16 ms·

After Jobs Dry Up, What Then?

145 points by cryptoz 12y ago

nissimk 12y ago
It's interesting that the nyt is covering basic income. I wonder if it would be possible to institute basic income as a policy without significant social unrest. It seems unlikely to me that basic income would be accepted politically unless there was significant action first by disenfranchised workers.
- thret 12y ago
  I wonder if the tipping point might simply be when >50%-80% of people are already on welfare.
  - neohaven 12y ago
    Yep. When you can't hold up the "you can't find a job because you're lazy/a slob/stupid/etc." narrative, we'll get these things.
- edward 12y ago
  I was going to point out that UK Green party supports a basic income, but now I find that they have dropped it from their 2015 manifesto. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/green-party/11383801/Greens-ditch-citizens-income-from-election-manifesto.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/green-party/1138380...
  - mrec 12y ago
    It's not clear yet that they have dropped it; I think a lot of reporters jumped the gun after some (typically) careless comments. The Greens' "basic income" is only a partial one, though; most notably it's set at a level that couldn't possibly replace Housing Benefit, and so doesn't avoid the welfare trap.
- smountcastle 12y ago
  I'm curious why you don't think that a basic income would accepted politically? If it were provided to everyone without regard to their other sources of income it would differ from other approaches like welfare. I realize that the money has to come from somewhere, so perhaps a transition to a consumption tax rather than income tax would work. Of course the basic income would need to be significant enough to offset the increased cost of consumption for basic needs.
  - Shivetya 12y ago
    Sell it to the left as assistance programs, sell it to the right as a tax overhaul, (fair tax/flat etc). You could cover both sides by consolidating aid programs into one basic income payment and bundling with tax reform where all tax paid is via a consumption tax. So borrow the fair tax idea of a prebate, where the government automatically deposits a set amount weekly/monthly into your account. The worrisome parts here are is that far too many people are willing to live at near poverty levels as long as the feel comfortable and the effort to exist there requires little on their part. We could end up legislating an entire segment to permanent poverty, paid enough to keep them from rising against those who have all the money
  - JonFish85 12y ago
    Once people saw the cost of the program, I think it would cause a great deal of outrage. I've done the back-of-the-envelope math here on HN several times, so I don't really care to do it again, but essentially it would dwarf our current budget (which is already spending beyond income). The cost is enormous. I believe if you taxed everyone whose net worth is over $1b at a 100% rate, you could pay for this program for just under 2 years. And if you're talking about "everyone gets the same amount", remember that you have to collect it back, so you have the overhead of giving a person $1 just to collect it back again.
    - minthd 12y ago
      The key for this to be possible is a big reduction in the cost of living. Robots,automation and other tech , combined with the right regulations, could possible reduce cost of living by 80%-90%. Under those assumptions, won't basic income become possible ?
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  We've already (in America) got so many basic support programs, I don't see a problem with accepting Basic Income. There's food stamps, housing assistance (20% of Americans!) and free education already. {edit: add Basic Income}
  - flatline 12y ago
    The problem is at the intersection of welfare and work. You have to be really poor and stay really poor to qualify for most of these social programs, and the programs are designed to be pretty minimal and thereby encourage people to work. At the same time, they disincentivize much of the low-paying work that many people on welfare can obtain, because they will be worse off without the handout. This is what unconditional basic income is supposed to address. It is also the source of concern about jobs going away, that a much larger number of people are going to be swept into government-subsidized poverty, which will put strains on the already burdened welfare system in the US. Where will the money come from?
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      The question was about acceptance, which is demonstrate by the existence of these programs. The further question of resource is a good one. And its not about money, which is after all, imaginary points on a scorecard. The real question is where are the goods coming from? It'll have to be automation, because the premise is that people won't be working.
  - geebee 12y ago
    I think the big arguments for basic income are: 1) there is a huge and inefficient bureaucracy involved in administering these various assistance programs 2) the way these programs work (you lose access to them if your income rises above a fairly low threshold), we've essentially created a marginal tax rate of 100% on certain types of low income workers. 3) rapid technological change and increasing automation undermines the moral argument against redistribution of wealth. It is interesting that libertarians, not generally known for enthusiasm around wealth distribution, appear at least intrigued by basic income. This is just a quick summary, of course, I'd encourage you to read more about the case for basic income.
- timepiece 12y ago
  Marx was dead right all along. We should not work for capitalists who plunder the nations wealth with the help of politicians for them to make more money off our efforts. We should fight for (believe me these leeches won't give up very easily) fair share in aggregate wealth and people should not work for subsistence anymore esp when we have all these resources available on the planet.
  - chrisbennet 12y ago
    I think the word you are looking for is "plunder" not "blunder". If it is, you misspelled it in your other post also.
    - timepiece 12y ago
      Thanks for the correction. :)
  - lucozade 12y ago
