As others have noted on HN, what you're describing is called the "Lump of Labor" Fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
The long-term, progressive solution is to train people up. Give them the resources and autonomy to learn the skills they need to rise to a higher level of work. If this is done, then we break out of the zero-sum labor regime, people graduate to more creative, high-yield work, and we can all be happy.
But... someone has to pay for these people to survive while they learn, which takes far away from our original-sin (work, or don't eat) economy and closer to the basic income concept.
The unpaid internship phenomenon is not there to skirt minimum wage laws, but to avoid an uncanny valley. The actual economic worth of a publishing intern is nonzero (and probably above the minimum) but unsavory. No middle-class college-educated person will work for $9.50 an hour-- it's a pride thing-- so the wage is reduced to a flat zero and the job type is redefined as a "learning experience". To be fair, it's not totally dishonest bullshit. If the pay is zero, the power dynamic is different. So it is a different kind of experience (I'm just not sure how much of one it really is).
I actually think that a basic income is good insofar as it removes the need for the minimum wage. Minimum wage is essentially a clumsy minimum-income program where the bill is paid by low-end employers, who respond by cutting low-end jobs, creating unemployment. In theory, without a minimum wage, we'd have zero unemployment (except for the beneficial, intrinsic kind). Add that to basic income, and the (theoretical) result still holds: full employment. Most capable people would work, for economic reasons, but the option not to work would give employees more leverage and be better, on the whole, for society. As much or more work would be getting done, since it's unambiguously bad for people to be economically disenfranchised (1930s proved that fucker true).
It's probably one of those things that happens, but is more isolated than it seems.
Wow -- that's pretty far removed from reality, at least as I've seen it. I know plenty of people with undergraduate degrees who work for that or less, because they can't find jobs related to their field. They would definitely work paid internships that were minimum wage, if it was part of the career path.
In fact, that's about on par with what I get from teaching classes as an adjunct!
I think some degree of discretionary income is useful, if only from a complexity-reducing standpoint (better to give the person funds than to regulate "how much phone" is necessary to get jobs and what is a luxury).
At any rate, I don't worry about the parasites we might have at the bottom of society if we're more compassionate. The costs they induce are a rounding error. We lose a lot more to the parasites we already have at the top of society.
I've always thought the basic income idea is interesting, but I'm not sure how it could be made to work. If everyone receives a basic income, then those who earn more must pay back enough in taxes to cover their own basic income and then some. How this is really different than what we have today? People who receive government benefits get them mostly in the form of discretionary income. The argument goes back to "who" and "how much."
In current situation, if you start working - you are losing your welfare/disability benefits.
I've been curious for awhile: in the USA, if you took Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, student loans, welfare and rolled them all up into one fund that was evenly divided to each person, how much would you have given out? Turns out the number is about $6-7k per capita. That's... not enough, but a pretty decent start. The economics suggest it would increase overall productivity, which would bring in a bit more tax revenue by itself. But taxes would have to be raised significantly--but not an obscene amount--to make it work.
Did you read the article?
People at the Social Security Administration, which runs the federal disability programs, say we cannot afford this. The reserves in the disability insurance program are on track to run out in 2016, Steve Goss, the chief actuary at Social Security, told me.
Goss is confident that Congress will act to keep disability payments flowing, probably by taking money from the Social Security retirement fund. Of course, the retirement fund itself is on track to run out of money by 2035.
Goss and his colleagues have worked out a temporary fix under which the retirement and disability funds will both run out of money by 2033. He says he hopes the country will have come up with a better plan by then.
Does it sound like a rounding error to you? It doesn't to me.
And the big screen could easily double as a second monitor for doing work on a laptop.
The worst that happens is someone has more than they need. And then what happens?
One of two things:
1: It sits in the bank, where it's lent out for investment
2: It's spent, possibly on something optional but still legitimately useful and non-frivolous, in which case it flows back out into the economy
I don't see a bad outcome. The vast majority of people want to have the self-esteem boost of fulfilling employment, and will seek it out once they're not stuck in the welfare trap. There's even a solid chance this will bring civilization to a point where no one needs a minimum income.
I'm probably just preaching to the choir, so you can have the last word if you want it.
One of two things:
1: It sits in the bank, where it's lent out for investment
2: It's spent, possibly on something optional but still legitimately useful and non-frivolous, in which case it flows back out into the economy
I don't see a bad outcome..!
The problem with your suggestion is that it would necessarily create runaway inflation, because there's no way to square that payout with government tax income.
You can have redistribution of wealth without runaway inflation, there are a number of existence proofs of this.
A phone is peanuts in comparison to the things that really matter.
How? At what price? 10 hours per week even at $10/hour is still $100/week, minus some taxes - you're at... say, $80/week = max $400/month. How on earth can someone earning $400/month afford 'small luxuries' like a $200 tv? And the 'big screen tv' that was mentioned - I've never seen any (new) under $450 (yet). Not sure where you're living, but for someone earning minimum wage working 10 hours per week these are simply unattainable. Or, let me rephrase that - should be unattainable, because there's nothing left for subsistence.
