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this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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Why is it that work is the only way? Why must we work and have "incentive to work"? Who decided that we must work or be worthless? Why must we be forced to play a game that treats us like shit or be outcast and ostracized?
I don't expect you to have answers, this is just something I've always wondered.
Humans are naturally creative and driven. We like working, building and accomplishing something.
Yet you must be forced to do the work of your employment.
If you had all your necessities met, not for long you would start to work. But you would work on projects you enjoyed. I doubt all those projects would be less useful for society than the average workplace nowadays.
I think must of the UBI experiments that we've done, many of the participants chose to do work in addition to the basic income.
For one, the operational word is "experiments". People on experimental UBI know it's only temporary.
For another, they are never large scale. So you can have success stories about how people given a UBI reprieve were able to take a moment to get things together, get some training, and maybe be selective and find a good job, but it's unfortunately not saying how it would scale. Unfortunately those great opportunities are likely sparse, and if entire cities could take that same benefit, you'd likely see a reset to a similar scenario as before UBI. That said it may be a much better simpler situation than means tested welfare, but the ubi amounts in the experiments are often less than welfare, so you'd not replace the system...
Then there's the debate of how much UBI.
On top of everything else that's been said, most people would want more than just whatever the UBI was even if that was enough to survive on. Most people do not want to just survive. Sure, you might get enough to live a very basic life without any frills if you didn't work, but isn't it better to guarantee those people homes and food rather than just let them die in the street?
Because all the things in that picture are produced by people working. If there are not people working to make clothes, you don't get clothes. If there are not people making and maintaining power plants, there is no electricity. And so on.
It's okay if temporarily non working people, or people that are unable to work, or people that work but are not paid enough gets these things for free (or deeply discounted. But if absolutely everyone gets all of that for free, there won't be enough people working just to sustain the ones who won't.
This isn't really a reasonable conclusion though, why could the people doing that work not be incentivised, by being rewarded in some other way than just a bare minimum livelihood? Why would they abandon their station to just do nothing instead ? Doesn't good protection enable the worker to negotiate their work to be fulfilling, rewarding and well compensated? Are the workers not just cogs in the machine if they don't get that power to actually negotiate? ....
It makes no sense to assume nothing would get done if we just had enough to live no matter what, the argument that we'll make more and better things seems much more likely to me. Both are somewhat unknowable until we just do right by people and see it working.
It's not that "nothing will get done". Sure, some people will work, but much less, if you could get a "fulfilling life" regardless of employment status.
There is already many (quotation needed) people that choose to live off of family members+the state in exchange of some (or a lot) quality of life.
The more you provide for free, the less people will need to work (and some people work only because they need to). This will put more strain on the people that do work, because they are the ones that pay more taxes, which would lead to less luxuries for the people that do actually work.
The higher the production, the higher mean (not median, the rich will always skew the curve a lot) QoL. The idea behind this post aims to increase the median QoL, but I think it'll just bring the mean closer to the median, and shrink the whole thing.
We have value beyond work,, but ultimately theres the practical questions of:
All the "free stuff" needs people to work to make it a reality. It may be that we can "afford" to provide basic needs confidently for free in a way that leaves motivation to do those jobs to get better, but ultimately we need work to be done and some way to motivate that work to be done.
I mean we could go back to being hunter gatherers with no electricity, roads, police, government etc..But in order to have the comforts of life, we need peoples to do stuff and cooperate and coordinate.. think about who runs the cables for your Internet or maintains the cell towers, picks up your trash, grows the avocados for your guacamole, manufactures the medicines..etc etc..If nobody has a job, nothing gets done.. think about living off the grid and the logistics associated with it, that's just a small taste
I unironically believe that these things would get done without the need of coercing people to do them by stripping them of the means of survival. Anthropology backs me up on this one.
Show me some horsey sourcey cuz
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution
Also: The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Basically: anything by Graeber.
Did you just use a book written in 1902 as a source
Is the origin of species out of date, cause it is older?
Also, the bulk of Graeber's work is from the 21st century.
You can just say that you don't want to believe me, you know.
I don't believe you
As I said: if you want contemporary anthropological sources: read basically any book by David Graeber. Mutual Aid is a bit old, but still relevant, too.
Give me some excerpts, quotes or a chapter, using whole books is a little vague and isn't getting your point across. Yeah Darwin's book is still relevant but we have also learned a lot more with his theories as the foundation(comparing biology to anthropology?). Your books are working off of what the primitive societal needs of long ago were, right? Do you really think that those same concepts apply to the society of today?
Look, I'm not ananthropologist and I'm trying to sneak in some lemmy while no one's watching at work, so I'm not going to be able to immediately supply you with concise excerpts of anthropological learnings on human nature.
The gist of Mutual Aid is that cooperation within a species is a vital factor of evolution. That's why I namedropped Darwin. That thesis complements the origin of species.
Still doesn't mean that you can't learn anything from a book published in 1902, or that it's not worth reading anymore.
Why is this controvertial? Aren't humans a biological species? Anthropology and biology are about as connected as physics and math is.
No, they aren't (exclusively). They give testimony of how we got here and that things can be different as they are now.
Yes, at least partly. The human brain has had the same biology for the last 100.000 years. You can learn things about human nature from this massive time scale. The basic gist of basically everything Graeber wrote is that societies are formable things. The societies we form will in turn change the way humans interact with each other (changing "human nature"). This in turn means that the whole notion of "progress" being a linear thing, only going into one, unchangeable direction is wrong.
I think you are confused about what you believe in. It's ok, we have all been there bud
I think you are quite an arrogant prick.
That sure is one way to not have to engage and still feel superior, huh? /s
I lik u. Wil u b frend?
There's a qualitative question in what the "free" tier entails. If it's basic survival, then that might be "affordable" with room to motivate. If the adequate food was "bachelor chow and water", ok. If the "home" is a basic bed with a lockable door in a walkin closet sized room, ok.
If we say everyone should get all you can eat buffet with quality apartments, then you start eroding the mechanism to motivate people to do work that needs to be done.
I'd like to distance myself from the individualistic, service-oriented notion that an allayou-can-eat-buffet entails.
Give people free homes and a community and they'll sooner or later create an all you can eat potluck.
Imagine if we had a universal basic income and people got paid more than that if they had a job?
Oh wait, that's the whole fucking idea.
You are soo cute, do u have pp
Not everyone HAS to work. There are plenty of homeless people now who don't work. People can choose to work to increase their pay and quality of life. Even if all my needs were met, I'd still like to buy things, travel, etc. The people making the most money in this world right now are definitely not the people who are working the hardest, nor are they cooperating and coordinating for everyone's best interest.