> The lack of real world experience on a HackerNews UBI discussion is infuriating. Western society's white collar elite are completely unaware of truly how many "sucky" jobs there are in the world that all enable our (currently) superior standard of living.
Your comment makes it complete clear you have a severe lack of real world experience.
Go to a wealthy country. I mean an actual wealthy one where even lower class people are paid well enough to buy a house, have a project car, get at least 6 weeks vacation a year, get generous maternity leave etc. etc.
Now look around and notice that all those sucky jobs you talks about are getting done.
Also notice that in those wealthy countries people can quite readily choose to get welfare to the tune of a few grand a month. They could perfectly sit around and do nothing and get enough money to live, if they wanted to.
But they don't.
Why do you think that is? It's because they're paid well to do those jobs. As long as jobs (even sucky ones) pay well, there will always be a line of people willing to do them.
If there are no people willing to do them, pay more.
As a real-world example I used to live in one such country and I worked in a factory stacking boxes. All day, every day. Pick up box, turn around, put down box. Starting hourly rate was $45/hr. Time and half on Sundays. Double time on a holiday. No union, those were just the pay rates.
The company I worked for still made a healthy profit, and so did the end company the boxes were being stacked for (Safeway, actually)
Not sure if you are thinking of Scandinavian countries? If so, I think you're exaggerating the wealth of your average citizen a tad, even if the point still stands.
But in Scandinavian countries it seems to be mainly immigrants that do the sucky jobs, even if they are better compensated than elsewhere (although of course everything is more expensive, food, housing, etc).
Your comment makes it complete clear you have a severe lack of real world experience.
Go to a wealthy country. I mean an actual wealthy one where even lower class people are paid well enough to buy a house, have a project car, get at least 6 weeks vacation a year, get generous maternity leave etc. etc.
Now look around and notice that all those sucky jobs you talks about are getting done.
Also notice that in those wealthy countries people can quite readily choose to get welfare to the tune of a few grand a month. They could perfectly sit around and do nothing and get enough money to live, if they wanted to.
But they don't.
Why do you think that is? It's because they're paid well to do those jobs. As long as jobs (even sucky ones) pay well, there will always be a line of people willing to do them.
If there are no people willing to do them, pay more.
As a real-world example I used to live in one such country and I worked in a factory stacking boxes. All day, every day. Pick up box, turn around, put down box. Starting hourly rate was $45/hr. Time and half on Sundays. Double time on a holiday. No union, those were just the pay rates. The company I worked for still made a healthy profit, and so did the end company the boxes were being stacked for (Safeway, actually)