> they would be making projects, business ventures, or volunteering
This is not what actually happens in practice. There is no sudden outbreak of productive activity because people have more free time. If this was going to occur there would be mountains of empirical evidence for it by now because this situation isn't rare.
I know many people with a lot of free time. In the vast majority of cases, people spend their free time in almost exactly the same way they spent their free time when they had less of it. Binging on social media, television, or games? Now they just do more of it for longer. The people that volunteer more were already doing it, and they are in the small minority.
People should probably work less but the idea that this will generate productive activity is a rationalization against all evidence.
> I know many people with a lot of free time. In the vast majority of cases, people spend their free time in almost exactly the same way they spent their free time when they had less of it. Binging on social media, television, or games? Now they just do more of it for longer. The people that volunteer more were already doing it, and they are in the small minority.
You lock people for decades in the madhouse which leaves only escapism as a coping mechanism and then act surprised when they continue to escape. Make the experiment with a clean slate: a group of children raised to be empowered by creation and creativity, having generous allowances to experiment and not burdened with work or brain rot. Did I just describe rich kids? Anyway.
And what’s “a lot of free time” anyway?
More than 10% of 18-25 year olds are considered NEETs. They haven't experienced anything but sitting at school for 25 hours a week with zero responsibilities. Yet none of them do anything useful with their free time. Funnily, this affects both poor and rich kids equally
> More than 10% of 18-25 year olds are considered NEETs. They haven't experienced anything but sitting at school for 25 hours a week with zero responsibilities.
Being dumped by absent parents and having lack of pointers/goals in life is not
> raised to be empowered by creation and creativity, having generous allowances to experiment and not burdened with work or brain rot.
in my book.
Cease this wild extrapolation, which starts at dementia, passes through a casual myth called "brain rot", and ends at games. I like games and I like being idle. I don't like the judgmental concept of "productive activity" and I don't think that arbitrarily occupying yourself, even if you produce something, is inherently worthy and good. I produce certain things with my ass, gimme a medal.
> You lock people for decades in the madhouse which leaves only escapism as a coping mechanism and then act surprised when they continue to escape.
This is so good I feel the need of framing it!
> Did I just described rich kids?
You just described Lord Of The Flies.
Be mindful of fundamental human nature and how it shapes everything we do, including all our social constructs. Few people are, which make mindlessness the dominant modus operandi.
Lord of the Flies was a fictional novel, it never happened, it’s not real and shouldn’t be used to inform your thinking.
Especially when real life instances of groups of young children being stranded without adult help exist and play out in ways directly opposite of the novel’s central thesis.
You can make any society work if you're writing fiction.
For example, Star Trek is Roddenberry's idea of a utopia. A benevolent dictator with his happy ship of comrades all rowing together. (But hey, I enjoyed watching it!)
STTNG amps that up even further. It got so heavy-handed with it I lost interest in it.
I'm not understanding how you're extrapolating Lord of the Flies from what they're saying. A key part of "raised to be empowered by creation and creativity" would involve parents and other adults to do that. I haven't read the book in a while, were they stranded on the island with their parents?
True mindfulness is to know when the machine breaks, why it breaks and to recognize known flaws of the machine, for example to assume that all others are automatons running on low-energy heuristics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_f...
> Be mindful of fundamental human nature and how it shapes everything we do, including all our social constructs. Few people are, which make mindlessness the dominant modus operandi.
What is the fundamental human nature in your opinion?
Adapation
So many pointed jabs.
There are both groups. Some people are busy now and will remain busy. Others have no hobbies, and will continue to have none.
Which is to say figure out something you can do in your free time so when you have more it can fill that time. Even if it is only a few minutes per week that you can do something. There are a lot of options. Volunteer, build wooden boxes, paint pictures: there are many great options. The point isn't to be productive or useful (though volunteering is and I recommend it for at least some of your free time), it is to have something to do with your time.
> There is no sudden outbreak of productive activity because people have more free time.
