No, it's needed because forcing people to perform increasingly pointless tasks for wealthier humans in order to be granted the right to live is obscene.
Unemployment is _good_. Being poor is bad. They are only correlated because we decided that made sense in the past. It doesn't any more.
That said, it seems too much to say "Unemployment is good." It's hard to disentangle the effects of poverty versus unemployment, but there are pretty strong hints that having a (good) job is good for health--prolonged unemployment from solidly middle class jobs leads to depression, and people die at higher rates after retiring.
People need a purpose and outlet for their creativity, and a sense of order and direction for their lives: sitting at home all day playing video games would be disastrous, and encouraging automation (which a basic income will do) will make it even harder to get entry level positions. We've got to enable some kind of meaningful labor (market-compensated or not) that people still can engage in after the basic income is implemented.
>We've got to enable some kind of meaningful labor (market-compensated or not) that people still can engage in after the basic income is implemented.
Are there no charities, no community organizations, no sports teams? Why trade the forced labor of market compensation for forced labor of government compensation?
Meaningful labor already exists outside of market compensation. Anything the government would implement would just be beaurocracy soaking up funds that should be going towards the basic income.
I don't think anyone is proposing that we outlaw work, so I fail to see the point of your final sentence. Meaningful labor will never go away as long as people are free to choose what they want to do. Personally I just don't think it makes sense as a society to continue expecting everyone to work to survive. We don't need everyone to work all of the time. What if everyone worked 6 months out of the year? We'd all be fine, and likely much, much happier.
I also think it's unlikely that people would spend all of their time playing video games. Sure, in today's overworked society all anyone wants to do when they get a free moment is zone out. But if people weren't so overworked, they'd likely seek out meaningful things of their own free will. No need for us to worry about them, humans have a natural inclination to seek interesting stimulation. Many people will get stuck on boring things, but many people will choose to get more out of life and as someone who would be in the latter category I want to live in a society where that is possible.
there're two distinct senses for the word "work" that're pertinent. let's call it toil when we're given work to do, and play when we find our own work to do. in my experience, i see we're conditioned from childhood to think that toil is the normal way in which we're to make ourselves useful, or rather that it's the normal way in which we're made useful. we're also conditioned to think that play is kids stuff, that it isn't serious. so play becomes stunted, not maturing past kids stuff, and toil becomes serious and responsible, when actually it's infantile.
so, you get laid off and find yourself, first of all under stress because your financial situation is uncertain, but secondly wasting away as a person and frittering you newly abundant free time playing video games. i don't think that points to your deep need to toil, to be given work to do. it's evidence of a poorly developed ability to play, that is to find work to put yourself to.
as for me, i've had a few stints of unemployment and it's improved everything in my life, except my bank account. and when i got work again, everything became worse, again, except my bank account. now, like i said, this is just my own experience, but though i hear often enough that people have a real need to toil, i've never seen it in my actual experience. on the other hand i can see a real human need to play, which most people are deprived of. and, of course, a need for money, which is the only tangible thing people get from their toil.
I find it difficult to understand exactly what type of a social contract you are suggesting as 'making sense'.
You seem to be suggesting that people shouldn't have to be 'forced' to be employed (i.e. trade their personal skills for $$) but instead should receive an income from the government for simply existing. They could then do whatever they wanted in their free time.
This clearly doesn't work for everyone unless you are working under the assumption that the 'government' can just print money and everything will just work out.
So you seem to be suggesting that there should be two groups of people. Those who simply live on income given to them no strings attached by the government and another group of people who are doing something bad by being employed and are forced to give up some of their income/wealth to the government to be given to the group of people who opt out of that system.
This seems to be what you are advocating but I must be missing something.
BTW, I'm actually interested in a basic income mechanism as a more efficient way of delivering a social safety net to those who need some assistance but in my mind that presupposes that only a fraction of the people need assistance. I can't see how that works if the basic income is an attempt to provide a minimal viable income for everyone!
Basic income only works if everyone receives it. If it's like welfare and you lose it if you're employed, then no one works. If it's truly universal basic income, it actually encourages work because any additional income increases your standard of living.
I think the confusion comes from the use of the term 'basic income'. There is a difference between income assistance that is given to everyone in order to simplify the delivery of government benefits (generally to avoid having to have complicated needs/eligibility requirements and the associated enforcement mechanisms) and and a guaranteed income that is not just assistance but in fact a sufficient amount to live on.
I think the difficulty in evaluating a basic income mechanism is in understanding how such a program would work with different amounts of basic income, $200/month, $500/month, $1000/month? Is it per person? per household? extra amounts per child? Is it adjusted geographically? Depending on how you answer those questions you get different incentives and different costs for the program.
While I don't have good answers to many of those questions I don't think a basic income program can work if it is construed as a way to enable anyone to simply quit their job, pursue their artistic or intellectual pursuits, and have 'the government' (i.e. other people) pay for that privilege. That type of an existence, while desirable, is not a 'right' to be supported by forcibly taking assets away from other people (taxing/redistribution of wealth).
> forcibly taking assets away from other people (taxing/redistribution of wealth).
Taxation is not "taking assets away". Everyone that lives and works in a Western country today is able to because of successive generations who have built this society. If you have a computer job today, it's thanks to the people who developed the first computers years ago. Who went to universities other people built, travelled on infrastructure the government built, and so on.
You know what a country without taxes looks like? The 3rd world. Dirt roads, no power or water, no police or emergency services. That's what life without taxes is. And no the private sector doesn't pick up the slack - they buy big trucks, haul away resources and live in a separate country, where nice things are paid for by the government through taxes.
The question shouldn't be "what's fair?". But "what sort of society do we want?".
If paying hipsters to do nothing but sip coffee all day builds a better society (who knows, maybe those bored hipsters will do something creative like start an app or something), we should be all for it. I'd rather sip coffee in Paris while paying 75% tax than live in Somalia paying no taxes.
Taxing is certainly about forcibly taking assets. That is a descriptive statement, not an judgmental statement. The details though are important, from who, for what, and how much?
I don't understand why you think that utilizing the wealth/knowledge/resources generated/developed by previous generations is something specific to 'Western' countries. You don't say so explicitly but you seem to be suggesting that those assets should be controlled by and available for distribution via the "government". You don't say why that should be true, but it implies to me an argument against private property rights since you are assuming all those assets are under the control (or should be under control) of "the government" I don't see any attempt to explain how or why the government should gain that control other than some handwaving about 'what do we want?' and some ever harder to understand handwaving about 'what is fair?' being an inappropriate question.
I'm not sure why you concluded that I was advocating for no taxes. But I will certainly advocate against taking my money and giving it to hipsters to do nothing but sip coffee because that is what 'society wants'.