    Absolutely. There's overwhelming evidence that when the proletariat rise up it producers worker utopiae and doesn't revert to another capitalist system a few years later. Oh wait...
- tosser-002 12y ago
  You can't have both open borders and guaranteed income. Maintaining open borders seems to be a higher priority for the time being amongst those who would also advocate for a guaranteed income.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > You can't have both open borders and guaranteed income. Sure you can have liberalized immigration and basic income: basic income isn't means/behaviorally-tested, but it still has a target population -- which can well be citizens. If anything, a relatively liberalized immigration policy with unconditional basic income for citizens but not noncitizens minimizes the economic incentive for immigrants without their own strong support (whether from their own assets or family support) to come to the country.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > I wonder if it would be possible to institute basic income as a policy without significant social unrest. Probably. But it depends on what it replaces, how it is funded, and how it is sold.
sktrdie 12y ago
Wouldn't there always be new jobs? I mean, sure, technology has automated lots of things. But that's a good thing. We just need new kinds of jobs - ones that can't be automated. Who knows, perhaps in the future everybody can be an artist. Not sure a universal basic income would work from a mathematical point of view. Giving money to everybody would only increase the price of things.
- alandarev 12y ago
  Alternatively, not giving the money to majority, yet producing enough food for everybody will drive prices to zero.
- marksbrown 12y ago
  CGP Grey covered a few of your points in his video 'humans need not apply'[1]. The main argument against new jobs filling the void as it were, was the prevalence of the kinds of jobs that most people currently perform and the lack of any industry requiring millions of people in the future. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
  - snowwrestler 12y ago
    I find these arguments incredibly short-sighted. A typical American in 1850 could not have conceived of most of the jobs that employed a typical American in 1950. And a typical American in 1950 could not have conceived of most of the jobs that people here on HN hold. The idea that "this time it's different" seems so vain to me; like somehow NOW we're able to reliably predict the future of society, when we've proved terrible at doing that for thousands of years. What an amazing coincidence it would be if we all just happen to be alive at the time when all the surprises were over in human society! The founding premise of the market economy is that we can't predict the future, so we set up systems to be flexible in the face of changing technologies and cultures. Is that really all over now? That feels like an extraordinary claim, so I'd want to see extraordinary proof, and I'm not seeing it. Employment is actually on the upswing in the U.S. right now, and there are hiring shortages in "jobs of the future" type fields like programming, data analysis, genetic analysis, engineering, etc. Employment will change, and our training and education systems need to change too. But I think it's way early to declare the end of specialization and employment.
imgabe 12y ago
> “The challenges we face are big, but our politics are small,” Mr. Cruddas said. “We have stopped asking ourselves the important question Bobby Kennedy asked. What makes life worthwhile?” This is the real problem. I can't imagine any current politician giving a speech like the one quoted in the article. Politics today is not about "How do we make our country as good as possible?". Instead politicians only care about "How do I get my party to win and make the other party look bad?"
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  It is our own fault: we no longer vote for idealism. And the other party will just drag you through the mud if you try to run on something like "hope." Edit: did I say something offensive?
  - dataker 12y ago
    Not really, but pragmatism, rather than idealism, would be a better idea. Most of the time, people believe in ludicrous promises and take the candidate as a just and incorruptible individual. One would be better off looking at what candidates and their backers truthfully represent.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > It is our own fault: we no longer vote for idealism. We who? > And the other party will just drag you through the mud if you try to run on something like "hope." A pretty much immutable property of the two-party system in the US has been -- from day one -- that the other side will drag you through the mud for whatever you say. Whether it is idealistic or pragmatic or anything else. The idea that this is somehow new is, well, historically blind.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      We the citizens and voters. We do vote these people in office.
  - philwelch 12y ago
wallflower 12y ago
Marshall Brain's "Manna" is an interesting take on humans becoming more robot-like with the oversight of efficiency and automation software. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
- tomp 12y ago
  I just love this story. It really describes the ideal world for me, and kind-of gives long-term meaning to my projects.
- StevePerkins 12y ago
  That's an interesting piece of writing, but just a quick SPOILER ALERT for anyone clicking the link for the first time: It isn't a story. It's just a device for painting a picture of one person's concept of a techno-utopia. Libertarians often recommend Ayn Rand novels, because fiction is a useful medium for showcasing their utopian (or dystopian) ideals. However, at least Ayn Rand novels have intricate plots, and more or less fleshed-out characters. "Manna" does not. The narrator, speaking to us from the near future, describes the endgame of technology advances within the capitalist order we now know. At the outset of the "story", the narrator is destitute in this order. He meets people from an isolated utopia, who have built a different order. A speaker from that group explains this alternative order to the narrator. The end. I still think that "Manna" is recommended reading, but I just want to give people proper expectations going into it. I was actually a bit angry the first time I finished it, because it was presented to me as something it wasn't. It is an essay presenting one possible alternative order for human civilization. While interesting in its own right, it isn't a real "story".
