When I see people write things like “with unconditional basic income, people would not need to work, but without work their lives would lose meaning”, I wonder whether they considered the following:
There are meaningful things besides work, such as spending time with your friends, or with your family.
Work doesn’t have to be “full-time or nothing”. Working only for one or two days a week, or working full week but only once in a while, would probably not provide enough money to make living, but in some context it can still be useful work and provide the sense of meaning and identity.
Sometimes it is difficult to convert useful work to money. For example, helping poor people overcome poverty seems like a useful thing, but the poor people, almost by definition, would have a problem paying for such service. The obvious objection here is that there would be no poverty with UBI, so instead let’s talk about various dysfunctions that are currently correlated with poverty.
I don’t have an obvious example here, but imagine a kind of work, where it is very difficult to evaluate its impact: it could be very useful, or it could accomplish nothing; and if you offer to pay people for it, you will attract masses of scammers. A person with an independent income could volunteer to do it for free.
But I think the greatest problem is jumping from “most work is not needed” directly to “post-scarcity society with superhuman AI”. We might spend a few decades between these two; and in between, most people would have a problem to secure an income by doing economically useful work, but there will still be many useful things to do that simply wouldn’t pay sufficiently.
When I see people write things like “with unconditional basic income, people would not need to work, but without work their lives would lose meaning”, I wonder whether they considered the following:
There are meaningful things besides work, such as spending time with your friends, or with your family.
Friendship arises from a common stressor and withers without it. Family arises from a need to support each other and kids. If you remove all stressors and all need of support, but assert that friendships and families will continue exactly as they are, you aren’t thinking seriously.
Yeah, fair enough. I’m just thinking that individualism has already done quite a lot in that direction. We’re much more isolated than people in past societies: many of us barely know our neighbors, can go months without talking to parents, and have few friends outside of work. So if we’re discussing further individualist proposals, like basic income, maybe it’s worth spending some time thinking about the consequences to the social fabric (never thought I’d use that phrase...)
IME, the need to make a sustainable living is a big reason for why people can’t fix those individualist problems. At least in my social circles, there are plenty of people who have all kinds of communal projects and would want to spend time doing meaningful things with people who are important to them… but none of those things bring a living, so instead they have to burn most of their time and energy earning money and have much less left that they could use to build a more communal society.
It’s no wonder that people have few friends outside work when work and family combined leave little time for anything else. NYT on why it’s hard to make friends after 30:
As external conditions change, it becomes tougher to meet the three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other, said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This is why so many people meet their lifelong friends in college, she added.
In the professional world, “proximity” is hard to maintain, as work colleagues are reassigned or move on to new jobs. Last year, Erica Rivinoja, a writer on the NBC series “Up All Night,” became close with a woman, Jen, when they worked together on a pilot. Almost instantly, they knew each other’s exercise schedules and food preferences. Jen could sense when Ms. Rivinoja needed a jolt of caffeine, and without asking would be there with an iced tea.
“But as soon as the pilot was over, it was hard to be as close without that constant day-to-day interaction,” said Ms. Rivinoja, 35. They can occasionally carve out time for a quick gin and tonic, she said, but “there aren’t those long afternoons which bleed into evenings hanging out at the beach and then heading to a bar.”
The workplace can crackle with competition, so people learn to hide vulnerabilities and quirks from colleagues, Dr. Adams said. Work friendships often take on a transactional feel; it is difficult to say where networking ends and real friendship begins.
Here is another world I’ve been seeing the possibility of increasingly clearly lately. The most important feature of this world is that you have a tribe to whom you’re securely attached. You love and support each other. You touch each other. You sing and dance together. And sometimes, some of you explore romantic / sexual connection with each other. And if that gets rocky – when someone gets anxious or avoidant or some other kind of triggered – the attachment that the people involved have with everyone else in the tribe acts as a stabilizing and calming force. If your attachment to your tribe is secure enough, the prospect of a partner leaving you maybe feels less like the end of the world.
