It would be nice to break the link between work and survival.
Because there are going to be fewer and fewer jobs in the future (automation, etc).
Because there are going to be fewer and fewer jobs in the future (automation, etc).
Folks said the same thing before for every industrial revolution. I'd like to see more facts than religion on this matter.
The ability of machines to replace people is advancing to points we've never seen before, and I don't think any of us can really predict what will happen.
Not being able to predict the future is a very strong argument against redesigning the welfare state to give more people money on the assumption that historic links between economic growth and the labour force are about to disappear.
Except you're presuming that Moore's Law will last forever.
How will you know when it's about to stop?
I'm arguing "as things get cheaper because fewer people were used to make it, you'd better have really good reasons to believe people won't just use the excess money to buy more stuff as we've always observed them do in the past". If there's one resource that seems to consistently fulfil Jevons' Paradox it's labour. We might have fewer radiologists instead of more X-ray scans in future, but I see little reason to believe that won't be offset by the need for highly trained people to calmly reassure them about other diagnostic tools that have only just been invented. Throw in a bit of Veblen "people with excess money actually really like paying people to do things for them in unnecessarily laborious ways to signal how wealthy they are". It's rooted in human psychology as well as a couple of hundred years of empirical observations.
I rather think the burden of proof - especially when calling for drastic action - is on the people arguing this time it'll be different, and they're the ones reliant on projections of trend lines to try to argue that computers that do everything better than humans are [still] only a decade away.
You're saying price drops when cost drops, and that's empirically not true.
Price drops when demand drops, or when supply increases.
When the cost drops, then the producer just gets more profit. And if they're wise, they buy or merge with their slightly less efficient competitors, because collusion is illegal, but no one is stopping M&A these days. And for necessary goods like food, water, shelter, clothing, it's not like the demand drops much over time, so the demand stays where it was (or grows with population.)
Worker productivity is through the roof. That's automation.
Real wages are going down. That's evidence. What happens when they keep dropping? "Nothing changes," is your answer?
Whereas we've got 200 years of data confirming the basic logic that the relative prices of basic food and clothing get much cheaper as lower costs increase competitors' ability to supply, something I'm genuinely amazed you can argue doesn't happen. Sure, individual companies can prop up their monopoly profit margins through IP protection or M&A or positioning themselves as a luxury item, but only in the same sense that water can be forced, in certain circumstances, to flow uphill.
Food and clothing are cheaper - that's great. The barriers to entry there are pretty low.
How much cheaper is healthcare? Housing? Cars? College?
Is there not enough competition in any of those? (Obviously not.)
I agree with you that the "jobs are running out" is an argument that requires evidence, given its history of being wrong, but there are good reasons to believe it's going to be true, eventually. To be clear "because it's never happened before" is -also- an argument that's always right, until its wrong.
For example, if you look at the list of most widely held jobs that don't require a college degree and pay middle class salary. It's a rapidly dwindling list and has been declining for a long time. Of the ones that employ many of people, there's basically one left: truck driver. That's the reason that the rise of automated automobiles is coinciding with this conversation.
I worked in Medical Imaging for a decade. I made it so that one Radiologist with my software could do the work of two Radiologists without my software.
Radiologists are highly trained, highly specialized, and earn big, big bucks.
And I was making machines that stole their jobs.
Everyone, and I mean everyone, is at danger of automation helping replace their job.
I had this debate with people all the time, and it turns out I was wrong.
There WILL be jobs.
They were right about that, I believe.
It's just that they won't pay enough to be able to provide for yourself.
We have divisions of labor, because they work.
But your ability to sit in an office, type on a computer, answer phone calls, and go to meetings, only translates into your ability to feed yourself, clothe yourself, have a living space, because of supply and demand. Those skills are in short enough supply right now, that they have enough value... to trade with the people who make your food, clothing, housing.
But if you imagine that in the future, automation is going to make it so that smaller and smaller numbers of people are necessary to do your job (it's happening to Radiologists and Physicists, it can happen to anyone), then essentially there's far too many of you in the supply, so you won't be able to demand good wages.
On the other hand, it's not like the demand for food, clothing, and housing will drop. And even though the COST to make food, clothing, and housing will drop, THAT'S NOT HOW THINGS ARE PRICED. They are priced by their scarcity.
And the machines that make the food, clothing, and housing, are still going to be relatively expensive. (Lucky for the people who own them!)
So the people who own the machines will have you over a barrel. You need what they can make, and you have nothing they want in exchange.
Without Universal Basic Income, I think we'd have to resort to Socialism (literally, the government control of the means of production of basic needs like food, clothing, housing), in order to not have people starving in the streets.
OR
People will stop "dividing their labor," and they'll get good at taking care of themselves. Like the Amish. Farming. Sewing. Textiles. Chopping wood. I don't mean this sarcastically, there's nothing wrong with that kind of life. If you look at history, the Amish are very healthy in comparison to everyone else. Maybe they're more puritanical than any of us would accept, but their DIY, hands on, back to nature life isn't a crazy idea.
But if we do have Universal Basic Income, I think people will find ways to keep busy, and to make some extra money for luxuries.
Want to go to Disney World? Well, work in the record shop you like. Listen to tunes all day, discuss music with people with similar interests. You only earn about $2 an hour, but that's fine. It's all just gravy.
Want to be a Radiologist? That's great - use your UBI to pay for college. Earn tons of money. Go to Disney World all the time.
UBI + Progressive taxes just makes tons of sense to me.
Don't tax me much when I'm getting started in my career. Tax the crap out of me when I'm figuring out whether I can afford 5 weeks or only 4 at Disney World each year.
But if the cost of making food, clothing, and housing drops, but the price doesn't, then a bunch of people are going to look at the situation and see that there's big money to be made. And this will increase the supply until there isn't much scarcity left.
(This argument sweeps a bunch of stuff under the rug, like collusion/cartels, regulation, lag time, and probably a few others. Still, I think the overall point is valid.)
Nations specialize to a ridiculous degree and benefit (for a while) from free trade, but then more and more jobs within wealthy nations get priced out of their country.
So a country has less and less they can be competitive on the global stage, while more of their people become unemployed (drain on economy anyways as a result of welfare or UBI needs), if they intend to fully squeeze out all excess costs of goods.
OR
They hedge: Keep some markets local (national) and pay the price of not optimizing all jobs to global maximum efficiency, but retain opportunities for millions more of their citizens to be productively(?) employed.
One point supporting this is you don't want to go years as a country without any experience working in certain markets that you abandoned long ago... if in the future labor costs will rise globally and keeping those jobs at home would become more viable anyways. (well.. automation might make this a moot point. that is probably the bigger issue.. but medium term "globalism" destroying jobs has merit)
Also, hedging your bets as an economy and not putting your eggs in one (highly skilled) basket while depending completely on foreign countries for everything else (global supply chain issues, foreign policy, etc.) just seems prudent.
Globalism happened so fast that the policies of countries who have been somewhat hurt by it have erred on the side of nationalistic rather than redistributive (which would have accounted for the higher marginal productivity of capital vs labor)
Free money for no work, or subsidized jobs? Know what I'm saying?... I personally resist jumping to redistribution with no work attached and would rather see some support of industry that will at least enable people to be gainfully employed.
At the end of the day, you'd be getting money in the hands of those that otherwise couldn't earn it on their own, at the expense of those that can (higher costs for the domestic products produced), but with lesser socially destructive costs of perpetual dependence on welfare transfer payments, food stamps, UBI, etc.
I actually don't see how we have erred on the side of nationalistic policy, yet.. though I see the demand for it now.