http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/charts/employment/...
I fear that 1999 was "peak labor" -- the point at which technology started to destroy more jobs than it created.
We HN types live in a bubble in which times couldn't be better -- but in the larger economy there are fewer jobs paying and they're paying lower wages. It's troubling.
That's an odd response to our most precious resource, human minds, being freed from time sucking drudgery.
We've created the economic systems. They are not the Laws of the Universe. We can change them if they become a problem
But we're not there yet, and you can't tell someone that is unemployed and can't find work that they should be happy to be free of the time sucking drudgery of employment. That's clearly a "let them eat cake" response.
How might I contribute to making Basic Income happen? I've been seeing more and more people talk seriously about it, which seems like a great sign, but perhaps not enough to change anything. Are there any advocacy efforts I could donate to?
I think that a lot of people hear Basic Income, and if they have some form of compassion for their fellow man and an awareness of computers currently allow and where they are headed, they understand that pretty soon we'll have to figure out a way of living in which a large portion of the population, or at least a large enough amount to comprise a real threat to social stability, will be unemployable. Completely. There will be no job that actually contributes to moving our society forward that either a machine or another person with greater abilities will not be better suited for. There will literally be no place in the economy for them to contribute.
So what do we do with these people? Well we say that they get a Basic Income, enough money to live, and not just survive, but live. We're not going to be able to consign a hundred million people to lives of depredation, so Basic Income is going to have to cover the basics and some of the stuff that makes life good.
In a lot of these discussions there are examples of the money currently spent on the welfare bureaucracy and how all that money can be rolled into BI, and I think that a lot of people stop listening there, convincing themselves that we'll be able to create a BI, provide for people who can no longer work, and nothing in their lives will have to change. And my gut tells me that this is dead wrong.
So what can you do to contribute to making BI happen? Well you can realize that taking care of those people is not going to be free. You can start making yourself comfortable with the idea that taxes will have to go up. Definitely on the ultra rich and the very rich, but also on us programmers, sitting here on HN and complaining about making 180k a year because San Francisco. BI is going to mean that the people we put out of work get taken care of, but its also going to mean that you'll be driving a camry and not a tesla. Because we are the top 5%, and even if the 1% and the 0.1% are definitely going to have to be taxed way way more, we are going to have to do our part for the 95% below us. You've got to square yourself with the possibility that having a job will be something that very few people get, and that you will not be rewarded with incredible riches for doing so. BI will probably bring a bunch of us a lot closer together, and hey if we're lucky it might even be awesome Star Trek style.
But to get there we're going to have to sacrifice to take care of our fellow man, and it won't all just magically take care of itself. If you start preparing for this now, hopefully you won't be like so many of the baby boomers I see, my parents and their friends included, who pay lip service to taking care of their fellow man, but whose actions in the voting booth betray these principles, as they just can't bring themselves to make even a small sacrifice in their current living condition. That's what I try to work on every day, making sure that I am not so addicted to my lifestyle and material goods that when BI and a 90% marginal top tax rate are on the ballot, I don't blink and find myself voting for the man who promises "tax cuts and forget about the other guy".
That, I think, is the biggest thing you can do to make BI happen.
Virtually every discussion of basic income on the internet these days avoids doing even the most basic arithmetic. So I'll give a very oversimplified set of calculations below. The details can be nitpicked ad nauseum, but this is essentially Feynman-style estimation, so please see the forest and not just the trees.
First, some facts:
According to the BLS, the lowest quintile of Americans spent $12,955 on goods and services in 2014 [1].
The US adult population in 2014 is about 242.5 million people [2].
So if we wanted to provide a guaranteed unconditional income equal to the average yearly expenditures of the bottom quintile of Americans, the cost would total about 3.14 trillion dollars.
Total U.S. tax revenue in 2014 was 3.2 trillion dollars [3].
So a basic income program that merely provides poverty-level income for all Americans is going to cost all of our current federal tax revenue, and we are already running a federal defecit.
This is plainly not feasible without vastly increasing tax revenue.
You could argue that state and local revenue could pick up the slack, but states and municipalities are generally under severe budgetary pressures as well and have even less power to raise additional revenue. Even if all tax revenue in the US from any source is considered accessible for a basic income program, that pile of money is only about $6 trillion, so a poverty-level basic income program is going to consume half of all tax revenue collected from any source in the US.
All of this is an optimistic calculation. It doesn't account for the contraction of the economy (and thus tax revenue) that would occur due to people ceasing part time work or other low paying jobs. Or the increasing amount of federal revenue directed to servicing our national debt [4], which will make any basic income system increasingly unaffordable in the future (absent corresponding economic growth). You could alleviate some of that economic contraction by taxing the basic income itself (possibly conditionally, based on economic circumstances), but then you are providing a post-tax basic income that doesn't even meet the poverty level.
