I think a flat tax + UBI is the only way to go. The dream of AI should be a society where maybe 10% of people have to work. The nightmare is if the other 90% still need work but can’t find it.
We would do well to improve safety nets so that everyone benefits.
The corporate veil is extraordinarily valuable to the point where a minimum 10% tax on any money passing through options makes a lot of sense. However, the idea you can pass liability off for free is so pervasive you’d never get something like that to pass. Not because of how good or bad the idea is, but because of how effective voting blocks + donors are.
But I think the nightmare you imagine is not realistic. There isn't a lump of labor. We shouldn't make policy decisions based on the assumption that the labor pool will be limited.
Three people doing the work required to seed, spray, harvest 4,000 Hectares for assorted barley, canola, etc is commonplace today in areas that once struggled to farm a few hundred hectares with four brothers and a father.
Where labor has contracted in some places, it has grown elsewhere.
In any case, COVID was a hellish time for pretty much every economic metric, but for unemployment specifically, the catastrophe didn’t actually end up lasting that long, and the labor market in the U.S. has recovered remarkably well.
I think that’s fair, since even if you are homeless, as long you’re receiving unemployment benefits, you count as part of the statistic.
And there’s good reason to count certain people out of the labor force. Retired folks, stay-at-home parents, anybody else that’s willfully unemployed—if your working in or around government trying to make labor policy decisions, including these people gives you an inaccurate picture of the labor market. If you want to help people get jobs, you need to focus on the people that actually need help.
Of course no statistic is perfect, but broadly, I think that the unemployment rate is a useful and accurate measure. If you think otherwise, I’d invite you to propose a good alternative.
It’s not on me to invent a new statistic. It is on me to push back on ridiculous claims that minimize the fact that this statistic has been defanged over and over again in the decades since it was first introduced.
To include people who don’t want to be employed in the labor force is counter-productive, since why would you try to find jobs for people who don’t want them?
It’s not even that these people are “lazy” like many who (wrongly) disparage the unemployed say. They just aren’t looking for jobs at the moment—stay at home parents, retired people, anybody that doesn’t need/want to work. (And by the way, plenty of homeless people receive unemployment benefits and are therefore included in the statistic.)
The unemployment rate is useful because it helps us see how many people need jobs. If you start including people who don’t need jobs, the metric just becomes less useful.
To your other point, I’m not asking you to invent a new statistic. It’s just that when people say one metric isn’t working, someone smart usually has come up with alternatives. A lot of people for example don’t like using GDP, and thus economists have come up with HDI, GNI weighted GDP, or whatever else suits their taste.
I bring this up because there are few alternatives to unemployment metrics, simply because they are not nearly as problematic as you paint them to be. Practically every competent government on Earth uses the same measures for unemployment, and specifying the labor force to only people actively looking for work is very standard; if you want to say that this nearly ubiquitous method is wrong, I think it’s reasonable to ask what needs to be fixed.
Edit: only people who are homeless for less than six months would be on unemployment benefits. That doesn’t sound like “plenty” to me.
Eurostat, the Internation Labor Organization, OECD--what incentive do all these organizations have to globally misrepresent unemployment? Of course they measure and consider U6, but they choose to headline U3 instead not because it's prettier and they want to serve national propaganda interests, but because it's just more useful.
C'mon man. I have to give up on this thread.
Edit: it must just be a happy coincidence that U6 has never been lower than U3.
Where do all jobs come from? Ultimately they’re created by people, so I wouldn’t worry about there being a demand but no supply.
Our wants today are vastly different from our wants a hundred years ago, and thus the labor pool looks vastly different. We shouldn't make policy decisions based on the assumption that there is a limited lump of labor.
This made me pause and think for a moment.
Desire is not an external entity or being that manipulates us. Our biology generates desire, since it has been selected for by evolution through natural selection.
People create jobs.
But unlike the conventional picture people have in their head, it is a unidirectional creation process (i.e. by the "job giver"). The job is created through the dynamic of the "giver" and the "seeker".
Citation required. I assure you, wanting vs. being able to realistically acquire is a very powerful force of want extinguishment. You cannot, in fact, get a thing, if the world around you is not conducive to enabling you to pull the requisite capital together to meet the prices set. Something that is getting markedly harder for various strata in the economy currently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarcity
Sorry to be so overly-intellectual. I probably should’ve been simpler.
FYI in some places flat taxes are technically unconstitutional
You can't have a revolution based entirely on not having to wipe your ass (except when you still do because bidets are garbage).
Unless you are fresh out of college and working at some lame startup or coding sweatshop, mature white collar work has always been pretty damn close to "not having to work".
You're easily replaceable early on when your only value is doing, but with more experience come more meetings and responsibilities. You become valuable for knowing, and knowing is not mere knowledge.
Assuming that the years of experience have shaken out the chaff, the only source of stress for those who remain employed is what is already inseparable from life itself. Personal growth without work doesn't even make sense.
That's why it doesn't feel like work. That's why the concept of "not having to work" is pathological and ridiculous. Anyone feeling this way about "work" needs to get help. I'm totally serious when I say that.
For me they're a huge upgrade.