For that matter, there is no real reason why a public sector jobs expansion can’t include the arts: A New Deal for the Arts
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While I applaud people working to improve the quality of life of other people, I view UBI or a job guarantees to both be admitting defeat on the larger problem. The linked article starts off referring to people that are economically worthless. This isn’t new. My ancestors that were poor farmers growing enough to eat had no economic role. The larger problem is that a world that centers every aspect of life around money considers people that are economically worthless to be worthless. We don’t need to make sure everyone has money, we need to remove money as a prerequisite for a decent life. Healthcare, food and home guarantees I’ll support. People should be allowed to live without income
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The question of work is really a question of whether you own the decisions that happen at work which includes the choice to work, the product to be made, and how it should be distributed (packaging, marketing, etc). When you’re just a factory worker that does one tiny part of the process (like pulling out and inspecting plastic parts from a vacuum mold machine) you really don’t get any say in what happens. You punch in, do your work for the allotted time and/or quota required, punch out, and go home. But you don’t have any agency beyond working or not working. That’s what frustrates people more often than not. They see that something can be done better but they never get to try it. Even if it’s something small it’s still a significant boon to worker morale and sense of agency to ‘own’ the process and product of their labor. In a way, that’s all Marx’s ideas came down to. It wasn’t merely more equal distribution of wealth (which is a part of it but not the core question being raised in his later works) but that everyone equally shared in the burden and blessing of their work. When this is the goal then work isn’t just another kind of drudgery.
Edit: this doesn’t mean the question of UBI vs jobs guarantee isn’t important but that it doesn’t frame the entire problem. Yes, there needs to be an abolition of wages for labor. In this age of plenty there doesn’t need to be a single person homeless or hungry. There’s just too many social norms that block such distribution. But I’ll say that tying such necessities to work is a bad idea. We should be focused on making something like UBI more than the BASIC part of its acronym if you understand my argument.
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Far easier said than ever done; without a feasible plan to achieve such a lofty goal (which would have to include dismantling the deeply entrenched Powers That Be), it’s just wishful thinking.
Agreed; being a mere ‘cog’ in ‘the machine’ in order to survive can be incredibly demoralizing and disenfranchising.
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My Dear Wife and I have a secret to happiness, cocktails at 5:00 PM without fail. Try it, you’ll like it.
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Universal Basic Ethanol?
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Thank you. It’s really tiring and annoying to keep seeing articles citing multiple “experts” who proclaim that humans will shrivel up and die if they don’t work, work, work. I’d ask who is paying for these studies, but I’m sure we all know the answer to that! What’s worse is the descriptions of the guaranteed jobs like they are something really desirable. It’s too close to a future where people are assigned jobs no one else wants to do, and our country has a terrible track record with that.
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I just want to sit round in my underpants reading books.
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Universal Basic Marijuana?
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Hey, those 10 yachts are spread across the whole DeVos family! She and her husband only have 1 or 2 yachts of their own. They worked hard for those inheritances! /s
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I vaguely recall something like this in Cordwainer Smith (Paul Linebarger)'s Instrumentality of Mankind books; we need something to do something with meaning.
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My guess is that having enough time and money to become a professional couch potato would create a new leisure class, full of escapees from the working class.
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Yet many of the trappings of work frustrate us.
Just a bit ago I was informed that it has been decided that the managers are all going to work together in the conference room on Mondays. The others all have laptops; I can’t do my work on a laptop, and don’t have one.
So I’m going to be disconnecting my iMac and carrying it to the conference room on Monday. I’ll have to leave my 2nd monitor behind. At the end of the day, I’ll have to quit everything, shut it down, and take it back to my desk, and hook everything back up.
I am frustrated by this trapping.
Quite right. If UBI does become a thing, I’m going to be very annoyed that I spent the last 22 years doing what I’ve been doing just to keep me and my family clothed, fed and housed. But I’ll feel very good for my children.
Precisely this! I’m right there with you. Maybe we should form a band?
Agreed! And instead of being useful I’m working in fucking advertising trying to stay alive for now while wondering if I’ll manage to die before I’m laid off for the last time, because I have no hope of ever “retiring” to anything better than a one room apartment and a cupboard of cat food at this point.
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I can’t speak for everyone, but I think I would find more personal satisfaction working a bullshit job vs universal income, assuming the pay was the same.
Now… I probably would tell myself I could work on creative stuff if I didn’t have to work that bullshit job, but I know that would be lying to myself.
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Cordwainer Smith’s Instrumentality of Man was really about the idea that you need conflict to advance the plot. Remove too much fear and suffering and humanity will stagnate. It does take tens of thousands of years, though. I, for one, would like to try it anyway.
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I also find the concept that one has to always be doing something, working at a job or just staying busy, to be very strange. People who have the ability, need to be away from BS, irrelevant time wasting schemes that don’t allow them to reach their full creativity. The old saying, “Idle hands are the devil’s tools.” is utter crap. Creative people rarely have idle hands or minds. It wreaks of working-class authoritarianism.
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On the opposite end of that spectrum are people like me; talented and formally trained in an artistic field, only to never have landed a real job in said field because I suck at networking/kissing ass… so I’m stuck working ‘a bullshit job’ that doesn’t pertain to my degree in any way, because I don’t want me or my kid to starve or sleep in the streets.
UBI plus universal healthcare would make it so that I might actually be able to make living doing what I love without also worrying constantly about keeping a roof over our heads.
*Edited for typos.
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I don’t want a job. I want to go to school and get degrees forever. I also like to volunteer and help people with their tech problems. What a great world that would be where I could volunteer and go to school forever.
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Agreed, I could do with a few millennia of stagnation. (Also, you need cats to advance the plot.)
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< sarcasm > Now, now, let’s not get common sense involved here! < /sarcasm > 
