
Show HN: A new alternative to universal basic income: the universal job rebate - jonny_eh
https://medium.com/@jonathanabrams/a-simple-fix-for-jobs-in-the-new-millennium-ea712ea85c75
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ohnotthatguy
Yeah, there is nothing in the world that brings people a deeper more
fulfilling sense of purpose, and meaning to their lives than work. Ask someone
with a family, an artist, or a political activist, and they will surely tell
you, "I love being a Human, but I really don't feel whole without having to
perform labor for the financial benefit of another party at the cost of my
time and energy."

Maybe I'm the only person who reads this stuff who has actually done
construction work, landscaping, painted houses, washed dishes, etc. while what
they really wanted to do was to be studying mathematics and computer science,
but as such a person, I find the "let's try to find a way around universal
income in light of the coming 'automated utopia'" conversation to be extremely
offensive. You say (and I'm paraphrasing for dramatic effect) that 'these poor
people love to work, without work they wouldn't even be whole people' Not
quite as offensive as "Let's liquidate the lower-class when we no longer need
them to perform rote tasks to further our objectives." but close.

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jonny_eh
I hear ya, but at the end of the day people still say they want jobs. Instead
of telling people what they should want, why don't we listen?

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ohnotthatguy
You're referring to people who do not have sufficient access to resources.
Those people say they want jobs because they don't have access to resources,
and they can't envision said access without the intermediary process of having
to perform work at a job to obtain said resources. They view the two concepts:
jobs and resources, as inextricably interwoven facets of a single process.

As someone with a job, with friends and acquaintances who all have jobs, and
parents who have jobs, I feel like I can safely speak for all of them when I
tell you right now: We do not want jobs. We want access to a fair share of the
available resources.

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jonny_eh
But you don't speak for everyone. I like having a job, it happens to pay well,
but even if it didn't I'd still want to work. I like having something to do. I
like having people that depend on me to show up.

I also like vacations, but after a couple weeks I look forward to returning to
work.

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sova
I don't think a Universal Basic Income implies that people stop providing
value to society. The idea is that we are intelligent enough now that we would
find more productive uses of our time than appeasing the financial cycle of
wealth/interest/poverty. Job rebates are a nice idea if jobs are inherently
valuable to society, but they are not always so.

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pm24601
A surprisingly uninformed article.

The article does not consider these issues. The extra people:

1\. need to be trained.

2\. can screw up customer service, misfile things, enter numbers incorrectly,
etc.

3\. Occupy space - there are limits to the number of people that can be in a
factory.

4\. Create a distraction - (asking "beginner" questions)

5\. Diffuse responsibility for completing tasks. (If the same amount of work
is spread over 2 people - who is responsible for a quality outcome)

\-------

Companies only hire people when there is a need. Sadly for the purists: the
economy is driven by the true job creators - the middle class.

Focus on rebuilding the middle class and reduce the wealthy imbalance. (Yes
this means the rich will have to pay up a lot of their wealthy in the form of
taxes.)

Through out history, this has been shown to be the best way for a healthy
economy.

P.S. you are welcome to disagree if you can talk about the 1873 bank panics
(and through the 1900s), the Great Depression . Every example of wealth
imbalance has resulted in a stagnant economy.

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eridius
The only thing this does for people who don't have jobs (who arguably are most
in need of something like Basic Income) is it _hopefully_ causes more jobs to
be created. But these are going to be low-wage jobs (e.g. expect to see jobs
that pay exactly $30k per year). So basically, what you're proposing is to
give people a chance at a shitty job (and remember, it's just a chance, it
certainly won't drive unemployment down to 0%). That's very different from
Basic Income. One of the big benefits of Basic Income is that, freed from the
need to work just to have food/shelter, people can seek out more fulfilling
things to do instead of having to work crappy jobs just to live. I guarantee
you nobody feels fulfilled by working a minimum wage job.

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certifiedloud
One of my favorite jobs was minimum wage. Certainly more fulfilling than doing
nothing.

I can't be alone in feeling the therapeutic effects of work.

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eridius
Nobody said people on basic income have to do nothing. One of the big wins of
basic income is it frees people up to do whatever they find fulfilling. This
could be working the same job you have today. This could be going to school so
you can do more than just flip burgers. Or maybe becoming an artist, or a
musician, or whatever else you may be passionate about.

It's also worth pointing out that Basic Income certainly won't give people a
very comfortable life, so they'll still want some form of additional income.
But maybe they don't have to work two jobs to feed their family anymore.

~~~
certifiedloud
I wasn't talking about basic income. I was addressing your "guarantee" that
nobody is fulfilled working for minimum wage.

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ocdtrekkie
Interesting, though it does beg the question of it also will encourage work
for the sake of work. An example is provided that one could be hired to write
hand-written messages on products. But one could also be tasked to do
something robots could do because you just artificially made human labor
cheaper than your robots.

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jonny_eh
> But one could also be tasked to do something robots could do because you
> just artificially made human labor cheaper than your robots

Exactly, that's my main point. It gives humans a fighting chance against the
robots.

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ocdtrekkie
I don't think humans being effectively modern mules is a good thing. If robots
are better than humans at something, we should generally let robots do that
thing. It would be more human labor hours to use screwdrivers for things, but
we use power drills where applicable because power drills are better.

Now, there are things we have also started letting robots do that they are not
better at doing than humans, mind you. I think Google has demonstrated how
colossally bad algorithms are at providing customer service, for example. I
could definitely see this model making it more palatable for companies to get
rid of the reviled automated answering systems and similar processes, and put
humans back in the customer service field, in particular.

I am concerned about enabling the former, I would like to enable the latter.

~~~
k__
I Bad the same thought.

"give people purpose. how? lets give them mechanical jobs!"

wat?!

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bluesign
This doesn't solve immigration, just increases the fake employment.

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Fjolsvith
I don't see this idea as being all peachy for businesses. They have a lot of
extra expenses beyond the wage for each employee.

