Show HN: A new alternative to universal basic income: the universal job rebate | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A new alternative to universal basic income: the universal job rebate

medium.com

13 pointsjonny_eh19 comments

Yeah, there is nothing in the world that brings people a deeper more fulfilling sense of purpose, and meaning to their lives than work. Ask someone with a family, an artist, or a political activist, and they will surely tell you, "I love being a Human, but I really don't feel whole without having to perform labor for the financial benefit of another party at the cost of my time and energy."

Maybe I'm the only person who reads this stuff who has actually done construction work, landscaping, painted houses, washed dishes, etc. while what they really wanted to do was to be studying mathematics and computer science, but as such a person, I find the "let's try to find a way around universal income in light of the coming 'automated utopia'" conversation to be extremely offensive. You say (and I'm paraphrasing for dramatic effect) that 'these poor people love to work, without work they wouldn't even be whole people' Not quite as offensive as "Let's liquidate the lower-class when we no longer need them to perform rote tasks to further our objectives." but close.

I hear ya, but at the end of the day people still say they want jobs. Instead of telling people what they should want, why don't we listen?

You're referring to people who do not have sufficient access to resources. Those people say they want jobs because they don't have access to resources, and they can't envision said access without the intermediary process of having to perform work at a job to obtain said resources. They view the two concepts: jobs and resources, as inextricably interwoven facets of a single process.

As someone with a job, with friends and acquaintances who all have jobs, and parents who have jobs, I feel like I can safely speak for all of them when I tell you right now: We do not want jobs. We want access to a fair share of the available resources.

But you don't speak for everyone. I like having a job, it happens to pay well, but even if it didn't I'd still want to work. I like having something to do. I like having people that depend on me to show up.

I also like vacations, but after a couple weeks I look forward to returning to work.

I don't think a Universal Basic Income implies that people stop providing value to society. The idea is that we are intelligent enough now that we would find more productive uses of our time than appeasing the financial cycle of wealth/interest/poverty. Job rebates are a nice idea if jobs are inherently valuable to society, but they are not always so.

I would agree that sitting home and gaming all day would get tiring pretty quickly. But I work somewhere that I feel like I make a difference, and where my contributions are valued, and that's pretty great.

Bear in mind though, jobs created by making human labor cheaper may not be so fulfilling as my job.

A surprisingly uninformed article.

The article does not consider these issues. The extra people:

1. need to be trained.

2. can screw up customer service, misfile things, enter numbers incorrectly, etc.

3. Occupy space - there are limits to the number of people that can be in a factory.

4. Create a distraction - (asking "beginner" questions)

5. Diffuse responsibility for completing tasks. (If the same amount of work is spread over 2 people - who is responsible for a quality outcome)

-------

Companies only hire people when there is a need. Sadly for the purists: the economy is driven by the true job creators - the middle class.

Focus on rebuilding the middle class and reduce the wealthy imbalance. (Yes this means the rich will have to pay up a lot of their wealthy in the form of taxes.)

Through out history, this has been shown to be the best way for a healthy economy.

P.S. you are welcome to disagree if you can talk about the 1873 bank panics (and through the 1900s), the Great Depression . Every example of wealth imbalance has resulted in a stagnant economy.

The only thing this does for people who don't have jobs (who arguably are most in need of something like Basic Income) is it hopefully causes more jobs to be created. But these are going to be low-wage jobs (e.g. expect to see jobs that pay exactly $30k per year). So basically, what you're proposing is to give people a chance at a shitty job (and remember, it's just a chance, it certainly won't drive unemployment down to 0%). That's very different from Basic Income. One of the big benefits of Basic Income is that, freed from the need to work just to have food/shelter, people can seek out more fulfilling things to do instead of having to work crappy jobs just to live. I guarantee you nobody feels fulfilled by working a minimum wage job.

> it hopefully causes more jobs to be created.

Actually, companies that don't hire will still pay the higher taxes. This plan would cause larger companies to benefit more than smaller ones.

How will a smaller company (say 5-person) be able to afford to pay another 20 employees throughout the year and then collect the rebate back?

One of my favorite jobs was minimum wage. Certainly more fulfilling than doing nothing.

I can't be alone in feeling the therapeutic effects of work.

Nobody said people on basic income have to do nothing. One of the big wins of basic income is it frees people up to do whatever they find fulfilling. This could be working the same job you have today. This could be going to school so you can do more than just flip burgers. Or maybe becoming an artist, or a musician, or whatever else you may be passionate about.

It's also worth pointing out that Basic Income certainly won't give people a very comfortable life, so they'll still want some form of additional income. But maybe they don't have to work two jobs to feed their family anymore.

I wasn't talking about basic income. I was addressing your "guarantee" that nobody is fulfilled working for minimum wage.

Interesting, though it does beg the question of it also will encourage work for the sake of work. An example is provided that one could be hired to write hand-written messages on products. But one could also be tasked to do something robots could do because you just artificially made human labor cheaper than your robots.

> But one could also be tasked to do something robots could do because you just artificially made human labor cheaper than your robots

Exactly, that's my main point. It gives humans a fighting chance against the robots.

I don't think humans being effectively modern mules is a good thing. If robots are better than humans at something, we should generally let robots do that thing. It would be more human labor hours to use screwdrivers for things, but we use power drills where applicable because power drills are better.

Now, there are things we have also started letting robots do that they are not better at doing than humans, mind you. I think Google has demonstrated how colossally bad algorithms are at providing customer service, for example. I could definitely see this model making it more palatable for companies to get rid of the reviled automated answering systems and similar processes, and put humans back in the customer service field, in particular.

I am concerned about enabling the former, I would like to enable the latter.

I Bad the same thought.

"give people purpose. how? lets give them mechanical jobs!"

wat?!

This plan doesn't force businesses to use humans instead of machines. If there's a job that ought to be done by a robot for the best result, competition will still ensure that's what's done.

This just gives humans a leg up when competing on price.

This doesn't solve immigration, just increases the fake employment.

I don't see this idea as being all peachy for businesses. They have a lot of extra expenses beyond the wage for each employee.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com