8 ms·

The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

46 points by rpm4321 12y ago

istjohn 12y ago
Current top comment: I think the answer is fairly straightforward: create a guaranteed minimum income. Tax all income after that. As productivity goes up, you increase the guaranteed minimum income. If you want more than the minimum, you go out and work, and the people who have only skills that can be done by a computer/robot more cheaply than a minimum wage work just leave the work force. Should productivity go down (say we run out of fossil fuels without developing a cheap alternative or all our productivity starts going to dealing with run-away climate change) then you just decrease the guaranteed minimum income. --Mark Russo This.
- bayesianhorse 12y ago
  I don't see a way to get there, for most nations. Big nations would have the most trouble introducing this. And what about immigration? Immigration can't be effectively regulated by any means available to a moderately democratic state. Should immigrants receive the BLS? If yes, you go broke. If no, the immigrants are essentially second-class citizens who have to work for an extremely low wage (because they would have to pay indirectly for the BLS).
  - tomp 12y ago
    Immigrants aren't even citizens; I don't think they receive any sort of social security in most countries even today. I'm not saying that's the optimal policy, just that they wouldn't be worse-off.
    - bayesianhorse 12y ago
      In Europe, most immigrants can receive social security, which doesn't mean they do. In the US, undocumented immigrants have that problem though. Some politicians praised illegal immigration because that's a young, eager workforce with zero rights and benefits. Also it seems that welfare states can't really save money by excluding immigrants. At the very least the society has to foot the bill for medical emergencies, so declining them prevention and health care may fire backwards. It's hard to "get rid" of the immigrants' children, so you better make sure they get the same education and chances as citizens do (or you end up with a young, poor and extremely discontent minority). If these children aren't put in good schools and fed accordingly, they will also be sicker and less intelligent than their peers. That's why I think social security is a very profitable business for state and society.
      - tomp 12y ago
        Yes, I agree. In my opinion, every resident of a country should have both social and medical security. The reason is simple: there are two main ways that the government finances itself: consumption taxes and earnings taxes. Earnings taxes are proportional, or even progressive; anyways, 0 earnings -> 0 taxes. On the other hand, even the homeless are paying consumption taxes - if they eat food, someone has bought it, and that someone also paid taxes; so, if you give food to a homeless person, you're also donating a share of taxes you paid. That way, everybody is taxed fairly - proportionally to how much they earn and consume. So, everybody should also be treated fairly - provided all the basic services that the government provides.
      - tegeek 12y ago
        In almost entire Scandinavian (Sweden, Denmark, Nowray) if as an immigrant you loose your job, you've got 3 to 6 months to find a new job. If you can't find, you can't stay legally and you become illegal. In during the time of job searching you get no social security.
        bayesianhorse 12y ago
        Declaring someone an illegal immigrant doesn't necessarily make him go somewhere else. Especially if he is from some country where employment is even harder to find. Less so if we're talking about well-educated or at least skilled immigrants. They tend to go where they are more wanted. The small, rich countries in the north have a lot less problems with controlling immigration, owing to cold or wet borders, low absolute population and low population density. These countries only recently became attractive to immigrants. They may even be able to deport most of the illegal immigrants. Germany for example can't expulse illegal immigrants on a grant scale. Justified public outrage about "German mass deportations" would even be the least of problems. It's just logistically and politically impossible. That's why I say that immigration is almost impossible to regulate effectively with the means available to a democratic nation. You'd need some kind of STASI to hunt down hundreds of thousands of immigrants. Nothing would be worth that....
    - drderidder 12y ago
      Not the case at all in many advanced countries, where non-citizen permanent residents have full health coverage and access to social assistance programs. Japan and Canada are two concrete examples. Also, many immigrants do become citizens in their country of residence.
  - tim333 12y ago
    On the other hand we (I'm in the UK) seem to be drifting in that direction, that if you don't work you get social security. I don't know that it will ever be a simple fixed amount though as the government want to encourage people to be somewhat productive rather than just getting drunk etc. Here's part of the UK system: http://www.focusondisability.org.uk/brates-1.html http://www.focusondisability.org.uk/brates-1.html
    - pjc50 12y ago
      Absolutely not - we're going in the other direction. "Universal credit" is an administrative project to coordinate all the existing systems. The disability payments you linked to are subject to increasingly stringent processes which end up declaring terminally ill or permanently severely disabled people "fit to work" and withdrawing the funds they need to survive. This has resulted in some poverty-related deaths and suicides. Jobseekers' allowance is also subject to heavy scrutiny. I've heard that the best strategy if you have children is to declare yourself self-employed on a zero-hours basis: this stops the jobcentre from hassling you as you no longer count as "unemployed", you just don't have any work. You can then claim "working family tax credits", housing benefit, and child benefit.
      - tim333 12y ago
        Guess it depends on the time frame. I was thinking more now compared with 100 years ago. I'll give you the present Tory government is trying to undo it but I think they are fighting against the tide of history.
  - saticmotion 12y ago
    A solution - though extremely unlikely in this day and age - would be to abandon the notion of nations. Especially in the far future, if we are ever to meet aliens. Imagine having to explain that you only represent one of 196 nations. Seems a bit silly to me.
    - crisnoble 12y ago
      Would it not be possible to change the standard US/THEM mental model without meeting a new THEM?
    - syf81 12y ago
      Maybe the hypothetical aliens also only represent their own nation?
    - libraryatnight 12y ago
      This is what I hope for, though I'd like to think it happens even without aliens.
    - bayesianhorse 12y ago
      The "national" level will always matter. It's a problem of governing and risk management. Different regions have different problems, and the bigger an organisational structure, the more complicated. The hierarchical system with different levels of legislation and regulation at least works. In some sense we are already working towards a global government by claiming human rights to be universal. Out of that endeavour there will (in the far future) emerge a central authority or assembly which effectively enforces human rights and free trade.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