rdlecler1 12y ago
I like basic income in principle, but I just don't see how it wouldn't (1) discourage people from joining the workforce (2) the prices of goods and services will still adapt to reflect supply and demand unless we can also increase things like housing, access to education, and healthcare.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Those are ok things. If we don't need people in the workforce, let them stay home and watch Survivor. And demand isn't changing, nor supply if we assume automation is the reason there's no jobs. Plenty of houses, plenty of goods, just no reason for people to be involved in making them. It used to be called Utopia; but these days we resist for some reason and call it Unemployment.
- karmacondon 12y ago
  These issues have obviously been addressed by more knowledgeable people, but here is my understanding: (1) people work out of pride, not necessity. if your only concern was sustenance you could live off of welfare or charity now. even with a basic income, people will still be motivated to work because they want to have nice things (2) market forces will still apply. if you raise your prices because low income customers now have more money, I'll lower mine. barring cases of outright collusion, you'll see economic growth as opposed to rising prices Basic Income is still a long way away, but it has been thought through. A practical implementation may or may not succeed, but it won't be because of fundamental flaws in the idea.
  - zanny 12y ago
    A few more points on top of these: (1) The way jobs are valued would fundamentally change. Rather than higher wage work being the work that fewer people can do, you would also see a rise in cost for jobs that people do not want to do. Today you have your unskilled employees trapped between a rock and a hard place when you offer them a job as a burger flipper - work in wage servitude for us, or starve. The employer has a tremendous amount of sway during negotiations in an economy where employment is effectively mandated to survive. Ask yourself - "why is McDonalds so cheap?" does it make any sense that having people working in depressing service jobs makes cheap food? Wouldn't the optimization of food be automated delivery, minimizing the people involved? McDonalds can only exist as it does today because all its employees are forced to work for it. (2) You would also see production shift. Economics goes where the money is - we have too little low income housing and too many McMansions because single family houses are profitable and reliable when sold and low income housing is unreliable and less profitable. If everyone had a minimum of income, there would be a tremendous amount of economic pressure to meet the demands of that crowd that has maximal economic consistency in revenue. So in the short term prices would be a mess, but in the long term the equilibrium state would be that there would be a huge market to provide as much of what the UBI unemployed class wants as possible within their budget for profit.
vinceyuan 12y ago
Because "Becoming Steve Jobs" was mentioned many time recently, when I saw 'Jobs' in the title, I thought "Is it another article about Steve Jobs and that book"?
lordnacho 12y ago
I actually like the basic income idea, though I hadn't arrived at it from an automation perspective. If you're guaranteed money, you do away with the marginal effects of means-tested benefits. Basically, if you're a low income earner it can happen that you face a very high effective tax rate, in many countries. If you're guaranteed money, you don't have this marginal tax problem; you can sit on your ass or work for a bit of extra money. If you already make more, take it as a tax allowance. This in turn means you do away with the means testing system. No more forms to fill out; no more mandatory courses that do nothing but line the pockets of the course provider. No more looking over people's shoulders to see if they're cheating. No more pressure on doctors to write iffy diagnoses. There are of course issues with this system. For instance what do you do about immigration?
- dantheman 12y ago
  More importantly the math doesn't work out. Some people have way more costs because they're disabled, sick, have a large number of kids.
  - eru 12y ago
    What's the problem with that? You have an NHS-like system for the sick, and you pay basic income for kids, too. (Perhaps at half the adult rate for people under 18?)
    - ddod 12y ago
      The most important part of a universal basic income, in my opinion, is to not provide it for people under 18, otherwise, you're incentivizing people to have more children (which in many macro cases is a good thing, but in practice in the US would probably have immediate negative impacts).
      - rwallace 12y ago
        In reality, birthrates in every developed country have crashed below extinction level; providing an actually universal basic income might help reverse that. But if that's not going to be the case, if 'universal' is going to be a lie, then I'm opposed to the whole concept. Our society has too much bullshit ageism as it stands. The current social welfare system, flawed as it is, is better than bringing in more.
dataker 12y ago
The only thing one can do is let the market takes care of itself. In my country(Brazil), unemployment rate is fairly low( ~5% )and the government loves to brag about it. Most of these jobs are 'artificial' in a way the government blocks innovation in order to 'retain jobs' and justify its economic intervention. As a consequence, products and services are way more inefficient and expensive. At the same time, employees have wages that, from a Western standpoint, would be below poverty line. For example, the government forbids customers to put gas on their vehicle. To do so, one needs an attendant who works 10h/day with $3/hour wages.
- eru 12y ago
  Which country is that?
  - dataker 12y ago
    Brazil
- fnordsensei 12y ago
