That isn't going to happen easily. My experience: I've talked about this to many people (highly educated, smart people) - most of them are adamant on the idea that human beings absolutely have to work to deserve anything, even food and water. This might very well be anecdotal, but very few people get ideas like Basic Income intuitively. It would likely take tremendous amount to first make people understand, then accept radical ideas.
I'm all for doing work, but never understood worship of hard work for hard work's sake.
I honestly feel basic income is a MUST have. I so much believe in it that I WANT the automation to come, I want to see the jobs disappear, I live for the day when robots do all the physical work and a job is optional--and we can pick and choose what we work on because having a roof over our head and food on the table, and healthcare is just a given.
We can be entrepreneurs, etc.. I have a ton of app ideas, but I work 45-50 hours a week and just don't have much time to implement anything. -- Even if we moved to 20 hours / week w/ lots of time for family, and leisure.
Mankind is supposed to rule the world, not be beasts of burden, and many are just that. Some horses live better than mankind. We have a friend who works at walmart and two other jobs, so his wife can stay home and take care of the kids. It's sad and pathetic - nobody should have to work over 40 hours just to have a house and home.
I think before that day comes there will be unrest and revolts, maybe even French revolution style, but in the end there has to be a better way.
Having a worldwide population of more than 10000 people ?
What I don't get about basic income is the incentives this would bring, which invalidate the whole thing. It's not a Nash equilibrium. What this would create is a huge class of 100% dependent people who have no power, entitlement and are in a very unfair relationship (to their advantage) with the rest of humanity (by current standards).
The productive group will hate the basic income receivers because they "steal" money. And the basic income receivers will hate the productive group because they'll be the ones constantly saying "no you can't have any more", "no we can't do that", "no we can't save your little girl by dedicated 50 medical personnel to just her", "no no no no no no" ... And while I don't believe in Ayn Rand, I do believe that the productive group can leave.
This will bring tensions and hate between the productive side of the population, which will be only a few, and the rest. The government, of course, will be in the pocket of the productive side, because they represent (and control to some extent) the limits of what is realistically/economically possible. The smaller the productive group, the more clout they'll have.
Eventually they will get rid of the basic income receivers.
That's not the case though because THEY are basic income receivers too -- EVERYONE receives even the 1% and elites. That's one thing that makes it better than current welfare. People on welfare KNOW they're 'leeches' and with that comes a stigma of being a trashy person because you can't get enough jobs to supply enough income for your family.
Take away welfare, give everyone the same amount monthly, and it's a citizenship 'right' or contract for being a good citizen of the United States. The only stipulation is you HAVE to have a physical address to mail the checks to -- meaning if you still for some reason want to be homeless even w/ the added income then you're sol. The goal should be 100% end to starvation and homelessness.
On top of that it spurs growth of the economy. When robots do take over and 50% are unemployed -- who will shop at walmart, or amazon? Absolutely nobody. The money will still flow up to the 1% in droves, for the absolute necessities, but eventually even that will drip dry. Give money to the poorer people though and they end up spending 100% of whatever they make usually.
This goes right back to the Walton's most likely, but it increases economic power, and gdp. I also think if you give everyone enough to be across the poverty line, then we could move to a flat SALES tax over income which would have lower tax for legal citizens / etc and more for those who are undocumented, or travelling through the states. Then we could alter and adjust the national sales tax every year or so based on whether we have a surplus or deficit. We can also do away w/ the IRS completely and end more bureacracy.
Perhaps I chose my words poorly, and we'll call them net-tax-payers and net-tax-receivers instead. The people involved will be pretty aware of which situation they're in.
Besides, total social spending in the US is about 2.5 trillion dollars, or about $650/person/month. That's what basic income would realistically pay (assuming illegal immigrants get nothing, otherwise it'd be $630). The flip side of this would be to kill all government support programs. No more Obamacare, no more social security, no more veteran pensions, nothing like that. All replaced by that pitiful amount.
Good luck paying cancer treatments from that. Hell, good luck paying getting bandaged after a simple scratch from a fall for that amount. If you don't cover medical insurance, then of course it would have to be less (to be exact it would be $360 per month per person).
