Exactly we could have a society oriented around the arts and sciences, pure creativity and discovery instead of bullshit jobs we could put the pedal to the metal in human freedom and innovation.
Putting aside our political slants, one might ask when exactly in the history of human civilization has any fraction of humanity ever consistently demonstrated that they were willing to devote themselves to the sole pursuit of "the arts and sciences, pure creativity and discovery" for any significant length of time?
If such instances existed, did those noble pursuits come without costs? To either themselves or others?
Say they did manage to exist in harmony with other civilizations (who may not have had any such lofty ideals or pursuits) then how long did they manage to keep doing so? [1] [2]
How long did they survive?
How long did their inventions or works of knowledge survive, in their intended forms?
In fact the evidence is to the contrary that when humans are bequeathed with a surfeit of riches and time to devote, they indulged in decadence, degeneracy and if nothing else sloth.
At which time, they were quickly wiped off by their geopolitical peers who placed a higher importance on self-preservation than they did on arts, science & discovery.
We like to think we have ridden ourselves from the shortsightedness of those older, less-prudent & ill-advised civilizations.
"oriented around" != "sole pursuit". You're making a strawman by inserting an overly-high bar.
However, the USA in the 50s and 60s matches your demand. An incredibly wealthy time, it was also a golden age of modern art and a golden age of science in so many fields. The moon shot itself cost 4% of the USA's GDP. How well did these advances survive? The cultural waves turned out to be the origin of the USA's soft power, with movies, music, and fashion spreading out throughout the world like nothing before. And much of the science continues to be the bedrock of science, engineering, and manufacturing today.
People are already creating more art than we actually need (witness how hard it is to make a living as an artist). Now just wait till the AIs become serious competition at that too.
The amount of money someone can make in our economy as an artist isn't a reflection of how much art we "need." Art in particular is not a commodity that society can just have enough of. And in general, the price something fetches in our economy isn't always a reflection of its value to society. See: salaries of social workers, emergency medical technicians, etc.
Everything, including art, follows supply and demand. Value is the point where they meet. Salaries of social works and EMTs are where the supply of those positions meet the need for those positions in any certain area.
Art has a defined supply and demand, where the supply is high and demand is low (probably due to the fact you can buy copies of famous masterpieces for very cheap).
> Everything, including art, follows supply and demand.
It isn't about supply and demand, it's about transaction costs.
Suppose you could create a work of art that fifty million people would each value at 25c, so total value of two million dollars. Far more than enough to pay your wages for a year. But if you actually try to charge them, the credit card company wants 30c + 3% per person (consuming more than the entire value) and other payment mechanisms suffer similarly infeasible costs in money or inconvenience or otherwise.
But if we would pay the artist unconditionally and then they create art and give it away, we would get two million dollars worth of art for $12,000 and with no transaction costs.
Meanwhile this allows some of the artists to become famous and then charge prices for their art that exceed the transaction costs, and now they're paying taxes and funding the UBI for the next generation of artists/inventors/experimentalists/etc.
> What happens when a competitor creates a substitute artwork (i.e. one that competes for market share with the original artwork) and sells it at 24¢?
Price and value aren't the same thing, that's part of the problem.
Suppose in response to competition the original artist would lower the price to 24c. The customer still gets the same value as before but is paying less. The customer gets 1c more of the surplus and the artist gets 1c less.
But the total surplus is still the same. The benefit the customer gets from having the art hasn't gone down, only the price.
Where this gets weird is displacement. Suppose competing art appears and now half the customers will choose the other art instead, and the customers only have time for one piece of art. Now the original art has lost half its total value because there are half as many people with it, regardless of what price was paid.
Which means it is possible to have "enough" art and more would be too much -- when you have so much that people are too busy with existing art for enough of them to choose the new art to justify its creation. But that point is well past what transaction costs will allow if payment has to be made per-customer via an ugly hack like copyright.
It may even be past the point where there is "too much" art/science/software, because you can justify over-producing a lot of junk if the result is even one more Andy Warhol or Albert Einstein or Alan Turing.
And obviously to total $2M at 25c requires 8M customers rather than 50M if you actually divide by .25 instead of multiplying by 25, so that's even easier.