Let's say my basic income is $1000. All my expenses are paid every month, and I have $100 disposable income. I can work 10 hours at $10/hour, and all of a sudden my total income goes up 10%, my disposable income goes up 100%. Work 40 hours my income goes up 40%, and disposable income goes up 400%. And so on.
Not to mention, it'll encourage going to school or starting a business as basic needs can be met in the event of failure.
The point at which earning extra money no longer brings utility/happiness is well beyond the income of most poor people...
What would they work at? Just because we can all find jobs for ourselves, it doesn't mean that everyone in the world will be the same. Incentivizing someone to do something that is impossible is cruel.
That statement is always made in comparison to traditional unemployment or welfare services, which give you fewer benefits once you start making more money.
Versus existing programs that are poorly structured (some existing programs are poorly structured, some aren't), an unconditional program would remove some disincentives to work where increased work income leads to cuts in benefits and a net lower standard of living.
(Of course fixing poorly structure programs is going to be easier than implementing a basic income)
That's a valid point. My previous comment wasn't considering that BI would replace the current means-tested welfare programs, mostly because I do not believe that a BI would actually lead to elimination of the other programs. There will still be people who waste their BI for a variety of reasons, and I don't think society will be fine with them living destitute with no additional safety net.
"There will still be people who waste their BI for a variety of reasons, and I don't think society will be fine with them living destitute with no additional safety net."
I am not "fine with them living destitute", but if a person cannot get by with a reasonable income provided then clearly they need some sort of help beyond the financial. "Means tested free stuff" doesn't seem a very good fit.
> then clearly they need some sort of help beyond the financial
I'm not sure what you mean by that. They need help, and that help will almost certainly cost money, regardless of whether you're giving them money, products, services, etc. Because the help will cost money, there will almost certainly need to be means testing.
"My previous comment wasn't considering that BI would replace the current means-tested welfare programs"
That's exactly what it would do.
If, as in your hypothetical situation, someone spends their basic income too fast, they'll just have to wait until the next week/next month to get their next installment. If they can't manage that, then there are likely to be other contributing factors, such as drug addiction or mental illness, in which case you can offer alternative forms of support.
I think the point being missed here is that those with high incomes or wealth essentially have their lifestyles subsidised by those who are forced to take the basic jobs in order to live. Their labour is cheaper than it would be if they were truly free. Essentially, they have little negotiating power.
I'm advocating for flipping that position and seeing where it leads us.
I don't think that people would suddenly stop working entirely. I think there would be a redistribution from rich to poor. I think that's reasonable.
If you feel that the world would fall apart and people would stop doing anything useful if they weren't coerced, then I would ask the question - why do the wealthy work? They already have a basic income. What proportion of people who could retire permanently at say, age 40, actually do? I think the picture being painted of a bunch of feckless, consuming meatballs, is wildly off base.
I'm having a hard time understanding why you describe working for a living as being coerced. The resources required to continue living (food, shelter, etc) don't magically appear. So if you aren't making an effort in some way to get them (barter, labor, personal relationships) then you are just living the life of a dependent, something that we usual reserve for children and the infirm.
There is also a huge difference between providing assistance to ease the efforts required and simply removing the need for effort entirely by providing 100% assistance (i.e. dependency).
Taking a 'basic job' in order to live seems like a reasonable trade-off and a starting point for something better. To assume that people should be able 'to live' in the absence of a basic job (i.e. to live as a dependent) just because they don't want to work is problematic.
For the purposes of this discussion, I'm assuming that 'basic job' is not something inherently hazardous, although I also think that individuals should have the freedom to make an informed decision about taking on personal risks. So even hazardous jobs should be available as long as the hazards are disclosed.
The reason I call it coercion is that the resources individuals require to make a life for themselves are held by others.
If I own 1000 acres of land and you own zero, I can coerce you into working for me. If I own 1000 and you own 10, we'll negotiate. Does that make sense?
It's not really about providing people amazing lives - it's more that free trade doesn't really work properly when one party is playing a completely different game.
Example - as a software developer I could choose a 30k PA job or a 90k PA job. I feel a pressure to take the latter, but it doesn't feel like coercion, I can actually make the choice.
If you're unskilled - and bear in mind that unskilled is a moving target which essentially means 'not required by society at the present time' - then it doesn't work that way. You take whatever you can get.
That's the problem with inequality. It's not about toys, size of house. it's about the extreme outcomes - the bottom level becoming interchangeable cogs and no longer human beings with free will.
It is difficult to have a discussion without agreement on terms. "Coercion" means forcing someone to do something via threats or actual force. It doesn't mean "not giving me what I want (or need)". Perhaps you should be given what you need, but failing to do that isn't coercive.
There is an unsettling attitude on HN that there is something inherently wrong with unskilled labor or more generally work that doesn't require some sort of advanced study. Perhaps there is a future world where everyone is engaged in highly skilled labor that satisfies their every desire but until that time there are going to be many people who will be occupied in other types of work and there is nothing inherently wrong with that. Honest work of any kind that enables someone to be self-sufficient should be applauded, not disdained.
What is wrong with an unskilled worker taking the best available job and building from there? Isn't that generally how people acquire skills? If the argument is that a person can't sustain themselves that way, then I would suggest that developing programs to assist people who are already working is much easier than developing programs to assist people who aren't working at all.
Regarding 'inequality', I just don't find that very compelling mainly because the discussion seems to be all about how to take things away from rich people in order to give it to poor people, that is, redistribution schemes based on the mistaken notion that this is a zero-sum game. In many cases, the wealth is acquired by distortions in the market created by government intervention. Eliminating the market distortions would be a good first step towards a more vibrant economy that would benefit every one.
Isn't that a bit like saying that professional athletes or entertainers have their lifestyles subsidized by those who are forced to take basic jobs because they lack the athleticism or artistic skill of the professionals? Or would you say that athletes and entertainers are okay because their success is based more on their own merit?
Athletes and entertainers are mostly struggling people. There's tons of talented people who don't get rich at all. The smaller number who get rich are winners in a largely winner-take-all media system controlled by big corporations.
Even most NFL players aren't rich, only the stars, the others just make a decent living but then have to quit at a young age and live with concussions. The best collegiate wrestlers are athletes of the highest order and have no living from it. And so on and so on.
Regardless, these spectacles are barely productive or valuable really. They are mostly escapist distractions. The circus part of "bread and circuses". The idea that you can look at this completely unjust system and say "oh, the Gladiators deserve their fortunes though" is absurdly out of touch.
> because they lack the athleticism or artistic skill of the professionals
Your comment implies that we could have a functioning society if everyone were rock stars and athletes. That's absurd. The role of rock-star and athlete is a zero-sum game. We don't need a billion rock stars. If everyone were virtuoso musicians, then a few of them would still win the lottery as being the ones that make it over others, and nothing would be that different. We'd still be having the same discussions about economics etc.
