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Slashdot Asks: Do We Need To Plan For a Future Without Jobs And Should We Resort To Universal Basic Income? (vox.com)
Andy Stern (former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which today represents close to 2 million workers in the United States and Canada) has spent his career organizing workers. He has a warning for all of us: our jobs are really, really doomed. Stern adds that one of the only way outs of this is a universal basic income. Stern has been arguing about the need for a universal basic income (UBI) for more than a year now. Stern pointed out that people with college degrees are not making anywhere near the kind of progress that their parents made, and that it's not their fault. He adds: The possibility that you can end up with job security and retirement attached to it is statistically diminishing over time. The American dream doesn't have to be dead, but it is dying. All the resources and assets are available to make it real. It's just that we have a huge distribution problem. Unions and the government used to play an important part at the top of the market, but this is less true today. The market completely distributes toward those at the top. Unions simply aren't as effective in terms of their impact on the economy, and government has been somewhat on the sidelines in recent years.Making a case for the need of universal basic income, he adds:A universal basic income is essentially giving every single working-age American a check every month, much like we do with social security for elderly people. It's an unconditional stipend, as it were. The reason it's necessary is we're now learning through lots of reputable research that technological change is accelerating, and that this process will continue to displace workers and terminate careers. A significant number of tasks now performed by humans will be performed by machines and artificial intelligence. He warned that we could very well see five million jobs eliminated by the end of the decade because of technology. He elaborates: It looks like the Hunger Games. It's more of what we're beginning to see now: an enclave of extremely successful people at the center and then everyone else on the margins. There will be fewer opportunities in a hollowed out and increasingly zero-sum economy. If capital trumps labor, the people who own will keep getting wealthier and the people who supply labor will become less necessary. And this is exactly what AI and robotics and software are now doing: substituting capital for labor.What's your thoughts on this? Do you think in the next two-three decades to come we will have significantly fewer jobs than we do now?
It is well known that the majority voice - both in staff and readers - at slashdot has leaned conservative for over a decade now. UBI is a deeply unpopular idea here, and the fact that it is in this article being promoted by a (former) union leader means that it will be get about as warm of a welcoming here as ebola. I expect one of the next comments in here will either contain or be followed in signature with the usual bit about two wolves and a sheep deciding dinner.
The bigger problem with this article though is that it really doesn't belong here. This is not a technology issue, or even a science issue. This is an economics issue, and a monetary issue. The jobs aren't going away because people here are being replaced by better technology, the jobs are going away here because people are being replaced by workers in other countries who can work for less. These actions are of course being rewarded by the boards of the companies who are doing this.
It is, of course, a fact that careers are a foreign concept to most workers now in this country. Few people who are in the labor force now will stay with one employer more than a decade at a time. Retirement is quickly becoming a passing dream for the majority of workers as well.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I see no need to pay for others to sit at home and do nothing.
Everyone has to contribute....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
How many people farmed in 1700? When everyone stopped being farmers did the world end? No we found other stuff to do.
Did the world end when punch card operators stopped being needed?
There's more than enough to be done that requires humans.
We can keep working instead. Just pass laws that ban progress and you are done.
In the late 1800s over 90% of Americans were farmers. Automation braught that down to less than 3%. That means at least 87% of Americans are unemployed according to this article.
Here is a useful graph to look at. You can see the chunk of people he is talking about in the peak at the left. I'm not sure if it's fair to talk about them as two different groups (rich/non-rich), but you can see, if you were one of the people on the far left, it would seem like all the people on the right were together in the group of "those making a lot of money." It might seem impossible for you to get into that group, and it might seem unfair.
It helps to try to see both perspectives before starting an argument.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Entrepreneurship is at a low (especially among Millenials) because of low consumer confidence - people are afraid for their financial security because of their job insecurity and are afraid to take risks, especially when their various insurances can be jeopardized and they have ever increasing rents and bills. This sticks people into dead end jobs.
There will be a portion of people who sit on their asses with UBI on the dole, but anyone with even a hint of drive will strike out on their own and try to hit it big with whatever business idea they've been cooking up, knowing that there's a UBI safety net under them if the business happens to fail. Entrepreneurship is the lifeblood of a capitalist country and is the only way people can avoid being turned into wageslaves, and anything that encourages entrepreneurship can help keep business competition thriving. I have complete faith that the additional economic activity from people who would go for the gold will sharply outbalance the people who end up sitting on their asses, who quite frankly wouldn't have done much other than sit at their dead end job anyway.
Plan B get into a nice club fed. MAX COPAY $3!
Kill 'em All.
Simplest solution.
There is no fighting the powers that be. Socialism is evil, didn't you know?
How does this make it past moderation so often, and why does it keep coming back up?
the concept of UBI is garbage. it can't work without a slave or plebe class of literal subhumans, and frankly i'm tired of this repeatedly getting shoved down our throats as if reality has changed. =/
Apologies if I'm badly behind the discussion on UBI, but I'm curious about one aspect of its viability.
One limiting factor in human reproduction rates is our ability to afford food, housing, and healthcare. To the extent that UBI would meet those needs, I would expect human populations to grow even further, until other limiting factors imposed an equilibrium.
At that point, prices would rise, causing an unlimited inflationary bubble with the things UBI was meant to provide for. Because no matter what money games people play, you still have $X people competing for $F units of food and $L units of living space.
Is there some reason people think this wouldn't be a serious problem with UBI?
I don't think UBI would work because it affects the whole monetary system. I think public options for essential goods and services are a better idea--ie, traditional progressive redistribution systems and/or public works.
Why? Because the traditional model addresses particular needs without affecting the monetary system as a whole.
A UBI inflates the entire monetary system.
That is fine as a temporary measure, but run the play through for a generation and see where it leads. The first thing that happens is that you have children growing up in an environment where there is no history of earning and no expectation of it. That leads to the question: why bother with an education? Once you start questioning that and consider the costs - books, all the stuff the "other kids" have, trips, the cost of transporting your offspring to school - it all adds up. And to what end? You don't have a job, the next generation is even less likely to have one - why expend energy and time learning stuff that will be no use.
After that we're really sunk: we have a generation who might just have picked up the basics: speech, a little counting, but who needs nothing more. Even if they are only a proportion of the population they are significant: not least because they will have a vote. But not only do they have no skills, they have no ability to pass on to their kids anything of themselves.
Sure, there would be machine learning available - but why bother, if you will never need that information or any skills.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
People have been spouting this prophecy for more than 300 years, and its never come true. Despite incredible technological advancement, more people are employed now than in any point in history. Some people mightl lose out in the short term, but in the long term, the number of jobs only grows.
A basic income may or may not be a good idea - I know in Australia, that the cost of the bureaucracy attached to our welfare system means that replacing it with a basic income (or better, negative income tax) is actually cheaper for the state. I don't know if the same is true in the US, bu t I wouldn't be surprised if it is.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
If you don't give poor people enough to satisfy them, they will come to your house and take your stuff.
UBI is to prevent a revolution, nothing more.
I'm just waiting for UBI and government payed health. I'm 45, have $600k in retirement savings, and will have the mortgage paid off soon. This means I can finally quit my job and screw around all day on tech projects. Of course my two kids will need college funds, but Hillary is going to pay for that. Bring it on!
Companies will bitch and whine and complain about leaving the country, doom and gloom (even though 99% wouldn't/won't). Politicians will bark like dogs about how jobs will suffer (even though your job is already on the chopping block by doing nothing). Bill will die on the vine, because Joe Sixpack and Jane RocketScience don't care about the problem beyond their own self-interests (like we have since ever). Don't even get me started about the 'baby-factory cheats robbing us hard working citizens dry' ads which will surely flourish if this solution gets some legs..
Further, the problem is that the mass destruction of jobs hasn't hit peek. Wait for 20 years when all these 50%+ of present university grads are unemployable due to mass automation leaving 'nothing meaningful to do for the masses'. There will always be the need for human jobs, but the raw number of 'necessary' and 'commodity' jobs will be all but non-existent. We'll see if there are enough new and exciting job categories to remotely support our now-very-educated post-secondary workforce, keeping them relevant.
Bye!
There are some ideas that have been bantered around that look to be palatable to both the conservative and the liberal (if not either's ideal) The one that I prefer is the job guarantee. Would like to see it phased in place of current unemployment and then just gradually extended as jobs are replaced by technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Cut full time down to 30-32 hours to start! and then start to work on fixing the lack of salary OT or having some kind of limits.
After some time make full time 20 hours a week.
Instead of allowing employers to have an entitlement mentality to perfection or desperation, why not make it harder for them to not hire citizens, especially the ones looking for work? Get rid of guest workers, make offshoring a royal PITA, and penalize anyone that overlooks the long-term unemployed/discouraged.
Entrepreneurship doesn't provide a steady income or a good upward path (unless you like casino-level risk), and UBI would serve to reward laziness.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Barring a meteor, pandemic, nuclear war or super-volcano there WILL be an end to most jobs and we WILL need something like a UBI. Barring the things I mentioned or anything else that wipes out humanity this IS the path we're on. It's not a matter of if this is coming but when.
Yet another one of those robots-will-take-everyone's-jobs stories. Is anyone still retarded enough to believe this bullshit?
If they come to my house to take my stuff, the AI in the artificial machine guns on the perimeter will recognize it and turn them into swiss cheese.
We need to plan for a future where people work a lot less hours. Either 4 days a week, or the standard 5 days but with three month vacations. We already have examples of how this can work. There are plenty of YouTube channels of people who work for a while and then travel for a while e.g. Sailing La Vagabonde, Kombi Life, SV Delos (or at least they did before they became YouTube celebrities).
For people in NorthAmerica both of these options will sound shocking and impossible to implement in practice, even though Europe is not far from already having those in place***
*** This is not unlike universal healthcare, which works quite well in every developed country in the world, yet it is assumed to be utopic (or straight out communist) in the USA.
since they want to force us to have to work.
Andy Stem should be unemployed and starving with that stupid pronouncement. Like all of us are starving since computer automation has done away with our office jobs....HA!
Just wait till we put everything on the net with the little rice-grain sized chips that are coming out, IT infrastructure will have to grow by a factor of 100.
There is an alternative. The whole notion of UBI depends on the assumption that goods must be purchased. But if they are getting made for essentially free (after costs of capital investment have been recovered; also think in terms of renewable energy and resource-recycling), then why should there be any charge for those goods? Logically, if the goods can be made for free, and obtained for free, an income isn't really quite as important as the OP indicates.
Reading the titel: I know he mattered alot but Steve Jobs have been dead for half a decade by now and while it is clearly a huge lose of creativity (rounded conners and all) I do not think we need to transit to UCI over it.
At the very least, yet another utopian ideal doomed to be shredded on the jagged rocks of reality. The only way the UBI can work is if there's some magical way to get everyone to "give according to his abilities" while being satisfied with "getting according to his needs".
