
Ask HN: Could we restructure society so that people don't hate their jobs? - thepope
As it is we seem to have a lot of people doing jobs that are preventing them from living up to their full potential. Is it really true that if you gave people a universal basic income that they would devolve into couch potatoes? When you think of it how much free time do you really have in the day? After getting ready in the morning, your commute, work plus a lunch hour, a trip to the store, some time to decompress, dinner, and spending time with your kids how much time is left for yourself? Even if you had the will power left over at the end of the day to give 100% you&#x27;re so overburdened that it&#x27;s no wonder you can&#x27;t get anywhere. And we have the gual to suggest that these same people would do nothing but sit on the couch all day if they were let off their leash. That&#x27;s cognitive dissonance right there.<p>I have worked in a few industries that I had zero interest in at all. Yet every time I made contributions to those industries out of a sense of satisfaction that I never could have got sitting at home. Perhaps you might say people will get satisfaction from playing video games but I think that’s a hollow argument. It&#x27;s hollow in the same way that winning at video games makes you feel. Like you just wasted a bunch of time when you could have gotten something done. People will use video games to escape, for sure. But few will find real meaning in them.<p>We are forcing people to spend all of their waking hours drudging through a routine that leaves them exhausted before they are free to make any choices for themselves. But if we gave people time to live up to their potential we would see a net positive in both the health and financial security of our nation.
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edoo
Technology is deflationary. You get more done with less. Prices should be
going down not up. The average steel worker now can produce thousands of times
the amount of steel than their counterparts could a hundred years ago, yet
they work more hours and receive less purchasing power for their time. Most
all of this can be traced to regulations, like fiat currency and patent
systems. If we had an honest society not based on grift the average person
would be able to work a fraction of the time they have to now to make ends
meet, which would let them have massively more free time to pursue what they
wanted and may not hate doing some drudge work everyday. When I was a kid you
could put yourself through college and rent an apartment delivering pizzas a
few nights a week. In the 50's you could work a couple days a month to pay the
rent. It is the attempts at social planning that drain the tech gains away
from people. Ditch the fiat.

~~~
Vinceo
What should replace the fiat?

~~~
edoo
The only thing legally allowed in this in country, a hard currency.

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mrfusion
I talk to a lot of retired people. And a lot of them mention they’re bored and
interested in finding some kind of fun job. of those that have tried it, it’s
gone badly. There’s just so much nonsense in any job.

It seems like employers really take advantage of the fact that the employees
need the money to live.

~~~
SpikeDad
Very true. I retired early (around 50) and not having enough money to be a
world globetrotter I found things boring around my town. So I started working
again (2x) 4 times per week and that helped a lot.

I agree that older workers not in specific high needs businesses are seen as
low wage cogs.

Funny but I live in a town with a lot of people who've retired and so even
volunteering is difficult - there's a glut of volunteers. Now with Covid stay
at home almost all volunteer opportunities have dried up.

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sunstone
People don't hate their jobs so much as they dislike having a boss. That's why
fishermen, farmers and other bossless occupations stay working way past 65.

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elindbe2
Any solution to this problem needs to consider that its not just about getting
work done. It's getting the right work done to satisfy the needs of society.
Money acts fairly well as a feedback mechanism, because if the work you're
doing isn't useful to someone else (or at least believed by them to be
useful), you won't get paid to do it.

For example, If I'm feeling generous I might be willing to cut the grass of an
elderly neighbor or volunteer to repaint some rooms in a local school. On the
other hand, I'm not going to spend thousands of hours learning a trade plus
tens of thousands on equipment, licensing, etc so I can build a school or
build my neighbor a house for free.

Jobs consist of some mix of fun work and drudge work. If I'm not getting
compensated, even if I do need some small amount of work in my life, why
wouldn't I focus on the fun work (e.g. writing new software) and skip the
drudge work (e.g. software testing, maintenance, planning, work tracking,
documentation)?

Also, I'd like to say I've always felt that my jobs took up too much of my
time. Even if I decide that some work in my life is valuable, it might be at a
much lower level than would benefit society (e.g. 8 hours per week vs. 40
hours per week). Average that over a whole society and that's a lot less
getting done.

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fallingfrog
Of course we could, but it would mean a sharp reduction in the values of most
stocks, declines in economic output as measured by products and services
bought and sold, and empowerment of regular people at the expense of elites.
People would spend a lot more time creating art and spending time with friends
and family and not converting raw materials into widgets.

For all those reasons, it can’t happen without some kind of revolutionary
break with our current economic system.

I mean on some level you have to see past the whole work/life balance paradigm
and see that really, it’s _all_ life, and is this really how you want to live
it? If we were genuinely free to make choices and not forced to fight over
positional assets we would make dramatically different choices.

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Mountain_Skies
I've done unpleasant work throughout my life. Some of it blue collar, some of
it white collar. It's almost never the work itself that made me unhappy and
almost always management. In the vast majority of the cases, the management
issues had little to nothing to do with productivity or increasing income for
the company. It was about petty turf wars and ego stroking. A minority of the
cases were due to death marches from poor management. Conflicts with co-
workers have happened but those are almost always short lived and resolved
quickly. The nasty jobs like getting burnt by hot exhaust pipes while changing
oil all day or manually changing strings random enough to defy regex into
something new in thousands of files are unpleasant but you do them and they're
done. The petty middle management sociopaths on the other hand, they just keep
going on and on and on. Glad I'm financially secure and wise enough now to
quickly exit those situations.

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alexmingoia
We don't need UBI to work less than 8-10 hours a day. We can work less by
living with less, and learning to be more productive. It really is that
simple.

We are not forced to work. Work is required to produce or acquire the things
we consume. There are only two ways to reduce the need for work: Consume less,
or produce more with the same amount of work.

