Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Along with the daily fish, does it makes sense to provide some sort of vocational training that an otherwise healthy person can take advantage of?
If a person was not able to take advantage of early education for whatever reason, but is currently physically healthy, there is still opportunity to provide for himself and his family by learning some vocational skills.
Choosing Oakland in particular has interesting connotations, considering that it is a major industrial center where there may be lots of opportunity for skilled workers.
Maybe even a reversal of the automation movement in favor of using basic labor for many repetitive tasks in order to achieve this altruistic goal.
Of course, there are still a great many people who truly could take advantage of the basic income experiment because their other options are severely limited for whatever reason.
There are already lots of great free (or very cheap) ways to educate yourself but all of them require time and energy. If you spend most of your time and energy working an awful job just to survive you can't take advantage of these opportunities.
Take away the need to invest time and energy into basic survival and you can suddenly take advantage of a lot of cool things that were previously not accessible to you.
even ignoring the grind that is an awful job: Community College is cheap and has all sorts of vocational training... if you can take Monday Wednesday Friday off between 9:30 and 10:15 then again between 1:00 and 1:45.
The intersection of Jobs-That-Can-Work-With-That-Schedule and Jobs-That-Can-Pay-Enough-For-CC-AND-Food-AND-Shelter is tiny and flooded with existing students.
There are people out there that wouldn't be able to cope with that. If you're on low income and have a family to support and, equally as important, nurture, then you are gonna struggle to find time, money and energy for community college.
With the strains of poverty, health issues increase. Sometimes this could lead to involvement via social services. At this point, education is a pipe dream.
I've been there. Still am there. I could spend the evening reading educational books. Sometimes I do but always at the expense of what needs to be done. Always st the expense of the little family time I have (I see my kids perhaps one hour tops weekdays - that is a luxury compared to what I used to have).
This is with a system where the state, currently begrudgingly, helps me out a great deal. I whince thinking about countries where the social security net isn't as helpful.
It requires a lot of optimism to keep yourself a float in a situation like this. College, through my eyes, is a wonderful idea that is a bit too on the optimistic side at the moment, even for me.
> Maybe even a reversal of the automation movement in favor of using basic labor for many repetitive tasks in order to achieve this altruistic goal.
That would be horrific, doing "work for works sake" knowing that the only reason you are doing it instead of a machine is because someone decided you needed the nobleness of having a 'job'.
This exists in Japan, and is actually a very wonderful thing for the most part.
There are a lot of low-paying jobs here that involve doing little else than basic customer service: answering questions and directing people where to go. Similarly, there are also a lot of low-skill labor jobs focused on parts of the national infrastructure.
Imagine, in the United States, if we pulled a page out of FDRs playbook and started putting the underemployed to work on our national infrastructure. Helping out road crews, cleaning up parks, cleaning up trash, that sort of thing
Government offices are part of that infrastructure, so people could also learn to answer phones, guide citizens through navigating the maze that is most civil service agencies, and so on.
It would take a lot of work to get there, but all that money goes right back into the economy, and it makes life better for their entire community, which I think should at least be a point of pride.
> That would be horrific, doing "work for works sake" knowing that the only reason you are doing it instead of a machine is because someone decided you needed the nobleness of having a 'job'.
We automate many things to squeeze the absolute last penny out of it. That can have deleterious effects, too.
For example, many fruits and vegetables have been bred to be harvested by machine. These foods have been shown to have fewer nutrients and taste differently from those which much be harvested by hand.
Employing some people to harvest some of the non-automatable crops would be a good thing.
> Along with the daily fish, does it makes sense to provide some sort of vocational training that an otherwise healthy person can take advantage of?
The two things have little to do with each other.
A universal basic income has two primary purposes. The first is that it can act as the safety net for people with no other options, without the administrative overhead and errors inherent in means testing or the disincentive to work of welfare benefits you lose when you get a job. The second is that it's inherently redistributive across the whole wealth spectrum, so it allows you to simplify the tax system because you're doing the redistributive part on the spending side, allowing you to use a single universal tax rate that can't be avoided with shell games and accounting tricks.
Now you want to offer vocational training on top of that, but this is the usual "we should help people by giving them food stamps" fallacy. Give people the money instead. They know more about their own situation than you do. If their best option is to use the money to go to school, they'll do that. But maybe their better option is to use the money to move somewhere else, or pay down debts, or go to rehab, etc.
The people know better than the government what the people need.
In America there is no such thing as "no other options".
When you see folks saying these people are lazy, they are folks who understand there are always "other options". They might not be the options you want, but then you want free money so who cares what you want.
> Maybe even a reversal of the automation movement in favor of using basic labor for many repetitive tasks in order to achieve this altruistic goal.