Your job may not be as secure as you think.
"What's your thoughts on this? Do you think in the next two-three decades to come we will have significantly fewer jobs than we do now?"
I think we're asking the wrong question here, since the presented question (and answer) is rather obvious.
It's also rather obvious who will be paying for everyone else when it is only those who "own" who are employed.
Given that fact, the far more relevant question is quite simple; Recognizing history, what the hell makes governments think they will actually collect on the taxes they expect to get from the uber-rich in order to pay for UBI when they can't even properly collect taxes from the financially elite today?
Yeah, you're right. There is a huge distribution problem, and it starts with correcting the tax burden distribution.
There, fixed it for you.
No carried interest lower rate.
No exemption from SS income for any reason.
Problem solved.
No non-contribution for contractors.
Fixed.
No overseas tax exemptions for corporations.
Fully funded.
Capiche?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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What happened to the horse population at the dawn of the 20th century, when technology eliminated the need to employ horses for their labor or for transportation?
You are sitting comfortably on your high (but rapidly disappearing under you) horse decreeing that no one but those able to find the very few jobs left will be able to eat and live. How will you feel when your job is automated out? No, seriously, it can and will happen no matter how skilled you think you are. Your friends, your family, your neighbors, all their jobs automated out. Will you still be have such a cold-hearted view when everyone that you care about that is around you is in dire straits? When the job-less crisis is a world-wide phenomenon?
What will you contribute when everything you could possibly produce can be produced better, faster, cheaper, with more creativity and flair by a machine? See: https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Ro...
Only I can judge you.
I suppose it's impossible to stop people from feeling that this time is different, but it's never different. According to Wikipedia:
In 1870, almost 50 percent of the US population was employed in agriculture.[16] As of 2008, less than 2 percent of the population is directly employed in agriculture.
The unemployment rate has shrugged off that "job disappearance", somehow. Now other swathes of jobs will also disappear, and people will find other things to do. There is nothing different about this new "technical revolution".
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
luckily thise are artificial machine guns. really, if it comes to this, then you have to be able to live selfe-sustained, holed in in your home. if that's possible with the energy you create yourself (otherwise your machine guns would just get powered down), nobody would come to your house to take your goods, because goods would be free anyways.
I don't think the most optimistic economist realizes what the internet has done to the service economy.
If there is someone who can perform the service you're interested in anywhere on Earth you can find that person quickly and easily. And that person almost certainly will charge a price based on factors like the cost of his education and his area's cost of living. But people, understandably, don't want rich foreigners walking in and ruining their cost of living by dragging in all their money with them so while capital and goods are free to travel, people are not.
We're in a race to the bottom, and the only one who wins is the guy who lives on a few dollars a day (and even then you have to qualify that victory as "surviving"). Meanwhile, billions of people have nothing to do because globalization has made their entire existence redundant. We're either going to transition to an entirely local services-based economy (food production, construction, local government) or the developed world is going to collapse when the starving underclass decides they've had enough of the much-lauded benefits of global trade.
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Education should be mandatory until age 65.
86% of that budget is medicare & medicaid ... which feeds and houses no one. In fact if you actually look at the budget, http://www.hhs.gov/sites/defau... you'll see almost nothing goes to feeding and housing.... that answer your question ?
"Do We Need To Plan For a Future Without Jobs And Should We Resort To Universal Basic Income?" Me, no. I have a job, thanks. You, sure, as long as you don't make me pay any more taxes.
That's the American way.
Over the course of human history, technology has made many jobs obsolete. But other jobs come available. We aren't facing a future of no jobs for people this time, either. What the latest technological advances have done, however, is make it financially viable to have goods and services performed by anyone anywhere in the world. What this means is that the western lifestyle is generally unsustainable. Global trade and manufacturing tends to raise the overall lifestyle of the country importing jobs (China, India, etc.) while putting downward pressure on the wages and lifestyle of the top countries exporting them. We'll have to accept that our children can't expect their overall experience to be as far ahead of ours as our parents' was ahead of our grandparents.
What?
Everyone says that, until it's they who can't get hired
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Mythical fairytale? I don't really follow. Where do you think, assuming the wheels don't come off the whole system e.g. WW3 or some other catastrophe, we are heading?
If we proceed at the pace we are now, that time will come. It's when, not if.
I'm far from a socialist hippie but the fact is that as more and more automation comes into play efficiency will skyrocket and profits will be even further concentrated. At that point the choices get fairly stark. UBI or something like it, or strife and war.
Now, it's a long ways off. But the question is what do you do in the interim? Let's say we hit Utopia in 100 years. That road is tough because you have the jobs going away but no mechanism (ultra cheap, almost free things) to compensate.
People in dire situations will come up with amazing discoveries that will change the way the world works. If you start giving everyone a little something to feel good, then they won't want to go out and change things. The way that people need to think and see the future needs to change, and welcome the change. It really is only going to get better as people move on to other jobs that were not there before. There are so many areas that need people to create new industries and make changes. This is a global economy, you want jobs back here, then figure out a way to make it cheaper here in the US. If your doing a routine task that can be automated or exported, then yes you are at risk and should start thinking about how to change what your doing.
Groups of organized workers should redirect their union dues toward being a player in this burgeoning automation economy.
There will need to be plenty of people required to design, develop, deploy and maintain all of this equipment.
Most likely though, it will be business as usual with money directed toward protectionism through lobbying. We know what happens when the disruption comes. Examples: Blockbuster, stock traders, book stores, and now human labor.
Adapt or perish.
It's my understanding that many Republicans inside the beltline are open to the idea of UBI due in large part to all the overhead the dizzying array of social programs. All those departments, and their associated costs, legislation, etc. all go away. They look at all that savings. No more forms, case reviewers, appeals, etc.
So how about the people who happen to own the machines? Do they have to contribute or do they get to make money for passively allowing their machines to continue producing? Are they owed rent?
There'll be plenty of jobs. What there won't be will be employee positions. Companies will increasingly replace employees with robotics and software. Work will shift to self-employment. A contract software engineer will contract with an accountant to handle accounting, with an advertising firm to handle ad placement, with their hosting services to handle routine administration of their servers and so on. An author would contract with someone to screen calls and mail and act as a secretary/receptionist, with someone else to proofread and edit their manuscripts and so on, and would publish directly through distribution channels like Amazon's Kindle Store. A seamstress would contract for advertising services and for janitorial services for the store. Lots of work, but no employees.
My argument in favor of basic income is that starting all of that requires a certain stability. You can't start a contract software consulting business, or start writing full-time, or start a dressmaking store, if you're scrambling to keep food on the table and a roof over your family's head. You can't get a full-time job to cover the bills because those full-time jobs won't exist. So what's the alternative to a basic income if you want people to work? If it's not there they won't be able to afford to spare the concentrated effort needed to get a successful business off the ground, it'll all be sucked up by the scramble to get enough cash this week to buy groceries. If they put in the effort, their family'll be out on the streets and starving in the time it takes for the effort to start producing results.
why bother with an piece of paper education vs real skills??
and under an UBI at very least make K-12 + at least 2 years CC or some kind of trades schooling free.
Personally, I'd be in favor of an optional basic income. The plan is this: You can register to vote or you can register for the basic income. But not both.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
So in the future when there are no jobs, where is the money for this UBI dream going to come from?
Let's start simple and get UBH Universal Basic Healthcare running successfully first, then we can try UBI.
That gangster is still alive?
The problem of unemployment due to automation is constrained by the limits of available programmers. So on the one hand we have business who need humans to program stuff, and on the other hand we have a lot of unemployed people. If we can find a way to retrain our workers we might be able to avoid most of the problem.
IMHO, 3-pronged approach to dealing with the problem of unemployment due to automation:
1) Long-term: extend public education to college-level, make programming courses (and/or IT QA courses) mandatory at all levels and majors. This will protect our children.
2) Mid-term: provide free night classes (remote or community college, etc) in programming/QA at all levels. Make it as easy as possible to get the workforce retrained. This will protect our current generation.
3) Reform tax plan: Merge exemptions & standard deductions, raise to $35k, and tax all remaining income at 30%. Applies to individuals and corporations. Half of the US population pays no taxes, individual tax revenue for the govt stays the same, and corp tax revenue for the govt increases quite a bit. These changes will finally help the population get a handle on the tax code, and the extra money can be used to help fund the increased education costs.
Anyone who's interested in the hard details can go to https://medemaforprez.com/#Tax...
at least the frikking robots will say "thank you," which is more than anyone does now.
It's a good thing you posted anonymously. ;-)
Only I can judge you.
Look at that country with no border and basic income...
People keep oversimplifying this discussion every time it happens.
It should be outright obvious that many new jobs have been created over the same period that farming dropped from 90% to 3%.
Extremists on one side insist that as-much-or-more new work has been invented, so there is zero net loss of need for human labor.
Extremists on the other side insist that zero new work was created and even more work was lost due to automation.
Both positions are plainly stupid.
New tech creates maintenance work...BUT....if it creates as-much-or-more work than it eliminates, then its total cost of ownership makes it non-viable in the market. So the technologies that survive are the ones that result in a NET loss of human labor, even though they also shift some human labor to a new industry.
Unemployment stats lie, as there are points when people are no longer counted even though they still don't have work (arrested, moved in with parents and vanished from the tracking, turned to illegal income and vanished from the tracking, starved to death in the street, etc.).
So even if the numbers aren't as stark as extremists would like them to be, it remains true that there is tremendous economic incentive to reducing labor costs, which has the net effect of putting people out of work over the long haul, and we are going to see some sever economic and civil turbulence over this as the situation continues to worsen.
the automatic loom was invented. It hasn't happen yet. And it won't happen for a very long time. A large # of jobs provide personal service and would not work without a person. People left farming for the factory and then they left the factory to provide service. All that will happen with AI is that the service provided will be more and more personal.
What is the most serious proposal put forth thus far for transitioning to UBI(in the US). What is the proposed effect on things like social security, etc and the interaction of payments to citizens who can draw from both, and so on?
One word: competition. Only if they have a legal monopoly (e.g. patent) can someone charge what the market will bear. Once that expires, the market will be open and competitors will appear based on how excessive the first company's mark-up is. Once the mark-up drops to a reasonable profit level, no new competitors will come in. Then you have stable pricing. Like in laptops and desktops today, for example.
As to your beverage example, I'm pretty sure soda companies advertise. Yet a recent article said that 70% of marketing costs are spent to ensure shelf space. So there are plenty of other costs besides the bottle, flavors, sugar and things like RO filtering etc.
