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Comment by gdix | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of work that I do free of charge. Wash my car. Go grocery shopping. Do my laundry. I walk my dog out of a sense of love and duty. Shouldn't I be paid for this? Why isn't the government paying me for this invisible labor that I chose to do?

I cut back my hours and quit my job because I have so much to do so, what the hell society, where's my compensation?

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That is why compensation for unpaid work is not a good argument in favour of basic income.

Better arguments: it's a safety net no one can fall through, it's simpler and less demeaning than the existing system, and unemployed people are always better off when they take low-paid or part-time work.

The difference is that the state has the duty to care for elderly people and children, so when they are not cared for by relatives, it has to pay professionals to do it.

I have not decided whether or not I support a basic income, but I do think that people, who take care for elderly relatives should get paid some reasonable fraction of the costs that the state would have to pay anyway. If these elderly people do have the funds to care for themselves, I think they should be responsible to pay this fraction, before the state has to do it.

With children it is a bit more complicated, because a society generally benefits if people of higher education reproduce, which generally have a higher threshold to do so because of financial incentives. Also you decide to have children, because you want to have children. You do not decide to have parents who need care.

All the things you named are things you are doing for yourself in order to have a clean car, to have something to eat, to have clean cloths, to have a dog. Having children is certainly to some extend also something you do for yourself because you enjoy raising children but beyond that it is also a service to the society because this is what keeps it running in the long term. In the past having children was probably more driven by selfish motives, e.g. having someone to care for you when you are old and the like, but nowadays this is no longer true and you can quite easily forgo the costs associated with having children. Therefore it seems not unreasonable to me that a society supports the part of it that takes the burden to sustain it.

In the past, having children was probably more driven by lack of birth control.

I won't argue against that, it is certainly true, but I think my point still stands that it was beneficial to have more children even if it was not always a concessions decision because of the lack of birth control.

Everything I have ever read suggests that birth control and limiting the number of children you have improves quality of life. Having scads of kids is generally the mark of a culture that a) either has no means to prevent conception (and people are screwing anyway) or b) has very high child mortality rates because the culture as a whole is poor, uneducated, lacks infrastructure, etc. Across the globe, as child mortality rates go down, birth rates fall following the fall of death rates. From what I have read, this is statistically consistent.

If there is anything "selfish" going on, it is "sex feels good, so I am going to get laid, and the consequences be damned." I have met damn few people who were able to have exactly as many kids as they wanted, exactly when they wanted them. The vast majority of the time, kids seem to fall into one of two categories: 1) "Oops" or 2) "We tried for this one forever."

What time frame are we talking about? The last hundred or three hundred years? The last two thousand years? The last million years?

What part of my comment are you asking about?

The falling birth rates following falling death rates is a global trend in my lifetime. Limiting kids to keep you out of poverty and keep you middle class is an observation that goes back at least a few hundred years in Europe. The "most kids are a case of Oops or We tried forever" is personal observation of discussions I have had with people: Any time you get the back story, it is typically one of those situations (tbf, my second child was a case of "we skipped birth control 2 or 3 times" -- which almost felt like an Oops because I was surrounded by people talking about how very long it took them to get child 2 or their latest).

Does that help clarify any?

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