Wars of I BC century and Roman laws that put people into slavery for debts had brought hundreds of thousands of slaves into economy bringing cost of labour close to zero. Conquest of Egypt and North Africa flooded markets with cheap grain.
That market disruption made artisan shops and small farms unable to sustain/compete on the market with larger enterprises based on slave labour.
Majority of citizens of lower class had been then entitled to free food and free entertainment (bread and circus). It was necessary for keeping their votes and for keeping appearances of the republic. (Even what we call Roman Empire were still nominally a Republic with Senate and elections held for various offices every year at Fields of Mars).
I recommend everyone reading Rubicon by Tom Holland. https://www.amazon.com/Rubicon-Tom-Holland/dp/1400078970
I voted for Bernie personally -- not a full out socialist... but I do think single payer + ubi + free college makes sense -- take the stress out of living paycheck to paycheck... at least somewhat... Not saying make everyone a millionaire and inflate the crap out of thnigs...but there needs to be some equilibrium...
One good policy might be capped CEO pay at say 200 * average employee salary. In this way - for CEO to get a raise, average salary must go up -- this can happen either by raising across the board or by moving more people to management and increasing upward mobility. Any money the CEO makes over 200* from that company is taxed at 100% including benefits, stocks, etc...
I'm currently very impressed by the work of Prof. Richard Wolff, an economist that heavily criticizes Capitalism and tries to make actual practical changes in the lives of people starting from their workplaces.
Here is a talk he made in front of Google employees (the irony): https://youtu.be/ynbgMKclWWc
I do like UBI though along with (the pragmatist in me) believes gov't should work like agile dev teams... push changes up to a github like interface for bills.. the all bills should be VERY succinct and serve 1 goal, and that they should be repealable pretty easily like reverting a change on github... I think we have WAY too much bloat, and omnibuses just don't make sense at all and should be illegal.
Congressmen make very good money and benefits -- and have lots of perks so they should be required to work as hard as the next guy in America - -40 hours per week IN congress discussing bills and voting - -anything to 'market' themselves for future elections is NOT part of their job and outside their 'paid' duties and should be done on their own time.
I think automation, etc will disrupt the entire fabric of society soon, and honestly I hope we can move back to middle-age work days... they worked maybe 20 hours a week, if that and some weeks not at all - if farming the winter was pretty much just don't freeze to death... While their lives weren't long, I have to think they enjoyed life more than we do today.
If I could live for free (no rent, free food, free electricity, etc), I probably would quit. I don't have much savings and my quality of life would drop a little, but I would probably take 6-12 months vacation and just dick about, playing video games and concentrating on my hobbies.
That said, I agree with your point, just bad example.
The hoops some members of this forum will jump through to convince themselves that building CRUD apps is some zenith of intellectual might just continues to astound me.
Maybe if jobs for all skill-sets were still growing (in availability and compensation) it'd be easier to write off a good portion of the population as mentally inferior, but now that knowledge jobs are gaining a monopoly on living wages/salaries I don't think it's as easy to be that glib.
We need to do better as a society.
We're not that glib when it comes to children and early education, and I don't think we should change attitude just because a person has reached adulthood. Laziness and/or the attribution fallacy seems to get the better of a lot of us on HN.
Presuming we want people to have good lives who aren’t able or inclined to do jobs requiring much higher intellectual demands than janitorial ones (and I certainly do want us to presume that!), we need to figure out how to in the short term allow people doing those jobs to have good lives and in the long term allow them to have good lives while robots do those jobs.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding your comment.
This economic system isn't working for the vast majority of Americans, hence the support for Bernie and Trump.
However, small sample size notwithstanding, I have been involved with mentoring in an outreach program targeted at people with little to no CS experience. And these students were coding circles around "CS" grads in under 6 weeks. Sure the theoretical foundations aren't there yet, but, do you really need that much math to stand up an app, build a website, or do any of the work expected of a junior dev?
