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Comment by 77pt77 | Hacker News Reader

This means that on a societal level we will probably implement some kind of artificial scarcity or even make belief work.

The later is in a way already happening just to keep unemployed people occupied:

Have a look at Potemkin economy:

http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/frances-potemkin-econo...

> Candelia is one of a number of so-called “Potemkin” companies operating in France.

> Everything about these entities is imaginary from the customers, to the supply chain, to the banks, to the “wages” employees receive and while the idea used to be that the creation of a “parallel economic universe” would help to train the jobless and prepare them for real employment sometime in the future, these “occupations” are now serving simply as way for the out-of-work to suspend reality for eight hours a day

Society fears a large unoccupied class. Whether that fear is warranted or not is a different thing.

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It's absolutely warranted. I spent time in South Africa, specifically Johannesburg and Durban, and due to completely unrestricted immigration there is a massive unemployed population (there simply isn't enough work for all the people coming in to the country), and crime rates have gone through the roof.

"Idle hands are the Devil's workshop." Human beings do not naturally drift towards societally beneficial behaviour when lacking productive activities to engage in.

> "Idle hands are the Devil's workshop."

I was almost having a mental countdown until this exact expression popped up.

What you wrote is true, but that unemployed population didn't have any money or their needs met.

What would happen if living was really easy and work either unneeded or just downright impossible to get?

> "Idle hands are the Devil's workshop."

This puritanical belief makes the idea of Basic Income politically un-doable through most of the world, along with the belief that a living is something that must be earned through productive work.

> This puritanical belief

That's one way to ignore human nature as a force driving human society.

> Basic Income

That's another.

Human nature isn't anywhere near as simplistic as economists tend to believe. That is why half the theories doesn't work in reality, people are far from the rational actors they're made out to be.

> This puritanical belief makes the idea of Basic Income politically un-doable through most of the world, along with the belief that a living is something that must be earned through productive work.

It's just a framing problem.

For example, the Earned Income Tax Credit in the US is a small de facto UBI. If you eliminated all US welfare programs and used all the money to increase the amount of the EITC you will have effectively solved the problem.

In theory the EITC requires you to earn money, but if you eliminated the loss of welfare benefits that currently occurs if you report earning any amount of money, suddenly you'll discover that everybody everywhere has "income" from doing odd jobs for their friends and so on, most of which they've been doing the whole time in exchange for in-kind services but (illegally!) not reporting it as income because reporting it previously caused a net loss rather than a net gain.

> immigration there is a massive unemployed population (there simply isn't enough work for all the people coming in to the country), and crime rates have gone through the roof.

The situation in South Africa is far more nuanced. Due to a sham government and a badly fractured education system, the immigrants to South Africa are generally more skilled and far more employable than many locals. The immigrants also open shops and are more entrepreneurial. There might be some crime from foreigners, but surely we don't need to go making blanket statements like this. This is the kind of thing said by mob leaders during buildup to xenophobic attacks, which surely you know actually take place in South Africa.

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While I've never seen a graying Chia Pet before, I would've preferred a link to the NYT article [0] on which that blog post was based. The blog post wasn't even by him, it was just republished from ZeroHedge where it was credited to "Tyler Durden."

It's an interesting story, I had not heard of "practice firms" as a form of training for the unemployed. They don't really say how long people stay in the training program, I think one quoted person had been there for four months, which seems like a long time. "The success rate of the training centers is high. About 60 to 70 percent of those who go through France’s practice firms find jobs, often administrative positions, Mr. Troton said.

But in a reflection of the shifting nature of the European workplace, most are low-paying and last for short stints, sometimes just three to six months."

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/business/international/in...

You're right.

I read the sidebar and it's a bit too shady but the content in this article is solid.

Thank you for posting the NYT link.

A better option would be to employ more people in the sciences. There is still a lot to be discovered and labs I have worked in have a range of work to be done from the low skilled cleaning glassware to high skilled design of experiments.

Most people are unable to contribute to human scientific development in any meaningful capacity.

The exception might be repetitive tasks that are already being automated, like drug testing.

I have no idea how all these trends are going to play out, at least during the transient regime we are currently experiencing.

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