This is often the retort of certain types of privileged people have when you bring up the fact that wages across the board have historically in the last ~30 years severely lagged behind inflation, especially at the lowest levels. It's like telling someone who just got in a horrible car accident that involves the amputation of a limb and the death of a child "hey but you're not dead, right?" It's little consolation. Go look at rent to income ratios in practically any US city or state and tell me how much of the country you can live and meet your needs on $12-$16 hourly wages, let alone the federal minimum wage. It is seriously depressing.
If you believe there is work that needs doing and isn't getting done, then train and hire people to do it until everyone who is ready, willing, and able to work is doing so.
If there is a surplus labor force, don't doom them to die homeless in a gutter. Don't ask them to waste their lives doing undignified pretend-work. Guarantee for them the basic human rights of clothing, food, water, shelter, health care, and education. Whether you do that directly with taxation and government services, or indirectly, by handing out money that can be used to purchase those things, doesn't much matter either way.
And those people who aren't officially working jobs with wages, how many of them will truly not work at all? Sure, some will sit in front of the TV the rest of their lives. But many or most will find the freedom to still do valuable things without profit motive. I predict there would be an explosion of artistic production that would enrich our entire society even though it wouldn't show up on any balance sheet.
The answer is highly subjective.
On the one hand, there are people who don’t work in spite of the absence of any income: some people believe the answer is “none”.
On the other hand, there are workaholics who already covered their total cost of living, yet have massive workloads: they believe the answer is “all of it!”
My goals in life are futuristic, so to quote Daft Punk: Our work is never over
not significant
In England: in the future, nobody will have to work. In Germany: in the future, everyone will do their duty and work (at whatever they want).
I am a robotics engineer and I believe very strongly that we can and must build a world where people do not have to work for their survival. I don't think UBI could ever achieve that. As I have seen it pitched, UBI would be attached to our current system, with elite control of the means of production, and those elites would be taxed very high amounts to fund the UBI (along with some MMT goodness sprinkled in). The primary issue is that if elites control the means of production and have more wealth than everyone else, then they hold the real power, they will control the political system, and they will ensure that whatever UBI existed would be far too little to live on - just like minimum wage is today in the USA.
We do still need people to work too.
One important principle I have found is that many important industrial machines are extremely patent encumbered and overpriced. My go-to example is 3D printers. They were $50k in 1998 and $25k in 2008, all patented. Then the patents expired and by 2011 they were under $2k. By 2018 they were $250. This happened because thousands of people all over the world built open source versions, experimented on cost reduction, and shared their designs for others to build off of.
My theory is that we can do this with all machinery and other vital equipment. Cut costs by 100x through open source and a wind-down of the power of IP restrictions which keep costs high [1]. I wonder how bloated and overpriced medical scanners are for example, and how that keeps our healthcare costs high. Perhaps we need open specifications and open designs, with verified manufacturers who are paid for their production time, with innovation done in the open through grants and community funding.
Simultaneous to cost reduction efforts, we should encourage community-ownership of the means of production through cooperatives and collective ownership agreements.
People can achieve freedom when they own the means of production which they depend upon for their own survival. Now its not quite so simple as different regions have different resources and specialization can be a very good thing, but put simply I think we can reduce the actual cost of reproducing society by reducing the cost of machines, and simultaneously stimulate community ownership of these machines, and in doing so people can actually directly receive the benefits of automation, critically without laundering profits through some massive federal political system where people who know nothing about you and don't care about you have impossible to avoid temptation to serve themselves first.
In such a system, some work still needs to be done. Things would need to be arranged to that what work does need to be done is minimal, and can either be done by bored volunteers or by setting up additional compensation for people who do more work, with careful limits on accumulation of extra resources.
Some of this is fanciful too and long term, but the status quo is miserable people working long hours with little freedom to speak of. Perhaps the next step is a community owned system where everyone must work 30 hours a week, with four weeks paid vacation. When that is achieved, perhaps it could be further automated so that work hours can be reduced further, and vacation extended, etc.
[1] Many people take issue with this claim, but every time I discuss problems with IP restrictions with those people, they provide me with economic models which are unable to explain how open source works. I believe those views are based on received wisdom which is false, and must be updated to account for the fact that people absolutely will work for free if they enjoy it. The root of my theory lies in building a system that puts qualified people in a position to work on what they love for free, maximally sharing their work with others who in turn do what they love with it, creating a collaborative economy of expert volunteers.
You still need operators.
My hope is either to make it fun enough that people want to do it a few hours a week just to contribute back to others, or find a payment scheme that doesn’t lead to little kings trying to rule everyone.