I said "professional" athletes and entertainers. I'm not just talking about the ultra wealthy stars. I just mean people who make a living doing that full time.
> Your comment implies that we could have a functioning society if everyone were rock stars and athletes. That's absurd
I'm arguing the opposite, by highlighting this absurdity.
Sorry if I misread your comment. You seemed to be implying that people who make a living as artists and athletes "deserve" their living and that other people are not-so-talented. Maybe you were playing the character of someone with that sort of dumb bias.
I think you're attributing some sort of negative towards the wealthy that I don't hold.
I have no issue with the rich.
I have a problem with the lack of negotiating power that the poor have.
The subsidy comment is intended to illustrate that it's not as simple as 'take money from the rich and give to the poor'. At the moment we have the reverse - the rich are able to give less because the market is not free - the poor are coerced into providing their services for a lower amount because they own nothing.
"I have no issue with the rich.
I have a problem with the lack of negotiating power that the poor have."
This! It's not about jealousy but augmenting the winner take all dynamics of uncontrolled economic system into something that feels humanely more fair without disincentivizing or creating pathological scenarios.
I absolutely agree that the distribution of wealth from poor to rich is both real and crappy. And it's not just the "coercion" of having to trade labor for basic needs. The government (often at the behest of the very wealthy) has blatant poorer-to-richer income distribution policies. Virtually all subsidies of special interests are examples of this. Tariffs and other trade restrictions are examples of this. Social Security is an example of this (perhaps not by design). Inflation can be an example of this.
I'm having a hard time understanding the notion that some forms of effort ('labor') to sustain yourself are bad but other forms of effort (something other than labor) are good but apparently are insufficient for survival and that there is some obligation for the government (i.e. other people) to make up the difference.
If you don't want to exchange your skills (physical or mental) for money, then you probably need to find a benefactor of some kind to sustain you and I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing if it is a mutually consenting relationship.
Note, there is a difference between not wanting to sustain yourself through your own effort and being incapable of doing so. There is plenty of room to talk about government assistance in latter case, not so much in the former case.
Did you not look at the comic in the post you're replying to? The broader argument is that the topic at hand is not actually about labor to sustain yourself. It's about a system designed to actually deprive you of access to naturally-existing wealth and resources so that you are then forced to labor for someone else in order to gain sustenance.
In other words, there was at one point fresh water and land and berries and such just available in the world. People had to labor to get them, but they were there. We've made far more value for society overall such that we have resources to support far more people, and it's mostly from a long evolution of technology and science.
There's tons of productive things to do to keep things going. But since we have an attitude of "you deserve your share of resources only if you labor" we have a ton of make-work bullshit that people do that can even be counter-productive. We're not all working on things that actually add value to society. People who skim off the system such as high-speed traders get a huge share of the resources while laboring in ways that create no value whatsoever.
So, we need to get rid of the "work to eat" idea because it leads people to do whatever to eat when they are desperate. We'd do better if we focus on promoting things that provide the most value, and we get that better if we provide other motivations than "do whatever it takes not to starve".
"and another group of people who are doing something bad by being employed"
Did you overlook the group of people that has huge capital resources from accruing it from generation to generation and can simply sit on this wealth as the robots it purchases bring in even more wealth? Or do you consider that "being employed"?
And do you think that if someone cannot find employment because there are not enough jobs in the world that they should therefore have a shitty life in their one and only finite existence?
> And do you think that if someone cannot find employment because there are not enough jobs in the world that they should therefore have a shitty life in their one and only finite existence?
I think it is pretty clear from what I wrote: "delivering a social safety net to those who need some assistance" that I don't think that.
Why do you think that people's jobs are increasingly pointless? It seems to me that the opposite is true, since types of jobs disappear when they become much more efficiently performed by machines. To me, having someone plow a field by hand or operate a telephone switchboard is very pointless.
The jobs which actually need to be done in order for us to feed and clothes ourselves are increasingly done by machines. In some cases overseas labour is cheaper than automation, but we're still progressing there.
As a result, because we're clinging to the idea that a person shouldn't eat unless they perform labour, we have to invent more and more categories of employment which become less and less essential - basically, people work in luxury sectors.
I don't think we've quite reached the point at which the world can spin without unskilled labour, but I do think we can now afford to compensate it appropriately, and I think that giving the lower classes negotiation power via the basic income is the best way to achieve that.
> because we're clinging to the idea that a person shouldn't eat unless they perform labour
I don't understand this way of phrasing the argument. Do people really "cling" to this idea? It sounds equivalent to saying "we're still clinging to the idea that a person shouldn't be in good physical shape unless they exercise and eat well." I don't think many people cling to these ideas in an ethical sense, as if it would be immoral to be healthy without exercising or wealthy without working [0]. The ideas are just reflections of the actual state of the world, even though it might suck. I'd certainly rather be healthy without exercising and wealthy without working, but I don't expect or demand a forceful restructuring of society to satisfy my wishes.
[0] Actually, now that I think of it, many people even in this thread do condemn people who become wealthy without working. It's perhaps somewhat ironic.
The distinction is that trading labour for money/capital is a creation of society. It's not a natural rule. There are gatekeepers. I can't simply decide to go out and kill some wild animals or whatever and eat, and I can't decide to chop trees down and build a house. Getting a job is not a simple matter of just deciding to do it.
By contrast, eating well is, aside from in cases of poverty, completely a matter of free choice.
I don't see that contrast at all. You just said you can't decide to go out and kill wild animals to eat, then followed up by saying that what you eat is completely a matter of free choice.
I'm going to leave this now as I suspect we're not likely to make further progress.
Working a job for an employer in order to live is not immutable, people do cling to it - if you think we can't change that, we have nothing further to discuss.
Unemployment isn't good. I get your point, and agree. But basic income is not about unemployment = good but more about giving you the time to transform to do what you really want to do in life.
Doing nothing in your life sucks hard. Everyone gets depressed and suicidal in the long term.
Interesting that you automatically equate "unemployment" with "doing nothing in your life." It is possible for people to find meaning outside of labor.
I think we are playing with words here. I read your other comment about sports team, charity etc. Of course that is "doing something". And one could argue that _working_ for the Red Cross is some sort of labor?
The discussion, so far as I can tell, has rested on the notion that people "need something to do" and that -- I guess? -- the government should be responsible for making sure that Basic Income money isn't going to "waste" on people who are just "unemployed." I'm arguing that no such discussion is necessary. People are perfectly able to entertain themselves, work or no, and find meaning in their lives. Those that aren't won't be helped by the government, that bluntest of tools used for the most delicate of incisions.
My point is: Basic Income should be free from stipulation. Play video games, care for a sick mother in law, grow plants on your balcony and sing to them in Hindi -- none of the government's concern. While we're at it, eliminate the minimum wage and let the small businesses hire workers at whatever they can afford to pay. Let someone work at the local bakery if that makes them happy. Let's see what the people come up with when they don't have to worry about how they're going to eat.