I come here for the love
The power of technology will necessarily require UBI. If there is no UBI, then we will have to do the equivalent of mandatory gas-station attendants but for 95% of things. We will have to artificially create jobs doing things that could be more easily done with automation, just to reinforce the old ways. Automation, AI, you all Should know what those technologies are capable of. The idyllic future where machines can fill the vast majority of society's needs may not arrive for another 50 years or longer, but so long as the wheel of technological progress turns, we too get closer and closer. With robots taking care of everything, its not that humans couldn't work, but that it makes no sense to send 100 people to farm a field that a robot can take care of, by itself, more efficiently, with less pain and toil. IE, most humans will be UNEMPLOYABLE through no fault of their own, because machines can do pretty much everything they can do, harder, better, faster, and stronger. I'm not saying we should switch to UBI tomorrow. We're not ready. The systems are not in place. But so long as we progress, we get closer to that day and it does better to just accept that. Its just another part of progress.
Shouldn't the world have a UBI first? I recommend a start at $1 per day. That buys a ton of rice and it'd only cost about 3 trillion a year.
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
We just need to plan for a future with different sorts of jobs. The exact same thing was said about other labour-saving equipment that was introduced into industry in the past. Probably one of the first American examples was the Cotton Gin. That actually lead to an increase in employment (of slave labour).
As most of us on here are well aware, computers need to be programmed before they will do anything, and they have a tendency to break and require maintenance. More computers means more jobs for slashdotters doing these sorts of things. Also there will be more work on product design and development, as if you can get a computer to deliver the actual product, you can easily do a lot more variations on what you offer, and that will be how you differentiate from competitors.
My guess is this is likely to happen simply because its cheaper to pay people off than to maintain a security state.
But since it won't be implemented with in any intentional way, it will of course end up woefully corrupted and not really be enough income for more than baseline subsistence.
Given the minimal value of basic income, it will still be necessary to do work to have anything like a desirable standard of living. That summer in college where you lived off $400 a month was fun, but sharing a bedroom with a stranger in an old house with 10 other tenants isn't any kind of a long-term lifestyle.
It might improve the quality of working at the low end of the employment scale, since "I may live badly, but at least I don't work to do it" has a certain subtle appeal. Low wage employers will have to automate or pay more. Higher level jobs may benefit as well, as employers will likely have to pay a premium for employee continuity -- working and then quitting for a while will be popular as people work to meet short-term financial goals and then return to basic.
I think Friedman's negative income tax is the way to do it, at least as I understand it. A subsistence income is guaranteed, and tapers off as earned income increases. But it doesn't disappear with the first $1 of income, providing motivation for work, since you can add to your income rather than just trading idleness for labor at the same level of poverty. I think the bureaucratic savings of eliminating all the other entitlement programs and their administration will pay for a lot of it, but I think it will have a dollar cost that will end up being met by heavier taxing at the top end.
Unlike the basic income, the current programs are filled with bureaucrats whose only job is to demand a pile of paperwork that will be filed and forgotten, and are loaded with tricks and traps that make it very hard to ever improve the situation it's "clients" are in.
As a libertarian, many people expect I'm going to be completely against the concept of a UBI. However, that's not really the case. What I *am* against is the premature pushing of it on people in still-functional Capitalist society, which amounts to an appeal to convert to Socialism.
The UBI makes complete sense as a way to handle the economy in a POST Capitalist world, which we're nowhere near ready to transition to. (Just because you have some fear-mongering about specific industries like trucking going away doesn't mean "all the jobs are gone".)
From what I've observed on the hiring end of the equation? There are actually a lot of decent-paying, respectable jobs out there that go unfilled for months because the quality of the applicants is pretty terrible. My wife recently helped interview over a dozen people for a computer support job at a local college, and she showed me the "best of the bunch" of 40 or 50 resumes they received. We were laughing at how bad several were, including misspellings and people who had NO clue how to sell themselves as having any useful skills.
When they finally did interview 4 or 5 people? One of them showed up an hour late. They agreed to reschedule him and give him another chance, only because he had an excuse about a traffic accident on the highway keeping him from making it on time. When he was due to come back, he waited until 10 minutes before the scheduled time to tell them he wasn't interested any longer. Another candidate was a woman who actually sounded like she had good credentials on paper and they were excited to possibly offer her a position, but she was so "ho hum" about the whole interview, they decided to move on. She not only made no effort to dress nicely for it, but when asked questions about what she did in her previous jobs, etc. -- she just gave really brief answers, acted like she was bored, and didn't do a thing to impress anyone.
I see evidence of a similar mindset in other areas too, including this uproar over a $15 minimum wage.... In reality? You should really be able to eliminate the "minimum wage" completely and it would make no real difference. Why? Because first of all, there's no one number anybody can quote you that *really* makes sense as THE proper starting wage to pay people that's "fair" instead of "unfair". Depending on where you live in the country, the cost of living is radically different, for starters. A very small percentage of people in America actually work for the mandated minimum wage, and when they do? A big percentage of THOSE are people who earn tips - meaning it's almost not even fair to count them in those totals to begin with. What you wind up left with are a lot of people who don't really need a "living wage" in the first place. (For example, many of the mentally or physically handicapped people are already receiving SSI benefits, and can't earn much of their own income or they lose those. Yet they want to feel like productive members of society and get out of the house. So they'll accept very low paying jobs, doing such things as putting advertisements in envelopes. They don't really WANT a higher wage because it'd put them in a much worse situation overall than what they get without it.) But people keep pushing for this with the mindset that by boosting the minimum by another $X per hour, that translates to "across the board" increases of about the same amount. And that, in turn, means they can do some minimally skilled job of limited real value to an employer but receive the type of pay you should really only get for doing something much more valuable to society. I don't believe that really works except in the short-term, before the overall economy has time to adapt to the changes (inflation).
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So how about the people who happen to own the machines? Do they have to contribute
"Happen to own", yep. Contributed nothing to get them, nope, you did not build that. Just happened to own. Woke up one day and the machine fairy had left them a factory under their pillow. Just happened one day.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
That's what I was thinking. If we eliminate all jobs, how about eliminating the currencies, and just letting anybody pick up whatever they want. Who'll be motivated to make them? Why, the robots, of course. Nobody should have to work for anything, since jobs are clearly expendable
And people still think that 'free' stuff from the government is free.
In the past, technology destroyed some jobs but created many more. This has been happening for thousands of years and thus will continue to happen forever. People have worried about this in the past and been wrong, thus they are wrong now.
To summarize: technological progress will continue forever, but we'll never need to adapt economic policy because people will always be able to contribute something that machines can't - and those things will employ enough people for near full employment, in perpetuity, regardless of the capabilities of machines. Like most of the other reflexively doubtful posters in this thread, I can't posit what kind of things those will be (personal touch, maybe?) - but I'm sure it'll be something because:
1. People have been wrong previously about this
2. Cotton gins and farmers
3. Socialism is wrong
4. QED
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Instead of giving away money to everyone, provide jobs for every one. If you can't find a job at a private company, then the government can bring back public jobs programs. The unemployed can work on habitat for humanity style homes, maintaining public parks and other landscaping, etc. Those that can't hand the physical labor can sew hats for stray kittens or some other low-impact work.
Paying people to do nothing just seems like incentive to do nothing.
I would rather be dead than be a thief.
Fuck off with your justifications for being a shitbag looter.
The Adult Population of the USA is something like 194.5 Million people.
Let's say that you can get by on $25,000 per year, tax free.
Providing UBI for this many people will cost the economy 4.8 Trillion Dollars. Where is this going to come from?
OK, let's scale this back a bit. We will give every adult in the USA $200 per week - $10,400 per year. We're still talking about $2.02 Trillion - this is 11% of the entire GDP of the USA.
To put this in perspective, the USA spends $810 Billion on public education per year, $1.3 Trillion on pensions and almost $600 Billion on defence.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Next question.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Someone suggested moving the jobless to a trailer park in Texas and giving them basic cable. But given that governments are tools of the rich, demogrants are unlikely. Plan for prison, war and escape routes were the unemployed become somebody else's problem. Barring such weeding out of the unneeded, there could be an arts and crafts revival. It happened before in Japan and the West in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries as an anti-industrial movement. It could happen again. Do you garden?
Time to start up the Neo-Luddite movement and get cracking on some robocide. Let's smash us some job stealin' robots boys! Yeee-ha!
How many of the households on the far left are retired, living on their savings and social security? A household in that situation will have a low income but can be living quite well.
I understand that /. readers are not amused by videos much, however there is only a video form of this content, which I think is extremely relevant to the topic here and at least it should be interesting for those, who are capable of discerning details and nuance.
Unions, collectivism, government with its money and market manipulation have destroyed the savings in the USA, pushed the productive people out of the country and now they are calling for milking the remaining productive people so that whoever is still in the union can jump right from their 'ensured' job position to an ensured retirement.
This guys is no fool, he understands where the bread is buttered, he knows that his amazing skills are not what is required in the real productive world. What he does not understand is that the real productive world that still keeps feeding the USA to the tune of over 500,000,000,000 USD a / year (trade deficit) cannot actually be taxed to give him a cushy retirement.
Good luck with that idea though, you'll need all of these fantastic ideas when the dollar and the bond collapse. What would a USD denominated cheque buy you at that time? I am sure *you will get your cheques*, I just don't think you'll be buying much in terms of products for them because you are not producing anything of value and the only thing you have produced with your collectivism is destruction.
You can't handle the truth.
I get it. The Johnny Student of History perspective. Why, because things happened in the past they are sure to happen the same way now!
If it's not clear, I'm dismissing 9/10's of your post as meaningless. Appeals to history mean nothing in the context of the massive, accelerating change we are seeing now.
Sorry, past performance is not, in fact, indicative of future potential. As efficiency ramps up you get 1 dude, supporting the robots and other automation, doing effectively what 100 did before. And I don't know if you've noticed, but we already have a UBI of sorts called welfare, among other things. It's just going to keep growing.
It would be interesting to see what happened to all the horse and hay farmers when automobiles made that obsolete.
I imaging many went into say cattle farming instead, but all the other horse farmers trying the same probably made that a difficult position to obtain. Tractors were reducing the market for farmers already.
If you had been farming all your life, would you be able to walk into a factory and sit in a chair sticking widgets into wadgets all day? That could be a psychological shock to somebody used to outdoor and varied work. I imagine some made the transition okay, but certainly not all.
New fields such as oil drilling, gas pump operator, and mechanic opened up, but were there enough of such positions to offset the loss? And were those given mostly to the young due to age bias?
Table-ized A.I.
He is both right and wrong. He is correct in saying that currently capital, especially in the form of technology, is trumping labor. He is also correct in saying that as long as that is true, the people who control capital will take the lions share of the productivity increases created by investments in technology. But that is not inevitable. Capital is ascendant because it has legal protections that labor does not. Those protections largely assure that control of capital will be concentrated in the hands of a small number of people who take most of the benefit. Decentralize that control by eliminating government protections for accumulating control over large blocks of capital. That will inevitably result in a wider distribution of the benefits from the investments it makes possible.
The idea of most people relying on a guaranteed income is the worst possible outcome. They will be entirely at the mercy of a ruling elite and get only the minimum crumbs required to keep them quiet. In the long run, they will be returned to serfdom, totally dependent on the whims of an aristocracy that controls the means of production.