(And sometimes, some of you have children, and those children are raised by a tribe of people who are lovingly stabilizing and calming each other, instead of being at the mercy of a fragile little tribe of two…)
It hurts to think about this world, and how far away from it most people are. There are so many forces pushing against it: high school friends going to different colleges, college friends taking jobs in different cities, friends moving into their own apartments, couples living by themselves, the crushing burdens of late-stage capitalism… and, among so many other things, some sense that it’s a little weird to allow your friends to matter to you as much as or more than your partners.
A basic income wouldn’t fix all of this, but if it would at least allow people to refuse taking on the kinds of meaningless bullshit jobs that suck your energy dry, then that would help a little. Not being forced to prioritize a job over community would be a great start.
I find the most clarifying thing in these types of discussions is to distinguish between work and employment. No one derives meaning from working at McDonald’s or at Walmart. I have a good job, and I don’t derive any meaning from it, either; it is a strictly mercenary arrangement with the side benefit of being able to learn cool things at the same time.
I would rather have the bandwidth to solve problems in my community. But I don’t and neither does anyone else for the most part, so they limp along below crisis levels.
Be very aware of https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Typical_mind_fallacy for discussions about what people do or could find meaning in. I know at least a few hourly retail employees who do get some self-worth from helping customers. It’s mixed with drudgery and annoyance, but not completely meaningless.
The good thing about employment is that it’s guaranteed that someone (your employer) thinks you’re providing value to other humans, and there is (outside of government, or government-sized behemoth organizations) a feedback look for that to be a true belief. If you weren’t providing value, you wouldn’t be paid.
That’s not true of unpaid work—it’s still the case that you can do good and provide value to others, but there’s much less feedback about whether and how much.
I predict that there will be no true post-scarcity world. We’ll reduce scarcity, we’ll make many unrewarding and low-paying jobs unnecessary, so that one can likely live a minimum-wage lifestyle without actually working. But we’ll still have a large amount of luxury available only to the lucky and productive (rich), and a larger amount of semi-luxury available only to those who are employed by the rich. In this reduced-scarcity world, those who find meaning in employment can partake, and will enjoy a bit of luxury as (part of) the reward.
I am confident that the percentage of people who work in fast food and retail that derive meaning from it is ~0.
I know at least a few hourly retail employees who do get some self-worth from helping customers
This speaks to the work/employment distinction I raised. Do they suddenly stop helping people when they aren’t on the clock? I very much doubt it; they are probably the same kind of people who are happy to give strangers directions on the street. The meaning likely comes from helping people, not from helping people at their retail job.
This can be contrasted with something like being employed as an EMT or a 911 call operator, where the ability to help people is conditional on the resources and organization that comes with the employment relationship.
But your point also indicates a central challenge that reduced employment would produce: we have invested much of our social expectations and effort in employment. I would go as far as to say a hard majority of contact with other people, excluding family. It would be hard to replace that on short notice, which is to say on the order of years. The costs of social isolation accrue faster than that.
FYI, while I worked at a grocery store as a clerk, janitor and sometimes baker, I...
wrote multiple songs about it (always a bit ironic and self-deprecating but not entirely so, and some functioned as pseudo-anthems).
had a lot of fun talking to customers, and talked to like 1-2 orders of magnitude more of them than I would have talked to random strangers.
got a lot of physical exercise by default.
In my case I also had other longterm goals and aptitudes that made me not want to work there forever, but ever since then I’ve considered it surprisingly hard to beat “have a part time job that involves talking to customers and a lot of physical labor”, as a way to make sure a lot of basic needs are met at once, including certain kinds of tribal resonance.
(Up until starting work at LessWrong, I think I was generally less happy, or approximately as happy, at the programming jobs I worked at. I was also happier at other jobs when I intentionally shifted into “find meaning in the situation” stance)
This is largely because I have a property of “able to make meaning wherever I go”, which has pluses and minuses. I also did art and stuff that provides a lot of meaning, but I think at the time the meaning I got from my grocery clerk job to be… I dunno ranging from 10-60% of the meaning I was getting at a given time, depending on what other projects I had going on.
