9 ms·

To me, this sounds like a good case for a basic income guarantee or a negative income tax. If we don't need people to work, why should the government bend over

by tikhonj 12y ago

To me, this sounds like a good case for a basic income guarantee or a negative income tax. If we don't need people to work, why should the government bend over backwards and "get on their knees and beg businesses to keep employing humans over algorithms"? The whole point of automation is to make less work. But in the immediate past it hasn't meaningfully translated to less work for most people. We're even afraid of it! I think that's a structural issue with society, which we can only really fix with broad changes and a completely different attitude. The broad fetishization of work and the obsession that everyone has to work is really standing in the way of progress. We have more and more technology. It's time to start taking advantage of it. Unemployment should be a goal, not a menace.

NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
> To me, this sounds like a good case for a basic income guarantee Where will the money come from? The math doesn't work. > If we don't need people to work, This is at the heart of the confusion. There is no "we". Other people do not need the workers. Those workers? They need to work.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Where will the money come from? Taxes. > The math doesn't work. If automation is really more efficient than employing workers, than letting firms automate instead of employing workers, taxing the firms, and providing goods to the non-workers with the taxes will actually be more efficient than any form of make-work labor-based economy. > Those workers? They need to work. They don't need jobs, they need goods and services. To the extent that their labor is an efficient method of production, its socially useful for them to work to get it. To the extent that it is not, however, it is socially costly to require them to do make-work to get it.
- voidlogic 12y ago
  >> To me, this sounds like a good case for a basic income guarantee >Where will the money come from? The math doesn't work. I'm assuming the OP is funding basic income from the businesses since they are replacing the human labor with automation. This could be a direct tax on businesses or a tax on dividends or something. I'm not arguing for or against this here. The math does in fact work out if the cost of basic income is less than the productivity increase created by the increased automation.
  - CoffeeDregs 12y ago
    >This could be a direct tax on businesses or a tax on dividends or something. Seems reasonable. Also, seems like the exact opposite of what Gates was recommending?
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
    > I'm assuming the OP is funding basic income from the businesses since they are replacing the human labor with automation. Then he needs to do some math. There are just under 300 million people in the United States, for instance. He doesn't have to give all of them an income. Just tell me which demographic slice, and how much they're being given. Either it's not "universal", or it's so low it's not income. > This could be a direct tax on businesses or a tax on dividends or something. Businesses would be asked to shoulder even more of the national revenue at that point. Unless you're suggesting that your $12,000/year universal income should be pissed away right back to the IRS... at which point it's not enough to survive on. So they're shouldering all of burden of what used to be personal income tax, extra on top of it, and somehow will still have the money to buy the robots that will make it all happen? The math just doesn't work. > The math does in fact work out if the cost of basic income is less than the productivity increase created by the increased automation. How do you intend to extract that extra revenue? Besides, this illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how it will all play out. The increased productivity will happen simultaneously with a reduced demand (no one can afford to buy the products). We'll get all sorts of fluctuations, but eventually the robot owners realize that they don't need to sell things to remain wealthy. The robots are the perfect slave, and they turn raw materials (which the wealthy own) directly into luxury products. Why sell something for cash, to turn around and use the cash to buy luxury products that you can just have made to order? This even avoids all sorts of taxes. If you have no income, there is no income tax. A better way to envision this is to think "soon, the important and rich people won't need you at all". Well, maybe not the audience here at HN, I imagine there are lots of robot software types reading my comment. You guys have a few more decades, I think.
    - voidlogic 12y ago
      All this is based on the fact the the effectiveness of automation at a given price point is growing. If I replace 100 employees with a machine that has a TCO of $100k yr and I was paying them each $30k. I am $2900k ahead, should the government require I supply $15k basic income for 30 people I would still be $1640k ahead, not to mention less overhead for HR, recruiting etc. The real trick is in distributing this burden so the businesses benefiting from the automation are paying it.
- DennisP 12y ago
  The math doesn't work at the moment, but if robots take over the jobs, we'll have the same amount of production, it just won't be people doing them. So if you fund basic income with a tax on the corporations doing that production, and give the money to the people who would have been doing the work, we'd have about the same overall balance of payments as now. That assumes the robots don't cost a significant fraction of what employees did, but long-term I think that's a good assumption, and shorter-term it just means the people will make less than they did as employees.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