A UBI by itself is not good enough.
The people should get their fair share of the resources of the planet as well, not just a UBI check.
A citizens dividend will ensure material resources don't get concentrated into the hands of the few either.
Who is going to make the robots?
Unions simply aren't as effective in terms of their impact on the economy, and government has been somewhat on the sidelines in recent years.
Thanks mostly to Reagan and Bush, the US government has moved the cost of poverty away from rich people, onto poor people. It's more of the 'socialism is evil' and 'fuck you, I got mine' attitude in action; which is why social collapse continues in poverty-stricken suburbs.
There are more fundamental questions here than just UBI. For the past 30,000 years, mankind has settled, and formed civilization amongst ourselves predicated on the notion that specialization and trade increases yields for the society as a whole. 1 guy can make more bread full time than 5 guys who only make the bread they need. This is the first economic principle of economies of scale. As time went on, the need for general purchasing (armies, ships, government coordination, central planning, etc...) meant that standard units of value had to be made, so that the trading can become coordinated and standardized. Money was born, and the price system itself was created. It was the first form of middleware. Suddenly you could trade with whole horses of people all around the world, using money and the price system in free markets to coordinate. When you buy a laptop, you trade a portion of your skill and profession for some plastic, some metal, some silicon, some machine time, design, manufacturing, standards, IP, etc... to bring you a laptop. You traded with hundreds of thousands of people to bring the laptop to you. That price system, and the money system that backs it, is the basis for today's global civilization and economy. The best value propositions won the market and were in demand to trade. Now, I don't want to trade with you. I want to trade with a machine that has a better value proposition than you do. The problem is, there's a machine that has a better value proposition than me. The net effect is that our trade-based system is breaking down. The old basis for civilization no longer functions. So to does the need for people. The more people I had to trade with, the more value I got for my profession. Now that paradigm is going away. We need instead more machines and less people. This raises ethical questions. How many people do we need? Should we still incentivize child-rearing? Should we still allow unlimited population growth? We don't need more people. For the health of the environment and sustainable living, we need less. But what replaces trade and money? I don't know the right answers, but I think that we have to frame the question correctly before we solve it.
We need this plus mandatory birth control.
The population needs to contract, not grow. We no longer need workers.
Yes, because they happened to be born to rich parents. They probably got a small loan of a million dollars.
But that was yesterday. What are they doing today? You and cayenne8 seem to expect everyone else to do something today.
If you could invision that the average working week will be approximately 10 hours in 100 years from now because of Technology, then simply draw a line between now and then, and we need to get from here to there gradually in an orderly fashion. it is a simple as that.
Make no mistake: there IS a coming job crisis as we continue to replace people with automation. The lower end of jobs will be hit especially hard by this, deeply affecting people who already had few job options anyway. Left unchecked, that is a recipei for civil unrest and riots and mass numbers of youth have nothing else to do and no hope. The UK saw riots like that in the 80s. It's bad.
The writing is on the wall that this is going to happen in the US. Now the question is, does the US owe these people anything? Is it society's problem when there are far fewer minimum wage jobs? Traditionally the answer is no. But these kids will have no hope and absolutely nothing to lose by going on rampages and stealing what they can't afford to buy. It may end up being the worst period of civil unrest in American history and we can see it coming now. Do we say this is not society's problem and do nothing, or do we do what we can to mitigate this disaster before it gets out of control? Citizens will demand the future government DO SOMETHING. We have time now to keep it from getting that bad. We can probably do more now than we will be able to do in 20 years. But do we have the will? I doubt it.
Universal Income, or whatever it will be called, is an interesting idea but the fatal flaw with it is that as long as people keep having kids and we still allow immigration, then there will always be more and more and more and more people who want the money.
Eventually there won't be enough money to pay for this and we have living examples of what happens. Several towns in New England had very generous benefits for unemployed, the poor, etc. The few local people making use of these benefits were cared for thanks to the generosity of the towns, who assumed they would only ever need to support a few such beneficiaries. Things were fine.
But word got out about how amazing things were in these towns, how you could get money and food and a free place to stay, etc. and more and more indigents and especially foreign refugees began arriving in those towns having travelled there specifically to acquire the benefits. The towns suddenly became burdened with dozens and dozens and then hundreds of people in need and the entire towns were destroyed economically from trying to keep up with their commitment to the poor.
So if we adopt a national benefit, then the birthrate alone is going to bankrupt the country (nevermind that we're always on deficit spending anyway so we are already technically bankrupt). Minority groups already have much higher birthrates than the traditional caucasian groups so the country will continue toward "the browning of America" as some have called it with more and more people born every year. So the universal income would balloon out of control right away.
This is going to be a challenging period for the USA. I probably won't live to see how bad things get. THAT is the only thing I am happy about.
Sig for hire.
It's simple. More and more jobs will be done by technology. More and more people will be unemployed. At some point, it is cheaper to use a robot than to pay a person enough for his own sustenance. The actual problem is capitalism itself: who is going to be play the consumer if most of your population is unemployed?
[sarcasm]Why have UBI, why not just make everything FREE![/sarcasm] Whatever your answer to this question is about why it wouldn't work, or can't be implemented is the same reasons that UBI isn't a good idea either. You can't just make money from thin air or you end up making money completely worthless that you might aswell just give everything away for free.
If the UBI comes from tax, then you would have to tax so much that the portion of the population that does work will pay so much taxes that they will question whether it's worth it, and worker morale will be in the toilet.
'Cause it's not like social security checks are enough to live on. Seniors should not be denied UBI just because they are getting social security and also working as greeters at Wal-Mart.
The problem is it needs to be phased in, and various support programs need to be phased out. Handling this smoothly will be difficult. And the transition period probably needs to be about 15 years.
Jobs ARE disappearing a lot faster than they are being created, and the population is growing. This does not augur well for social stability unless there is some universal support system. Basic Income is the universal support system that has the most push behind it. And we need a lot more effort put into virtual reality, so that people without jobs can find something that they will do rather than cause trouble. Of course, that itself will eliminate entire classes of jobs. But virtual reality when properly developed could replace gyms, schools, and many other activities. The "school" replacement could be essentially apprenticeship games.
Think of this as a high-tech version of "bread and circuses", but it needs to be done in a way that's less socially disruptive than Rome was forced into....and preferably before wide-scale civil war breaks out. (Again, check the history of Rome.)
If this is handled right we could be headed towards a utopia...but if it isn't we could be headed towards a profound dystopia. Unfortunately, I see very few signs that anyone with any power even realizes the problems.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
But without a crushing bureaucracy to navigate, how would politicians justify their existence. Might as well ask them to reduce their salaries and perks.
Yep, no one ever started a business from scratch. No poor immigrant ever made good. Everyone who is rich came from rich parents. Total social immobility, that's what the US is famous for. You betcha.
BTW, I only expect someone to do something today if they aren't living off their savings/investments. That's how it's supposed to work, after all: you earn and invest during your working years, then live off those investments during your waning years. You know, those investments you just happen to have after 40 years of savings.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
wrong, lawless thugs would be maimed, beaten and shot by cops and residents in my neighborhood. Maybe there is another kind of revolution coming, where able bodied but lawless lazy useless people are no longer allowed to sponge.
BI will not work and will lead to severe social problems. Basic reasoning and logic is why people dislike the idea, not because of a political party or affiliation. Let me give a couple of the major points on why it would fail, but to be perfectly honest this is not a Slashdot discussion but a much longer debate.
1. Cost of Living: BI does not consider the variances in cost of living. A person in CA would need a BI of about 80K/yr in the Bay area, but a BI of 30K in Detroit. So simple you say, get it done. Now you have humans being trafficked to CA to live in mass shanty towns to generate massive amounts of cash to be sent back to Detroit. This already happens with expensive items and drugs, so it can not simply be dismissed when discussing BI.
2. Where does the cash come from? BI exceeds the total GDP today or you don't have BI. I don't care if you take all of Bill Gates money, Clinton's money, Zuckerberg's money, and any other rich person you can think of. It will not pay the bill, and surely can't sustain the bill.
3. It can not replace current Welfare systems and still requires those same programs. The US Welfare system is a way of life for many. Many are mentally ill, but some are addicts who choose not to get help to correct themselves so live off of the State. Giving them a bucket of cash just gives them more money to spend as they see fit. There is no assurances that they will use BI for food, utilities, housing, or any other purpose one claims BI is for. Welfare programs are not getting the majority of recipeients on their feet after a fall, but are a method of maintaining a class of people dependent on the Government. Intentional or not, that is how the system works. Get married, lose benefits. Get a job, lose benefits. Have a kid out of wedlock, gain benefits. Quit your job, gain benefits. We have not fixed what we have so there is no reason to believe that BI is some magic bullet that gets people to behave responsibly and for the betterment of themselves and society.
Now some may say "but item 2 and 3 can be protected against" to which I say horse dookie. Unless you want a massive amount of BI police consuming even more tax money it can't happen. Further, there are many in politics who want more of a dependent class. That is how many people stay in power.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Once you take away the human desire to better themselves, you end up with socialism. Why push yourself to do better, if the bum next to you knows regardless if they do anything, they will receive the same amount, as someone who busts their ass to achieve? Look at all the poor job quality that came out of the old soviet union? Look at the problems in the welfare class? Is that what you want for the entire world?
I'm an electrician. My job involves autonomous movement in 3 dimensions, the ability to problem solve when many variables are completely unknown or unknowable, and the requirement that I can adapt to any existing infrastructure without additional information.
I don't see AI or automated systems doing any of those things until long after I'm dead. Same goes for most other tradespeople. Oh and I'm pretty sure electricity isn't going to be going away any time soon.
Even if we perfect a system where robots can handle these things in new buildings specifically designed with this purpose in mind, older facilities will still exist, and require maintenance and troubleshooting.
I suggest you remove it, and see how that goes.
Now while in your case, gazillians of your body cells just doing their own thing might well be more effective than your current governed body, that is not the case for most assemblages of millions or billions of actors. They work better and are more stable and thrive better when they are organized, or governed, if you will.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Sounds to me like this guy doesn't want to work hard for his constituents. The basic premise is that you should be paid for gracing the world with your existence. Accomplishments and merit are irrelevant to them. Oh, you showed up to work for 40 hours? That's nice. Did you accomplish anything? No? Tell me again why you think you're worth more money. Never cave to these people. Nothing is ever enough.
A lot of those jobs are in trade fields and have to do with working with the real world where things aren't designed with millimeter precision in mind, such as a leaky pipe under your nearly-century-old house, machining a one-off part for mounting the base of one of those robots so it can be set up to do work, or making new cabinets for your kitchen that will account for the fact the walls aren't quite squared. Or replacing a part on what in those 20-30 years from now will be a classic car. Or running new wiring to allow one of those robots to have a food supply the building wasn't originally designed for.
