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One problem of minimum income is that it will make it very expensive to find people willing to do "dirty" work. Unless you think robots will take care of nursin
by moonchrome 11y ago
One problem of minimum income is that it will make it very expensive to find people willing to do "dirty" work. Unless you think robots will take care of nursing (which is grueling and dirty when dealing with disabled people and it doesn't pay well), farm work (they already have trouble finding workers), cleaning, etc.
Automation isn't nowhere near to eliminating those and I'm guessing it would increase labor costs very disproportionately - diminishing marginal utility of income and all that. This would then make related products/services more expensive and further lower your global competitiveness.
This can be mitigated by immigration (ie. not granting minimum income to immigrants) but that has a bunch of issues on it's own.
- timClicks 11y agoOn the flip side, there is lots of dirty work carried out that is not recognised by the current economy today.
- pg314 11y agoMaybe the "dirty" work should be better paid. It is convenient to have a large supply of workers that have to take any work to survive, so the "dirty" work gets done cheaply, but that doesn't make it right.
- moonchrome 11y agoIt depends on how you look at it I guess - a large supply of low skilled workers is what allows you to have access to many things you take for granted and removing that means that a lot of products and services aren't going to be accessible to general population. Overall it would lower the standard of living for anyone not at the bottom of income bracket and not change much for the top.