    > we'll have the same amount of production, it just won't be people doing them. So if you fund basic income with a tax on the corporations doing that production Those corporations will have less revenue. There won't be many blue-collar types buying new clothes dryers and bigscreen televisions. They can reduce prices to try to increase demand, but there on the wrong side of some sort of reverse Laffer curve.
    - DennisP 12y ago
      Assuming no basic income, you're right.
- thecage411 12y ago
  > Where will the money come from? The math doesn't work. This is of course a ridiculous argument when the parameters of the discussion haven't even been established. For example, we could get rid of all our social services and use the outlays and administrative costs on a basic income (minus the administrative costs of the basic income itself). That might not be a good idea for various reasons, but there's no law of mathematics preventing it.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
    Get rid of all the welfare. Sure. But quite a bit of that was paid for through personal income tax. So you're not saving anything there... it will be money you no longer have to pay for universal income with. When you do the numbers, no matter what you cut, there's not enough to go around. You either make it not universal (in which case what little political support there is evaporates) or you make it so low that it's not enough for someone to live in a cardboard box eating Chinese-melamine-poisoned dogfood. The math doesn't work. Your taxbase is eroding at a faster rate than your employment.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      To make a basic income work you need to change what you are taxing. If the premise is that work is no longer necessary, it no longer makes sense to have a tax system that taxes primarily labor income (both as "income tax" and then again to provide benefits in the form of "payroll tax") most heavily and gives preferential lower rates (as "income tax", and excludes entirely from taxation to support major benefit programs) to capital income. You have to shift your revenue base to focus on taxes on capital income as the primary source of revenue (especially if, in addition to funding basic income, you also want to slow the transition away from employment-as-a-norm -- heavily taxing employment encourages that transition by making employing people expensive for what the employee receives.) The current tax system is based on the premise of employment-as-a-near-universal norm as much as any other feature of society is.
    - thecage411 12y ago
      Have you done the math?
- parkovski 12y ago
  No money is going away. Say I have a factory today, and I have to pay x workers $7/hr. If my factory is big, that's a lot of money. Now if I replace them all with robots, aside from the upfront and maintenance costs, I don't pay anybody anything. Now, a lot of people are going to say that the owner deserves to pocket the difference because he was innovative or reduced costs or whatever. But either way, notice the factory still makes the same amount of money. It just doesn't have to pay workers anymore. So now we have a political debate, and you get all these people saying that those workers should just find a new job, and if they don't have the skills they're just lazy, don't deserve handouts, etc. I think it's sad that people think this way, but I'm not going to try to argue it because it's pointless. But if this side wins out, you'll find in the future that our country looks very 3rd world. A large wealth divide, lots of crime, little opportunity for advancement if you're not already wealthy. So how do you stop that from happening? Well, the factory owner probably deserves something for being innovative, sure. But the people that lost their jobs do too. If we get to the point where the population is a lot larger than the job pool, you basically get to pick basic income or 3rd world. There's really no other option. You can deny this all you want now - go ahead. If you want to do this, I'm not going to pretend I can convince you otherwise. One more thing though - people have jobs today not because they inherently need them, it's because some entrepreneur needs to hire people to get things done. No business person wants to spend money to hire someone they don't have to, so if we get to the point where most jobs can be automated, then we have a mostly unemployed society. We can decide how we want to handle that, but we can't really stop it from happening.
  - victoro 12y ago
    >> No business person wants to spend money to hire someone they don't have to This. Every time I hear an organization brag about how many jobs they "create" I can't help but think about how much of an oxymoron that is. Any half-decent business owner wants to get a specific job done at the lowest cost possible -- if it can be done equally well themselves without paying anybody for anything, thats the best possible scenario. Bragging about creating jobs is basically bragging that your costs of production have gotten higher.
  - misterbishop 12y ago
- tzs 12y ago
  That math works fine, as we can verify by looking at the numerous prior societies that successfully did this. It's easy to overlook them, because they didn't call their workers "robots". They called them "slaves" or "serfs".
- pasiaj 12y ago
  > The math doesn't work. Sure it does. Just lower your expectations. The main problem is that a lot of the middle income jobs will disappear or be replaced with low income jobs that won't pay a living wage. At the same time need for highly skilled people will increase and therefore pay for the highly skilled will increase. The Nordic system falls apart in this situation. The unemployed do not have an incentive to work in a low paying job, if welfare pays the same. A system where everyone is guaranteed a basic goverment income that isn't affected by your other income incentivises work and produces a more productive system overall.