    - randallsquared 12y ago
      Imagine having to explain that you represent some people only because you told those people you represent them. What with all the independence movements, the direction of the world seems to be toward a million nations, not world government.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Immigration can't be effectively regulated by any means available to a moderately democratic state. That's debatable. But lets assume it for the sake of argument. > Should immigrants receive the BLS? If yes, you go broke. If no, the immigrants are essentially second-class citizens who have to work for an extremely low wage (because they would have to pay indirectly for the BLS). I think this claim is overly simplistic; also, I think there are several categories to consider,that I think you've failed to distinguish: (1) Naturalized citizens should certainly receive whatever universal or guaranteed income is adopted, but immigrants don't become naturalized citizens immediately. (2) Legal immigrants (the number and characteristics of whom a democratic state can effectively regulate), who are not citizens, probably should be eligible for the support [1] as well, but may be admitted on criteria that include having means of support that make it less likely that immigrant will be a recipient (in a GMI scheme) or net recipient (in a BI scheme). (3) Non-immigrant, but legally-present workers, visitors, etc. should not generally be eligible for the support. In the case of non-immigrant economic admission categories, adequate support means should be part of the conditions for admission. There may be some exceptions to this (note [1] again may apply to these exceptions) or some categories of non-immigrant admits that are qualified for alternative, status-specific support. (4) Those illegally present probably should not be eligible for the benefits, but may be eligible for some kind of normalization of status process after which they would become legal immigrants who might be eligible for benefits (to which note [1] would apply again). This normalization process might include up-front payment of a fine for those with means, or commitment to income contingent future payment of the fine with nominal interest, and might even include limitations on benefit eligibility for some period even beyond what regular legal immigrants might face, or commitments to repay any benefits claimed during a certain transitional period on an income-contingent basis. (In general, payment for normalization -- or payment for above-quota legal immigration -- makes sense for individuals who are not personally barred, since limits on levels of such immigration are a cost-of-immigration control measure, and its better for people who want to immigrate to bear the costs then for society to bear the costs of inefficiently trying to keep them out, and then also bearing the costs of them coming in anyway.) [1] As productivity advances and if the basic support improves to provide more than a very minimal floor, its not entirely unreasonable that non-citizens might recieve less than the full support level, however, possibly based on a sliding scale based on residency; in theoretical terms, in a rent on the commons model, this represents a kind of "vesting" process where the immigrant doesn't become a full "owner" until they are naturalized; in practical terms it provides basic social support but reduces the immediate immigration incentive.
- Loughla 12y ago
  I legitimately do not believe that this would work in the US before an extreme collapse of the current system - including but not limited to a civil war. I believe this because we have a hard enough time pushing through cursory and very basic social welfare programs. Quite literally guaranteeing someone a basic income with 0 work involved would be as palatable as thumb tacks to many individuals in the states. Logic doesn't really carry that far anymore, and I'm not sure why.
  - tomp 12y ago
    Don't worry, an obvious solution will present itself as soon as unemployment reaches 50% of the voting population.
    - pitt1980 12y ago
      yeah this public opinion is plastic, especially when faced with real world pain
    - TuringTest 12y ago
      Unfortunately, that obvious solution is usually War.
  - forca 12y ago
    Thank you, Tea Party (yes, I'm being sarcastic). The far right in this country have driven home their stupid Ayn Rand message and too many people have listened. We now have the most polarized government since the Civil War. The right believe that their way is the only way. To them everything is a zero sum game. I would settle for a Scandinavian or Swiss-style system. The older I get, the less I like capitalism as described by the right.
    - MarcusVorenus 12y ago
      Basic income is not a left vs right issue. Lots of libertarians (including Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek) support basic income as a more efficient safety net than government-run programs.
- githulhu 12y ago
  Yeah, but then you're creating a whole class of people who basically don't have anything anything to do. They will inevitably find things to fill that vacuum, such as having lots of babies. What happens when population growth outstrips the ability of production to provide for the needs of non-production? Unless you assume that productivity can scale up indefinitely, those people will just get poorer and poorer as wealth needs to be shared between more and more non-productive people.
  - tomp 12y ago
    First of all, the consequence of free time isn't necessarily more children. In fact, as people move up from poverty to "middle-class" lifestyle (with more free time as well), they have less children. Second, China solved the overpopulation problem quite well with the one-child policy (maybe too well, even).
    - tomjen3 12y ago
      About your China point - I would not consider anything that involved forced abortions to be a solution.
  - draugadrotten 12y ago
    Productivity doesn't need to scale up indefinitely - it just needs to be able to scale up until it's enough. Silly but simple thought experiment: - 10 people on an island - 2 people can pick enough coconuts for all 10 to eat well - Using a ladder, productivity picks up enough so 1 person can pick enough coconuts for all 10 - A coconut picking robot is developed, picking enough coconuts for all 10 The coconut picking robot's productivity can't scale indefinitely but it doesn't have to. I am sure you can see the implications of using robots in the real world. Edit: Speaking of babies, prof. Hans Rosling's TED talks are mandatory. http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies
    - kilbasa 12y ago
- grinnbearit 12y ago
  Why a basic income? I propose basic welfare, food + clothing + shelter, even entertainment. Mass produced in order to minimise costs. Then allocate a fixed amount of tax revenue to fund it, say 10%. Then as productivity goes up and goods become cheaper, this 10% can provide even more. Let money be what it is, a claim on goods and services provided for by other people. With basic welfare no one is forced into work out of fear of death, only for want of choice.
