Right, let's stop talking about jobs. Who's gonna give to today's truck drivers the money to pay the mortgage they have to keep paying for the next 20 years?
But the constant drone of "create jobs" at every political debate? The yardsticking of every public policy measure against how many "jobs" it will "create" or "destroy"? A central bank with a mandate not to simply implement fair and simple currency regulations, but to actually manipulate the money supply so as to "create jobs"?
This is not just a discussion; it's an obsession. And I posit that it's as much about a moralistic work ethic (and a bunch of other things) as it is about any sound economic theory.
We need to move on to new ideas about automation, economics, and sustainability.
But they will be substantially different when facing difficult realities of war: those benefits as well may be cut and those people should go to factories, computers, fields, whatever occupation current war needs.
How do you explain a whole generation of people that their allowance will not be paid? How do you tell them that their occupation will be unpleasant? How do you train millions of people discipline, relevant skills, command-and-control?
No major nation wants to lose next war, so we are locked in full employment race.
(sorry for bad english)
A reasonable explanation could be proximity: When the war takes place in their own country, people are more likely to pick up guns instead of waiting for drones to be sent.
If one looks at it from economic-theory or game-theory perspective it sounds like a solution to many problems, nobody knows yet if that would work in practice though, especially on large scale.
As far as I know, open questions that remain are:
- Will we be able to afford it? Sort of back-of-the-napkin calculations can show, that if we introduced i.e UBI in Germany for everybody (80 mil) on a level of minimum wage (1473 E ?), it would eat their federal budget for Ministry of Health and Social Security and Ministry of Economics and Labour
- What would be the unintended consequences? (i.e on small scale uneployment rose by single digits, but we can't really tell what will happen on country scale)
(Land prices go up, as other taxes go down, as you can see on the Swiss/German border. Taxing land rents has no economic deadweight loss, since the supply of land is fixed.)
At the most crude, you could separate natural resources from the rest of the land rights, people already do that.
By the way if memory serves right Germany, which doesn't have general land taxes, already doesn't let you own mineral resources below your land by default. Would be interesting to see what effect that regulation already has on people prospecting.
>- Will we be able to afford it? Sort of back-of-the-napkin calculations can show, that if we introduced i.e UBI in Germany for everybody (80 mil) on a level of minimum wage (1473 E ?), it would eat their federal budget for Ministry of Health and Social Security and Ministry of Economics and Labour
In what way is that an unanswered question?
Every single debate about this has any number of people pointing out that you would adjust taxes so that for most people the UBI + tax increases would be net neutral with perhaps slightly higher marginal taxes at the top.
Every single discussion about UBI also somehow has any number of people pretending this point has never been raised and insisting that the cost of UBI will be UBI_Amount * Population.
This isn't even taking into account the reduction in existing social programs which would presumably be replaced by UBI.
http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/disabili...
States love it because it comes out of federal budgets, and feds love it because it's a social security net that doesn't have the pejorative inklings of "welfare."
It doesn't really matter what you 'think' about things; they'll happen and there is not very much to do about it; we (humanity) have to come up with a way not to let these (most?) people die in the streets while there are no jobs. And of course, once that is accepted, make sure not everyone hangs themselves or others out of boredom. Not saying this will happen next year, but within 100 years for sure.
Some things, like trucks, will happen faster than others and that's why (parts of) this needs to be fixed now instead of when it already happened.
I for one would be happy when this 'stress of needing to have a job' goes away for future generations: I like what I do and i'll do it forever, but the stress to 'have a job' was pushed way too hard by parents, schools, university and society as a whole. And the 'failure' of not having a job too.