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Worshiping the Grind is Basic
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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You don't want to collect trash off the streets? Well, looks like our city will look like shit forever. You don't want to work as a cashier? Well, looks like our supermarkets will remain closed.
Most jobs are not fulfilling and would never be done voluntarily (at a relevant scale).
That’s why they pay above the UBI.
The UBI (universal basic income) is intended to meet basic needs, it’s not intended to give a lavish life. If you want more than the basic, you need to work a bit for it.
What it would do for work is to make it optional and more flexible. If your employer isn’t paying you enough to be there, you don’t keep working there. You find a different job. You have the security to quit with nothing lined up. Because nobody has to be there to meet their basic needs, employers have to actively make you want to work there for your extra wants to be met.
That means maybe a store clerk gets a discount on goods in addition to their flexible hours per week.
But ultimately a shift to UBI plus socialized housing and socialized healthcare would lead to a shift in society such that we don’t have the bullshit jobs we do now, and a lot more people would probably be happy to do menial society supporting labor as part of a rotation. Idk, frankly I’ve met people, they don’t mind doing grunt work if it’s appreciated and valued.
If my bills were paid and I had to cashier or collect trash 2 days a week to keep society running (and for some extra spending, like for electronics or games or whatever) I would totally do so. It’s not my full time occupation, which makes it infinitely more desirable.
I can’t really capture an entire economic shift in one digestible comment, but a lot of stuff would necessarily change to accommodate this shift. It’s not a business as usual proposal, so you can’t really apply a business as usual mindset to it.
While I think UBI is a good direction for us to head towards as a society, I have a feeling megacorps would just skyjack the prices of pretty much everything to negate the benefits of UBI (look what happened during the pandemic). We would need some kind of legislated regulatory shift as well that would inhibit price gouging just for because there is more money floating through the economy.
You are probably correct in that racketeering would need to be reigned in, but I don’t really think it’s all that impactful over housing and medical.
We already have what you are using as a worst case, it’s just fully legal and uncontrolled. Rent and medical has been inflating for years for no reason. Because the proletariat can handle it (even though we can’t).
Its barely an inconvenience. And no job should be undesirable in a society that values the labor that it runs on.
yeah but realistically no one is ever going to be leaping for joy about cleaning toilets
Literally because they aren't treated with respect in our society, while actively keeping our society functional. Cashier's are Literally in the process of becoming obsolete in our Modern Society. Wake up! Ding dong! Ding Dong!
Fwiw, I’d love to see cashiering eliminated as a position. We have the tech for it already and honestly only keep humans doing it because we need to keep human labor up (capitalism and “reasons”).
There is no reason whatever to keep that position huminated (as opposed to automated), other than driving up employment. And maybe reducing loss through theft, but if there was less meaningless junk everywhere that would be less of an issue overall.. plus people wouldn’t be destitute and could pay for it..
Citation needed.
We voluntarily do plenty of distasteful tasks, even without any expectation of a non-economic reward. Lemmy moderation is a salient example.
I've got other gripes about UBI, and especially about pinning the hopes of a "purely voluntary (but with asterisks)" workforce onto it... but there really is no telling how we would behave if we tried this experiment.
For every study suggesting that Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" is actually a legit thing (even though Hardin was later exposed as an academic fraud who fabricated his theory because of his white supremacist, eugenicist political agenda), there is another study suggesting that we're actually historically really, really good at managing commons and that perhaps capitalist framing only gets in the way of the cooperation that we're predisposed toward.
There's even one that came to mind specifically about sanitation workers: https://youtu.be/fe-SZ_FPZew?t=2403
There's also not any evidence that we settled into our modern capitalist model due to any sort of societal optimization. All of the theoretical reasons why an economic abstraction may be an advantage over a social gift economy don't really hold up when you look at historical or contemporaneous accounts of actual gift economies. It seems like the only reason we ended up with this model is because it was advantageous for several waves of wealthy rulers who needed ways to translate their violence-based power into legal power or else lose it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/fe-SZ_FPZew?t=2403
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
What is "enough"?
