>ONCE UPON A time, artists had jobs. And not “advising the Library of Congress on its newest Verdi acquisition” jobs, but job jobs, the kind you hear about in stump speeches. Think of T.S. Eliot, conjuring “The Waste Land” (1922) by night and overseeing foreign accounts at Lloyds Bank during the day, or Wallace Stevens, scribbling lines of poetry on his two-mile walk to work, then handing them over to his secretary to transcribe at the insurance agency where he supervised real estate claims. The avant-garde composer Philip Glass shocked at least one music lover when he materialized, smock-clad and brandishing plumber’s tools, in a home with a malfunctioning appliance. “While working,” Glass recounted to The Guardian in 2001, “I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him that I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.”
he actually drove a NYC taxi for decades to pay bills, buy his first house on the lower east side, etc. in his autobiography, reflecting on it he simply states "i enjoyed driving a cab" for many of the same reasons Uber markets today.
Yep, it’s entirely possible whole new categories of work and goods/services would open up thanks to an UBI. Suddenly a person can choose to work mornings at a nonprofit (presumably paid more in karma than in cash) and afternoons somewhere else making better money. Or maybe work three different jobs that add up to a highly valuable skill after 3 years with each job. Ie a programmer with domain knowledge in commercial driving and liquor business operations.
I like programming but I probably wouldn't spend 40 hours per week on it every week, if I could do whatever. And even then I probably would choose different things to work on and wouldn't sit through stuff like Scrum ceremonies.
Not at all. Yes, pleasing work is wonderful. But you’re still tied to being there for most of your waking hours. It doesn’t matter how flexible the position is, there are opportunity costs.
Modern society would likely not work if everyone had a job they enjoyed. Are there really that many people genuinely interested in sewage, fast food, tax, etc.
This is such a false premise. What you don’t realize about those jobs is they go out of their way to diminish what people earn. “Burger flippers” are not hired full time. They give them full time -1 hour just to avoid providing benefits. They’ll even break up a workers schedule and require them work two different locations in the same day. They are not paid for travel time and the hours don’t add up to full time.
Then there are sewage workers. I recall on “Dirty Jobs” the divers that have to work on submerged pipes make large amounts of money (six figures iirc).
I advocate for UBI because we really do have enough to feed and house everyone. The UBI isn’t a quota system - merely a per deim to purchase the bare minimum. That won’t place artificial prices on commodities nor force labor. People will still purchase goods and services on a relative, trade-off basis. The current system forces labor.
As for whether people will then decide to not work for burger joints: if a business needs to resort to the business practices I mentioned earlier in order to operate then maybe that business isn’t needed by society. Further, people with a UBI will see the minimal hours scheduled as a bonus - they’re just adding another income stream to their UBI at that point. And yes, the line for cutting off either should not exist or be high enough to be negligible at the trade off point.
The most advanced society in the world still needs grave diggers and morticians. You can change the structure of jobs and compensation but you probably can't have a system where people only do work they love.
>The most advanced society in the world still needs grave diggers and morticians. You can change the structure of jobs and compensation but you probably can't have a system where people only do work they love.
There are lots of people that take pride in being grave diggers and morticians. It's also a cool job for anyone with gothic tendencies...
I don't think many people love their work so much they'd be doing it for free.
At best, they'd doing SIMILAR work for free -- but not the work itself, with the commercial and organizational constraints it has.
E.g. even if some people love programming and would still program for free, they wouldn't really want to program the features some bozo PMs have decided, and in the timeline they provided, and with meetings and other baggage that comes with it being a job.
So, one might love the field/domain, but loving "the job" itself is far less common (if it exists).
>I advocate for UBI because we really do have enough to feed and house everyone.
Sure, though I contend we ought to see much further than this. We need infrastructure in place, when the time comes, to allow citizens to collaborate efficiently on large projects as without income and access to capital, loafing around only gets you so far.
Lower-income/no-income citizens in the West rely on welfare, low-income housing as it is but that doesn't dispel the "impoverished" status despite being fed and housed; it mostly stretches beyond homelessness. And by extension ubi won't turn everyone into middle-class citizens. It doesn't address the issues of drug and crime microcultures in the ghetto either.
I think you're underselling the science and engineering behind building waste disposal systems that scale, the science behind the taste, shelf life, etc. of packaged food & beverages, and the complexity of taxes.
Sure, there is a lot of menial work, but society has been on a trend of automating that away for decades. No matter the field, there are things which can't be automated away and those are also things which someone somewhere is bound to find deeply interesting.
“Burger flipping” is not a good nor service critical to society. It’s convenience food and expensive at that. No ones dying because they didn’t eat at McDonalds. If you can afford a burger then you can afford milk and cereal for more than one meal - just an example.
I argue people will be more willing to take menial work with a UBI. Because with UBI people will move from working to survive to working for luxury. Ie the UBI won’t buy them a nicer apartment, but the UBI plus a cruddy but simple job will.
If you know you can afford a sufficiently large home and food for your family at wage X (UBI), how much higher does the pay need to be to motivate you to clean toilets or work in a steel mill? People don't do those things (in general) because they're a public good, or because they're a "calling". They do them because they need the money, and the pay is sufficiently good.
UBI may be a good thing (if we can work out the economics of it), but people will still do the menial and risky jobs out of need, not to end up in the penthouse of a high-rise luxury building unless the pay is damned good.
The economics are sound so long as it’s a simple income. Economists have argued for simple payments to decision makers instead of regulations many times and different contexts.
Automate the stuff people don't like doing, redistribute the proceeds and products, and let everyone reap the bounty. Do we really need fast food anyway?
A cool thing about being an individual is that you don't strictly need to worry about what would happen to the whole economy if everyone quit their jobs. You can just quit your job, and watch the system trivially rebalance as if you were never even there.
You dont have to flip burgers for the rest of your life. As long as there is always transition between jobs there are always enough people in every field of work.
There have been plenty of times in my life where I knew I could otherwise advance but for forces out of my control holding me back. Simple knowledge is never enough for change.
Many forces add up and keep people in inefficient situations. In China, there’s a sort of majority dictatorship holding people down. In the US, there are local, state, and federal forces at play - from things like living in “the wrong” zip code to outsized rent, poor pay, lack of healthcare, through to national competition for scarce, good career options, racism, sexism, many other-isms, and so on.
My point is that many people complain that life's too short while spending 40+ hours per week doing something they don't like without giving it a second thought. Sure, not everyone is able to get a job they love. I'm not saying it's easy. But many don't even try.