People are the reason we will always need people.
Computers, Electronics, and wrenching on my own cars were three things that helped me immensely when I decided to study Robotics after getting sick from solder fumes for the better part of a decade.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
Interestingly, Probably 90% of people in the private sector work in failing businesses.
The whole economy basically turns on undue faith in failing businesses, and the credit that keeps them alive for a while.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
"It won't" is not an answer.
"Old man yells at systemd"
The very concept of a Job is a Modern Construct. To imply that without Jobs you have to have a Universal Basic Income is to imply that before theire were 'Jobs' there was no trade or business for people to engage in. But there was trade and functionality before the modern concept of the 9 to 5. The real culprit is someone creating a fiction around the concept of The Job, blame for which in my opinion goes back to FDR.
Where the money comes from?
Robots go get materials, and make stuff. Computers sell it. The government taxes the sale and the profit, and gives the money to people, who buy stuff. Repeat.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Perhaps it's time for a revolution. Western society has moved toward an ideal of total capitalism and survival of the richest. Once humans achieve wealth they can give a damn about their fellow human. The CEOs and Executives of large corporations do everything to secure their own future without any regard for those who were not lucky enough to be born into a situation that allowed them to exploit their fellow humans to insure their own comfort and survival. We in the west have become entrapped in a framework of financial slavery of which we are no longer even aware. Talk about living in the Matrix...
As Anonymous Coward indicates, UBI is just a pacifier for the masses and a bon bon to assuage the last shred of conscience a few of the wealthy may have left.
The occupy movement failed because it didn't see the potential a large group of unified people possess nor did it have a quantifiable goal. The goal of occupy should have been the restructuring of government, an end to the government promotion of capitalism, the nationalization of corporations, and the redistribution of wealth so that is shared equally by all.
Don't buy company stocks. Don't accept a 401k or a 403b from your employer. Don't invest in an IRA. Don't put money in the bank. This just concentrates wealth in the hands of the few who are manipulating the financial systems. Only buy what you need to live. Don't buy real estate- we are part of the land. We do not own it.
If humans can learn to not be hierarchical and competitive they may have a chance to continue existing. If humans cannot learn to overcome their own nature then only the wealthy will survive. Everyone else will die. Overcome human nature. Join the revolution.
What kind of idiot writes stuff like this? Maybe he should stop smoking meth.
More and more jobs are going. First they'll go to countries with living wages which are a fraction of those in the west and then they'll all be automated. The writing is on the wall guys, all you need to do is look up. If it isn't UBI then what's it going to be? Ban robots? Ban AI?
If you want action on this, write a business management AI. Show the boards of the big companies that they can replace their $30 million a year CEO with a million dollar a year software licence. Only a fraction of the price and it doesn't chase the secretaries around the executive wing. See if that get the bastards thinking, and if it doesn't, write a company board member AI.
I don't think he'll resurrect
Just like these jokers: https://www.yakimawa.gov/council/
The comments here fall into two primary all-or-nothing buckets that seem to be on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Yet when you look closely, it is plain to see that both sides are really talking about the same thing: fear of the unknown resulting from change.
This fear arises because we don't take the time to actually use our minds to think critically from all points of view. Fear paralyzes us - and we take the easy way out - resorting to regurgitating dogma from sources that we identify with our own world-view. We do ourselves and the people around us a disservice when we substitute dogma for thought.
Here is a simple rule to live by - and help you determine if your dogma is in the best interests of everyone. The Golden Rule or law of reciprocity is the principle of treating others as one would wish to be treated oneself. It is a maxim of altruism seen in many human religions and cultures the world over. Now - put yourself in the shoes of the people you are considering in the discussion - and assuming it is you who has to live with the outcome apply the dogma/position that you align with.
Now after doing that thought exercise, if you can honestly say that your position/dogma will not adversely impact others, then it is worthy of consideration. If it cannot, then you need to think about a new dogma.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
...our future without Jobs started about 5 years ago.
Sorry, wrong agency. Federal and state welfare spending still pass $1T so my point stands.
Well, most of us use the term "inheritance" for that.
Great post, insightful and well written, wish I hadnt used up my mod points.
Sure, once in a while someone really does work very hard and have everything go their way and make it from scratch. However, most are born on 3rd base. Some just inherit the lot. You don't seem to mind that they don't have to contribute to live it up.
And what should we do with UBI? Play video games all day? I don't get it.
Most jobs will either go to a country overseas with no real human/worker rights or it will be automated (Obama even said a lot of jobs are not coming back to the USA). My buddies and I often wondered in the 1990's, "if robots do all the work in the future, who will be able to buy anything?" My roommate who oft smoked the most weed said, " we just have to own a few robots and we'll be fine"... So start investing my friends.
TLNP: Too Long, No Paragraphs.
Reading these articles about how there is no need for workers is hilarious. For one thing, we obviously need twice as many teachers, especially English and Writing teachers.
The issue is not the need for workers. The issue is clawing back the ill-gotten gains of billionaires and corporations to pay for those workers.
X is not an answer is not an answer.
Ad infinitum.
Don't comment on it. Chill and go play with your fucking XBOX.
If nobody has any jobs, there's no income to take from group A to redistribute to everyone for a base income.
Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? Get off your ass and find a way to be useful to society. Jesus fucking christ you fucking millenial cry babies.
UBI will be like the great depression soup kitchen. It will be the minimum to live. It will also be more or less worth less than a penny today after automation. Unfortunately, UBI will not help the economic. It will only keep people alive a little longer.
The bigger problem is how automation unlike previous technology will not only replace the lower class, but a large amount of middle class. Previous technology replaces the lower class, leaving them to die (the old, sick and young first as survival of the fittest) or live with pennies (like earning UBI). This time middle class people that had a job will be left to die or to live with pennies too. For once, the farmers, fishermen and other self-life sustained jobs will be better off (you eat what you got), if global warning hasn't kill those jobs off.
If the system of automation happened too fast, we'll be in another great depression, which depends on who stepped up at the right time gain power as a new dictator, fascist, or communist government. If it happens slower, we'll be in a depression with some middle class being able to adopt the new system of automation.
Yes, there will be jobs, just not the same in types or amount. Someone has to maintain each automation or AI and further research. Especially when self-learning AI is not perfect (try having cortana that can maintain ms windows from buggy patches and keep improving security and avoid virus...that's like a while loop that is looping to find the statement false). The only time there will be no job is when the world stopped from trading/buying. As long as the riches still spends, there will be jobs.
Nonetheless, for once the bell curve will shift so much that our today's high class jobs like doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, etc. will be gone with plenty of us unprepared. The rules and laws that were set for us until that day will be rendered useless for the future of automation. Only those that have the value in the age of automation can pass onward. UBI wouldn't help much here.
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The world's current population is economically and ecologically *not* sustainable. Automation will deprive the excess population of the means to survive, which is exactly how it should be. The One Percenters with their technologically-savvy entourage (sorry, computer nerds, you're not part of it), their artists and their retainers will inherit the Earth. Nothing you can do about it.
How can we justify doing that while increasing the social security age? Why not lower it instead? If we go with the assumption that the knowledge economy is what makes people obsolete, then why not ensure basic living conditions for those who (because of their advanced age) are at a disadvantage when it comes to learning new skills?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Of course we need a plan! It is becoming a realistic scenario that there are going to be people that do not have any marketable skills because the work they did is automated away. We have to figure something out to deal with this or we may end up with a sizable part of humanity that is going to be piss poor and have no options. And that is not going to end well. We need a more sustainable plan than plundering earths resources, polluting it, megacorps not paying taxes and all.s
Communism only work with small groups. Humans do not care about those they do not know personally. You can't change human nature... Yet.
Thus: Permanent War (TM) and the Surveillance State. Plus, rich people will always need prostitutes and security guards.
...this situation was brought about by the invention of the evil microprocessor.
E Proelio Veritas.
I can't believe how many times I have had to reference this old film in the past six months:
... lighten up and enjoy it.
The Kingdom of Mocha
Caveats:
1) It isn't a perfect illustration, but it helps provide a foundation for understanding that too many contemporary posters sorely lack.
2) It is filled with politically incorrect (but hilarious) stereotyping
Having at least this entry-level understanding of how a basic economy and tax system works is a prerequisite to useful discussion of a topic like UBI.
See you space cowboy
The problem is education. That's where we have to start. Make the high school diploma worth something again.
It's a crock to suggest entrepreneurship is low with millennials because of low consumer confidence - it's low with millennials because of ideas like this, ideas that foster the poor work ethic that fails to drive millennials to move forward, ideas that an entrepreneur needs a safety net to be an entrepreneur. A common factor found in the biographies of famous entrepreneurs is a history of failed business attempts and living poor while trying to get their dream off the ground. The difference between then and now is that they didn't broadcast their failures on social media and blame everyone else. As someone with entrepreneurship in his blood I can tell you that consumer confidence doesn't dissuade us from taking risks and steamrolling ahead regardless of confidence levels felt by others. Later in life we may learn to interpret ideas like consumer confidence but even then, it probably won't stop us from trying.
UBI never gets at the issue of where all this free money to be given to people just because they exist comes from. If you take it from the rich, then they just take their ball and go play elsewhere. If you force the redistribution of wealth then you're just a communist that takes away the incentive for anyone to be productive. @damn_registrars is right that this article really doesn't belong here. That being said UBI is simply a non-starter being proposed by those who want to be paid more and more for doing less and less. That's a species ending combination if ever I saw one.
UBI is a solution that won't work, for a problem that doesn't exist.
This story that "all the jobs are going away" is false. Just take a quick look at the Employment Rate (not the Unemployment Rate) over at the BLS and you can see that a great percentage of the population is employed today (59.8%) than at any time before November of 1978. If UBI was the answer it would have come about in the previous decades when fewer people were employed, not today. And certainly not during the 2008 bubble when this whole UBI theory started gaining traction.
But even if it were the case that jobs are going away, UBI still wouldn't be the answer. The idea that you can just give cash handouts to the whole population is silly. The GDP per capita in the US is about $50k. If you going to give everyone enough income, about $12k according the Dept. Health, that means a tax rate of 24% of GDP to pay for bare minimum of UBI. And that is on top of the 27% that the government currently taxes, which already doesn't bring in enough income to balance the budget. To balance the budget you would need to bring the tax rate up to the expenditure rate which is currently 41% of GDP and add UBI's 24% on top of that. By the time it's all said and done the government would account for almost 2/3rds of the entire economy; for a minimum UBI. If you want a UBI that allows for a little more comfort, say $20k, then the government would now account for 4/5ths of the entire economy. Who the hell is going to invest in an economy like that?