mason55 12y ago
It's weird, the industrial revolution definitely reduced the amount we work. Two day weekends and forty-hour work weeks were not possible before the rise of machines (and also unions). For some reason we stopped striving to work less once we reached our current state and it's been like that for almost 100 years now.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > It's weird, the industrial revolution definitely reduced the amount we work. Two day weekends and forty-hour work weeks were not possible before the rise of machines (and also unions). Actually, long year-round work weeks generally weren't possible before the industrial revolution; the industrial revolution made them possible, which was among the problems facing the concentrated industrial labor force that led to the rise of unions, which then led to limited working hours.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    And lots of work used to be seasonal.
- bryanlarsen 12y ago
  We are substantially reducing the number of hours we work as a society. Most of the reduction has come as an increase in retirement length (because we're living longer), but some of it has come because people are entering the workforce later (due to post-secondary schooling). Since 2007 there has also been a massive increase in the number of working age people who have dropped out of the work force.
  - leaveyou 12y ago
    I'm not sure I get your logic. During the last 50-100 years: the population was continuously growing, the percent of employed population was continuously growing (women entered workforce like never before), the retirement age was always growing together with life expectancy. Do you really think all that growth is negated by "some percent of population entered workforce ~4 years later" and "some percent of people got fired since 2007" ? edit: I no longer bet you are an employer.
31reasons 12y ago
"The broad fetishization of work and the obsession that everyone has to work is really standing in the way of progress." nailed it!
nathan_f77 12y ago
Unfortunately, we don't really have more and more technology. Business owners do, and they're just going to use it to earn more money for themselves and their shareholders. That's just how capitalism tends to operate. I'm going to come right out and say that at some point, maybe we should re-evaluate communism. Of course it's going to need a massive rebranding, and we'll need to figure out how to prevent all the recurring themes of corruption and "making people disappear". My colleague highly recommends Capital in the Twenty-First Century [1], which I'm looking forward to reading. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Pi...
- MattHeard 12y ago
  Wouldn't increasing the progressivity of taxation improve redistribution without removing the efficient incentives that capitalism provides?
  - nickff 12y ago
    One of the many problems which this idea has is that it redistributes money away from people who are good at investing in growth, and gives it to people who are likely to spend on consumption goods.
    - GeneralMayhem 12y ago
      ...which is fine, really, because spending on consumption goods is the basis of the modern economy anyway. Giving money to the poor is one of the most effective ways to give money to the rich, and has the nice side effect of feeding a few mouths along the way.
      - nickff 12y ago
        Money invested in growth has different economic effects from money invested in consumption goods; the former is likely to be spent on capital goods, and thereby increase production and reduce prices in the future, whereas the latter is likely to be spent on raw materials and labor (or possibly just driving up prices), with fewer long-term benefits.
grecy 12y ago
The fixation on working more and more is much weaker outside America. See France passing a law banning company emails outside work hours, and European countries passing laws about shorter work weeks. Here in Northern Canada, working the least amount possible to have the lifestyle you want is the norm, not the exception.
- roma1n 12y ago
  France never passed such a law... But we did pass a 35 hour work-week law though.
  - demallien 12y ago
    True enough, but there was an accord signed with the unions substantially limiting the use of email after hours, which I imagine the OP wax referring to.
misterbishop 12y ago
Yes, I think we should have a basic income guarantee, but that only solves the problem of persistent hunger and homelessness. In order to provide a dignified living for a large number of people, wage earners need to take over decision-making in production. Under the current organization, automation and "labor-saving" means more profit for the owners while the mass of people struggle with unemployment, poor education and poverty. If workers made decisions about their own workplaces, labor saving could actually mean less labor without a reduction in wages. Or the surplus profit could be directed to benefits like higher education for the workers. The classic union model has been successful to a point, but has often suppressed by police violence or legal machinations. While I support unions wholeheartedly, I also think new organizations should be started on a democratic, cooperative model. That way the problems of equity are solved upfront, rather than trying to expropriate powerful elites after they've gathered up the profit. As the power of cooperative enterprises grow, workers will be in a position to directly antagonize traditional businesses. Some means include consumer boycotts, workers refusing to work for anti-democratic organizations, and pressuring the state for favorable legislation. This is a long struggle, but I think the alternative is roughly what Gates described: Meager wages, extraordinary unemployment, and Oligarchy.
