Why are you interested in a study? Studies typically tell you about the averages and in many cases the averages are not what you need. In some cases, they are, actually, what no one needs.
Some people fall apart without externally imposed structure, but some people thrive in the absence of constraints. The latter are often called “self-directed” or “self-motivated” or some other term like that. Both types exist, not to mention the intermediate cases, of course.
Because I plan on doing some more serious campaigning for a more aggressive GBI (among other things) than what a lot of people advocate. I plan on making the case that there is absolutely nothing wrong with someone deciding to just live off the dole and not work, and that people who choose that are often more in the way of people making progress than helping them when they show up to clock hours. I also plan to assert that people who don’t have to work, effectively on penalty of death if I want to sound dramatic, will have a better wheat/chaff ratio for what they do do. Of course I want to make sure it’s true first :P
If I get to design the study it’ll be a little different from the study I seek because I don’t think I can expect anyone to have done that study. And I’ll be more interested in the whole study than the executive summary for exactly the reasons you describe.
there is absolutely nothing wrong with someone deciding to just live off the dole and not work
Within which framework? From an individual point of view, sure. From the point of view of the society, not so much—someone has to produce value which this person will consume. Arguing that it’s psychologically healthy to not work isn’t a relevant argument here.
that people who don’t have to work … will have a better wheat/chaff ratio for what they do do
You know that the primary function of the markets is provide incentives for wheat and disincentives for chaff, right? They perform this function quite well. You will argue that without the guiding prod of the market people will produce more of better stuff all by themselves?
Well I have a much longer argument for this in the book, but I propose that the amount of work people will do because they want to is more than enough to run society. 40h per person per week (ish) is, in my view, largely makework.
Of course. The markets have a major confound, imo, in the form of pro-job policy. I believe, and I have some support for this but not enough to prove the point yet, that if “jobs creation” did not occur as a political activity, the market would normalize below the level people would produce without, again using the provocative language descriptively not manipulatively, the lingering threat of dying of want.
I propose that the amount of work people will do because they want to is more than enough to run society
That’s classic Communist utopia straight out of Karl Marx. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. Why do you believe this to be true?
Another question, related to the role of the markets as conduits of information, is why do you think the work people will do is the work that other people need? As a first-order approximation I would expect that you won’t have any problems having your portrait painted, but your clogged toilet will stay clogged for a long time.
if “jobs creation” did not occur as a political activity, the market would normalize below the level people would produce without, again using the provocative language descriptively not manipulatively, the lingering threat of dying of want.
First, that’s not self-evident. Job creation policies mostly reallocate labour (from productive use to less productive). Getting rid of make-work jobs, in the absence of other regulations, will just free up these people to be employed in other areas where their talents can be utilized better. The net effect would be higher productivity but not necessarily a lower level of employment.
Besides, do you want this “below the level”? You interpret this a lots of leisure. I interpret this as a poor society.
1a. I don’t think that follows. I’m not saying people should work according to their ability, but that on the whole, the output humanity will have anyway will run the world. As time goes by, we can and have gotten more inequality, and by some measure I saw once (citation needed, but I’m preparing to host a party soon. Delaying not deferring) the achievements of some group of say 100 people have done more than the rest of the world put together. I do not think most of them were in it to keep body and soul together, but more research is needed.
1b. Money, same as now. I’m not waving a wand and declaring superabundance here, just saying if we’re not ready as a society to let people die of want, let’s not mess about and let’s just give everybody money. I do not have a counterargument to “He who does not work shall not eat,” except to say that that is a coherent view and a different set of values than I think most of America holds. If you’re okay with a lazy fella dying on the street, I don’t know how to bridge the gap in basic premises.
2a. This is another “jury question” I’m afraid, and I don’t have the data. Getting rid of make-work jobs (and fractional things in that vein) will free up people to not have to work for society not to collapse, but the big issue leads right into...
2b. This is really the bedrock question. Is it better to work five fewer hours a week to get to the moon a year later and keep the old iPhone an extra few months? What are the real numbers for that (those came straight from the rectal number generator)? I’m still working on that one, and as with most questions of value, it will likely vary, but it can still be clarified.
And OT, this right here is why I don’t want LW to die. Every other venue of which I can think (apart from one friend, incidentally the one that introduced me to LW) would either say “that’s dumb” or “Cool idea” with no further helpful commentary. Off to party setup if I don’t reply it’s not me being evasive.
“The output humanity will have anyway will run the world.”
In the first place, at least some people would stop working. That would mean that less goods would be produced. That would mean that the price of goods would increase. If it increased too much, then the quantity established as a “basic income” would no longer be enough to support people. Then if you wanted to maintain the system, you would have to increase the amount of the basic income, and a cycle would ensue.
