Mark Zuckerberg again defends government giving people free money
cnbc.com
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Is this true? My impression is that many of the problems in regards to young people having trouble in the labor market have to do with the fact that for the most part they are more free than their parents to pursue their interests rather than "survival". This is due in part to their parents being more wealthy and they have the luxury to pursue majors that don't pay well. Also, the safety net extends after they graduate. For instance, 40% of Americans under 35 live with their parents or relatives [0].
And the problem runs deeper than that. Low labor participation rates are not something that should be a policy objective. From my anecdotal experience, those people not participating in the workforce are rarely living meaningful happy lives.
[0] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/percentage-of-young-americans-li...
Student debt is a luxury. There are plenty of affordable colleges and universities. Many just choose to go to expensive options and they are able to do so due to subsidized student loan rates (also a luxury) and support from relatively wealthy parents. In regards to mortgages being unattainable due to housing appreciation, I think that is only half the story. The other half is that mortgage rates are at near historic lows. Yes, homes were cheaper in the 50s-90s but mortgage rates were ~6-18% at that time. This makes a huge difference in home affordability. For instance, a 30 year 100k mortgage at 8% and 4% interest have mortgage payments of $733 vs $477, respectively.
[0] http://blog.lucidrealty.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/mortg...
Though it can be fun to get as much as possible optimized results with as less as possible investment (time and/or money).
I live in one of the world's richer countries (The Netherlands) and anecdotally I'd say it's both true and not true.
It's true in the sense that most people I know in the 20-35 range, usually non-STEM university bachelor's and sometimes master's, struggle to get by.
They live in shared flats (kamers, WG's), often spend a sizable chunk of their time doing menial jobs to survive, and I'd say many of them manage on a student-level income (which I'd say is quite a bit below median income, possibly poverty-level). There's often quite a bit of depression or general malaise about this situation, as they'd prefer to work full-time, make a little more money, have a little more stability and have some sense of progress (whether in the sense of meaning or promotion), and in some cases would like to have children but feel they are not stable enough to start a family. I'd say this is significantly worse than at least the past generation (or two?).
On the other hand, some of this seems to be by choice: they'd rather 'organically' operate in survival mode over just taking a job that, after a year or so of menial and pointless busywork, possibly but not certainly provides a promotion to something more meaningful. They go for a 10 euro Spotify and a 10 euro Netflix account, and a shared flat in the city, over a more financially prudent non-city, non-mass-and-convenient-entertainment situation in part by choice: how would they really know if this makes them happier than, say, a more rural alternative?
Some of the latter could just be a case of 'making the best of a shitty deal', but I get the impression that, at least for this generation, it's to a significant degree ideological.
Ultimately all that only makes the whole situation seem worse to me, on balance.
Things are generally shitty for young people, even if you account for 'shifts in thinking' (that confuse the older generations), but somehow there's little collective action to make things better. If you want to change things, the 'accepted' avenues are self-employment or starting/joining a startup, completely disregarding civil society or political activism, and, to a degree, the idea of doing something collectively rather than following only the exact and singular configuration of your particular self.
This seems to be a great pitch for convincing rich people to help introduce basic income. Basic income is in their best self-interest. If no one has money to buy their stuff, they’ll stop being rich!
They might wonder the same about the owners. The French Revolution didn't work out well for the owners.
Wherein by "first", you mean "17th article" (or 30).
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Huma...
EDIT: Ah, I forgot about the context of the French Revolution, so I looked at the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_M... of August 1789. The right to property is actually the last article in that one, so the original point remains debunked.
In a actual human model, because the point of technology is to make human lives better, and not just to get more technology.
The theory is that increasing leverage continues to produce even more super-concentrated wealth, creating both the means and the political will (in the form of enlightened self-interest of the ultra-rich) to use surplus wealth to do things like Basic Income.
It's plausible, I guess. But I don't think that timeline is necessarily a lock.
'Other people' can vote in a democracy, but that may not be enough!
The mass of people used to have more convincing political/market power, due to the world needing them as 'wet robots' for labor. In the absence of real power for the mass of people, in the absence of the world actually 'needing' them for their output, I'm skeptical that mere democratic institutions are a good enough protection.
Democratic institutions, despite their relative benevolence, have historically have extended political power to people who are already de facto powerful (at least powerful enough to demand a seat at the table!), whether it be wealthy property owners in the age of the 'one-class' society, or the working heads-of-household during the heyday of human labor.
Power finds a way in any human system, is all I'm saying, and to the extent that increasing numbers of people lack power in the market, I'm skeptical that democratic institutions will guarantee benevolent social outcomes.
I think it's more likely we'll see a large expansion of existing welfare and food-stamp systems into a system of universal basic rationing. Probably they'll be some kind of parallel, digital pseudo-currency, in the form of spendable credits. They'll be limited to certain categories of goods, and luxury brands and most entertainment products will be banned.
I think you'll also see a requirement to do some form of "work", even artificial and meaningless tasks, in order to qualify. This is already how the system works in the UK, for example. In order to access the UK's welfare system, you are basically required to seek work, any work, no matter how menial or pointless. There is a "workfare" system whereby you work, unpaid, for commercial companies, doing things like stacking shelves for low-quality retailers, in order to get access to your welfare payments.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5168192/
I signed on once as I was between contracts and it seemed like it'd be stupid not to.
Soul destroying and utterly ridiculous bureaucracy that's feels like it's meant to humiliate you rather than get you a job.
