Prolong is killing the Solarian Union

The E wrote:

Tenshinai wrote:That´s bullshit. Places that have actually tried various systems for it has seen fairly neutral results, and where it differs from without it, it´s usually that it ends up with LESS people not working.

As it allows unemployed the ability to TRY something new without having to risk their future for it.
Your magically appearing new jobs isn´t going to happen without something like this.

Tenshinai is completely correct here. What happened in those experiments was that people started to reprioritize their time, spending more of it with family and being social and less working (while not actually losing much, if anything, in terms of productiveness). The Weberian vision of the Dolist sitting at home all day, hopped on drugs and watching TV, didn't come to pass at all, instead people felt more secure to do things that aren't immediately relevant to their survival and being happier as a result.

However that was explained away that the Legislaturalists actually encouraged that lazy, drugged up lazy lifestyle.

Your average dole is designed to allow one to live, maybe not comfortably, but to buy the necessities. But minimum wage is usually also higher, so if you work a 40 hour/week, you make more in 2 weeks than a dolist makes in a month.

Now flip that situation, so the dolists make twice as much as you would on minimum wage, how many people do you know would keep slaving away 40 to 60 hour weeks, when they know Joe in the apartment next door makes twice as much as they do for sitting around, binging on television and getting drunk/high?

Somtaaw wrote:

The E wrote:
Tenshinai is completely correct here. What happened in those experiments was that people started to reprioritize their time, spending more of it with family and being social and less working (while not actually losing much, if anything, in terms of productiveness). The Weberian vision of the Dolist sitting at home all day, hopped on drugs and watching TV, didn't come to pass at all, instead people felt more secure to do things that aren't immediately relevant to their survival and being happier as a result.

However that was explained away that the Legislaturalists actually encouraged that lazy, drugged up lazy lifestyle.

Your average dole is designed to allow one to live, maybe not comfortably, but to buy the necessities. But minimum wage is usually also higher, so if you work a 40 hour/week, you make more in 2 weeks than a dolist makes in a month.

Now flip that situation, so the dolists make twice as much as you would on minimum wage, how many people do you know would keep slaving away 40 to 60 hour weeks, when they know Joe in the apartment next door makes twice as much as they do for sitting around, binging on television and getting drunk/high?

And then throw a lot of regulations and restrictions up to make trying to do a hobby or startup business painful and unprofitable...

Because one of the things that a universal basic income is supposed to do is give people enough safety cushion that they're willing to try their hand at a small craft business or the like. Some will succeed and be a net economic win, and others will fail but without trapping the people in a cycle of debt they can't pay.

But throw up roadblocks preventing that and you do tend to force people towards apathetically accepting their dole.

Somtaaw wrote:Your average dole is designed to allow one to live, maybe not comfortably, but to buy the necessities. But minimum wage is usually also higher, so if you work a 40 hour/week, you make more in 2 weeks than a dolist makes in a month.

Now flip that situation, so the dolists make twice as much as you would on minimum wage, how many people do you know would keep slaving away 40 to 60 hour weeks, when they know Joe in the apartment next door makes twice as much as they do for sitting around, binging on television and getting drunk/high?

But that's not what UBI is about. UBI means that everyone, employed or not, has whatever the basic income is at minimum. In your hypothetical case, the person working 40 hours would still have more money available than good ol' Joe on his couch, it's just that Joe wouldn't be in any danger to ever fall into bankruptcy because that book he wrote didn't sell or because his skillset became obsolete and he's too old to train for a new qualified position.

Speaking of unexamined biases: There is an ugliness at the core of capitalist thinking (which finds its way into the ways in which societies treat people who aren't working, no matter the reason) that basically equates the worth of a person with their employment status, up to and including a willingness to let people who lose their jobs lose their lives as well.

Indeed.

The core of capitalism is predator instincts.
Really NOT healthy for any sort of society.

the constant barrage of articles and coverage of people who are seemingly doing outrageous things while on benefits

And when you actually try to check things out, nearly always what is found is that those people amount to less than 1 in 1000 at the most.

the moral outrage that happens when a poor person dares to aspire to the luxury items that, mentally, are reserved for the "deserving" (i.e. working), these are all toxic impulses that we need to get over soon, given the trajectory the global (or, at least, western) economy is on.

Seriously yes.

Tenshinai is completely correct here. What happened in those experiments was that people started to reprioritize their time, spending more of it with family and being social and less working (while not actually losing much, if anything, in terms of productiveness). The Weberian vision of the Dolist sitting at home all day, hopped on drugs and watching TV, didn't come to pass at all, instead people felt more secure to do things that aren't immediately relevant to their survival and being happier as a result.

AND, the average number of new business started per year per population went up drastically.
With the number of new business that stayed viable after 3 years increased even more.
So, more people dared to start up something of their own, and many more of them suceeded(because they could rely on the guaranteed income until their business actually worked out, or for when they hit a "pothole" that would have made a business under regular conditions crash and burn).

Somtaaw wrote:However that was explained away that the Legislaturalists actually encouraged that lazy, drugged up lazy lifestyle.

Yes, the dolists of haven were given thorough Pavlovian training to stay quiet and docile.

A simple but highly inept way of running a nation by force.

Somtaaw wrote:Your average dole is designed to allow one to live, maybe not comfortably, but to buy the necessities. But minimum wage is usually also higher, so if you work a 40 hour/week, you make more in 2 weeks than a dolist makes in a month.

Now flip that situation, so the dolists make twice as much as you would on minimum wage, how many people do you know would keep slaving away 40 to 60 hour weeks, when they know Joe in the apartment next door makes twice as much as they do for sitting around, binging on television and getting drunk/high?

Nobody has ever suggested something as utterly stupid and braindead like that.

