If you are a consequentialist, you should think about the consequences of such decision.
For example, imagine a civilization where an average person has to work nine hours to produce enough food to survive. Now the pharaoh makes a new law saying that (a) all produced food has to be distribute equally among all citizens, and (b) no one can be compelled to work more than eight hours; you can work as a volunteer, but all your produced food is redistributed equally.
What would happen is such situation? In my opinion, this would be a mass Prisoners’ Dilemma where people would gradually stop cooperating (because the additional hour of work gives them epsilon benefits) and start being hungry. There would be no legal solution; people would try to make some food in their free time illegally, but the unlucky ones would simply starve and die.
The law would seem great in far mode, but its near mode consequences would be horrible. Of course, if the pharaoh is not completely insane, he would revoke the law; but there would be a lot of suffering meanwhile.
If people had “a basic human right to have enough money without having to work”, situation could progress similarly. It depends on many things—for example how much of the working people’s money would you have to redistribute to non-working ones, and how much could they keep. Assuming that one’s basic human right is to have $500 a month, but if you work, you can keep $3000 a month, some people could still prefer to work. But there is no guarantee it would work long-term. For example there would be a positive feedback loop—the more people are non-working, the more votes politicians can gain by promising to increase their “basic human right income”, the higher are taxes, and the smaller incentives to work. Also, it could work for the starting generation, but corrupt the next generation… imagine yourself as a high school student knowing that you will never ever have to work; how much effort would an average student give to studying, instead of e.g. internet browsing, Playstation gaming, or disco and sex? Years later, the same student will be unable to keep a job that requires education.
Also, if less people have to work, the more work is not done. For example, it will take more time to find a cure for cancer. How would you like a society where no one has to work, but if you become sick, you can’t find a doctor? Yes, there would be some doctors, but not enough for the whole population, and most of them would have less education and less experience than today. You would have to pay them a lot of money, because they would be rare, and because most of the money you pay them would be paid back to state as tax, so even everything you have could be not enough motivating for them.
Systems that don’t require people to work are only beneficial if non-human work (or human work not motivated by need) is still producing enough goods that the humans are better off not working and being able to spend their time in other ways.
I don’t think we’re even close to that point. I can imagine societies in a hundred years that are at that point (I have no idea whether they’ll happen or not), but it would be foolish for them to condemn our lack of such a system now since we don’t have the ability to support it, just as it would be foolish for us to condemn people in earlier and less well-off times for not having welfare systems as encompassing as ours.
I’d also note that issues like abolition and universal suffrage are qualitatively distinct from the issue of a minimum guaranteed income (what the quote addresses). Even the poorest of societies can avoid holding slaves or placing women or men in legally inferior roles. The poorest societies cannot afford the “full unemployment” discussed in the quote, and neither can even the richest of modern societies right now (they could certainly come closer than the present, but I don’t think any modern economy could survive the implementation of such a system in the present).
I do agree, however, about it being a solid goal, at least for basic amenities.
Even the poorest of societies can avoid holding slaves or placing women or men in legally inferior roles.
To avoid having slaves, the poorest society could decide to kill all war captives, and to let starve to death all people unable to pay their debts. Yes, this would avoid legal discrimination. Is it therefore a morally preferable solution?
Since when has the institution of slavery been a charitable one? Historically, slave-owners have payed immense costs, directly and indirectly, for the privilege of owning slaves, and done so knowingly and willingly. It is human nature to derive pleasure from holding power over others.
I’m not sure about those direct costs. According to my references, a male slave in 10th-century Scandinavia cost about as much as a horse, a female slave about two-thirds as much; that’s a pretty good chunk of change but it doesn’t seem obviously out of line with the value of labor after externalities. I don’t have figures offhand for any other slaveholding cultures, but the impression I get is that the pure exercise of power was not the main determinant of value in most, if not all, of them,
I seem to recall someone arguing that, in combat between iron age tribes, it was basically a choice between massacre and slavery—if you did neither, they would wreck revenge upon your tribe further down the line.
This wouldn’t be charity, as I guess the winners did benefit from having a source of labour that didn’t need to be compensated at the market rate, but it would be a case where slavery was beneficial to the victims.