Because that's really what we want in the 21st century: human machine cogs like we had in the 19th. No, let's let robots do robot things and we don't need humans to "compete" with them. Let's let humans do more human (and humane) oriented tasks.
"Let's let humans do more human (and humane) oriented tasks."
The definition of "humane" keeps shifting over time and will always be a matter of perspective.
To share a personal story, my father was unemployed while I was in college. Within a few months he looked like he had aged 10 years. Several months later he took a part time job as a landscaper and he started recovering.
I remember coming home from college once, driving to his work site and watching him push a lawnmower until he had a break in his work. This was a man that used to wear a suit and tie and commute to the city every day. Yet as I watched him push a lawnmower, I never felt more proud of him. He introduced me to his co-workers and it was the first time I had seen him smile in nearly a year. Several months later he was able to find gainful employment.
One could argue the isolation and lethargy caused by long term unemployment is more damaging mentally and physically than most labor intensive jobs. Moreover, society needs rungs in the ladder of economic advancement and it is human nature to find value in work and being part of a team.
There are a lot of assumptions here. Why can't people learn to or be assisted in finding purpose and happiness outside of a job? I've done it twice myself, going 6+ months by choice without a job. Regarding isolation, I don't think it is that difficult to imagine ways people can stay connected and have a vibrant social life without full time employment.
A big aspect of this is reframing cultural values so that people don't feel so strongly that there worth is determined by their employment status.
That's his point. Although it wasn't a blue collar job like his dad originally had, it was still enough to keep him mentally healthy. Being completely unemployed sitting home harmed him psychologically.
His point was that having any job will create enough benefits to offset the supposed harms caused by having a job that one would consider himself overqualified for.
For the most part I agree, with the caveat that 'any job' is perhaps too broad.
I've done loads of 'menial' jobs throughout my life and some were so soul-crushingly terrible (to me) that I'm not sure having them was better than 'sitting at home unemployed'.
I've never done landscaping, but I suspect it would not have been one of those soul-crushing jobs.
It wasn't "gainful" employment because of schedule variabilities. Beside, the PP is arguing against the employment value of "cog" type jobs that are easily automated.
"Provide" isn't a good word here - if vocational training is connected to this program, the only connection possible would be forcing people to use these vocational programs (I mean, you might just send a brochure to people but that's not a real connection). Present day social services abound with various "workfare" schemes. Even more prison labor, they tend to be failures on all levels - neither preparing the participants for jobs in the real economy nor producing things of value nor giving the participants a feeling of worth.
The idea of universal basic income is to eliminate social services bureaucracy - basically that the money spent deciding who is or isn't deserving could be better allocated by just giving something to everyone.
Answer: Life gets better. We have proof of this from history. When was the last time anybody here ground their own flour or washed their laundry using a rock and a river?
We are gonna end up in the future that Wall-E has predicted. Machines do everything and humans are fat slugs. Our minds are lazy and want to do the least amount of work. If given the option, we will do the least amount and occupy ourselves in entertainment. Now is that living? Thats up to you to decide. A good book to read on experiments done to understand human behavior is Daniel Kahnemans Thinking Fast and Slow.
That's a very negative opinion of human nature, and a big reason I thought Wall-E was bullshit.
Humans enjoy their bodies. We play sports because it's fun and feels good. We enjoy the burn of a good run. We like to look in the mirror and see something vaguely attractive. We like to fuck. And we want to fuck people we find attractive.
> Humans enjoy their bodies. We play sports because it's fun and feels good. We enjoy the burn of a good run. We like to look in the mirror and see something vaguely attractive. We like to fuck. And we want to fuck people we find attractive.
Please excuse the low effort comment, but I've seen far more people who treat their body terribly, and who become overweight/obese compared to the number of people who do anything close to keeping in shape with sports, running, and so on. Not that that stops people from fucking, but the proportion of athletic, attractive people fucking is far lower than you might make it out to be.
A lot of that is because, in the current world, staying fit is difficult. I, for example, would be in great shape if I could exercise. I like exercise. Exercise is, in fact, how I discovered that I have joint problems. I unfortunately don't have time to go to a pool every week, which is basically the only exercise I can handle, and so I have trouble with fitness. On larger scales, there are entire towns that don't have access to fresh fruit or vegetables; google "food desert". There are people that don't have enough money to buy anything other than pure calories per dollar without paying any attention to health. There are people whose household water is barely potable and drink soda all the time because it's cheaper than bottled water. There are people that grew up in households that drank soda and have sufficiently shitty jobs that they can't summon up the willpower to change that habit. Then you've got people that simply rolled badly on the genetic lottery or inherited bad intestinal flora and can't be fit no matter what they do.