  This is horrible. In my opinion, as soon as something can be done well by a machine, it is from then on unworthy of being done by a human being. That type of artificial job creation seems demeaning and somehow akin to some sort of indirect slavery. Politicians in my country (like everywhere, I imagine) are going on about how job creation is extremely important, and that they are focusing on lowering unemployment. Well, 1) No it isn't, and 2) No, they are not. 1) What's so great about jobs? They are a side effect of the economic model we have, nothing more. What actually matters to us are the things we support by this model. A job can be a great, fulfilling experience, but it is not by virtue of specifically being a job that it is fulfilling, it's because of all the things we actually care about: interesting problems, great coworkers, a purpose in life. We could very well find other ways to support the things we actually care about, and we will have to, once a sufficient amount of jobs are done by machines. 2) All politicians, from left to right, want unemployment. If there were no unemployment, salaries would spiral out of control, which would trigger a massive rise in prices on goods in order to pay those salaries, which triggers more raises in order for employees to afford the goods and so on. In order to prevent this, an unemployment of 5-6% is required, as far as I understand it. Yet somehow, we also have to pretend that those unemployed are not doing society a service, that the cards are not stacked against them, and that we really want them to have a job. Blergh. Well, enough ranting.
panglott 12y ago
'Jeremy Rifkin, author of “The Third Industrial Revolution,” said a basic income would enable people to volunteer their time in areas like elder care, child care, culture and the environment.' This seems like the most important sentence in the article. Raising children, caring for the elderly, editing Wikipedia, free software, &c. creates huge amounts of unremunerated value. If people were freed from economic drudge work, they would have free time not only for leisure, but that kind of valuable work as well. Japan for example has a time-based currency to coordinate elder care, but that sort of thing will always be an issue of sharing volunteer labor. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11657006 http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11657006
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Cynical me. I don't see people who've never had to work, doing more than watching the latest Reality TV program and complaining about the quality of the free food. Doing those other things is all about cultural values, and nothing about free time.
  - vijayr 12y ago
    try watching TV non stop for a week or two - it gets boring and annoying, real fast. there will be people who will watch TV all day when they don't have to work, but there will also be people who would spend their time doing useful things. Even if the latter group is just a fraction, it would benefit everyone immensely in the long run. After all, only a few thousand people edit wikipedia out of 7 billion of us, only a few thousand people write open source software but all of humanity benefits from it, right?
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      Pollyanna. Think about a generation of teenaged boys with nothing to do but watch television. The carnage!
  - iamthepieman 12y ago
    Selection bias right there in "people who've never had to work" What if you took people who have always had to work/chosen to work and give them resources to free up their time. Of course, you'd probably get a lot of bad things as well as good since sudden changes will always generate some churn and chaos short-term. Think about this for yourself. If you didn't have to work, or only had to work 25-30 hours a week what would you do with the extra time? Now apply that to every middle class individual. Sure some would spend the time in less productive or even harmful ways. But others would spend it even more wisely than you imagine yourself spending it.
gklotz 12y ago
Play this through to its logical conclusions. If 50% of the jobs are eliminated through automation, who will buy things? You may still have a software engineering job creating new automation technology, but who will it be sold to? If there is 60% unemployment, who will buy those machine picked strawberries, iPads, or the products in Google ads? If this keeps going, big companies like Apple and Google will be the biggest proponents of basic income. Their other option is to go bankrupt.
kra34 12y ago
The plan we discussed at SXSW was to establish some sort of hunger games style competition where the unemployed battle for a rich life in the capital far from their respective districts, but admittedly there is a lot of work to do between now and then.
known 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income FTW
Animats 12y ago
Looking at the past won't help. Think of it this way. There's a list of productive things humans can do that machines can't. That list keeps getting shorter. Since computers got really cheap, it's become much shorter much faster. That's new. Previous technologies knocked off one skill. Computers knock off broad ranges of them. A brief history of manufacturing technology: Until the 20th century, the big economic problem was simply making enough stuff, and it took about 80% of the workforce to make all the stuff. During the 20th century, manufacturing technology got good, and by the 1950s, there was plenty of stuff in the developed world, but the quality was iffy and it still took about 40% of the workforce to make all the stuff. By the 1980s, the quality was a lot better, and there was a glut of high-quality stuff. Today, in the developed world, about 13% of the workforce makes all the stuff, and there are no significant shortages of any buyable thing. (Is it out of stock on Amazon? No.) That's where we are. We have no clue how to organize an economic system where a sizable fraction of the population has negative economic value. Welfare, the dole, and such have been tried - that leads to huge public housing projects warehousing useless people. Then we get riots because there are too many bored people. So that won't work. That's the problem we face. Where do we go from here?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
anonbanker 12y ago
well, he's been in the ground a few years now. chances are, he's pretty dry already. I guess you can dig him up and donate his bones to science? (didn't read the article)

