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When you look at UBI, you can consider it as the government supplying a "default job" to everyone, in the same sort of way it provides a few other "defaults" -
by RangerScience 10y ago
When you look at UBI, you can consider it as the government supplying a "default job" to everyone, in the same sort of way it provides a few other "defaults" - mail (USPS) being a good example.
This provides a "minimum competition" against which any company must compete - FedEx is always going to have to be better than the USPS.
So notionally - if UBI provides a "default job", companies will have to offer better jobs than that, in order to attract any employees at all.
Except this article is pointing out that for a chunk of the population, that effect is already here, supplied by video games. The job (compensation considered) must be less shitty than playing video games all day.
- recondite 10y agoInteresting take, but isn't this also the motivation for companies to automate as much of their workforce as possible? Nobody really wants to take orders at McDonald's for $9/hour and Ronald McOwner doesn't want to pay his workers $15+ when the minimum wage gets raised so he installs automated kiosks to take customer orders. Theoretically, those workers who lost their jobs to the machines are "freed" to pursue more productive ventures, but what we've actually been seeing is the 1% capturing that capital even more (as the poster above noted). I think we're getting to a point where society is going to have to accept that vast swaths of the population are simply not necessary or otherwise employable, in the modern labor force, and hopefully, treating "labor" as an expendable market resource becomes an archaic concept, similar to how we view human slavery. The problem is, the 1% will not change on their own, that has never been the case. The incentives are just not there for them to want to.