Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Progressive Redistribution models fail because eventually you run out of other people's money. There is no incentive to contribute to people who are otherwise able, but are unwilling to work. Our current formula is that about 1/3 of the American workforce is out of the labor market, any much more and it becomes even less sustainable than it is now. And for all Obama and the budget measures of the Republicans, our debt has more than doubled in the last eight years, with stagflation we haven't seen since Carter. Jobs growth is gone, economy is anemic, more and more people are simply giving up.
Meanwhile the Democrats answer is to "Tax you" more. (See Hillary's proposals) and increase government spending (see Hillary's proposals for job growth). Taxes, all of them, are regressive. The rich can avoid them (See Trump), and the poor don't pay them, the middle class always gets stuck with them.
The ONLY real answer is to get government out of picking winners and losers in the economy.
AND before you start, no, grandma wont starve, and no we don't need to be like Somalia. We have enough Fear Mongering going on with Trump and Clinton.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
This is when Libertarianism just turns into Fascism, where certain types of Libertarians actually show themselves to be wannabe autocrats who want to create a tiered society where, presumably, they're at the top, in possession of special privileges like voting.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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
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.
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.
You weren't offering sufficient compensation/opportunity to attract quality applicants. Its really that simple.
The problem is that there are a lot of poorly run businesses/institutions that can not afford to attract the talent they need to crawl out of their mediocre rut. Attracting qualified people is simply impossible, so they rationalize accordingly.
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.
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.