I’m yet to hear an UBI proponent explain to me how those jobs would get done. The naive go-to answer is ”automation”, but on HN people generally understand how hard automating unskilled labor is
On a more meta note, this is an incredibly common and obvious answer to your question, and I wonder if it's even asked in good faith. If you've "yet to hear an UBI proponent explain" this to you then you really don't understand it at all.
Except their goods are going to cost more too now. Unless you're going to start proposing price controls.
I can't really see UBI doing anything except inflating itself away.
And even if the benefits are entirely "inflated away" in aggregate (which is extremely dubious given that UBI produces real economic value in terms of stability), that's just the aggregate effect. To take an extreme example, if the Fed prints 1,000,000 exadollars and distributes them equally, then yeah it's pure inflation, but it also massively redistributes wealth to the point where everyone is practically identical. Hopefully that example demonstrates that the effect isn't zero even if it's just "inflating itself away."
Finally, I object to treating this question in pure economic terms. We shouldn't be overly concerned with optimizing aggregate economic outcomes for society. Those at the top end can more than afford to give up some wealth, and those at the bottom are struggling to a heartbreaking degree. The utility function of holding wealth is not linear and if you're interested in increasing everyone's well-being then that's a fact you have to address.
That is because if you print exadollars then either the assets rise in value in proportion or beyond a certain point, implode, making the country as a whole poorer. That is because companies can no longer make money. Suppliers demand more anticipating further inflation. You then need to pass it on but may not be able to pass it on fast enough. Cycle builds upon itself.
Pretty soon, your currency is completely devalued and there is a robust underground economy. You run into shortages for essentials and have to introduce price controls. The poor get poorer. The rich get poorer. Good job.
Lebanon. Venezuela.
2. The wage of the burger flipper at mcdonalds might not contribute much to the overall price of a big mac, but the wage of the burger flipper plus the wage that was factored into the cost of the ingredients might.
Companies in America are incredibly top-heavy, and a more stable economy could emerge if those resources at the top are distributed down to the worker. If implemented properly, UBI could push companies to share more of those profits with their workers without affecting the buyer.
Additionally capital generates more social value when it circulates (when its being spent) vs when it is stagnant (when it sits in a bank). Even if things are more expensive, more people having access to things allows local economies to grow
This is totally backwards. Better-off people have more disposable income and are less sensitive to price increases than lower-class workers are. For example, suppose your favorite restaurant raises its prices from $10 to $15 per meal. If you're a tech worker, you probably won't care and will continue eating there as often as ever. If you're an unskilled worker, there's a good chance you'll never go there anymore.
I don't know if you've ever worked with people in low socioeconomic strata, but I've been a camp counselor with some kids who's socioeconomics were such that eating off the dollar menu at McDonalds on their birthday was a big deal. I don't think Chipotle being more expansive is a material concern so long as actual purchasing power goes up.
I tend to think the minimum wage should be regarded as a moral concern - if you can't make enough to live decently then the line between effective indentured servitude and freedom is eroded, and this is dangerous in a society premised on the general welfare being such that each citizen has enough leisure time to be educated and vote.
But if you're trying to generalize the idea that increasing minimum wage would lead to an inflation death spiral because labor is too high a percentage of cost of staple goods... I'm not sure I buy it, though agriculture is definitely one of the industries most impacted by low cost labor (I don't know what they pay the folks crossing the border at 3 AM to pick lettuce in Yuma in 100+ degree heat, but it's not a lot). But my general sense is that the labor to harvest isn't most of the component cost of lettuce, there's transport, refrigeration, irrigation, pesticides, etc., so you can probably assume doubling minimum wage doesn't do anything like double the price of lettuce. If you believe that the labor to pick lettuce is 50% of the cost of lettuce, your worst case for a 2x wage increase is a 1.5x gain in the price of lettuce, which means the low end of the economy is getting net purchasing power growth, but more realistically, I can't imagine that picking lettuce is 50% of the cost, meaning low-end labor wage increases can't have near that much impact on prices.
My assumption is that the issue with higher labor costs is foreign competition at lower cost with lower standards causing a competitive issue and net less business more than it's an "wages increasing the price and causing an inflation issue." (IE the general "US must have 3rd world wages because otherwise it can't compete with the 3rd world" idea.)
But in my view so long as the increase in minimum wage creates an increase in overall purchasing power greater than any follow-on cost of inflation, it's probably net positive, and should be more efficient because the more normalized wages and living conditions are circa median income, the greater benefit to economies of scale and services and such for that group. Having too many poor and too many distinct socioeconomic bands is bad for the market because it means that the next model-T type product will be more likely to fail. So dealing with the issue caused by competing with lower-wage producers outside our boarders should be addressed separately. (For example, subsidizing US labor's wages by how deficient the living standards of competing labor is, or some other, smarter, plan, someone smarter than me comes up with.)