I can't recall which studies they were, but I was under the impression that with a sudden expansion of free time, the earliest productivity gains don't occur until months later at the earliest.
I think the effect came up in long-term UBI trial participants, and those that acquired sudden wealth from inheritance / lottery / stocks / etc...
There tends to be a decompression stage after leaving work environment that didn't suit the person, then a deconstruction / rebuilding / searching stage afterwards.
I think it's also common for large lottery winners to become depressed because they have trouble searching for what to do afterwards.
Anecdotes obviously aren't data, but from my own experience going some time jobless after my last startup I was basically useless for the first three months. By month four I started looking for some things to do and excuses to regularly leave the house. By month 9 I had a bunch of side projects and hobbies going on. Some productive, some artistic, some just screwing around.
Then I got a job I liked, and while some of the hobbies were still quite active for the first two months or so they've all come to rest now. Still trying to figure out how to get a better work-life balance again, because I quite liked those hobbies
Yep, the statement is so bad with a pattern of "because most won't, then all won't", which commonly used during birth rate issues too. It's either ignorant or malicious with hidden agenda behind.
Giving employees 1 week of free time? That's nothing, and nothing will change too as a result. Give them a whole month of free time? I bet they will make some small, short term projects, even doing hobbies like gaming, fishing, cooking or golfing where it wasn't available before.
> Giving employees 1 week of free time? That's nothing, and nothing will change too as a result. Give them a whole month of free time? I bet they will make some small, short term projects, even doing hobbies like gaming, fishing, cooking or golfing where it wasn't available before.
*confused in European, again*
Hey, if only there was an entire continent of hundreds of millions of people who typically have 5 weeks of paid vacation per year or more so that we could check this and see what happens?
I'm not sure about other countries in europe but in Germany your employer can and will try to prevent you from starting a company. Some are more lenient and don't care if it's another industry, but same? Usually that is not going to happen.
So the cheapest and safest way to open a company is closed to a lot of employees, even with UBI.
You have confused 5 weeks (across a year) for 5 weeks (contiguous), this isn't speciality european confusion it's the regular garden variety.
5 weeks, even contiguous is not enough to unwind from decades of job induced stress. I took some time off between jobs, and it was a solid 3 months before I noticed major improvements.
There's tons of people over here taking 3 or 4 weeks contiguous, especially if they have children. That is in addition to other vacations around christmas etc. It's definitely not 5 separate weeks.
I don't think there's a lot of things that one could do in 5 weeks, but where 4 weeks would be too short.
Tons? Hyperbole? Are they teachers or something? That amount of leave in one go is basically unheard of, with the exception of maternity leave I don't know anyone who's been on leave for more than 3 weeks as a single block.
This is also taking from that same 5 week leave bucket people have available per annum, if they're taking 4 weeks then they have 5 days to last the remainder of the year. Not that crazy, but I have literally never even met a single person who does this let alone knowing tons.
I don't know if this is a Norway exclusive thing or if some other countries have similar laws aswell, but we have the right to take three continuous weeks of vacation during summer. You don't have to take the continuous weeks, but in my experience most people do
yes, the exact point I've mentioned, feels like an organized effort to reduce the importance of free time. "Look at those European with astonishing 5 weeks of paid vacation and they aren't productive at all!" argument without getting the point:
* no source to back them up, and equalize everyone without considering some will be productive
* equating all non-money making or enterpreneur activities as non-productive and equal to doomscrolling
* ignoring other limitations like living space size, funds availability, opportunity, license or regulation
5 weeks is nothing over a year.
> I think the effect came up in long-term UBI trial participants,
The failure of UBI trials to show these effects has been one of the noteworthy developments in the UBI topic in recent years.
There were several studies that tried really hard to demonstrate that UBI would increase the rate of business creation and similar metrics. The last one I remember reading was trying to show that the long-term cash recipients reported a marginally higher rate of thinking about maybe starting a business, but they weren't actually doing it.
As I remember it, there were four kinds of UBI trials:
- Low UBI, short term
- Low UBI, long term
- High UBI, short term
- High UBI, long term
Both low UBI kinds did little except provide a little better food/medical security for poor folks.