The fact is that the demographics of the United States simply prohibit any meaningful basic income system from working at the present time. It simply won't work without increasing tax revenues to levels that will destroy the economy. And this is ignoring the political obstacles that would have to be overcome (such as placing most of the additional tax burden on the 1%).
Our existing welfare systems, inefficient and bloated as they are, at least attempt to target those who are most at need. If you try to make a basic income system that essentially replaces existing welfare programs by taxing most of the basic income back from people who exceed certain economic threshholds, you are doing little more than inefficiently adjusting tax brackets.
It's a nice dream, but somebody has to pay for it and right now nobody can.
[1] ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/standard/2008/quintile.txt
[2] http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/99-total-populat...
[3] http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/fed_revenue_2014US
[4] http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-GT738_ristid_G_...
You are not going to put 50% of people of work, and you're not going to consign a hundred million people to a worsening standard of living even as those with capital get to live like gods. Its not happening. Period. End of. So however it gets done, the fruits of automation will be shared in some way with the majority who do not own factories or the factories will be smashed. We can bandy about numbers all day, and talk about levels of taxation that will "destroy the economy" but at the end of the day the bottom line is that we will be taking care of those who can't work, and that is probably going to end up including you. So you should probably start thinking about how we can make that happen in the least disruptive way possible, and what you can do to make it happen.
This is known as the head-in-the-sand approach and it is obviously nonsense.
Basic income is one proposed solution to the increasing automation of work and population growth. It's achieved such a cultlike status in some circles that those within them forget it's not the only possible solution.
And, truthfully, there is no guarantee that a solution will even be found. If one is, it may not be a "solution" in the usual sense. Here are some other possible resolutions to increasing wealth concentration combined with population growth:
1. State redistribution of wealth via tax and other changes
2. A shift of wealth from industries that automate things to those that produce valuable things or services which cannot be automated (i.e. as automation becomes increasingly cheap, competition in industries which rely on it results in those becoming commodity industries)
3. Society chooses to tolerate an increased number of homeless and poor people and their suffering rather than make changes to its tax or legal structure.
4. Artificial population control. A world with decreasing job opportunities can be sustained as long as population decreases in proportion.
5. Revolution
And there are other options, some completely unseen.
> "You are not going to put 50% of people of work, and you're not going to consign a hundred million people to a worsening standard of living even as those with capital get to live like gods."
The exact numbers may not be as dire as 50%, but historically plutocracy has been the norm and not the exception. Plenty of egalitarian societies (for varying definitions of "egalitarian") have sprung up and died off, but plutocracy as a system exhibits long term stability due to the nature of wealth and inheritance. Whatever its moral deficiencies, plutocracy is simply a consequence of the fact that wealth naturally tends towards concentration rather than dispersal.
The real problem with basic income is that the inspiration for the system not only relies on an unproven assumption about the future, but one that has no historical precedent: the destruction of job opportunities for most people without a corresponding increase in new opportunities. The former has happened over and over throughout history but it has always been followed by the latter.
What we've seen over the past century has been a steady automation of mundane tasks displacing menial labor and an increase in the number of people in "creative" professions. Until strong AI comes along, and in particular a strong AI that enjoys making art, there will always be a need for human beings to serve in the latter category of jobs.
A bigger economic problem, and one which actually does deserve serious thought and consideration, is how to make the economics of a creative economy work. The old feudal style model of publishers lording over their effectively serf-like artists (while the latter churned out content whose profits were largely eaten by the former) plainly doesn't work.
The bottom line is that changes are coming, and while those changes can't be stopped it is hubris to claim that one and only one never-tried-before solution will solve a never-occurred-before economic problem. The reason you never see faithful proponents of basic income discuss it in terms of hard numbers is because doing so makes it obvious that other solutions will have to be considered. The mainstream proposals for basic income are an economic religion complete with all the hallmarks of religion: an unfalsifiable dogma ("in the future, robots will take all the jobs"), guilt and fear as a means of control and persuasion, and an apocalptic narrative. But they are most definitely not economic science.
Everyone I've heard seriously propose a basic income has coupled it with a progressive increase in federal income tax, so that individuals earning above $50k or so would receive no increase in their BI+earned income-federal income tax.
So the actual ratio of basic income provision to federal income tax would be much lower than 1:1. 1:2 seems more reasonable.
Then, the expectation is we would significantly reduce spending on distortionary and expensive bureaucracy like food stamps, welfare, minimum wage, school lunches, and housing subsidies.
I imagine overall people in high income brackets would pay higher income taxes to the extent that we wanted to balance the budget.
The list goes on and on. Its cheaper to do BI than it is to do what we're already doing. It doesnt cost $3T _more_ it costs less than what we _already_ spend.
Let's make Basic Income a reality and cut out the government middleman/waste from the process!