In many countries, your basic needs are already fully met no matter which job you do.
E.g. in Germany working minimum wage full time gets you way more money than you need.
Minimum wage full time gets you about 2160€ before tax, which will be about 1650€ after tax (and healthcare etc.).
You can easily pay for your basic needs for less than half of that (even when living alone). The rest you can use to buy upgrades, like a new phone etc.
Minimum wage workers in Germany are already wealthy.
But of course, if you'd ask the average German minimum wage worker, they'd claim to be poor.
They claim to be poor because they can not afford modern luxury. They can not afford to pay for expensive brands, they can not afford to eat in expensive restaurants.
They can not afford to be lavish.
Now imagine if every person in Germany could afford twice as much (something that happens multiple times in a lifetime). Would they stop considering themselves poor? No, their entitlement would simply rise accordingly (as we've seen again and again throughout the thousands of years of history).
You can not pay people "enough". People do not care about their individual wealth. They only care about how wealthy they are compared to others.
The majority of people can never be wealthy, because people only consider themselves wealthy if they have someone (or rather many) to look down upon.
As cited above, the GDP per capita in Germany doubles every few years.
How many times more do you think it has to be doubled until you and your friends deem themselves wealthy.
They never will. Because you, too, define wealth as being able to look down on others (in your social environment).
A large part of the world's population would consider themselves extremely wealthy if they had even near the income of a German worker earning minimum wage.
On a global scale, German minimum wage workers are very, very wealthy.
The only reason you'd ever consider German minimum wage to be too little is if you're used to extreme excess, if you've lived in a hyper wealthy environment all your life.
You're so used to extreme wealth, that you deem slightly less extreme wealth to be poverty. You consider it to be poverty, because the people surrounding you are even wealthier. You consider it poverty, because you can not look down on them.
The current system.
I don't have detailed knowledge of the US economy, which is why I keep using Germany as an example.
In Germany you are never one paycheck away from being homeless unless you're actively wasting money. As said before, 800€ is more than enough to live alone in an apartment. And you make more than double that (in the worst case).
I am indeed ignorant about the United States. This may surprise you, but I don't know about every economy around the world. I'm sure you don't either.
But I do know that a capitalist system can work well without UBI, as proven by the German system.
(Yes, I will keep using the German system as an example.)
As long as we haven't fully automated it, people will have to scrub toilets and pick fruits in any econonic system. What you wish for is for them to not be poor. Which they aren't (in Germany).
Are you claiming that people's actual wealth has not gone up in the past 50 years? That we don't eat better regulated food, that we don't own very advanced devices, that we don't eat food shipped from across the world?
Normal people's wealth does keep growing. That is a very obvious fact. You may claim that it doesn't grow fast enough, but it does grow.
Can you please quote where I did that? Because I never made any global claim. I always referred either to "many countries" or "Germany", neither of which explicitly include the USA.
They can get paid more. But they're already dignified and already well paid (in Germany).
Where is "here"? Some country which didn't manage to implement capitalism successfully? I never claimed that calitalism does work everywhere, I claimed that can work everywhere.
Maybe US capitalism is shit. But it can work well without UBI (as proven by, you guessed it, Germany).
I'm sorry, I don't see where I explicitly mentioned the USA in those quotes.
Was it "A large part of the world's population"? (Note that it doesn't say "the entire world's population".)
okay
sure
Again, I never claimed that capitalism is well implemented everywhere. I only claimed that
I'm not sure whether you believe to be arguing without moving goalposts. Do you want me to tell you about some goalposts you moved? (E.g. asking me to apply my statements regarding Germany to all countries, including the USA.)
Oh, the people in Germany (whom I was talking about all along) are living just fine.
Perhaps. Good thing I never claimed the status quo to be successful in all countries.
can you two just fuck already