~~~
ApolloRising
The problem are the major costs that are out of your control when you have a
family like the cost of an apartment in major cities with more than 1 bedroom
or family health insurance etc. When you're single that makes things a lot
simpler but people with families...

~~~
alexmingoia
Costs are within a family's control. There's just more communication involved.

And costs are just one side of the equation. Income is the other side. People
can learn new skills. People can change jobs.

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dmccunney
A universal basic income is not a cure for this particular problem.

The reason the idea is getting interest is the number of people who don't have
and can't _get_ jobs.

Buckminster Fuller talked years ago about the need to abolish the notion of
"making a living" because he was prescient as usual and foresaw a time when
many people _couldn 't_.

You "make a living" doing a job. The job _exists_ because someone else is
willing to _pay_ to have that job done. What happens when you don't know how
to do anything someone else will pay for?

Work flows to where it can be done cheapest, and pretty much always has.

As the Internet Eats the World, and robotics become more sophisticated, whole
classes of jobs are going away. They are either being automated, or are being
done elsewhere because the job does not have to be done where you are and
someone elsewhere will do it cheaper than you can. They can do it cheaper
because it costs less to live where they do, and will accept a lower price
than you can charge.

(Government efforts at protectionism at best slow the process. They _cannot_
eliminate the problem. And protectionist efforts raise costs for everyone
else. How much _more_ are you willing to pay for things you buy to see that
they are made by workers in your country? At some point you'll say "That's too
expensive" and not pay it, which is why those jobs go elsewhere in they first
place.)

Technology gets praised as creating jobs, and indeed, it does. But the new
jobs created don't help those whose jobs were eliminated by technology. By
definition, those new jobs are _new_ , and the folks idled don't know how to
do them, and possibly can't learn because the job requires the equivalent of
an advanced degree to be _able_ to do it. What do those folks do instead?

Work flowing to where it can be done cheapest has always been a factor. What
is changing is the amount of work that _can_ be done elsewhere or by machine.
Folks doing unskilled/low skilled labor have suffered the most, as no one will
pay living wages for that sort of work in an industrialized nation like the
US. Well meaning efforts like mandated minimum wage increases are a band aid.
There must _be_ minimum wage jobs covered by those mandates, and the higher
the minimum wage goes, the harder employers think about what the job is worth
and whether they want to pay that much for it. If you _have_ a minimum wage
job, you benefit (if you don't get laid off to cut costs.) If you don't have a
job and are looking for a minimum wage job the bar just got raised.

But increasingly, it's not just unskilled/low skilled labor affected. I tell
people, if it _can_ be done by machine, or elsewhere for less than you want to
be paid, it _will_. We are still discovering how many that applies to.

Will a guaranteed basic income make everyone couch potatoes? Hardly. Aside
from providing income needed to live, jobs structure _time_ , and give you
something to do with your waking hours. The bigger question is just what sort
of potential people have to unleash. What would you do with your time if you
didn't have to work for a living?

This is ultimately a political and social pro0blem more than an economic one.
The notion of "making a living" is embedded in our culture. Jobs are _status_
markers. What you do for a living and what sort of living you make doing it is
a principal source of status. What happens to your status when you _can 't_
make a living?

I don't have good answers for any of this. I am simply convinced that we aer
mostly not even asking the right _questions_.

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dojitza1
I think we humans rely on ourselves doing menial and unrewarding work too much
for us to give ourselves the ability to refuse.

Slavery was abolished though, so I am hopeful.

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mxmilkb
Check out Murray Bookchin.

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AlexanderNull
There are plenty of jobs which are meaningful yet worthless from a
capitalistic respect. I've turned down plenty of jobs in the past that would
provide much more benefit to the world at large because they couldn't pay me
enough to save up comfortably for retirement. So instead I've just worn these
golden handcuffs for the past few years while working in marketing tech (which
if anything is a net detractor from society). I'm a fantastic teacher and
enjoy getting the opportunity any chance I can, but I could never do that for
a living because the wages wouldn't leave me with enough to be financially
secure in this nation.

It's amazing how much of privilege there is attached to volunteer work. So
much of it can make a significant difference in other people's lives. Yet such
time commitments either require that you've made money elsewhere (normally
through means not super productive to society) in your "real job" making
business widgets/yet another spreadsheet, or that you also willfully give up
on your own financial security.

Even if a significant portion of the population were to become couch potatoes
I posit that society would be no worse off in the long run. Such people are
not the people currently making the next cure for cancer, or rescuing people
from burning buildings. Such people are those barely getting through the day
as is, not giving a crap about their boring job, just going through the
motions to make money for someone else. Sure the companies that currently pay
an unfairly low rate for those people's limited time will suffer... GOOD, such
predatory behaviors should not be supported, propped up, an even enforced as
they currently are by our government.

By providing people with an alternative to meaningless work we not only free
up those who would want to do truly beneficial work to do so, we also provide
much greater market power to those who simply want something minimally
productive during the day. So many people make minimum wage or less for
amazingly demanding and unsafe work. Currently that is the only option for so
many people, so those employers who are unscrupulous can wield so much power
and demand so much while providing so little in return.

Even if a significant percentage of the population ends up just spending their
time out hiking, watching tv, or generally spending more time with their
friends family (horrible outcome right?!?), if the rest of us get to benefit
from either of the two previous scenarios then the only humans who wouldn't be
better off would either be 1) those who think they deserve all the riches of
the world even if they must bury the rest of us, or 2) those who use
insecurity to force people into laying down their lives to fight their battles
for them because they can keep those "lowly" people from having anything of
meaning in this life.