Yes, the problem is that without basic income you have to work to earn your right to live but to do volunteer work which may be much more meaningful to you than your day job.
> equate "unemployment" with "doing nothing in your life."
These can be seen as synonymous for certain definitions of "unemployed". You are not "employed", unused, not applying yourself to anything. In that definition, if you are able to provide for yourself and have found meaning in allocating yout time, that is a form of employment -- even if it's not a job.
That said, my preferred definition of unemployment is "without job, seeking job". Likely, basic income would reduce the statistic by that definition.
>These can be seen as synonymous for certain definitions of "unemployed"
Semantic discussions are interesting among us mere mortals, but if you're proposing that the government start making judgements about who is "employed" in the abstract sense or merely "doing nothing with their life," especially when it comes to allowing or disallowing that person to receive the Basic Income, I'll leave my BI check uncashed. BI should be a way to increase liberty, not create a way for the government to tell people how to live their lives.
Semantic discussions are interesting among us mere mortals, but if you're proposing that the government start making judgements about who is "employed" in the abstract sense or merely "doing nothing with their life,"
As far as semantic discussions go, US government unemployment statistics make a distinction between people who are not working and who are looking for work vs those who are not working and not looking for work. The later are not "unemployed" for the purposes of unemployment statistics.
I agree that the goal should be provide a meaningful safety net while increasing (or maintaining liberty), and thus it should be Universal Basic Income: all citizens get it unconditionally.
There are lots of things you could do that aren't menial jobs. Arts, crafts, travel...heck, fishing or bowling -- the list of things that are more rewarding than flipping burgers could go on for quite a long time.
Unemployment is neither bad nor good. What's bad is forced employment. Work can be a source of satisfaction and social cohesion, I don't see the benefit in getting rid of it completely, but the important difference is that work shouldn't determine your ability to survive. We are capable of letting everyone have a decent quality of life without being a wage slave (and without destroying the planet), any work beyond that should be based on what we're interested in doing.
What to do with alcoholics and drug addicts that need jobs to avoid addictions? What to do with people that some sort of purpose in life? Wouldn't negative tax be better?
>Unemployment is _good_. Being poor is bad. They are only correlated because we decided that made sense in the past. It doesn't any more.
The way I see it, the idea behind basic income in a largely capitalist society would be to make being poor a lot less bad. It'd still be bad, probably, as a lot of us like having nice stuff; we like living in desirable areas, and those things won't be available to people on basic income, assuming we continue to use markets to distribute those scarce goods.
Those of us who come from middle class families who maintain good family relationships often have a similar option; crashing with mom and dad for a while. It's not really something you want to do for any length of time, but it's nice to know that if things really go south, you aren't homeless, and you don't have to do anything truly repugnant.
But just like crashing with mom and dad, it's not really a desirable long-term option for most of us. Sure, sure, it's going to be better than the jobs that are the worst on the unpleasantness/compensation scale, and I predict would dramatically drive up wages in the least pleasant fields, (and I predict would lower the rates of the less remunerative forms of crime for money) but if you are a software developer or something, especially if you come from a middle-class family that you maintain ties to, a realistically-sized basic income isn't really going to change your motivation.
Point being, unemployment (as usually defined in statistics, meaning people who want work but can't get it) will remain a bad thing, and assuming a realistically sized basic income, most people who currently work are going to want to continue working.
And... this is important. We need people to continue working. The basic income choice is really, "do we want people to do really unpleasant jobs for not very much money?" and then "are we all willing to pay rather a lot to make it so that people don't have to do really unpleasant jobs for not very much money?"
The argument in favor is the idea that if a job really is that unpleasant, it ought to be compensated for that unpleasantness, and effort ought to be put into automating that job away. Making workers less desperate would make those things happen. Making workers less desperate would also decrease the workforce participation rate. More people wouldn't work, and more people would work part time.
The argument against is that this is going to be pretty expensive, both in terms of what we have to pay to get the difficult-to-automate unpleasant jobs done, and in terms of just the taxes that would be required to fund the scheme.
I am genuinely concerned for the millions of Americans who drive for a living. Autonomous vehicle technology is a clear and present risk to that class of work. Like the rust belt of the 80s and 90s as manufacturing moved out of the US, there will be a major shift in where people work and what kind of work they do. Many, if not most, of those affected will go through hell getting their lives sorted out again.
There are other affects of autonomous vehicles to consider. Labor is a major cost of shipping or taxiing. Accidents and the resulting repair, liability and insurance costs are expected to come down with autonomous vehicles. So the cost of just about everything we buy will come down, and we'll spend that difference elsewhere. Those 'elsewheres' will then see more employment.
What we can expect, at a macroeconomic level, is not massive national unemployment, but a transition period as the work opportunities change.
At a micro economic level, it will be very painful for millions as they go through the transition. I don't know if a basic income can make this transition smoother for the country, but it is worth studying.
There are a lot of jobs that humans can inherently perform better than robots for the next few decades at least: taking care of the elderly, hospice care, community development, physical therapy, etc. Humans are wired to trust and engage with our own species over any machines that could be developed any time soon.
Populations in most countries likely to own robotic technology are aging fast and there will be even more demand for such jobs. In fact, a lot of demand already exists, only that the costs are too high for middle-class elders or patients to afford the services regularly. (See: expansion of nursing care in lower-cost countries like Thailand, but most people would prefer to stay in their own country if they have the choice.)
Moreover, aptitudes the tasks required often match with those present in lower-wage workers in the service sectors. We need to retrain them for these higher-valued jobs. As a big plus, the jobs above often feel more meaningful than scanning items at cashier, delivering packages, or waiting table.
There is evidence that being unemployed is not good for people's psyche and well-being in the long run. Demand for meaningful, high-valued services still exists and we ought to retrain workers for these jobs instead. Pay for these jobs should be higher and hours reasonable--more redistribution could be utilized to accomplish these.
I believe earning one's living through work leads to a more meaningful existence. Demand for human work still exists for several decades to come. We need better social infrastructure to retrain workers at risk from technological unemployment and fully support them (including with good pay) during retraining.
Technology has the potential to let us be human, free us from menial jobs, and focus on what we do best--if we develop the socioeconomic system to complement it and help with the transition.
>There are a lot of jobs that humans can inherently perform better than robots for the next few decades at least: taking care of the elderly, hospice care, community development, physical therapy, etc. Humans are wired to trust and engage with our own species over any machines that could be developed any time soon.
While this is true and one of the unintended consequences of guaranteed minimum income would be even harder to obtain elderly care, not everyone is suited for this kind of work - and if you think a large % of people who spent the last 20 years driving cabs and trucks can now go on to be a nurse or some such I don't think it's very realistic.
