After Jobs Dry Up, What Then?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This is the real problem. I can't imagine any current politician giving a speech like the one quoted in the article. Politics today is not about "How do we make our country as good as possible?". Instead politicians only care about "How do I get my party to win and make the other party look bad?"
Edit: did I say something offensive?
One would be better off looking at what candidates and their backers truthfully represent.
We who?
> And the other party will just drag you through the mud if you try to run on something like "hope."
A pretty much immutable property of the two-party system in the US has been -- from day one -- that the other side will drag you through the mud for whatever you say. Whether it is idealistic or pragmatic or anything else.
The idea that this is somehow new is, well, historically blind.
If there is one thing Americans hate more than they gov killing Americans abroad, its Americans getting killed by terrorists at home. Ya, this is a very abstract threat, but politics revolves around it.
One could ask however, is that kind of thinking what people expected or hoped for?
It has never been. Parties or other representatives will represent (or claim to represent) their backers, not everyone. The more important the backers are the more they will influence the politicians. If there are two parties, one represents everyone equally and the other provides you slightly more advantage than to others, then you will (normally) vote for the latter.
You should _always_ look at politics from the game theoretical and/or evolutionary perspective. (Read 'The Dictators' Handbook').
It's entirely a function of economics. When JFK gave speeches, the U.S. was on the top of a world in which all its competitors had bombed each other to pieces. When Obama gives a speech, it's in a world where U.S. blue collar jobs have fled to China and Mexico. Idealism just rings hollow under those circumstances.
It also just so happens that one of the main parties in the US has been working tirelessly for the last 40 years to make sure that faith in government is lowered. I believe it's their overarching strategy to get people to disconnect from politics, so they can rule the roost. What other reason for their party's popularity, when the party policies are not in the best interest of those voting for it?
However, do not confuse the national parties and the Washington establishment with local Democrats and Republicans. The local level politicians usually are much more responsive to the needs of their constituents.
I think your statements are not in line with the facts, not by far. State Republican governments are often more beholden to corporate interests than even the federal party. They often fall in line with federal level ideological ploys as well (eg. banning gay marriage), so they're no better on that front.
I was merely trying to point out the cause of one aspect of the original post.
Regarding "rape", perhaps Google [mimi alford]; it comes close.
His overall point was to contrast the actual behavior of elected officials with the mores of the time. Compare the epic freak-out over Clinton and Lewinsky to the reverence people have for JFK.
The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons at your wrist, and the wind in your hair.
It's not just a problem with politicians, it's a problem with all of us. We have, en masse, forgotten what actually matters in life.
I'd probably be sick all the time with all that wind.
You don't have to imagine... if you like, you could listen to them all day. They hire speechwriters who author stirring oration, and not even just during campaign season.
No one bothers to listen. Ignorance? A disdain for becoming informed?
I actually think that it's we all know how hollow their words are. How conditional and revocable their not-really-promises are. How many excuses they have ready when nothing changes.
Everyone should read Galbraith's "the Affluent Society". Our economy is built on scarcity; we couple productivity to consumption (thus, we need jobs because we need to have money so we can buy things so we have jobs). This is idiotic, especially when we don't have scarcity any more. It's very likely humanity is productive enough to give everyone a high standard of living, but our economics don't permit it. We're too busy redistributing income upwards.
Basic income seems a way out, at first. But a post-scarcity economy should be fundamentally different. This likely means getting rid of some forms of property; this won't be easy.
We are nowhere near living in a post-scarcity world - a world isn't possible anyway (assuming an earth based society) because there is a finite amount of resources such as land, water, minerals, ect.
Humans have been doing agriculture for 10's of 1000's of years. Simply stating, "Well, that just has to go, period." without explanation (and then moving on from there) is cute, and ridiculous.
I agree that we're not near living in a post-scarcity society, but not necessarily because of technical limitations. Humans don't need infinite amounts of land, water, minerals, etc.
The biggest problem is that a scarcity-based economy hinders the development of a post-scarcity society, by creating artificial scarcity.
And considering that robots already took all the agriculture and manufacturing jobs, and we're supposedly split between "knowledge workers" and "service workers", I'd say the problem of automation taking our jobs still has a long way to go.
This seems like the most important sentence in the article. Raising children, caring for the elderly, editing Wikipedia, free software, &c. creates huge amounts of unremunerated value. If people were freed from economic drudge work, they would have free time not only for leisure, but that kind of valuable work as well.
Japan for example has a time-based currency to coordinate elder care, but that sort of thing will always be an issue of sharing volunteer labor. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11657006
What if you took people who have always had to work/chosen to work and give them resources to free up their time. Of course, you'd probably get a lot of bad things as well as good since sudden changes will always generate some churn and chaos short-term.
Think about this for yourself. If you didn't have to work, or only had to work 25-30 hours a week what would you do with the extra time?
Now apply that to every middle class individual. Sure some would spend the time in less productive or even harmful ways. But others would spend it even more wisely than you imagine yourself spending it.
My in-laws, who diligently spent their entire lives working boring jobs in banks (as accountants and such, not wall street), who prepared for their retirement by paying off their modest $250,000 home (in Nashville, it's nicer than the dollar amount makes it seem), found themselves screwed when they went to retire, as their 401Ks were now worth fractions of what they'd expected.
So they're still working, extending their retirement in the hopes that their portfolios will recover, or that they can continue earning enough while they're healthy that they can offset it.
It literally never occurred to me until your comment that someone might resent them for trying to earn a living for themselves without burdening the rest of society.
Not trying to judge or anything, just wondering what the deal is, because from everything I've seen around me, that is far from typical.