Never mind what a disaster it would be for the labour force. We know that the utility of income is marginal. A $0.50 pay raise means a lot more to someone making $10/h than it does to someone making $50/h. People today work for $10/h because that is a huge step up from nothing. But if everyone is getting a $20k/year free handout who is going to work for $10/h? $10/h is only $20k/year, that's a paltry marginal increase for having to work an extra 40hrs a week. So in order to attract workers, pay will have to rise, which means price of good and services will rise, which means the UBI will have to rise. You think big business is shipping jobs to China and India now? Just wait until the price of labour in the new UBI economy stabilizes.
UBI is a classic example of something that sounds like a great idea in theory, but in practice would be an unmitigated disaster.
If none of us have jobs, then the government will just have to pay us all a living stipend, right? So, where does this money come from if no one is working and producing things? I suppose the government could just print it (even more than they do already) but that would collapse quickly as the currency would soon have no value at all. Trust the SEIU to come up with a great solution.
You are right but you also forget something. If new houses are handled by robots and old houses are taken down, less and less humans are needed to maintain them. You might keep your job but the person next to you wont. And now it is all about who is best and cheapest. So if nothing else, your salary will drop.
We don't need more producers - but we still need the consumption
Brilliant idea, that. Who pays for it?
Here's why...
The game is rigged. As more people see the reality of that and choose to opt out it won't really matter. Get used to poverty and subsistence living.
A wise man once said "you don't need a million dollars to do nothin". If taxes are rigged against all but the wealthy, if higher education becomes a meaningless debt trap, if housing never costs less than the most you can pay, then eventually something has to give. Why play the game if all it does is sap your life for no better standard of living?
If you want to win in this game over the 0.1% you have 2 options. Beating them at their game is not one of them. Historically, killing them has been a popular choice. The only non-violent choice is not to play. Voluntarily reduce your standard of living as much as possible. Do not support any company you can possibly avoid or do without. (This may be really tough for the iphone people.) And I don't mean just save money, because putting savings into banks and investments only gives more control to those in power. I mean simply do not participate in the economy any more than the absolute minimum. Take all that extra time and energy and invest in society and community instead. Pick up some litter at the park or walking to it. Grow your own food if you can. Live car free if you can. Try living in a typical 50's-60's home, they're tiny compared to the typical modern monstrosity. Unless you enjoy heating/cooling/cleaning 3000sqft you don't need, not to mention paying mortgage interest on. You can probably live quite comfortable on 10% of your current income if you are able to effectively filter wants from needs.
Or, just keep feeding the machine that wants to control and exploit you...
What I don't think people see when they complain about UBI is how vulnerable their jobs are. Techies in particular feel that they're always going to get high pay and have great jobs, but we keep seeing offhshoring of even the good tech jobs in pursuit of lower labor costs. Removal of the rest of the white collar low-to-mid level workforce is going to be even more disruptive than getting rid of labor. I work very hard to stay current with the technology I work with and I'm still seeing companies doing everything they can to pay less...managing out older employees, removing the idea of a career track, etc. All I'm saying is that the people who are currently smug and looking down at the "unskilled" class of labor from on high are about to be shocked when it turns out their job can be automated or done cheaper somewhere else as well.
Why do I think this is a big deal? In corporate IT, I constantly see tons of jobs that could easily be automated if some MBA decided to do a cost-benefit analysis. In lots of companies these jobs are the majority of the workforce. Why do you think HP, Dell, etc. are announcing layoffs in the 5 digits as a response to the slump in PC sales? Lots of people in cube-dweller land are doing modern versions of paper-movement jobs that existed 40 years ago, having pointless project meetings, etc. Inefficient, right? Sure, but those same people pay taxes, have children, buy houses, buy the products their companies make, and generally keep things moving. People being worried that they'll be able to pay their bills all the time reduce their spending and put off major purchases. Look at the Millennials as an example...most aren't jumping right into home ownership because they don't feel they have a stable footing.
I do see a lot of logistical problems, but I see way more problems if something like this isn't done. If companies suddenly don't have to pay their workforce as much, and wages are the highest cost in many companies, you suddenly have tons of money floating around. Businesses are going to scream socialism if we try something like forcing them to contribute to the UBI fund with all this extra money they have. I imagine that without UBI, the business owners will just keep squeezing employees and keep all the savings for themselves. The problem with this scenario is that money-for-labor economies can cope with 5% unemployment, are uncomfortable at 10+%, and get pretty screwed up much beyond that. Imagine an 80 or 90% unemployment rate across all walks of life...all the guards in the world won't protect the business owners from an angry population with nothing else to do and no way to earn a living.
Folks, 'Atlas Shrugged' was supposed to be a warning to the USA, not a how-to manual.
People respond to incentives. Any conceivable tax increase to raise the funds needed for a UBI will make the Great Depression look like a joke.
- Necron69
I don't mind if some groups try this, but *please* not at the federal level in the USA. Doing it at the federal level is bad because:
1) it violates the very wise parts of the constitution which say that all non-enumerated powers are left to the people and the states, and,
2) means that nobody else gets to try a different, better approach, but we are all forced to pay our money to what many will see as yet another mismanaged federal system to take money and use it inefficiently for bureaucrats to expand their domains and make rules for others. E.g., forced charity.
I believe we are responsible before God to help each other, and will be judged for our choices, but that giving charitably should not be done by force. If the federal government wouldn't take so much of our money, some people could do a better job with charity than the government does with our money now. And if these things are tried at the state level the opportunities are there for states to try different things and learn from each other.
I know of an organization where they would sometimes have "beauty contests" to make tech decisions: allow multiple ideas to be tried and take the one that worked best. If it's done at the federal level that becomes almost impossible to try different things within the USA. We can still learn from other countries but not as effectively for local situations, if the same solution is imposed on all states. And if done at the state (or other, lower) level, local decisions can be made to suit local circumstances. Or one can move. Yay!
A Free, fast personal organizer for touch typists: onemodel
I realize you're joking. It sounds like Venezuela, which hasn't gone well.
A Free, fast personal organizer for touch typists: onemodel
Woo! Hoo! Lets roll out boys! I brought the moonshine!
Oh, wait, I have some software I need to write at work... I'll meet up with all of y'all on Friday, ok?
Only I can judge you.
It's like I keep telling everyone. Jobs aren't going away... employers are.
That doesn't mean that we're looking at a future without jobs. It means we're looking at a future where the investors and the management overhead is mostly cut out of the picture. There will be groups of consultants that hire people, but these working groups will be small, and concise. Most work, at least as it relates to tech and service oriented work will be remote.
Massive corporations are going away. Nobody realizes it yet, but that's the trajectory we're on. The organizational structure doesn't make sense, and they won't be able to compete with well organized groups of consultants who can do the same jobs, for less money. These companies bleed money, and they simply won't be able to survive when the dynamic of the workforce changes, which it's already doing.
If we're lucky, we've got another eight years of "jobs" as we know them left. This is the time to invest in your future. Know your trade, build a social network. Broaden your skillset, and take some business and sales training. When the time comes, you're going to need to be able to articulate your unique value add, because you'll be competing on a global scale. But all is not lost, you can win this. There's huge upside opportunity for those that get serious now.
You can call me a communist, or a crazy man all you like. But this is where I see it going.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Know what'll probably happen if the U.S. was stupid enough to actually give this rediculous 'UBI' idea any play? Businesses would immediately cut everyone's pay to lower their overhead costs, because they'd know everyone was getting 'free money' from the government. Then the government would, despite all the programs that UBI proponents claim would be ended as part of the implementation of UBI, raise income taxes across the board, and maybe raise other taxes, to cover the cost. Oh and of course there will be government programs that won't end for whatever perfectly reasonable-sounding reasons, so there's more money out of the pockets of people who still work. Meanwhile all of the UBI champions seem to be completely incompetent mathematically; when this first came up I did the math and discovered that there's not enough money on the entire planet to do something like this for 300,000,000 people and have it be sustainable in any way whatsoever, no matter how many government programs you cut. Also there's military spending; you can't cut military spending unless you want the modern-day Huns walking in here and taking over. We can't just pull out of all our alliances, pull out of everywhere we are already, pull back into our borders, and pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist anymore; it's way too late for that and you're not living in reality if you believe otherwise.
In the end this so-called 'UBI' doesn't scale up; if implemented in the U.S., it would destroy the nations' economy overnight, and it would probably have the opposite effect of what's desired: there would likely be more poverty, not less, and more people stuck below the poverty line with no way to get out of it. Face it: We can't even provide free basic medical insurance for every U.S. citizen free of charge. The ACA is completely out of control, medical costs are skyrocketing, people are spending more and more money every year on medical insurance that doesn't actually do anything to actually keep them healthy, you're required by law to have it or pay an expensive tax penalty, and there's no end in sight to for it, it'll get worse and worse until it finally collapses and they have to end the whole program anyway. Now look at Social Security: That's the closest thing to you so-called 'UBI' we have, and it's a joke, you can't live on it, and by the time I'm ready to 'retire' (which won't happen, I'll never be able to afford it) Social Security won't even be there anymore, despite having paid a huge chunk of our paychecks into it our entire working lives. This is what your so-called 'UBI' will look like: another boondoggle that ends up costing everyone a huge chunk of money, and that doesn't do what it claims to do. Meanwhile the only people who really think it's a good idea are people who are bad at math, and people who just don't want to work and want to be lazy screw-offs all day long and don't care what it means to anyone else or to the country.
Now, the real solution: Proponents of the so-called 'UBI' say that more automation and so-called 'AI' (a term that I highly contest, since I think it's misused) will take millions of people's jobs. I say that rather than corporations doing what they would naturally do (fire everyone and not give a damn what happens to them, 'not our problem!'), they be required to retrain people whose jobs are being obsoleted, and continue to employ them in new positions. Human beings need a sense of purpose, and they need to do work they feel is meaningful, or Bad Things happen. Ask any psychologist or sociologist; people sitting around with nothing to do, all day every day, will either decay, or they will get into some sort of trouble. Is this the direction you want Humanity to go? You think there are bad wars now? There will be worse wars if you have millions of people suddenly with nothing to do. There will have to be jobs created for people put out of work, plain and simple.
The rallying cry of neanderthals throughout their truncated history, as they were being outcompeted by the other human species.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
The headline makes it sound like instituting a universal basic income would be somehow admitting defeat rather than making progress.
Fantasy. All those spending programs are based on bribes to the PAC's, Unions, Foundations, etc. etc. etc. all of which would cease to be paid. If you really want this crap to end elect a non establishment candidate. But this isn't likely as the establishment will do damn near anything to stay in power.
Sure, Johnny, sure. The last 50 years have been _just like_ any other given 50 year period in history.
I need no evidence for a logic based analysis and you are begging the question. Pointing to the past is not a fact based approach, pretending it is means nothing. It's amusing to me that you think nothing will ever happen differently "becuzz history!"
As you watch what happens over the next 50 years (hell, 10 years) remember how foolish you sounded pretending to be a history professor and thinking that a series of historical events happening in a completely different context can accurately guide you in a completely and utterly different set of circumstances.