  - istjohn 12y ago
    In kind welfare is notoriously inefficient. The bureaucracy required weighs down the system. No one knows what they need better than the people themselves.
    - Benji_San 12y ago
      The current overly bureaucratic welfare systems are reactions on the idea that everyone is supposed to have a "job". If you don't have a job your job is to navigate the welfare system to "earn" your welfare income while you are "looking for a job that doesn't necessarily exist". The overly bureaucratic system also require more people to maintain it which means jobs are created through it, which ultimately is a good thing because more jobs is obviously a good thing in the western economies, right?
    - tomjen3 12y ago
      Inefficient in what terms? If you want to optimize for a nice current life for that person you give money, if you want to optimzing for getting back to work without starving then you given physical goods.
      - dragonwriter 12y ago
        > If you want to optimize for a nice current life for that person you give money, if you want to optimzing for getting back to work without starving then you given physical goods. If you want to optimize for getting back to work in an economy which is rapidly changing, you provide (1) resources which are flexible in form so that people can address different reasons why they might be out of work and the different needs they have to meet to get back into work, and (2) you provide aid in a form makes it easy for people to benefit from work income as additive to the aid. Money is better for both than a standard-issue set of goods.
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  Should productivity go down (say we run out of fossil fuels without developing a cheap alternative or all our productivity starts going to dealing with run-away climate change) then you just decrease the guaranteed minimum income. That decision would have lots of consequences. People usually live slightly beyond their means. Decrease their means, and suddenly the majority of your population is living way beyond their means. Any guaranteed minimum income can't ever go down for this reason. You could try to drop it, but then you'll wind up paying them the same amount anyway in welfare, because many more people will be seeking welfare to supplant their missing guaranteed income.
  - imgabe 12y ago
    > People usually live slightly beyond their means ^ Citation needed. Maybe it's become common since the advent of easily available credit, but for most of human history it was physically impossible to live beyond your means.
  - brazzy 12y ago
    I don't think you've grasped the idea of basic income: it replaces welfare. And yes, I'm pretty sure that the USA is the only country in the world where "People usually live slightly beyond their means".
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > People usually live slightly beyond their means. There've been brief periods in US history where that was true (where the savings rate was negative), but that usually been when there's been an economic downturn [1] in the wake of stronger economic times, and in any case relies on credit availability or savings to make possible. A drop in guaranteed minimum income or basic income doesn't mean welfare automatically reappears, it means that the standard of living drops for those dependent on the GMI/BI. But that's what you'd expect in a broad-based economic downturn -- the mean standard of living drops. (Even if you keep GMI/BI at the same nominal level, lower productivity will increase the inflationary effect of GMI/BI, which will have the same net effect as cutting the nominal level -- its just that price levels will go up rather than payments going down.) [1] which may include an "effective" downturn for most people during what is in aggregate terms an expansion, but where narrow distribution means that most individuals/households are making less with a small class making all the gains.
- deleted 12y ago
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  - knowtheory 12y ago
    Your judgementalness is showing. There are equally likely explanations for people sitting around drinking. Maybe they don't work first shift. Maybe they're on vacation. Maybe they're disabled for some reason. The fact that you leap to "oh the government pays them to be unemployed" is on you, not the government or them. (also note that it's increasingly difficult to get SNAP benefits in states due to budget cut backs)
  - davidcbc 12y ago
    There are still more than 2 unemployed people per job opening in the US.[1] So there is in fact a lack of jobs and work needing to be done. [1] http://www.bls.gov/web/jolts/jlt_labstatgraphs.pdf http://www.bls.gov/web/jolts/jlt_labstatgraphs.pdf
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - wavefunction 12y ago
      When do you ever see someone paying with "green stamps?" All the states and territories moved to EBT cards some time back. Your story about seeing a woman hop out of her "Escalade" to pay with food stamps reeks of Conservative Racial Dog-whistling.
- DanielBMarkham 12y ago
  So we're just done with providing natural stress on the population, where each person strives to learn and do things that other people appreciate? Instead, we provide the option for "checking out" and getting paid no matter what? Even if I bought into the narrative of the end of useful labor, which I don't, and even if I bought into the narrative of people who can't be trained, which I don't, the economics of this don't make any sense to me. I wouldn't oppose it, though. Instead let's get a few dozen small experiments going, see how they work out. Even bad ideas are good if you can learn from them. The real enemy to progress is the idea that we are forced to either reject new ideas like this in their entirety or embrace them at some huge scale.
- pconner 12y ago
  This sounds a lot like the world in Vonnegut's "Player Piano" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_(novel) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_(novel)
- tomjen3 12y ago
  Not this. A minimum income means that it is in everybody who doesn't works interest to raise it, which is what will happen (because that is what will win elections) which will cause more people to not work, which will further the pressure. This will banckrupt any state that starts down that path, assuming you set the initial income about what 10% or so makes, which is typically enough to swing an election.
  - dalore 12y ago
    Then bring in mandatory voting like in Australia. Or better yet, let's vote on issues collectively and do away with representation system. We have the internet. Then the majority of people who make more than the minimum income will vote out the ones who do.
    - tomjen3 12y ago
      Those solutions just make the problem worse. If you make direct voting happen then it will be even easier to raise the limit and even more difficult to lower it. The root issue is that votes should be linked to net tax dollars paid - the more you pay the more you get to decide.
- MadManE 12y ago