Removing stresses on time, money, social interaction, culture, and mortality will make the population more healthy, not less healthy.
> Please excuse the low effort comment, but I've seen far more people who treat their body terribly, and who become overweight/obese compared to the number of people who do anything close to keeping in shape with sports, running, and so on.
Research has shown that a lack of "psychological bandwidth" degrades impulse control.
Being excessively poor, having to take care of children or elderly parents, having a crappy job, etc. all take their toll on your ability to execute on things like exercise, cleaning, saving, etc.
Removing the problem of "daily living expenses" from someone's plate is a HUGE step toward helping them improve their situation both physically and mentally.
Yeah, that's a risk. However, I'm less afraid of the robots that get us there and far more afraid of the applied psychology (propaganda/advertising/politics) that could trap the entire species in that state. The Culture demonstrates a future with similar robotic capabilities where the exact opposite happens, with people gaining nearly ultimate self-actualization, the difference being in the application of intelligence.
I guess you haven't read the Culture novels? They explain it better than I could.
The short form is that they've solved Friendliness and handed most of the management over to hyperintelligent, near-omnipotent benevolent AIs. The only real problems left for individuals qualify as "how to not get bored", which for the most part they approach by cultivating eye-watering arrays of esoteric and satisfying hobbies, projects, arts and crafts, high-brow debates, luxurious indulgences, social groups, and games. The few people that still aren't satisfied generally end up in their diplomatic corps slash military slash spy agency slash police force. "Ultimate" may have been an exaggeration, but it is by far the most satisfying utopia I've seen described.
You make it sound as if we are going to run out of work? We can always increase the level of education then have more research scientists and engineers, for example. Imagine if we did 10x the amount of R&D.
Does everyone have the capacity to become a research scientist or engineer with enough training? I think we'll have to find some creative ways to use low-skilled labor.
What you said was that it could solve the problem of running out of work for people. This only works as a solution if everyone can be trained to that R&D.
No, I didn't say that. I said we could train a lot more people. Do you think 10% of the world population currently works in R&D? My proposal was to greatly increase the number.
Then what the highly trained research scientists and engineers need to do is apply their scientific training to fleecing rich people of their money.
Which is actually what is happening, and has been happening for the last 2 decades with the entry of a large number of physics, math, and CS Ph.Ds into hedge funds and tech entrepreneurship. Stage 1 is a massive wealth transfer from dumb old money built on relationships to smart new money built on technology. Stage 2 is increased funding for STEM research & applications, as the new money diverts capital into their interests. Stage 2 takes a generation or so - it doesn't happen until the new money feels secure enough in their wealth that they can divert attention to becoming powerful. But we've seen the beginnings of it already, with Tesla, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Calico, Google X, YC Research, Breakthrough Starshot, and the Gates Foundation diverting some of that money that was redirected into scientifically-trained hands back to actual scientists.
10x R&D sounds great, but as you throw more money towards a subject, you dont get more good research, you get more crap you have to wade thru. I remember when there was virtually unlimited money towards aid research, they quickly ran out of anything resembling a remotely qualify researcher very quickly.
Education is the great emancipator, but education you and I take for granted as being common, is often not.
It's hard to learn and work on improving yourself when you have no time or energy left from being able to just pay the bills to eat, sleep and work.
Poverty really is a cycle that more people should try out to see how quickly all of their options, rights, and entitlements dissapear and become inaccesible and traded for constant struggle.
about 50% of people make it out of poverty over a 20 year span. It seems if we stopped people from slipping into poverty in the first place, then we'd eventually have no (or exactly 1) people in poverty.
Basic income would help people do all sorts of things including having money to spend while you're getting your education.
Meanwhile, providing vocational training is a great thing.
Tying them together assumes you're a better judge of someone's needs when you don't know them. They may have a smarter way to spend or invest the money.
I suspect that an important subset of the people that worry about what the unwashed masses are going to do with so many free time, is also a subset of the people that complain about paternalistic states. Kind of ironic.
Along with the daily fish, does it makes sense to provide some sort of vocational training that an otherwise healthy person can take advantage of?
If a person was not able to take advantage of early education for whatever reason, but is currently physically healthy, there is still opportunity to provide for himself and his family by learning some vocational skills.
Choosing Oakland in particular has interesting connotations, considering that it is a major industrial center where there may be lots of opportunity for skilled workers.
Maybe even a reversal of the automation movement in favor of using basic labor for many repetitive tasks in order to achieve this altruistic goal.
Of course, there are still a great many people who truly could take advantage of the basic income experiment because their other options are severely limited for whatever reason.