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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

> The enormous social costs of non-employment suggests that fighting long-term joblessness is more important than fighting income inequality.

Isn’t joblessness a second order problem? What is the root cause? One’s ability to survive (basic necessities-wise) is limited by their ability to get and keep a job. Uncouple these two, via Basic Incone or something like it, and joblessness in and of itself is no longer a problem. Tough to do politically, since the prevailing Puritanical world view sees a living as something that must be earned.

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>Uncouple these two, via Basic Income or something like it, and joblessness in and of itself is no longer a problem.

I don't think that's entirely true and I think equating contrary views with Puritanism is a cheap way to make it seem so.

Lots of people do take pride in their work, when we look at people who have lost their jobs in industries which aren't going to return there's not just the loss of income there's the loss of usefulness. There is a value to people in having a skill which you're good at, having a community (the workplace) which places some level of authority or trust in you to execute that task and then the ability to actually go and do that skill to recertify that trust/authority. Steel workers in Pennsylvania aren't just looking at a smaller paycheck for the rest of their lives, they're faced with potentially never being good enough at a useful task to ever get that sort of trust again and that itself can be corrosive to the human spirit.

Retrain them as park rangers, refund the preservation of America's wild life, fund research into outdoor living, go hunting on the weekends in flow with the wildlife preservation and environmental research. Bring the bacon home, keep America's ecosystem thriving, start figuring out how to get people out of unhealthy suburban/urban living, use long-term isolation wilderness research to pre-empt space colonization challenges, use our ecology studies to plan the terraforming of mars, terrform mars, repeat ecological policy on mars.

If a UBI was big enough, steel workers could go back to work. They could run a factory and make steel, at a loss, but it wouldn't matter because doing something useful (making steel) is decoupled from their livelihood.

And for the people who want to get that sense of usefulness another way (raising kids, teaching others how to make steel, playing video games, building houses) they would have the financial freedom to do so.

This is what Walmart does and all they get is people complaining about it.

Doesn’t that sound like an unaffordable loss?

I agree with everything you said. More clearly I’d say with something like Basic Income, joblessness is still a problem—but it becomes an inconvenience, a temporary lifestyle downgrade, or a bruised ego, rather than a pants-on-fire emergency which is what it is today.

It's more of an Old Testament "thou shalt not steal" worldview given that people on basic income would be mooching off of people that work.

Tough to do economically, since it takes a staggering amount of money to provide a Basic Income that's enough to actually survive on.

For many, in particular among those who aren't self-motivated, having a job provides much more than just a paycheck. For one's mental health, knowing you are contributing something back to society provides an enormous boost to your sense of self-worth, regardless of how big the paycheck is at the end of the day.

> contributing something back to society

It is really challenging to contextualize a lot of service industry jobs this way.

There are a lot of service industry workers workers who would disagree with you, and view your comment as smug elitism.

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