Travel will be much easier, at least in some forms. Put your housing resources into an RV type vehicle, and you could spend all your time driving around. Most people don’t do that these days, because you only have a week or two of vacation, and you don’t want to spend half of it driving. But if you didn’t have to work? Take a week or two, drive to the other end of North America. Why not?
Also, since these won’t be built with a profit motive in mind, we can expand on what we think of as an “apartment building”. Wider hallways, more windows, incorporate public spaces for kids and others to hang out, maybe performance spaces or worksops for those who want them. More an arcology than a tenement block.
My two oldest close friends, one boyhood, one med school, both retired, and both have made attempts at “unretiring.” The latter put it as that “it actually is possible to watch everything good on tv” … he’s also been YouTubing home repair stuff. Neither would be returning to work because they need the money.
I’m not sure that is what the hypothetical was? But then yes it is as now. Will people submit to work as so defined above and beyond what is required to have basic needs met, in order to get more … stuff, status, dates, recognition, whatever? Yes we do.
In a system like this, I think a lot of people would use the opportunity to create their own jobs rather than accepting one offered by someone else. The greatest barrier to entrepreneurship is the dependence people have on their corporate overlords for basic necessities (especially health care).
I am a retiree working a part time job partly for extra cash, partly for structure in my life, and partly to feel useful. I have enough money to live rather better than the hypothetical ubi lifestyle without working. But i accepted this job in part thinking it would make it easier to justify a nice Antarctic cruise.
I’d be fine working part time at the local public library. I just retired, and I plan to sub at nearby schools (no more than 10 minutes from home). Our house is paid for, and I’m getting a pension, but an extra 20-25K per year will come in handy.
Also, many jobs require some sort of boss to make sure people aren’t working at cross-purposes. Otherwise you’ll end up with issues like multiple people doubling up on some jobs while others are left undone, or mistakenly building components according to incompatible standards, and so on. The sort of thing that happens in real life without a supervising individual, although typically because a boss is incompetent or neglectful rather than nonexistent. But that fact is humans aren’t a hive mind, we do need somebody in charge with most complex group activities.
The main difference would be that the boss would have much less ability to coerce and abuse people. I also suspect it would attract different personality types; petty tyrants and the greedy likely wouldn’t be interested because in such a society being a boss wouldn’t give them what they wanted.
Some bosses are genuine leaders - they guide and organize people to do a task, job, or whatever. Or they, you know, lead rather than command. When people can up and leave at any time coercion is no longer a tool, bosses will need to use persuasion.
”The most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.” - J.R.R. Tolkien
Why should that be what work is?
I acknowledge that’s what work is for so many people in this particular society that they think that’s just the assumed norm. I think that’s one of the major things wrong with this particular society; and the assumption leads to a whole lot of people being in the wrong jobs, to the detriment not only to themselves but also to the work.
Yes, there’s some work that requires coordination, including often (though not always) coordination of schedules. However, often that can be sorted out cooperatively – individuals may not get every detail how they wanted it, but they still get input into the schedule; and they still can choose the overall work.
There’s very little if any work that, taken as a whole, doesn’t include some pieces the worker doesn’t like individually; but that doesn’t mean the worker’s doing something they dislike overall that’s entirely under somebody else’s control. I doubt anybody loves changing diapers, but a lot of people (not all) do love having babies to care for.
And they’ll still grow crops, and cook, and take care of children, and write code, and do engineering, and science in all sorts of fields, and medical work of various types, and do complicated planning in all sorts of areas, and do just about everything else you can think of. Because there are people who when given half a chance love doing those things. And if they don’t have to do them (or, in this world, very likely do something else that they hate and do poorly) out of desperation, they’ll be able to do insist on doing them under working conditions that, overall, function well for them.
Yes. And the organization will have to actually be suited to, and required by, the job. People who want to get a particular job done will accept organization which is done by someone who actually understands the work and who is setting things up so that the work will get done as smoothly as possible. Bosses who are just determined that everybody be at point X at minute Y when there’s no good reason for it and some good reasons against it will find themselves without any workers. But the ones who can say ‘in order to get this house built we first need to do a with about y number of people, plus we need z number of people preparing b and c so that those are ready to go as soon as a’s done, and remember the electricians need to come in after the roofing crew but ahead of the drywallers (etc.), plus here’s the plan for what to do if it rains for three weeks at each stage of construction’ – and know what they’re talking about and understand the capacities of the workers: they’ll be the ones who will find a crew willing to work with them.