Now you could say cancer treatments will become cheaper. And sure enough they will. However, even Martin Shkreli worked with a profit margin of around 30%. So ... if you make the treatments more than 30% cheaper (assuming all of pharma is as much of a scumbag as he is, which it isn't, 10% is more common), you can say goodbye to improvements. They won't happen. For quite a few treatments there is an actual reason to be that expensive (e.g. paying for a surgeon's training, 10 years of living, ... and then having them operate, with a staff of 5 each trained for 5 years, in an impeccably clean room, fresh expensive equipment that mostly gets thrown away after one use because it's just too risky otherwise, ... Oh, and don't forget : you replaced most spending with basic income, so you can't just fund that as well. This would have to be funded from that $650/person/month). You'd also have to accept market forces. You live in a town with less than 52 cancer patients per year ? (assuming 1 treatment takes about a week of work) No cancer treatment for you without long traveling, not included, of course, in the price.
You cannot just legislate your way out of economic problems. It doesn't work. When law fights economics, economics wins, and the whole country suffers. See the many attempts at doing it anyway, e.g. in Venezuela most recently. Or to put it another way: basic income will not stop the poor from suffering. Only having them do something useful enough to give them a good life will.
The incentive to make money and be rewarded for work is still there.
Regarding the unfairness concern, this is why I prefer rebranding it as a citizen's dividend funded by a land value tax. See my other comment in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13141203 . Essentially this makes it morally justifiable. Not to mention our system is already unfair in that rentiers profit off the earth's land, and rich people don't have to work.
We're already seeing the same tensions due to automation reducing the number and quality of jobs. We have a 1% class that have orders of magnitude more than what everyone else has while the plebeians barely scrape by and can't find steady, quality, decent paying work. Basic income is the solution to reducing this tension. Another option would be guaranteeing jobs, but I think that would be extraordinarily inefficient, and it perpetuates this notion that people without money have to work for people with money to justify their existence.
We're already highly dependent on each other. Chances are you work in an office and aren't growing your own food, building your own homes, maintaining your own plumbing, building your own cars, manufacturing your own products, and so on. Basic income just says that we have enough wealth to go around and we're all shareholders of this land, so here's your dividend for permitting others monopoly ownership of our land and its resources. It also says that in an advanced enough society, nobody should starve and go homeless.
Without a basic income, mass job automation and extreme income inequality will lead to a French Revolution.
So far automation has not resulted in net fewer jobs, but more productive jobs replacing more mundane ones. That has been the story throughout human history.
I see no evidence that is going to change. Indeed "AI" has so far only created jobs, not killed them.
>So far automation has not resulted in net fewer jobs
Yes. Yes it has. Manufacturing has seen hundred of thousands of jobs replaced. And the amount of software developers or maintenance jobs created to make that work doesn't even begin to cover what has been lost.
As far as job creation goes, guess you'll have to check that up with the ever growing percentage of unemployment throughout first world countries.
yes there's less manufacturing jobs. There's also less farming jobs, and less clerical jobs, and fewer blacksmiths, cobblers, seamstresses and about a 1,000 other professions too. But the developed world is at near full employment.
And ever since 1990 or so the percentage of the population that is working has dropped. Very slowly at first, then much, much faster since 2008. We're currently at ~5% less employed, relative to total population than before.
Granted, there are more employed persons total, but population is growing faster. Therefore the experience that people keep referring to, that less people have jobs (relative to the total they know), is accurate (not in the Bay Area, though only by the slimmest of margins. It is not far from the truth that employment has been stagnant for coming up on 30 years even there).
In the US 152 million people have a job, for a total of 321.6 million people total, plus about 12 million (wtf) illegal immigrants.
So in the US, today, a little under 46% of the population is employed. 10 years ago that was about 47% and it was over 55% in 1990, about when the decline started. That means, of course, that the economic value a single individual provides today has to be distributed over 1/46%, or 2.1 individuals, whereas it used to be only 1.8.
Since the financial crisis there has, from this perspective, been no recovery. In fact, things continued to become systematically worse since 1990 (but with a huge dive downward in 2008). There is an uptic since middle 2015, but, frankly, that looks a lot more like a blip than a recovery.
Granted, in Europe, the situation is much worse, especially in Southern Europe (but it will be as bad in Northern Europe in a decade or so, as we're getting close to the point that even the massive and very much unsustainable immigration Europe is experiencing cannot keep those countries' labour forces from declining).