  How do you determine what "minimum" means? Depending on who you ask, "Basic Living" is high speed internet and all new iProducts on release along with a new car every 5 years. Where do you draw the line? Also, how does this propagate after a few generations? We can already see the welfare lifestyle being inherited - will this be any better? Especially since there is much less reason to try to be better under this system.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  For the record, "guaranteed minimum income" typically labels a different policy than "basic income" - where in the former the government pays you N-M when you make M<N. I don't know that this is what was being proposed; the term is fairly frequently misapplied to basic income. For the record, I favor a (reasonably sized) basic income, and would object to a minimum income.
- ibisum 12y ago
  Get rid of income tax, how about that. Its not needed so much any more, since there will always be innovative ways to avoid paying tax; that is the purpose of technology, so far, it seems.
m0nty 12y ago
This is a serious and interesting subject which requires a better treatment than emotive words like "hand-wringing" and "worriers", and a conclusion with more depth than "in the long run, we're all dead." All the author really says is that experts disagree on the effects of automation (who would have guessed?) and that this might lead to lower pay and fewer jobs (again, hardly news). Meaningless assertions like "the education system has to change to prepare young people for a world in which most of today’s jobs are automated" don't begin to answer the real question - how are we to be prepared for this change? What are we expected to do with our time without paid work? How does an economy run if a significant number of people are not earning more than a basic wage? Fascinating subject, superficial and unhelpful article.
- crisnoble 12y ago
  >What are we expected to do with our time without paid work? What would you do if you had infinite free time? I would spend more time exploring my city, read more books, and finally get around to my garden project. In fact, I fantasize about retirement all of the time because I imagine myself doing these things.
- wcummings 12y ago
  >"in the long run, we're all dead." On a long enough timeline...
Kiro 12y ago
Technological innovation is more important than any job.
- oddevan 12y ago
  Can you elaborate? For example, what is the end-goal of technological innovation? What's the end-goal of any job? To me, the point of innovation is to make people's lives better. Growing pains, a temporary loss of one type of job, those are inevitable when talking about innovation. But people adapt, they get new jobs, sometimes enabled by the very innovations that displaced them in the first place. That's fine, that's the pattern in the world so far. A blanket statement like this seems to say that progress for its own sake should be prioritized over the people said progress is supposed to help.
  - tomjen3 12y ago
    A job is a means to an end. Technological innovation is a means to make our lives better. There is no end goal because there is no limit to how good we can make it.
wyager 12y ago
Right up until we invent strong AI (and probably even then), there's no particular reason the same thing that always happened won't keep happening; unskilled laborers will get replaced, most will retool, and no one in the next generation will train for the now-automated job. This happened to cordwainers, calculators, etc. The reasoning for this is very simple. It's why the Luddites were wrong then and the Luddites are wrong now. When a job is automated away, the benefit is distributed among three areas: 1. Automation company profit 2. Automation user profit 3. End customer costs. The net benefit is always positive, or else the automation would not be used in the first place. These 3 groups do not take their earnings and hide it under the mattress. This newly produced value has to be spent somewhere. So we end up with fields that were historically not viable, but because automation lowers the overhead of doing other things, now are viable. These fields recreate the labor requirements "lost" to automation. The question, of course, is how long it will take for unskilled laborers to retool, and what will they do in the time between jobs? Perhaps there will be technical solutions to speed the retooling process.
m-i-l 12y ago
The argument resolves around the "longer-term trend toward income and wealth inequality". There is nothing however to directly link this to technological innovation. In fact I believe it is government policy which is increasing inequality rather than technology. In the UK for example, we have been seeing some clear cases of policies which have (either deliberately or inadvertently) transferred wealth from the state (i.e. the population as a whole) to the elite (i.e. the rich), e.g. the privatisation of the Royal Mail.
deleted 12y ago
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crdoconnor 12y ago
>Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, among others, see a “great decoupling” of productivity from wages since about 2000 as technology outpaces human workers’ education and skills. Workers, in other words, are losing the race between education and technology. This may be exacerbating a longer-term trend in which capital has gained the upper hand on labor since the 1970s. Yeah, not really. Capital gained the upper hand through systematic lobbying/corruption of government and trade policy. It wasn't robots in Wisconsin that took American jobs, it was Chinese, Mexican, Vietnamese, Guatemalan and other factory workers in factories built with American money. This article is not really supposed to be a serious analysis of technological trends. It's mostly insinuation (wealth inequality is getting worse and robots are getting better. coincidence?), anecdotes about robots and a survey asking a bunch of experts what they think will happen in the future (this has never been a reliable way of predicting the future). Now for the really interesting question: why does this article exist? This article decrying the 'new luddites' exists for mostly the same reason why somebody paid a bunch of money for this advert: https://i.imgur.com/VZAEg5b.jpg https://i.imgur.com/VZAEg5b.jpg The reason this meme is really pushed, in both adverts like the one above, talking heads on TV and editorials like this (hastily researched; mostly cribbed from the output of think tanks) is largely to keep workers afraid and insecure. Insecure workers keep their head down, don't strike, don't demand raises and work overtime without complaint. All of these things are good for profits. This isn't to say that automation won't make job roles obsolete, just that its purported effect on net job destruction (i.e. jobs lost - jobs gained) is likely to be significantly overstated for very clear political reasons - keeping the working classes disenfranchised.
bottled_poe 12y ago
Job-killing is a GOAL of technological innovation, and this is a good thing. In an ideal world this would free up our time to be spent doing things we as humans WANT to do. Technological improvements should decrease the price of good and services because less resources and efforts are required to provide them. Sadly, this is not what we have seen. Working hours go up, and so do the prices. Perhaps it is due to the nature of capitalism, something like Jevon's paradox or some other unexpected behaviour.