(I think Carlyle was wrong about other supposed cases of slavery proving beneficial for the victims)
One could argue that happened in Ancient Rome, with prisoners fo war as the main source of slaves. Also they/their descendants arguably benefited in the long term from being part of the larger more sophisticated culture, if they survived that long.
In poor societies that permit slavery, a man might be willing to sell himself into slavery. He gets food and lodging, possibly for his family as well as himself; his new purchaser gets a whole lot of labour. There’s a certain loss of status, but a person might well be willing to live with that in order to avoid starvation.
I’d also note that issues like abolition and universal suffrage are qualitatively distinct from the issue of a minimum guaranteed income (what the quote addresses). Even the poorest of societies can avoid holding slaves or placing women or men in legally inferior roles.
Elections can take quite a bit of resources to run when you have a large voting population...
No, politicians can afford to spend lots of money on them. The actual mechanism of elections have never, so far as I know, been all that expensive pre-computation.
IAWYC, but the claims that most of the economic costs of elections are in political spending, and most of the costs of actually running elections are in voting machines are both probably wrong. (Public data is terrible, so I’m crudely extrapolating all of this from local to national levels.)
The opportunity costs of voting alone dwarf spending on election campaigns. Assuming that all states have the same share of GDP, that people who don’t a full-state holiday to vote take an hour off to vote, that people work 260 days a year and 8 hours a day, and that nobody in the holiday states do work, then we get:
Political spending: 5.3 billion USD
Opportunity costs of elections: 15 trillion USD (US GDP) (9/50 (states with voting holidays) 1⁄260 (percentage of work-time lost) + 41⁄50 (states without holidays) 1⁄601⁄8 (percentage of work-time lost)) ≈ 16 billion USD
Extrapolating from New York City figures, election machines cost ~1.9 billion nationwide. (50 million for a population ~38 times smaller than the total US population.) and extrapolating Oakland County’s 650,000 USD cost across the US’s 3143 counties, direct costs are just over 2 billion USD. (This is for a single election; however, some states have had as many as 5 elections in a single year. The cost of the voting machines can be amortized over multiple elections in multiple years.)
(If you add together the opportunity costs for holding one general and one non-general election a year (no state holidays; around ~7 billion USD), plus the costs of actually running them, plus half the cost of the campaign money, the total cost/election seems to be around 30 billion USD, or ~0.002% of the US’s GDP.)
Correction accepted. Still seems like something a poor society could afford, though, since labor and opportunity would also cost less. I understand that lots of poor societies do.
The actual mechanism of elections have never, so far as I know, been all that expensive pre-computation.
What? If anything I’d assume them to be more expensive before computers were introduced. In Italy where they are still paper based they have to hire people to count the ballots (and they have to pay them a lot, given that they select people at random and you’re not allowed to refuse unless you are ill or something).
According to Wikipedia, the 2005 elections in germany did cost 63 million euros, with a population of 81 million people. 0,78 eurocent per person or the 0,00000281st part of the GDP. Does not seem much, in the grander scheme of things. And since the german constitutional court prohibited the use of most types of voting machines, that figure does include the cost to the helpers; 13 million, again, not a prohibitive expenditure.
“Low electoral costs, approximately $1 to $3 per elector, tend to manifest in countries with longer electoral experience”
. In Italy where they are still paper based they have to hire people to count the ballots (and they have to pay them a lot, given that they select people at random and you’re not allowed to refuse unless you are ill or something
That’s a somewhat confusing comment. If they’re effectively conscripted (them not being allowed to refuse), not really “hired”—that would imply they don’t need to be paid a lot...
Is that that little? I think many fewer people would vote if they had to pay $3 out of their own pocket in order to do so.
If they’re effectively conscripted (them not being allowed to refuse), not really “hired”—that would imply they don’t need to be paid a lot...
A law compelling people to do stuff would be very unpopular, unless they get adequate compensation. Not paying them much would just mean they would feign illness or something. (If they didn’t select people by lot, the people doing that would be the ones applying for that job, who would presumably like it more than the rest of the population and hence be willing to do that for less.)