And of course, this situation is about half due to baby boomers retiring and half due to people "leaving the labor force" (having 2 family members who have "left the labor force" I feel the scare quotes are justified. They have not left the labor force voluntarily)
This is also disregarding that there has been a massive shift from manufacturing into service jobs. The problem with that is that it's a massive shift from $25/hour unionized, rigid hours, stable jobs for decades, with benefits into $9/hour without benefits, shifting hours, no unions, jobs lasting about 1.5 years, tops. That has happened, over the last 20 years, to close to 20% of the labor force, or over 30 million people.
Full employment is a meaningless metric. If 90% of the workforce is working meaningless minimum wage jobs and barely making ends meet, the economy is at "full employment", but that doesn't mean we're doing well. Full unemployment also doesn't take into account the labor participation rate, which has been on a downward trend.
All humans have a psychological need to be needed. The current way to best feel this is to provide income for yourself and your family through work, and provide a service for your employer. This is extremely satisfying for a majority of people. Take away work and these two things collapse.
To get UBI to work, we need a new way for people to feel needed.
I disagree entirely that work is the best way to feel needed, and that feeling needed is necessary. I work because I have to, not because I care about working. If I didn't have to work, I wouldn't. I would spend time on personal projects and enjoying my life with my friends. Relationships are far better than work for "feeling needed".
To be honest though, I don't care about being needed. I don't need to exist. I like existing, and I don't want that to change any time soon, but not being needed doesn't affect my enjoyment. I like when my existence is appreciated by someone else, but my happiness and mental wellbeing is not predicated on that.
> There are a number of reasons why health declines after retirement, said Dave, but, mental and social stimulation are a large factor. For many people, work is where they are the most social and do the most physical activity. When that core social network is removed, health declines.
Specifically, this.
> For many people, work is where they are the most social and do the most physical activity. When that core social network is removed, health declines.
By that notion, are all young Remote workers -- think 99% of the Wordpress core team -- declining in health and dying? I'm not buying this.
They're needed by their job, and their friends, society. For a lot of people, when they retire, they don't really have anyone to talk to anymore. Maybe they don't have many personal friends. Maybe they don't have a strong marriage, or their spouse passed, or they never married. Maybe their children have moved away, and are so busy with their exciting lives, it seems they never have time for anything more than the obligatory weekly skype session.
I understand what you’re saying but I wouldn’t completely dismiss the psychological effect that a sense of feeling needed or the pride you can gain from work has on many people. The sense of being needed may not be important to you, and to be clear I make no negative judgement about that, in fact I’m glad to hear from anyone whose own self worth or happiness isn’t tied to their job as this probably leads to much richer lives, but for many people this doesn’t hold true.
I often see the sentiment shared on HN that if posters here didn’t have to work for a living they would be equally or more fulfilled working on their own projects or spending more time with friends/family, but in some ways I think this feeling at least partially correlates with intelligence, creativity, ambition, or simply being a confident well adjusted adult. I definitely get the impression that HN is filled with people on the higher end of the intelligence/creativity/entrepreneurial spectrum and that might be resulting in a particular narrative that doesn’t always hold true for the rest of us.
I would say that I definitely fall into the very bottom portion of intelligence/creativity among the readership here. I don’t really have much to contribute to this community beyond personal anecdotes, and I’m frequently in awe of the projects and overall knowledge I see on display here. As someone who isn’t smart or creative, never did well in school and has no formal education beyond high school, grew up in poverty and has been homeless for extended periods (12 months or more) twice in my life, doesn’t have a whole lot of self confidence or things to be proud of, my work (which involves machining and precision manufacturing) is pretty much the main thing that gives me a sense of self worth. For many people that statement may seem sad or somewhat pathetic, but it’s honestly how I feel.
I live in LA county, not exactly a low CoL area, and as a single person without dependents I can very comfortably survive on $1100-$1200 per month. BI could easily fulfill my financial needs but it wouldn’t do much to provide for the other things that my work provides for me, namely the sense of purpose and pride it gives me. I understand that BI doesn’t mean the end or work, or that people wouldn’t be allowed to work or seek out volunteer opportunities, so my comment isn’t a general critique of BI, particularly as the more I learn about it, increasingly from HN, the more optimistic and supportive I become of it, but a realization that while I think it’s effects would be very positive overall, I don’t think it would solve all of our problems. As a society we will still need to find ways to make people feel wanted. And as of now for many of us work is what fulfills that role.
