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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Human reproduction rates are trending downwards across the developed world (i.e. anywhere a UBI would be introduced) due to cultural factors and enormous expenditures involved with raising children. There's plenty of food and plenty of space available in most of the advanced world, yet the population of Europe is shrinking and the US is only growing slightly due to immigration.
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.
But are populations trending downwards because two parents need to work to afford a house now and kids come later in life or not at all?
This is demonstrably false; developed nations have much lower reproduction rates than the undeveloped nation. Once the risk of childhood mortality is eliminated, our species preferred reproductive strategy appears to be to use additional resources to improve the quality of our offspring rather than the quantity.
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.
That's a question that has literal libraries worth of books and papers written about it. Lots of factors - women having careers, Millenials choosing to not marry or have kids, families only having one kid because they feel like they can only afford that one kid's college education, etc etc. Your guess is as good as mine.
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".
"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.
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.
"Just pass laws that ban progress and you are done."
Close. Pass laws that allow people to work for "free". And by "free" I mean to get your UBI check. Example, why pay the cost of an restaurant's "order taking robot" and all its upkeep' when a business can get 2 or 3 "free" workers? Maybe two levels of UBI - UBI employeed (get an extra 10% or 20% over UBI unemployed).
There's a bunch of holes in my suggestion that I can see easily -- probably a bunch I haven't considered, too. But it's at least worth being part of the conversation.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Everyone says that, until it's they who can't get hired
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
No, your brain is not the 'government' of your body, nor does the government act in the way that a brain does. A government, at least THIS government in the USA provides some governing capability, but it is not in command of all of us. It has limited powers by design. Very limited by the intent of it's designers, in fact.
Piss-poor analogy.
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?
We don't need more producers - but we still need the consumption
The question at hand is "is it OK for people to receive value without doing anything". You and cayenne8 seem to be saying "only if they're fabulously wealthy". rather than the more consistant "No, put the rich parasites to work too" or "Yes, that's fine".
As for the rest, yes small scale automation is a good thing. So is large scale automation. The automation isn't the problem, it is a failure to adjust our social and economic policies to the new reality that is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.