It is not clear where that cycle would end. It is possible it would end with enough people working to support everyone else. It is also possible that it would not, in which case money would become worthless, and each person would either survive on his own work, or die. I do not think it is a good idea to simply assume that the first thing will happen.
I agree with Lumifer that, to a first approximation, no one in America or Europe today dies of starvation because they are lazy. I would be surprised if anyone can find even a single example of this happening. But part of the reason for this is the existence of social incentives that move many lazy people to work anyway. If you take away those incentives, there is no guarantee that lazy people will not actually die.
the output humanity will have anyway will run the world
Sure, but at which level? Hunter-gatherer societies have no “jobs” and “run the world” (or at least used to) -- would you like to go live in one?
if we’re not ready as a society to let people die of want, let’s not mess about and let’s just give everybody money.
First, no one in America will die of starvation because of unwillingness to work. Right here, right now, no one.
Second, I don’t see the need for the black-and-white approach: GBI or nothing. There are nuances and incentives matter.
Is it better to work five fewer hours a week to get to the moon a year later and keep the old iPhone an extra few months?
How about medical care?
In any case, if you want to discuss the issue it would help to get specific. For example, your main point is that GBI would be great. So specify how large ($/year) and what does “great” mean (what are you going to measure and what you will be willing to trade off for that).
Amen, and amen, and amen. I agree with everything you say here and consider none of it refutation.
Fresh eyes: I fell into a trap here. “Because I plan on doing some more serious campaigning for a more aggressive GBI (among other things) ” was poorly phrased, and I fell into a pattern of defending it. I focused there because it seemed the nearest point of contact to this community. My intent was largely to dodge answering questions about my actual thesis because I’m not public with it yet.
In doing so, I sound like a bad parrot of all the other GBI plans that spend a lot of time talking about how pretty the island over there probably is and far less time on boat schematics. GBI is compatible and has a foothold, but is not my core thesis. And while I assumed the downvotes were just the social conservative faction doing what they do (I don’t know anything specific I’ve done to tick them off, but I disagree more with them than any other LW faction and it’s a documented tactic of theirs, so it was an easy out), I now think maybe some folks noticed this and didn’t have time to type it up. Thanks guys, message worth hearing.
So I’ll respond here and wrap up, unless you want more, because my question was already answered.
I think there are a variety of preferences on the issue, and that policy is skewed toward accomodating the work-hard-play-hard group. I’d like that rolled back a bit.
Golly that did read like a false dilemma didn’t it? Sorry. My intent was to say that I have heard that argument a few times, and I can’t beat it. I definitely agree there are compromise positions, and even though I’d love a non-means-based GBI with tax simplification, in practice I bet we end up with one in the best reasonable case. But 2a is a total strawman. It is uncontroversially true, nobody I’ve ever met denies it, and it has nothing to do with my argument. If I say “if you argue that gravity is a repulsive force originating from dark matter that only looks attractive because we’re in gravity shadows I can’t defeat that argument.,” “nobody in America is being repelled by gravity under the current system” is not a rejoinder.
Yup, medical care is a tough one. We’re not immortal yet, and that’s a problem. It’s a good point, and I hope it gets a good answer in actual policy.
Don’t worry much about the downvotes; we have a local village idiot who automatically downvotes every single comment made by anyone whom he suspects of left-wing opinions—I guess you were just added to his list. (He got already banned for this, but he just makes another account, and the tech support is too busy to deal with him effectively. Sigh. Long story I don’t want to start here, it’s just the explanation that seemed most likely to me at the moment.)
Oh I’m not worried. I was just saying I had assumed that it was that and missed the signal for the noise and might have picked up that I was making a mistake earlier if I hadn’t. Though when “Thanks for your help” gets downvoted… maybe it’s not zero effect :)
It’s like when I waited tables. I don’t think I’m alone here, but when I got a bad tip, as long as I didn’t pour coffee on the customer’s lap, there was only one reason for a bad tip. The customer was a cheap bastard of course. Might be why I never stopped being a very bad waiter until I stopped being a waiter :)
Lumifer, I find it ironic that a few comments above, Ixiel asked for a study, and you said something like “meh, who cares about averages”… and a few comments later now you lecture Ixiel about the need to define and measure stuff. :D
Yep, I don’t see any contradiction in that. The accents have shifted, however, because when we were talking about studies I thought Ixiel had in mind her own situation, but then it turned out she really was planning a book and that’s a different kettle of fish...
