During COVID, my friends and I were temporarily retired. Lamenting every moment since having to come out of retirement. We were all laid off and received about $2k/mo for awhile and what happened was we ended up hanging out every since day working on whatever we were working on, and feelings of inadequacy faded into the background. It was a micro golden age for us and that period of time has cemented UBI for us. It was a small amount of money and we lived with our parents but we were never more productive and happy.
Hopefully before I die I can witness a strong implementation of UBI. It would directly reflect in culture in terms of music and the arts. Little funding for the arts currently combined with massive rent nearly everywhere leaves little room for cultural phenomenon that was possible in places like the lower east side bowery for example. Or arts funding in the USSR and other soviet bloc countries.
East side bowery was very cheap back then (it was also a pretty rough part of town, which is easy to forget). You just need to convince a hoard of like minded folks to congregate somewhere cheap and you can live like this. There's plenty of cheap places to live in the US. I kind of feel like we need to learn how to build new cities, we have the land, it's mostly cheap, we just continue to choose to reside in expensive places chasing jobs that help us cover the rent while working us to death.
Idk man, I wouldn't call bowery rough or cheap by any stretch - 20 years ago, during covid, or now. For rough during covid or now, head to east new york. For cheap, head deeper into the other boroughs.
Absolutely. More generally, as a taxpayer, I'm very unlikely to vote for anything that is justified in terms of how great the USSR was. One of several comments in this thread that give away the game: scratch a UBI bro, find a commie.
You were the beneficiary of a bullshit short term policy that has wrecked the global and national economies and think that means it was a good thing to replicate?
Your fun time was extremely damaging to people everywhere but of course, we can pretend "it was necessary because COVID" which we then knew and now it's undeniable, was an absolute farce of hygiene theater.
The people who worked paid for you to do nothing at your parents home. That's all there is. Meanwhile, there also were massive transfers of wealth with the same excuse, from tax payers to the wealthies company owners.
The only good Soviet art was the stuff that expressed the suffocating oppression of the communist regime and warned the world to never to do it again. Some of it was oblique, but all of it was human. If you and your friends lack the taste to understand that, then I am really glad that my tax dollars are no longer funding your arts and crafts projects.
> Or arts funding in the USSR and other soviet bloc countries.
This is pretty good example why UBI is dangerous. Those funded artists were very happy to suck it up and go along with the regime. The censorship was in place, but self-censorship was even stronger.
Meanwhile a lot of art existed outside of the system with people working some shitty jobs and doing arts in free time.
Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich was published.
The premise was that people were self censoring even outside of what was being officially approved, so not really.
That book was published during Kruschiov era. Which was definitely not representative of the rest of Soviet era. Let alone that the book was peanuts compared to Gulag archipelago.
Eventually Solzhenytsin was kicked out from USSR and had to take exile in west. Do you really want to use him as an example of Soviet artistic freedom?
So, one dude did not censor himself, during a cultural warm up era, ended up being kicked out to exile. Which was a fortunate outcome due to his previous fame. Hmmm, is that an example how people were free to do whatever in USSR? :) Is that more like an example how dangerous it was to not self-censor even to well known people with support (for some time) from the ruling elite?
Hearing parents and grandparents stories... And having talked to older artsy people who did grow up before the fall of USSR... Self-censorship was the default modus operandi. Sure, few didn't do it. Most of those paid the price either in gulags in earlier years or mental asylums later.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Edit: Several of your recent comments are in breach of the guidelines and are being flagged by other community members.
We need you to keep to the guidelines if you're going to keep commenting on HN, thanks.
Born in USSR and growing up in then ex-USSR I’ve pretty good experience of arts created during USSR period and both official and underground artists.
But yes, maybe some delusional USSR loving academics in west wrote some BS study how awesome life in USSR was. Which is very funny because those people would have ended up in KGB blacklists if they were on the other side of the iron curtain.
the problem here was the USSR not the UBI. you need to disconnect the two. the USSR and the associated political repression came first and it's no surprise that any handouts thereafter were in service of that political system.
we are discussing UBI in a democratic system, and i feel it is rather unlikely that implementation of UBI would turn a country into something like the USSR.
I agree. It was OP up the thread who brought up USSR artists funding as an example.
USSR and UBI is an interesting combination though. Being unemployed was illegal. And for common man it was very hard to get laid off. Just show up, even if intoxicated (and continue drinking at work), sleep at work (e.g. drive your tractor to the field and just park there) and you'll still get paid crappy salary as anybody else and roof over your head. I guess it was closest it was to real UBI. Yes, it was not exactly UBI, but it was still universal income where you get food & shelter regardless of your work performance.
Regarding UBI turning countries into USSR, I don't think UBI would turn countries into totalitarian regimes. But it may turn countries into similar inefficient slacking-off culture where vast majority of people do as little as possible in least involving way.
Sure, some of them may claim they're super productive and creative in their hobby adventures. But if thousands of programmers create awesome ToDo apps in their free time... Is that really productive from society perspective? Society needs a lot of bring stuff, not thousands of great ToDo apps...
i accept that the risk of turning into a slacking-off culture is there. the problem is the exploitation and the lack of perspective for a better future. this can be addressed with better education. we need to teach people to motivate them to do something meaningful to the benefit of humanity. see my other comments here for more thoughts on this.
Better education or propaganda to brainwash people to keep producing? :) Funnily enough, USSR loved all sort of propaganda of the worker of the month, stachanovists and all that jazz :) Yet it didn't work. Maybe the real better education would be to teach people to enjoy peaceful idleness and live with less?
Ultimately people don't need that much to live. Once you remove consumerist desire to keep up with the jones, the only motivation is to get roof, food and some supplies to have fun with. Currently passing this threshold requires quite a bit of effort. Then there's relatively little extra effort to get somewhat nicer toys. Yes, some people will work extra hard and make €€€€, but vast majority of people ain't workaholics. If that base threshold was removed with UBI, then it'd be a massively different effort to get somewhat nicer toys. This would change the equation a lot. I've a feeling the jones might be in trouble then.
Hopefully before I die I can witness a strong implementation of UBI. It would directly reflect in culture in terms of music and the arts. Little funding for the arts currently combined with massive rent nearly everywhere leaves little room for cultural phenomenon that was possible in places like the lower east side bowery for example. Or arts funding in the USSR and other soviet bloc countries.
Time is more valuable than anything else.