And that was like 8 years ago, it's got worse.
Ultimately, as automation drives more people out of work, the voting base for a radical change for wealth distribution will grow and the social conservative base will shrink.
"Fairness" will be a sticking point. It's not reasonable that some people should have to work, so that others may voluntarily sit idle.
But my other reasons for opposing universal income are different than what you listed:
(1) I suspect universal income makes inaccurate assumptions about human nature. I think that without a need to work, a large fraction of people will choose not to. I doubt universal income could sustain that.
(2) Our population keeps on growing, but our planet stays the same size. Unless this changes, we'll see increasing competition for food and living space. The fraction of the economy spent on UBI would continue to increase due to inflation of those costs.
If I turn out to be mistaken about (1) and (2), then I'd be more open to UBI.
But it is, under the right circumstances.
If you have a mostly automated society, where only 1% of today's human work is required to design, build and service the robots that do the actual work. Now you could have each person working half an hour per week, but that would mean that you would have to pay to educate every person out there in robot design, construction or maintenance. In this scenario, it's wildly more efficient to just educate 1% of the potential workforce and have them work 40 hours per week (or maybe 2% at 20 hours). You get the same work done, but spend way less on education (and also on auxiliary costs like payroll and shift planning).
Note that I'm explicitly only arguing with economic concerns, not social ones. If you define "reasonable" in social rather than economic terms, my argument need not apply.
> I think that without a need to work, a large fraction of people will choose not to.
Why is it then, that most people who are rich enough to sustain themselves indefinitely without having to work, still choose to work?
> The fraction of the economy spent on UBI would continue to increase due to inflation of those costs.
That's a problem, but UBI doesn't change it AFAICS. You can just reword this as "The fraction of the economy spent on food and living space would continue to increase due to inflation of these costs", and it would hold true regardless of whether there's UBI or not.
What would motivate the 1% to work 40 hours a week when they could spend their time on things they enjoy instead?
When has this not been true? The only thing that changes are the amount of people that can be idle and that the people able to get education will be more pressed to work.
>I suspect universal income makes inaccurate assumptions about human nature. I think that without a need to work, a large fraction of people will choose not to. I doubt universal income could sustain that.
What percentage of the labor force do you think are motivated purely by survival now? It's basically the unskilled laborers, anyone else has other motivations.
>Our population keeps on growing, but our planet stays the same size. Unless this changes, we'll see increasing competition for food and living space. The fraction of the economy spent on UBI would continue to increase due to inflation of those costs
Drove through 500 miles of basically nothing today. We're fine on living space for quite some time, and a combination of better food production and waste limiting would handle food availability for quite some time.
Does it? I mean, I cannot imagine any desirable way in which welfare could be administered that cannot be misspent. If you give starving people money, they can technically buy something other than food. If you give them food stamps or actual food instead, they can trade that for money to spend on useless junk.
The only alternatives are to admit them to closed therapy, if the cause of their misspending is an addiction or other mental illness, or to force-feed them, which I would not want because it defies my concept of human dignity.
Why? If the means of production and warfare run without labour, what do you need population for? Ignore ethics for a second. The rich can be plenty rich buying and selling to and from each other, exclusively, if their guns and butter churn out without workers.
Once the rich dispose of the surplus to requirements workers they would turn on each other.
The optimistic version is that technology creates enough wealth to provide a basic income for everyone when the value of most human labour is diminished. The interesting part here is who 'everyone' is, because in our imagination it rarely includes impoverished countries.
The pessimistic version is that technology could already create enough value for everyone, but what it really does is it increases inequality.
The value of automation might be captured by few large companies and a technological elite in a few countries, which have no incentive to support the rest of humanity other than to avoid a bloodbath. Combine this with vastly increasing populations in developing countries and resource scarcity + climate change in various regions causing mass migration movements, I just do not see how this can really workout peacefully.
If people have seen the movie Elysium, I always feel that this is already happening, just that Europe and the US are Elysium, and it is only about to get worse.
Not necessarily a bad thing.
I don't think we can ever say that the "jobs are gone". There are always things that people can do that are beneficial to the society but they can be either a) not profitable in the current economic framework or b) require highly skilled workforce that is currently not available on the job market.
If a) is the case, that means we are not really yet in the post scarcity world and need to first work more on providing "basic" goods so that we can afford having these less essential ones.
If b) is the case that means we need to put more resources into educating and training people. There is a sentiment that modern day universities are not worth the cost, but I highly disagree with that - society is only as good as people are educated and the more knowledge and highly developed skills people have the more they can participate in the economy.
In the world of the future, the "easy" jobs will be gone, but there will still be lots of things to do for smart, educated and skilled people. The only problem is that learning process and guiding a young human from newborn to such person is a costly process to the society. Providing basic income of barely "survival minimum" disincentives people to take that cost and participate in the economy. Until we have the AI that is better than humans at doing basic research, there is still a ton of things to do for humans, and I don't see anything good with excluding parts of the society from the process.
My gut tells me that Europe will embrace shorter work weeks and basic income, but in the US where we love to see people being punished for perceived failure to pull oneself up by bootstraps and other moral failures, and to promote businesses over the welfare of citizens, we'll find a way to justify laborers fighting over peanuts.
We sort of do the latter today, between rich countries and poor ones. Extending the analogy to e.g. America versus not-America, or New York City and the Bay Area versus Middle America, or any other configuration seems conceivable.