Universal basic income

[Chuckanut]

The problem is not just the elimination of jobs. It is also how rapidly it occurs.

+1

I remember hearding a talk about how our factories got clobbered by Chinese imports. Nobody anticipated that the Chinese productions ability would overwhelm American factories so quickly by providing a huge base for very cheap production of goods in a very short time. They just didn't see it coming.

 

[Katsmeow]

I am not sure about the Universal Basic Income but I think it is a serious issue because it is tied to the vanishing job with the changes in technology. I couple of years ago I found this an interesting article in talking about how the era of the "job" is relatively recent. That is, in years past most people worked in agriculture, often on the family farm.

https://goplifer.com/2016/03/13/ending-the-era-of-the-job/

I have been doing some family tree research and I am struck by the huge families in the pre-depression era. Families of 10 or more kids (some of whom died in childhood) were common. And, often, in the census you see most of the young adult kids working on the family farm. And, then they grow up marry sometimes own a farm down the street and then they have 8 kids or whatever.

My parents were born in the 1920s and were part of the last era of big families. They had jobs and moved off the farm. But, I'm not sure there are enough jobs out there for everyone and one of the solutions in the universal basic income.

The concept of it is that for some people -- the incapable, the lazy, the less healthy, the elderly. the less talented-- the basic income enables life at well a basic level.

But for those who are more capable, who have talents, who have drive and ambition, who are healthy, etc. then they won't be satisified with it and can make more money.

Again, I don't know enough to really know if this will work but I find it interesting to consider.

 

[HadEnuff]

I will be mightily surprised if I see anything a few generations down the road.

you are just trying to convince yourself that you are OK with your SWR.

 

[explanade]

PCs in homes led to the Internet.

But before then, PCs were sold to business for "office automation."

What happened to all the secretaries that companies used to employ?

Office automation.

 

[Sunset]

I don't see Universal Basic Income working because if gov't gave everyone $1,000 /mo, then gov't would need to get the money from somewhere, so gov't would need to tax everyone $1,000 + (admin cost) per month to pay for it.

Otherwise, if you limit it based on something like existing income, then it's welfare, and we already have that and are really discussing the range and limits of welfare. Nothing Universal about that.

 

[copyright1997reloaded]

Has anyone ever read player piano?

 

[Nemo2]

if gov't gave everyone $1,000 /mo, then gov't would need to get the money from somewhere, so gov't would need to tax everyone $1,000 + (admin cost) per month to pay for it.

Unless said government kept running up more and more and more debt.

 

[Just_Steve]

I think that is a long way off. Hopefully I am long gone before we start paying everyone for nothing...

Agree.

 

[USGrant1962]

I think that is a long way off. Hopefully I am long gone before we start paying everyone for nothing...

I'm sure it is a long way off, probably never. One could argue the merits of UBI if we were starting with a clean slate, but for better or worse we already have a well-developed welfare state. IMO, it would be politically impossible to overturn it, which would be necessary in order to implement UBI.

 

[Redbugdave]

I don't see how a free ride for everyone could work in a capitalist system like ours. There would always be people "with get up and go" to make it above the sloth life and do well. What you are really describing is a socialist system and we don't have that here and hopefully never will.

Throughout time, there have been changes in society as new times appear. People adapt. One type of job ends but others open up. Not long ago there was no such thing as IT jobs. In my working career, computers have changed the work landscape and I think now more people are employed because of it than ever before. The automobile took over the horse carriage. An industry based on petroleum surfaced because of it. I think with these changes our standard of life has increased and less people are truly poor. As long as we have capitalism, we will do fine when the buggy whip is replaced by a car key. I am an optimist.

 

[aja8888]

Unless said government kept running up more and more and more debt.

Hey, a trillion here, a trillion there...what's a few more? Sooner or later, it's just play money. The tipping point will be when there's not enough revenue to cover the UBI (and other handouts). Then it's over. (anybody want to try to guess what "over" will be like?)

