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This will only work if gigs are well paid and allow you to pay for expenses during the off periods. In theory this is great and already happens in the IT secto
by ilurk 11y ago
This will only work if gigs are well paid and allow you to pay for expenses during the off periods.
In theory this is great and already happens in the IT sector of some countries.
In practice I suspect that as years go by the salaries will go lower as the gig-economy becomes standard.
But by then there will be another problem too: robotics.
In the end the solution will have to include a basic salary for everyone. Those who work get something extra.
- s73v3r 11y agoYeah, that probably won't happen. There is simply too much political opposition to the idea of basic income in the US.
- mc32 11y agoIt would happen as soon as enough people were affected such that producers of goods as well as unemployed consumers demand it from the congress and the rest of society. What that tipping point will be I dont know, but it's almost inevitable, if the current trend continues unabated.
- Daishiman 11y agoBy that metric, the US should have had single payer health care years ago.
- mc32 11y agoBetter late than never. It did eventually happen, if late. I'm not saying basic income is on the horizon, but if trends continue into the future, we will see something resembling it. Nixon and team considered negative income taxes back in the seventies when it looked like we were in a downward spiral. Nixon might have been a thief and a liar but above all else he was practical.
- s73v3r 11y agoNo it didn't. We don't have Single Payer here in the US.
- s73v3r 11y agoNope. The Tea Party will scream and yell that the government wants to give welfare queens Cadillacs, and that's all anyone will hear. I want Basic Income to happen. But I also know that there are a lot of people who benefit from it not happening, mostly cheap-ass crappy bosses who don't want workers to have any alternative, and so are stuck there.
- zanny 11y agoIt took almost five thousand years to stop openly owning other human beings (and people still do it with different names today, but at least we don't condone it anymore). Basic income is inevitable in any society that maintains a capitalist market economy post-scarcity. If the US wants to destroy itself by being backwards (cough, healthcare, measurement units, date format, DST, national holidays, PTO, regressive welfare, etc) it cannot hold the rest of the world back forever.
- Retra 11y agoMeasurement units? You realize that units are arbitrary, right?
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago>It took almost five thousand years to stop openly owning other human beings (and people still do it with different names today, but at least we don't condone it anymore). In the US it never stopped. It merely became only the right of corporations and the state via prisons. Maybe it stopped in other countries, but how is that different than saying it stopped at the first civilization that banned slavery?
- yourapostasy 11y agoThere is no need for suspecting "...that as years go by the salaries will go lower as the gig-economy becomes standard." There is empirical evidence today anywhere you care to analyze freelancing results. I'm loathe to admit this as I used to think the "free agent economy" was the way to go, but I have to face the cumulative evidence over the past several decades. Mainstreaming the freelance economy will be disastrous for median incomes, and further concentrate power because the majority of freelancers have little to no leverage. That is because by definition, the majority of freelancers fall somewhere close to some average metric (whatever objective/subjective measure is chosen by the buyer). That average is commoditized through many different means (the primary channel of delivering that commoditization being the purchasing/procurement department), and then the individual members of the average are pitted against each other. Everyone wants to think they are the special snowflake that will beat the averages, but by definition only a top 10-40% (depending upon a variety of factors) can beat the numbers. My personal rule of thumb to staying a free agent for over the past ten years is assiduously put in the deliberate practice for 10K+ hours on a running 5-year basis constantly learning and applying new fields/skills/concepts, and successfully sell that (the key part many fall down upon). This is alongside the work you do to put bread on the table. My other rule of thumb is the moment you are negotiating a proposed gig's technical deliverables through the purchasing/procurement bureaucracy instead of the business unit that will realize the benefits of the gig, you are losing large chunks of your agency to their buying process that acts as a highly lossy compression algorithm, if you haven't lost it all already by that point.