Might want to read The Dispossessed, by Ursula LeGuin. She describes what a society with no requirement to work for a living might look like. Everyone has a basic level of food, clothing, shelter, but because of the sparse environment of the planet, not a lot more. In her scenario, everything is shared equally among everyone – it is a conscious social experiment in ‘anarchosyndicalism’. Because of this ethos, nearly everyone contributes what they can to the general good. There’s a lot of thoughtfulness in everything LeGuin wrote, none more so than in this work.
LeGuin did not believe humans were intrinsically selfish, striving individualists. She drew on deep anthropological roots to understand human societies. Which is something very very few people can do – they see through the pinhole of their own experience in the present era, virtually always.
That’s not a post-scarcity society; it’s an equalizing-the scarcity society. But it is an interesting and well-thought-out attempt both at combining modern (for the time it was written plus some extrapolated) technology with such a lifestyle, and at scaling it up for a population large enough to include cities with such things as physics research institutes.
Ah. That makes sense. And I’m usually the one in a conversation trying to say ‘define your terms!’ (and often being poorly received.)
I think there is some disagreement; in that some in the thread have been saying that they themselves, at least, wouldn’t want to do any work at all that involves any sort of committment to any schedule at all; and also some have been discussing the question of whether prestige would be a sufficient driver for many and also the question of whether prestige, in such a society, would attach to having more money or to having more recreational time.
And I think there’s also some question as to what percentage of people would choose to do nothing useful to others at all; but there seems, as near as I can tell, consensus in the thread that that percentage, while not zero, would be low. However, if there would be a high percentage of people who wouldn’t accept any schedule even if consensually agreed upon or even if entirely self-imposed, there would be a lot of kinds of work that it would be hard to find humans to accept at all; even if many of them did produce some random useful excess from time to time.
I recall reading about temporary disaster shelters once. The people running them have some built-in jobs that people in the shelter can do, because they found out that, no matter what, about 10% of the people seeking shelter really wanted to contribute to helping out, and if they didn’t have some jobs for these people, they’d make themselves nuisances looking for things to do.
Conversely, about 10% were quite content to just do nothing at all, just hanging out waiting for the next meal time, and who would be quite happy to just stay in the shelter, even long past the time that the disaster has been dealt with.
And that obviously leaves the 80% in the middle, who would do things if needed, but didn’t always actively seek out jobs to do.
I’m sure people like that exist (see upthread), but I don’t think it would ever be what I’d consider to be a “high” percentage.
Even if I’m doing hobby-type stuff on the side to earn a few extra bucks (like my casual woodworking I do), while the main part of my schedule may be entirely flexible (I can go down to the workshop, or not, any given day), there are things I’d have to do on “someone else’s schedule”. Need supplies? I have to go shopping when the stores are open. Selling my stuff? I have to be there the day the local craft fair is open. I think the vast majority of people could handle “schedules” like that, and wouldn’t toss out their whole side gig because of them.
For all that some people do not want would would reject any form of scheduling if they could there are others who find security, even joy, in predictability and actively look forward to scheduled events.
In such a society human diversity around such things may become more obvious than it is now.
Yes, that would be the thing. If you’re so opposed to any scheduling out of your control that even opening your own store on your own terms is utterly unacceptable to you, then fine, don’t do that. The whole point of this exercise is that you don’t have to do that. Your friends and family might think you’re a weirdo (“Don’t invite Bob to the BBQ, he’ll start ranting on Facebook about us “Trying to schedule him like some kind of Cookout Slave.””), but we already tolerate a lot of weirdos in society. This would just make it easier, because no one would feel the need to force the weirdos to “stop being so weird and get a job!”
The OP was deliberately fairly vague about where the societal wealth and income would come from to implement UBS. And when pushed a bit on how “nice” that UBS was, came up with an economic level that seems well below current US median income. Current urban poor would find it a welcome respite from crappy rotting tenements. Current higher end blue collar or lower end white collar workers would find it real spartan.
Two unrelated thoughts.
Imagine a world where only the very basics are provided gratis and by AI + Android magic, not by human labor at any level. Now imagine that only a small cash allowance is given beyond that to buy what comparative luxuries the robots are configured to produce.
In that world then practically only way to get money to buy goods or services is to work for the various definitions of “work” upthread. You gotta earn it to have it to spend. Which says this human part of the economy (both goods and services) will only be as big as there are workers to make product and other workers to buy them. The (un-)willingness to work will put a cap on how many jobs there are and how remunerative they might be.
Different thought.
The willingness to work depends real strongly on how nice the UBI is. For sure there are non-economic incentives to working, as discussed upthread. Social status, personal fulfillment, etc.
But I’m going to bet the number of people wanting to supplement the spartan 1-room apartment + issued food existence is very different than if everyone was given a 3 BR house, a new car every couple years, a bunch of spending money every month to buy the goods and services the robots make, etc.
At least in the first generation after UBI was introduced there’d be a lot of ferment as the folks who’ve never had it that good “retire” early to a life of what they see as luxury, while the folks for whom the new UBI is a relative pittance, will be highly motivated to get more money to buy more stuff. At least until they absorb the reality of the new ways of living.