145 points by cryptoz 12y ago

It's interesting that the nyt is covering basic income. I wonder if it would be possible to institute basic income as a policy without significant social unrest. It seems unlikely to me that basic income would be accepted politically unless there was significant action first by disenfranchised workers.

thret 12y ago
I wonder if the tipping point might simply be when >50%-80% of people are already on welfare.
- neohaven 12y ago
  Yep. When you can't hold up the "you can't find a job because you're lazy/a slob/stupid/etc." narrative, we'll get these things.
edward 12y ago
I was going to point out that UK Green party supports a basic income, but now I find that they have dropped it from their 2015 manifesto. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/green-party/11383801/Greens-ditch-citizens-income-from-election-manifesto.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/green-party/1138380...
- mrec 12y ago
  It's not clear yet that they have dropped it; I think a lot of reporters jumped the gun after some (typically) careless comments. The Greens' "basic income" is only a partial one, though; most notably it's set at a level that couldn't possibly replace Housing Benefit, and so doesn't avoid the welfare trap.
smountcastle 12y ago
I'm curious why you don't think that a basic income would accepted politically? If it were provided to everyone without regard to their other sources of income it would differ from other approaches like welfare. I realize that the money has to come from somewhere, so perhaps a transition to a consumption tax rather than income tax would work. Of course the basic income would need to be significant enough to offset the increased cost of consumption for basic needs.
- Shivetya 12y ago
  Sell it to the left as assistance programs, sell it to the right as a tax overhaul, (fair tax/flat etc). You could cover both sides by consolidating aid programs into one basic income payment and bundling with tax reform where all tax paid is via a consumption tax. So borrow the fair tax idea of a prebate, where the government automatically deposits a set amount weekly/monthly into your account. The worrisome parts here are is that far too many people are willing to live at near poverty levels as long as the feel comfortable and the effort to exist there requires little on their part. We could end up legislating an entire segment to permanent poverty, paid enough to keep them from rising against those who have all the money
- JonFish85 12y ago
  Once people saw the cost of the program, I think it would cause a great deal of outrage. I've done the back-of-the-envelope math here on HN several times, so I don't really care to do it again, but essentially it would dwarf our current budget (which is already spending beyond income). The cost is enormous. I believe if you taxed everyone whose net worth is over $1b at a 100% rate, you could pay for this program for just under 2 years. And if you're talking about "everyone gets the same amount", remember that you have to collect it back, so you have the overhead of giving a person $1 just to collect it back again.
  - minthd 12y ago
    The key for this to be possible is a big reduction in the cost of living. Robots,automation and other tech , combined with the right regulations, could possible reduce cost of living by 80%-90%. Under those assumptions, won't basic income become possible ?
JoeAltmaier 12y ago
We've already (in America) got so many basic support programs, I don't see a problem with accepting Basic Income. There's food stamps, housing assistance (20% of Americans!) and free education already. {edit: add Basic Income}
- flatline 12y ago
  The problem is at the intersection of welfare and work. You have to be really poor and stay really poor to qualify for most of these social programs, and the programs are designed to be pretty minimal and thereby encourage people to work. At the same time, they disincentivize much of the low-paying work that many people on welfare can obtain, because they will be worse off without the handout. This is what unconditional basic income is supposed to address. It is also the source of concern about jobs going away, that a much larger number of people are going to be swept into government-subsidized poverty, which will put strains on the already burdened welfare system in the US. Where will the money come from?
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    The question was about acceptance, which is demonstrate by the existence of these programs. The further question of resource is a good one. And its not about money, which is after all, imaginary points on a scorecard. The real question is where are the goods coming from? It'll have to be automation, because the premise is that people won't be working.
- geebee 12y ago
  I think the big arguments for basic income are: 1) there is a huge and inefficient bureaucracy involved in administering these various assistance programs 2) the way these programs work (you lose access to them if your income rises above a fairly low threshold), we've essentially created a marginal tax rate of 100% on certain types of low income workers. 3) rapid technological change and increasing automation undermines the moral argument against redistribution of wealth. It is interesting that libertarians, not generally known for enthusiasm around wealth distribution, appear at least intrigued by basic income. This is just a quick summary, of course, I'd encourage you to read more about the case for basic income.
timepiece 12y ago
Marx was dead right all along. We should not work for capitalists who plunder the nations wealth with the help of politicians for them to make more money off our efforts. We should fight for (believe me these leeches won't give up very easily) fair share in aggregate wealth and people should not work for subsistence anymore esp when we have all these resources available on the planet.
- chrisbennet 12y ago
  I think the word you are looking for is "plunder" not "blunder". If it is, you misspelled it in your other post also.
  - timepiece 12y ago
    Thanks for the correction. :)
- lucozade 12y ago
  Absolutely. There's overwhelming evidence that when the proletariat rise up it producers worker utopiae and doesn't revert to another capitalist system a few years later. Oh wait...
tosser-002 12y ago
You can't have both open borders and guaranteed income. Maintaining open borders seems to be a higher priority for the time being amongst those who would also advocate for a guaranteed income.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > You can't have both open borders and guaranteed income. Sure you can have liberalized immigration and basic income: basic income isn't means/behaviorally-tested, but it still has a target population -- which can well be citizens. If anything, a relatively liberalized immigration policy with unconditional basic income for citizens but not noncitizens minimizes the economic incentive for immigrants without their own strong support (whether from their own assets or family support) to come to the country.
dragonwriter 12y ago
> I wonder if it would be possible to institute basic income as a policy without significant social unrest. Probably. But it depends on what it replaces, how it is funded, and how it is sold.