46 points by rpm4321 12y ago

Current top comment: I think the answer is fairly straightforward: create a guaranteed minimum income. Tax all income after that. As productivity goes up, you increase the guaranteed minimum income. If you want more than the minimum, you go out and work, and the people who have only skills that can be done by a computer/robot more cheaply than a minimum wage work just leave the work force. Should productivity go down (say we run out of fossil fuels without developing a cheap alternative or all our productivity starts going to dealing with run-away climate change) then you just decrease the guaranteed minimum income. --Mark Russo This.

bayesianhorse 12y ago
I don't see a way to get there, for most nations. Big nations would have the most trouble introducing this. And what about immigration? Immigration can't be effectively regulated by any means available to a moderately democratic state. Should immigrants receive the BLS? If yes, you go broke. If no, the immigrants are essentially second-class citizens who have to work for an extremely low wage (because they would have to pay indirectly for the BLS).
- tomp 12y ago
  Immigrants aren't even citizens; I don't think they receive any sort of social security in most countries even today. I'm not saying that's the optimal policy, just that they wouldn't be worse-off.
  - bayesianhorse 12y ago
    In Europe, most immigrants can receive social security, which doesn't mean they do. In the US, undocumented immigrants have that problem though. Some politicians praised illegal immigration because that's a young, eager workforce with zero rights and benefits. Also it seems that welfare states can't really save money by excluding immigrants. At the very least the society has to foot the bill for medical emergencies, so declining them prevention and health care may fire backwards. It's hard to "get rid" of the immigrants' children, so you better make sure they get the same education and chances as citizens do (or you end up with a young, poor and extremely discontent minority). If these children aren't put in good schools and fed accordingly, they will also be sicker and less intelligent than their peers. That's why I think social security is a very profitable business for state and society.
    - tomp 12y ago
      Yes, I agree. In my opinion, every resident of a country should have both social and medical security. The reason is simple: there are two main ways that the government finances itself: consumption taxes and earnings taxes. Earnings taxes are proportional, or even progressive; anyways, 0 earnings -> 0 taxes. On the other hand, even the homeless are paying consumption taxes - if they eat food, someone has bought it, and that someone also paid taxes; so, if you give food to a homeless person, you're also donating a share of taxes you paid. That way, everybody is taxed fairly - proportionally to how much they earn and consume. So, everybody should also be treated fairly - provided all the basic services that the government provides.
    - tegeek 12y ago
      In almost entire Scandinavian (Sweden, Denmark, Nowray) if as an immigrant you loose your job, you've got 3 to 6 months to find a new job. If you can't find, you can't stay legally and you become illegal. In during the time of job searching you get no social security.
      - bayesianhorse 12y ago
        Declaring someone an illegal immigrant doesn't necessarily make him go somewhere else. Especially if he is from some country where employment is even harder to find. Less so if we're talking about well-educated or at least skilled immigrants. They tend to go where they are more wanted. The small, rich countries in the north have a lot less problems with controlling immigration, owing to cold or wet borders, low absolute population and low population density. These countries only recently became attractive to immigrants. They may even be able to deport most of the illegal immigrants. Germany for example can't expulse illegal immigrants on a grant scale. Justified public outrage about "German mass deportations" would even be the least of problems. It's just logistically and politically impossible. That's why I say that immigration is almost impossible to regulate effectively with the means available to a democratic nation. You'd need some kind of STASI to hunt down hundreds of thousands of immigrants. Nothing would be worth that....
  - drderidder 12y ago
    Not the case at all in many advanced countries, where non-citizen permanent residents have full health coverage and access to social assistance programs. Japan and Canada are two concrete examples. Also, many immigrants do become citizens in their country of residence.
- tim333 12y ago
  On the other hand we (I'm in the UK) seem to be drifting in that direction, that if you don't work you get social security. I don't know that it will ever be a simple fixed amount though as the government want to encourage people to be somewhat productive rather than just getting drunk etc. Here's part of the UK system: http://www.focusondisability.org.uk/brates-1.html http://www.focusondisability.org.uk/brates-1.html
  - pjc50 12y ago
    Absolutely not - we're going in the other direction. "Universal credit" is an administrative project to coordinate all the existing systems. The disability payments you linked to are subject to increasingly stringent processes which end up declaring terminally ill or permanently severely disabled people "fit to work" and withdrawing the funds they need to survive. This has resulted in some poverty-related deaths and suicides. Jobseekers' allowance is also subject to heavy scrutiny. I've heard that the best strategy if you have children is to declare yourself self-employed on a zero-hours basis: this stops the jobcentre from hassling you as you no longer count as "unemployed", you just don't have any work. You can then claim "working family tax credits", housing benefit, and child benefit.
    - tim333 12y ago
      Guess it depends on the time frame. I was thinking more now compared with 100 years ago. I'll give you the present Tory government is trying to undo it but I think they are fighting against the tide of history.
- saticmotion 12y ago
  A solution - though extremely unlikely in this day and age - would be to abandon the notion of nations. Especially in the far future, if we are ever to meet aliens. Imagine having to explain that you only represent one of 196 nations. Seems a bit silly to me.
  - crisnoble 12y ago
    Would it not be possible to change the standard US/THEM mental model without meeting a new THEM?
  - syf81 12y ago
    Maybe the hypothetical aliens also only represent their own nation?
  - libraryatnight 12y ago
    This is what I hope for, though I'd like to think it happens even without aliens.
  - bayesianhorse 12y ago
    The "national" level will always matter. It's a problem of governing and risk management. Different regions have different problems, and the bigger an organisational structure, the more complicated. The hierarchical system with different levels of legislation and regulation at least works. In some sense we are already working towards a global government by claiming human rights to be universal. Out of that endeavour there will (in the far future) emerge a central authority or assembly which effectively enforces human rights and free trade.
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  - randallsquared 12y ago
