Not necessarily my point of view but I keep seeing the term bullshit jobs being used frequently, this is the best summary I could find:
In Bullshit Jobs, American anthropologist David Graeber posits that the productivity benefits of automation have not led to a 15-hour workweek, as predicted by economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930, because of "bullshit jobs": workers who pretend that their role isn't as pointless or harmful as they know it to be. Graeber contends that more than half of societal work is pointless, both large parts of some jobs and, as he describes, five types of entirely pointless jobs:
- flunkies, who serve to make others feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants
- goons, who act aggressively on behalf of their employers, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations
- duct tapers, who fix problems that shouldn't exist, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code
Graeber argues that these jobs are largely in the private sector despite the idea that market competition would root out such inefficiencies. In companies, he credits "managerial feudalism" as employers need underlings to feel important.
In society, he credits the Puritan-capitalist work ethic for making the labor of capitalism into religious duty: that workers did not reap advances in productivity as a reduced workday because, as a societal norm, they believe that work determines their self-worth, even as they find that work pointless. Graeber describes this cycle as "profound psychological violence".
Graeber holds that work as a source of virtue is a recent idea, that work was disdained by the aristocracy in classical times, but inverted as virtuous through radical philosophers like John Locke. The Puritan idea of virtue through suffering justified the toil of the working classes as noble.
As a potential solution, Graeber suggests universal basic income, a livable benefit paid to all without qualification, which would let people work at their leisure
One notable predicate of UBI is more aggressive population control. Either positively or negatively.
If we're allocating a portion of production to all people, but have finite energy resources (e.g. current state), then there exists a range of population (and demographics therein) where this is practical.
Why is this not also true of the functioning of every other resource allocation strategy, such that it is especially notable to universal basic income in particular? It seems to me that resources inherently constrain population size. So every allocation strategy has this problem, making it unworthy of note and outweighed by other factors which do differentiate resource allocation strategies, like the differences between what they incentivize and what we want.
All other allocation strategies in practice (that come to my mind) pretty cold-bloodedly control access to life requirements. Communism probably being the notable exclusion, but I'd say my point is born out there too.
In that in non-communist allocation systems, if one does not produce value (somewhat arbitrarily defined, but usually semi-attached to actual value) then neither one nor one's children eat.
UBI fundamentally changes this, in that hypothetically people could do nothing (and reproduce), thereby eventually exhausting available energy resources.
If your point is that everything has an absolute carrying capacity, then agreed. But here I'm assuming UBI is implemented before resource scarcity is truly eliminated by technological progress.
Thereby leaving the equation in an "It balances, but only if these percentage of people work, age demographics don't get too out of whack, and population growth falls in range" state.
Oh, I get what you're saying now. Thanks for the clarification. You're right that without anything in place to prevent it, universal basic income can fall prey to something similar to a tragedy of the commons. You're also right that its vulnerable to changes in population, with both huge swings up and down turning into a tax with low projected benefit once its split among the population. Definitely a severe structural problem, which would make putting more explicit population control mechanics into the system important if it were widely adopted.
In Bullshit Jobs, American anthropologist David Graeber posits that the productivity benefits of automation have not led to a 15-hour workweek, as predicted by economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930, because of "bullshit jobs": workers who pretend that their role isn't as pointless or harmful as they know it to be. Graeber contends that more than half of societal work is pointless, both large parts of some jobs and, as he describes, five types of entirely pointless jobs:
- flunkies, who serve to make others feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants
- goons, who act aggressively on behalf of their employers, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations
- duct tapers, who fix problems that shouldn't exist, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code
- box tickers, e.g., performance managers, in-house magazine journalists, leisure coordinators
- taskmasters, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals
Graeber argues that these jobs are largely in the private sector despite the idea that market competition would root out such inefficiencies. In companies, he credits "managerial feudalism" as employers need underlings to feel important.
In society, he credits the Puritan-capitalist work ethic for making the labor of capitalism into religious duty: that workers did not reap advances in productivity as a reduced workday because, as a societal norm, they believe that work determines their self-worth, even as they find that work pointless. Graeber describes this cycle as "profound psychological violence".
Graeber holds that work as a source of virtue is a recent idea, that work was disdained by the aristocracy in classical times, but inverted as virtuous through radical philosophers like John Locke. The Puritan idea of virtue through suffering justified the toil of the working classes as noble.
As a potential solution, Graeber suggests universal basic income, a livable benefit paid to all without qualification, which would let people work at their leisure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs