> I think people would be less prone to preserving problems if they wouldn't potentially lose their job and livelihood. I agree with that. And I think part of

> I think people would be less prone to preserving problems if they wouldn't potentially lose their job and livelihood. I agree with that. And I think part of the problem is the cultural notion that everything has to be "efficient". But a trade-off must be made between efficiency and robustness. I think it's a big myth that free market is efficient. No, free market is ridiculously redundant, but what actually makes it working so well is its robustness resulting from the redundancy. Hierarchical planning, like in big companies, is actually efficient. Global optimization. But being too efficient at the expense of robustness is what leads to unexpected disasters. Being ultra-efficient means no margin for failure. And unfortunately, the executives in big companies are motivated to take risk and overshoot the desired efficiency. And this idea came to public policy, where we don't want the public money to be "wasted", so we would rather have unemployment than people who are redundant for one reason or another. And that's what the basic income (as other commenter noted) debate is about, essentially. In the other comment here I also suggest 20% innovation time as a solution. It's actually the same problem - innovation time is seen as wasted, because it doesn't increase efficiency, only robustness.