High UBI short term mostly only led to people either saving or spending the money immediately.
High UBI long term was the only one where the effect I was talking about showed up. Most people carried on as they did, some reduced hours, there was an increase in people switching jobs, and an increasing in people leaving work to get a degree.
I also remember the difference between the first three kinds and the last kind led to confusion between UBI trials.
Admittedly I haven't looked in a few years, so I'll have to check again.
Starting a business can be horrifically expensive, complicated, and risky. You have to spend a good few months researching all the things you need to do before you actually do it. And most people don't even know what questions to ask.
Some people will grow up in households where their parents understand basic law, finance, and business bureaucracy. They may already be part of a network with similar individuals in their cohort.
There's also the informal culture - knowing when you can push and maybe exploit vs knowing when to fold and play by the rules.
Other people come to it completely cold. They don't know the basics, don't understand the requirements, have no experience of the culture, don't even know what the words mean.
This is another reason why UBI isn't enough. If you want people to be more entrepreneurial you need a practical culture that supports that. Investing in them financially is a good first step, but it's not a complete solution.
> Starting a business can be horrifically expensive, complicated, and risky.
Or just go door to door offering maid service or yard service or cleanup service or handyman service or tutoring service or ...
I think those that would start a business, self-select themselves out of any crowd that would receive UBI before the experiment.
It's such an unimaginative metric. First, we lump all jobs together into one bag. Depending on who you are some jobs are an actual joy whole others are absurdly demanding. We have zero dialog about the correct number of hours for each.
Lots of jobs (both physically and mentally) require slacking off half the shift. I've seen quite a few that on paper require 8 hours of top tier athletic performance. It might be possible to train a person to accomplish that. The work schedule looks nothing like a training program.
To grow, mental and physical challenges have to push people to their limit for X hours over Y days where X and Y depend a lot on what it is one does and their point of exhaustion. If you are not exhausted you aren't growing. When you are exhausted you should be resting. Rest should be exactly the right duration.
If people are never challenged physically, mentally (and perhaps socially) they will decline and eventually the lack of physical fitness will eat away their mental performance just like a lack of mental challenge will ruin physical performance.
There is no discussion about the duration or frequency of shifts.
If you look at it strictly from a greed and exploitation perspective it is a dumb idea to pay someone for 8 hours if it isn't possible to do more than 5 hours of work. It is dumb to have people work 5 days if they are used up after 3. It is dumb to have 2 days of weekend if the employee is not recharged. The collective goal was to exploit them until retirement. If they cant even be allowed to grow stronger it is a truly dumb schedule.
I had a job once that involved a weekly truck full of 75 kg bags of flour. About 10 employees were unable to do a single bag, about 10 could do 1-5. Then there was one guy who did the other 150 bags. Not a coincidence it was the same guy who put them in the mixer. Say 10 000 kg. The world record most weight lifted in a day is half a million kg or say 6500 bags.
They calculated top memory sports people are on average 5000 times better at remembering things than untrained people. They weren't born like that nor did it just happen suddenly.
Lots of people want to start their own business but they are terrified by the amount of work and level of uncertainty. It doesn't seem like we want people to start their own business. We need them to but it looks more like we've made it intentionally complicated. Complicated enough that you probably shouldn't invest in them.
There is also the angle of people able to support you. If everyone has 4 day weekends you really should ask them to help you. If it is only 2 days you'd best not bother.
> I know many people with a lot of free time. In the vast majority of cases, people spend their free time in almost exactly the same way they spent their free time when they had less of it. Binging on social media, television, or games? Now they just do more of it for longer. The people that volunteer more were already doing it, and they are in the small minority.
This is why I am so thankful that I grew up before the days of social media and devices. I have direct first hand knowledge that the world does not end because some feed hasn't been checked in the past 5 minutes. I am forced to hear others doom scrolling their feeds and listening to the disjointed audio from short clips looping or getting interrupted to get to the next one, and I am constantly reminded of those that would sit on the sofa with the remote constantly flipping channels. Nothing was on the screen long enough to really see what was on, but just enough they decided not what they wanted to see. It's like the exact same personality cranked to 11.