Money, same as now. I’m not waving a wand and declaring superabundance here, just saying if we’re not ready as a society to let people die of want, let’s not mess about and let’s just give everybody money. I do not have a counterargument to “He who does not work shall not eat,” except to say that that is a coherent view and a different set of values than I think most of America holds. If you’re okay with a lazy fella dying on the street, I don’t know how to bridge the gap in basic premises.
A basic income won’t help here. The lazy fellow dying in the streets will squander the money you give him on booze and drugs and then still be dying in the streets.
Why are you interested in a study? Studies typically tell you about the averages and in many cases the averages are not what you need. In some cases, they are, actually, what no one needs.
Some people fall apart without externally imposed structure, but some people thrive in the absence of constraints. The latter are often called “self-directed” or “self-motivated” or some other term like that. Both types exist, not to mention the intermediate cases, of course.
Because I plan on doing some more serious campaigning for a more aggressive GBI (among other things) than what a lot of people advocate. I plan on making the case that there is absolutely nothing wrong with someone deciding to just live off the dole and not work, and that people who choose that are often more in the way of people making progress than helping them when they show up to clock hours. I also plan to assert that people who don’t have to work, effectively on penalty of death if I want to sound dramatic, will have a better wheat/chaff ratio for what they do do. Of course I want to make sure it’s true first :P
If I get to design the study it’ll be a little different from the study I seek because I don’t think I can expect anyone to have done that study. And I’ll be more interested in the whole study than the executive summary for exactly the reasons you describe.
Within which framework? From an individual point of view, sure. From the point of view of the society, not so much—someone has to produce value which this person will consume. Arguing that it’s psychologically healthy to not work isn’t a relevant argument here.
You know that the primary function of the markets is provide incentives for wheat and disincentives for chaff, right? They perform this function quite well. You will argue that without the guiding prod of the market people will produce more of better stuff all by themselves?
Well I have a much longer argument for this in the book, but I propose that the amount of work people will do because they want to is more than enough to run society. 40h per person per week (ish) is, in my view, largely makework.
Of course.
The markets have a major confound, imo, in the form of pro-job policy. I believe, and I have some support for this but not enough to prove the point yet, that if “jobs creation” did not occur as a political activity, the market would normalize below the level people would produce without, again using the provocative language descriptively not manipulatively, the lingering threat of dying of want.
That’s classic Communist utopia straight out of Karl Marx. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. Why do you believe this to be true?
Another question, related to the role of the markets as conduits of information, is why do you think the work people will do is the work that other people need? As a first-order approximation I would expect that you won’t have any problems having your portrait painted, but your clogged toilet will stay clogged for a long time.
First, that’s not self-evident. Job creation policies mostly reallocate labour (from productive use to less productive). Getting rid of make-work jobs, in the absence of other regulations, will just free up these people to be employed in other areas where their talents can be utilized better. The net effect would be higher productivity but not necessarily a lower level of employment.
Besides, do you want this “below the level”? You interpret this a lots of leisure. I interpret this as a poor society.
1a. I don’t think that follows. I’m not saying people should work according to their ability, but that on the whole, the output humanity will have anyway will run the world. As time goes by, we can and have gotten more inequality, and by some measure I saw once (citation needed, but I’m preparing to host a party soon. Delaying not deferring) the achievements of some group of say 100 people have done more than the rest of the world put together. I do not think most of them were in it to keep body and soul together, but more research is needed.
1b. Money, same as now. I’m not waving a wand and declaring superabundance here, just saying if we’re not ready as a society to let people die of want, let’s not mess about and let’s just give everybody money. I do not have a counterargument to “He who does not work shall not eat,” except to say that that is a coherent view and a different set of values than I think most of America holds. If you’re okay with a lazy fella dying on the street, I don’t know how to bridge the gap in basic premises.
2a. This is another “jury question” I’m afraid, and I don’t have the data. Getting rid of make-work jobs (and fractional things in that vein) will free up people to not have to work for society not to collapse, but the big issue leads right into...
2b. This is really the bedrock question. Is it better to work five fewer hours a week to get to the moon a year later and keep the old iPhone an extra few months? What are the real numbers for that (those came straight from the rectal number generator)? I’m still working on that one, and as with most questions of value, it will likely vary, but it can still be clarified.
And OT, this right here is why I don’t want LW to die. Every other venue of which I can think (apart from one friend, incidentally the one that introduced me to LW) would either say “that’s dumb” or “Cool idea” with no further helpful commentary. Off to party setup if I don’t reply it’s not me being evasive.
“The output humanity will have anyway will run the world.”
In the first place, at least some people would stop working. That would mean that less goods would be produced. That would mean that the price of goods would increase. If it increased too much, then the quantity established as a “basic income” would no longer be enough to support people. Then if you wanted to maintain the system, you would have to increase the amount of the basic income, and a cycle would ensue.