In many ways, this transition era would be more interesting to study than would be the steady state a generation or two later, where only the wrinklies remember the days before the generous UBI switched on.
And some of the weirdos would create weird things, even if not on a schedule. Possibly because they had the time and energy, not having spent it all trying to survive in a scheduled world.
And some of the other people would say ‘What a neat weird thing!’; and want some, and/or develop something else interesting based in part on the weird thing.
– and yes, there are people who strongly prefer schedules; it wouldn’t be that nothing that needed schedules would find nobody willing to do it.
Without getting into the weeds too much, I approximate the OP. I’m comfortably retired but not rich. I have a stable income from pensions and investments that are largely recession-resistant. No major debts - no mortgage or car loans, and credit cards get paid in full every month. And yet I work.
I don’t work for money, and I have no employer, but I run a small non-profit that serves my community. Think of it as a small time version of a boys/girls club. I draw no pay of any kind, and neither do any of my assistants (there are about half a dozen). You could say it’s a hobby, but if you want to call it a hobby, it’s one that consumes between 15-30 hours per week, more or less. It places enough demands of my time that there are things I must do, but the demands are such that there are few actual deadlines to meet, just things that need to get done in a certain timeframe. Much like mowing the lawn doesn’t have to be done by a certain date/time, but it needs to get done before the grass gets unmanageable, that kind of deadline.
Before I took over this non-profit, I did other volunteering. I don’t think I could sit on my fat ass all day, 7 days a week, accomplishing nothing.
My wife is the same: retired, but busy with volunteering. So in this sample where N=2, the percentage is 100.
How would you feel if you had to do only a few hours a week or month of these dirty jobs, along with everyone else sharing in the same work? And your paid work was not controlled by a boss but by you and others in the workplace? I think the snag in this thought experiment is it doesn’t go far enough, that is, it assumes that mostly the economy stays the same, rather than imagining a new basis for the production, distribution, and consumption of our needs and wants.
Cite: Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and a lot of work by others since then.
I accept having to do a modicum of dirty/unpleasant work at the moment (in the form of housework and such - including clearing drains, scraping bird poop off the car - turning the compost heap etc) so I think I’d be fine with it.
Exactly! Life requires maintenance, but the rich can hire people to degrout their toenails and other work as the source of our income. Taking out the garbage is only really nasty w(en you have to do it 5 days a week/8 hours a day for lousy pay and an uncertain future. It’s not so much the actual task as the conditions under which we have to perform it.
Very odd that they have #1, #2, and #5 of the Earthsea books but not #3 and #4. Especially since #3’s pretty much an essential part of the original trilogy.
Very much this.
Also, of course, if you have to handle the garbage in a fashion that’s harder on your body than it needs to be, and/or in an overall enviroment that’s more unpleasant than it needs to be.
Part of the problem is that we chop work up into bits, so that instead of taking out the garbage as part of the larger job which created it* we land some people with just taking out garbage, others with just cutting up carcasses, and so on.
Another part of the problem is that we tend to define any job involving physical labor as “dirty” – and then define driving to the gym and working out there as “recreation” and charge people for doing it.
People quite willingly dig in the dirt as part of a hobby, and love doing it. Not everybody, of course; but quite a few people.
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of course, a lot of the “garbage” is defined as “garbage” also because we’ve chopped things up into bits; instead of the livestock producing valuable manure, they’re producing pollutants, because the feedlot has been separated from the fields; instead of our food waste going into compost or being fed to livestock, it becomes landfill garbage, because the livestock and gardens are so separated from most peoples’ llives that it’s impractical to get them there – I could go on.
That’s the old Wealth of Nations/division of labour thing though - it’s more efficient to divide things into specialised tasks that people do repeatedly, but it makes for some unpleasant jobs
“Efficient” is an interesting term. I find it useful to ask “Efficient in terms of what?” Generally in this society the answer is “efficient in terms of financial cost per unit of production, any and all “external” costs not included in the calculation” and/or “efficient in terms of units produced per hour of human labor, any and all effects on the individual laborer and on the labor pool not included in the calculation.”
Sure, but when Adam Smith wrote about it, he was like ‘OMG You GUYS! this is how we all get richer!’ - there was an underlying assumption that greater productivity would advance the world into a state where we all had better stuff and were all better off because of it.
Which is true. Even the poor today live better than the poor of Smith’s time.
What’s NOT true is that somehow we ensured the growth in GDP (or other measures of output) was distributed first to even everyone out to within a factor of e.g. 2 or 3 at most, then held that ratio such that the rising tide would then indeed lift all boats pretty much the same way.
and also @Mangetout: It’s also not true that this was accomplished without serious cost; both in the destruction of lives of many whose ways of life were destroyed against their will (and many of whom did not survive, or did so only with serious damage), and in damage to the environmental capability of production which sustains us all. The long-term results of this experiment are not yet known, and won’t be in our lifetimes (though it’s quite possible that many of us will see disaster in our lifetimes; people in a number of places already are.)
Whether there were far less damaging ways to lift the boats that did get lifted – that’s a “what-if” argument. There may well have been, but, if so, there’s no way to prove it now.
And how much of that is simply a result of advancing technology? The poor have what little they possess in spite of capitalism, not because of it. Also, I doubt the homeless are really that much better off in the first place.