I don't know many people in the rentier class that have never had to work, but my understanding is that the status quo already allows them to spend all the time they want watching reality TV ;)
Other than the idle rich, I don't see many people who've never had to work either. I've seen people unable to work, and I've seen people denied the opportunity to work, but the idle poor are really not as prevalent as people seem to think.
How will the economic drudge work then get done, and by whom?
As I understand it, the increased productivity resulting from increased automation will reduce the need for human beings to engage in economic drudge work.
That seems entirely reasonable to me.
However, it sounds as if the benefit from the increased productivity is to be taken from the person who produced it, and redistributed to others.
In other words, if I own a factory, and I install some robots to paint the cars, and thus no longer need to hire people to paint cars, the economic benefits from the increased automation are to be used to help provide others with a guaranteed income.
Is this roughly accurate?
Automation here is making production a function of capital rather than a function of labor. Certainly legacy property rights would be with the idea that the owner of capital would have all rights to the benefits of the productivity improvements in this case.
Maybe this is a fallacious slippery slope, or projecting too far forward as a means of deflecting your point, but if this process can be extended indefinitely, you might have a small rentier class who have inherited their unearned wealth/capital and a large mass of displaced workers whose labor is obsolete in the scarcity economy.
If your factory is the whole economy, it sounds like a massive decrease in utility to throw all those workers on the street when robots have taken all their jobs. Besides, I don't know who you'll sell your cars to if you fire all your workers. Redistribution seems like a less-bad option.
There's a deeper level, I think, where those legacy property rights are built upon a certain kind of social compact. And if the owners of capital make large numbers of the population economically obsolete, then the social compact has got to change. If the ethical basis of the law is built upon preserving property rights rather than human flourishing, it seems like we'd all be replaced by robots in the end.
In your second paragraph, I'm going to suggest that automation is a function of capital, intellectual effort, personal will and the freedom to act in one's self-interest. Remove any of these and I don't think automation is likely to occur.
Thank you for the comment about the rentier class and inheritance.
If a person owns a certain amount of wealth, and he gives it to someone else, should anyone else somehow obtain title to some or all of it? I say no, on the basis that this undermines property rights.
If I own a gold coin, and give it to my daughter, by what justification does anyone else claim even a fraction of that coin?
I recognize that many people will have a different view. I'm genuinely interested in the logical basis for different views.
As regards the large mass of displaced workers, whose labor is said to be obsolete in the scarcity economy.
I wish to ask, is it really, absolutely, the case that these men and women, if they are free to use their minds, and do choose to use their minds, cannot be productive in a changed economy?
I don't know a lot about it, but I'm wondering if the idea that these people will necessarily be unemployed forever, because "all they have to offer is their labor" (quotes mine) is a projection of the mind-body dichotomy?
I have to get back to work, but in closing, your comment about utility catches my eye as well. For the record, I'm not an advocate of utilitarianism, if that's part of this discussion.
In closing, thank you for a thoughtful reply.
Ideally the owners of the factories/robot armies will have an upside to that deal, but I think once a huge proportion of the population cannot produce and the basic goods are completely delivered by a few private parties,the social balance would collapse and could lead to a revolution.
About employment, I think the notion of work would change, and we'get back to a concept of occupying people. Of course entertainment would be of super high value, but one could imagine that fields with very low return on time invested like research, social care, artisanal craft or art/monuments building would also raise in popularity, with some additional sense of urgency so people emotionaly engage with their 'work'.
In that system people still get value from their work, don't need to feel assisted under a 'basic income' banner. What they do just doesn't affect production of basic goods anymore.
Also religion and gambling and cruel games would be on the rise.
In most places within the US we pay state and local sales taxes today. If we eliminated income tax, AMT, and other taxes on earnings and instead went after consumption, I think it would be a simpler system with fewer loopholes. Obviously transactions between individuals wouldn't be taxed unless there was a way to enforce it (e.g. make eBay capture that 20% consumption tax) but we have that issue today with the states trying to figure out how they can tax online sales.
Nothing currently today prevents any person unemployed and receiving assistance from doing what he claims people would do IF ONLY except society does not penalize sloth and laziness.
Before we get onto the give everyone an income train we need to do some work getting people back into the idea of contributing whether they are compensated directly or not. The idea of take take take without doing giving of your own should gradually moved into the idea of simple repulsiveness. This is where the internet/tv come into play.
It is socially toxic, and only exists because you can fall through the bottom of society and become forgotten and discarded. It is treading water just to survive. It makes people hostile, selfish, and bitter. Plenty of studies show how poverty will change your brain chemistry for the worse.
Of course the first generation of UBI would be a trying time. It is correcting so many social wrongs at once it upsets your worldview completely. But I cannot imagine anyone beyond the first batch ever having anything but significantly increased happiness, social cohesion, voluntarism, and enterpenurism, because once you can (hate to say it) cull the damaged goods, you have a society where everyone can take risks but always keep a roof over their heads and food in their bellies, and be as generous as they want while always having a bed to sleep on. That is such a huge psychological advantage for society.
Which is kind of why I find UBI such a no brainer nowadays. You can approach it from so many angles - cultural, microeconomic, macroeconomic, social, psychological, and every one of them in and of itself has so many benefits it seems insane not to implement it at almost any cost just for those benefits alone. But they are not alone, it helps in almost every problem center of the modern world.
In the US, the lower economic rungs are either working incredibly hard for little gains (try making a livable wage when most employers only offer part time hours that are constantly changing, preventing you from getting health insurance or secondary jobs), living off of welfare, or some combination thereof and also working in the drug/sex/theft trade.
That to me shows that most people have a natural interest in gain above the minimum for survival and an interest in working for it. Unfortunately, most of that work isn't really benefiting society or the people doing it, and it creates a poverty loop.
