Comment on If a universal basic income started today with the stipulation that you had to put 40 hrs/wk towards making the world a better place or solving societal problems, how would you spend your time?

don@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• Bocky@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Exactly. Its value becomes evident when a version gets to the stage where they can’t work. Very different from those that choose not to work.

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  • AA5B@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    And even more evident when you need to decide how to set up a bureaucracy, paperwork, and verification to judge whether someone else could be working more, or just not

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• whoreticulture@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s a hypothetical question, read the room 🙄. He’s just asking what you would do if you were tasked with making the world a better place.

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  • njordomir@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    You heard what I meant and I appreciate that. It was poorly phrased and I wish I had explained the theoretical better.

    I qualified it with the “naturally industrious” thing because I wanted people to talk about what they’d do after they slept off the drudgery of current capitalism not immediately upon finding out they don’t have to go to work anymore just to survive and have basic amenities. As you stated, I could have also phrased in an equally bad way where everyone just pointed at their job and said “I have no time or energy”. That’s the problem. I was trying to filter out the “If I had UBI, I would smoke weed and eat potato chips all day” answers.

    If I had phrased my question as, “if you had a guaranteed income and were able to use 40hrs a week of your time to make the world a better place, what would you do?” That would have been better.

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• card797@champserver.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Can that actually work in the real world though? If we all take the money and do nothing. Would that actually be sustainable?

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  • T156@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Unclear. But eventually, people would work. People get bored, it’s nice to have something to do, and get paid extra on top of it.

    UBI just ensures that if they don’t like a job, they can just quit, rather than be forced to keep working on pain of starvation.

    Tests so far seem to be fairly positive about it working. People who get UBI aren’t likely to sit on that money, they’ll just go and spend it either paying back debts, or buying something nice for themselves, so the money will keep going around. They might even buy more than they might otherwise have, if they’re not just scraping by.

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