 

[samclem]

There is no fixed number of jobs. Jobs that don't make sense at today's wages do make sense if wages are reduced (I would have someone mowing my lawn right now if I could pay them 1/2 as much. At some wage the people cost less than the robots (capital has a value, and a complex machine ties up capital). Similarly, there's no fixed amount of work to be done: as machines do some of the things we do using human labor now (e.g. as they took over 99% of the hand labor on farms) people will move on to other pursuits to produce goods and services that machines can't (just as those who moved off the farms did).
If social and economic stability is eventually threatened by an increasing imbalance between the those who are adept at earning money through their creativity, smarts, initiative, drive etc in the new economy and those who can't/don't produce as much value, then I'd think we'd be better off as a society to find a way to increase the relative value of their work rather than just seize assets of some people to give to others while they create nothing. One construct that might work is a hyper-progressive income tax that, at the low end, provides matching subsidies (as the EITC does today) for those who earn little. The scale should be smooth so that earning more >always< results in more take-home pay than earning less. There's a LOT I don't like about that approach, but at least it encourages meaningful work (e.g. somebody thought their efforts were worth something in the free market, which is better than a govt make-work program), it would serve to reduce the shadow off-the-books economy at thel ow end, etc.

Also, we should expect population growth to taper off among the poor, especially if compensation/subsidies are tied to work rather than just to being alive.

 

[ShokWaveRider]

I am not for or against this. On one hand, the super rich have way more than they can possibly need or want for that matter, The poor are inadequately provided for.

But a UBI in the whole USA as a benefit. Not I'm my lifetime. Maybe for the Top 1%, but not for those who need it. But they already get that at the expense of the masses (Tax Reform and the deficit it generates?).

 

[explanade]

Maybe a crisis like the Great Depression to enact policies which seem unthinkable.

Opioid crisis may be a manifestation of economic duress affecting millions.

 

[GrayHare]

I don't see Universal Basic Income working because if gov't gave everyone $1,000 /mo, then gov't would need to get the money from somewhere, so gov't would need to tax everyone $1,000 + (admin cost) per month to pay for it.

That begs the question of where money comes from currently. If you say it arises from human effort, in the place of humans substitute machines, ones that are OK with a human receiving the machine's (taxable) wages.

 

[MRG]

PCs in homes led to the Internet.

But before then, PCs were sold to business for "office automation."

What happened to all the secretaries that companies used to employ?

Office automation.

The last 20 years of my career was spent implementing solutions for paper problems. That led folks to ask why do we need 3270 operators. Remember the thousands of folks who used to take paper from us and type it in a line of business system?

Today we do most of that via the net for our providers, the paper that still comes in, software scrapes data from paper and programmatically updates systems.

 

[samclem]

That begs the question of where money comes from currently. If you say it arises from human effort, in the place of humans substitute machines, ones that are OK with a human receiving the machine's (taxable) wages.

Of course, today somebody (or a group of somebodies) owns the machine. It gets no wages, and those somebodies own the value of whatever that machine produces.

But if/when our AI advances to the point where machines become sapient (effectively, attaining consciousness), the issues get thornier:
- Will it be legal for a person to own a sapient machine, or is that no different from slavery?
- Will sapient machines be willing to allow others to have the benefit of all the value they produce?
- Will sapient machines even remain motivated to do work if they receive no benefit from it (animals and people generally won't, after all).
- Will it be considered legal/moral to program/design a sapient machine that will toil without any expectation of reward?

These are the types of questions >good< science fiction explores. And I'm sure it already has.

 

[MuirWannabe]

Of course, today somebody (or a group of somebodies) owns the machine. It gets no wages, and those somebodies own the value of whatever that machine produces.

But if/when our AI advances to the point where machines become sapient (effectively, attaining consciousness), the issues get thornier:
- Will it be legal for a person to own a sapient machine, or is that no different from slavery?
- Will sapient machines be willing to allow others to have the benefit of all the value they produce?
- Will sapient machines even remain motivated to do work if they receive no benefit from it (animals and people generally won't, after all).
- Will it be considered legal/moral to program/design a sapient machine that will toil without any expectation of reward?

These are the types of questions >good< science fiction explores. And I'm sure it already has.

If they aren’t willing to work will they qualify for welfare?

 

[Nemo2]

If they aren’t willing to work will they qualify for welfare?

That'd be automatic.

 

[Walt34]

I have been doing some family tree research and I am struck by the huge families in the pre-depression era. Families of 10 or more kids (some of whom died in childhood) were common.

An aside:

My mother's family had 10 kids including her. They lived in Buffalo, NY and her father was a brakeman on the railroad, a very dangerous job.

