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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

I really want to believe there are people out there for whom UBI would motivate the, to take a part time job to do something they love but couldn’t afford to eat on.

But I don’t know if human nature supports this. If you’re a five year old and you know that you don’t have to work, does it change how you dream of the future for better, or for worse? Does it end up like the Expanse where people have UBI but are still miserable because they can’t afford to go to school to learn a trade, and colleges become socialized and bureaucratic, enforcing artificial scarcity?

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There are jobs almost no one would take by choice, but they learn to have a passion for over time. In other cases, some jobs simply need to be done.

If I think about living only off UBI, or UBI + a passion project, it assumes all the infrastructure and service businesses are still running to make my life comfortable. Will those things run if the motivation is taken away?

Would you trade one month in twelve to make things comfortable for everyone?

I've often wondered if the solution to the "who will clean the toilets?!" problem is: everyone, but only when it's their month to do so.

A pipe-dream, of course, and likely only doable under a military dictatorship.

I visited Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen when I traveled to Denmark. I don't have a lot of information, but I walked by someone giving a tour, and from the little I overheard, it sounded like that's how it worked there. Everyone rotated handling the various responsibilities to take care of what needed to be done. But that's a small community of like-minded people, so it doesn't really have to scale like it would for it to work on a large city, state, or country level.

Yes, for one of two reasons, I'd say:

* In the big cities, increased rents will almost immediately eat up the extra income from the UBI, and there won't be any meaningful change in the status quo for anyone who rents — which I imagine includes the majority of the people who do the important but undesirable jobs.

* Anywhere that the people doing these jobs either can afford houses (smaller American towns, e.g.), or where there's enough rental supply that rent won't immediately go up by the same amount as the UBI, will have to start paying people more to do these jobs. As far as I understand it, jobs like trash collection are already relatively well-paid given the training and qualifications required, so they might not even have to pay that much more.

Pretty sure my uncle, the reformed fuckup, bought his first house with sanitation dept money.

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