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Comment by svepuri | Hacker News Reader

While I appreciate the advances in technology to sew garments, I wonder how this will negatively impact the economies, which are thriving because of the garment business.

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As good an argument for universal basic income as I've ever seen.

Won't happen. These are mostly poor countries. What'll happen is these people will be cast aside, and forgotten.

To be fair, that seems to be much of how it functions in richer countries as well. It's not as bad if you're well educated, have other strengths and a bit of money laid up. But if you're a minimum wage factory operative or warehouse worker or one of the other relatively unskilled low-paid jobs, then the thing that you're good at vanishing can leave you in a very hard place; very limited funding to retrain and limited options for doing so even where such funding can be managed.

Basic income works in poor countries too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_in_India

India has 1.23 Billion[0] people in it, and that wikipedia article is quite short, with only 4 sources. They don't cite any of the sources for the figure which stated 6460 people are in the program.

The program serves %0.000005 of India, or in much more familiar terms, if implemented at the same scale in America it would help slightly less people than there were killed by lions in Tanzania over the trailing 20 years[1].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India

[2]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/wildlife/5149977/Top-1...

[3]Off by one errors.

It's a pilot program, not a nationwide initiative. That said, the economics of it would be positive if applied nationwide.

If you're interested in the pilot, it's documented very extensively in this book, which the Wikipedia article ought to be referencing: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Income-Renana-Jhabvala-Soumya-Standi...

Sure, to be clear I would like basic income. My point was that it is really easy to raise capital and test it on a scale like this. While I was making a joke, the implications are real. Inflation can rise if people are all still buying things at the same economic level and region. Where does the money come from?

The problem with basic income is that when the conditions exist to make it possible, it wont matter anymore. We need large transition to solar, automated farming, automated transportation and distribution networks, etc. Then the marginal cost of food, transportation, energy will be $0 so we can afford to give it away.

Economics is not always the zero sum game it is made out to be. Microlending could work, and getting these people access to conputers and internet will too.

If they are desperate enough to steal or riot, they might not be forgotten. Is imprisoning a significant portion of the population cheaper than a basic income or at least free provision of basic services?

I think we will boil as frogs too slowly for there to be a dramatic escalation of violence, but things obviously need to change.

The fatal problem with any universal basic income scheme is that people will always vote for whatever politicians promise to augment their basic income, irrespective of any other factors, leading to ever higher strain on the economy and eventually bankrupting the country.

Basic income is actually pretty rare, even among democracies. So it would seem you are empirically wrong. Not only will people not vote to augment basic income, they won't even vote for a modest basic income.

Few politicians have seriously proposed it so far. If and when they do, the votes will follow (a testable prediction.)

This process has indeed happened already. It was a large part of the downfall of ancient Rome. Glossing over the many details, when slaves were doing most of the work, people supported those politicians who offered them ever increasing grain doles, until the state could no longer afford them and collapsed.

Socialism in general is a variant of the basic income scheme, and hugely popular: a state guarantee of a certain basic income and level of material security, no matter what happens to you in life. It has done well in elections for a long time and remains popular today, as well as driving various popular Communist revolutions on a non-democratic basis.

If we take away the `thing` that defines garment works (despite how unfulfilling we see the work), I hope that society does not leave these people behind to fend for themselves (and use the new efficiencies for earning money to re-train & re-tool these individuals.

The workers just really need to shift functions from craftwork to technical. Since the industrial revolution, that's the way it goes.

Unfortunately, the more automation, fewer and more skilled workers are needed. That's always been the case and will only continue to happen. People will be able to specialize and diversify more.

You mean these workers need to be trained to handle machines? Perhaps thats going to be a huge challenge for the middle-age workers, who would have lived all their lives doing the craft work. Survival of the fittest!

What alternative do you propose that doesn't either impose nonsensical costs on businesses or persist dangerous, backbreaking, and unnecessary practices for workers?

Diffusing into different industries?

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