IMO there will soon be a new class of unemployable people - with low social skills and low enough IQ to not be trainable fast enough (one thing that is a requirement in modern economy is fast training and adaptation - no more learn one job and do that for the next 30 years - you stick around for one job for a couple of years and then your position gets automated, the company reduces capacity, relocates operation, shifts focus, etc. etc.)
So on one hand there will be vacancies for many jobs (like competent programmers right now) but on the other hand people available will not be able to enter those markets in any reasonable amount of time.
I can tell you myself - years of working on a computer over 8 hours a day have left my motor system very very underdeveloped and I have a hard time focusing on menial things, my first job was physical labor after highschool - I took months to get to the point where I could be useful and I was a work hazard during my training - the only reason I got a job there was because the manager knew me from school "internship" and he knew I could code/was a fast learner - he gave me a job before he could get an opening to move me to production planning/management. I needed the money because I was poor. But there was 0 point in hiring a person like me for that kind of work - if I was hired for that job I would be fired way before I got good enough at it to not be a hazard. On the other hand I've seen new people come on out of school that learned much faster and were just better at it. Just like there would be 0 point in hiring anyone that was good at that job to be a programmer.
For those with lower social skills, there are plumbing, home improvement (hard/risky for elderly or the ill), security guards, public infrastructure development (welding, checking for leaks), household/public gardening, etc. There are a lot of needs which humans will be more cost-effective than advanced robots in the foreseeable future.
If everything is perfect in a country, they can send aid to a foreign land for compassion, goodwill, and diplomatic relations. Always more work is available to do until..
When the whole world becomes like heaven and nowhere is left to improve, which is a long time to come, money would be far less important than it is now.
My point is not everyone can be a plumber - at least not a competent one. If you're going to do it professionally, especially as we get more advanced we expect higher standards, markets get more competitive and middle man services like uber are going to become a norm in contracting - IMO - making it easier to filter out the bad contractors after a few botched jobs. And in most areas even if the job doesn't become fully automated it will get better tools that will either be trivial enough to use on your own or require skill to operate, or allow a smaller number of people to do the same job efficiently. Basically optimization.
Automation will probably outpace demand growth especially considering the effect it will have on demand :
a) it makes skilled workers much more productive and as we know in SW dev they don't scale by add more workers -> linearly increase output - a skilled worker working longer > two workers for the same job, so market get more competitive and value longer work hours = less time for consumption
b) short term unemployment from automation = lower demand on low end
And then you have a deflationary spiral basically. I don't see this "getting better on it's own" and despite all the cons I still think something like guaranteed income would create a floor + boost demand more efficiently than the current pump money into financials with negative interest rates
300 years ago, humans couldn't even imagine the way the planet (economy, rules etc) would work in 2015. It's natural, that this cycle will repeat itself again and again. Do not worry about drivers, there was a lot of jobs that were eliminated by time/technology and humans survived. Maybe in 2100 people will not need to work at all. This revolution is coming, it's part of evolution, stop fighting it, embrace it and learn how to live in new reality, because you can't stop it.
300 years ago, humans couldn't even imagine the way the planet (economy, rules etc) would work in 2015.
Except the (potentially) sweeping changes due to automation & other technologies aren't expected to happen in 300 years -- more like 5-20 years. Do you see a difference here?
This revolution is coming, it's part of evolution, stop fighting it, embrace it and learn how to live in new reality,
Do you really think your own livelihood -- and that of people close to you -- is that immune from the potential negative consequences of the "revolution"?
because you can't stop it.
Not entirely. But we can moderate and regulate it if we wish (and we pay close attention). That's the key issue, here -- not simply "either fight it or embrace it."
No, it wont be 5-20 years. What i am talking about can't be achieved in 20 years, what you will achieve is part of evolution, not revolution.
Do you really think your own livelihood -- and that of people close to you -- is that immune from the potential negative consequences of the "revolution"?
Don't worry about me, i will survive natural selection.
Not entirely. But we can moderate and regulate it if we wish (and we pay close attention). That's the key issue, here -- not simply "either fight it or embrace it."
Good luck with that, seriously, you will regulate it for sure as hundreds of other things that needed to be regulated in USA and didn't because of lobbying. How do you want to regulate it ? Did you regulate wall street? How about punishing anyone after 2008? How about HFT? Did you prevented deregulation that caused world crisis? No, you didn't and you know why. What about gun control? how about hundreds others, where big players are involved? So did you do all those things that felt even more right to do than what we are talking about ? No, so please wake up and stop pretending you have any choice.
USA know that technology is the core future of economy, no one will stop it, you know why? Because USA is not the only player in the world, and if USA still want to be in top, it just can't be stopped, because others won't. It's just couple examples from thousand why you can't do anything about what's coming. Big corporations will just benefit too much from it and you will see this argument "we need AI/robots, costs are too high, or we can't compete with the rest of the world". Sorry, but you already lost this war, you just don't know it yet...
Why do you view 'working' as having asymmetric value?
If I'm a plumber working for myself and I fix pipes all day so that I can put food on the table and a roof over my head, am I not working for my own survival?
If I'm a plumber working for a plumbing company has something changed about the value proposition?
If I'm a plumber who quits the plumbing company to work for myself am I working for my own survival?
If I'm a plumber working for myself who decides I don't want to deal with marketing, accounting, risk management, and so on and so I start working for a plumbing company, am I working for my own survival?
So what? You can purchase carrots with the money you made fixing pipes. Suddenly that isn't about your own survival but is about someone else survival?
Even if you don't want to bring 'money' into the conversation and shift to an entirely barter based mechanism you are still going to take the fruits of your labor and convert them into the fruits of someone else's labor via trade.
In the absence of coercion both parties benefit from the trade.
Coercion is most effective when it goes unnoticed.
Why does the plumber need to purchase carrots? Why can't this individual avail themselves of existing carrots of their own will?
Ah, because someone decided there is this thing called "property rights", which are violently protected. The person growing the carrots purchased a piece of paper that says they "own" the land, and the legal system supports the notion that they also own the carrots they grow on the land. Never mind where the land originally came from.
I wonder, is the enforcement of this artificial notion of property rights a form of coercion? If it didn't exist, would the plumber still choose to fix pipes all day?
> I wonder, is the enforcement of this artificial notion of property rights a form of coercion? If it didn't exist, would the plumber still choose to fix pipes all day?
It is going to be hard to have a reasonable conversation if you want to invert the meaning of words. In your hypothetical world if you attempt to take my property I'm the one being coercive if I attempt to stop you?
There is an enormous body of knowledge regarding the value of property rights and the connection to economic prosperity. You seem to be rejecting that body of knowledge and advocating for a Hobbsian 'state of nature'.
You're making an assumption that doesn't follow from my comment.