This would cost $40B a year, which comes out to roughly $400/year for each remaining household that chooses to carry the burden. To a lot of families, that's a lot of money. Is it moral to forcibly take it from them and give it to someone who is willfully idle? Also, would the idleness rate really be 1% as in this example? I think it would be much, much higher.
consider this: there is a factory. it employs 100 workers, generates some amount of value which is split between worker salaries and profits for the owner. now someone invents a robot which can replace 90 of those workers, and cost the less to run and maintain than those workers' salaries. should the factory owner make the switch? of course he should, it's insane to make humans work when a machine can do their jobs. but now what about the people who were working there? they could be forced to retrain and find new jobs (not always possible). they could be kicked out to fend for themselves (what happens now). or the government could tax the means of production highly enough that it could pay them in welfare what they were making in salaries. the factory owner would be no worse off, the workers would be better off, and the government would have corrected for the fact that wealth tends to pool in the hands of the people who already have it, because they are the only ones who can afford to acquire the means of passively generating income.
in terms of morality it seems better than making person A "forcibly"[0] labour for person B simply because person B happened to start out with a lot more money.
[0] no one is putting a gun to his head, but if it's either work or starve you cannot call it uncoerced.
but then it wouldn't be $400 per family...
there's a lot of money pooled at the top, where it's pretty much doing nothing.
In real life, we've been shifting ever-more-steadily towards a rentier economy as actual production grows more and more efficient.
I really don't believe this strategy will accomplish any of these objectives in the way you intend. I don't mean to pick on your example or opinion; apologies if I come off as harsh.
the bugbear of international competition simply means that everyone involved gets caught up in a race to the bottom; the fact is that this would simply be a progressive tax on leveraged ways of making money. there's always an incentive to make more at a lower cost and effort, whether some of that more is taxed or not. i would go as far as to say that it's a basic human drive. the sticking point is, once you have a setup so productive that you do not need other people to contribute to it, what happens to the displaced people?
the current model seems geared towards "deserving" the means to acquire necessities and luxuries, by contributing something to the system, whether the system needs them to or not. however that leads to very strong inequities where the rich get richer and the poor lead lives of ever-increasing desperation, including the need to perform menial jobs at a "loss" (i.e. getting less for them than the human cost of doing them).
i also do not believe my scheme would destroy wealth, for the following reason: $100 would let a poor person eat better, a middle-class person buy a better cellphone, and a rich person tip his blackjack dealer. my contention is that the $100 is therefore worth strictly more in the hands of the poor person, and that "destroying wealth" is an illusion caused by the fallacy that $100 is $100 regardless.
This is just false. As computers begin to become capable of more and more jobs, the demand for human labor will decline. Automation is qualitatively different from mechanization. Education is a thin gilding on an impressive but non-optimal brain architecture. To say education will cure the ills of automation is a bit like saying fitness training could have saved workhorses from obsolescence. Workers of the world, you're fucked.
People often expect that Singularity-causing AI will have a set of pre-programmed guidelines about what to do (human happiness is good, killing all humans is bad, etc). It seems far more likely that we'll just use it to make money. If that happens, the Friendly AI Problem is exactly the Friendly Economics Problem.
So inevitably, the only thing humans will have to contribute to the economy will be consumption. Can AI be a consumer?
This is a critical step, politically. What we do now to the "useless" members of society will eventually be done to all of humanity.
But in my thinking, it's a bit more complicated than you make it out to be. Consumption doesn't really contribute to the economy in the relavent way; labor does. The only reason consumption matters now is that it returns the value of the labor's output to the capitalists. Then they can use the money to buy yachts and private planes and so on. Basically, consumption is a way of turning labor into general-purpose money. That's a fine model until you don't need the labor because you have all these fancy machines that can make everything (and design everything and clean everything and so on). So you lay everyone off. And then there's no reason you want the consumers because no one has given them any money to give back to you. You just make the private airplanes and swap them with the guy who makes yachts and call it day. And you're richer than ever before because you're massively more productive.
Now a few different things can happen: one is that everyone else just starts new businesses that employ the labor so that they can benefit from it, as sort of a second-tier economy, which exists until its elite accrue enough capital to build their own automation and the cycle repeats. That doesn't seem too likely. What seems much more likely is that everyone gets really mad that the current system doesn't provide for them anymore and demand a cut of all these robots' output. Maybe that happens voluntarily on the part of the capitalists (I think this is more likely, on reflection, than it sounds) or maybe it involves some government-sponsored coercion or a populist revolution. I don't really know.
Here's the core issue: "economics" or "the economy" or basically any ideological, rule-based mode of controlling human conduct is all really just a massively-parallel distributed computation/program running on meatware substrate-nodes. The Unfriendly AI is already here, it's called capitalism, it already rules the world, and it runs on us.
The computer is unfriendly, and we are the computer. This is why it has become a political act to remind people that they actually do value things other than capital accumulation.
Yes, AI can be programmed to consume. See Lem's novels as examples.
Of course, you can easily get nonsensical results.
Maybe the Objectivists are right – we need to program our AI to be selfish.