- Futurebot 12y ago
  The GBI can solve more than that, I believe. A nice property of a system that has both that and a high level of socio-cultural development (i.e., lots of art, music, sports, etc.) is that it can free people to participate in an "arts, sports, and leisure" society. People will play games - cheap ones, and lots of them. We do this now, and has Cowen has pointed us, the western world is excellent at developing an endless supply of cheap entertainment. We'll likely do a whole lot more of that. How many people would play WoW or such 12+ hours a day at 15/month if they didn't have to work, and had all the basics taken care of? A lot, most likely. Other things we'll probably be looking at will be extremely powerful, long-lasting, side-effect-free (or tolerable-side effect-having) drugs. That road of course leads to wireheading, but I think that collectively denying that as a possibility now is extremely naive. Another nice property (especially if you throw in things like a real universal health care system) is that the "sharing economy " jobs go from looking borderline exploitative to perfectly acceptable, along with all other kinds of freelance and part time work. With the GBI obviating the need for a minimum wage, people who are marginal in the current system wage-wise would simply be able to opt out, which would likely bring the wages of those jobs up as it would be much harder to find people to do them. This would also apply to jobs up the wage chain; all the econo-dreams about "perfect labor fluidity" (sans perfect mobility) would be possible. Job sucks? Quit. Go elsewhere. Can't find another? Sit around and study new things, then go get a new job. Or don't. All possible with a (properly indexed and region-specific/cost-of-living-adjusted) GBI. It'd be a different kind of freedom than we're used to in the US, but one that would be much more appropriate given the way things are going.
BigChiefSmokem 12y ago
The elephant in this argument is that "work" means many different things to many different people. Some people actually do like their jobs and don't feel that "working" 40 or 80 or 100 hours means anything good or bad to them. As an adult, I do feel more accomplished now, but definitely not as fulfilled (and in turn, not as happy) with my career. This is not because I lack recognition, pay, or a cool project - but because day in and day out I’m forced by society to meander with the horrible details of doing business (“going to work”) that what I actually like to do, solving tough problems via technology, is so buried underneath it all that it makes it feel that most of the effort of my life and career has been based mostly around non-sense. There have been golden nuggets of experience and wisdom to cherish here and there, yes, but mostly it’s all been non-sense. In essence, working is not the problem – but what and how we do it is what is broken. I’ve always believed this is a problem that needs to be broken down into its more immediate and solvable root causes: monotony, disinterest (lack of learning or doing), no autonomy (middle management can and should be automated by machines), time and money lost commuting, etc. Everything about modern-day work life violates all the aspects of human nature we all instinctively hold dear. But what do you expect from a system born out of the industrial revolution? It’s like we moved on to being a service-based economy, where the machines handle all the dirty work, but we never thought of evolving the workday and educational systems that support it. A new world requires new ideas, not old shoehorned ones that keep proving time and time again how broken society is. Minimum wage, for example. I believe people should only do in life what they actually want to do, not what they have to do because of money and quality of life issues. Humanity needs to be outside enjoying the abstract universe that surrounds us. Non-sense? Maybe, but striving for ideals and perfection is also in our nature.
grondilu 12y ago
Unemployment is a goal for lots of people. Many people save money in order not to have to work in the future. So the problem is about what to do with people who are unable to save money and thus need a job. The basic income idea seems to assume that those people should be assisted and given the capital they were unable to buy by themselves. It's not much a different issue than with current unemployment and welfare programs. Only the scale is different.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  The incentive structure and social dynamics are also different.
ArkyBeagle 12y ago
But we've (ab)used labor as a trade good for income. We have an entire ... "geometry" built on that "axiom". If we don't replace wages as a social mechanism, then it's Arnold Kling's interpretation of Vickies and Thetes of "The Diamond Age". This is breaking down, and people like Charles Murray write (frequently perceived-to-be) incendiary texts that lay a perceived more general breakdown in society at this breakdown's feet. And in hiring, we see a lot of employers who don't have to hire well using personal preference instead of predicted employee effectiveness. Got tats? No job for you. Buy birth control? Not on my health plan. No BSCS? No thanks. Murray at least gets the arrow of causation right here; some people who hold to a fear of rising barbarism think the decline begins with the population and employers are simply forced into this. They think we were okay when iron discipline reigned. I think many employers have a massive narcissism problem. But what else do you expect in a world where "social" means "selfies?" I'm trying to automate industrial processes in a ... price-dynamic industry , and it's really bleak. You have actual Luddites out there. And, frankly, corporations seem to enjoy encouraging this.

by tikhonj 12y ago

NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago

> To me, this sounds like a good case for a basic income guarantee Where will the money come from? The math doesn't work. > If we don't need people to work, This is at the heart of the confusion. There is no "we". Other people do not need the workers. Those workers? They need to work.

dragonwriter 12y ago
> Where will the money come from? Taxes. > The math doesn't work. If automation is really more efficient than employing workers, than letting firms automate instead of employing workers, taxing the firms, and providing goods to the non-workers with the taxes will actually be more efficient than any form of make-work labor-based economy. > Those workers? They need to work. They don't need jobs, they need goods and services. To the extent that their labor is an efficient method of production, its socially useful for them to work to get it. To the extent that it is not, however, it is socially costly to require them to do make-work to get it.
voidlogic 12y ago
>> To me, this sounds like a good case for a basic income guarantee >Where will the money come from? The math doesn't work. I'm assuming the OP is funding basic income from the businesses since they are replacing the human labor with automation. This could be a direct tax on businesses or a tax on dividends or something. I'm not arguing for or against this here. The math does in fact work out if the cost of basic income is less than the productivity increase created by the increased automation.
- CoffeeDregs 12y ago
  >This could be a direct tax on businesses or a tax on dividends or something. Seems reasonable. Also, seems like the exact opposite of what Gates was recommending?
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
  > I'm assuming the OP is funding basic income from the businesses since they are replacing the human labor with automation. Then he needs to do some math. There are just under 300 million people in the United States, for instance. He doesn't have to give all of them an income. Just tell me which demographic slice, and how much they're being given. Either it's not "universal", or it's so low it's not income. > This could be a direct tax on businesses or a tax on dividends or something. Businesses would be asked to shoulder even more of the national revenue at that point. Unless you're suggesting that your $12,000/year universal income should be pissed away right back to the IRS... at which point it's not enough to survive on. So they're shouldering all of burden of what used to be personal income tax, extra on top of it, and somehow will still have the money to buy the robots that will make it all happen? The math just doesn't work. > The math does in fact work out if the cost of basic income is less than the productivity increase created by the increased automation. How do you intend to extract that extra revenue? Besides, this illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how it will all play out. The increased productivity will happen simultaneously with a reduced demand (no one can afford to buy the products). We'll get all sorts of fluctuations, but eventually the robot owners realize that they don't need to sell things to remain wealthy. The robots are the perfect slave, and they turn raw materials (which the wealthy own) directly into luxury products. Why sell something for cash, to turn around and use the cash to buy luxury products that you can just have made to order? This even avoids all sorts of taxes. If you have no income, there is no income tax. A better way to envision this is to think "soon, the important and rich people won't need you at all". Well, maybe not the audience here at HN, I imagine there are lots of robot software types reading my comment. You guys have a few more decades, I think.
  - voidlogic 12y ago
    All this is based on the fact the the effectiveness of automation at a given price point is growing. If I replace 100 employees with a machine that has a TCO of $100k yr and I was paying them each $30k. I am $2900k ahead, should the government require I supply $15k basic income for 30 people I would still be $1640k ahead, not to mention less overhead for HR, recruiting etc. The real trick is in distributing this burden so the businesses benefiting from the automation are paying it.
DennisP 12y ago
The math doesn't work at the moment, but if robots take over the jobs, we'll have the same amount of production, it just won't be people doing them. So if you fund basic income with a tax on the corporations doing that production, and give the money to the people who would have been doing the work, we'd have about the same overall balance of payments as now. That assumes the robots don't cost a significant fraction of what employees did, but long-term I think that's a good assumption, and shorter-term it just means the people will make less than they did as employees.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
  > we'll have the same amount of production, it just won't be people doing them. So if you fund basic income with a tax on the corporations doing that production Those corporations will have less revenue. There won't be many blue-collar types buying new clothes dryers and bigscreen televisions. They can reduce prices to try to increase demand, but there on the wrong side of some sort of reverse Laffer curve.
  - DennisP 12y ago
    Assuming no basic income, you're right.
thecage411 12y ago
> Where will the money come from? The math doesn't work. This is of course a ridiculous argument when the parameters of the discussion haven't even been established. For example, we could get rid of all our social services and use the outlays and administrative costs on a basic income (minus the administrative costs of the basic income itself). That might not be a good idea for various reasons, but there's no law of mathematics preventing it.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
  Get rid of all the welfare. Sure. But quite a bit of that was paid for through personal income tax. So you're not saving anything there... it will be money you no longer have to pay for universal income with. When you do the numbers, no matter what you cut, there's not enough to go around. You either make it not universal (in which case what little political support there is evaporates) or you make it so low that it's not enough for someone to live in a cardboard box eating Chinese-melamine-poisoned dogfood. The math doesn't work. Your taxbase is eroding at a faster rate than your employment.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    To make a basic income work you need to change what you are taxing. If the premise is that work is no longer necessary, it no longer makes sense to have a tax system that taxes primarily labor income (both as "income tax" and then again to provide benefits in the form of "payroll tax") most heavily and gives preferential lower rates (as "income tax", and excludes entirely from taxation to support major benefit programs) to capital income. You have to shift your revenue base to focus on taxes on capital income as the primary source of revenue (especially if, in addition to funding basic income, you also want to slow the transition away from employment-as-a-norm -- heavily taxing employment encourages that transition by making employing people expensive for what the employee receives.) The current tax system is based on the premise of employment-as-a-near-universal norm as much as any other feature of society is.
  - thecage411 12y ago
    Have you done the math?
parkovski 12y ago
No money is going away. Say I have a factory today, and I have to pay x workers $7/hr. If my factory is big, that's a lot of money. Now if I replace them all with robots, aside from the upfront and maintenance costs, I don't pay anybody anything. Now, a lot of people are going to say that the owner deserves to pocket the difference because he was innovative or reduced costs or whatever. But either way, notice the factory still makes the same amount of money. It just doesn't have to pay workers anymore. So now we have a political debate, and you get all these people saying that those workers should just find a new job, and if they don't have the skills they're just lazy, don't deserve handouts, etc. I think it's sad that people think this way, but I'm not going to try to argue it because it's pointless. But if this side wins out, you'll find in the future that our country looks very 3rd world. A large wealth divide, lots of crime, little opportunity for advancement if you're not already wealthy. So how do you stop that from happening? Well, the factory owner probably deserves something for being innovative, sure. But the people that lost their jobs do too. If we get to the point where the population is a lot larger than the job pool, you basically get to pick basic income or 3rd world. There's really no other option. You can deny this all you want now - go ahead. If you want to do this, I'm not going to pretend I can convince you otherwise. One more thing though - people have jobs today not because they inherently need them, it's because some entrepreneur needs to hire people to get things done. No business person wants to spend money to hire someone they don't have to, so if we get to the point where most jobs can be automated, then we have a mostly unemployed society. We can decide how we want to handle that, but we can't really stop it from happening.
- victoro 12y ago
  >> No business person wants to spend money to hire someone they don't have to This. Every time I hear an organization brag about how many jobs they "create" I can't help but think about how much of an oxymoron that is. Any half-decent business owner wants to get a specific job done at the lowest cost possible -- if it can be done equally well themselves without paying anybody for anything, thats the best possible scenario. Bragging about creating jobs is basically bragging that your costs of production have gotten higher.
- misterbishop 12y ago
tzs 12y ago
That math works fine, as we can verify by looking at the numerous prior societies that successfully did this. It's easy to overlook them, because they didn't call their workers "robots". They called them "slaves" or "serfs".
pasiaj 12y ago
> The math doesn't work. Sure it does. Just lower your expectations. The main problem is that a lot of the middle income jobs will disappear or be replaced with low income jobs that won't pay a living wage. At the same time need for highly skilled people will increase and therefore pay for the highly skilled will increase. The Nordic system falls apart in this situation. The unemployed do not have an incentive to work in a low paying job, if welfare pays the same. A system where everyone is guaranteed a basic goverment income that isn't affected by your other income incentivises work and produces a more productive system overall.

