If a universal basic income started today with the stipulation…
Let me stop you right there. If there are any “stipulations,” it ceases to be “universal” by definition.
Yep. That’s literally what a minimum wage job is
Except some minimum wage jobs involve making the world worse.
Lmao…a minimum wage job is not 40 hours a week of making the world a better place, and where I live, it cannot provide for the basic necessities of life.
The point of UBI is that it has no stipulations. It’s guaranteed no matter what.
Exactly. Its value becomes evident when a version gets to the stage where they can’t work. Very different from those that choose not to work.
And even more evident when you need to decide how to set up a bureaucracy, paperwork, and verification to judge whether someone else could be working more, or just not
Can that actually work in the real world though? If we all take the money and do nothing. Would that actually be sustainable?
Unclear. But eventually, people would work. People get bored, it’s nice to have something to do, and get paid extra on top of it.
UBI just ensures that if they don’t like a job, they can just quit, rather than be forced to keep working on pain of starvation.
Tests so far seem to be fairly positive about it working. People who get UBI aren’t likely to sit on that money, they’ll just go and spend it either paying back debts, or buying something nice for themselves, so the money will keep going around (just look at the COVID economic stimulus packages). They might even spend more than they might otherwise have, if they’re not just scraping by.
It’s a hypothetical question, read the room 🙄. He’s just asking what you would do if you were tasked with making the world a better place.
You heard what I meant and I appreciate that. It was poorly phrased and I wish I had explained the theoretical better.
I qualified it with the “naturally industrious” thing because I wanted people to talk about what they’d do after they slept off the drudgery of current capitalism not immediately upon finding out they don’t have to go to work anymore just to survive and have basic amenities. As you stated, I could have also phrased in an equally bad way where everyone just pointed at their job and said “I have no time or energy”. That’s the problem. I was trying to filter out the “If I had UBI, I would smoke weed and eat potato chips all day” answers.
If I had phrased my question as, “if you had a guaranteed income and were able to use 40hrs a week of your time to make the world a better place, what would you do?” That would have been better.
It’s just a job at that point, though.
At least you’re doing something productive instead of just making Chris Kempczinski richer.
You are indeed, but it points to a fallacy in the original question. It’s not universal basic income if it is stipulated that you have to do something to receive it.
Isn’t that just a government job with extra steps? I thought the point of UBI is that it’s meant to be, you know, universal.
As a side note, people have this tendency to think that government programs must be means-tested. That is, there must be a criteria that is met before someone is eligible for the program. Same with your assumption in the post - you assume that it must be better to add a stipulation. There seems to be this natural skepticism that if there is no criteria, people will take advantage of the program. I want to challenge that skepticism.
Adding criteria for eligibility inherently means the government must establish a bureaucracy for checking that the criteria is met. This has two notable downsides that people tend to not consider. First, it causes an applicant to wait longer before they can hear back from the program. With existing programs, it sometimes takes months before someone hears back. This ends up discouraging anyone from applying, even if they meet all the criteria. After all, what’s the point of receiving aid in 3 months if you need the aid now?
Second, it causes the cost of the program to increase. A bureaucracy is difficult to maintain. The more money that is spent on checking for eligibility, the less money that people in need will get. And what is the work that such a bureaucracy will do anyways? How does it benefit society to hire someone to say that people’s needs aren’t “real enough” to get government aid?
Which leads me to a third, additional point - it’s morally questionable to require people to meet a certain criteria before they can receive aid. To put it in another way, why do you feel like you need to gatekeep other people’s needs? If a person says they’re struggling, why should anyone say that they’re not struggling enough?
I believe that people are naturally industrious and my goal in asking was to hear how peoples priorities would change without the threat of starvation and the like being weaponized by corporations to extract value from the working class. I know many of us would probably sleep for 2 months straight before starting anything. :-D
Perhaps the better question would have been:
If you had your basic needs guaranteed, how would you spend your time?
I believe that people are naturally industrious
Universal basic income means no requirement to do anything.
However as a worker in healthcare, I’d probably continue as I am.
The problem is you can’t really define what is “good for society”. Maybe I think weird abstract art is good for society, whereas most people think it’s a waste of time.
Who gets to decide?
That’s an extreme example, but there are many such types of cases. Is a cash advance place “good for society”? It scams poor people but also provides them a line of credit that banks will not.
What about used car dealerships that sell overpriced cars at high interest? Is that “good”? Poor people get scammed but it gets them a car they otherwise would not be able to get a higher end dealership.
As for what I would do? Probably just contribute to open source projects or something.
disabled people (or others who cannot work) would be more fucked than they already are, raising the income floor for everyone except them, - this is why universal basic income is supposed to be universal
I left it open ended specifically so they could target their time how they wish. I know several disabled people who all contribute to my communities in various impactful ways, some without ever leaving the home. Having said that, my question could have been phrased better.
I’d sit at the end of my driveway and offer free hugs. That’s making the world better, imo
Hell yeah! I wish you could do that instead of going to work.
Making the world a better place doesn’t need to be some grandiose revolutionary affair.
All the little things you do while being alive would add up. Whether it’s hanging out with a friend, giving your pet some extra pats, or cleaning up your own space, and that would put you a good deal of the way there, if not be enough on its own.
This is not universal basic income.
You’re describing something more like civil service than ubi I think. But if I was financially independent without a full time job I would focus on hobbies like music and find some advocacy cause to help support, probably separation of church and state or ai for everyone with easier to build and use models on consumer hardware, there’s a few open source projects out there I’d like to understand better and contribute to if I had more time.
My union has me working 37 hours a week. Its not basic income if you have to work for it especially if you have to work more than a full time employment!
8hrs a day 5 days a week is normal employment. Some companies don’t count lunches, so you stay there for 8.5 hrs.
Normal is subjective
37 hour workweek is normal here
https://businessindenmark.virk.dk/guidance/employment-and-dismissal/working-hours/
Are we counting raising kids? Because I feel like that would be the answer for the supermajority of people. It’s super necessary work that society is utterly dependent on, yet we insist on not compensating.
Shit, we could just do UBI for parents and we’d be 80% there.
Assuming you actually are raising the kids. Plenty of utterly useless parents out there who end up raising other psychos.
Because they are forced to spend 50% of their awake time working to make other people rich. I’m sure this would get much better when people get the time to properly concentrate on raising a child and maybe even have time to visit a course on how to be a better parent
Germany does Kindergeld which translates to “kid money”. Of course Germans don’t want to have kids as much. Many Americans don’t know what birth control is or how to use it (someone else on this thread is solving that issue). I absolutely believe that you should be able to take as much time as you need to ensure your kids grow up well. Plus, some kids are harder than others.
My current job is receiving/dispatching IT equipment to keep hospitals running, so I think I’d keep doing what I’m doing. It’s a modest contribution, but someone has to make sure the people working on cures for cancer can get their email.
One of the unsung heros… no sarcasm. I chose not to imagine my dentist drilling around or my surgeon slicing me up without all their fancy tools and software. Why, because it’s horrifying. Thank you for your contributions.
Disregarding the fallacy in your opening, and calling things for what they are:
If a conditional basic income started today with the stipulation that I had to put 40 hrs/week towards making the world a better place or solving societal problems,
I would spend them by becoming a politician and implementing true Universal Basic Income.