I get really tired of these people who blame current bad economic conditions on the 'failed free market'
There IS NO FREE MARKET in America, certainly not lazzie faire. First off so long as there exists a central bank in a regional economy, there is no free market. (and since almost every single country in the world has a central bank, it means there are no free markets anywhere in the world) The power to manipulate interest rates and print money is so tremendous, and causes so many imbalances in the markets, that any time one exists it means there is no free market. Free markets require FREEDOM.
We have minimum wage, employer mandated health insurance, taxes on everything from savings, production, income, AND consumption. Then follow it up with 50 different states with different (and often incompatible) regulations, licensing and restrictions... no WONDER the economy is struggling to reach equilibrium.
But all the problems of the diminishing middle class, the loss of job stability, the rise of tent cities, stagnant wages and rising prices, yeah those have NOTHING to do with the items i mentioned earlier, its all capitalisms fault, the only solution is to give it up and go directly to socialism/communism.
That welfare keeps growing does not make it a good thing. Making the world safe for couch potatoes does not make the world a better place.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
You don't seem to mind that they don't have to contribute to live it up.
I don't care at all, because it's a very small number of people. Most small business owners started the business. Most 1%ers are there for only a couple of years. Most Americans have stock investments, and gradually accumulate retirement savings.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Yes, everyone needs an income apart from their wages. And we always have needed it. Jobs are a dumb excuse for income. It makes dumb jobs just proliferate. There's tons of social surplus, and always has been. Mainly it's the value of land, nature, Earth. Just as Alaska shares some of its oil "rent", every place could share its "land rent", as Singapore does to a degree, and so does Aspen CO. And you don't have to spend it on basic needs or basic anything. It's your share of the worth of Earth. You can do anything you want with it. And it grows with progress. Look how silicon chips made Silicon Valley one of the most valuable (and least affordable) locations on Earth. That's our bonanza, for all of us. Everyone getting their fair share will get rid of the dumb jobs and shrink the workweek to what it should've been all along. We just need to lose the peasant mentality and realize we're all Earthlings.
"It won't" is the perfect answer for questions than involve unicorn farts.
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Most small business owners who started the business without that small million dollar loan from dad do not own machines that crank out value while they watch. Most end up being owner/operators. They would probably benefit greatly from the basic income. They need for enough local people to have enough money to spend to keep them in business.
Loggers to saw the trees
Mills to generate the cards
Mechanics to build the machines and fix them
Operators to load the cards, punch them, etc.
When I double click on a file then someone in the "cloud" needs to go retrieve the box of cards from a drawer, load them in a hopper and voila... there's my file. Save the edits back to punched card.
Jobs!
If I lose my job to robots or - way more likely - optimised standardised software and can't have any share in the production gain, then I just grab myself a Kalashnikov and take what I need.
Glad we could clear this up so quickly.
Be seeing you soon.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Most small business owners who started the business without that small million dollar loan from dad do not own machines that crank out value while they watch
No one does today. Do you think a plumber or electrician who owns his own business won't benefit from automation in their fields? They own the trucks and equipment now, why would that change? Do you think a dentist won't from automation in their fields? Mine already owns the closest thing to a "machine that cranks out value" - the machine that makes crowns. Do you think someone who owns a pizza restaurant won't benefit from automation? They are the directly ones who will benefit from kitchen and delivery automation.
The big manufacturing facilities in the US are heavily automated already - that's not where a change-in-kind is coming. It bringing that automation down in minimum practical scale allowing more and more people to benefit.
Heck, why would you think, when small-scale manufacturing is fully mature, that the "machine that cranks out value" wouldn't be in everyone's house? I predict the same arc as laser printers here - from massive capital outlay, to specialty shops scattered everywhere, to easily affordable for everyone.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Maybe a UBI would work in a Scandinavian country or Japan, that has a lot of workers and few immigrants. When you have millions of people heading for your border, putting out more pork for them, is insanity. Maybe we could pay UBI to the US "Citizens", but could we pay for UBI to all of South and Central America?
You can bet millions more would come across the southern border. Open borders, might work, UBI might work, but together they are a DISASTER!
Look at the proposed fiscal policies, not who groped or whose husband raped. - How will the policies affect YOU, then vote.
The GFC made it obvious that conjuring up trillions of dollars wasn't a problem. Easy. The issue is who gets the money. Bankers got it. They hung their heads for an hour or two then carried on making money hand over fist from the rest of us. Money isn't the problem. Who gets it is the problem. A UBI will be essential. But it has to be aligned with food supply and hiding supply and transport costs. You can't do one in isolation from the others.
Only boring people are ever bored.
Entrepreneurship is low because of the hurdles that have been put in place. Cut the red tape and safeguards. Cut taxes and get rid of the officers going about making it miserable for small companies. Then you would see more companies forming. Adding rules benefits the entrenched players, not the new players.
Shrink D.C. and tell Washington to Stop Spending MY MONEY!!
As I posted before in 2013, again in 2013 and latest in 2015
I'll summarize it for you all though. In order to avoid a situation where the majority are unsustainably poor and ready to revolt, we'll need to meet the following criteria:
- Every country in the world needs to be at about the same technological level at about the same time
- Every government in the world (and all the people within them) embrace strong socialist beliefs that make current socialist states look like anarchists
- We need to abolish the concept that work is directly related to value, and in turn, diminish the concept that scarcity and demand have real impact on value.
- We have to accept that there is going to be a sizable number of people in the world who add no value to society or the world, and simply exist as consumers
The average person would have a trade skill that they use when they feel like it, perhaps no more than 1-3 hours a week, live in a house or home they like, and their things (clothing, devices, transportation, food etc) would be freely given to them with only limits placed on quantity by need - for example, no one needs more than 1 car, but you might - from time to time- need a truck or a motorcycle. There'd be no such thing as money, private ownership of property (items & land) is almost completely gone, and naturally limited resources would be metered out by some merit plus popularity based system, so not everyone would have a starship, for example. ... but the reality is that we're probably going to have to go through at least one, if not more cycles of horrific violence or strife, to the point that it forces us to radically redefine our thoughts and behaviors. We're just too caught up in concepts of justice-as-defined-by-the-beholder, us-vs-them, and so on to do it right now.
Philosophical libertarians subscribe to the Non Aggression Principal.
Government is, by nature, Aggression.
Participation in government - voting - is to support the notion that certain types of aggression are OK.
If you support aggression, you are NOT a libertarian.
The Libertarian Party is just another aggressor.
As more and more task become automated, human skills for those task will continue to atrophy. Just ask, well almost anyone to do arithmetic in their head. Clearly the unintended consequence of calculators. At some point the entire design build process will be automated. Then not only will the average user no longer be able to tell you how things are done, but no one will. What will be the unintended consequences of that? We already have programs doing things we don't really understand. What could possibly go wrong?
In order to give away a living wage (UBI), you need 2 basic things:
1. Unfettered control over resources,
2. The ability to create without expense (essentially free labor)
1) In order to really make this work, a government will need control over all necessary resources to make everything needed to live. This ultimately will lead to a single world government since the necessary resources are scattered across the globe. The government will own all resources since that is the only way to truly control them. Also, a central planning agency will be necessary not only for distribution, but to even out consumption. Populations in overcrowded areas or suboptimal distribution areas will need to be relocated. Without such control, those who do control the resources will eventually become wealthy enough to topple the government (if for no other reason than for their own amusement).
2) Automation will greatly increase the workability of this solution, but if the timing is not right, this plan could collapse like a house of cards, or more specifically, like a Soviet Union. Remember that experiment? While there were a few who did amazing self-actualizing in the arts and sciences, most were stuck in crap jobs with no motivation to perform the essential tasks. One of the keys that led to its collapse was a basic misunderstanding of what motived workers. While machines do not need motivation (only power), humans do. If all of the non-self-actualizing tasks are not automated, they will simply not get done. You may find one or two altruistic people who will be willing to haul away all of the garbage in their village, but the world will not be able to sustain itself on such altruism or hoping that there are enough self-actualizing garbage collectors in their society.
The success or failure of UBI will basically hinge on how well we transition to it. If we inspire workers to leave critical but unfulfilling jobs before the jobs are sufficiently automated, then we will be doomed. If we withhold UBI until all of the workers are displaced by automation, we are equally doomed. While things like the industrial revolution happened quickly, they were not over night. There was time for people to adjust somewhat, even if they failed to do so because they were unprepared. In the just-in-time western civilization, a sustained break in a couple sectors in the system could cause the entire thing to collapse before we get the needed processes in place to replace the old tasks.
If a UBI were enacted in the U.S. it would lead to the same permanent underclass enslavement that has occurred in the African American community with the welfare state. As working people are increasingly taxed to pay for UBI it will permanently divide America into those who feel there's no reason to work and thus remain a permanent underclass and those who earn upper middle class wages and can afford the tax. It will greatly increase the divide between the haves and the have-nots. But this is why those who want their share of power in a more controlling government love UBI because once someone is made a permanent life-long slave to UBI they will vote away everything they have to get their free daily bread.
Strangely enough, based on your lack of insight, compassion, and general inability to extrapolate from a clearly stated premise, I would also rather you chose your alternative to thieving. Please do it before you vote for Trump, too, m'kay?
That's one argument you can make ... but my point is, this particular college also offered an opportunity where you get a full 6 weeks of vacation per year, starting with your first year of employment, and work weeks are 35 hours, not 40, despite receiving all the same health insurance and related benefits of any 40 hour per week job. The salary is definitely not measurably lower than what anyone else offers for the same type of work, given those facts.
If computer support is considered such as "low level" type of work today (as some people on here claim), then surely it's within the abilities of some of these folks currently upset that their retail or fast food job won't pay them $15/hr. or more? Study to get an A+ certification and show some enthusiasm for wanting to work someplace, and you're essentially qualified.
But no... I guess it's easier to bellyache and claim we all need a basic income paid to us for doing nothing instead?
That idea has already been done. It's called COMMUNISM.
I will withhold all taxes if anybody even tries to implement such a thing.
The problem is that it's utterly disastrous in the long term. If you subsidize people who add essentially no value to society, they reproduce and create even more people who add no value to society. Whether they're worthless due to low IQ or bad values is irrelevant. So unless you're willing to go all the way to eugenics, you have to keep some degree of Darwinism in your society lest it slide too far down. Since the general consensus is that eugenics is completely off the table, that's not an option.
If you keep some Darwinism in tact, then you avoid that catastrophe because over time, there will be less and less people who aren't capable of competing in such a society.
Not to mention, involuntarily taking the fruits of someone else's labor and not compensating them for it is theft or slavery by any other name.
I think it will be a while before machines cause that much loss of jobs. I think machines and AI will augment people, not replace them.
That said, we need to get ready to revamp our insane tax system. A fair income tax should be applied to a worker whether its is human or mechanical. Maybe go to VAT?