Thank you for the encouraging words. I try and check HN every day before my shift but I usually never have time to comment until much later, at which point there isn't much activity in the threads, so I sometimes wonder whether or not my posts add any value or if I'm just writing for myself.
With regards to how I ended up in my current job I'll do my best to offer a succinct timeline. My prior work experience consisted mostly of manual labor or retail/customer service type jobs. I never enjoyed customer service, I'm too shy, but through circumstance and my own apathy and lack of ambition that's were I ended up. After some time my dissatisfaction with my work and my own wasted potential led me to reevaluate the seriousness with which I needed to focus on my career. Machining/welding and general manufacturing was something that always interested me even though I had limited experience with any of those fields. I've always been good with my hands and I'm obsessively detail oriented and like fixing things. I love following well delineated procedures and checklists actually make me smile so I felt something in aerospace might be a good fit.
I was fortunate to be living in an area with a ton of aerospace/manufacturing companies and I ended up applying to a number of them. I got hired for a very entry level low skill position having nothing to do with the manufacturing side of things. But, it got my foot in the door and I eventually moved into a role closer to the factory floor and from there worked my way into an apprenticeship that led to my current position.
As to how I found HN, I'm not entirely sure. While I've been reading HN for a number of years I've only relatively recently started posting, largely in an attempt to improve my writing, which is something I'm very self conscious about. I find this one of the few places online were I'm confident that if I say something stupid or make an argument lacking clarity, that I'll be called out on it in a civil and constructive manner. It's possible that I came about HN through one of those "We act like HackerNews" threads on /g/ but that would be slightly embarrassing so I hope it was through some other avenue.
I've worked with a number of brands like Haas, Fanuc, Mazak and recently some 3d printers from EOS. Haas stuff breaks all the time which can be infuriating.
Inconel please continue to comment whenever you think you have something to contribute to the conversation. I also appreciated hearing your perspective. Your writing is fine! No need to feel self conscious.
Well life seems to have worked out fairly well for you so that's good. Not sure why you worry about your writing, seems fine to me.
How many machines are in your shop? Do you guys happen to use any software that monitors all the machines so you can see various charts and what not on uptime, downtime by reason, that sort of thing?
Thanks again to both you and mswen for the kind words and encouragement.
Sorry to not offer more specifics but I need to be careful on what I reveal about our workflow and ops since my employer guards those things pretty seriously but we have quite a large array of CNC, milling, lathes, spin forming, autoclave, welding, 3d printing, and other machines. The building I work in is a couple hundred thousand square feet and is constantly overflowing. We definitely have software tracking uptime/downtime and things like that.
Thank you for sharing, it's good to get outside perspectives on issues like this. I'll share a bit about myself as well, so you can get a better idea of where I'm coming from.
I don't consider myself on par with most of the stuff I see here either. I consider myself above average intelligence, but nothing special. I'm not particularly creative, but I love being part of the creative process with other people. If there's something I pride myself on, it's my ability to facilitate meaningful and effective conversation. I'm not very confident in myself; I think my above average intelligence lead me into contact with enough people who are simply smarter and work harder than me that I don't have any false notions of grandeur.
I get how work can provide you with a sense of purpose, I really do. One of the things I would do, assuming I didn't have to work, is volunteer for a non-profit that tackles an issue/issues I feel are important (like clean water for everyone). My personal projects would basically be two lifelong ones and whatever else caught my fancy. The first would be a music recommendation system that works differently from most others I've seen (any I've seen? copyright Jeff Holland, 2016): it would let you find music in genres you normally don't or have never listened to. The idea is, you can say "I like Queens of the Stone Age. What rap artists do QotSA fans like?" and it would suggest artists (and songs) accordingly. The great thing is, the sky is the limit when it comes to refining and expanding something like that, the challenges are technical and algorithmic. The second project would be a traditional roguelike with a different progression model for characters and story than is usual, with a technical focus on being truly cross-platform and providing a means of playing games via TLS on a central server (a la DCSS).
I know that was probably way more information than you wanted, but I wanted to give you some background on me. I'm not amazing or confident, but I do have a few things I'm passionate about. If either one of my personal projects was successful I would be incredibly happy. It doesn't even have to make me money if it makes enough to be self sustaining and the users find it worthwhile. All to say, I understand the feeling you can get from producing something valuable for others, and even enjoy it. I made a conscious decision when I was young(er) to disconnect that from my sense of self-worth, and it's now ingrained in me.