It is not clear where that cycle would end. It is possible it would end with enough people working to support everyone else. It is also possible that it would not, in which case money would become worthless, and each person would either survive on his own work, or die. I do not think it is a good idea to simply assume that the first thing will happen.
I agree with Lumifer that, to a first approximation, no one in America or Europe today dies of starvation because they are lazy. I would be surprised if anyone can find even a single example of this happening. But part of the reason for this is the existence of social incentives that move many lazy people to work anyway. If you take away those incentives, there is no guarantee that lazy people will not actually die.
Sure, but at which level? Hunter-gatherer societies have no “jobs” and “run the world” (or at least used to) -- would you like to go live in one?
First, no one in America will die of starvation because of unwillingness to work. Right here, right now, no one.
Second, I don’t see the need for the black-and-white approach: GBI or nothing. There are nuances and incentives matter.
How about medical care?
In any case, if you want to discuss the issue it would help to get specific. For example, your main point is that GBI would be great. So specify how large ($/year) and what does “great” mean (what are you going to measure and what you will be willing to trade off for that).
Amen, and amen, and amen. I agree with everything you say here and consider none of it refutation.
Fresh eyes: I fell into a trap here. “Because I plan on doing some more serious campaigning for a more aggressive GBI (among other things) ” was poorly phrased, and I fell into a pattern of defending it. I focused there because it seemed the nearest point of contact to this community. My intent was largely to dodge answering questions about my actual thesis because I’m not public with it yet.
In doing so, I sound like a bad parrot of all the other GBI plans that spend a lot of time talking about how pretty the island over there probably is and far less time on boat schematics. GBI is compatible and has a foothold, but is not my core thesis. And while I assumed the downvotes were just the social conservative faction doing what they do (I don’t know anything specific I’ve done to tick them off, but I disagree more with them than any other LW faction and it’s a documented tactic of theirs, so it was an easy out), I now think maybe some folks noticed this and didn’t have time to type it up. Thanks guys, message worth hearing.
So I’ll respond here and wrap up, unless you want more, because my question was already answered.
I think there are a variety of preferences on the issue, and that policy is skewed toward accomodating the work-hard-play-hard group. I’d like that rolled back a bit.
Golly that did read like a false dilemma didn’t it? Sorry. My intent was to say that I have heard that argument a few times, and I can’t beat it. I definitely agree there are compromise positions, and even though I’d love a non-means-based GBI with tax simplification, in practice I bet we end up with one in the best reasonable case. But 2a is a total strawman. It is uncontroversially true, nobody I’ve ever met denies it, and it has nothing to do with my argument. If I say “if you argue that gravity is a repulsive force originating from dark matter that only looks attractive because we’re in gravity shadows I can’t defeat that argument.,” “nobody in America is being repelled by gravity under the current system” is not a rejoinder.
Yup, medical care is a tough one. We’re not immortal yet, and that’s a problem. It’s a good point, and I hope it gets a good answer in actual policy.
Anyway, thanks for your patience.
Don’t worry much about the downvotes; we have a local village idiot who automatically downvotes every single comment made by anyone whom he suspects of left-wing opinions—I guess you were just added to his list. (He got already banned for this, but he just makes another account, and the tech support is too busy to deal with him effectively. Sigh. Long story I don’t want to start here, it’s just the explanation that seemed most likely to me at the moment.)
Oh I’m not worried. I was just saying I had assumed that it was that and missed the signal for the noise and might have picked up that I was making a mistake earlier if I hadn’t. Though when “Thanks for your help” gets downvoted… maybe it’s not zero effect :)
It’s like when I waited tables. I don’t think I’m alone here, but when I got a bad tip, as long as I didn’t pour coffee on the customer’s lap, there was only one reason for a bad tip. The customer was a cheap bastard of course. Might be why I never stopped being a very bad waiter until I stopped being a waiter :)
Lumifer, I find it ironic that a few comments above, Ixiel asked for a study, and you said something like “meh, who cares about averages”… and a few comments later now you lecture Ixiel about the need to define and measure stuff. :D
Yep, I don’t see any contradiction in that. The accents have shifted, however, because when we were talking about studies I thought Ixiel had in mind her own situation, but then it turned out she really was planning a book and that’s a different kettle of fish...
Yes please, can we start a UBI thread so we can discuss methods and actions, rather than communism/capitalism and lazy/lucky ?
Is there anything stopping you?
A basic income won’t help here. The lazy fellow dying in the streets will squander the money you give him on booze and drugs and then still be dying in the streets.
Original thread here.