So if you got the same amount of exercise and talked to the same amount of people as you did working at the grocery store, but you did it not at the grocery store, do you think you would have gotten less meaning, more meaning, or about the same meaning? My expectation is about the same, and if correct that implies the meaning gained from being employed by the grocery store is about zero.
I assert that this:
This is largely because I have a property of “able to make meaning wherever I go”, which has pluses and minuses.
is a default trait of humans. The meaning almost invariably comes from actions and experiences (like exercise and talking to people). The reason that people attribute meaning to having a job is because every systematic generator of actions and experiences has been converted to an employment relationship, or died. Employment doesn’t cause meaning, in general—it is just the dominant context in which it occurs. I think disentangling these things is important for thinking about this and similar problems (like automation).
Another counterpoint to the McDonald’s/Walmart example I used above might be people who are invested in the status that comes from working someplace prestigious, like Apple or Google, or anyone who is towards the top of their profession. Then people would derive meaning by the mere fact of the employment relationship. But I also think that such meaning is not threatened by making employment optional, because such people will simply choose to remain employed.
When I see people write things like “with unconditional basic income, people would not need to work, but without work their lives would lose meaning”, I wonder whether they considered the following:
There are meaningful things besides work, such as spending time with your friends, or with your family.
Work doesn’t have to be “full-time or nothing”. Working only for one or two days a week, or working full week but only once in a while, would probably not provide enough money to make living, but in some context it can still be useful work and provide the sense of meaning and identity.
Sometimes it is difficult to convert useful work to money. For example, helping poor people overcome poverty seems like a useful thing, but the poor people, almost by definition, would have a problem paying for such service. The obvious objection here is that there would be no poverty with UBI, so instead let’s talk about various dysfunctions that are currently correlated with poverty.
I don’t have an obvious example here, but imagine a kind of work, where it is very difficult to evaluate its impact: it could be very useful, or it could accomplish nothing; and if you offer to pay people for it, you will attract masses of scammers. A person with an independent income could volunteer to do it for free.
But I think the greatest problem is jumping from “most work is not needed” directly to “post-scarcity society with superhuman AI”. We might spend a few decades between these two; and in between, most people would have a problem to secure an income by doing economically useful work, but there will still be many useful things to do that simply wouldn’t pay sufficiently.
Friendship arises from a common stressor and withers without it. Family arises from a need to support each other and kids. If you remove all stressors and all need of support, but assert that friendships and families will continue exactly as they are, you aren’t thinking seriously.
Somewhat reducing the amount of financial stressors is pretty far from removing all stressors and need of support, though.
Yeah, fair enough. I’m just thinking that individualism has already done quite a lot in that direction. We’re much more isolated than people in past societies: many of us barely know our neighbors, can go months without talking to parents, and have few friends outside of work. So if we’re discussing further individualist proposals, like basic income, maybe it’s worth spending some time thinking about the consequences to the social fabric (never thought I’d use that phrase...)
IME, the need to make a sustainable living is a big reason for why people can’t fix those individualist problems. At least in my social circles, there are plenty of people who have all kinds of communal projects and would want to spend time doing meaningful things with people who are important to them… but none of those things bring a living, so instead they have to burn most of their time and energy earning money and have much less left that they could use to build a more communal society.
It’s no wonder that people have few friends outside work when work and family combined leave little time for anything else. NYT on why it’s hard to make friends after 30:
Also Qiaochu Yuan:
A basic income wouldn’t fix all of this, but if it would at least allow people to refuse taking on the kinds of meaningless bullshit jobs that suck your energy dry, then that would help a little. Not being forced to prioritize a job over community would be a great start.
I find the most clarifying thing in these types of discussions is to distinguish between work and employment. No one derives meaning from working at McDonald’s or at Walmart. I have a good job, and I don’t derive any meaning from it, either; it is a strictly mercenary arrangement with the side benefit of being able to learn cool things at the same time.
