LogFAQs > #956004778

adjl posted...

In pretty much every minimum income/UBI experiment that's been conducted, it's been found that people do ultimately end up working, they just use the breathing room provided by the guaranteed subsistence income to pursue the training they need to get jobs they actually want (instead of spending all their time working terrible low-paying jobs that don't leave them with enough time or money to improve their skills), even if those jobs don't pay enough to live off of. That hasn't happened with the Covid unemployment boost, but that's also a temporary thing (and therefore not something to plan a career around), plus the nature of the pandemic has made changing jobs a pretty risky idea.

The problem is, there aren't enough "good jobs" for everyone, or even close to it.
No one seems to want to face that reality, but there simply aren't that many skilled jobs and/or jobs that are enjoyable/rewarding.
You can't just have everyone "learn to code" and things will be fine. Heck, I'm an engineer and I remember graduating into the recession and was told by people in IEEE that the unemployment rate for engineers was 8% (usually it was 1%), and struggling to get into a career. Even really high skill jobs or jobs that require advanced degrees can be overrun if there's a glut of applicants (the recession was the opposite, a lack of demand from companies, but it works the same either way if the supply of workers increases).

Ultimately, people like working. Having purpose, routine, and direction are generally good things for people's mental health and sense of self-worth. This is why so may retirees pick up jobs after being retired for a few years. What people don't like is working miserable jobs where they're routinely mistreated, purely because the alternative is starving on the streets (and even then, the pay only barely staves that off). Given a choice between that and being able to survive just as well (if not better) without working at all, it's only natural people would choose the latter.

As has been mentioned, you don't need a (paid) job to have purpose in your life. A lot of retired people also do volunteering, they can have hobbies, etc...
But yeah, if people don't NEED to work, they're not going to take the crappy jobs that nevertheless society needs. For some jobs like sanitation worker, they can pay an inflated salary to entice people, but that's not going to be a feasible model for stuff like groceries store cashiers or burger flippers at a fast food place, where they operate on thin margins. Eventually automation will kill most/all of those jobs, but until then we're in the awkward transition period. Which is why I say that we aren't ready for UBI today, but we should be setting things up for a smooth transition into it later on.
Heavily tax corporate profits at the point of sale, remove all corporate tax breaks and replace them w/ breaks for employing legal U.S. residents (and get rid of stuff like payroll taxes that punish companies for hiring people). Then as automation replaces jobs and corporate profits stay the same or even increase, the government becomes flush w/ money to pay for UBI so all the displaced workers aren't homeless and starving. The future is massive corporate profits off of an almost entirely AI "workforce", so we'd be smart to align our tax structure for that sooner than later.