    Imagine having to explain that you represent some people only because you told those people you represent them. What with all the independence movements, the direction of the world seems to be toward a million nations, not world government.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Immigration can't be effectively regulated by any means available to a moderately democratic state. That's debatable. But lets assume it for the sake of argument. > Should immigrants receive the BLS? If yes, you go broke. If no, the immigrants are essentially second-class citizens who have to work for an extremely low wage (because they would have to pay indirectly for the BLS). I think this claim is overly simplistic; also, I think there are several categories to consider,that I think you've failed to distinguish: (1) Naturalized citizens should certainly receive whatever universal or guaranteed income is adopted, but immigrants don't become naturalized citizens immediately. (2) Legal immigrants (the number and characteristics of whom a democratic state can effectively regulate), who are not citizens, probably should be eligible for the support [1] as well, but may be admitted on criteria that include having means of support that make it less likely that immigrant will be a recipient (in a GMI scheme) or net recipient (in a BI scheme). (3) Non-immigrant, but legally-present workers, visitors, etc. should not generally be eligible for the support. In the case of non-immigrant economic admission categories, adequate support means should be part of the conditions for admission. There may be some exceptions to this (note [1] again may apply to these exceptions) or some categories of non-immigrant admits that are qualified for alternative, status-specific support. (4) Those illegally present probably should not be eligible for the benefits, but may be eligible for some kind of normalization of status process after which they would become legal immigrants who might be eligible for benefits (to which note [1] would apply again). This normalization process might include up-front payment of a fine for those with means, or commitment to income contingent future payment of the fine with nominal interest, and might even include limitations on benefit eligibility for some period even beyond what regular legal immigrants might face, or commitments to repay any benefits claimed during a certain transitional period on an income-contingent basis. (In general, payment for normalization -- or payment for above-quota legal immigration -- makes sense for individuals who are not personally barred, since limits on levels of such immigration are a cost-of-immigration control measure, and its better for people who want to immigrate to bear the costs then for society to bear the costs of inefficiently trying to keep them out, and then also bearing the costs of them coming in anyway.) [1] As productivity advances and if the basic support improves to provide more than a very minimal floor, its not entirely unreasonable that non-citizens might recieve less than the full support level, however, possibly based on a sliding scale based on residency; in theoretical terms, in a rent on the commons model, this represents a kind of "vesting" process where the immigrant doesn't become a full "owner" until they are naturalized; in practical terms it provides basic social support but reduces the immediate immigration incentive.
Loughla 12y ago
I legitimately do not believe that this would work in the US before an extreme collapse of the current system - including but not limited to a civil war. I believe this because we have a hard enough time pushing through cursory and very basic social welfare programs. Quite literally guaranteeing someone a basic income with 0 work involved would be as palatable as thumb tacks to many individuals in the states. Logic doesn't really carry that far anymore, and I'm not sure why.
- tomp 12y ago
  Don't worry, an obvious solution will present itself as soon as unemployment reaches 50% of the voting population.
  - pitt1980 12y ago
    yeah this public opinion is plastic, especially when faced with real world pain
  - TuringTest 12y ago
    Unfortunately, that obvious solution is usually War.
- forca 12y ago
  Thank you, Tea Party (yes, I'm being sarcastic). The far right in this country have driven home their stupid Ayn Rand message and too many people have listened. We now have the most polarized government since the Civil War. The right believe that their way is the only way. To them everything is a zero sum game. I would settle for a Scandinavian or Swiss-style system. The older I get, the less I like capitalism as described by the right.
  - MarcusVorenus 12y ago
    Basic income is not a left vs right issue. Lots of libertarians (including Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek) support basic income as a more efficient safety net than government-run programs.
githulhu 12y ago
Yeah, but then you're creating a whole class of people who basically don't have anything anything to do. They will inevitably find things to fill that vacuum, such as having lots of babies. What happens when population growth outstrips the ability of production to provide for the needs of non-production? Unless you assume that productivity can scale up indefinitely, those people will just get poorer and poorer as wealth needs to be shared between more and more non-productive people.
- tomp 12y ago
  First of all, the consequence of free time isn't necessarily more children. In fact, as people move up from poverty to "middle-class" lifestyle (with more free time as well), they have less children. Second, China solved the overpopulation problem quite well with the one-child policy (maybe too well, even).
  - tomjen3 12y ago
    About your China point - I would not consider anything that involved forced abortions to be a solution.
- draugadrotten 12y ago
  Productivity doesn't need to scale up indefinitely - it just needs to be able to scale up until it's enough. Silly but simple thought experiment: - 10 people on an island - 2 people can pick enough coconuts for all 10 to eat well - Using a ladder, productivity picks up enough so 1 person can pick enough coconuts for all 10 - A coconut picking robot is developed, picking enough coconuts for all 10 The coconut picking robot's productivity can't scale indefinitely but it doesn't have to. I am sure you can see the implications of using robots in the real world. Edit: Speaking of babies, prof. Hans Rosling's TED talks are mandatory. http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies
  - kilbasa 12y ago
grinnbearit 12y ago
Why a basic income? I propose basic welfare, food + clothing + shelter, even entertainment. Mass produced in order to minimise costs. Then allocate a fixed amount of tax revenue to fund it, say 10%. Then as productivity goes up and goods become cheaper, this 10% can provide even more. Let money be what it is, a claim on goods and services provided for by other people. With basic welfare no one is forced into work out of fear of death, only for want of choice.
- istjohn 12y ago
  In kind welfare is notoriously inefficient. The bureaucracy required weighs down the system. No one knows what they need better than the people themselves.
  - Benji_San 12y ago
    The current overly bureaucratic welfare systems are reactions on the idea that everyone is supposed to have a "job". If you don't have a job your job is to navigate the welfare system to "earn" your welfare income while you are "looking for a job that doesn't necessarily exist". The overly bureaucratic system also require more people to maintain it which means jobs are created through it, which ultimately is a good thing because more jobs is obviously a good thing in the western economies, right?