Systems that don’t require people to work are only beneficial if non-human work (or human work not motivated by need) is still producing enough goods that the humans are better off not working
Well, yes. Almost tautologically so, I should think. The tricky part is working out when humans are better off.
If you are a bayesian, you should think about how much evidence your imagination constitutes.
For example, imagine a civilization where an average person gains little or no total productivity by working over 8 hour per day. Imagine, moreover, that in this civilization, working 10 hours a day doubles your risk of coronary heart disease, the leading cause of death in this civilization. Finally, imagine that, in this civilization, a common way for workers to signal their dedication to their jobs is by staying at work long hours, regardless of the harm it does both to their company and themselves.
In this civilization, a law preventing individuals from working over 8 hours per day is a tremendous social good.
Work hour skepticism leaves out the question of the cost of mistakes. It’s one thing to have a higher proportion of defective widgets on an assembly line (though even that can matter, especially if you want a reputation for high quality products), another if the serious injury rate goes up, and a third if you end up with the Exxon Valdez.
the higher are taxes, and the smaller incentives to work
You mean “incentives to fully report your income”, right? ;-) (There are countries where a sizeable fraction of the economy is underground. I come from one.)
how much effort would an average student give to studying, instead of e.g. internet browsing, Playstation gaming, or disco and sex?
The same they give today. Students not interested in studying mostly just cheat.
Well, if your society isn’t rich enough, you just do what you can. (And a lot of work really isn’t all that important; would it be that big of a disaster if your local store carried fewer kinds of cosmetics, or if your local restaurant had trouble hiring waiters?)
It is true that in the long run, things could work out worse with a guarantee of sufficient food/supplies for everyone. I think, though, that this post answers the wrong question; the question to answer in order to compare consequences is how probable it is to be better or worse, and by what amounts. Showing that it “could” be worse merely answers the question “can I justify holding this belief” rather than the question “what belief should I hold”. The potential benefits of a world where people are guaranteed food seem quite high on the face of it, so it is a question well worth asking seriously… or would be if one were in a position to actually do anything about it, anyway.
Prisoners’ dilemmas amongst humans with reputation and social pressure effects do not reliably work out with consistent defection, and models of societies (and students*) can easily predict almost any result by varying the factors they model and how they do so, and so contribute very little evidence in the absence of other evidence that they generate accurate predictions.
The only reliable information that I am aware of is that we know that states making such guarantees can exist for multiple generations with no obvious signs of failure, at least with the right starting conditions, because we have such states existing in the world today. The welfare systems of some European countries have worked this way for quite a long time, and while some are doing poorly economically, others are doing comparably well.
I think that it is worth assessing the consequences of deciding to live by the idea of universal availability of supplies, but they are not so straightforwardly likely to be dire as this post suggests, requiring a longer analysis.
As I wrote, it depends on many things. I can imagine a situation where this would work; I can also imagine a situation where it would not. As I also wrote, I can imagine such system functioning well if people who don’t work get enough money to survive, but people who do work get significantly more.
Data point: In Slovakia many uneducated people don’t work, because it wouldn’t make economical sense for them. Their wage, minus traveling expenses, would be only a little more, in some cases even less than their welfare. What’s the point of spending 8 hours in work if in result you have less money? They cannot get higher wages, because they are uneducated and unskilled; and in Slovakia even educated people get relatively little money. The welfare cannot be lowered, because the voters on the left would not allow it. The social pressure stops working if too many people in the same town are doing this; they provide moral support for each other. We have villages where unemployment is over 80% and people have already accommodated to this; after a decade of such life, even if you offer them a work with a decent wage, they will not take it, because it would mean walking away from their social circle.
This would not happen in a sane society, but it does happen in the real life. Other European countries seem to fare better in this aspect, but I can imagine the same thing happening there in a generation or two. A generation ago most people would probably not predict this situation in Slovakia.
I also can’t imagine the social pressure to work on the “generation Facebook”. If someone spends most of their day on Facebook or playing online multiplayer games, who exactly is going to socially press them? Their friends? Most of them live the same way. Their parents? The conflict between generations is not the same thing as peer pressure. And the “money without work is a basic human right” meme also does not help.