Even if you believe humans are naturally lazy, what is the takeaway? When their labor value decreases to next to nothing, what value is all their willingness to work for survival?
First thing though, the scenario analysed here is a scenario where there is not enough thing to contribute to.
Let's imagine that everything can be done through a computer and only a few million developers worldwide are required to program the machines. Do you want 10 billion uninsterested people fight to get the job or only the motivated ones ? If there are 2 persons for 1 job, that is stupid to chose the one that hates it and just want to be home doing something else.
Secondly, considering that our whole economy is driven be consumption ( nowadays, there is virtually unlimited amount of money available on the investment side ), so a guy consuming the whole day is playing a bigger part in society than a guy working 12 hours a day and saving his money.
We recently went through a several year period of mass unemployment where many people had free time and those things didn't happen.
If you're guaranteed money, you do away with the marginal effects of means-tested benefits. Basically, if you're a low income earner it can happen that you face a very high effective tax rate, in many countries. If you're guaranteed money, you don't have this marginal tax problem; you can sit on your ass or work for a bit of extra money. If you already make more, take it as a tax allowance.
This in turn means you do away with the means testing system. No more forms to fill out; no more mandatory courses that do nothing but line the pockets of the course provider. No more looking over people's shoulders to see if they're cheating. No more pressure on doctors to write iffy diagnoses.
There are of course issues with this system. For instance what do you do about immigration?
But if that's not going to be the case, if 'universal' is going to be a lie, then I'm opposed to the whole concept. Our society has too much bullshit ageism as it stands. The current social welfare system, flawed as it is, is better than bringing in more.
Those supporting the current system think that it triages need and allocates more to those with more needs. The basic income way of thinking doesn't consider this, everyone gets the same. Everyone getting the same is essential
I lean towards the latter, I think the benefits system is an expensive and ineffective way to triage needs. EG, rent allowance. If we could have a basic income set at a level above the median benefits for non workers, almost everyone would be better off, but not everyone.
Some people would be worse off, unless you take the highest possible benefits and use that as the basic income, but that's unaffordable.
The thing is, I think that the state is very far from meeting people's needs and assuming full responsibility for it. There are right now people who should be eligible or are eligible for some benefit, but aren't getting it. The State can help. It can minimize problems, but it can't solve them fully. I think charities, families and such also need to play a role. I think the idea that the state can make sure people's needs are met is just false. A lot of the triage mechanisms are about pretending that it is, not ensuring that it is.
But there are those without other help, that have no other way of supplementing income that have additional costs. These people will be worse off. Other people will be better off. I think the bigger win should inform the decision, but this is unlikely.
Not really. There are many aspects of the current welfare state system, and there's no reason that some features couldn't be replaced with a UBI, while some situationally-tested features could be retained. The relative costs and effectiveness of various testing methods aren't all the same -- e.g., the adverse incentives of means-testing aren't present with, say, targeting aid based on medical diagnosis. One could replace means-tested programs with UBI but not other targeted programs. UBI can be conceived as replacing all targeted programs, but it doesn't have to be, and it especially doesn't have to do so all at once.
> If we could have a basic income set at a level above the median benefits for non workers, almost everyone would be better off, but not everyone.
Whether that's true or not depends on how you fund the UBI.
I am guessing that it will need to be implemented globally or at least regionally (e.g North-America, Europe, etc). Every country according to their possibilities.
As far as immigration, they'd need a job to survive here much like they do today and only once they achieve citizenship would they be eligible for UBI. I wouldn't see this changing much from today.
But then how do you buy votes to get elected? Decreasing government power and discretion is never a good idea, because it makes it harder to reward your lobbyists and donors.
/s
The idea that "this time it's different" seems so vain to me; like somehow NOW we're able to reliably predict the future of society, when we've proved terrible at doing that for thousands of years.
What an amazing coincidence it would be if we all just happen to be alive at the time when all the surprises were over in human society!
The founding premise of the market economy is that we can't predict the future, so we set up systems to be flexible in the face of changing technologies and cultures. Is that really all over now?
That feels like an extraordinary claim, so I'd want to see extraordinary proof, and I'm not seeing it. Employment is actually on the upswing in the U.S. right now, and there are hiring shortages in "jobs of the future" type fields like programming, data analysis, genetic analysis, engineering, etc.
Employment will change, and our training and education systems need to change too. But I think it's way early to declare the end of specialization and employment.
A job means you have something to offer that somebody is willing to pay you for. If nobody needs anything from you (or nobody has money), what job can you get?
While there hasn't always been currency trading hands for goods and services on a regular schedule there have always been people creating value for themselves, their family, their community and, ultimately, the world. Trading currency is just a convenient way to trade on that value. I have no doubt that we can figure out a way to continue to create value and reward those involved.
That's very reassuring :-)
Left to our own, we will after a while of boredom, just get bored of boredom and create - games, dances, arts, softwares, tools, crafts, houses.
Or put in another way we will continue to satisfy our needs.
We already had, those are so-called 'bullshit jobs' - things that have no value for humanity but has "economical value" because they're part of zero-sum games. But I hope that at some point the society will ask itself the question "why are we all doing this nonsense anyway?" and drop the concept of jobs entirely.
?
While I believe there is plenty of inefficiency for bullshit to live in, I am not sure there is enough to create a whole class of jobs. Do you have some examples of what you mean? I am also not sure how you could say that people creating value are engaged in bullshit...
Almost all of marketing today is zero-sum. Unless you're not coming up with something genuinly new and useful, you're competing for a limited pool of customers - and all the resources you put into it work only to undo the work your competitors do. You can scale marketing expenses ad infinitum for no marginal benefit. Political campaigns work similarly - they all cancel each other out (pg described it in [0]).