mason55 12y ago

It's weird, the industrial revolution definitely reduced the amount we work. Two day weekends and forty-hour work weeks were not possible before the rise of machines (and also unions). For some reason we stopped striving to work less once we reached our current state and it's been like that for almost 100 years now.

dragonwriter 12y ago
> It's weird, the industrial revolution definitely reduced the amount we work. Two day weekends and forty-hour work weeks were not possible before the rise of machines (and also unions). Actually, long year-round work weeks generally weren't possible before the industrial revolution; the industrial revolution made them possible, which was among the problems facing the concentrated industrial labor force that led to the rise of unions, which then led to limited working hours.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  And lots of work used to be seasonal.
bryanlarsen 12y ago
We are substantially reducing the number of hours we work as a society. Most of the reduction has come as an increase in retirement length (because we're living longer), but some of it has come because people are entering the workforce later (due to post-secondary schooling). Since 2007 there has also been a massive increase in the number of working age people who have dropped out of the work force.
- leaveyou 12y ago
  I'm not sure I get your logic. During the last 50-100 years: the population was continuously growing, the percent of employed population was continuously growing (women entered workforce like never before), the retirement age was always growing together with life expectancy. Do you really think all that growth is negated by "some percent of population entered workforce ~4 years later" and "some percent of people got fired since 2007" ? edit: I no longer bet you are an employer.

31reasons 12y ago

"The broad fetishization of work and the obsession that everyone has to work is really standing in the way of progress." nailed it!

nathan_f77 12y ago

Unfortunately, we don't really have more and more technology. Business owners do, and they're just going to use it to earn more money for themselves and their shareholders. That's just how capitalism tends to operate. I'm going to come right out and say that at some point, maybe we should re-evaluate communism. Of course it's going to need a massive rebranding, and we'll need to figure out how to prevent all the recurring themes of corruption and "making people disappear". My colleague highly recommends Capital in the Twenty-First Century [1], which I'm looking forward to reading. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Pi...

MattHeard 12y ago
Wouldn't increasing the progressivity of taxation improve redistribution without removing the efficient incentives that capitalism provides?
- nickff 12y ago
  One of the many problems which this idea has is that it redistributes money away from people who are good at investing in growth, and gives it to people who are likely to spend on consumption goods.
  - GeneralMayhem 12y ago
    ...which is fine, really, because spending on consumption goods is the basis of the modern economy anyway. Giving money to the poor is one of the most effective ways to give money to the rich, and has the nice side effect of feeding a few mouths along the way.
    - nickff 12y ago
      Money invested in growth has different economic effects from money invested in consumption goods; the former is likely to be spent on capital goods, and thereby increase production and reduce prices in the future, whereas the latter is likely to be spent on raw materials and labor (or possibly just driving up prices), with fewer long-term benefits.

grecy 12y ago

The fixation on working more and more is much weaker outside America. See France passing a law banning company emails outside work hours, and European countries passing laws about shorter work weeks. Here in Northern Canada, working the least amount possible to have the lifestyle you want is the norm, not the exception.

roma1n 12y ago
France never passed such a law... But we did pass a 35 hour work-week law though.
- demallien 12y ago
  True enough, but there was an accord signed with the unions substantially limiting the use of email after hours, which I imagine the OP wax referring to.

misterbishop 12y ago

Yes, I think we should have a basic income guarantee, but that only solves the problem of persistent hunger and homelessness. In order to provide a dignified living for a large number of people, wage earners need to take over decision-making in production. Under the current organization, automation and "labor-saving" means more profit for the owners while the mass of people struggle with unemployment, poor education and poverty. If workers made decisions about their own workplaces, labor saving could actually mean less labor without a reduction in wages. Or the surplus profit could be directed to benefits like higher education for the workers. The classic union model has been successful to a point, but has often suppressed by police violence or legal machinations. While I support unions wholeheartedly, I also think new organizations should be started on a democratic, cooperative model. That way the problems of equity are solved upfront, rather than trying to expropriate powerful elites after they've gathered up the profit. As the power of cooperative enterprises grow, workers will be in a position to directly antagonize traditional businesses. Some means include consumer boycotts, workers refusing to work for anti-democratic organizations, and pressuring the state for favorable legislation. This is a long struggle, but I think the alternative is roughly what Gates described: Meager wages, extraordinary unemployment, and Oligarchy.