I would rather have the bandwidth to solve problems in my community. But I don’t and neither does anyone else for the most part, so they limp along below crisis levels.
Be very aware of https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Typical_mind_fallacy for discussions about what people do or could find meaning in. I know at least a few hourly retail employees who do get some self-worth from helping customers. It’s mixed with drudgery and annoyance, but not completely meaningless.
The good thing about employment is that it’s guaranteed that someone (your employer) thinks you’re providing value to other humans, and there is (outside of government, or government-sized behemoth organizations) a feedback look for that to be a true belief. If you weren’t providing value, you wouldn’t be paid.
That’s not true of unpaid work—it’s still the case that you can do good and provide value to others, but there’s much less feedback about whether and how much.
I predict that there will be no true post-scarcity world. We’ll reduce scarcity, we’ll make many unrewarding and low-paying jobs unnecessary, so that one can likely live a minimum-wage lifestyle without actually working. But we’ll still have a large amount of luxury available only to the lucky and productive (rich), and a larger amount of semi-luxury available only to those who are employed by the rich. In this reduced-scarcity world, those who find meaning in employment can partake, and will enjoy a bit of luxury as (part of) the reward.
I am confident that the percentage of people who work in fast food and retail that derive meaning from it is ~0.
This speaks to the work/employment distinction I raised. Do they suddenly stop helping people when they aren’t on the clock? I very much doubt it; they are probably the same kind of people who are happy to give strangers directions on the street. The meaning likely comes from helping people, not from helping people at their retail job.
This can be contrasted with something like being employed as an EMT or a 911 call operator, where the ability to help people is conditional on the resources and organization that comes with the employment relationship.
But your point also indicates a central challenge that reduced employment would produce: we have invested much of our social expectations and effort in employment. I would go as far as to say a hard majority of contact with other people, excluding family. It would be hard to replace that on short notice, which is to say on the order of years. The costs of social isolation accrue faster than that.
FYI, while I worked at a grocery store as a clerk, janitor and sometimes baker, I...
wrote multiple songs about it (always a bit ironic and self-deprecating but not entirely so, and some functioned as pseudo-anthems).
had a lot of fun talking to customers, and talked to like 1-2 orders of magnitude more of them than I would have talked to random strangers.
got a lot of physical exercise by default.
In my case I also had other longterm goals and aptitudes that made me not want to work there forever, but ever since then I’ve considered it surprisingly hard to beat “have a part time job that involves talking to customers and a lot of physical labor”, as a way to make sure a lot of basic needs are met at once, including certain kinds of tribal resonance.
(Up until starting work at LessWrong, I think I was generally less happy, or approximately as happy, at the programming jobs I worked at. I was also happier at other jobs when I intentionally shifted into “find meaning in the situation” stance)
This is largely because I have a property of “able to make meaning wherever I go”, which has pluses and minuses. I also did art and stuff that provides a lot of meaning, but I think at the time the meaning I got from my grocery clerk job to be… I dunno ranging from 10-60% of the meaning I was getting at a given time, depending on what other projects I had going on.
So if you got the same amount of exercise and talked to the same amount of people as you did working at the grocery store, but you did it not at the grocery store, do you think you would have gotten less meaning, more meaning, or about the same meaning? My expectation is about the same, and if correct that implies the meaning gained from being employed by the grocery store is about zero.
I assert that this:
is a default trait of humans. The meaning almost invariably comes from actions and experiences (like exercise and talking to people). The reason that people attribute meaning to having a job is because every systematic generator of actions and experiences has been converted to an employment relationship, or died. Employment doesn’t cause meaning, in general—it is just the dominant context in which it occurs. I think disentangling these things is important for thinking about this and similar problems (like automation).
Another counterpoint to the McDonald’s/Walmart example I used above might be people who are invested in the status that comes from working someplace prestigious, like Apple or Google, or anyone who is towards the top of their profession. Then people would derive meaning by the mere fact of the employment relationship. But I also think that such meaning is not threatened by making employment optional, because such people will simply choose to remain employed.