After many discussions with alot of people about Universal basic income, i think it is time to write my own thoughts about it.
first of all, let us ask ourselfs, what is work?
Work is something that you so that you can stay alive. In the Prehistory, they hunted for their food. And they also did some gathering. And moved on from time from time. After that, they started to domesticate animals and started farming. But now they needed to save up food for the winter and progress was made with pottery, tools and weapons. Then Hierarchy or goverments started to form. Trough power and religion, a ruling or elite class appeared.
From farming to factories
We all know the ancient Greeks, the Roman empire and the medieval period. So let’s continue the story in the industrial revolution. At the start of this periode, around 60-75% of the people worked in the agricultural sector and after the industrial revolution, 10-20% worked on the fields. So alot of things changed in that period. First people started working in factories and then in the service industry (tertiary sector). People started working very long hours. Over 70 hours a week was normal for factory workers. But in 1911 (in the netherlands) the maximum amount became 10 hours a day. And in 1919, 8 hours. That was back in 1919, and we have made much progress. Since then, it is normal to work 36 and even 32 hours a week. People can enjoy their lives more since the maximum amount of hours became a law.
My country
All my life i have been told, “those who will not work shall not eat”. You need to produce something in your life, so that you earn your own money to have a normal life. I am dutch and the dutch culture was all about working long hours and then maybe you could be rich. Our demands since the Prehistory has increased, but also our technology. We have the knowledge of building machines, we can code AI to do things for us. And computers have made our lifes much easier. We allready have self driving cars. Why should we continue to work if machines and AI can do the work for us?
UBI
But why should we not make the final step? What if we could have those machines and computers do 90% of our work? But then we won’t have any income? “those who will not work shall not eat”. Right?
I think we have a solution for that. Universal basic income. Everyone gets the same amount of money and you need to be able to live a good life with the UBI. It does not matter if you have a job or don’t have a job. You can allways work if you want extra money, but no one can force you to do anything. People can really enjoy their lives.
Isn't this the dream we humans have for centuries? What is really stopping us?
I understand some problems will raise when you implement this new idea. I will adress this in the next articles i will write.
sourcehttps://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture
https://www.history.com/news/prehistoric-ages-timeline#:~:text=In%20the%20Paleolithic%20period%20(roughly,hunting%20birds%20and%20wild%20animals.
Good article, albeit I think you neglected to mention how much of a downgrade was the Industrial Revolution (medieval peasants worked from sunrise to sunset on a maximum of 150 days per year - in contrast, modern-day workers work 9 to 5 on 230 days a year, things were even worse during the Industrial Revolution).
"What is really stopping us?" - I think culture is what's stopping us ultimately. As long as most people have the "He who does not work shall not eat"-mentality, it doesn't matter what kind of awesome labour-saving technologies we invent. Even if 99% of the population becomes unemployable, there's still going to be some boomers who will INSIST that "he who does not work shall not eat".