Yes, but - one of the reasons I retired is because I want to do as little as possible on a schedule that is not completely my own. Not because I had a problem with being at point X at minute Y when there was no good reason for it - that wasn’t really an issue in my job. But I couldn’t decide on Wednesday to go on a two week vacation starting Saturday. Depending on specifics, I might not even have been able to decide on Thursday to take Friday off.There are hardly any activities that I would consider work that don’t involve some degree of “not on my own schedule” - I could cook for myself on my own schedule, and possibly for my family but anything more than that, I’ll have to have some sort of schedule, otherwise how will people know when to show up to be fed? There’s a limit to how much I can set my own schedule when I’m growing crops - sure, I can plant today or tomorrow , I can weed this morning or Tuesday afternoon but I’m guessing I probably can’t go on a three week vacation in September without making some sort of prior arrangements. Which is fine if I’m just growing some fruit for myself , it’s not so fine if people are depending on buying produce from me to feed themselves. I don’t even want to do anything on a “by appointment” sort of basis - I’m not musical , but it’s one thing to play music for my own pleasure and another to agree to play at the bar next Friday night.
I think for this question, a distinction has to be made between doing something just because you love it ( which pretty much anyone will do ) and doing something you love with the goal of earning money to have more than the basics that the UBI will provide (which will probably be fewer people)
It’s actually more complicated than that. If you get two inches of rain on Monday you’re going to wish you’d weeded on Sunday, because the field will be too wet to do much in on Tuesday and probably Wednesday and the weeds will be twice as big by Thursday, even if it’s not pouring again by then. But if it’s not going to rain on Monday, maybe you need to be hooking up irrigation on Sunday instead of weeding. (And the weather report is 80% chance of thunderstorms, which means that any given spot in the area may get two inches, or four inches with hail, or a tenth of an inch, or no rain at all.) But you’re still in charge of your schedule, in the sense that there’s no Company Boss telling you what to do.
That I’ll grant is probably true; though I think the accumulated societal benefits of work done just for the love of it will be considerable. (That afghan’s just as good if made in October instead of September, and while any given gardener may lose their zucchini crop, somebody will probably have extra.) But what I was objecting to, again, were the assumptions in this, which I’ll quote a bit more of this time:
That reads to me as meaning “it’s only work if you’re doing it for a boss other than yourself, and only if it’s work you would never do any of if not paid for it, and only if you have no say over your schedule other than to keep the job or quit. Nothing done that doesn’t meet all these conditions qualifies as work.”
Fwiw, I’ve always worked for a boss, but none of the other conditions ever really applied to my work. There have always been parts i would do for no pay (in fact, I’m still doing some of those things for no pay) and I’ve always had a lot of control over my schedule, especially after 1997, when i left a job that i loved but that had a shitty vacation policy.
I think that an important aspect of this is that in a society where people are working by choice rather than necessity, the odds are good that the boss as well will be someone who likes or is devoted to the job at hand. They have the same incentive and ability as everyone else to pick out something they really want to do, after all.
Perhaps. Petty tyrants love petty tyranting. And will seek out opportunities to be paid to do so.
Sure, they would, and everyone else would walk away from those jobs. Petty tyrant types would find themselves absolute rulers of empty offices. Why wouldn’t they? Would you stay in a job you literally didn’t need, if your boss was being an asshole all the time? Especially if there’s another job just like it available down the street? For jobs that need to be done by a human, there will pretty much always be a demand for new workers, and if you have the skills needed, you could probably walk into any workplace and get a job.
And when word gets around that Boss A is a petty tyrant type who has driven off all the workers at one location, everyone else would just say, “Fine, I’ll go to location B instead.”
Yes, there’s no Company Boss in charge of your schedule - but what I’m trying to say is that for someone like me, it doesn’t matter much what is setting my schedule. Whether it’s the Company Boss , or the need to be open at predictable hours so that customers can find me or the weather doesn’t matter. What matters is that there is something preventing me from deciding today to leave on a three week vacation Wednesday morning - and it doesn’t much matter whether it’s a Company Boss or that I promised to bake six dozen cupcakes to be delivered for a party on Saturday or that’s it’s been pouring for days and if I leave for three weeks without mowing my yard first it will be a jungle when I get back. If I’m baking for my own pleasure, no problem to suddenly leave for three weeks.