It could work in a country where the difference between average wage (even for a less educated and less skilled people) is much more than one needs to survive. But it can work long-term only if the amount of “basic human right money” does not grow faster than the average wage. -- OK, finally here is something that can be measured: what is the relative increase in wages vs welfares in western European countries in recent decades; optionally, extrapolate these numbers to estimate how long the system can survive.
This is interesting, particularly the idea of comparing wage growth against welfare growth predicting success of “free money” welfare. I agree that it seems reasonably unlikely that a welfare system paying more than typical wages, without restrictions conflicting with the “detached from work” principle, would be sustainable, and identifying unsustainable trends in such systems seems like an interesting way to recognise where something is going to have to change, long-term.
I appreciate the clarification; it provides what I was missing in terms of evidence or reasoned probability estimates over narrative/untested model. I’m taking a hint from feedback that I likely still communicated this poorly, and will revise my approach in future.
Back on the topic of taking these ideas as principles, perhaps more practical near-term goals which provide a subset of the guarantee, like detaching availability of resources basic survival from the availability of work, might be more probably achievable. There are a wider range of options available for implementing these ideas, and of incentives/disincentives to avoid long-term use. An example which comes to mind is providing users with credit usable only to order basic supplies and basic food. My rough estimate is that it seems likely that something in this space could be designed to operate sustainably with only the technology we have now.
On the side, relating to generation Facebook, my model of the typical 16-22 year old today would predict that they’d like to be able to buy an iPad, go to movies, afford alcohol, drive a nice car, go on holidays, and eventually get most of the same goals previous generations sought, and that their friends will also want these things. At younger ages, I agree that parental pressure wouldn’t be typically classified as “peer pressure”, but I still think it likely to provide significant incentive to do school work; the parents can punish them by taking away their toys if they don’t, as effectively as for earlier generations. My model is only based on my personal experience, so mostly this is an example of anecdotal data leading to different untested models.
An example which comes to mind is providing users with credit usable only to order basic supplies and basic food.
I have heard this idea proposed, and many people object against it saying that it would take away the dignity of those people. In other words, some people seem to think that “basic human rights” include not just things necessary for survival, but also some luxury and perhaps some status items (which then obviously stop being status items, if everyone has them).
parents can punish them by taking away their toys if they don’t, as effectively as for earlier generations.
In theory, yes. However, as a former teacher I have seen parents completely fail at this.
Data point: A mother came to school and asked me to tell her 16 year old daughter, my student, to not spend all her free time at internet. I did not understand WTF she wanted. She explained to me that as a computer science teacher her daughter will probably regard me an authority about computers, so if I ask her to not use the computer all day long, she wil respect me. This was her last hope, because as a mother she could not convince her daughter to go away from the computer.
To me this seemed completely insane. First, the teachers in given school were never treated as authorities on anything; they were usually treated like shit both by students and school administration (a month later I left that school). Second, as a teacher I have zero influence on what my students do outside school, she as a mother is there; she has many possible ways to stop her daughter from interneting… for instance to forcibly turn off the computer, or just hide the computer somewhere while her daughter is at school. But she should have started doing something before her daughter turned 16. If she does not know that, she is clearly unqualified to have children; but there is no law against that.
OK, this was an extreme example, but during my 4-years teaching carreer I have seen or heard from colleagues about many really fucked up parents; and those people were middle and higher social class. This leads me to very pesimistic views, not shared by people who don’t have the same experience and are more free to rationalize this away. I think that if you need parents to do something non-trivial, you should expect at least 20% of population to fail at that. Let’s suppose that in each generation 20% of parents fail to pressure their children to work, in a world where work is not necessary for decent living. What happens in 5 generations?
My model is only based on my personal experience
Personal experience can give different amounts of evidence. If the experience is “me, my family, and people I willingly associate with”, that one is most biased. When you have some kind of job where you interact with people you didn’t choose, that one is a bit better—it is still biased by your personal evaluation, geography, perhaps social class… but at least you are more exposed to people you would otherwise avoid. (For example I usually avoid impolite people from dysfunctional families. As a teacher, they are just there and I have to deal with them. Then I notice that they exist and are actually pretty frequent. When I go outside of the school, they again disappear somehow.)