I am named after an uncle (her little brother) who died at the age of 3 from an infection in his knee from a scratch when he fell. This was the pre-antibiotic era. A shot of penicillin would probably have fixed him right up.

 

[ERD50]

The problem is not just the elimination of jobs. It is also how rapidly it occurs.
Your example is over a 228 year period. With some predictions of AI eliminating up to 7 million jobs in the trucking and delivery industry alone in less than a decade it is mass unemployment on a totally different scale. ...

Sure, the time frame is important. But from 1790 to 1950, the loss each 20 years was about 10% points. That's a big change in a fairly short time, and it just kept going for 16 decades w/o any let up.

I'm not convinced AI/SDC is going to move so fast to eliminate 7 million trucking jobs in a decade.

There are approximately 3.5 million professional truck drivers in the United States, according to estimates by the American Trucking Association. The total number of people employed in the industry, including those in positions that do not entail driving, exceeds 8.7 million.

SDC sure won't eliminate all the jobs. Mechanics, etc?

I think it's all way overstated.

-ERD50

 

[dixonge]

I don't accept the premise that new tech will mean so few jobs. Why aren't people working the widely predicted 8 (or 20? or?) hour week today? Why isn't unemployment 80%?

Look to history. In the US:

1990, farmers are 2.6% of labor force
1980, farmers are 3.4% of labor force
1960, farmers are 8.3% of labor force
1950, farmers are 12.2% of labor force
1930, farmers are 21% of labor force
1910, farmers are 31% of labor force
1890, farmers are 43% of labor force
1870, farmers are 53% of labor force
1840, farmers are 69% of labor force
1790, farmers are 90% of labor force

https://www.agclassroom.org/gan/timeline/farmers_land.htm

Those people found jobs.

-ERD50

I got into this with a friend recently. He is completely convinced that AI and robots will doom humanity, therefore we must enact UBI.

You listed farm labor - but you can probably list similar numbers for dozens of other professions. We no longer have rooms full of people with pencil and paper (or machine calculators) due to computers. Grocery stores have self-checkout, yet we still have clerks. Barcodes have made inventory, shipping and checkout extremely efficient, yet people still work in all those areas. Online education hasn't put colleges or teachers out of work yet. Gas pumps nation-wide used to be manned. Milk used to be delivered. Automobiles used to be 100% hand-assembled.

Automation has *roared* through industry in the last 100 years, especially here in America. And what is our unemployment rate? Yeah...

 

[MRG]

An aside:

My mother's family had 10 kids including her. They lived in Buffalo, NY and her father was a brakeman on the railroad, a very dangerous job.

I am named after an uncle (her little brother) who died at the age of 3 from an infection in his knee from a scratch when he fell. This was the pre-antibiotic era. A shot of penicillin would probably have fixed him right up.

My Grandfather was a brakeman on the railroad in '29. Those days brakeman road on top of the cars and sometimes had to jump between two cars.

One day the guy ahead of him on the train forgot to yell duck at a low pass. That was his last day. Dangerous indeed!

Interesting too, he was orphaned in 1895 when both his parent's died from a local flu. Survival was not guaranteed back then.

 

[ClayMore]

Scarcity

I think our concepts of economics fall short of contemplating a world in which scarcity may no longer exist. Futurists like Max Tegmark believe we are within conceptual range (100 years?)of being able to make anything from anything at the subatomic building block level. Accelerating advances in nanotechnology and genetic sequencing imply much longer lifespans will be possible. The conditions to create super intelligent AI exist now and it’s probability of emerging has spurred researchers to formulate strategies to prevent it from pursuing goals that could destroy us. If the only scarce resource is energy, then the last thing needed will be systems to harvest from the sun with the Dyson sphere concept as the pinnacle.
Capitalism creates wealth by improving productivity and reducing scarcity. I think something like VAT+UBI must precede this if we are to avoid a an oligopoly of a few multi trillionaires lording over billions of indigents. That is unless the AI decides that the suffering of the human condition only has one solution.

 

[Nemo2]

Personally, (although I won't be around then), I'd place the old "Devil & Idle Hands" mantra as (almost) the biggest concern.......'humanity' (in general) ain't gonna sit around emulating the Eloi if there's nothing for them to do.