When talking to people who dislike UBI about UBI, they'll often say both that 'people need a purpose in life' and that 'nobody will work if they get free money'.
Those seem incompatible to me.
(UBI means Universal Basic Income, giving everyone a basic income, for free)
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If I could afford to only work 4 days a week, those 4 days would most likely be a lot more productive as I would have time to get treatment for my chronic illnesses.
I have been told by HR last year to use my surplus vacation days somewhere. I used them on every Monday for half a year. I got not only more productive, but also less stressed. It works.
Yeah as an industrial/human factors engineer it’s our profession’s dirty little secret. It doesn’t apply to every job, but improvement to work quality does. Reducing shift length also does. Hours 7-8 are rarely very productive for thinky workers.
Unfortunately nobody has managed to successfully explain the concept of mathematics or empirical evidence to businesspeople. Sometimes I wonder if they have thoughts beyond gut instinct.
Oh they do understand mathematics alright. As long as it's adding numbers to their net worth
I can manage financially with 2 days of work a week, and I'm now at a point where I would not want to scale back because my work would become of lower quality. Every Monday would be like coming back from a vacation, and I think I'd lose touch and feel with the job.
Those 5 days weekend sure give me time for personally enriching hobbies!
Society couldn't function if most people worked like you. I'm happy for you and it's the exact place I want to be but I think its only possible in our current framework.
With increasing automation, it could totally work soon
Also, a fair bit of work is work for the sake of work. It doesn’t enrich society, just the capitalism machine. So if UBI were enacted on a large scale, there is plenty of unnecessary work that can go by the wayside.
Who determines its unnecessary? The market? Government groups?
We're still a far way away from the level of automation necessary to make working only 2 days a week feasible imo
It actually could. Imagine if salary had increased in accordance to the productivity boosts that automation has brought. Then you could have 3 people, working 2 days a week, sharing a job and being able to live from it. After all, it used to take more than 3 people to do the work a single person does nowadays.
Why would a business pay for these things that make their workers more efficient and then relinquish all of the profit that came from making things more efficient?
There’s a difference between “society couldn’t function” and “companies are too greedy”. One of them is wrong and the other needs to change.
source?