Futurebot 12y ago
The GBI can solve more than that, I believe. A nice property of a system that has both that and a high level of socio-cultural development (i.e., lots of art, music, sports, etc.) is that it can free people to participate in an "arts, sports, and leisure" society. People will play games - cheap ones, and lots of them. We do this now, and has Cowen has pointed us, the western world is excellent at developing an endless supply of cheap entertainment. We'll likely do a whole lot more of that. How many people would play WoW or such 12+ hours a day at 15/month if they didn't have to work, and had all the basics taken care of? A lot, most likely. Other things we'll probably be looking at will be extremely powerful, long-lasting, side-effect-free (or tolerable-side effect-having) drugs. That road of course leads to wireheading, but I think that collectively denying that as a possibility now is extremely naive. Another nice property (especially if you throw in things like a real universal health care system) is that the "sharing economy " jobs go from looking borderline exploitative to perfectly acceptable, along with all other kinds of freelance and part time work. With the GBI obviating the need for a minimum wage, people who are marginal in the current system wage-wise would simply be able to opt out, which would likely bring the wages of those jobs up as it would be much harder to find people to do them. This would also apply to jobs up the wage chain; all the econo-dreams about "perfect labor fluidity" (sans perfect mobility) would be possible. Job sucks? Quit. Go elsewhere. Can't find another? Sit around and study new things, then go get a new job. Or don't. All possible with a (properly indexed and region-specific/cost-of-living-adjusted) GBI. It'd be a different kind of freedom than we're used to in the US, but one that would be much more appropriate given the way things are going.

BigChiefSmokem 12y ago

The elephant in this argument is that "work" means many different things to many different people. Some people actually do like their jobs and don't feel that "working" 40 or 80 or 100 hours means anything good or bad to them. As an adult, I do feel more accomplished now, but definitely not as fulfilled (and in turn, not as happy) with my career. This is not because I lack recognition, pay, or a cool project - but because day in and day out I’m forced by society to meander with the horrible details of doing business (“going to work”) that what I actually like to do, solving tough problems via technology, is so buried underneath it all that it makes it feel that most of the effort of my life and career has been based mostly around non-sense. There have been golden nuggets of experience and wisdom to cherish here and there, yes, but mostly it’s all been non-sense. In essence, working is not the problem – but what and how we do it is what is broken. I’ve always believed this is a problem that needs to be broken down into its more immediate and solvable root causes: monotony, disinterest (lack of learning or doing), no autonomy (middle management can and should be automated by machines), time and money lost commuting, etc. Everything about modern-day work life violates all the aspects of human nature we all instinctively hold dear. But what do you expect from a system born out of the industrial revolution? It’s like we moved on to being a service-based economy, where the machines handle all the dirty work, but we never thought of evolving the workday and educational systems that support it. A new world requires new ideas, not old shoehorned ones that keep proving time and time again how broken society is. Minimum wage, for example. I believe people should only do in life what they actually want to do, not what they have to do because of money and quality of life issues. Humanity needs to be outside enjoying the abstract universe that surrounds us. Non-sense? Maybe, but striving for ideals and perfection is also in our nature.

grondilu 12y ago

Unemployment is a goal for lots of people. Many people save money in order not to have to work in the future. So the problem is about what to do with people who are unable to save money and thus need a job. The basic income idea seems to assume that those people should be assisted and given the capital they were unable to buy by themselves. It's not much a different issue than with current unemployment and welfare programs. Only the scale is different.

dllthomas 12y ago
The incentive structure and social dynamics are also different.

ArkyBeagle 12y ago

But we've (ab)used labor as a trade good for income. We have an entire ... "geometry" built on that "axiom". If we don't replace wages as a social mechanism, then it's Arnold Kling's interpretation of Vickies and Thetes of "The Diamond Age". This is breaking down, and people like Charles Murray write (frequently perceived-to-be) incendiary texts that lay a perceived more general breakdown in society at this breakdown's feet. And in hiring, we see a lot of employers who don't have to hire well using personal preference instead of predicted employee effectiveness. Got tats? No job for you. Buy birth control? Not on my health plan. No BSCS? No thanks. Murray at least gets the arrow of causation right here; some people who hold to a fear of rising barbarism think the decline begins with the population and employers are simply forced into this. They think we were okay when iron discipline reigned. I think many employers have a massive narcissism problem. But what else do you expect in a world where "social" means "selfies?" I'm trying to automate industrial processes in a ... price-dynamic industry , and it's really bleak. You have actual Luddites out there. And, frankly, corporations seem to enjoy encouraging this.