Of course, I would still prefer having a statistic; I am just not sure if there are available statistics on how many parents completely fail at different tasks, such as not letting their children spend all free time with a computer.
If you are a consequentialist, you should think about the consequences of such decision.
For example, imagine a civilization where an average person has to work nine hours to produce enough food to survive. Now the pharaoh makes a new law saying that (a) all produced food has to be distribute equally among all citizens, and (b) no one can be compelled to work more than eight hours; you can work as a volunteer, but all your produced food is redistributed equally.
What would happen is such situation? In my opinion, this would be a mass Prisoners’ Dilemma where people would gradually stop cooperating (because the additional hour of work gives them epsilon benefits) and start being hungry. There would be no legal solution; people would try to make some food in their free time illegally, but the unlucky ones would simply starve and die.
The law would seem great in far mode, but its near mode consequences would be horrible. Of course, if the pharaoh is not completely insane, he would revoke the law; but there would be a lot of suffering meanwhile.
If people had “a basic human right to have enough money without having to work”, situation could progress similarly. It depends on many things—for example how much of the working people’s money would you have to redistribute to non-working ones, and how much could they keep. Assuming that one’s basic human right is to have $500 a month, but if you work, you can keep $3000 a month, some people could still prefer to work. But there is no guarantee it would work long-term. For example there would be a positive feedback loop—the more people are non-working, the more votes politicians can gain by promising to increase their “basic human right income”, the higher are taxes, and the smaller incentives to work. Also, it could work for the starting generation, but corrupt the next generation… imagine yourself as a high school student knowing that you will never ever have to work; how much effort would an average student give to studying, instead of e.g. internet browsing, Playstation gaming, or disco and sex? Years later, the same student will be unable to keep a job that requires education.
Also, if less people have to work, the more work is not done. For example, it will take more time to find a cure for cancer. How would you like a society where no one has to work, but if you become sick, you can’t find a doctor? Yes, there would be some doctors, but not enough for the whole population, and most of them would have less education and less experience than today. You would have to pay them a lot of money, because they would be rare, and because most of the money you pay them would be paid back to state as tax, so even everything you have could be not enough motivating for them.
Systems that don’t require people to work are only beneficial if non-human work (or human work not motivated by need) is still producing enough goods that the humans are better off not working and being able to spend their time in other ways. I don’t think we’re even close to that point. I can imagine societies in a hundred years that are at that point (I have no idea whether they’ll happen or not), but it would be foolish for them to condemn our lack of such a system now since we don’t have the ability to support it, just as it would be foolish for us to condemn people in earlier and less well-off times for not having welfare systems as encompassing as ours.
I’d also note that issues like abolition and universal suffrage are qualitatively distinct from the issue of a minimum guaranteed income (what the quote addresses). Even the poorest of societies can avoid holding slaves or placing women or men in legally inferior roles. The poorest societies cannot afford the “full unemployment” discussed in the quote, and neither can even the richest of modern societies right now (they could certainly come closer than the present, but I don’t think any modern economy could survive the implementation of such a system in the present).
I do agree, however, about it being a solid goal, at least for basic amenities.
To avoid having slaves, the poorest society could decide to kill all war captives, and to let starve to death all people unable to pay their debts. Yes, this would avoid legal discrimination. Is it therefore a morally preferable solution?
Since when has the institution of slavery been a charitable one? Historically, slave-owners have payed immense costs, directly and indirectly, for the privilege of owning slaves, and done so knowingly and willingly. It is human nature to derive pleasure from holding power over others.
I’m not sure about those direct costs. According to my references, a male slave in 10th-century Scandinavia cost about as much as a horse, a female slave about two-thirds as much; that’s a pretty good chunk of change but it doesn’t seem obviously out of line with the value of labor after externalities. I don’t have figures offhand for any other slaveholding cultures, but the impression I get is that the pure exercise of power was not the main determinant of value in most, if not all, of them,
I seem to recall someone arguing that, in combat between iron age tribes, it was basically a choice between massacre and slavery—if you did neither, they would wreck revenge upon your tribe further down the line.
