> Maybe we need to acknowledge that we're moving towards having a society where "everyone has a job that earns them their living" is untenable
No, we need a society that guarantees everyone a job, a job that will generate the income necessary for survival. We shouldn't give up agency and become simple wards of the state, waiting hand stretched ahead for the UBI to fall from the crumblings at the tech billionaires table. UBI without jobs is humiliating and lacks vertical mobility. Self reliance is good.
The slogan should be "Give us jobs or give us the means of production!"
In the future it will be easier to be self reliant by using solar energy, agro-bots, 3d-printing and various biotech and materials research technologies. We can be self reliant, we don't need no stinking BHI. We don't like to be passive and hand our dignity out for a penny.
As a final argument, think about this: what is cheaper? what is more tenable - to hand out free money to everyone, or to create jobs that pay for themselves? The jobs could be - cultivate your own food, raise your own house, educate the children of your community, repair cars and electronics for local people, etc. Most of the jobs emerge from the needs of the community, so the community can hand them to itself. Then only a small amount of external aid could go as far as a huge amount of UBI.
I welcome the crumblings of the tech billionaires table. Let them think they're the masters of the universe while subsidizing my ability to spend my time the way I want.
Let the tech billionaires be saddled with the moralizing virtues of self-reliance and feelings of humiliation. Certain societies raise their youth to value work as a means of proving themselves. The truth is that perspective is completely subjective and in many ways a pathology more than a guiding principle.
Humans will work. That is what we do. If we're alive we will create reasons to do things. The problem is who is deciding the values we're supposed to work toward. Distributing work will fail because people don't agree on what is important and will even act against their own self interest. When that happens what do you do? Do you punish them? Do you leave them to die? Do you ostracize them from the community? That's why the system we have now in the industrialized west works at all, because it allows us the illusion of choice. Our shared language of moralizing and virtue signaling is how we cope with the fact that we actually don't have a choice, we're just pragmatically putting our heads down and picking our poison.
With UBI it's scary to think of millions of people unmoored from work because work is a form of social control. UBI will turn hundreds of years of social convention on its head. As much as we want to believe it there are no iron laws of culture. Some values will be destroyed and new values will be born. That's the nature of change.
Our descendants at some undefined point in the future will find our moralizing about work absolutely quaint.
I agree, but for this attitude to work, we need to recognize that this situation won't happen by itself. It will take massive cultural shifts, a lot of money, and a lot of time. We've already seen what happens to communities when all the jobs leave, and help isn't sufficient (imagine any crumbling city). It's a lot harder to, for lack of a better word, rehabilitate those communities after they succumb to generational poverty.
I think a much better alternative to UBI, which is just a modern twist on bread and circuses, would simply be larger inheritance taxes that are kept by the state. That way work that actually contributes to human betterment still gets rewarded, but society doesn't begin to stratify into rich and poor people in a world where it becomes almost impossible to move from poor to rich.
That said, your idea isn't mutually exclusive with UBI. One interpretation of UBI is that it acts more as a social safety net than as a long-term solution.
What if the economy evolves in such a way that most people are unproductive?
What if the cost of creating a job (creating a jobs bureaucracy, administering it by assigning jobs to people, making sure they show up to work, etc.) is actually higher than the economic value that those jobs generate?
In that case, 'jobs for all' would just be a subsidy, or UBI, with many more steps, no?
I agree that giving people a share of the means of production makes sense. We should experiment with granting a share of equity to all citizens and sitting an equity floor.
Then make the job one that enriches lives. "Entertainment" comes to mind as today's best example (acting, sports trainers, players, etc).
However that comes to my mind because what I really think that the job should be is a more general category of 'problem solver' and right now society is really bad about making it easy for people to make good choices and have positive impacts.
You might read up about the history of the communist block, where such a system was in place. The government was literally obliged to give every single person a job, and it caused a ton of problems.
Seriously, UBI is better than inventing jobs just so that people could have jobs. At least in this system, you can get cash, and become a home maker, an artist, or invent some other occupation for yourself that you wouldn't otherwise have. Unlike the "guaranteed job" program, where you would be pushed to do barely useful stuff, that not only would break your spirit, but would not give you time to do something truly productive.
Except local production is often less efficient/more expensive. UBI would create a floor for job quality, and allow people to pursue riskier or less capitalistic ventures.
Eventually, when the current people are long gone, maybe it will be standard practice to rely on UBI and it will have a decent value. But in the meantime, there will be huge resource allocation problems.
We need people to defend themselves from big corporations that suck the money out of communities, such as Walmart, Amazon, Comcast, Verizon, large banks, Samsung, Apple, Monsanto, etc as they start automating jobs and paying less in wages.
We could give everyone in the world a job right now by banning construction equipment, computers, cars, assembly lines, or any form of automation really.
No, we need a society that guarantees everyone a job, a job that will generate the income necessary for survival. We shouldn't give up agency and become simple wards of the state, waiting hand stretched ahead for the UBI to fall from the crumblings at the tech billionaires table. UBI without jobs is humiliating and lacks vertical mobility. Self reliance is good.
The slogan should be "Give us jobs or give us the means of production!"
In the future it will be easier to be self reliant by using solar energy, agro-bots, 3d-printing and various biotech and materials research technologies. We can be self reliant, we don't need no stinking BHI. We don't like to be passive and hand our dignity out for a penny.
As a final argument, think about this: what is cheaper? what is more tenable - to hand out free money to everyone, or to create jobs that pay for themselves? The jobs could be - cultivate your own food, raise your own house, educate the children of your community, repair cars and electronics for local people, etc. Most of the jobs emerge from the needs of the community, so the community can hand them to itself. Then only a small amount of external aid could go as far as a huge amount of UBI.
The name of this philosophy is Local Self Reliance and it is related to Distributism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism).
A list of related concepts: community ISPs, credit coops, anti-trust, buying from local businesses.
This is a promo video from the Institute of Local Self Reliance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDw4dZLSDXg