~~~
Vinceo
Thanks for a very insightful post

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slx26
I find the discussion in the comments very interesting.

Yes, we could restructure society. More than hate, what worries me is the many
people that can't find a way forward in the current world and the immense
amount of wasted human potential.

We live in the world with most opportunities we have ever seen, and yet we are
really poor on time and spaces to develop that potential. Maybe in the past we
also didn't have that much time, but nowadays the dissonance in "what could be
and what is" is definitely at an all time high.

But I believe the current crisis we are facing is a good opportunity to let
everyone know how fragile capitalism is. I don't say everything is terrible
with capitalism, but its need for an efficient market that needs to keep
growing and becoming ever more efficient has some clear downsides. First, the
consumism and the general stress it causes to the population with its
relentless pace. Keep finding new ways to convince people that you are giving
them something valuable. Otherwise you won't be competitive enough and you
will fall. The second problem is the inflexibility during times of economic
deceleration. So, if we have a pandemic and we must only provide essential
services, what? Why does the world need to collapse? What kind of miserable
system is this?

I think we could reach a social contract where we all contribute a bit on what
we need to satisfy our basic needs, without having to work endless hours in
miserable shifts, treated like production machines instead of what we are,
which is humans.

But without a doubt, changing society seems extremely hard at this point. It's
not like anyone owns the system. The monster has already grown under its own
premises, and no one really holds a key or controls it.

From my perspective, the only thing we can do is try to find ways to free more
time for people, and create spaces that exist outside the capitalist system,
with as little relation to money as possible. You can't really convince
everyone with an ideology. We need to slowly change the dynamics under which
we live, and with that progressively shift the direction to which we walk.
Sadly, this only tends to happen as enough people hit the wall, and that means
an astounding and unnacceptable amount of suffering.

Still, I really wonder about people's potential. I'd like to live in a world
like this just to see what would we be capable of. Would it be something
extraordinary, or wouldn't it be that different from what we have now? I'd
really want to see it.

Reducing the problems we currently have and giving everyone more space and
time to pursue whatever they feel will fill their hearts is not such a big
technological / technical problem as a problem of social organization,
communication and consensus.

~~~
luxuryballs
I’d argue that it’s not capitalism that is fragile, markets are a natural
phenomenon, what we are witnessing is government being very powerful and
technology enabling people to communicate rapidly and effectively force the
market into submission.