Note that this creates a whole lot of dependent industries. Graphic design, "growth hackers", printing houses, people manufacturing ink and paper, all are supported entirely or partially by zero-sum marketing. These can similarly scale up ad infinitum, using up fuel, electricity, time and labour we could put to a better use elsewhere.
Going to disagree there. Marketing and sales can grow a market, not just compete for a limited pool.
But that analysis only holds for a nearly saturated market where everyone has all of the information they need to make a decent decision (think Coke and Pepsi).
For almost everything else marketing is just a type of information flow -- a semi-directed broadcast. This task, getting information where it needs to be, is extremely valuable. Therefore marketing, as inefficient and difficult to measure as it is, creates value.
I think your distaste might come from how inefficient it is, kind of like turning on every light in a neighborhood because one person wants to read at night, but the person selling the book and the person reading the book find enough value in the transaction to more than cover the electricity.
But marketing is not "getting information where it needs to be" anymore. If you let everyone know about your product and this didn't lead to at least some people buying it who otherwise wouldn't, you failed at marketing. This is where you enter the zero-sum game, because you don't want to just inform about your product, you want to influence choice - and so do your competitors.
"The person selling the book and the person reading the book find enough value in the transaction" is a nice theoretical sentiment but I doubt it actually holds in practice. I'm yet to find a single person (except marketers themselves) who appreciates the amount of ads being thrown at them.
> I think your distaste might come from how inefficient it is, kind of like turning on every light in a neighborhood
Yes, this is where part of my distaste comes from - ads are broadcast messages today. This can be limited with e.g. targeted advertising, but it doesn't solve my main issue - that they're zero-sum game, so the inefficiency can increase up to infinity.
And to circle back to the discussion about automation - I suspect that, as people will get automated away from their jobs, you'll see a huge growth of advertising sector - because it's one of the few places that can accomodate unlimited amount of low-skill workers (it doesn't take much of training to make a junior social media marketer; I know from experience - my company's PR department is basically a machine for turning interns into people doing content marketing on Facebook).
Who knows how pervasive that kind of system will become. Will it apply to other industries/mediums? Could Reddit or Hacker News find a way to pay individuals for well regarded content? There are some possibilities here.
But I wonder if that kind of system can really support that many people. Most of the content created sucks, right? Then only a really small number would actually be successful. Maybe you'd have to incentivize sorting through content to find the good stuff a la Steam Greenlight (and find a way to pay users for their work).
Anyways, I'm sure people will find something to do. Even if it's just being paid a basic income for nothing in return. I think peoples' standards of living have been improved by technology (nukes and what not notwithstanding). Why expect that trend to stop now? It's just that, from our relatively medieval point of view, it's hard to imagine what that world will look like so we're naturally scared of it. That's also not to suggest that there won't be serious growing pains while we all collectively try to figure this new world out.
At the top, you have often less than 1% becoming wildly successful, making hundreds of thousands to millions each year.
Below that you have maybe 5-10% who are able to make a living at it, but will not pull any spectacular numbers.
After that, you have everyone else. These are people who's apps are rarely downloaded, who have less than a few thousand views on any video they put up, or actors who are out of work most of the time. These section may pull in some revenue, but not enough to survive on. At best its a side job, at least until their main job goes away.
At the core of all this, is that we don't have enough time to consume all the media that is produced. We often end up letting other curate the content that we consume. Whether it be media companies or friends and family. But it tends to create self reinforcing cycles, driving more attention to the hits and less to everything else.
Guaranteed basic income doesn't necessarily give money to everybody: only at the lowest levels of income, where people already have the lowest levels of consumption. It seems like the increase of consumption at the low end from a basic income could be easily projected, and I suspect the impact on inflation would not be overwhelming. Of course I also think we should have a slightly higher inflation target (say 3%), as well.
A basic income would definitely need to be paired with supply-side policies to reduce poverty, to reduce housing prices for example.
As discussed in the article above and as debated in both right- and left-wing political circles, guaranteed basic income does give the basic income to everybody, either in cash benefits or tax credits [1].
Thus, basic income is unconditional. There is no expensive bureaucracy to decide who gets it and who doesn't get it. And there can be no accusations about "those people" receiving basic income, and the accuser not. Everyone gets it.
That's the beauty of the system.
The article is ambiguous, bringing up the idea as Milton Friedman's support for a negative income tax (which IIRC is a form of GMI).
Why can't everyone be an artist? Because you can only consume so much art. I have a page group that is currently ~45 pages of artists on that website whose galleries I need to review and potentially watch. They total up to around 15k works of art, and that pool just grows, I can never get it under wraps, because it would take me probably a full workweek just to get through half of that.
On that, I'm already following nearly one thousand artists. I get probably 1 - 2 thousand pieces of art every month in my inbox.
A lot of these artists are actually living off their creations. Over time my standards had to rise because there are just so many people drawing. That doesn't even touch the writers on fanfiction.net or the thousands of sites dedicated to hand crafted continuities that are hundreds of thousands of pages long. Nowadays I really only follow people on Deviantart who consistently do beautiful full color ultra high resolution art pieces that would have probably bowled a king over half a milennia ago.
And I'm getting thousands of them a month, for free.
Because a lot of those creators are not living off their creations. They are wasting amazing potential flipping burgers at McDonalds because I don't have the money to fund them all. I've probably spent $100 this year on commissions so far, but I do not have nearly enough income to subsidize the (probably) 800 or so artists I follow who are stuck in bottom feeding jobs to survive.
But that is only bad for the 200 making a living off of it.