sktrdie 12y ago

Wouldn't there always be new jobs? I mean, sure, technology has automated lots of things. But that's a good thing. We just need new kinds of jobs - ones that can't be automated. Who knows, perhaps in the future everybody can be an artist. Not sure a universal basic income would work from a mathematical point of view. Giving money to everybody would only increase the price of things.

alandarev 12y ago
Alternatively, not giving the money to majority, yet producing enough food for everybody will drive prices to zero.
marksbrown 12y ago
CGP Grey covered a few of your points in his video 'humans need not apply'[1]. The main argument against new jobs filling the void as it were, was the prevalence of the kinds of jobs that most people currently perform and the lack of any industry requiring millions of people in the future. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  I find these arguments incredibly short-sighted. A typical American in 1850 could not have conceived of most of the jobs that employed a typical American in 1950. And a typical American in 1950 could not have conceived of most of the jobs that people here on HN hold. The idea that "this time it's different" seems so vain to me; like somehow NOW we're able to reliably predict the future of society, when we've proved terrible at doing that for thousands of years. What an amazing coincidence it would be if we all just happen to be alive at the time when all the surprises were over in human society! The founding premise of the market economy is that we can't predict the future, so we set up systems to be flexible in the face of changing technologies and cultures. Is that really all over now? That feels like an extraordinary claim, so I'd want to see extraordinary proof, and I'm not seeing it. Employment is actually on the upswing in the U.S. right now, and there are hiring shortages in "jobs of the future" type fields like programming, data analysis, genetic analysis, engineering, etc. Employment will change, and our training and education systems need to change too. But I think it's way early to declare the end of specialization and employment.

imgabe 12y ago

> “The challenges we face are big, but our politics are small,” Mr. Cruddas said. “We have stopped asking ourselves the important question Bobby Kennedy asked. What makes life worthwhile?” This is the real problem. I can't imagine any current politician giving a speech like the one quoted in the article. Politics today is not about "How do we make our country as good as possible?". Instead politicians only care about "How do I get my party to win and make the other party look bad?"

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
It is our own fault: we no longer vote for idealism. And the other party will just drag you through the mud if you try to run on something like "hope." Edit: did I say something offensive?
- dataker 12y ago
  Not really, but pragmatism, rather than idealism, would be a better idea. Most of the time, people believe in ludicrous promises and take the candidate as a just and incorruptible individual. One would be better off looking at what candidates and their backers truthfully represent.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > It is our own fault: we no longer vote for idealism. We who? > And the other party will just drag you through the mud if you try to run on something like "hope." A pretty much immutable property of the two-party system in the US has been -- from day one -- that the other side will drag you through the mud for whatever you say. Whether it is idealistic or pragmatic or anything else. The idea that this is somehow new is, well, historically blind.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    We the citizens and voters. We do vote these people in office.
- philwelch 12y ago

wallflower 12y ago

Marshall Brain's "Manna" is an interesting take on humans becoming more robot-like with the oversight of efficiency and automation software. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

tomp 12y ago
I just love this story. It really describes the ideal world for me, and kind-of gives long-term meaning to my projects.
StevePerkins 12y ago
That's an interesting piece of writing, but just a quick SPOILER ALERT for anyone clicking the link for the first time: It isn't a story. It's just a device for painting a picture of one person's concept of a techno-utopia. Libertarians often recommend Ayn Rand novels, because fiction is a useful medium for showcasing their utopian (or dystopian) ideals. However, at least Ayn Rand novels have intricate plots, and more or less fleshed-out characters. "Manna" does not. The narrator, speaking to us from the near future, describes the endgame of technology advances within the capitalist order we now know. At the outset of the "story", the narrator is destitute in this order. He meets people from an isolated utopia, who have built a different order. A speaker from that group explains this alternative order to the narrator. The end. I still think that "Manna" is recommended reading, but I just want to give people proper expectations going into it. I was actually a bit angry the first time I finished it, because it was presented to me as something it wasn't. It is an essay presenting one possible alternative order for human civilization. While interesting in its own right, it isn't a real "story".

