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?
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.
It's currently 2016, getting close to 2017, so we're rapidly reaching the two decade mark.
I would say that Slashdot has a strong *libertarian* bent, not necessarily a conservative one. It's definitely gotten more pronounced in the last few years, going from grumbling about government to out and out hatred of government. Even the on-topic comments about tech have gotten pretty bad, with tribal shit-flinging drowning out the rare piece of actual insightful commentary.
Never underestimate the stupidity inherent in all human beings.
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.
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).
Everybody gets it, no strings attached. That will solve a lot of it.
I would say that Slashdot has a strong *libertarian* bent, not necessarily a conservative one. It's definitely gotten more pronounced in the last few years, going from grumbling about government to out and out hatred of government. Even the on-topic comments about tech have gotten pretty bad, with tribal shit-flinging drowning out the rare piece of actual insightful commentary.
Libertarians are not automatically against UBI. In fact, many have welcomed it.
I am all for UBI if it can be implemented intelligently.
Problem is, the math doesn't work. Lets say we pay out 100% of current federal revenue as UBI (setting aside the fact we'd still need Medicare etc). That's just over $10,000 per citizen. Is that even a subsistence wage? Will that even buy health insurance from the exchange? Heck, let's say all medical expenses are met by faerie dust. Is $10k really subsistence income in most of the US ? Even in rural areas, full time minimum wage is significantly more than that.
And of course we can't give all the federal budget to the UBI. And we can't handwave medical costs. So it all comes down to assuming that some future tax increase will raise federal revenue in a way that no past tax system ever has (that is, bring in more than 20% of GDP). Good luck with that.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You seem to be confusing the top 1% by income with the top 0.1% by wealth. Two entirely different animals and a massive gap. Working Doctors, Lawyers, and Engineers are in the top 1% by income the top 0.1% don't do any work, they just scrape wealth off the top in interest, loan it back to the people who do all the work, rinse and repeat. They contribute no more than a drunk bum on a street corner, less, that guy might pick up cans or work in a shelter every now and then but they consume dramatically more than anyone else (although they pay far less than anyone else would because of the leverage of wealth).
Also, the top 10% by income pays half the taxes, not the top 1% or the top 0.1%. Warren Buffet is a good example, his income is billions and according to the tax statement he just released he got his adjusted gross income down to about $11 million on which he only paid $1.5m in taxes. The doctors actually contributing to society working in even one small hospital pay more tax than that guy. Remove the top 0.1% from the equation and you likely won't see a big drop in the portion of taxes paid by the top 10% but take away their wealth and you'll see a massive drop in the portion of the nations wealth held by the top 10%.
Extend overtime rules to exempt employees. That'll fix things in a damn hurry.
Should've been done a long time ago, really. I can't speak for other careers, but many IT folk, like the poster above you, work more than 40 hours a week. They're on call 24x7, they work long hours, etc.; there are many places where this is required. Translation: IT workers are being exploited. That they agreed to it does not make it right or ethical -- and those extra hours are hours that some other unemployed individual could be working, thus creating more jobs (that in reality should already exist, but companies don't really care all that much about their slave^Wcheap labor).
Glad I found a sane place to work that doesn't screw its employees.
Not sure why you posted anonymously though. Nothing illegal about what you said, and probably exactly what everyone would do bar alterations to exempt status.
-- sigs cause cancer.