This wouldn’t be charity, as I guess the winners did benefit from having a source of labour that didn’t need to be compensated at the market rate, but it would be a case where slavery was beneficial to the victims.
(I think Carlyle was wrong about other supposed cases of slavery proving beneficial for the victims)
One could argue that happened in Ancient Rome, with prisoners fo war as the main source of slaves. Also they/their descendants arguably benefited in the long term from being part of the larger more sophisticated culture, if they survived that long.
In poor societies that permit slavery, a man might be willing to sell himself into slavery. He gets food and lodging, possibly for his family as well as himself; his new purchaser gets a whole lot of labour. There’s a certain loss of status, but a person might well be willing to live with that in order to avoid starvation.
Elections can take quite a bit of resources to run when you have a large voting population...
No, politicians can afford to spend lots of money on them. The actual mechanism of elections have never, so far as I know, been all that expensive pre-computation.
IAWYC, but the claims that most of the economic costs of elections are in political spending, and most of the costs of actually running elections are in voting machines are both probably wrong. (Public data is terrible, so I’m crudely extrapolating all of this from local to national levels.)
The opportunity costs of voting alone dwarf spending on election campaigns. Assuming that all states have the same share of GDP, that people who don’t a full-state holiday to vote take an hour off to vote, that people work 260 days a year and 8 hours a day, and that nobody in the holiday states do work, then we get:
Political spending: 5.3 billion USD Opportunity costs of elections: 15 trillion USD (US GDP) (9/50 (states with voting holidays) 1⁄260 (percentage of work-time lost) + 41⁄50 (states without holidays) 1⁄60 1⁄8 (percentage of work-time lost)) ≈ 16 billion USD
Extrapolating from New York City figures, election machines cost ~1.9 billion nationwide. (50 million for a population ~38 times smaller than the total US population.) and extrapolating Oakland County’s 650,000 USD cost across the US’s 3143 counties, direct costs are just over 2 billion USD. (This is for a single election; however, some states have had as many as 5 elections in a single year. The cost of the voting machines can be amortized over multiple elections in multiple years.)
(If you add together the opportunity costs for holding one general and one non-general election a year (no state holidays; around ~7 billion USD), plus the costs of actually running them, plus half the cost of the campaign money, the total cost/election seems to be around 30 billion USD, or ~0.002% of the US’s GDP.)
Correction accepted. Still seems like something a poor society could afford, though, since labor and opportunity would also cost less. I understand that lots of poor societies do.
What? If anything I’d assume them to be more expensive before computers were introduced. In Italy where they are still paper based they have to hire people to count the ballots (and they have to pay them a lot, given that they select people at random and you’re not allowed to refuse unless you are ill or something).
According to Wikipedia, the 2005 elections in germany did cost 63 million euros, with a population of 81 million people. 0,78 eurocent per person or the 0,00000281st part of the GDP. Does not seem much, in the grander scheme of things. And since the german constitutional court prohibited the use of most types of voting machines, that figure does include the cost to the helpers; 13 million, again, not a prohibitive expenditure.
http://aceproject.org/ace-en/focus/core/crb/crb03
“Low electoral costs, approximately $1 to $3 per elector, tend to manifest in countries with longer electoral experience”
That’s a somewhat confusing comment. If they’re effectively conscripted (them not being allowed to refuse), not really “hired”—that would imply they don’t need to be paid a lot...
Is that that little? I think many fewer people would vote if they had to pay $3 out of their own pocket in order to do so.
A law compelling people to do stuff would be very unpopular, unless they get adequate compensation. Not paying them much would just mean they would feign illness or something. (If they didn’t select people by lot, the people doing that would be the ones applying for that job, who would presumably like it more than the rest of the population and hence be willing to do that for less.)
Well perhaps fewer people would vote if they had to pay a single cent out of their own pocket—would that mean that 0.01$ isn’t little either?
How much are these Italian ballot-counters being paid? Can we quantify this?
IIRC, something like €150 per election. I’ll look for the actual figure.