rdlecler1 12y ago

I like basic income in principle, but I just don't see how it wouldn't (1) discourage people from joining the workforce (2) the prices of goods and services will still adapt to reflect supply and demand unless we can also increase things like housing, access to education, and healthcare.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Those are ok things. If we don't need people in the workforce, let them stay home and watch Survivor. And demand isn't changing, nor supply if we assume automation is the reason there's no jobs. Plenty of houses, plenty of goods, just no reason for people to be involved in making them. It used to be called Utopia; but these days we resist for some reason and call it Unemployment.
karmacondon 12y ago
These issues have obviously been addressed by more knowledgeable people, but here is my understanding: (1) people work out of pride, not necessity. if your only concern was sustenance you could live off of welfare or charity now. even with a basic income, people will still be motivated to work because they want to have nice things (2) market forces will still apply. if you raise your prices because low income customers now have more money, I'll lower mine. barring cases of outright collusion, you'll see economic growth as opposed to rising prices Basic Income is still a long way away, but it has been thought through. A practical implementation may or may not succeed, but it won't be because of fundamental flaws in the idea.
- zanny 12y ago
  A few more points on top of these: (1) The way jobs are valued would fundamentally change. Rather than higher wage work being the work that fewer people can do, you would also see a rise in cost for jobs that people do not want to do. Today you have your unskilled employees trapped between a rock and a hard place when you offer them a job as a burger flipper - work in wage servitude for us, or starve. The employer has a tremendous amount of sway during negotiations in an economy where employment is effectively mandated to survive. Ask yourself - "why is McDonalds so cheap?" does it make any sense that having people working in depressing service jobs makes cheap food? Wouldn't the optimization of food be automated delivery, minimizing the people involved? McDonalds can only exist as it does today because all its employees are forced to work for it. (2) You would also see production shift. Economics goes where the money is - we have too little low income housing and too many McMansions because single family houses are profitable and reliable when sold and low income housing is unreliable and less profitable. If everyone had a minimum of income, there would be a tremendous amount of economic pressure to meet the demands of that crowd that has maximal economic consistency in revenue. So in the short term prices would be a mess, but in the long term the equilibrium state would be that there would be a huge market to provide as much of what the UBI unemployed class wants as possible within their budget for profit.

vinceyuan 12y ago

Because "Becoming Steve Jobs" was mentioned many time recently, when I saw 'Jobs' in the title, I thought "Is it another article about Steve Jobs and that book"?

lordnacho 12y ago

I actually like the basic income idea, though I hadn't arrived at it from an automation perspective. If you're guaranteed money, you do away with the marginal effects of means-tested benefits. Basically, if you're a low income earner it can happen that you face a very high effective tax rate, in many countries. If you're guaranteed money, you don't have this marginal tax problem; you can sit on your ass or work for a bit of extra money. If you already make more, take it as a tax allowance. This in turn means you do away with the means testing system. No more forms to fill out; no more mandatory courses that do nothing but line the pockets of the course provider. No more looking over people's shoulders to see if they're cheating. No more pressure on doctors to write iffy diagnoses. There are of course issues with this system. For instance what do you do about immigration?

dantheman 12y ago
More importantly the math doesn't work out. Some people have way more costs because they're disabled, sick, have a large number of kids.
- eru 12y ago
  What's the problem with that? You have an NHS-like system for the sick, and you pay basic income for kids, too. (Perhaps at half the adult rate for people under 18?)
  - ddod 12y ago
    The most important part of a universal basic income, in my opinion, is to not provide it for people under 18, otherwise, you're incentivizing people to have more children (which in many macro cases is a good thing, but in practice in the US would probably have immediate negative impacts).
    - rwallace 12y ago
      In reality, birthrates in every developed country have crashed below extinction level; providing an actually universal basic income might help reverse that. But if that's not going to be the case, if 'universal' is going to be a lie, then I'm opposed to the whole concept. Our society has too much bullshit ageism as it stands. The current social welfare system, flawed as it is, is better than bringing in more.

dataker 12y ago

The only thing one can do is let the market takes care of itself. In my country(Brazil), unemployment rate is fairly low( ~5% )and the government loves to brag about it. Most of these jobs are 'artificial' in a way the government blocks innovation in order to 'retain jobs' and justify its economic intervention. As a consequence, products and services are way more inefficient and expensive. At the same time, employees have wages that, from a Western standpoint, would be below poverty line. For example, the government forbids customers to put gas on their vehicle. To do so, one needs an attendant who works 10h/day with $3/hour wages.