Anecdotal evidence, but once I stopped working I spent _much_ more time doing things I wouldn’t do before, such as running and cooking new recipes for me and my partner. I also went out more to play board games.
The issue of work isn’t the time it consumes, but _the energy_. Scrolling social media costs virtually no energy, hence it being a way to spend time after work when you’re already tired.
No, statistically it's exactly what happens. People have more initiative and produce meaningful outcomes when they own part of their time. You do need to account for what isn't measured in capital. Off the top of my head:
- Caretaking
- Community and organization
- Art ventures
- Political involvement
All of which are meaningful parts of as functioning society, but almost invisible to the capitalistic eye. Some of these (caretaking for example) are obstacles to one industry being maximally profitable, so sometimes they're structurally pushed out by the simple act of prioritizing company interest over decades.
You'll notice they were also kind of stereotypically married women's activities when women used to be homemakers in majority, and that went away when women of working age joined the workforce, i.e. lost control over how they distributed their working day.
That's just what you claim.
Me and 50 years of trials and studies
> The scheme also gave some participants “the possibility to try and live their dreams”, Blomberg-Kroll said. “Freelancers and artists and entrepreneurs had more positive views on the effects of the basic income, which some felt had created opportunities for them to start businesses.”
It also encouraged some participants to get more involved in society, by undertaking voluntary work, for example. “Some found the guaranteed income increased the possibility for them to do things like providing informal care for their family or their neighbours,” said one of the researchers, Christian Kroll.
- https://weall.org/resource/finland-universal-basic-income-pi...
> Involvement in the Mincome project didn’t cause a significant labour force reduction in Dauphin, as some critics of the program feared. The program’s approach to reducing payments based on income meant that it was better for participants to remain working as opposed to leaving the work force. Most participants continued to work.
Two notable groups of people did use Mincome to stay out of the work force. New mothers chose to stay at home longer with their babies and teenaged boys stayed in school instead of dropping out before Grade 12 to help support their families. The opportunity for students to stay in school was reflected in the higher graduation numbers and university enrollments seen during the experiment.
- https://humanrights.ca/story/manitobas-mincome-experiment
> When asked about the ease of combining paid work with care responsibilities, the average score increased from 2.76 to 3.58 on a 1 (‘very difficult’) to 5 (‘very easy’) scale. 60% of employees reported that balancing care responsibilities had become easier. Similarly, the experience of balancing employment with social life benefited, with an average reported increase from 2.9 to 3.78 (again with 1 as ‘very difficult’, and 5 as ‘very easy’).
- UK's 2023 four-day pilot study (page 39) https://autonomy.work/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/The-results...
> Researchers said this was partly due to remote working but there were other signs that people were more environmentally conscious. Time spent on household recycling, walking and cycling and buying eco-friendly products saw “a small but significant” increase.
- World Economic Forum on 4-day weeks https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/10/surprising-benefits-...
This has been my experience as well. My stock advice to people who want to save money is to simply work more. Not because the marginal hours will be meaningfully worth it, but because it stops them from spending money by default.
I don't think there is evidence of that. You would need long term changes to schedules so that people accommodate for the free time. That isn't the case if you have three weeks off.
Otherwise people would indeed do the exact same stuff they would do in their free time. In certain perspectives, that is maximising productivity in essence.
That was not my experience. I devoted more of my work to less productive tasks. Call it craftsmanship. I made a LOT more art, wrote more code, biked more. It is crazy what you can do with more energy.
If anything I wasted less time because I did not finish the day needing to recover from a demanding job.
This is only anecdata
> This is not what actually happens in practice. There is no sudden outbreak of productive activity because people have more free time. If this was going to occur there would be mountains of empirical evidence for it by now because this situation isn't rare.
Wrong.
> I know many people with a lot of free time...
Not a valid argument for, or against anything.
