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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
You answered your own question, sort of.
In New York State, Baltimore City, California, Washington State, and really all over America, there's a broad distribution of low-income neighborhoods with an average rent of $1-$1.06/sqft. Food in Seattle grocery stores costs approximately the same as food in Baltimore City grocery stores--for example: 10 pounds of Pinto beans costs $5.83 in Baltimore, MD and $6.16 in Seattle, WA. Flour, bacon, eggs, and other commodities are similar. The same goes for personal care items.
It's not so much that people will bus to Detroit as it is that they'll bus to the same low-income areas as they do currently.
BI exceeds the total GDP today or you don't have BI.
Using 2013 as a model, it's possible (although unpleasant) to create a single-individual budget from retail prices. Food is the riskiest, while clothing and personal care are the most flexible; housing is the most-complex.
It's possible to incorporate a serving of vegetables, meat, and large amounts of beans or rice into the diet each day in as little as $25 for 2000kcal/day for 30 days. That includes things like Sam's Club's rotisserie chickens, eggs, some bacon, pancake syrup, and a few other so-called luxuries that don't seem luxurious. I based the original budget on a $100/month food budget, and eventually altered that to use a combined food, clothing, and personal care budget, because the latter two are flexible and food is volatile (it's easy to overspend on food).
In 2013, that combined budget was $170; the 2015 number is $181, accounting for income and population growth.
Housing is trickier. Landlords face increasing risk as incomes lower: low-income tenants have no savings, and often face loss of hours or jobs. Evictions and empty units become more-common, and so the cost-of-risk goes into rent. For example: if for every 10 units you will face the cost of 1 empty unit (through the combined cost of all risks), then a $250 unit has to rent for $275 to maintain the same profit.
Risk-reduction is inherent in a UBI, notably in my Universal Social Security plan, because the benefit isn't counted as income. That means it can't be taxed, garnered, or seized. Further risk-reduction is possible, for example by entering into a two-party agreement mediated by the Social Security Administration: the exact rent is direct-deposited to your landlord, and you get the remainder; if either party cancels this agreement, both receive immediate notice. As well, tenants can buy their way out of the cost-of-risk by placing a larger security deposit as an insurance fund against their own risk.
All of this means we can rent stably to these people at a profit. I expect landlords with many units would invest cautiously, at first adding a few units for such tenants to see how the market works, then expanding when they've identified and learned to control risk--hence why transitioning is so delicate (you have to transition without disrupting current welfare e.g. HUD until the market adapts).
With a 224sqft single-occupancy apartment (I've done some designs), $300/month in my original budget gives $1.34/sqft. In 2015, that portion of the budget represents $1.43/sqft. The per-square-foot cost of construction is similar to the cost of building any other unit, although there might be $15-$20/month ($0.07-$0.09/sqft) of additional fixed costs (bathroom and kitchen), assuming everything has a 15-year life. The average life of a kitchen sink or cabinet is 50 years, while the faucet does last about 15; cheap countertops last over a decade and can be relaminated; and bathroom fixtures
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