eru 12y ago
Which country is that?
- dataker 12y ago
  Brazil
fnordsensei 12y ago
This is horrible. In my opinion, as soon as something can be done well by a machine, it is from then on unworthy of being done by a human being. That type of artificial job creation seems demeaning and somehow akin to some sort of indirect slavery. Politicians in my country (like everywhere, I imagine) are going on about how job creation is extremely important, and that they are focusing on lowering unemployment. Well, 1) No it isn't, and 2) No, they are not. 1) What's so great about jobs? They are a side effect of the economic model we have, nothing more. What actually matters to us are the things we support by this model. A job can be a great, fulfilling experience, but it is not by virtue of specifically being a job that it is fulfilling, it's because of all the things we actually care about: interesting problems, great coworkers, a purpose in life. We could very well find other ways to support the things we actually care about, and we will have to, once a sufficient amount of jobs are done by machines. 2) All politicians, from left to right, want unemployment. If there were no unemployment, salaries would spiral out of control, which would trigger a massive rise in prices on goods in order to pay those salaries, which triggers more raises in order for employees to afford the goods and so on. In order to prevent this, an unemployment of 5-6% is required, as far as I understand it. Yet somehow, we also have to pretend that those unemployed are not doing society a service, that the cards are not stacked against them, and that we really want them to have a job. Blergh. Well, enough ranting.

panglott 12y ago

'Jeremy Rifkin, author of “The Third Industrial Revolution,” said a basic income would enable people to volunteer their time in areas like elder care, child care, culture and the environment.' This seems like the most important sentence in the article. Raising children, caring for the elderly, editing Wikipedia, free software, &c. creates huge amounts of unremunerated value. If people were freed from economic drudge work, they would have free time not only for leisure, but that kind of valuable work as well. Japan for example has a time-based currency to coordinate elder care, but that sort of thing will always be an issue of sharing volunteer labor. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11657006 http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11657006

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Cynical me. I don't see people who've never had to work, doing more than watching the latest Reality TV program and complaining about the quality of the free food. Doing those other things is all about cultural values, and nothing about free time.
- vijayr 12y ago
  try watching TV non stop for a week or two - it gets boring and annoying, real fast. there will be people who will watch TV all day when they don't have to work, but there will also be people who would spend their time doing useful things. Even if the latter group is just a fraction, it would benefit everyone immensely in the long run. After all, only a few thousand people edit wikipedia out of 7 billion of us, only a few thousand people write open source software but all of humanity benefits from it, right?
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Pollyanna. Think about a generation of teenaged boys with nothing to do but watch television. The carnage!
- iamthepieman 12y ago
  Selection bias right there in "people who've never had to work" What if you took people who have always had to work/chosen to work and give them resources to free up their time. Of course, you'd probably get a lot of bad things as well as good since sudden changes will always generate some churn and chaos short-term. Think about this for yourself. If you didn't have to work, or only had to work 25-30 hours a week what would you do with the extra time? Now apply that to every middle class individual. Sure some would spend the time in less productive or even harmful ways. But others would spend it even more wisely than you imagine yourself spending it.

gklotz 12y ago

Play this through to its logical conclusions. If 50% of the jobs are eliminated through automation, who will buy things? You may still have a software engineering job creating new automation technology, but who will it be sold to? If there is 60% unemployment, who will buy those machine picked strawberries, iPads, or the products in Google ads? If this keeps going, big companies like Apple and Google will be the biggest proponents of basic income. Their other option is to go bankrupt.

kra34 12y ago

The plan we discussed at SXSW was to establish some sort of hunger games style competition where the unemployed battle for a rich life in the capital far from their respective districts, but admittedly there is a lot of work to do between now and then.

known 12y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income FTW

Animats 12y ago

Looking at the past won't help. Think of it this way. There's a list of productive things humans can do that machines can't. That list keeps getting shorter. Since computers got really cheap, it's become much shorter much faster. That's new. Previous technologies knocked off one skill. Computers knock off broad ranges of them. A brief history of manufacturing technology: Until the 20th century, the big economic problem was simply making enough stuff, and it took about 80% of the workforce to make all the stuff. During the 20th century, manufacturing technology got good, and by the 1950s, there was plenty of stuff in the developed world, but the quality was iffy and it still took about 40% of the workforce to make all the stuff. By the 1980s, the quality was a lot better, and there was a glut of high-quality stuff. Today, in the developed world, about 13% of the workforce makes all the stuff, and there are no significant shortages of any buyable thing. (Is it out of stock on Amazon? No.) That's where we are. We have no clue how to organize an economic system where a sizable fraction of the population has negative economic value. Welfare, the dole, and such have been tried - that leads to huge public housing projects warehousing useless people. Then we get riots because there are too many bored people. So that won't work. That's the problem we face. Where do we go from here?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

anonbanker 12y ago

well, he's been in the ground a few years now. chances are, he's pretty dry already. I guess you can dig him up and donate his bones to science? (didn't read the article)