For that to be true, the price increase of goods purchased by the poor induced by the additional income would have to be a greater multiple than the additional income of the poor; this doesn't make any kind of sense.
That kind of thing is best kept for where markets don’t accurately price externalities, not ”$foo businesses can’t find staff at a price they are happy with”.
[0] mostly
There is a gas station attendant working at 4am because they only cost $8/h and the company makes enough revenue during that hour that that is worth it.
If they need to start paying $15h/h and have to close from 1am to 5am, some people might not be able to get cigarettes from the gas station, or buy gas without a credit card.
Or maybe, out of 5 gas stations, 1 will remain open and now have 5 times as many customers during those hours, so it's worth it to stay open again.
But right now, 4 out of 5 gas stations are open simply because they can be, no matter how useful they are.
You're arguing for the destruction of economic activity in the name of reducing the 'wasteful use of resources', which is just silly. You're just making it harder for these folks to support themselves, while burdening others with the need to support them.
This assumes the worker isn't doing something valuable during the day. I worked some night shifts to pay for college.
> day time, for 8 dollars per hour or more,
I got paid more for the night shift than the workers on the day shift. Fewer people wanted to be awake at 3:30AM. Even fewer wanted to work.
Well yes, people need to sleep. You can sleep during the day, or at night, but you still need to sleep at some point.
If a student is burning their energy working overnight, they aren't getting the most out of college, that's a waste of resources in a given system.
Being debt free after leaving college was worth the lost sleep.
Reality of course is that you can't optimize a global society of 7 billion individual thinking people with different abilities, wants, hopes, needs, indeed you can't even come up with a measure of what you are trying to optimize, but in my view mankind should have eliminating non-producive work as a goal.
I've just filled in forms to register at the local GP surgery. I had to fill them in on paper, putting name and address multiple times on different forms, this will all be transcribed by one of the receptionists into a computer.
This is waste. My health care system is fairly good with eliminating waste (compared with say the US system), but it's something that should be optimised -- it would have been more efficient for both me and the data entry person if I could have just typed in the data into an online form (complete with autofill), rather than this archaic method from the 1980s.
Having inefficient systems is bad. On the London Underground 20 years ago you had to queue up at a ticket office or machine to buy a ticket. Now you just walk through the barrier with your phone. 100 years ago you would tell someone behind a counter what you wanted and wait around while he went and got it, 50 years ago you walked through the shop and did that yourself, and now with some stores you scan simply pick up what you want and walk out without even paying. The total work done reduces each time, and that's a net win for the species.
Reducing tedious unfulfilling work should be the goal, and a higher minimum wage incentivises that.
Here in Switzerland, it still seems to be a 50/50 if you get to fill out a form, or simply hand the receptionist your insurance card which has your national insurance ID on a Magstripe. Usually, all they ask then is "Is your address at Example St still current?"
I only have my life that I can optimize. The rest of humanity is above my paygrade.
I'm writing this from Switzerland, which has this weird relationship of being quite like the US, but also quite unlike the US.
In this case, opening hours of everything are strictly regulated. Only some shops in (or next to) train stations and airports are allowed to remain open on Sundays and holidays, on a case-by-case basis.
But because there's also legislation requiring large hourly salary multipliers for employees working on those days, their products can also be expensive as balls.
(Seeing as these are also the shops tourists see most often, this is where the "$4 for a can of coke???" encounters originate)
Specially when the 4 couldn't properly pay their living costs. Issue really is that we can't find different work for the 3 anymore...
Why assume that the worker is four times as productive? Even if the same number of transactions occur because everyone goes to the one open shop, we've still destroyed 64K of GDP by canning four employees.
> Specially when the 4 couldn't properly pay their living costs.
The 4 people working for $8/hour were contributing 64K per year to paying their living costs. By destroying their jobs have you made them better able to properly pay their living costs? Of course not, you've merely transferred the cost of supporting them to some other poor schmuck.
Reducing economic activity and raising taxes is not a recipe for increased prosperity.
You mean they might not be able to buy gas at all. Gas stations will shut off their pumps when they close, so you can't even do self-service credit-card purchases.
Some do, some don't.
Many gas stations around here (CA) keep the pumps working for self-pay when they are closed.
Also I remember driving on US50 through Nevada late after midnight running out of gas and stopped at a completely dark gas station. Fortunately the pumps worked!
[0] https://www.avenergy.ch/images/pdf/TAB-16_2016_final_D_korri...