You see, the problem with a creative economy (beyond the CGP Grey robots will do it) is that a lot of people are creative, and while very few people are good at it, there are a lot of people. Just on this random website that pales in comparison of scale to premiere web ventures HN talks about all the time (of course most folks on here would love to be as successful as DA) is that you can meet everyones creative needs and desires with significantly fewer than the entirety of the population. Our current economy is satiating our entertainment desires to match whatever amount of money we are socially willing to impart to the business today, and we will only get poorer and less capable to fund entertainers of all forms (artists, writers, animators, comedians, etc) in the future as all our other jobs dry up and we lose all our income.
And then there are all those volunteers.
Today, they live off menial labor jobs. Tomorrow, when the jobs don't exist, they will try to make a living off the creativity when there is nothing left, but it cannot be enough. It is not enough today when wealth inequality is where it is at, it will never be enough tomorrow when it is even more random to find a patron with wealth to fund you - you are basically praying an aristocrat blesses you with prosperity in that world.
But they still give all of it away for free. Fundamentally I'm amazed people even spend money on entertainment at all, because I really do not - I have basically stopped watching film, because I don't see the opportunity cost of moving pictures as being worth it over the millions good of works of art and comics I have not seen yet. Music? There are millions of free tracks that could last me a lifetime on top of the collection I amassed before around 2010 of paid music that would last a lifetime. There are more fantastic free stories told than seconds left in my life to consume them all, and more are made every day.
And this is all in the infancy of the Internet. It has existed as a thing for only about twenty years where creative people could impart entertainment upon us through it. And its adoption grows every year. So the next ten years will not generate 50% more entertainment, it will probably generate magnitudes more, and we already have more than enough for a lifetime.
I mean, look at youtube. 300 hours of video every minute. It only .01% of all youtube content is great, then you are still behind spending this minute reading this sentence than watching that minute of great youtube content.
My point is the cat is out of the bag, and the economics would have never supported the cat in the bag in the first place. Art, music, video, even free (freedom and freeware) games, are all available en masse, at such scale that you cannot ever fathom to consume all we have today. There is no way we can create an economy around creating more of this stuff, because the Internet solves a long run problem that enabled the old world TV and radio industries of yesteryear - seamless persistence. All this data is going to be with us forever, always at our fingertips. No cumbersome recording hardware needed to preserve our entertainment, it is perpetually eternal thanks to the Internet Archive at the least. We can only add more from here on out, but until we achieve immortality we will only have so much any one person can possibly consume. And its not like that person is going to have any money to pay for it, if you have a creative economy, where the status quo is free, and all the other jobs evaporate.
It has a chilling effect on the current generations of artists, because we just don't need what they have to offer.
I'm just saying we can never have a creative economy because we already have a creative economy meeting all our creative demands, and that our ability to demand more creativity will only degrade over time as most people get poorer.
There will always be a market for new art, because not everything possible has been drawn yet, etc. Someone will always want something new, and now there are millions of artists at your fingertips to create it for you. The problem is a lot of them are already creating what they want for free to enjoy, and once you have whatever you want made, you have no more money to be spent on that industry.
That seems to be the business plan of Hollywood these days.
That's classic rock. Any new rock musician is in competition with the best ones of the last half-century. Few will beat the best in the past.
When was the last time someone wrote a new symphony and made money from it?
If it weren't for copyright term extensions, all that would be public domain. In the countries which still have 50-year copyright, it is.
I think UBI could be amazing for that. Take risks and try your dreams and you can always guarantee food and shelter at the end of the day. That would be revolutionary.
We have all these artists today, most of them creating art for arts sake, not for profit, yet many of them are toiling day in and out in banal pointless busywork to survive. You would have more artistic creation in that world, but its still a robot driven economy. Everyone just gets to pursue their dreams, profitable or not.
Sure. But will there always be enough jobs for everyone?
The worthless paper they issue to help their buddies plunder the nations wealth has to stop and we should look for more alternatives to derive meaning for our lives than working to death just to please those greedy capitalists. Enough is enough!
The recalling of the story of Maria Fernandes death always saddens me that a human being had to sacrifice her life for the capitalists to appropriate her work efforts and give her pennies in return just to keep her alive.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2737115/New-Jersey-w...
There's no fundamental law of economics that demands there always be new jobs.
There have been in the past, each wave of disruption created new job categories, even new industrial sectors. But that just means there will be new jobs until there aren't new jobs.
Science fiction authors have no trouble imagining scenarios where there are no new jobs for anyone. If that comes to pass, what then? Presumably the same economic forces that creates such a situation will also have allowed some small percentage of property owners to own the automation that makes everything. Depending on the details, this might not even be a Pyrrhic victory... why would they need your money anymore, if they had fleets of yacht-building automated shipyards and robots that kept the wine cellar stocked? If they can manage the transition from "we still need you to buy our products so I can live in luxury" to "the luxuries are produced in my automated factories directly"...
Then quite bluntly, you're fucked.
> Who knows, perhaps in the future everybody can be an artist
There is the cliche of the starving artist. Even today. And we live in a world which only supports less than 1% artists because that's the ceiling on that occupation. That is mostly the amount of art that the rich want in their lives.
Specialties rely on the idea that only a few do them. One specialty trades its goods and services for those produced by another.
If we all make art, then I could trade my art for yours. But neither of us can eat art.
I think that if "art" is a job that keeps you from starving, it requires a market for buying and selling.
If automation is ubiquitous, it doesn't mean you own it. And if you don't own it, you don't own what it produces.
No yachts for you.
Humans are still monkeys. They won't magically shuck off human nature in time for you have it easy.
And those who most ardently feel differently that everyone should share will use the rhetorical tactics that provoke the opposite of the desired reaction. We already see that with some of the wedge issues.
> but why turn the machine off at all?
