I love the idea -- you could even come up with a 30-40 year plan to reduce working hours to 20 hrs/week while gradually increasing a basic income. Perhaps we co

I love the idea -- you could even come up with a 30-40 year plan to reduce working hours to 20 hrs/week while gradually increasing a basic income. Perhaps we could end up in that Star Trek future we've all been hoping for. Implementation, however, looks tricky. I'm not at all sure it will roll out the way people think it's going to roll out. There's a lot of hand-waving about the effects, but it's mostly smoke and no fire. We really need some real-world data from various experiments to make better choices. There's also a vast difference between the slogan "basic income" and the actual details of how it would all work. But as you point out, aside from all of that, there's a very real political problem: we've created a large political caste that likes identifying some great misjustice and passing various social programs to fix them. These cost money. For existing programs, lots of folks have intricate ideas about how to tweak things so that they work even better. These take simple systems and make them opaque. In short, we might be able to create enough wealth over the next few decades such that we could see an incredible change in the living styles of most people -- but dang if I can see the political system actually letting that come to pass. Oddly enough, it's not because of direct opposition. It's the "embrace and extend" folks that could cause far more damage than anybody else.