I don't think that's an attainable goal, or at the very least it's not a realistic short or long term goal. There are so many other things we have to fix before that goal makes sense.
To start, I think a severe underlying problem America is facing is just that there isn't much community here, compared to other first world countries. How long have our families been living in the same place? Not long for most of us. I think this is causing some turmoil in the trust department.
Also, we really need to work on our regulations. We have a bad habit of legislating from the heart, but end up producing side effects that hurt us. For instance, laws preventing giving food to the homeless. Over-regulating also drives cost up for business, causing them to raise prices.
Another is minimum wage. Americans have a hard time admitting that increasing minimum wage has negative side effects, especially on small business. We can address the homeless problem pretty easily if we could decrease the minimum wage for them. And before you get angry at this one, what kind of smartphone are you using? There's a reason our jobs go over seas.
Jobs that would pay very low wage wouldn't be difficult jobs, but they also wouldn't care if the person is only half mentally there. Small pay, small work, you can be promoted and given raise. A factory for instance could even build a campground with facilities. How many homeless folks would love to have that opportunity? How many more potential employers does that produce?
We should also consider decreasing the federal budget and start paying off our debt, no? I would think that's a pretty important thing to keep in mind also.
These things are needed in order to achieve a more universal happiness.
Congratulations, you've just reinvented fuedalism, complete with the keep. Not trying to be flippant, but this is a perfect example of how 'rational' geeks can trivially rationalise literally anything, by ignoring context and history. Protections like minimum wage, safe working conditions, minimum work age etc didn't arise de novo. They exist (all be it in a much more limited form in the US than elsewhere in the developed world), because of repeated public outrage at the abuses their lack engendered. Repealing them to 'create jobs' as though that were in itself a nebulous good is the same logic that has prisoners in chain gangs (universally from poor, and overwhelmingly black) recreating the era of slavery in Texas.
I recommend anyone who holds this view to read at least one book written by Thomas Sowell.
Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed#Criticisms...
Repeated public outrage: cars are becoming less safe.
Economist: There is a tradeoff between safety and affordability, and making cars safer means less poor people can actually afford to buy them. In turn, this makes transportation even harder for them, which in turn means they will have fewer chances to improve their lives.
Repeated public outrage: lack of minimum wage will cause more exploitation.
Economist: Minimum wage destroys job opportunities for low skilled workers, who are already heavily marginalized in society. And once they are out of the job market, it becomes even harder for them to return to it.
That's why you create unemployment benefit, preferably in a way that does not discourage going back to work.
This way, works with starvation wages don't exist, and low-skilled workers have a chance to prepare for their next job (and even to be a bit picky). In my view this improves the job market much better than a race to the bottom in working conditions and salaries.
Alternatively you could subsidise low wage employment via a wage subsidy like the earned income tax credit. That way you get more people in work as opposed to fewer and those people develop skills and professional networks which will allow the recipients to escape low wage work in time.
Isn't this much easier said than done? Where will you cap the unemployment benefits so people are not discouraged? How do you come up with the number? How do you plan to verify the effect of your suggested cap?
Raising minimum wage has negative side effects. You can't escape this truth.
My half-informed impression was that it's not–demand for labor is often surprisingly inelastic. Maybe you can go from 100 to 95 people on an assembly line, but you can't have 0.95 of a person taking orders. Also, increasing someone's salary by $1/hr only costs a few thousand dollars per year (~2000 working hours/year + payroll taxes).
So you want to reduce the only leverage any honest regular hard working citizen has? To do what? Save money? How about taxing companies properly for starters? You are the second-biggest market in the world after all.
And another thing: if your goals are to decrease unemployment, homelessness and incarceration it is a totally valid strategy to state those goals publicly. The european givernments I lived under always do this and it doesn’t really seem to have the devastating economic consequences typical US-citizen’ always tell me it must have.
It is amazing how ingrained that corporate think is in the US and how unable people are to see that there are other things inbetween full on anarcho-capitalism and soviet style single party oligarchy.
I also don't think that paying off state debt right now is a good idea. Interest rates are pretty much zero or even negative. We should instead borrow as much as possible. For example we could invest trillions into getting rid of fossil fuels in the next twenty years. That would also create many jobs.
But also, I think this was not meant to be US specific. The real political challenge is trying to do it for everyone. Doing it for the US is easy.
This statement reveals a lack of knowledge of the root causes of the homelessness epidemic. Those who are homeless for purely economic reasons are a tiny minority. More often than not homelessness is a second order effect of mental health issues compounded by breakdown in family/community. Those need to be addressed first.
Go do some volunteering and you will very quickly start to understand.
If you can't afford to pay employees, then your business is not viable
From an individualist perspective, anyone without those things, but who is connected at least a little will probably want them, I would wager. Is your argument based on a belief that there are not enough natural resources to accommodate every human in theory? What do you think needs to be fixed before a higher standard of life for all humans should be considered a goal to progressively strive for?
Not at all what I meant. I think we can accommodate a lot more people.
> What do you think needs to be fixed before a higher standard of life for all humans should be considered a goal to progressively strive for?
I'm saying that the goals needed to achieve that kind of Utopia don't look like the goals described. I think many people don't want to admit certain policy failures, but they continue on like an addiction, hamstringing genuine efforts. I'm not sure if it's attainable because so many contentious things will have to change before we can even start with the goals described (food/housing/etc.)
If you want that outcome to be achieved by a scientific process, you need to include those as long term goals. They may not be intermediate goals (e.g. you might need to temporarily reduce health and access to the global network for some part of the population to send them as volunteer settlers to a space colony), but if you're not measuring them and using their improvement as progress, you cannot guarantee that in the long term the scientific progress will achieve them.
He said that we could work two hours a day, and retire after just a few years, having paid for our living expenses for the rest of one's life.
For one thing, we measure ourselves not in absolute but relative terms. This leads us into a never-ending signalling arms race.
The old caricature of the rich tycoon putting his feet up on the desk could not be more false. Look at the most visibly successful people in society (Bezos, Musk, even Zuck) and they all work extremely hard. Why is that? They have more money than anyone could spend in a lifetime. What they can't buy is satisfaction. Therefore they must continue to work hard and continue winning.
When you look at these most extreme, but not at all alien examples of humanity, you see that Fuller's claim is absurd. Anyone who had the capability to earn enough to retire on working just a few hours a day for just a few years would never be satisfied with that.
The harsh truth of it is that the richer and more technologically capable we become, the more resources we consume without any real net benefit in wellbeing or life satisfaction.
That's exactly my point: We already have all the technology we need, our problems now are all psychological and spiritual.
Bucky thought that it would be enough to put the technology before the people in what he called "Design Science Revolution", but as you point out it hasn't worked so far... People don't even notice.