  - tomjen3 12y ago
    Inefficient in what terms? If you want to optimize for a nice current life for that person you give money, if you want to optimzing for getting back to work without starving then you given physical goods.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > If you want to optimize for a nice current life for that person you give money, if you want to optimzing for getting back to work without starving then you given physical goods. If you want to optimize for getting back to work in an economy which is rapidly changing, you provide (1) resources which are flexible in form so that people can address different reasons why they might be out of work and the different needs they have to meet to get back into work, and (2) you provide aid in a form makes it easy for people to benefit from work income as additive to the aid. Money is better for both than a standard-issue set of goods.
sillysaurus3 12y ago
Should productivity go down (say we run out of fossil fuels without developing a cheap alternative or all our productivity starts going to dealing with run-away climate change) then you just decrease the guaranteed minimum income. That decision would have lots of consequences. People usually live slightly beyond their means. Decrease their means, and suddenly the majority of your population is living way beyond their means. Any guaranteed minimum income can't ever go down for this reason. You could try to drop it, but then you'll wind up paying them the same amount anyway in welfare, because many more people will be seeking welfare to supplant their missing guaranteed income.
- imgabe 12y ago
  > People usually live slightly beyond their means ^ Citation needed. Maybe it's become common since the advent of easily available credit, but for most of human history it was physically impossible to live beyond your means.
- brazzy 12y ago
  I don't think you've grasped the idea of basic income: it replaces welfare. And yes, I'm pretty sure that the USA is the only country in the world where "People usually live slightly beyond their means".
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > People usually live slightly beyond their means. There've been brief periods in US history where that was true (where the savings rate was negative), but that usually been when there's been an economic downturn [1] in the wake of stronger economic times, and in any case relies on credit availability or savings to make possible. A drop in guaranteed minimum income or basic income doesn't mean welfare automatically reappears, it means that the standard of living drops for those dependent on the GMI/BI. But that's what you'd expect in a broad-based economic downturn -- the mean standard of living drops. (Even if you keep GMI/BI at the same nominal level, lower productivity will increase the inflationary effect of GMI/BI, which will have the same net effect as cutting the nominal level -- its just that price levels will go up rather than payments going down.) [1] which may include an "effective" downturn for most people during what is in aggregate terms an expansion, but where narrow distribution means that most individuals/households are making less with a small class making all the gains.
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- knowtheory 12y ago
  Your judgementalness is showing. There are equally likely explanations for people sitting around drinking. Maybe they don't work first shift. Maybe they're on vacation. Maybe they're disabled for some reason. The fact that you leap to "oh the government pays them to be unemployed" is on you, not the government or them. (also note that it's increasingly difficult to get SNAP benefits in states due to budget cut backs)
- davidcbc 12y ago
  There are still more than 2 unemployed people per job opening in the US.[1] So there is in fact a lack of jobs and work needing to be done. [1] http://www.bls.gov/web/jolts/jlt_labstatgraphs.pdf http://www.bls.gov/web/jolts/jlt_labstatgraphs.pdf
- deleted 12y ago
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  - wavefunction 12y ago
    When do you ever see someone paying with "green stamps?" All the states and territories moved to EBT cards some time back. Your story about seeing a woman hop out of her "Escalade" to pay with food stamps reeks of Conservative Racial Dog-whistling.
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
So we're just done with providing natural stress on the population, where each person strives to learn and do things that other people appreciate? Instead, we provide the option for "checking out" and getting paid no matter what? Even if I bought into the narrative of the end of useful labor, which I don't, and even if I bought into the narrative of people who can't be trained, which I don't, the economics of this don't make any sense to me. I wouldn't oppose it, though. Instead let's get a few dozen small experiments going, see how they work out. Even bad ideas are good if you can learn from them. The real enemy to progress is the idea that we are forced to either reject new ideas like this in their entirety or embrace them at some huge scale.
pconner 12y ago
This sounds a lot like the world in Vonnegut's "Player Piano" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_(novel) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_(novel)
tomjen3 12y ago
Not this. A minimum income means that it is in everybody who doesn't works interest to raise it, which is what will happen (because that is what will win elections) which will cause more people to not work, which will further the pressure. This will banckrupt any state that starts down that path, assuming you set the initial income about what 10% or so makes, which is typically enough to swing an election.
- dalore 12y ago
  Then bring in mandatory voting like in Australia. Or better yet, let's vote on issues collectively and do away with representation system. We have the internet. Then the majority of people who make more than the minimum income will vote out the ones who do.
  - tomjen3 12y ago
    Those solutions just make the problem worse. If you make direct voting happen then it will be even easier to raise the limit and even more difficult to lower it. The root issue is that votes should be linked to net tax dollars paid - the more you pay the more you get to decide.
MadManE 12y ago
How do you determine what "minimum" means? Depending on who you ask, "Basic Living" is high speed internet and all new iProducts on release along with a new car every 5 years. Where do you draw the line? Also, how does this propagate after a few generations? We can already see the welfare lifestyle being inherited - will this be any better? Especially since there is much less reason to try to be better under this system.
dllthomas 12y ago
For the record, "guaranteed minimum income" typically labels a different policy than "basic income" - where in the former the government pays you N-M when you make M<N. I don't know that this is what was being proposed; the term is fairly frequently misapplied to basic income. For the record, I favor a (reasonably sized) basic income, and would object to a minimum income.
ibisum 12y ago
Get rid of income tax, how about that. Its not needed so much any more, since there will always be innovative ways to avoid paying tax; that is the purpose of technology, so far, it seems.