Suggestions i´ve seen have ranged from roughly 1/2 to 4/5th of minimum wage. Varying between suggestions in different countries because of great variation in both rules and suggested structure as well as what levels of minimum wages the country has.

Also very variable on regulations for how it is meant to function if someone is doing part-time or occasional/on demand work(here, it´s usually the most restrictive ones who are complete idiots, essentially wanting to make rule that are forcing people to choose one or the other exclusively, and then, well of course it becomes better to take the lower guaranteed income if the only way to work is to take a 50/50 chance at getting less than half or double the income in a month).

We have a potential problem in that our dole also includes an allowance to support children, so on the surface it would appear that someone on the dole with 6 young children would get as much as if he worked. The way we deal with this is that for every two dollars you earn, you lose a dollar of dole up to when it cuts out. Thus someone on the dole with lots of kids is still better off working.
Our experience is that there is a small hard core of (who knows for sure?) about 3% who really don't want to work no matter what. While each government in turn harasses these losers for political purposes, in reality it is cheaper to continue paying them the dole than to cut it off and eventually have to lock them up when they steal to live.
I admit that many decades ago I was working in that field, and did have some work satisfaction in chasing the deadbeats. They usually either moved away or managed to get enough compliant doctors to put them on a disability pension.

Daryl wrote:We have a potential problem in that our dole also includes an allowance to support children, so on the surface it would appear that someone on the dole with 6 young children would get as much as if he worked. The way we deal with this is that for every two dollars you earn, you lose a dollar of dole up to when it cuts out. Thus someone on the dole with lots of kids is still better off working.
Our experience is that there is a small hard core of (who knows for sure?) about 3% who really don't want to work no matter what. While each government in turn harasses these losers for political purposes, in reality it is cheaper to continue paying them the dole than to cut it off and eventually have to lock them up when they steal to live.

In my experience, the "hardcore" is very small, less than 1%, as the rest usually have at least halfdecent reasons for whatever they are doing, or NOT doing as it were.

Daryl wrote:I admit that many decades ago I was working in that field, and did have some work satisfaction in chasing the deadbeats. They usually either moved away or managed to get enough compliant doctors to put them on a disability pension.

OR, that just happened to be the reason they were "deadbeats" from the start.
Health issues is easily the most common reason forcing people to not be as active as they want to, even if it´s not bad enough to be accepted as such by bureaucracy.

You also need to remember that unless the reason is beyond 100% clearcut and obvious(and often even then), most people are very embarassed or even ashamed of not being able to work, and they´re not going to tell you about it just because you ask.

In Isaac Asimov's Robots series, the Spacer culture (versus the Earth culture) consists of some 50 sparsely populated worlds (the biggest population is Aurora with 250 million) who enjoy an extremely high standard of living (relative to earth) thanks to their massive use off robots and advanced genetics that allow them an average life span of some 250-300 years. Yet one of the Spacer protagonists, Han Fastolfe, is aware of the decadence, decay and decline of these overly-comfortable Spacers and seeks to launch a new wave of exploration and settlement but from Earth rather than the Spacer worlds because Earth is overpopulated and averse to robots. Yet a long life alone is not enough to explain such decay. It certainly is a catalyst in that it slows down the ways human behave (since they have so much time to do it in). But other factors are the real culprits.

Corruption within the league is the result of centuries in which no one on the federal level really cared about it unless it hurt their shareholders, their profits or their reputation. The powerful bureaucracy was a result of the shortcomings of the Solarian Constitution, which was written at a time when many of the Solarian League's members had been independent for centuries and wanted to retain as much of that local autonomy as possible. And neither of these problems has really bothered the average Solarian citizen unless they were diplomats, businessmen, merchant crews or naval personnel. Nor does there seem to be a common sense of identity among Solarians (they identify first as Beowulfers, Terrans, Meyerdahlans, Okadans or Strathmorese and only then as Solarian). As such, the disintegration of the League seems to be less the result of prolong (which has only been around for less than a century and more the result of all of these factors (and probably others).

Since Weber has not brought up what most people do, right now we are simply guessing. I would guess there is probably not a universal base salary on Manticore since we have never come across anything about it.

There are a lot of things that authors don't touch on. We have never had as far as I remember a character actually using a toilet yet we know that all of them did. So right now we are guessing.

As for the capitalist evils, generally speaking people flee socialist nations to come to capitalist ones not the other way around.

As for a universal base salary, the US (and other countries) has a welfare system. In New York City, not only did people on welfare receive cash benefits but got food stamps (which covered a large amount of the cost of food), subsidized housing and free medical care. I was an administrator in a large high school. Of 5000 students on register, at least 3500 were eligible for assistance. And some families were on the rolls for generations.

If we had a system to overcome those things, the person coming up with it would win a lot of awards. Hasn't happened yet.

This has been covered previously here. Most other developed countries have national compehensive welfare and health schemes that cover all citizens, administered by the national government.

ldwechsler wrote:Since Weber has not brought up what most people do, right now we are simply guessing. I would guess there is probably not a universal base salary on Manticore since we have never come across anything about it.

There are a lot of things that authors don't touch on. We have never had as far as I remember a character actually using a toilet yet we know that all of them did. So right now we are guessing.

As for the capitalist evils, generally speaking people flee socialist nations to come to capitalist ones not the other way around.

As for a universal base salary, the US (and other countries) has a welfare system. In New York City, not only did people on welfare receive cash benefits but got food stamps (which covered a large amount of the cost of food), subsidized housing and free medical care. I was an administrator in a large high school. Of 5000 students on register, at least 3500 were eligible for assistance. And some families were on the rolls for generations.

If we had a system to overcome those things, the person coming up with it would win a lot of awards. Hasn't happened yet.