Comment by trothamel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trothamel | Hacker News Reader

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The proposed problem - and it's an elitist one - is that if you try to solve the basic income problem with minimum wages, the skill level required to be productive also rises, and eventually you get to the point where employers try hard to automate the job out of existence. The argument is that at some point, the skill level required to justify an income becomes so high, large portions of the populace become unable to meet that bar.

You can't simply cut down working hours, since the problem isn't that there aren't enough jobs for people - it's that there are people who are unable to be productive enough to fill a job.

The UBI gradually transfers responsibility for someone from the government to an employer, as opposed to a minimum wage + welfare system, where the transfer is a lot more sharp.

(I haven't decided if I agree with this, and how plausible it actually is - but I think this is the argument for why UBIs are necessary, and necessary now.)

If there is a job that does not pay for a living, then there are two possible reasons. Customers actually value the work enough and pay enough for the product but the business owners take the money. In this case there should be a minimum wage cutting into the profits of the business owners making it a viable job.

On the other hand customers may not value the work enough and the job is just not viable, there is no market. Then you have to either bring the costs down by improving efficiency or automating it, or the job has to go away. Not paying a livable wage to the employers is just exploitation, giving benefits to the employers just means subsidizing the business owners and customers.

I am a bit unsure about the scenario when we just let the job go away and have a new unemployed we may have to support with benefits. Wouldn't it have been better to just subsidize the job a bit instead of having to pay for a new unemployed? But that of course creates incentives to underpay employees and take advantage of subsidies. It is probably harder to reason about this case because it is now a dynamic scenario and it is not obvious how things will turn out.

I am still struggling a bit to follow your thought process but I think you may have a point. I will probably have to add something later.

If we are in a situation where a part of the population is plainly unable to perform any work that pays for a living and we are unable to improve their skills, then we are really is some kind of trouble. They would essentially be like handicapped people. In analogy we would have a moral obligation to support them and it seems better to let them do some work not paying for a living and provide benefits on top of that instead of just having them fully on benefits. Kind of contradicting what I wrote above. And we are also back at the point from above of creating incentives to underpay employees.

The obvious solution would be to not get into this situation in the first place, to heavily invest into education and training. But if that is not good enough? How does reality compare to this scenario? What is the outlook? It is also not obvious to me whether a universal basic income or minimum wages and a conventional welfare system would provide better incentives. But I think I now at least understand the argument.

> If we are in a situation where a part of the population is plainly unable to perform any work that pays for a living and we are unable to improve their skills, then we are really is some kind of trouble.

And that's exactly the situation UBI is intended to solve because that's where automation is taking us. In the near future, only the very intelligent or machines will work because the machines will put most people out of work leaving only room for the very skilled.

> The obvious solution would be to not get into this situation in the first place, to heavily invest into education and training.

That is not a solution because it assumes wrongly that everyone is capable of performing knowledge work; they aren't. A very large minority of people simply won't be able to do anything worth paying them for, they won't have the capacity to do anything we can't get machines to do for far cheaper. When the machines take over blue collar work, and they will, the economy will have to change to something like UBI for it to continue working.

In parallel with everything relating to employment opportunities, I wonder if we are honestly doing enough about helping individuals with everything that goes with performing job tasks. Things like:

  - being punctual
  - staying healthy
  - staying positive/motivated, not making excuses
  - presenting and speaking well
  - importance of attention to detail and initiative

Even before jobs are lost to automation, there are countless tasks that are very simple to do, but I imagine many people fall and stay out of work due to the above issues rather than lacking skills relating directly to their tasks.

Why should every job provide a 'living wage'? A high school kid working through the summer at an ice cream shop is learning to work, learning responsibility, and getting a little spending money - why would you want to outlaw that?

I addressed this in other comments, I only want that a normal (full time) job pays for a living, I did not want to discuss all kind of edge cases and so it may not apply to your example. But if working at an ice cream shop is sufficiently easy to learn within a few days and the kid does all the same work including cleaning up and what not, how would you justify paying less than to a regular employee doing the same work and having to live on that income?

Nobody specifically wants to outlaw that. Literally nobody. Laws have to have a tradeoff between being too general and being too specific (and having too many special cases). Being too general means catching too many edge cases where it does more harm than good. Handling too many special cases creates a moral hazard where there's more benefit in finding loopholes or plainly ignoring poorly enforced parts of the laws than honest work.

Anecdotally, I did work as a kid, didn't learn anything useful, did not learn responsibility, a bit of money I didn't really need, and it felt like a waste of time and left a bad taste overall.

I fully believe that in many, possibly most cases, work is beneficial for kids (as long as they're not from poor families in which case there will be too much pressure to overwork, affecting school/homework and taking away whatever little time they have to enjoy childhood).

>The proposed problem - and it's an elitist one - is that if you try to solve the basic income problem with minimum wages, the skill level required to be productive also rises, and eventually you get to the point where employers try hard to automate the job out of existence.

"We'll just automate your job away" is one of the biggest empty threats along with "we'll just fire everybody, causing mass unemployment".

Employers fear a rising minimum wage because it eats into their profits. That fear translates into histrionics, threats and utopianistic predictions about the near future state of robot technology.

In the end when it happens they just deal with it and end up posting lower profits. As is the case in Seattle.

Have you seen the new McD's ordering kiosks? They're definitely there, and I find I prefer them to the previous cashier experience.

That combination looks bad for fast food front of house workers...

I have. Have you seen the equivalents of McD's kiosks from 1890's Berlin?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat#/media/File:Stollwerck...

Those things are bound to replace most food service workers by the 1920s at the very latest.

Indeed!. In the last 126 years technology has not progressed very much. Why should it be different today?

Indeed. The question clearly isn't "do people even want automat restaurants?" it's just "did the technology to push a button and have food delivered reach some sort of tipping point in 2016?"

Did you also know that original automats from the 30s mostly went bankrupt in the same decades (60s/70s) that the inflation adjusted minimum wage was at its highest and Americans had the most disposable income?

Funny that.

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