While in theory art would be efficiently transferred from the ideal seller (artist) to ideal buyer (rich #1 fan), in practice the idea that information falls in the right hands automagically is kinda laughable
Once ai starts making better art than humans it might be able to improve itself better than humans as well. At that point we don't need humans either. Still nice to keep us around though.
"we could have a society oriented around the arts and sciences, pure creativity and discovery instead of bullshit jobs "
I'm afraid your statement implies a misunderstanding of what 'the economy' is.
'The economy' is people providing services and building products for one another.
So that guy who waited on you at the restaurant, the girl who did your payroll, the guy who delivered your mail, the person monitoring your blocks internet connections, the person who planted crops, the person making sure your street is safe to walk down ...
Those 'bullshit jobs' all exist for a reason - because they provide value to someone (like you), and we are willing to pay for it all by doing stuff for others as well.
'The jobs' that we do are a function of what other people in the economy 'want done' in terms of products and services.
Not a function of 'what they want to do'.
If you don't want to do anything that 'helps others' - that's fine, but you can't expect for them to help you in return if your 'lifestyle choice' is 'windsurfing'.
But when we do help each other, the whole is actually greater than the sum of the parts (i.e. comparative value) - and that's where we really start to win.
Most of the things you need done for you are not that fun. It'll always be that way.
I mean, the whole idea is that if people have their basic needs met, they'll be able to be more creative and productive. Homeless people are the perfect counter example.
No. Homeless people almost all have mental illness, substance abuse problems, or some combination of the two.
I'm not seeing why you and the OP think they are representative of the general population in any way. They are, pretty much by definition, people who are too messed up to function in society.
Posting a link to a spun document from an advocacy group doesn't actually prove me wrong.
For example, "sleeping in public places not meant for human
habitation" would include anyone who has ever taken a nap in the airport, even one time.
When the piece starts out with an obviously bogus definition, there's really not much point in going through it point by point. It has zero credibility from the start.
Other sources (easily found by Google) suggest that up to 2/3 of the realchronic homeless population has problems with alcohol and/or other substances
You're moving the goalposts. You said homeless. If you're now shifting your claim to merely "chronic" homeless that's a different conversation all together. Furthermore do you have source material that calls the numbers used in the article into question or were you planning on solely relying on ad hominem to win the day?
No, I'm not. I'm pointing out that the definition given in your "factual" source, to wit "sleeping in public places not meant for human habitation" is ridiculous on its face.
Ever slept in class? Then you've been "homeless", according to your source.
I really don't mean this as a personal attack, but rather as a suggestion: you should learn to tell the difference between factual research and advocacy pieces. Your source is the latter. There is absolutely nothing wrong with advocacy, but one must take it with a grain of salt. When it starts out with a straw man definition (as does your source), perhaps a boulder of salt would be preferable.
"Furthermore do you have source material that calls the numbers used in the article into question"
"An earlier literature review on physical and mental disorders among those who are homeless (Martens, 2001) cited reports that found that anywhere between 25 and 90 percent of people who were homeless had a mental disorder. A review by Toro (2007) suggests that 20 to 40 percent of people who are homeless have a serious mental disorder, with 20 to 25 percent having depression and 5 to 15 percent having schizophrenia. In their introductory review, Greenberg and Rosenheck (2010a) note that estimates are that between 20 and 50 percent of people who are homeless have serious mental illness (SMI). Research reviewed by McQuistion and Gillig (2006) also indicates that between one third and one half of people who are homeless have SMI."
Substance abuse:
Another Midwestern study recruited subjects who were homeless from food programs and shelters (Forney, Lombardo, & Toro, 2007); here, 77 percent of men (n=161) and 55 percent of women (n=57) met criteria for a substance use disorder. Velasquez, Crouch, von Sternberg, and Grosdanis (2000) found that among a sample of 100 clients of the Service of the Emergency Aid Resource Center for the Homeless project in Texas, 60 percent reported use of illicit drugs in the prior 6 months. In an analysis of NESARC data for people who had experienced an episode of homelessness since the age of 15, 74.2 percent of respondents also met criteria for a lifetime substance use disorder; only 30.5 percent of those who had always been domiciled met such criteria (Greenberg & Rosenheck, 2010a).