I think we should develop an online service where we pair working individuals with one or more local individuals who are currently not working or have chosen not to work. Every month, the working person gets to meet up with the non-working one to check in on them and make sure they're doing alright. Maybe even treat them to lunch just to be neighborly. Finally, at the end of their meeting, the working individual writes the other a check to cover their expenses for the month.
I think it's safe to call Basic Income a charity, or at least charitable; it's a very Christian thing.
And while I agree that economic systems can and should be changed as we shift towards a post-labor society, I'm worried about political obstacles to that. Even in the height of the worst recession in 70 years, we couldn't get Congress to approve food stamps for people out of work. How are those same politicians going to feel about cranking the work week back to 20 hours and tripling the minimum wage to make everything balance out? And if companies end up having to pay the same in labor costs to offset their automating, then what's the point in them automating? Will we actually see automation-enabling technology (3D printing, robotics, etc) hit their own peak and slide backwards in the face of higher fees/social unrest/political change/etc etc etc?
It's a trickier situation than you're giving credit.
They will feel how the people tell them to feel (ideally).
Now, the real problem, how to change people's minds?
I see that as a job well suited to HN frequenters: intelligent, imaginative, creative people need to take their responsibility as harbingers seriously and evangelize for a better future. Smack one molecule at a time and eventually the whole pot boils. Show people that the way things are done are not necessarily how they must be done. As a group, we've done a pretty good job in certain areas but I definitely see a lot of reluctance to tackle macro-social problems with the same zeal as attacking other historical accidents that impede progress like Uber taking on cab companies.
It's tricky, sure, but its all in our collective head.
I absolutely agree that we are in a great position to influence debate. If anything needs to be disrupted, it's the political system. I wish more folks with our skill sets were interested in tackling something like that.
Let's try the previous scenario, then. Is it "freedom" to do easily automated mindless manual drudgery?
And what people seem to miss is that every task - even the task of raw creation or idea generation - can be considered trivial once you sufficiently understand the process behind it. Any job or skill can be broken down into easily digestible bits, and once that's possible the system can be automated and scaled.
Hell, company generation is the same way. Look at Y Combinator. They've created a system that generates companies in a very automated, predictable fashion. They have an algorithm for making companies successful. It isn't 100% successful (yet) but any self-aware system will improve itself over time as the process is better and better understood.
So while I would obviously prefer to be running Y Combinator than assembling brooms in a factory, I'm not sure you can consider one more valuable or "worthy" based off of whether one is more "free" or not, especially if your definition of freedom is something that can't be automated - aka reduced to an algorithm.
We must tackle some serious issues before that is viable as I'd like it to be, though.
First is that we must value creators and be eager to pay them for their work. Right now that is a serious problem in an era of glorified piracy. Hopefully, with technology bringing creators closer to their audience, this attitude will change.
Second, it wouldn't hurt to turn our incredible per capita productivity into more free time. This is time to both create and consume more of those creative works.
Sometimes the factory job that was just automated was the only job in town, and companies aren't going to retrain a 50y/o to program computers. Many people just don't have the resources to learn a new job, or move and find a similar one.
Right now we're on a path to automate jobs more quickly than people can reorganize into new careers. In the long term the economic systems will work themselves out, but in the short term there's a huge potential for social and economic unrest.
If you were supporting your family on "time sucking drudgery", your perspective might be a little different.
It's sad that for all the progress we've made we have to say "If these people don't spend all day doing something mind numbing and tedious all day their families will suffer!".
Is that how we want people deciding to do what they do with the bulk of their time, avoiding suffering with their family's survival at stake? It seems like a way to bake terrible exploitative inefficiencies into the system.
Then again, I am in a very 'hopeful for humanity' mood today. Perhaps there are a lot of people for whom, even in the best of circumstances, can only hope to contribute just that much to society.
Exactly how is the people in the receiving end of automation to develop the many skills needed to put together a "replacement system"... overnight... and execute flawlessly with no safety net below???
> Is that how we want people deciding to do what they do with the bulk of their time, avoiding suffering with their family's survival at stake? It seems like a way to bake terrible exploitative inefficiencies into the system.
YES, pretty much it. This is not the first time this has happened. Think of the liberation of the slaves in 19th century US, or women's right to divorce. If those freedoms do not come hand in hand with reliable access to means of production, they predictably turn into weapons. You get "free" but get cut off access to any legal means of earn your keep. Then you are free to either die or go rouge and join the underworld of predators and parasites.
A few percentage points over the course of 25 years? How significant is that over the course of millennia?
People have been "fearing" peak labour for centuries. Guessing where technology will bring is 100+ years is futile.
ZeroHedge has been very adamant about exposing the problem with your assumption: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-10-03/hiring-grandparents...
You assume the Baby Boomers can retire, and I assert that they are the most indebted, non-saving, addicted to their lifestyle cohort the US has ever seen. The only natural drop is when they drop dead naturally...but they'll go out kicking and screaming, demanding free healthcare that they didn't pay for, etc, etc.