Provide data that shows it is a larger risk. Without that data you are arguing based on ideology not facts.
The thing about not working is that we have government mechanisms to help those people. We can beef up social security, unemployment benefits, or direct payments. Then people can go back to work afterwards. Work will always exist. It exists even now with a “closed” economy.
I can absolutely understand, if we aren't capable of producing anything of value, forcing us to work doesn't do any good for society beyond putting every working age person in a skinner box.
My issue is more that I'd be putting a lot of trust in the government to provide for me for (avg lifespan - X) years of being a net drain on the system.
Ultimately, I don't think it's a choice I'll get to make though. Taking it to the cynical conclusion, I'd be better off with living a few years of living off BI before the government killbots come compared to working those same years and then getting killbotted.
Forcing people to work hasn't been historically successful. That includes stacking the incentives up to work or death. A large fraction of people simply choose death because no one wants to be forced to do things.
Well, part of the problem is that I said "we can take steps to make jobs cheaper" when I meant "we can take steps to make jobs safer".
We keep automating away jobs. People want/need work, mostly for money, but also because want to feel they are doing something and part of something. So I don't take it as a given that less free time and more human effort is objectively a bad thing. It really depends on the person and whether they feel a sense of accomplishment in their work.
As for death and accidents, that's somewhat addressed by my typo fix.
> It's only from the lens of the current economic system that it becomes a positive thing, which speaks volumes in itself.
The thing about the current economic system is that it's the current economic system. It can change, in small ways and big ways, but I'm not not sure it will (even if we're probably in the absolute best time to try out UBI we'll see in our lifetimes, and it will be a shame if/when it passes us by in that respect, even if it means life is much better overall).
Work for a year then take two years off? Or retire earlier? Again, I didn’t say that people wouldn’t work at all. I said that the barrier to obtaining a personal autonomy is too high in a society where providing the essentials of life has been largely automated.
We keep people working by making it had to survive otherwise (high rents that don’t represent the maintainence/construction costs etc).
I agree with all of that. But unless I'm misunderstanding, your previous comment was saying that more dead people leads more profits for companies, and I don't agree with that.
> Being fired and being unable to find employment elsewhere often has serious financial, physical and mental consequences for people. Often times it can completely ruin a persons life.
Yeah, and that's because we've tied a person's survival needs to their ability to find "work". And in many cases "work" is not really a productive activity; it's just a facade we've all bought into. It's a useful facade though, because if we were all perfectly efficient and only rewarded true productive work then we'd be in deeper trouble.
So our challenge, it seems, is to somehow keep finding new "work" when technology makes it harder and harder for us to trick ourselves into believing we're working. "Prompt engineer" comes to mind.
> But if they are genuinely of as little use to the workforce as it seems, does such a stigma to not working really make any sense?
in the natural world, if they are genuinely of as little use, they "should die", for the resources to keep them alive is more than the "profit" that they can generate. This is becoming more and more true with more and more automation - the cost of resources to keep somebody alive is getting to a point where their contributions don't really cover it. I dont know if there is a real solution to this problem.
Why would everyone stop working? If you were given the choice, would you just sit around and eat M&Ms and watch tv all day? Or would you work anyway?
Consider your examples. Who would grow the food? Farmers. Because people would grow food anyway (and do), whether or not they get paid, because it's intrinsically rewarding. Building houses? Jimmy Carter is rich and 90-odd years old and builds houses. Med school? Maybe people want to be doctors?
The jobs that are at risk in this model are the jobs that have no intrinsic value to the individual other than the paycheck.
Unless you can afford to retire now. We are all in varying degrees subjected to Forced Labor. We've made many advances in making everything efficient and more abundant. Yet we still work to the death.
I disagree that the majority of jobs give people happiness or a reason to live. Like you say, it's been a necessity for all of human history to work. Only now it's not, which is why so much work is meaningless.
Alleviating the threat of death due to unemployment is going to be a positive for most people.
If we can afford to keep people alive surely we can arrange for them to do something useful too. Unless we intend to condemn large numbers of people to chronic poverty we have to pay more than starvation wages even to those who do nothing.
It seems to me that the question to be answered is: how can we afford to not have full employment?
But you cannot with a straight face claim that work is optional if not
working leads to starvation and eventually death. The difference
between a ferrari and existence is that that the latter is a
right. Every human has the right to exist but none has the right to
own a ferrari. It's notable that the punishment you think is suitable
for non-workers (e.g. death) is usually reserved for the most heinous
of crimes. The conclusion is that you and the rest of society deem
non-working a worse crime than, say, assault which only nets you a few
years in prison.
> You don’t have to starve if you don’t work. You are welcome to grow
your own food, fish and hunt, and sustain yourself without working.
You are repeating arguments I have already addressed.
A better model than equating money with value is workfree societies
driven by voluntarism. I have given you many examples of those, so you
cannot claim that you haven't seen better models. Indeed, there is
ample evidence to suggest that the current model is not the best we
can do but you seem unable to consider that evidence.
> Where’s your proof? The fact that some people like to spend their
free time saving lives or writing code?
Yes? That those communities exist within a work-centric society
strongly suggests that work is not required for humans to do useful
tasks.
This is the big reason I think we need to figure out as a society how to make it possible for everyone to keep a roof over their head and food on their plates even if they don't work at all.
The question of whether lazy people will take advantage of the system is not a life-or-death question. The life-or-death question is whether highly motivated and desperate people will take risks they shouldn't because we make them take those risks.
People working X hours a week are guaranteed to be spending those X hours producing something useful to society, or at least to their employer. People not working are not.
Sure, some people who are not employed may be raising children or volunteering or doing something else beneficial to society,and encouraging them to work instead would be society's loss. But if we trust in the market economy, those people don't exist, and our real loss is people who are unproductive while on welfare who would be productive given a minimum wage job.
Everyone trying to convince you to be ok with this but no, you have seen it correctly and it is wrong. People can work themselves to death doing jobs that benefit us, and what they receive for it is misery and precarity. Trust your own judgement and don't accept this as a natural, inevitable, or just state.
A large fraction of Economist readers may have fulfilling white-collar jobs, but billions of people do not, and for them working until they die is less appealing.
The thing about not working is that we have government mechanisms to help those people. We can beef up social security, unemployment benefits, or direct payments. Then people can go back to work afterwards. Work will always exist. It exists even now with a “closed” economy.
The thing about dying is that it’s pretty final.
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