Its a simple failure of imagination. When 50% of the people were farmers, not many of them could imagine being airline pilots. A combine harvester must have seemed like a fearsome thing indeed.
You lay off 10,000 factory workers. Do you think they can ever be airline pilots? Or programmers? Or financial analysts? Or what-have-yous?
Sure, a small (very small) percentage of these folk will successfully retrain into another field, but the vast majority of them will be left behind. They do not have the educational background to pursue the knowledge-based jobs that are the only ones hiring.
And even if they did have the necessary educational background for retraining, who would pay for it? Education in the USA is already absurdly expensive, and the employer sure as hell won't be picking up the tab.
This is the reason that we need a wage for displaced workers. People who will probably never work again, due to lack of education or ambition. It's socialism, yes, but are we going to be responsible for allowing millions of people to become beggars while we enjoy the fruits of our labors?
I started my career right out of uni by developing software which eliminated hundreds of low skill jobs. Hundreds... really, what can you say about that? That I should pat myself on the back for boosting productivity by 3000% for a junior programmer's wages? That someone else would have done it if I hadn't? That these people have been freed up from tedious, repetitive jobs to become the creative people they always wanted to be? Honestly, the excuses ring a bit hollow.
It's my belief that as a result of our efforts, our drive to untangle complexity, that there will likely be 50% unemployment in the US by the end of the next decade. Let's design for that. I wish that our mentally absent congressmen would give a damn about what is happening to our economy under their watch.
Are you sure it's a good idea to systematically reward a lack of ambition?
> It's my belief that as a result of our efforts, our drive to untangle complexity, that there will likely be 50% unemployment in the US by the end of the next decade. Let's design for that.
You proposed design will become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Putting people on a permanent wage because they will "probably never work again" will signal to those people that society considers them worthless. You will never produce anything of sufficient value for anyone to consider it worthwhile to feed you for the effort.
You provide question and the answer. The idea of universal income (which this proposed wage is a limited application of) is that you give everyone a bare minimum stipend, while encouraging people to go out and earn more if they want more.
It wouldn't be event that expensive, considering what a modern social state already spends on its citizenry.
In a sense, modern government is partially already a mechanism of universal income (many government employees are unfit for being productive in private sector).
While it's good that there's a safety net so slip-ups and bad luck won't put you in the street and kill your children, institutionalising that dynamic (effectively removing it) will have catastrophic effects on the values of society.
These concerns are not crack-pot libertarian wet dreams, they were raised even by social democrats when the Nordic social democratic welfare states were designed. Britain has talked about anti-social behaviour and broken society for years (it's not just something David Cameron invented with his good-on-paper/WTF-IRL-"Big Society") - don't have that kind of language for it in Denmark, but the same dynamics are present.
Then find some more advanced goals for people to work at. If they really, truly, want nothing but a bare subsistence existence, and nothing else that modern society has to offer, then fine, let them sit around eating 2000 calories/day for free; maybe in the future robots will do all the work anyway, and lazy humans can just live off the munificence of their robot benefactors (we're halfway there). But an "advanced" society in 2011 where the reason people work is because they'll starve otherwise, despite the utter un-scarcity of food, now that seems like a pretty shameful dynamic. I'd be more interested in asking, rather than setting up artificial scarcity so that people have to work for the old scarce things (e.g. food) even though they aren't scarce anymore (there's only a distribution problem, not a scarcity problem), whether we can have a society where people work for something else. Maybe the answer's no, but to me that'd be a pretty sad answer.
We have moved beyond subsistence farming and free food - "food on the table" means a lot more, including many scarce goods.
You want tobacco? Go and work for it. You want booze? Go and work for it. You want PS3? Go and work for it.
Isn't this how food stamps are currently supposed to work? They only cover staples, and users aren't allowed to pay for tobacco, etc. The thing is, in the real world, food stamp recipients frequently barter their vouchers for these luxury items.
When considering such measures, we need to stop imagining what an optimal government might be able to do. Instead, look at the history of such efforts, and the incentive structures (consider Public Choice economics) to understand what is likely to transpire.
You act like this is a fundamental feature of humanity; it's not. Its a learned response to thousands of years of scarcity. There were plenty of societies where food was plentiful and thus they never developed this sort of social conditioning.
In a world where food, shelter, necessities are plentiful people will be freed up to gain social standing through creative endeavors. Or perhaps we'll do away with our need to rank each other based on arbitrary metrics. I welcome this future.
It's an idea whose time has come.
The value of new research undertaken by people on transfer income: very small, if any at all.
The reason the idea requiring direct democracy is that it involves two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
I guess it'd be interesting to read a study quantifying it, but I'd be surprised if it were really true that not much research comes out of people on transfer incomes, especially if you include the people who used transfer incomes to bootstrap the early stages of a startup.
Yes, unemployment benefits can provide a backstop that enables entrepreneurship, but Denmark has more generous benefits than most other countries, yet the levels of entrepreneurship don't follow.
Any other direct subsidy towards entrepreneurship (although often misguided) aren't transfer income in the sense being suggested by the GP.
The people who can just sit around and come up with exciting new research or who can become successful entrepreneurs are generally also the kind of people who can get a job if they want or need one.
Make that one wolf and 99 pissed-off sheep.
The thing is, it's not up to us to decide if it's a good idea: it's up to the people who would benefit -- which is the vast majority.