I 100% agree with you in that most people don't have the aptitude to become the next John Carmack, but, at least in my experience, that's not where the jobs are anyway. You don't need to be Linus to generate business value using Linux, and you don't need to be James Gosling to working Java enterprise apps. The jobs of the future need an army of people to modernize infrastructure and build using existing tools. These are the middle class anchors of the 21st century; I'd say look no farther than the "analyst" pipelines of the American finance industry to see this happening.
Have you ever been in any kind of teaching role, or observed some students at tutoring labs? Some people are just unteachable/not cut out for it.
then they can become janitors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
but you're right, ubi is essential. not everyone can handle janitorial work. ;)
manufacturing went away, agriculture went away, mining went away, all through automation. coincidently, this corresponded to growth in the people working in tech and other intellectual labor. but it's sloppy thinking to say that automation causes growth in intellectual labor, which seems to be the presumption. automation causes whatever it automates to shrink. intellectual labor will be automated-- possibly before janitorial work.
If everyone had better options, fewer would be willing to be janitors, and the need for janitors would cause janitorial wages to increase.
Basically, society is partly competitive.
If a position does not pay well enough for someone to have a family and raise and educate two or three children, it can be said not to pay for itself: which is to say, not to pay for its renewal from generation to generation. This is the real standard by which we must consider the wages paid to those positions, like waiters and teachers and janitors, which are perennial.
Why is it? A job is better than welfare, therefore it has value. The requirement that jobs are 'renewable' is only required of the average job, not every job.
Accepting the idea that renewability is either slightly more than 1.0 or slightly less, if the "average job" is renewable it suggests most of the common jobs have to be renewable in practice.
We could argue this in another way, which is to say that the average "career life course" or let's just say "life course" has to be renewable. This is where we encounter the idea that people should be setting themselves up for promotions -- but most people don't get promotions. It's not how life works. Promotions don't address the concern for the average life course.
The main features of janitorial work is few barriers to entry. There is fair demand, but there is plentiful supply which is why it is relatively low paid.
If Janitors could only replace Janitors, then being "non-renewable" would reduce supply, increasing wage, and maintaining balance.
In reality, the main feature of Janitorial work is most people otherwise lacking qualifications can do it; i.e. anyone. So it's not true that the renewability of janitorial work has a direct affect on supply.
Instead, it depends on overall supply of unskilled labour.
I thought about this for a while after you wrote it.
In a stable setting, where there is not a large and pre-existing supply of prey, prey animals tend to have large broods. Many off their offspring are preyed upon or otherwise unable to reproduce, but just enough make it in each generation and likewise manage to have large broods.
This is not a behaviour that seems plausible with modern people. The amount of time required to educate someone prior to their entering workforce is enormous now -- we can't afford to do something like what prey animals do, with regards to work.
Where does the unskilled labor come from?
It's not the core job, it's the fact that there's zero growth or mobility even possible that is the issue.
If you're a contracted employee, there's zero investment in you as an employee. You come in, do the task, and leave.
In the Bay Area schools my kids attend, they are working hard to emphasize this growth mindset. I think it's huge component in job mobility, whether it be upward or sideways.
Not everyone is a 'striver.' Some folks just want to pay their bills and enjoy what time they can with their family and friends.
I think everyone deserves to be able to have vacation time, especially single parents.
An article that focusses on inequality due to low income should perhaps pick an example with a more typical family situation.
To live a life free of consequences? As in have more kids, same quality of life?
How will that work?
> everyone deserves..
And who pays?
To live a fulfilling life without the constant fear of not being able to adequately provide for yourself or your offspring?
>And who pays?
Since it'd be us, collectively, as a society who would benefit it'd make sense for us, collectively, as a society to pay.
And this comes, for free, with no obligations? What is the standard for a "fulfilling life"? One child? A hundred? If I think my life will be fulfilled by skydiving, or playing XBox, or hookers and blow - should the state pay for those as well?
> it'd be us, collectively, as a society who would benefit
What you are describing is a market, but with no feedback or control; When someone ends up a burden on society due to a poor upbringing, does "society" get a refund?
If we are paying for people to bring up children, it would make more sense if the we initiated it; rather than people self-select for parenthood and get child welfare as an individual right.
I meant a mistake by society, i.e. it's a mistake to put people in a dead-end job, functionally ever.