bittersnurr:

theunitofcaring:

There’s a discussion on my dashboard about whether UBI is harmful because it promotes idleness, which is psychologically unhealthy. 

I do think that people vary, and that there are in fact lots of people who’d rather have a subsidized make-work job than a handout. I think it’s important to acknowledge that those people exist, because they’re not common among young progressive some-degree-of-anticapitalist tumblr users, and a discussion about idleness that either writes them all off as evil or pretends they don’t exist is going to be a less constructive one. I think that the reason this is so central to many peoples’ identify is because we have told them repeatedly that if they fail to provide for their family they have no other sources of value and affirmation, and that in the long run we should be offering other sources of value and affirmation, but in the meantime, their desire to provide for their family through work does matter, and policies which give them that opportunity are doing a good thing for them.

That said, I do not think that not having a paid job is soul-destroying or psychologically destructive or even unhealthy for most people, particularly not compared to actual real-world minimum wage jobs, and I don’t think that most people who say that have really thought about it. There are a lot of stay-at-home spouses, and I don’t tend to see opponents of idleness campaigning to make this unaffordable and untenable for the sake of saving those poor souls. There are rich people who just do whatever they feel like, and I’ve never seen the people who think the poor need to be saved from idleness argue that these rich people should be taxed into privation for their own good (or even that it would be good for their souls although it is poor overall economic incentives).

So, we clearly don’t think that idleness is always soul-destroying. But lots of people think that specifically the idleness of poor people would be soul-destroying. I think this is mostly just an error. Some people find value in work, and with a UBI they would largely choose to work. Some people find value even in stupid makework, but they’d probably find more value in real work, and there’d be plenty of real and needed jobs for them to do if they weren’t competing with people for whom those jobs are awful and torturous hells they are subjected to only because it’s slightly better than slowly starving. And most minimum-wage jobs are absolutely awful and soul-destroying! “More soul-destroying than a 12-hour shift being shouted at and forbidden from bathroom breaks” is a pretty high bar and it’d honestly be astonishing if idleness cleared it. 

I think a useful way of thinking about this is to imagine that tomorrow someone invented tiny, cheap robots that could produce food, water, electricity, shelter and wi-fi and cost $5, with $1/year in upkeep. 

Would lots of people buy one and quit their jobs? Yep. Would this make them worse off? I really really doubt it. I bet they’d spend more time with their loved ones; write their novels; recover from mental illnesses they’ve been fighting through for years, start a band, corner the Minecraft market, whatever interested them. I expect most of them would be made better off by their robot purchase. I expect that some would notice they were bored and go back to work, but I’d expect almost everybody who was better off working to notice this on their own, once they had both work and non-work to compare to. and it would astonish me if we were good at guessing in advance who would be worse off through a robot purchase. 

The biggest problem with UBI is that we don’t actually have those robots. And that’s legitimately a big deal. But it’s absurdly implausible to me that if we had those robots, most people who bought one would be worse off. And I feel like to some degree we’re putting the breaks on robot development (on efforts to make it as easy as possible to live extremely cheaply, and on private-sector privately funded UBI efforts which libertarians really shouldn’t be objecting to, and on efforts to spread the value ‘it’s good if people don’t have to choose between working and starving’, and to give poor people money when we want to make them better off) because we just don’t realize that, no, actually, most lives would be straightforwardly more fulfilling out from under the threat of starvation.

I feel like people who think this have never been in a position they legit CANNOT WORK for whatever reason forna long period of time.

Like if you can replace work with hobbies it’s one thing but it took all of like a year for me to feel worse about being unable to work when my previous job was so awful I was fired for refusing to walk 6 miles in 2’ of unplowed snow. I’d much rather have that job then be disabled but I don’t get to make that choice.

For every person who sits there drinking in front of the tv when they don’t have to work there is another person who is full on suicidal from boredom. I frequently injure myself because I need to do things or I lose my mind.

Also so many people who have degrees in “things that would move humanity forward” currently are working minimum wage retail and go home at night and collapse from exaustion. Prioritizing busy work over what is actually productive and healthy isn’t actually helpful and instead full on stagnating progress.