You can have concentrated wealth or you can have democratic principles, but you can't long maintain both.
No, I am not advocating a cash wage, what is needed is a wage that enables the holder to claim a fixed list of goods (e.g. food stamps allow the holder to buy food, not XBOX games). Likewise, I'm sure that the statistics show that giving money to the homeless to buy food is unlikely to produce positive outcomes, but giving them food or shelter directly is a more responsible option.
I believe that a broad application of this same idea -- to provide a wage for displaced workers in the form of rights to claim an enumerated set of goods rather than indirectly via a cash stipend preserves the incentive structures present in the other areas of our economy while taking care of those left behind yet not undermining ourselves in the process.
A final thought -- consider that an educated, well-fed population with a low infant mortality rate has fewer children. Therefore, a morally acceptable form of population control is available to us: feed and educate the populace. If we can do that, then we should be able to sustain 50% unemployment.
Why the assumption that if you pay someone a living wage when their services are no longer needed, they won't continue to seek meaningful work, re-educate themselves or provide valuable services to the community? I come from a working class family, all of whom have the option to not work yet choose to do one or all three of the above out of a basic need to participate in their community and be valued.
People who will probably never work again, due to lack of education or ambition.
There exist plenty of large areas dominated by people who are, let's call it "empowered to provide meaningful services to the community". Yet, these areas are more often examples of urban decay than they are of thriving communities.
The same thing doesn't work for people outside our tribe. Evolutionarily speaking, these were rivals for our food or mates or whatever. So we don't feel the same compulsion to help outsiders.
Here's a counter-example for you: I know several people (and I'm guessing that most of us do) that have exaggerated disability claims, so they're now "retired" and living off social security, when their disability isn't great enough to, e.g., run the machinery to dig a new septic tank.
How many people do not try to minimize their tax burden? Isn't that another example demonstrating that people don't naturally contribute to the well-being of those outside their tribes?
I mean, I think a some of the barrier to unskilled employment right now is cultural. Having someone clean your personal space is seen as extremely crass. Heck, expensive software engineers are expected to clean up their own cube. Even having a secretary is kinda weird these days. Man, it's really nice to have support staff, but culturally, we seem to look at it like owning slaves.
But really, I think most of the problem is just that the economy is in the dumps. It's hard for anyone outside of the top 20% skill-wise to find a job right now, doing much of anything. It's an employer's market.
>And even if they did have the necessary educational background for retraining, who would pay for it? Education in the USA is already absurdly expensive, and the employer sure as hell won't be picking up the tab.
This is the economy again. During the dot-com boom? anyone that looked like they might be able to become qualified (including a 17 year old me) could get a job learning to become a computer programmer or a sysadmin. These days, companies don't want to take those kinds of risks; but I think that has more to do with the economy than with any structural differences in the computer industry.
I mean, do you really 'train' a SysAdmin? that's not really how I've seen it work. You get a kid who is into that sort of thing already and throw some books at them, and it sticks or it doesn't. The cost is that the kid is going to make some mistakes while learning, you don't know if the kid is even capable of becoming good, and even if you pick the right kid, the kid doesn't break anything too expensive, you get them the right books, even then, once you have built a pretty good SysAdmin, well, they might just leave for a better paying job.
In Mexico and South America, it's even expected that if you're well off, you're going to have household people (gardeners, cooks, cleaning staff).
Here in Uruguay I used to have a cleaning lady (once a week) when my income was U$ 500/month ! (she made U$ 10 per visit).
Sure education is expensiv but self education is not!
Im not saying everybody should learn programming. There is lots of other stuff that will not get taken ofer by mashienes and its pretty easy to learn a lot of this because of the Internet.
The problem is that often its not really about beeing good, its more about having finished the right school or having the right certification. That a hole diffrent set of problems.
Farmers are highly entrepreneurial and work very hard, a combine is a welcome invention. It's the hired farm hands who are worried about the combine harvester. It's a very interesting question, what will happen to our society when we have less and less need for manual and rote labour.
But what they lack is capital, scale, vertical integration, and access to enterprise IT systems.
The first casualties of technological advances were the manual laborers, but, as technology advances, and automation evolves further, the "independent farmer" will cease to exist in North America outside of the smaller retirement/sustenance farms (that are numerous, but don't contribute that greatly to the food supply) and niche areas that supply "Organically Grown", "Locally harvested" markets.
The Very Large Farms (that is, those farms doing > $500K sales/year) will continue to grow as a percentage of total farms, and those will increasingly become larger, and, as a result, eliminate farming jobs.
Farmers are stubborn, and resilient, so it won't happen quickly - but as those farms are lost to the mega-agricorps, they won't come back into the family. Average age of a farmer in the United States is around 57 - so, in about 10 years from now, as we see wider deployment of automated vehicles, yet another segment of the american job market will begin its permanent decline.
"As America starts to debate farm subsidies and big ag, while college grads are starting more small farms than any time in the last 100 years, look to the power of technology to break open an unhealthy and highly inefficient food distribution system that has left the world both obese and stuck with higher food prices."
"Corbin Hill is using Farmigo and a CSA model to deliver this healthy and fresh food at prices LOWER than the local Harlem supermarkets."
http://sixkidsandafulltimejob.blogspot.com/2011/11/corbin-hi... (VC)