Why so? Usually when people can’t refuse to do a job, they’re paid little, not a lot.
Like jury duty. Yeah. Why would it be different in Greece?
In the UK, the counters are volunteers.
Well, yes. Almost tautologically so, I should think.
The tricky part is working out when humans are better off.
If you are a bayesian, you should think about how much evidence your imagination constitutes.
For example, imagine a civilization where an average person gains little or no total productivity by working over 8 hour per day. Imagine, moreover, that in this civilization, working 10 hours a day doubles your risk of coronary heart disease, the leading cause of death in this civilization. Finally, imagine that, in this civilization, a common way for workers to signal their dedication to their jobs is by staying at work long hours, regardless of the harm it does both to their company and themselves.
In this civilization, a law preventing individuals from working over 8 hours per day is a tremendous social good.
Work hour skepticism leaves out the question of the cost of mistakes. It’s one thing to have a higher proportion of defective widgets on an assembly line (though even that can matter, especially if you want a reputation for high quality products), another if the serious injury rate goes up, and a third if you end up with the Exxon Valdez.
You mean “incentives to fully report your income”, right? ;-) (There are countries where a sizeable fraction of the economy is underground. I come from one.)
The same they give today. Students not interested in studying mostly just cheat.
Well, if your society isn’t rich enough, you just do what you can. (And a lot of work really isn’t all that important; would it be that big of a disaster if your local store carried fewer kinds of cosmetics, or if your local restaurant had trouble hiring waiters?)
See also.
It is true that in the long run, things could work out worse with a guarantee of sufficient food/supplies for everyone. I think, though, that this post answers the wrong question; the question to answer in order to compare consequences is how probable it is to be better or worse, and by what amounts. Showing that it “could” be worse merely answers the question “can I justify holding this belief” rather than the question “what belief should I hold”. The potential benefits of a world where people are guaranteed food seem quite high on the face of it, so it is a question well worth asking seriously… or would be if one were in a position to actually do anything about it, anyway.
Prisoners’ dilemmas amongst humans with reputation and social pressure effects do not reliably work out with consistent defection, and models of societies (and students*) can easily predict almost any result by varying the factors they model and how they do so, and so contribute very little evidence in the absence of other evidence that they generate accurate predictions.
The only reliable information that I am aware of is that we know that states making such guarantees can exist for multiple generations with no obvious signs of failure, at least with the right starting conditions, because we have such states existing in the world today. The welfare systems of some European countries have worked this way for quite a long time, and while some are doing poorly economically, others are doing comparably well.
I think that it is worth assessing the consequences of deciding to live by the idea of universal availability of supplies, but they are not so straightforwardly likely to be dire as this post suggests, requiring a longer analysis.
As I wrote, it depends on many things. I can imagine a situation where this would work; I can also imagine a situation where it would not. As I also wrote, I can imagine such system functioning well if people who don’t work get enough money to survive, but people who do work get significantly more.
Data point: In Slovakia many uneducated people don’t work, because it wouldn’t make economical sense for them. Their wage, minus traveling expenses, would be only a little more, in some cases even less than their welfare. What’s the point of spending 8 hours in work if in result you have less money? They cannot get higher wages, because they are uneducated and unskilled; and in Slovakia even educated people get relatively little money. The welfare cannot be lowered, because the voters on the left would not allow it. The social pressure stops working if too many people in the same town are doing this; they provide moral support for each other. We have villages where unemployment is over 80% and people have already accommodated to this; after a decade of such life, even if you offer them a work with a decent wage, they will not take it, because it would mean walking away from their social circle.
This would not happen in a sane society, but it does happen in the real life. Other European countries seem to fare better in this aspect, but I can imagine the same thing happening there in a generation or two. A generation ago most people would probably not predict this situation in Slovakia.
I also can’t imagine the social pressure to work on the “generation Facebook”. If someone spends most of their day on Facebook or playing online multiplayer games, who exactly is going to socially press them? Their friends? Most of them live the same way. Their parents? The conflict between generations is not the same thing as peer pressure. And the “money without work is a basic human right” meme also does not help.
