Item — HN Reader

What incentive exists for someone to work in a coal mine - which is both physically taxing and guarantees lung problems by 40 - other than earning enough money so that their kids do not have to do the same thing?

You can replace coal mines above with a million other things, I chose a dramatic, niche example.

The fact is that in recorded history, there have been almost no instances of economic setups without the downtrodden. I like efforts like UBI being made to address that, but it is important to address the fact that UBI itself is not the final solution. It is still possible that we reach a working solution eventually(who knows when?) by exploring things like UBI though. A lot of online discourse simply lies in a narrow band of "UBI = communism which didn't work in the specific instance of the soviet union" and on the other side "opposing UBI = oligarch".

2 comments

So you're saying that shitty, dangerous, or unpleasant jobs would need to be paid a high enough wage that doing them is a valid option for people? I totally agree.

And that in turn, would drive the economics of building robots to replace the people because the people are so expensive.

These are time-lagged processes. According to your version of things,

- $UNPLEASANT_JOB is costing too much! Let us start making robots

- Let us continue to bear the cost of paying $UNPLEASANT_JOB a high wage for the decade+ it takes to develop the automation for that task.

Nope, here is what will happen:

- $UNPLEASANT_JOB is costing too much! Let us figure out how to automate this task. In the meanwhile, let us dump the wages for this role. Otherwise, our company closes down.

- 10-15 years later, the same automation needs to be cheaper than the dumped wage for it to be feasible, which is a completely different challenge. First of all, the automation has to be cheaper than your "high enough wage", which is more than you can say for robotics products today.

That is not what happened. Factories did not shut down while they worked out how to build robots. They continued paying decent (union) wages to skilled workers until the robots got good enough to replace them.

We've seen this play out before. We know how this goes.

In recorded history there have been plenty of economic setups that have very few or no downtrodden. You just gotta go and read anthropology. Another thing to take into account is where we are as a society - and where we can go. Both with automation and gear we can make such work easier, and in a society where we have more control where to direct research (as opposed to VCs seeking maximum profit) we can focus on solving bad jobs like that. Finally - incentives. Why have someone be a coal miner so that their kids do not have to starve, when we can have it be an exclusive and hard workplace, that is both celebrated in public and comes with the pay package of a director or executive. The coal miner certainly does more and more useful work than the average tech founder.

But I agree UBI is not the final solution. The final solution involves stuff like abolishing wage labor, circular economies, non-transferable labor-time tokens and democractic management.