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Comment by dools | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who is sympathetic to the cause of a "Just Transition" to a more automated, more technical, lower carbon economy, would do well to familiarise themselves with the federal job guarantee proposal: https://www.jobguarantee.org/

We should eliminate all involuntary unemployment, not just that caused by changes in technology or demography.

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Instead of giving people makework, we could move towards divorcing "livelihood" from "employment".

> Instead of giving people makework

Who suggested that?

> we could move towards divorcing "livelihood" from "employment".

Why would we do that?

Why would this be a good idea? I don't mean in the narrow sense of our current society etc. etc. but in general should't people have to contribute to society to get resources from society? this seems so anti social

If worker productivity keeps increasing, we may reach a point where it exceeds total labor required. If we keep livelyhood tied to employment, the only two options would be busywork or mass starvation.

As Bill Mitchell once told me (in person) "Sure when all work is removed by automation, assuming we share the gains of productivity equally, a Job Guarantee automatically becomes a UBI".

I don't mind. But that discussion doesn't even seem to really be fancied as of now.

Rather have more of that before talking about justifying the end of an entire labor sector.

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