Did I suggest we abolish property rights? I merely asked a question about how property rights relate to coercion. The solution may be to keep property rights, but to understand their place in society. I just want to stimulate that conversation.
We act as if property rights are absolute, but perhaps they should not be used to keep a hungry person from food, or a homeless person from shelter? Perhaps intellectual property rights shouldn't be used to keep a person from repairing their tractor? We're already having a discussion in the US about whether or not people should be able to access health care without exchanging their property to get it. Is it so radical to ask the question about food, shelter, and (inherently not scarce) digital goods?
> You're making an assumption that doesn't follow from my comment.
Usually when someone makes a comparison to coercion, I assume they're against it.
That seems like a fairer reading than, say, taking a pronoun someone used, changing its meaning, then using scare quotes to signify you know you're misrepresenting their point to dodge their argument.
But let's set aside the mechanics of the discussion.
We've moved the goal posts to: "Sometimes property rights are bad in extreme cases. They're really useful in other cases. The defense of necessity, which allows the use of property to provide shelter or food to people who need it, was a grand idea."
> "Those 'elsewheres' will then see more employment."
Not necessarily. If a company can capitalise on those new opportunities without employing the levels of workers that are made redundant by the shift in the market, then this mechanism you're describing will not work.
A classic example is Walmart vs Amazon. Putting aside their side businesses, their core business is broadly the same. In the US, Walmart employs approximately 1.4 million people. Amazon.com employs approximately 230,800 people. Walmart is still larger than Amazon in terms of sales, but consider this...
"Today, Walmart’s revenue is still much larger–although only 5 times larger now–and Amazon’s revenue per employee ($623,000) is nearly three times that of Walmart."
Why would Amazon seek to employ Walmart-levels of people when their business model allows each employee to earn 3x greater revenue (on average)?
Maybe I'm missing something, but it sounds like Walmart has 5x as much revenue as Amazon with 6x as many employees. Then you say that Amazon has 3x the revenue per employee as Walmart. Shouldn't that be 1.2x the revenue per employee?
You're both partially right, the numbers from the Time article appear to be off, but other sources still indicate that the difference in revenue per employee is greater than x1.2.
Here's a simple but imperfect comparison, let's look at Amazon 2014 vs Walmart 2015 (I'm using those years because they were the easiest stats to find, if you can source similar stats for Amazon 2015 or Walmart 2014 feel free to link to them)...
Revenue: $482.2 billion (not clear if just in US or globally).
Number of employees: 1.4 million US (2.2 million globally).
Revenue per employee: $344,428 if revenue is US only, $219,182 if revenue is worldwide.
Difference in revenue per employee:
X1.68 (if Walmart revenue is US only), or x2.68 (if Walmart revenue is worldwide).
> I am genuinely concerned for the millions of Americans who drive for a living.
You'd better be concerned about thousands of people they kill every year. It's far more important that an income of a bunch of lorry drivers. Even if some of them die as a result of losing their jobs (and it's quite an unlikely scenario), thousands of the lives spared would offset this by a huge margin.
I don't follow. I agree 100% that lives outweigh jobs and am 100% for self driving vehicles. But you can have concern for the unemployed drivers without thinking that we need to put them back on the roads killing people. That concern could manifest itself in the desire to see public training programs for out of work drivers so they can find new jobs, or all manner of things that don't conflict with a desire to see fewer people killed by trucks. I know I'm certainly concerned about how these unemployed people will survive, despite also wanting self-driving vehicles to get to market quickly to reduce fatalities.
Oh, sorry, I misinterpreted your concerns as a suggestion to slow down the self-driving adoption and make sure all such training programmes and relocation efforts are comprehensive enough.
Hah, that's quite an assumption! I'd never suggest slowing the advancement of technology to alleviate social issues. I wasn't making any suggestion, but if I was it would be to accelerate the social change not slow down the advancement of technology.
Won't we still need drivers in case the autonomous technology fails? We still have airline pilots... The drivers will need to do less actual driving, but I guess will still be needed.
Google tried that. It doesn't work. Driver's don't pay enough attention to be able to resume control in the event of a problem, so the decision was that cars need to be fully autonomous. I believe Astro Teller mentioned this in his youtube talk about moonshots, if you're curious for the source.
As for airplanes - there's a lot more time to deal with issues than there is in a car.
No one would waste a cent on developing autonomous driving technology if that were the case. They're not doing it because it's exciting, they're doing it because it'll be cheaper in the long run.
If something goes wrong in a plane you need to land it, which is a pretty delicate operation. If something goes wrong in a car, all you have to do is get off the roadway and stop.
A basic income tied to GDP per capita would be interesting. If automation begins pervading every industry, the inherent improvement processes involved would lead to maximally efficient production. A basic income should be tied to the productive power of these systems, as leaving the BI pegged at a certain point could make income inequality much worse than it is now. Capital-holders would begin benefitting tremendously from automation as it improves.
Another thing to ponder is, if certain technological innovations come to pass (ie, an affordable personal-AI system), should the government consider providing those technologies to all of its citizens? The disparity between someone with a personal-AI and someone without would increase exponentially, very quickly. This is simply considering the economic value an AI could provide, in terms of helping with business ideas, self-improvement, secreterial work, etc.
Anyways, massive unemployment is going to occur soon. If governments can't come to terms with providing a universal basic income, I would suggest they begin planning emergency food supply distribution systems immediately. The first thing that people will begin missing is food, and if a government can provide sustenance to needy populations, it would buy itself some time before civil unrest spread throughout the country. http://livescience.com/52724-can-strategic-games-prevent-foo...
The idea of basic income is popular on this site and has many ardent supporters here. Whichever side of the debate you're on, please bear in mind this topic needs an extra effort of patience and civility to have a productive conversation. Politicized topics like this break down into angry confrontations very easily.
Yes, but if you look over the comments, you'll see that the critics of BI are all either confused, ignorant, or have invalid world-views. ;)
(wish I had an emoji for only-kinda-tongue-in-cheek, i.e. saying something kinda unfair with self-awareness to be half-joking, but actually kinda asserting it anyway)
People seem to forget history and the fact that statements like this have pretty much always been wrong. There’s always something that supposed to replace something else and throw people out of work. Plus, robots are cute.
Quality of life across Europe plummeted? Factories weren't manned by force except that which drove people to avoid starvation in the face of a pitiful agrarian lifestyle.
As T. S. Ashton pointed out (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._S._Ashton) in 1948, the industrial revolution meant the difference between the grinding poverty that had characterized most of human history and the affluence of the modern industrialized nations. No economist today seriously disputes the fact that the industrial revolution began the transformation that has led to extraordinarily high (compared with the rest of human history) living standards for ordinary people throughout the market industrial economies.
You are saying the industrial revolution == repetitive factory work under horrible conditions?