There’s a reason I said as “little as possible” , and that’s because even without any sort of job or volunteer work (which also often has a schedule ) I still have to do things on a schedule that isn’t entirely my own - and so do the people on the other end. Generally speaking, I will either have to make appointments in advance ( for some services and stores) or show up during business hours (for other services and stores). I can’t wake up today and decide to see my doctor for a physical today . I have to make that appointment in advance - which means the doctor has to commit in advance to working that day. And it also means I can’t see the doctor at 8 am if the only slot available is at 2pm.
There’s really no way to live life entirely on your own schedule - but there are also few types of work that don’t require co-ordination with other people and their schedules. Try as I might, I can’t think of many - and in fact the only ones I can think of are things like making that afghan/finishing writing that book in October even though you might not see any money for months or maybe ever.
I’m sure not everybody is like me - but from what I can see, I’m far from the only one.
This is just IMHO, so I don’t want to get too deep into a debate. It just seems to me that the question “what percentage of people would work in this hypothetical society [where work was optional and needs are met in a comfortable fashion]” is asking about work as it exists for the majority of working Americans, which is year-round, full-time employment.
If we re-framed work as “occasionally doing something to make money whenever I feel like it”, or, “something that people would likely want to do even if they didn’t have to” then of course lots of people would participate in that version of work. And figuring out the practicalities of that economy would be an interesting discussion. But conflating that version of work with full-time employment (or even regular part-time employment) makes the answer to the OP both obvious and uninsightful.
I played two gigs this weekend and made a few hundred dollars. I would do “work” like that even if I didn’t have to. If I quit my job but still did occasional gigs, I would not say I was working.
This all has me curious about the history of how we define “work”. It seems to me that while one could use the word to describe both going to an office or job site daily for a 9 to 5 as well as foraging for food in a hunter-gatherer society (or in a post-scarcity society as posed by the OP), the actual activities and their relationship to human social organization are so wildly different that using the same word for both feels wrong.
Going to a job site daily for a 9 to 5 is pretty much a modern invention (for some definitions of modern.) Most societies through most of human evolution did the work that needed doing when that work needed to be done – which on some days required a lot more hours than that and on others a lot less, was often done on some sort of cooperative basis but not necessarily with a “boss”, and might or might not require going anywhere that wasn’t considered part of one’s home.
It’s certainly arguable, and I’ll agree, that “the actual activities and their relationship to human social organization” were in at least most cases drastically different from this society’s. I think that they’d also have to be drastically different in a post-scarcity society; though they might also be drastically different from those in a society in which everyone’s survival depended on the work getting done, even when the work was foraging, preparing food, childcare, and toolmaking and was done in an area in which that (aside from telling the children stories) took maybe twenty hours a week in most weeks.
But I don’t think we can really talk about how many people would go to work for a boss who gives them no input into their schedules for 40 hours a week every or almost every month of the year doing things they hate doing if they could live reasonably comfortably without doing so – because I think the answer to that is going to be a no-brainer ‘almost nobody, so those jobs won’t exist, because anybody trying to be that boss will go out of business in a hurry.’ But there will nevertheless IMO be a lot of people ‘going to work’ at cooperative businesses doing work that they overall like doing; as well as a lot of people working at home, sometimes on their own and sometimes in cooperative family enterprises.
If you want to come up with separate words for the two or three or more types of work – feel free. But it seems very odd to me to declare that only the modern corporate model, complete with peons who have no say, counts as work at all.
Your post all makes sense, and I don’t disagree. Though, I’d say that I’m not trying to come up with different words for the different types of work. Just that using an overly broad or inclusive definition, or just an unspecific definition, can render answers to the OP meaningless. One reasonable definition for work could be something like “any activity that is not a net consumption of resources, or explicitly rest” (poorly phrased, but hopefully the point is clear). With that definition it becomes almost impossible to envision a life without work, regardless of what necessities are taken care of. Consider the current understanding of the unpaid labor of maintaining a household- cleaning, preparing food, caregiving and raising children, etc etc. None of that work goes away in this new world. But is that the kind of work the OP is asking about whether or not people will choose to participate in? No. The question is about some kinds of work, but not all kinds of work. I guess to me there are two different questions:
- What percentage of people would work in the same way that they do now in this hypothetical society?
- What percentage of people would do some kind of work but in an undefined new paradigm in this hypothetical society?
… and folks seem to be answering both at the same time. I’d say that both questions are no-brainers, and it’s only the conflating the two that leads to disagreement. IOW no one in this thread disagrees about a typical human response to this hypothetical society, it’s just how we’re defining work that leads to different answers.