Because they can. Because they want to. To prove that they can. To make you get off your mooching ass. To help you by forcing you to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. By reinventing racism and pretending that they are another species. For shits and giggles. To usher in the end times. To prevent the end times from ever occurring. To see what will happen. To see if anything will happen. Because they don't care. Because they never noticed.
I could list hundreds of reasons, all of which will be at least partly true.
You'll still starve, even if you die knowing the "whys".
Not necessarily, inflation and the price level are more complicated than that. Creating new money in an economy with no idle capital might create 1-to-1 price level increases, but generally a guaranteed income is funded by progressive taxation. You'd expect some prices to go up and others to go down because the beneficiaries will use money differently, but a funded general income should cause no general inflation.
I'll say what I always say when this objection is raised: Is the rule that "new jobs will always arise to replace the ones automated" an iron law of nature, or just something that has been happening for a while and will eventually stop happening?
And if it will eventually stop happening, what would the early stages of it stopping look like? Perhaps an economic recovery that doesn't produce as many jobs as expected?
Further reading: http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/03/09/2120134/jobs-automatio...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/green-party/1138380...
The Greens' "basic income" is only a partial one, though; most notably it's set at a level that couldn't possibly replace Housing Benefit, and so doesn't avoid the welfare trap.
You could cover both sides by consolidating aid programs into one basic income payment and bundling with tax reform where all tax paid is via a consumption tax. So borrow the fair tax idea of a prebate, where the government automatically deposits a set amount weekly/monthly into your account.
The worrisome parts here are is that far too many people are willing to live at near poverty levels as long as the feel comfortable and the effort to exist there requires little on their part. We could end up legislating an entire segment to permanent poverty, paid enough to keep them from rising against those who have all the money
The cost is enormous. I believe if you taxed everyone whose net worth is over $1b at a 100% rate, you could pay for this program for just under 2 years.
And if you're talking about "everyone gets the same amount", remember that you have to collect it back, so you have the overhead of giving a person $1 just to collect it back again.
Relatively speaking, our cost of living has already been reduced by 80-90% since the late 1800's. The problem is, wealth is relative, not absolute.
And for most people, the stimulus of spending 1k vastly eclipses the recession of a billionaire losing 1k. The market pressure of demand by those who had none would generate so much economic growth it offsets a huge portion of the tax "cost" of basic income.
The real cost is not the figure in how much you take to give back. It is the opportunity cost - how much potential growth is lost depressing the rich in relation to how much growth is generated stimulating the poor.
And almost every economic report in history shows that is always a positive correlation. That the richer and more equal you make a society the more prosperous it is.
I think HN is a great reflection of that. SV is awash in venture capital, people are getting millions thrown at the most stupid ideas, because we are economically out of sync in this country, where the elites have too much and the masses have too little. This means that the rich are throwing money at random at things hoping to find new ways to get money out of the masses, but when the masses have so little they generate so little market pressure its impossible to gage what they want.
Likewise, you could have the inverse problem - where the masses have huge demand for things, but there is no venture capital left to kickstart meeting that demand. But honestly that sounds completely ridiculous today - in the age of the Internet I see no reason a wholly wealth-equal society could not just kickstart their own VC, because the only difference between one million people giving a dollar and one person giving a million dollars is the immediacy of your responsibility - your VC backer today is a lot more personal than a million funders, but I think Kickstarter and similar projects have shown how the model and work and fail.
But yes, if you talk about universal basic income / citizens dividend / negative income tax / etc in the wrong way, you will trigger all these culturally instinctual emotional responses in people against it.
But it is not like the military, or medicare (or NHS), where pretty much that "cost" is the cost. You spend money on something and hope for the benefits - non-monetary - to outweigh the expenses. In the later case you are hoping that taking care of your people is worth it over making them fend for themselves, but you are actually paying that bill with tax dollars.
Meanwhile, other projects like social security and UBI are just monetary redistribution. SS is much more inefficient than a well implemented UBI, but a huge portion of the money going into that program is redistribution. So you cannot talk about them as these black hole money traps when they are not, unless of course you are the opponent to their implementation.
Let's do some back of the envelope math here.
316 million Americans, at a $30k/year money sample works out to be $9 trillion dollars a year.
The budget that Obama just proposed is $4 trillion dollars (and that has no chance of getting implemented in full). Even if we say you can cut half of that out (Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, etc), let's call it $2 trillion dollars.
So we need $11 trillion dollars of tax money to fund this. The total net worth of US private people is $67 trillion or so[1]. The aggregate net worth of the top 400 people in the USA is $2.3 trillion[2]. You could take all of their money, and still not even come close to paying for the program for ONE YEAR.
At that point, you start having to come down hard on the upper middle class. The top 25% owns roughly 73% of the wealth in the country, or ~$48 trillion. If you tax their NET WORTH at 25%, you could fund the program for a year.
Pretty quickly you're going to run into a situation where you're cutting a check to everyone, then collecting the money (and more) back in taxes. And in this case, it's terribly inefficient.
On a small scale, a program like this probably works well. On a large scale, it would be a disaster.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_position_of_the_Unite.... [2] http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/
[1] In reality you presumably don't pay a full amount to minors.
Indirectly, business owners are deprived of cheap labor, while barriers to entry are lowered, increasing competition. The market becomes glutted by zero-employee owner-operated lifestyle businesses. DIY culture explodes, and is primarily motivated by a desire for genuine quality at an affordable price. Companies dedicated to supplying small businesses and home businesses, garage-sized production capital, and small quantities of raw materials win big (i.e. Staples, Home Depot) and those who depend on large business customers and factory-sized production capital lose a little.
The latter type of company pays for a lot of the government's pet projects. You simply can't tax small businesses as heavily without destroying them utterly.