Greed is the root of all evil.
Hate to tell you, but Bernie lost fair and square. You've been duped about him being robbed. Quite possibly by Republicans trying to fracture the liberal vote.
Translation: technology will always create more and better jobs for horses.
Turns out that wasn't true.
(With thanks to CGP Grey.)
Yeah, that's great, until you remember that in the entire history since Malthus humanity has never had any competition -- all the jobs went to humans. When we invent AIs, that will no longer be the case.
I'm sorry you (and so many other humans) are utterly incapable of imagining a world in which they are no longer the top of the employment food chain.
With robots able to work 24/7, without overtime pay, without pension deductions, without medical contributions, where a floor of 100 robots replaces 1000 workers, the question to answer is "Is there enough jobs to go around after retraining?". If the laied off workers have no money, who will be there to buy your products or services? Answer only a very few.
Car manufacturing is now done more by robots than by humans. 50,000 workers now down to 5000 for the same or improved output.
In the IT industries programming/system design, AI will eliminate many of the jobs. Those countries where the cost of living is so low as to be a poverty wage elsewhere will have the jobs.
I also see people flooding universities, schools, to increase their level of education. I see people who have no skills or having skills that are in abundance, unable to work and they will need not a minimal wage, but a living wage.
I see it with my adult children. They are working harder, and longer and earning comparatively less than what I earned at their age.
The best future job is to save your pennies and invest in real-estate.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Comment removed based on user account deletion
how about we just go to communism instead and share your wife and daughters
Yes! Of course. Absolutely. To both questions. Can't believe that anyone even needs to ask!
Astro
So why do you put up with it then? Why should .1% own everything?
The FairTax eliminates the IRS and embedded taxes while providing a prebate for all necessities up to the poverty level. Lots of other positive aspects as well. The only downside? It's revenue-neutral, meaning it won't immediately shrink government or our collective tax burden.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
As a libertarian, I do not find UBI inconsistent with my values. My libertarian beliefs are based on the idea of maximum freedom. "Get a job or starve to death" is not maximum freedom. Implementing UBI concurrent with automating away 80-90% of jobs increases, not decreases, freedom.
If I can print a new house in an afternoon, cheaper than hiring you, are you still necessary?
This is just another euphemism for Communism. ("From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" - Karl Marx). The first fatal flaw is it effectively wipes out the incentive to succeed; since someone can be handed a living with zero risk and near zero effort. The success of capitalist nations is because people are willing to risk their savings and comfort and to work much harder if success returns them material comfort. 95% of all small businesses fail even in the best of time. So this approach says that if someone risks everything and loses, the loss is their own. But if they are part of the 5% that succeeds, the government will seize most of what they made and re-distribute it to people that risked nothing. That failed in the old Soviet Union, it failed in China (who have now introduced capitalism just to create enough GDP to feed their citizens, it failed in Cuba, in failed in North Korea, etc. The British tried 95% top tax rates to give away more free handouts and too many of their biggest and most successful risk-takers took their show to other countries. If you want to lift the country; you need to provide incentives to increase the percentage of people willing to risk their own money and work hard to succeed; not guarantee the comfort of those who aren't motivated. The second fatal flaw is that it puts the government in charge of deciding who gets virtually all wealth created by effort. And in such countries, the main beneficiaries are government officials and their accomplices.
That is the road to plenty for all! Tax all robots and/or computers so each human displaced is provided for. Established a network of consultants to teach people how to live a life of leisure without going off the deep end. And make all education of healthcare free. Like people do what they love and encourage to serve out of duty - not work for greed.
This is the future. Presently we with a 24-hour firehose of information. Self-replicating robots will provide free service. Then unlimited energy with future replicator will provide all goods and money will obsolete.
Some regions (Alaska, Alberta, Norway?) have set up systems where some of the assets of the region are held in some sort of a fund that pays dividends to citizens. To me this makes a bit of sense - all the citizens collectively "own" the assets, so when "the state" sells mineral rights or any of those assets, giving to money to the citizens seems logical.
Maybe we should take all of the country's non-tax income, and split that between all of the country's citizens, then increase the tax rate enough to make up for the "lost revenue". Selling out natural resources? At least then the "little guy" gets a piece of the action rather than just the enviromental degredation and lost future value to the country.
If nobody is working, then who is paying the taxes to pay for the UBI?
Money doesn't grow on trees.
Food grows on trees, and someone has to pick it, ship it, and stock it before someone can buy it.
I see UBI as the collapse of society.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Not actually anonymous, Ryk E. Spoor here, in case anyone cares.
Automation will progress. Barring a disaster that really hammers the world back to the stone age, this isn't just a guess, it's truth. And the more that automation, and robotics, progresses, the more jobs they can take.
Unlike prior "OMG, Work is disappearing" eras, this one actually has a strong chance of succeeding in removing the vast majority of jobs from the marketplace, because intelligent adaptable automation can do the one thing humans USED to have a monopoly on: adapting and generalizing. If you can make machines that do various complex jobs, you can also make machines to maintain those machines AND themselves. Given the heavy work going on in automated vehicles, probably the first major sector of jobs (after things like fast-food clerks and cooks, etc.) to be eliminated will be professional drivers (truck, taxi, and so on). Once THAT proves out, a huge number of other jobs will be subject to automation.
I expect to see 50% permanent unemployment by the time I die, if I live a reasonably long time; my kids may live to see it hit 95%+. At this point we have really only two choices -- maintain the assumption that, really, people are only worth something if they work, in which case you'll see the few working (or the few who have enough power to make sure they're never replaced) in increasingly secure enclaves and more people starving and desperate. OR we say "people are themselves of value", in which case we need to recognize that robots are not producing wealth for the use of robots (unless and until we make actually fully-self-aware and sapient robots), but for people, and make sure that the wealth is distributed appropriately TO the people. Marshall Brain wrote "Manna" addressing these possibilities, and while I don't agree with him on all points, he gets the basic issues right.
The idea of universal basic income is absolutely wrong. It doesn't matter how many people lose their jobs. Intervention upon the economy, especially government intervention is very, very bad. This opens the door to all sorts of other problems and puts tremendous stress upon the economy. It is a fact that most of our jobs will dissapear in the near future and ALL our jobs will dissapear in the distant future. That's mainly because the concept of "job" will die as well. Androids will be able to do all the physical tasks we do and more; AI will be able to do all of our intellectual tasks and it will do them better than we can. The creative jobs, such as singing, writing, painting etc that many people believe will always be done by humans will belong to AI as well. And this is all very good. Because we do not need jobs. We never did. We need goals. Goals that we want to accomplish as individuals and as a species. Goals like extending our civilisation to other planets, becoming immortal and advancing our own intelligence to the point the we surpass the AI's that will surpass us in the near future.
Who will maintain the robots who are doing the work? Who will maintain and secure the computers in self-driving cars? Even if jobs are off shored, niche markets for quality goods develop. For example, I leave lots of money with local crafts people because I value the custom ceramics and furniture and clothing they make. I want things to last and everything that I purchased from crafts people has done just that. Plus, I buy organic food from a place that carefully checks whether produce is actually organic. The main reason I purchase organic is that having grown up on an organic farm, I know how carefully the land is treated and conserved. I have never set foot in WalMart. Costco I only occasionally turn to - mostly for canned goods for emergencies.
It's easy street. They say the AI is really good. Transcription is better done by machine now. Thought AI couldn't be far behind.
Let's just live easily from now on. Let the machines do the decisions, make stuff, even do the policing and military. Fly our planes, fighters, etc.
Hey, what could go wrong?
http://marshallbrain.com/secon...
of our issues. One we reach that percentage that's the critical mass of PERMANENT unemployablility you'll know it. Because we will be involved in perpetual, unending war. Oh, wait. THIS IS ALREADY THE CASE MAYBE YOU'RE ALL FUCKING IDIOTS WITH YOUR HEADS UP YOUR COLLECTIVE ASSES.
The USA refuses to even give medical care to people without bankrupting them. In what conceivable scenario would the same society give a basic income to everyone?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
This is the kind of subject that will make a lot more sense to people when we're actually at the crippling point where machines have replaced workers by a significant margin, across many industries. We're not close yet, but it's something that looks visible on the horizon. Our track record of response on this sort of thing pro-actively is really terrible, though. We need to be a few years in to the machine takeover before things like UBI will make sense, and by then some other solution may look more immediately appealing, anyway.
The people who would sit on their asses with a UBI are the same people who pretend to have autism and get social security disability checks, i.e. they would amount to nothing anyway
Between the ones that do and the ones that don't, it'd be far better to entice them with a good job on good terms versus the pittance of a Social Security check.
entrepreneur
Not everyone is fit to be the proverbial Richard Branson. They would be fine with their 30ish years of office work as a direct hire at a respectable company, with good benefits and increasing levels of responsibility. Consigning them to 60-70 years of squalor just for not having the startup bug in them is far from optimal.
Never mind that some people have a perfectly fine mindset that does not work well with startups, but works well with established organizations. Unlike some people of my generation, I saw how the latter can work well for people.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
That's all fine and good but what you are proposing will only stave off the inevitable for at most a year or two. Automation is coming, it is already here and covering more ground faster and faster. Read "Rise of the Robots" it is an enlightening read.
AI is fine and dandy, but only when it is an intelligent companion, not an existential threat.
If multi-disciplinary automation (such as current-day AI) wants to become a threat, treat it no differently. Nothing says that today's Watson can be treated the same way Mr. Patterson treated the original one.
How would you propose penalizing anyone that overlooks the long-term unemployed/discouraged? Who would you propose get penalized?
The party/parties that overlook the unemployed, including all third parties and contracting services.
What would be the mechanism for detecting and punishing these despicable beings?
The lowest bar of proof constitutionally allowable for the unemployed (that meets criminal/civil standards), such that no "safe reason" can be formed.
As for punishment? A golden ticket to work directly with the organization in question for a guaranteed minimum term measurable in decades, with provisions to survive existential events - including but not limited to acquisition, offshoring, bankruptcy, and/or reorganization. It might put the staffing industry out of business for being a favored benefit dodge, but it's not as if they've been of much use for regular people these days.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
There will never be a minimum guaranteed anything but early death for the worker bees who do all the work and that does NOT include the dynastic inheritance class of Trump, Bush, Kerry, Gates, RMoney et al.
Because, at the end of the day, Capital produces nothing. Capital HOLDERS profit by limiting access to tools and resources needed to get work done, and charge for permitting some to profit while others languish
This is how the owners like the world to run, so get used to it.
Starvation is a good incentive to DIE!
ok ... but aren't multiple, redundant programs, means testing, drug testing etc. wasteful of administrative dollars? How much of the budget actually goes to feeding, housing and clothing the unemployable and underemployed (like Walmart workers who are the largest employer of SNAP recipients.)? Answer me that.
"What do we want to want" - Yuval Noah Harari