m0nty 12y ago

This is a serious and interesting subject which requires a better treatment than emotive words like "hand-wringing" and "worriers", and a conclusion with more depth than "in the long run, we're all dead." All the author really says is that experts disagree on the effects of automation (who would have guessed?) and that this might lead to lower pay and fewer jobs (again, hardly news). Meaningless assertions like "the education system has to change to prepare young people for a world in which most of today’s jobs are automated" don't begin to answer the real question - how are we to be prepared for this change? What are we expected to do with our time without paid work? How does an economy run if a significant number of people are not earning more than a basic wage? Fascinating subject, superficial and unhelpful article.

crisnoble 12y ago
>What are we expected to do with our time without paid work? What would you do if you had infinite free time? I would spend more time exploring my city, read more books, and finally get around to my garden project. In fact, I fantasize about retirement all of the time because I imagine myself doing these things.
wcummings 12y ago
>"in the long run, we're all dead." On a long enough timeline...

Kiro 12y ago

Technological innovation is more important than any job.

oddevan 12y ago
Can you elaborate? For example, what is the end-goal of technological innovation? What's the end-goal of any job? To me, the point of innovation is to make people's lives better. Growing pains, a temporary loss of one type of job, those are inevitable when talking about innovation. But people adapt, they get new jobs, sometimes enabled by the very innovations that displaced them in the first place. That's fine, that's the pattern in the world so far. A blanket statement like this seems to say that progress for its own sake should be prioritized over the people said progress is supposed to help.
- tomjen3 12y ago
  A job is a means to an end. Technological innovation is a means to make our lives better. There is no end goal because there is no limit to how good we can make it.

wyager 12y ago

Right up until we invent strong AI (and probably even then), there's no particular reason the same thing that always happened won't keep happening; unskilled laborers will get replaced, most will retool, and no one in the next generation will train for the now-automated job. This happened to cordwainers, calculators, etc. The reasoning for this is very simple. It's why the Luddites were wrong then and the Luddites are wrong now. When a job is automated away, the benefit is distributed among three areas: 1. Automation company profit 2. Automation user profit 3. End customer costs. The net benefit is always positive, or else the automation would not be used in the first place. These 3 groups do not take their earnings and hide it under the mattress. This newly produced value has to be spent somewhere. So we end up with fields that were historically not viable, but because automation lowers the overhead of doing other things, now are viable. These fields recreate the labor requirements "lost" to automation. The question, of course, is how long it will take for unskilled laborers to retool, and what will they do in the time between jobs? Perhaps there will be technical solutions to speed the retooling process.

m-i-l 12y ago

The argument resolves around the "longer-term trend toward income and wealth inequality". There is nothing however to directly link this to technological innovation. In fact I believe it is government policy which is increasing inequality rather than technology. In the UK for example, we have been seeing some clear cases of policies which have (either deliberately or inadvertently) transferred wealth from the state (i.e. the population as a whole) to the elite (i.e. the rich), e.g. the privatisation of the Royal Mail.

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crdoconnor 12y ago

>Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, among others, see a “great decoupling” of productivity from wages since about 2000 as technology outpaces human workers’ education and skills. Workers, in other words, are losing the race between education and technology. This may be exacerbating a longer-term trend in which capital has gained the upper hand on labor since the 1970s. Yeah, not really. Capital gained the upper hand through systematic lobbying/corruption of government and trade policy. It wasn't robots in Wisconsin that took American jobs, it was Chinese, Mexican, Vietnamese, Guatemalan and other factory workers in factories built with American money. This article is not really supposed to be a serious analysis of technological trends. It's mostly insinuation (wealth inequality is getting worse and robots are getting better. coincidence?), anecdotes about robots and a survey asking a bunch of experts what they think will happen in the future (this has never been a reliable way of predicting the future). Now for the really interesting question: why does this article exist? This article decrying the 'new luddites' exists for mostly the same reason why somebody paid a bunch of money for this advert: https://i.imgur.com/VZAEg5b.jpg https://i.imgur.com/VZAEg5b.jpg The reason this meme is really pushed, in both adverts like the one above, talking heads on TV and editorials like this (hastily researched; mostly cribbed from the output of think tanks) is largely to keep workers afraid and insecure. Insecure workers keep their head down, don't strike, don't demand raises and work overtime without complaint. All of these things are good for profits. This isn't to say that automation won't make job roles obsolete, just that its purported effect on net job destruction (i.e. jobs lost - jobs gained) is likely to be significantly overstated for very clear political reasons - keeping the working classes disenfranchised.

bottled_poe 12y ago

Job-killing is a GOAL of technological innovation, and this is a good thing. In an ideal world this would free up our time to be spent doing things we as humans WANT to do. Technological improvements should decrease the price of good and services because less resources and efforts are required to provide them. Sadly, this is not what we have seen. Working hours go up, and so do the prices. Perhaps it is due to the nature of capitalism, something like Jevon's paradox or some other unexpected behaviour.