The parent comment was talking about artisans losing work, not farmers.
I think technological progress and innovation increased overall quality of life, while many specific things, such as jobs many workers felt they had no choice but to take in the shifting economic reality, were horrible for the people involved.
Saying that most of human history was grinding poverty is again, cherry picking. In terms of personal freedom and free time, as one of the most fundamental measures of value, humans had it way better at many points in history and much of prehistory.
It took almost a hundred years, and a lot of bloodshed for quality of life to return to where it was prior to the industrial revolution. I'm not particularly keen on seeing that happen in my life.
"It took almost a hundred years, and a lot of bloodshed for quality of life to return to where it was prior to the industrial revolution. "
Sorry, that is simply not true.
According to one study, real wages almost doubled in England between 1780 and 1850. An attempted rebuttal claimed that they "only" went up 30%.
Like many people, you seem to have an overly-rosy idea of what life is actually like as a subsistence-level, stoop-labor, agricultural peasant. Workers flocked to the new factories because those jobs were an improvement over what they had before (the exact same process is going on in China as we speak).
Were those jobs pretty nasty and horrible by modern standards? Of course they were. But not by the standards of the time.
This seems like a difficult moral argument to develop precisely. At what point in history do you prevent the current suffering, even if it would have resulted in a huge subsequent increase in quality of life?
In Milwaukee these days, around 50% of working-age black men can get work. 50 years ago it was 85%.
The market found more things for knowledge workers to do. Visit the rust belt sometime - the factory laborers were left behind a generation ago, we just choose not to think about it because they're in a different caste.
Agreed. The difference this time around is that basic needs are no longer scarce in areas advanced enought to decide what robots are doing. It's just a coincidence, but people conflate them
First world economies been in (or close to) a post-scarcity economy for probably the last fifty years.
The luddite fallacy misses the point. Nobody cares about employment rates if the job quality is shrinking. The luddite fallacy is still correct if everyone has to work two minimum wage jobs just to get by.
To some degree, I suspect a certain number of human jobs will remain long after automation simply for the sentimental value. Like organic or free range food, where people are willing to pay a premium for goods that aren't made via some industrial type process.
So you'd have 'human made' as a label on the side of slightly more expensive products tailored to slightly more well off people who see it as more ethical. Like a non food version of a farmer's market.
It won't save most of the jobs, but they'll definitely be enough people out there who don't want 'machine made' products by companies only using robots.
On another note, I suspect many of these articles also miss one other thing; there's no reason that every company would use robots or AI. Sure, large companies would. But in the same market would likely be hundreds or thousands of smaller ones with at least some humans in the workforce.
I mean, look at it this way. Go down the high street and look at the shops and restaurants. Sure, big chains exist, whether they be coffee ones like Starbucks and Costa or supermarkets like Walmart or Tesco or the likes, but so do tons of small companies run by people aiming at a local market, or a certain niche, or anything else. They're not all going to buy expensive machinery to run the shop, and they're not all going to go out of business. Heck, it could even be the opposite; quite a few businesses in the real world have actually gotten MORE popular once a Starbucks has moved in next door. People will still buy things from small businesses (especially if they're distrustful of large multinational companies), and those small (and even medium sized) businesses will still hire human staff.
That seems to be overlooked in these discussions. After all, if even something as big as Coca Cola or Disney or McDonalds or whatever has lots of competition, what makes you think your future companies won't?
There is so much work out there to be done, it's laughable that we are talking about paying people for doing nothing.
Think about all the elderly retiring people that will need to be cared for. All the working moms who struggle to find people to care for their kids during the day. All the litter and graffiti all over our cities and roads.
Countries like Japan are freaking out about their aging demographics and how they will support them. The solution is definitely not to decrease the amount of people working.
Instead of basic income, why not use the money instead to give a generous wage subsidy to people at the bottom? So that even a street sweeper, caretaker, nanny, or preschool teacher is well financially rewarded?
FWIW, the Scandinavian model, which has some of the highest equality and well-being in the world, requires people to work and has some of the highest labor force participation rates in the world.
> "There is so much work out there to be done, it's laughable that we are talking about paying people for doing nothing."
If automation continues to expand as expected, the majority of tasks humans do could be replaced by machines/AI. At this point, the total volume of work may be high, but the total volume of work only humans can best fulfil may be much lower than it is today. The question becomes, when we can apply automation to most jobs, what will human society look like?
> "Let's worry about that when it happens. My point is that it's premature to talk about introducing a UBI when there's so many needs out there."
The point of talking about an UBI now is to iron out any issues with it before it's needed. Furthermore, whilst the need for it isn't as strong as it might be later, there are certain benefits it could bring to simplifying and improving welfare even in today's society. If you're suggesting there's a risk people will not work, that all depends on the implementation (again, another reason why it's being discussed now). What I believe is likely to happen to the current job market if we had UBI is that people would be freer to switch careers, and as a consequence of this undesirable jobs are likely to have higher wages, and desirable jobs are likely to have lower wages. For example, cleaning jobs would pay more, and marketing jobs would pay less. In other words, the incentives for working would change based on the flexibility of the workforce.
> "Also, caring for children/elderly is not something that is necessarily desirable to automate..."
Most of that isn't paid work at it stands now, plus it's worth remembering that the automation of the future is likely to be more adaptive to individual needs (i.e. when it's driven by sufficiently sophisticated AI).
Lastly, the aim isn't to remove humans entirely from the world of work, the idea is to change the need for humans to work, the option to work will still be present.
> a system in which all citizens or residents of a country receive an unconditional sum of money, in addition to any income they bring in elsewhere.
It will come - simply b/c a majority will depend on it and politicians depend on majorities.
But it will also be so low that people will merely be able to afford a reasonable modern living standard.
At the same time there will be incentives to take new kind of jobs to pad the basic income.
Those jobs will be servant jobs - bringing people food, driving them around ... serving them ... b/c no robot can give you the feeling of being in a position of power.
So the fate for the uneducated or people educated but in economically irrelevant areas will be basic income plus being a servant.
On another note, does all this mean that in the future, intelligent robots will actually be in the same situation as humans? I mean, if simple ones can take care of simple jobs in stuff like manufacturing, driving vehicles, admin work, etc, one with real AI would basically be unemployable. If they don't want to pay humans for work, then they won't want to give a robot a paycheck either. That's going to be an interesting issue too.
It's future, in 100 years from now, all food, all energy and most of other services/products will be made without any human interaction. While everything will be produced without wasting any resources (full automation, recycling etc), there is no reason why food and energy should not be free. To work will be a choice not requirement.
Breathing doesn't require investing in technological infrastructure in most cases. Sometimes it does, though.
Posting on Hacker News requires me to keep paying my electric bill and my broadband bill or for someone, somewhere, at some point, to pay for the servers and power and everything involved in getting it to me.
