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?
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.
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.
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.
I am all for UBI if it can be implemented intelligently.
I am an able bodied guy and will continue to work. But I understand that there are others who are not as fortunate as me. I have no problem paying for their subsistence.
The only thing is, we have to do it well if we are going to do it right. Remove loopholes and incentivize productivity as much as possible.
But, I fear that something this radical is a non-starter for a lot of reasons, not least of which is because it is the much feared socialism which every Mercan knows is synonymous with evil...
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
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.
Or, it could be more like Star Trek. Where we essentially have reached a post scarcity society and people work for the self-actualization aspect of a job rather than the desperate need to struggle to survive. You might then have children who are raised by parents who have devoted their lives to perfecting some art form, advanced mathematics as a hobby, cooking or woodworking for the bliss of it. Then hey-lets-go-to-Mars because we haven't been there and I would like a challenge since I am not worried about a sickness putting my family in the poor-house for the next ten generations...
Only I can judge you.
Uh, Bernie was pushing Socialism hard and were it not for the entrenched and dirty DNC and the Clinton Machine, he would now be the candidate of the Democratic party.
As a Bernie supporter, I would like to respectfully disagree, with the following argument: When Bernie began his challenge, he was nearly unknown to the general voting population. I think that the Democratic Establishment was planning on an essentially uncontested primary season, conserving resources to prepare for what they were certain would be a ugly, expensive general election campaign. They almost certainly failed (*really* failed) to understand the power of so many people that were left out of the conversation during and after the Clinton Triangulation era. (I also Obama arrived with such a delicate economy that his hands were tied...)
I think that if Bernie had gotten going 2 months (or better, 6 months) earlier in the run-up to the primary, the actions of the party and likely the results of the primary would have been totally different.
Finally, while think Hillary is too centrist, she has remained standing in the face of attacks that would demotivate nearly everyone else, and to the best of my knowledge is a walking encyclopedia of policy. I am not sure Bernie really had the connections or the policy background. It seems like he has a very attractive philosophy which I had hoped would lead to greater detailed policy objectives and plans.
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%.
You incentivise productivity the same way you always have, by paying for it. The UBI just moves the incentive from "I have to do this or I'll die" to "I can do this and make a better life for myself and my family".
I'm generally a pretty conservative/libertarian sort of person, and as such UBI makes me more than a little uncomfortable, but I definitely think it's worth thinking about, and disussing amongst people who won't react to it based on knee-jerk predispositions. And at some point, I think it may well become preferable to the alternatives. What kind of changes (both positive and negative) would we see if we used a UBI to completely replace welfare, SNAP, social security, unemployment insurance, disability insurance, and the minimum wage? It's hard to know, but from a basic trade-off standpoint, would the amount of people who decide that living on a UBI is enough for them and permanently slack off balance the amount of people who are afraid that if they get a job, their government checks will stop (whether or not that's a valid fear)? Would the economy find a new equilibrium where every job that Mike Rowe has showcased would suddenly become significantly higher-paying (and much more effort would go into automation for those jobs) because no one *wants* to do them, and people pre-UBI are only willing to if they have no other choices but starvation?
And how would people abuse this system? If everyone has a guaranteed income for life, will people take advantage of the UBI-only "poor" by giving them loans that eat up their entire UBI and leave them just as broke as before? (The answer to that is yes, they will, so the real question is more like "so how do we prevent that from happening?")
In the US, I've heard a lot of people talk about our "Puritan work ethic" that says that work is its own reward. I think a UBI would really put that to the test. If it's true (and I personally believe it is) then people will work, even for next to nothing, with a UBI to keep them afloat. Maybe we even get rid of some of the laws that were enacted to keep workers safe from abuse by their employers, because those laws presuppose that you *have* to work to survive and so if an employer is abusive you don't have the freedom to say "screw you, I quit." (Or the laws are based on the notion that work is a finite resource, so if I'm working 80 hours a week, I'm taking food out of the mouths of someone who *could* be working half of those hours)
All in all, I think it's a fascinating subject, and one that deserves a ton of thought. Unfortunately, it touches so many nerves and goes against so many deeply held beliefs that it's hard to have a conversation about it that doesn't quickly devolve into an ugly mess (see also: this whole slashdot post) And that's a shame.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
No, he's a realist. The world is being reinvented right now, and our silly play money is going to have to be reinvented to match.
Last time this happened the world changed entirely. We call it the industrial revolution. This time it's going to happen faster, and the changes are going to be much more drastic.