In the US/Canada when I've filled up, at some places you turn up and someone does it for you, which is a right pain and breaks your train of thought as you have to engage in conversation with someone. Others you do it yourself, but you turn up and find the pump isn't open -- you have to go into the shop and pay in advance, which is just weird - I don't know how much I want to put it, I just want to top it up and then pay the amount on my credit card.
I believe laws vary by state or even smaller regions.
Switching to credit card kiosks won't help. It's usually illegal to have a gas station operating without an attendant. Something to do with that whole danger of blowing up and killing lots of people thing.
> maybe, out of 5 gas stations, 1 will remain open and now have 5 times as many customers
Except it costs some money to open and close the store, costs some money to have alarms & surveillance while the store is closed, costs the store in damages, and more than that, costs customers who will prefer the store that will always be open, even during normal hours. It may not all be as wasteful as you think.
And what happens when the store that can justify staying open happens to be the one that doesn't provide diesel, propane, milk, or similar? It can be very detrimental to the city.
Not in most of the US States I've visited. There are all-night gas stations across the nation that are unmanned.
> Except it costs some money to open and close the store, costs some money to have alarms & surveillance while the store is closed
I think you misunderstand. He's proposing that the competition of the 2-4 gas station clusters at most highway offramps/some intersections are over-competing. The permanent closing of some is a net good for the economy.
Multi-trillion dollar companies will eventually note how they are taking increased losses/less profit when faced with the current economics (wage floors, limited spending power of the middle class, etc).
Is this true? Probably not because the owners are largely franchisees who will not simply sacrifice their entire livelihood because profits are down. It's not like the owner of a Mobil station can set their own gas prices (near total control of these locations is baked into the franchise agreement, like with many large brands). The multi-billionaire brands aren't sweating a dime off their own fees when some location can't survive and closes down.
If the labor cost of the graveyard shift doubled the total cost of operations for that shift would increase only marginally. That gas station is only going to shut down for that shift if there's a significant change in costs. A small increase is completely covered by a single late night or early morning fill-up.
Usually, because fewer people are willing to work late nights, pay is usually higher for the night shift. This is often called a "shift differential".
> But right now, 4 out of 5 gas stations are open simply because they can be, no matter how useful they are.
If there was no economic advantage to being open, the store would be closed.
I think it's mostly the mix of overworked + low benefits + knowing that you have to do it otherwise you'll have nothing is the deal breaker - not so much the job itself.
A lot of people, myself included, would still work if they receive UBI. We'd just work less, plus it would be liberating and healthy for the mind to know that you can quit anytime without your survival being at stake.
Nobody is claiming that the entire humanity will stop working under an UBI system.
Is your current job cleaning gas station toilets at 5am?
Because if not, you haven't responded to the posts you're replying to.
People will definite do something for sure. It's just I'm not sure why something has to be some sort of job or anything beneficial to society. There are a lot of people whose jobs are damaging to society actually.
It's just that I'm fairly sure there will always be people willing to clean toilets for little extra money, especially if they're not abused and kept hostage of a minimum (but lifesaving for them) pay. And those conditions should be impossible in an UBI system.
That's assuming UBI would actually cover the basics. If that's half the needs to sustain their life I agree they would do that cleaning job, which is getting back to the original situation: job filled only because of lack of choice.
I'm not saying it's going to be the same group of people who will re-pick cleaning jobs.
There's plenty of people out there who need the occasional physical thankless labor (myself included). As long as it's no more than 3-4h shift IMO there will be people who will do it.
In my eyes the key element is having the choice of not doing it. UBI might give us that or it might be a half-arsed measure that only does things on paper. We have no way of knowing that right now though.
While I’m using hyperbole, what it shows is that, there is some non-exploitative wage for cleaning bathrooms and while it might be “too high” for the current business that need clean bathrooms, supply and demand “should” figure out the rest.
The problem is that the market is being distorted. It used to be that Alice would pay Bob $2000 per month to clean all of the bathrooms in her office. Now, Bob quit his job to live off of $2000 per month of UBI, and Alice's taxes got raised by $2000 per month to help pay for everyone's UBI.
Surely this isn't fair for Alice?
Information disimetry is what Alice benefited from, she has better skills, knowledge, or connections, or all of these. Bob has less and cleans other people's bathrooms instead of getting his cleaned while he can grow his wealth undisturbed by chores. The disymetry then keeps growing.
I doubt the solution is to provide money as if it grew on trees to those who are below average in term of status and profit abilities in society. It would likely drag most people further down and keep a few at the top who will find ways to fund the mandiants somehow.
One just gets used to it and it isn't a big deal.
But for now we can only speculate. I'm still super curious how will the whole thing turn out though!
And that in turn will spur development of automation instead of Bezos like corner cutting across our entire society.
