reality showed me, i could also just get shot and that would be the end of it. Even worse, my death could cascade and cause my child to follow the same path, and he could also just get shot, go crazy, lose all joy in life, and for what? For a fucking cause that is so fucking simple that one would almost get the feeling there is some global bamboozle going on. "No one should go hungry, no one should go cold, if you see someone who cannot fullfil this duty to the world, do your duty to the world "
i left out no shooting each other, no stealing, no rape etcetcetc because i think it could be obvious with a little bit of do treat em like you should yourself. But hey, im just a schizo these days, because my capitalist gains go op i hate myself 24/7 for not immediately fixing all the problems, when a nice girl ask me how i am doing i tell em about how our goverment be shooting child as we speak, about how i will never be able to have children because it will be impossible to sustain them emotionally with my 60 hour job, how fucked up it is public transit drivers gotta protest a whole year for a fucking pee brake and some fucking respect.
so yeah, fighting nhilism every day. Wish i could love myself a little and by result become an animal. Animals do get more sex tho, so who knows
everyone here should look at the Venus Project. We keep struggling to understand how automation makes sense in a capitalist society. SPOILER: it doesn’t. The entire system has to be re-imagined or we perish and the owners flourish (without us).
Yeah the owners are always going to get the labor as cheap as possible. There is no way you’ll get profits from a. Company that literally doesn’t employ you.
In the right hand pic the person doesn’t work for the company. Why does the pic imply they do?
If a company is fully automated and has no workers do they pay everyone? Lol
“If a company is fully automated and has no workers do they pay everyone? Lol”
you lol but entertain this thought experiment - it’s a little stretch of the imagination but totally feasible in the right conditions:
a benevolent philanthropist buys an autonomous car and gives the car ownership of itself. the car’s directive is to operate at cost and provide transportation to humans. the car operates on a model not unlike uber but without profit concerns. it arranges its own maintenance and budgets for replacments parts, etc. how much cheaper would that be than paying for a cab or uber?
of course none of that is feasible because the law doesn’t allow for a car to own itself and there’s still some R&D before it could operate on the level i’m talking about but still… if profit was removed and everything operated on cost alone, how much cheaper and accessible would things become?
Automate, but maje sure you take ownership of the production and get paid accordingly. Your tip is usually the best way to accomplish it.
unless you can spin it into a business to business service that you can sell after leaving the company to many more and paid more than your job’s salary.
this could be reality right now if we overthrew the owners. who keeps the owners in power? the conservative right. property is an unalienable right to them. what can we do? destroy the conservative right by any means necessary.
We should tax every company the equivalent of all the workers’ salaries (adjusted for modern cost of living) they automate out of a job and use the money to fund a UBI.
I can only imagine what the cost of food would be under your proposed plan if implemented for all technological advancements over the past 500 years.
One of the biggest benefits of automation for the masses is that things get cheaper and more widely available. By maintaining the status quo and keeping prices high QOL would stagnate or decline.
Seeing how the US handles healthcare and social security is all you need to know about the future of any said plans for UBI. It’s a nice idea but the republicans are going to drain it dry the second they get majority.
I would also propose that any company where someone is making more than the cost of living is automatically garnished to the amount extraneous, again to contribute to UBI. Under this system republicans can’t exist because there is no corporations with enough money to bribe politicians.
So you’re saying no matter what anyone does for work they only make as much as it costs to survive? That is how I interpret “any company where someone is making more than the cost of living is automatically garnished to the amount extraneous”
So basically everyone gets paid the same no matter if they work or not. There’s no incentive?
I include regular luxuries as part of the cost of living as they often factor into a well balanced life, e.g.: vacations, etc. But yeah. The incentive is being part of a system where everyone lives comfortably and can achieve the basic goals of modern life.
If you make the person on the right to be the next generation over, this picture is pretty accurate. Take a simple example: watch repair shops have gone out of business due to electronics - that sucked for them, but we’re actually in a better place because of them.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean. Would you think you’d be better off without electronics? Are you saying you’d rather live in a world where clocks were mechanical and you had to take them to a repair shop every now and then? Is your life worse because watchmaker is not a common trade anymore?
How can you prevent wide adoption of a cheaper and more reliable solution to a problem?
Some of them, yes.
There still are mechanical clocks. They’re just not that common. Or rather, they’re having a comeback as luxury/jewellery items since their functional aspect is not required anymore. And since they’re not a functional widespread item, the need for clock repair shops has reduced drastically. But there is a need for other type of repair shops for which the current generation of workers is well prepared and educated to handle. Hence my idea that the silly meme that we’re discussing is on a timeline rather than side by side.
Yes. I wasn’t able to get my great grandfather’s pocket watch repaired.
There are people who can fix those depending on where you live or how much you’re willing to pay. If you can’t find an artisan shop, try and talk to one of the big watch makers companies, they might help. When I needed something similar, Tissot pointed me to one of their local contractors in my area.
If people don’t have money, people can’t buy the goods being produced, demand will plummet and supply will skyrocket leading to the logical conclusion that a UBI is necessary to supplement life in an automated world. If that doesn’t happen, I Guess revolution?
revolution was always the answer. you think they’re just going to give up their place at the head of the table? they’ll figure out a way to wipe us all out before they do that.
Well, if hypothetically all the work people don’t intrinsically want to do can be done by robots with no self interest, fatigue, or capacity for sadness, pain, it resentment… Then we need a new system that doesn’t require work to make a livelihood. Whether that’s a realistic scenario… Probably not in the medium term future at least. But as a hypothetical, that could make for awesome living if we could get there without screwing it up (but we will).
As difficult getting to a reasonable end game under those ideal conditions, tougher question is what about if we still need people to do crap work, but like 5% of what we need today. Who gets stuck with that? To what extent in that scenario could you approach a 2 hour work week to have more people share that burden?
Frankly I’m pessimistic that we would navigate those to a better system, but if we could pull it off and such hypotheticals happen, it could be awesome.
I 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.
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.
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…
That 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.
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?
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.
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.
Tax 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 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.
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’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 .
No, but plenty would pick up a trade to get more money, for the same reason that people still overwhelmingly seek full-time jobs instead of only part-time jobs in areas with low CoL.
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
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.
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 we 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%. i.e. how much of it was success owing to better resources versus success owing to others needing to fail to allow that relative success.
What is the overall economic adjustment if 100% of the population has this income and participants in the economy may adjust
What does it look like when the funding model in terms of taxation resembles what is needed in a UBI
Just like all sorts of stuff in science, at scale does not necessarily map to small scale observations. Especially in economic and social science. That’s not to say UBI is definitely not going to work, it’s that we can’t know how it will work/not work until done “for real” at the appropriate scale.
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).
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.
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.
And in regards to your other comment about dialing in from the extremes, instead of making everything a uniform number, we can use an formula and a handful of variables to arrive at a local number. A function that takes in common cost of living costs, such as food, shelter, clothing, utilities, transport, and generates a number that will adequate cover those expenses for a given area plus some extra because something unexpect can always happen.
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.
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.
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