I think we'd expect that businesses which can still provide compelling work will have improved access to cheap labor (both due to the falling wage floor, and the ability of workers to refuse menial work in favor of the meaningful). Meanwhile, businesses that provide soul-sucking work will be less-able to rely on the almost-indentured-servitude of the poor and will have to provide more appropriate compensation for their work.
You can't hire cheap labor if the laborers can always get a better deal by self-incorporating and contracting themselves out to you.
If your choice is between contracting your building janitorial services to one large firm who no longer has any employees and splitting the work among 10 owner-employees, only one selection will actually result in clean toilets.
That is a huge hit to the existing business-owner class. It is no longer possible to skim off the top as a middleman without providing actual value as a manager.
Conversely, laborers can't get a better deal by self-incorporating and contracting themselves out to you if you aren't willing to give them a better terms as contractors than you would as employees. (And even if you are, they still might not be able to get a net better deal, as incorporating isn't without its own costs.)
> If your choice is between contracting your building janitorial services to one large firm who no longer has any employees and splitting the work among 10 owner-employees, only one selection will actually result in clean toilets.
OTOH, if your choice as a laborer is to work as an employee for the firm that has contracts to clean toilets or to be a firm that has no contracts, only one choice will get you a pay check.
Sure, if productivity has reached the state where society can provide a UBI that provides a reasonable living where few people need the work for the style of life they would prefer, you can just opt out. But if productivity reaches that point, the way you get the toilets clean is probably by contracting with the one big firm that owns the janitorial robots and has succeed in best optimizing the design of the hardware and software for them, so that it can undercut any competitor on price.
> That is a huge hit to the existing business-owner class.
UBI funded by a taxation system which doesn't preferentially minimize taxes on capital mitigates the degree to which automation and other capital-favoring productivity changes redistributes the gains of wealth to an increasingly narrow capitalist class; it does so by essentially granting the whole citizenry a share of the gains of capital. But it doesn't seem likely that any level at which is sustainable will actually be a meaningful blow to the existing capitalist class, its just will reduce the degree to which the top of that class rockets ahead in wealth and power of everyone else, including the bottom of that class.
They deserve all that pie~ It wouldn't be fair if they got less (to them, a lesser rate of increase is less--same as in government budget proposals)~ Without them, no one would even have any pie~ So they fund politicians to vote against proposals that would result in more pie for everyone.
It wouldn't be an actual blow to the wealthy, who would still get objectively more stuff, but it is a significant psychological injury to someone who may measure their self-worth relative to other people. If they can only buy everything you have ever owned 500 times, rather than 1000 times, they feel less rich, even if you have 3 times as much stuff as you had before.
By my perception, the more wealth you have, the more likely you are to measure its worth relatively rather than absolutely. Small-time investors own $X in stock. Big-time investors own Y% of the company. Small-time workers earn $X per year. Big-time workers earn $X plus Y% of company profits. People from opposite ends of the wealth spectrum don't even calculate with the same math.
The trouble with that is that the math becomes impossible.
If everyone gets equal benefit, then there are only two possibilities:
1. It's so small as to be worthless. Your annual basic income check of $6.28 won't be able to buy combo #3 at the drive thru, let alone combo #1.
2. The tax bill is so huge it strangles the economy. There are 300 billion people in the United States, for them to each get even $1000/year, that's $3 trillion. And what's $1000? Most basic income stooges talk more about 5 figure numbers... so we'd need $30 trillion/year.
Where does that come from? It needs to be up front, since people will lose jobs first, and only decades later will 100% automation actually produce immeasurable wealth.
300 billion? No. There are only around 318 million people in the US.
What can I say, it's still morning.
If we assume that 24% are under 18, that's roughly 242 million who get $1,500/month (for a total of $363 billion/month) plus the 76 million children that receive $500/month (for a total of $38 billion/month). That's $4.812 trillion/year which exceeds the current annual US budget by a little over $1 trillion.
So it doesn't look like $30 trillion/year. I agree that it seems unrealistic but perhaps the monthly amount can be lowered. Those who want to live better (or in more expensive locations) would still have to hold jobs. It does give others who cannot or do not want to work the opportunity to move to cost effective locations (where housing and utilities are cheap).
{edit: add Basic Income}
The further question of resource is a good one. And its not about money, which is after all, imaginary points on a scorecard. The real question is where are the goods coming from? It'll have to be automation, because the premise is that people won't be working.
1) there is a huge and inefficient bureaucracy involved in administering these various assistance programs
2) the way these programs work (you lose access to them if your income rises above a fairly low threshold), we've essentially created a marginal tax rate of 100% on certain types of low income workers.
3) rapid technological change and increasing automation undermines the moral argument against redistribution of wealth.
It is interesting that libertarians, not generally known for enthusiasm around wealth distribution, appear at least intrigued by basic income.
This is just a quick summary, of course, I'd encourage you to read more about the case for basic income.
The affordable care act is not even a national healthcare plan.
It was almost impossible for them to get ACA passed when it was basically just adding regulation and bureaucracy to the existing private insurance system. The opposition kept saying socialism and redistribution of wealth. Why do you think "Basic Income" would be "no problem," when it actually is both socialism and redistribution of wealth. Even looking through the comments here on HN, there are a lot of folks who would have a big problem with it.
We should not work for capitalists who plunder the nations wealth with the help of politicians for them to make more money off our efforts.
We should fight for (believe me these leeches won't give up very easily) fair share in aggregate wealth and people should not work for subsistence anymore esp when we have all these resources available on the planet.
Sure you can have liberalized immigration and basic income: basic income isn't means/behaviorally-tested, but it still has a target population -- which can well be citizens. If anything, a relatively liberalized immigration policy with unconditional basic income for citizens but not noncitizens minimizes the economic incentive for immigrants without their own strong support (whether from their own assets or family support) to come to the country.