Now if those low wage to minimum wage gigs came with solid health insurance and a social safety net I might have a colder heart here but honestly I'm glad they're finally figuring out just how rigged the game has been against them all along.
To be fair, by worshiping the affluent and hoping that one day they will be among them when they almost certainly will never be, they played their part in enabling the system that holds them down, but it seems we're moving to the next chapter here at last.
Right now a lot of the costs of such jobs are simply externalized to exploited employees - a UBI would cause the wages in those to rise to more fair levels.
And playing the mating game is a lot easier if you have the appropriate status symbols, fancy clothes, et cetera.
But I have experienced effects of the labor shortage firsthand, e.g., getting somewhere only to see a "closed today due to lack of staffing" sign on the door.
The people that need them done would offer sufficient pay to induce people to do them [0]. If the need isn’t sufficient to offer enough to do that in the presence of a sustainable (non-hyperinflationary) UBI, then the job doesn't need done and the fact that it is happening now is just a demonstration of the exploitative nature of the current economy (which includes features like time limits and behavior testing that mean that not everyone means-qualified gets means-tested support.)
[0] which UBI makes easier, at the same maximum benefit level, than traditional means-tested welfare, by not cutting benefits rapidly with outside income.
For the record, not a UBI proponent, nor do I think this is a good solution. It is however most likely solution, and how countries like Qatar have solved the problem.
As others have pointed out already, this is already true today: We use undocumented-workers, recent immigrants who don’t know better, and prison labor.
Recently, prison labor use has been on the rise.
Maybe losing UBI for N months could be a new standard punishment for certain crimes or a condition for parole. We'll let you out of prison early for good behavior, but no UBI for 2 years, forcing you to take those jobs no one else wants.
For example, I feel that certain high financial crimes are better served by percentage of net-worth, rather than exact dollar-figures.
Otherwise it’s a fixed cost of doing business.
If they are truly happy with the basics, then they would be happy with working 16 hours a week on two days. The truth is that the earning opportunity that allows this, forces them to live in an expensive location that then burdens them with another 24 hours of pointless busy work.
If I work hard and then win the lottery playing $2 tickets (so it already doesn't matter how hard I work), I can already not-work for the rest of my life. So the question isn't if this is possible, it's how many people can be supported at a 'basics' level with current technology.
Because there's a bunch of jobs important to society that won't get done. To be clear, it's okay that some people decide not to work. The problem is that currently, too many people are deciding not to work. If we eventually automate a bunch of low-skill jobs away, then I'd agree that it wouldn't be a problem anymore.
Fact is we have already automated away most trivial work, the remaining low skill labor is mostly there for the convenience of those with money. Society wont collapse if they aren't done.
Also, I think "reduced your choice of restaurants to go to" really undersells how bad that is. It's a bunch of small business owners losing everything they've ever worked for.
That being said: Unloading trucks is a solved problem that can be automated with sufficient containerization.
Go read https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedexers and let me know how solved that problem is.
There are better ways such as variable work weeks and gig/day labor for easily acquired menial labor (on top of UBI), but that may be a bigger shift in culture than UBI.
If something needs to be done and no one does it, then
1. Does it ACTUALLY need to be done? 2. The society starts just start splitting the work and doing it together.
This is strength of mini-governance. You're doing it because you care about the community and EVERYONE is responsible for it. Not a class system.
So many of the comments in this thread are so absolutely horrifying to me. Bunch of spoiled people thinking there isn’t a space for entry level jobs, like they’ve never held one themselves.
That being said, would I have jumped on the unemployment train back then if it got bumped up due to a pandemic? Definitely. Do I think people should advocate for living wages? Absolutely. Twenty years ago when I had my last entry level job, cost of living was half what it is now, but pay has only gone up by 50%. There are real issues, but they aren’t due to jobs being “demeaning”, they are with wages not keeping up with inflation.
Your hustle-culture narrative is appallingly toxic and your entire argument amounts to learning to love being treated like garbage so that you don't feel bad when you do it to others once you're the one on top.
Seriously, do you expect six weeks of paid vacation and 30 bucks an hour for running a till at an ice cream shop? I can see maybe 18 an hour at an ice cream shop, but even at that price I’d be shocked if you don’t lose business due to a cone costing 5 bucks instead of 4.
Maybe this conversation would be helped by understanding what you define “exploited” and “treated like garbage” to be, and some examples of how that is happening. I feel we must be talking past eachother, because it’s hard to understand how there’s a valid argument for non skilled labor to command a high salary.
Again for reference I believe that wages haven’t kept up with inflation and that a minimum wage of around 18 or so an hour would be appropriate given the cost of living increases we’ve seen in the last 12 months.
When everything is locked down, what's the point of looking nice in fancy clothes that nobody can see you wear?