You probably mean to say you already know humans are just 'lazy' and the evidence for it is vibes, which is completely and totally sufficient for you but for anyone who thinks otherwise - they better come up with evidence that isn't just vibes.
i think people trying to argue that we would be more productive is a symptom of the productivity disease. where all we value is productivity and thats the only way we can justify more non-work time. i personally just think we should all have more time to do what we want, whether that is being productive on personal projects, talking to people, playing games, or doing nothing. happier people right? why should 10% of the richest people enslave the rest of us.
edit: forget dems v pups, black v white, democracy v communism, its all about class struggle, probably always has been. i bet those 10% can pick and choose how productive they want to be and how much spare time they have lol.
> its all about class struggle
That's the foundation of Marxist theory.
In America, however, anyone can become wealthy.
Marxims is such a lazy evaluation system. Discarding culture altogether, refusing analysis of religion, its basically a Proof Of Non work, when it comes to sociology and analysis
I was all with you right up until the class conflict stuff. Nobody's enslaving anybody. Well that's not true, we're mostly enslaving ourselves. There are endless easy opportunities in life. For instance go teach English in Saudi Arabia and you'll earn around $60k a year which doesn't sound like much until you account for the fact you pay 0% in taxes and have a cost of living well under $1k a month.
Just live frugally, dump your excess into index funds, and you'll likely be a millionaire in a decade. Yeah it's Saudi Arabia, but the price is right. And from that point one never needs to work another day in their life if they don't want, since typical returns on a million $ are more than enough to pay for cost of living in like 90% of the world.
Yet approximately 0% of people will take this advice. Why? Because the overwhelming majority of people generally prefer to seek the easiest, most popular, lowest friction choices. Options like I'm mentioning here only exist precisely because most people won't take them. But it's a sort of paradox in that there's absolutely nothing stopping them from doing so.
> There are endless easy opportunities in life. For instance go teach English in Saudi Arabia and you'll earn around $60k a year which doesn't sound like much until you account for the fact you pay 0% in taxes and have a cost of living well under $1k a month.
Just be born a single male with knowledge of Saudi, English and ability to teach and then lock yourself away for 10 years in Arab world living like a second class citizen. What the fuck am I even reading? Let me guess, for women it’s “just open an OnlyFans account”? I swear to God, the shit I read on this forum when it comes to things outside of tech.
"Sacrifice your one and only precious youth for happiness" is the TL;DR here. Also, the Saudi's are very choosy about who gets to show up and teach - a girl I went to high school actually went - after she got her masters in education.
I'm not saying some people shouldn't do this, but everybody can't. I (mid 40s male living in Canada) used to be a huge proponent of living beneath your means and did in fact sock away 20% of my income into investments. But the K shaped job market, real estate market, and cost of living in general has made that far harder to do today. I had a dirt cheap apartment in downtown Toronto ~2004-2007 before I bought a place, managed to have a fun youth AND save by simply not participating in lifestyle creep (the number of young people I knew that blew money on fancy German cars and other bling as tech salaries started to grow still makes me shake my head).
But that same apartment I rented for $700/month is now $2500 and requires a letter of employment (read they only will rent to professionals) to apply for.
0% of people will take your advice because it's half-baked and you didn't actually research the requirements (hint: simply knowing English is not enough) to get such a job. Or you purposefully omitted the requirements to make your point that it's "easy".
A word of advice: if you want to give advice, at least be realistic.
Leaving the place you have lived your whole life, the place where your family and personal life is and going to another country for work for 5 to 10 years will destroy the past life they had.
After 5 10 years that person will almost become part Saudi due to living in another country. And after he comes back no one will be that close, even close family members will feel something different due to the person being away/(out of physical touch) for 10 years
> Nobody's enslaving anybody.
> Saudi Arabia
I have some news for you.
maybe class struggle was the wrong terminology, but the more i see of problems in the world the more i start to think its about money/power vs "all the other busywork" we get bombarded with daily.
The 10% richest people create the jobs for you by cleverly investing you know