Probably. But it depends on what it replaces, how it is funded, and how it is sold.
A brief history of manufacturing technology:
Until the 20th century, the big economic problem was simply making enough stuff, and it took about 80% of the workforce to make all the stuff. During the 20th century, manufacturing technology got good, and by the 1950s, there was plenty of stuff in the developed world, but the quality was iffy and it still took about 40% of the workforce to make all the stuff. By the 1980s, the quality was a lot better, and there was a glut of high-quality stuff. Today, in the developed world, about 13% of the workforce makes all the stuff, and there are no significant shortages of any buyable thing. (Is it out of stock on Amazon? No.)
That's where we are.
We have no clue how to organize an economic system where a sizable fraction of the population has negative economic value. Welfare, the dole, and such have been tried - that leads to huge public housing projects warehousing useless people. Then we get riots because there are too many bored people. So that won't work.
That's the problem we face. Where do we go from here?
Libertarians often recommend Ayn Rand novels, because fiction is a useful medium for showcasing their utopian (or dystopian) ideals. However, at least Ayn Rand novels have intricate plots, and more or less fleshed-out characters.
"Manna" does not. The narrator, speaking to us from the near future, describes the endgame of technology advances within the capitalist order we now know. At the outset of the "story", the narrator is destitute in this order. He meets people from an isolated utopia, who have built a different order. A speaker from that group explains this alternative order to the narrator.
The end.
I still think that "Manna" is recommended reading, but I just want to give people proper expectations going into it. I was actually a bit angry the first time I finished it, because it was presented to me as something it wasn't. It is an essay presenting one possible alternative order for human civilization. While interesting in its own right, it isn't a real "story".
If there is 60% unemployment, who will buy those machine picked strawberries, iPads, or the products in Google ads? If this keeps going, big companies like Apple and Google will be the biggest proponents of basic income. Their other option is to go bankrupt.
(1) people work out of pride, not necessity. if your only concern was sustenance you could live off of welfare or charity now. even with a basic income, people will still be motivated to work because they want to have nice things
(2) market forces will still apply. if you raise your prices because low income customers now have more money, I'll lower mine. barring cases of outright collusion, you'll see economic growth as opposed to rising prices
Basic Income is still a long way away, but it has been thought through. A practical implementation may or may not succeed, but it won't be because of fundamental flaws in the idea.
(1) The way jobs are valued would fundamentally change. Rather than higher wage work being the work that fewer people can do, you would also see a rise in cost for jobs that people do not want to do. Today you have your unskilled employees trapped between a rock and a hard place when you offer them a job as a burger flipper - work in wage servitude for us, or starve. The employer has a tremendous amount of sway during negotiations in an economy where employment is effectively mandated to survive.
Ask yourself - "why is McDonalds so cheap?" does it make any sense that having people working in depressing service jobs makes cheap food? Wouldn't the optimization of food be automated delivery, minimizing the people involved? McDonalds can only exist as it does today because all its employees are forced to work for it.
(2) You would also see production shift. Economics goes where the money is - we have too little low income housing and too many McMansions because single family houses are profitable and reliable when sold and low income housing is unreliable and less profitable. If everyone had a minimum of income, there would be a tremendous amount of economic pressure to meet the demands of that crowd that has maximal economic consistency in revenue. So in the short term prices would be a mess, but in the long term the equilibrium state would be that there would be a huge market to provide as much of what the UBI unemployed class wants as possible within their budget for profit.
If it's the case that there simply aren't going to be enough jobs for everybody then this would be an intended outcome.
2) Changing the minimum wage also adjusts the prices of goods and services but in the end it still ends up being a net positive for society. When the minimum wage is increased prices may go up at the same time but usually they don't completely cancel out the wage increase.
What won't last very much longer is this antiquated notion that two thirds of the adult population "should" be working. It should probably be more like 25% now, and that will only decrease. (NB: it could be 50% working half time, 75% working one-third time, etc.)
This notion of people having "jobs", and that being a normal thing, is fairly new in the story of H. sapiens (and it's only reaching parts of the developing world now, right as it's becoming obsolete).
In my country(Brazil), unemployment rate is fairly low( ~5% )and the government loves to brag about it. Most of these jobs are 'artificial' in a way the government blocks innovation in order to 'retain jobs' and justify its economic intervention.
As a consequence, products and services are way more inefficient and expensive. At the same time, employees have wages that, from a Western standpoint, would be below poverty line.
For example, the government forbids customers to put gas on their vehicle. To do so, one needs an attendant who works 10h/day with $3/hour wages.
Politicians in my country (like everywhere, I imagine) are going on about how job creation is extremely important, and that they are focusing on lowering unemployment. Well, 1) No it isn't, and 2) No, they are not.
1) What's so great about jobs? They are a side effect of the economic model we have, nothing more. What actually matters to us are the things we support by this model. A job can be a great, fulfilling experience, but it is not by virtue of specifically being a job that it is fulfilling, it's because of all the things we actually care about: interesting problems, great coworkers, a purpose in life. We could very well find other ways to support the things we actually care about, and we will have to, once a sufficient amount of jobs are done by machines.
2) All politicians, from left to right, want unemployment. If there were no unemployment, salaries would spiral out of control, which would trigger a massive rise in prices on goods in order to pay those salaries, which triggers more raises in order for employees to afford the goods and so on. In order to prevent this, an unemployment of 5-6% is required, as far as I understand it. Yet somehow, we also have to pretend that those unemployed are not doing society a service, that the cards are not stacked against them, and that we really want them to have a job.
Blergh. Well, enough ranting.
(didn't read the article)