Everything has cost to begin. But after that phase, you don't need to pay anymore, do you understand? If you create solar panels, you get energy from them without paying anymore. This is what he was talking about.
You need to really learn what word free means in context of energy. "Energy from sources that do not require an input which has to be paid for". You do not need to pay for sun, you do not need to pay for wind etc.
Fusion might be a vastly more efficient version of what we already have, but it's still neither perfect nor infinite. Sooner or later, you run out of fuel, or the reactor breaks down, or you have to build more reactors or something.
So you interpreted what i wrote about "infinite" literally..? Ok... We are talking about fusion... So you suggest then i think Sun will never die and has infinite energy too, yes?
Maybe i will explain you what i mean and everyone else mean when they say what i said. It means that we can RELEASE MORE (transform) ENERGY, because energy is never destroyed, it's transformed.
In other words the total mass of the tritium and deuterium nuclei before the reaction is greater than the mass of the helium and neutron after fusion has taken place – even though it is the same number of protons and neutrons.
This does not exist. This is well known as the Law of Conservation of Energy.
That said, if food production was so easy as to be almost free for the people with power, why not just make it free? If the cost is small enough, powerful people would be happy to absorb it to provide this service.
Free in a way YOU don't need to pay for it. Do you understand? But someone needs to invest billions into infrastructure, you need technology (AI) to make it work efficient. Whole chain needs to be controlled automatically without any human interaction, from energy to water supply. You know what are the biggest costs of making food ? All of them are market/human made. Google the costs, eliminate human factor and you will know what free food means.
And i i've answered your question and pointed why it's impossible now. I've wrote about free food in about 100 years from now, it would imply you referred to that it this context, saying it would still have high costs in 100 years from now too (If not then why even write anything about current situation if whole talk is about future ?). Seeing how world changes, i don't think that what you wrote will be true in 100 years from now.
Is a basic income meant to cover healthcare needs?
If yes, what incremental steps could be taken in the US to start reducing healthcare costs down to a level where we can even think about providing a stipend on top of the free healthcare?
Preventative care and the most cost-effective healthcare treatments should be universally available separately from BI. There's no good way for market systems to manage health care well.
As a society, we simply cannot afford to give everyone whatever-it-takes care for end-of-life though. We need to prioritize the health care that has the most impact for the cost, the stuff that keeps a normal healthy person healthy and productive, not the stuff that extends a terminally ill person's life by an extra 6 months. To reduce our costs, we have to focus on managing end-of-life to be a positive experience rather than trying to extend it as far as possible at whatever cost.
The thing that is most effective in reducing healthcare costs is prevention.
Easiest way today of increasing "overall health" in the US: better diet and more exercise
I believe this will also be automated and there will be a 'Computer doctor' that can give you guidance and maybe a basic Rx for the majority of problems that take people off work (a lot of which are resolved by staying at home for a couple of days)
Then you would have more complex problems dealt by a doctor
Prevention reduces spending. Lack of it doesn't provide a satisfying explanation as to why an xray bill is much higher at a given hospital and things like that.
Or is the lack of preventative care somehow showing up in the price of only some xrays?
"May be"? I thought that was the whole point: automation produces wealth but people are put out of jobs to make it happen, so it makes sense that they're compensated by something like a government.
Until wealthy people get sick of #feelingthebern and take over government with robotic force. I'm not sure you want to make the majority of people useless beggars.
They're already developing autonomous weapons. Once countries no longer need poor people to make up the military and police force, there'll be no incentive to help poor people. They can live in cloistered communities, and with all the means of production as well as war machines, there'll be parallel worlds - one ultra rich, one ultra poor.
Key quote: "Our current economic system requires people to either have wealth or to work to make a living, with the assumption that the economy creates jobs for all those who need them. If this assumption breaks down - and progress in automation is likely to break it down, I believe - then we need to rethink the very basic structure of our economic system."
That's a good statement of the problem. It's useful to get that clear before talking about solutions. Solutions are hypothetical; problems are real.
How far along are we in that direction already? About 14% of the US workforce makes all the stuff - that's manufacturing, construction, mining, and agriculture. That figure was about 50% in 1950 and around 90% in the 19th century.
The conventional wisdom was that more education helps. That is no longer the case. About 37% of employed US college graduates are in jobs which require only a high school diploma.[1] Overproduction of college graduates has reduced the value of a college education substantially.
It's not often mentioned, but there's one class of jobs that's almost totally gone - large numbers of people doing the same thing under close supervision. In 1900, Carnegie Steel had 5000 men with shovels at one plant. Today, you might see one or two people with shovels working, but beyond that, power equipment is brought in. There's a fraction of the population which needs jobs that structured. Many homeless are in that category. (Jobs where drunkenness is tolerated have almost totally disappeared.) That's a problem at the low end. 13.5% of the population has an IQ between 70 and 85. What are they going to do?[2]
Nothing above is really in question. So that's a way to look at the problem as of right now.
Looking ahead, there's this well-known study on jobs likely to be automated soon.[3]
Understanding the changing nature of work is the first step to dealing with it.
But in the 1950s this was solved by doing something new : get everyone and their dog a car. This got us to the 1980s or even the 1990s and is still employing large amounts of people, though not as large as before. After that we're getting everybody "services". Phones, bank accounts, insurance, apps, newsletters, ... that did make life better. That got us jobs until 2000/2001 or so.
We just need to find a new "car"/"phone". Something to get for everyone and their dog, that they'd want, ideally with recurring charges, that can't be delivered without employing God knows how many people (ideally something that would improve the more people you employ).
Because, whilst I don't subscribe to the positive side of Ayn Rand's philosophy, I do subscribe to the negative side. Having the government redivide wealth from the productive to everyone is something that may soften the short-term impact of unemployment, but in the medium/long term it's a disaster. I even agree that redividing wealth combined with human greed manifesting through corruption will make it impossible to turn back from redividing policies once they reach a certain percentage of the economy, by blocking any and all innovation (because it would require changing the redivision policies, which is too dangerous politically. Much easier to just block, say, autonomous cars. Meanwhile drivers die, or worse, kill others, are away from their families for weeks/months, and don't do anything useful. They're not improving anyone's life by having that job over not having that job. It would pretty much be better for everyone, including them, to just have them sitting at home watching TV. And why ? Because figuring out redividing policies would lead to political infighting, or even real fighting (just watch some European demonstrations by farmers, or students)).
I agree that the economy is there so people can live, and live well, not the other way around. But having the private sector do that is almost infinitely preferable over having government redivide wealth. We essentially need to find something new we can and want to do with the economy, that would improve our lives, and require large amounts of people helping to make that happen.
Unemployment is _good_. Being poor is bad. They are only correlated because we decided that made sense in the past. It doesn't any more.