It could work in a country where the difference between average wage (even for a less educated and less skilled people) is much more than one needs to survive. But it can work long-term only if the amount of “basic human right money” does not grow faster than the average wage. -- OK, finally here is something that can be measured: what is the relative increase in wages vs welfares in western European countries in recent decades; optionally, extrapolate these numbers to estimate how long the system can survive.
This is interesting, particularly the idea of comparing wage growth against welfare growth predicting success of “free money” welfare. I agree that it seems reasonably unlikely that a welfare system paying more than typical wages, without restrictions conflicting with the “detached from work” principle, would be sustainable, and identifying unsustainable trends in such systems seems like an interesting way to recognise where something is going to have to change, long-term.
I appreciate the clarification; it provides what I was missing in terms of evidence or reasoned probability estimates over narrative/untested model. I’m taking a hint from feedback that I likely still communicated this poorly, and will revise my approach in future.
Back on the topic of taking these ideas as principles, perhaps more practical near-term goals which provide a subset of the guarantee, like detaching availability of resources basic survival from the availability of work, might be more probably achievable. There are a wider range of options available for implementing these ideas, and of incentives/disincentives to avoid long-term use. An example which comes to mind is providing users with credit usable only to order basic supplies and basic food. My rough estimate is that it seems likely that something in this space could be designed to operate sustainably with only the technology we have now.
On the side, relating to generation Facebook, my model of the typical 16-22 year old today would predict that they’d like to be able to buy an iPad, go to movies, afford alcohol, drive a nice car, go on holidays, and eventually get most of the same goals previous generations sought, and that their friends will also want these things. At younger ages, I agree that parental pressure wouldn’t be typically classified as “peer pressure”, but I still think it likely to provide significant incentive to do school work; the parents can punish them by taking away their toys if they don’t, as effectively as for earlier generations. My model is only based on my personal experience, so mostly this is an example of anecdotal data leading to different untested models.
I have heard this idea proposed, and many people object against it saying that it would take away the dignity of those people. In other words, some people seem to think that “basic human rights” include not just things necessary for survival, but also some luxury and perhaps some status items (which then obviously stop being status items, if everyone has them).
In theory, yes. However, as a former teacher I have seen parents completely fail at this.
Data point: A mother came to school and asked me to tell her 16 year old daughter, my student, to not spend all her free time at internet. I did not understand WTF she wanted. She explained to me that as a computer science teacher her daughter will probably regard me an authority about computers, so if I ask her to not use the computer all day long, she wil respect me. This was her last hope, because as a mother she could not convince her daughter to go away from the computer.
To me this seemed completely insane. First, the teachers in given school were never treated as authorities on anything; they were usually treated like shit both by students and school administration (a month later I left that school). Second, as a teacher I have zero influence on what my students do outside school, she as a mother is there; she has many possible ways to stop her daughter from interneting… for instance to forcibly turn off the computer, or just hide the computer somewhere while her daughter is at school. But she should have started doing something before her daughter turned 16. If she does not know that, she is clearly unqualified to have children; but there is no law against that.
OK, this was an extreme example, but during my 4-years teaching carreer I have seen or heard from colleagues about many really fucked up parents; and those people were middle and higher social class. This leads me to very pesimistic views, not shared by people who don’t have the same experience and are more free to rationalize this away. I think that if you need parents to do something non-trivial, you should expect at least 20% of population to fail at that. Let’s suppose that in each generation 20% of parents fail to pressure their children to work, in a world where work is not necessary for decent living. What happens in 5 generations?
Personal experience can give different amounts of evidence. If the experience is “me, my family, and people I willingly associate with”, that one is most biased. When you have some kind of job where you interact with people you didn’t choose, that one is a bit better—it is still biased by your personal evaluation, geography, perhaps social class… but at least you are more exposed to people you would otherwise avoid. (For example I usually avoid impolite people from dysfunctional families. As a teacher, they are just there and I have to deal with them. Then I notice that they exist and are actually pretty frequent. When I go outside of the school, they again disappear somehow.)
Of course, I would still prefer having a statistic; I am just not sure if there are available statistics on how many parents completely fail at different tasks, such as not letting their children spend all free time with a computer.