What If People Don’t Want 'A Career?'
warzel.substack.com
warzel.substack.com
What are the circumstances that allow this behaviour from companies? It's a more complicated question than just "Why are companies behaving this way", that's easy. Greed, mostly, and because they can get away with it. I'm more interested in why they can get away with it. Too few, or unenforceable regulations? Too many available workers? Too many qualified or overqualified people fighting for too few jobs?
Honestly it's fine to not want a career, but you can't do nothing. We rely on people's work to get materials, build and heat homes, grow and distribute food. Society is built upon contribution. A UBI is not the answer because that's still just other people's labour. You cannot have both an opt-in working class and an opt-in nonworking class and have a healthy society.
It doesn't make sense to worry about a fictional labor shortage when there is an excess of profit being captured by the wealthy. If a labor shortage actually existed that differential wouldn't exist, because it couldn't afford to.
You're referring to 2 different "labor shortages" at once there. The proposed labor shortage in the question "what if UBI were available at a life sustaining level" and the labor shortage caused by the current wealthy being able to opt out of labor. That the latter hasn't caused societal labor shortage issues is true but as you say it has been capturing a portion of the profit in a negatively impacting way and it's also on the order of 100x fewer participants than UBI would have. With that in mind it doesn't seem to be unreasonable to ponder what negative impact expanding such a concept 100 fold may have.
The goal of society should be to become post-scarcity. All of our technological progress has led in that direction. We currently just live in a period where the majority of the gains have been captured by very few people and that has allowed them to exploit human labor to enrich themselves vs. building a self-sustainable society. Engineered or not, I think that's the inevitable end game of continuing humanity.
Apart from needing those technologies to exist before being able to claim them as reasons there won't be a labor shortage with UBI this is still completely independent of rich people existing today without causing a labor shortage. Perhaps it's a funding source to prove out things like automation by redistributing said wealth but the existence of said wealth in the hands of a few is not prove lack of labor in all is sustainable. To do that you must actually prove the alternative means of production out - regardless if the wealthy exist.
The problem is that we are dependent on these zero sum games to regulate our economy and as a result these zero sum games end up consuming all our our productivity gains and making up a progressively larger share of the economy.
UBI would allow people to expand their career paths since basic survival would not be on the line. Personally I've got minor health issues from being in front of a computer too much, would absolutely love switching it up with a more physicaly demanding job if I had UBI to make sure a drop in wages wasn't threatening my family's basic survival. This also assumes universal healthcare.
"You cannot have both an opt-in working class and an opt-in nonworking class and have a healthy society."
So I agree, but I do not think it would become a real problem. If it does become a problem we could implement a lottery system that swaps workers out every so often.
If more and more contribution is being done by a select few through advanced technology, what is the shrinking working class to do, learn to code?
What are the top winners of the current economy contributing as they disproportionately absorb more and more wealth? Especially as they dodge all tax.
VAT the companies, use it to fund a UBI. That money is going to immediately flow back into the economy as 60 - 80% live paycheck-to-paycheck.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_pilots
UBI is survival money. It's meant as a social safety net. It's not 'thrive' money.
But people want to thrive. So the theory is that people will continue to want jobs to advance themselves and their families.
Just with UBI the absence of a job is way less brutal.
It's also shrinks the government and allows companies to do layoffs with less brutal consequences to the people being laid off, which allows companies to adjust to economic conditions a lot more easily.
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Also, just like hunter gathering and farming ways of life were made obsolete by technology, this concept of a 'job' will potentially be made obsolete by technology in the future.
As automation and globalization increases and the number of jobs declines exponentially in the US and also around the world...the same value is being generated but the gains are only going to a few people.
Were going to have to figure out what to do with a ton of people who want to work but no jobs are available due to this legacy system.
Suppose we lived in a society where people didn't specialize and there were no careers. What would the day-to-day look like?
Well, you probably wouldn't be able to get pharmaceuticals. The expertise required to conceive and produce those is massive. Ditto for healthcare.
How about food? Without farmers, we are stuck growing our own or foraging. Too sick to forage or work the field? Then you don't eat.
Somebody comes by your home with a weapon. Who do you call? Nobody, that's who.
That's what society looks like if everyone opts out of a career. And if everyone can't do it, nobody should be able to. Fairness and all that. Extenuating circumstances notwithstanding, of course.
There is no labor shortage and there never will be. When exec pay equals worker pay, then all of the levers will have been pulled and we can maybe start to talk about a labor shortage. Much of which are jobs that shouldn't exist (ad sales), or things that can be automated.
Executive pay will not, nor should it ever, equal worker pay. I am not going to pretend multiple millions in yearly compensation is reasonable. But there is a bit more responsibility at the executive level than there is at the bottom.
Non-working investors are assuming risk. It is a different class of contribution than a worker. And don't forget, those "non-working investors" also include your average folk who are saving for retirement.
> That people reject taking on a career and being productive members of society is troubling. It also displays a ton of ignorance.
I’m saying it’s not ignorant at all, opting out of a system stacked against you is highly logical. I would find it far more troubling if people just ignored the inequality in their own companies and blindly worked to make others rich. That is the real problem.
Secondly: are people at the bottom, whose skills include things like "putting stuff on shelves" and "asking if you want fries with that" actually building a career? No.
Thirdly: those people all have the freedom to start their own companies. Unfortunately, what people will find is that it's a lot of work and a lot of risk. So they don't. And then complain about inequity.
Lots of complaining, very little effort into actually improving their own lives.
This isn't to say our system is perfect, cause it ain't. But by and large people aren't complaining because their life sucks, they're complaining because someone has more than them.
> But by and large people aren't complaining because their life sucks, they're complaining because someone has more than them.
They are complaining because life sucks. Housing, healthcare and education are either unobtainable or will sink most people into a life of debt. That’s not complaining because someone has more than you. That’s asking for the bare necessities to not take a lifetime of labor to pay off.
So nobody should be able to take on any occupation except farmer or hunter-gatherer, because we would go extinct if everyone was a pharmacist or cop or baker? I think you’ve got the notion of universalizability from moral philosophy mixed up with economics.
If half of society doesn’t need a “career” job to get by, that means society can be maintained without that much specialized labor. In fact, I’m under the impression that our society requires large quantities of unspecialized labor to function - and the dissatisfaction with such jobs (or rather, the conditions thereof) are the subject of this article.
So you took my examples and decided that because I didn't enumerate every possible occupation, that I intended to exclude all others?
I'd address your other points but it's not worth conversing with a person who clearly argues in bad faith.