Essentially, my hobbies take the place of where the need to feel wanted would be. There's so much out there to enjoy that I don't mind if I'm not necessary (are any of us, really?); I can share the things I love and appreciate with others.
I appreciate your response and it definitely wasn't more information than I wanted, the main reason I enjoy this site so much is because I get to see what others are passionate about.
I also want to make extra clear that I didn't intend for my comment to come off sounding like I was criticizing your point which is absolutely valid, and I'm not sure if it did, but again, that wasn't my intention. I was just providing a counterpoint on how I personally feel and the sense of fulfillment work gives me. Much of what you said resonates with me and I hope to one day be able to feel that same sense of accomplishment without outside validation. It sounds like we're probably on similar paths, I just might be a bit further behind, which pretty much describes my life.
Yep, +1000. This is apparently very hard to grasp for some, or they just really love working (which I have my own doubts about). It's crazy to me that in this age of bounty, everyone is positively required to sell at least 40 hours per week of their time or face social exile, starvation, homelessness, etc.
I think another aspect of it is that people want it to feel fair, and that's a complicated thing. It doesn't take much hunting to find videos of someone chastising another customer at Walmart for paying with a government assistance card. We have this strange animosity toward anyone we deem doesn't work as hard as we do for the same result. Well, it's literally true that some people in this country make 1000x what others make while working less hours, doing less "hard" labor. Personally, construction, food service, mechanical maintenance, etc work much harder than I do, even though they might not have a clue how to do what I do (I would also likely suck at their job initially).
I love my work, and hanging out w/ the other coders on slack, but I would prefer not being forced to work, I'd much rather it be a 'choice' not something thrust upon me, or that I could live off 20 hours per week and spend the other 20 working on prototypes for web and mobile apps.
Basic Income does not mean people cannot work. What it does mean is people can choose to work at whatever brings them joy, rather than working at whatever job is available to have the money to meet basic necessities. And for people who don't actually want to work, they have that option too.
There are numerous ways to satisfy one's urge to "feel needed". To give two very different examples, volunteering for various projects (trust me, there's a lot of stuff that needs doing), and contributing to open source.
Amen to this. We need basic income if for no other reason than to bring one parent home, I don't care if it's the father or mother, there should always be a parent available and at home.
I very strongly agree. In the very much socially just rush to get women in the workforce we've lost sight of the damage done to children by separation from their parents, and the damage done to relationships by the staggering workload of managing children and a household with both partners working full-time. I would very much love being able to fluidly transition between periods of being a house-husband and employment, and my girlfriend feels likewise.
One can choose to work on whatever they want, however they want. Believe it or not, most people have an innate desire to want to contribute to society and/or improve/create things. Basic income is not communism, you'll still get compensated for doing paid work. As long as that incentive to make money is there, there will always be people working.
Basic income should be the solution we, as an organized group, give to all individuals to be able to express themselves.
All human beings have basic needs and the State have to provide this.
The State here is the expression of the will of the population.
Do not take the State as something socialist or communist, taking from someone and giving it to someone for free; no,this is provided by us, the population, for us, the population. We care of each other and we want that our kids have good education, we want to have accessible health care for everyone. And definitely, we want that, if in a few years, a lot of jobs are automated or done by someone in the third country, no one is left behind.
This is a common argument for basic income and, even though you say "Do not take the State as something socialist or communist", your argument is the same as it is for socialism and communism.
You say, "Do not take the State as something socialist or communist, taking from someone and giving it to someone for free; no, this is provided by us, the population, for us, the population."
---
Here's the problem.
Can you think about what, exactly, "the population" is? Is it tangible? Is it a singular physical entity?
The answer is no, "the population" is merely a collection of individuals! Individuals, of course, exist-- they are tangible, singular, physical entities. You are one. I am one. Individuals exist.
Populations, on the other hand, are abstractions.
My point is this: when an abstraction needs to be represented, it cannot do so itself. In this case, individuals are required to represent the population because, well, individuals are the only ones with the actual ability to do so.
Under your proposed system in which the State provides basic income to each and every individual, who decides how much each is given? Who will be the ones to actually control the means of production; and who will be the ones to actually control distribution of goods? Only some will.
If you think democracy as it exists today already performs poorly in representing the ENTIRE population (i.e., representing each individual fully to their individual desires) (think of the surprising amount of people who feel conned by the election results), then just imagine the extent by which people will likely feel when the State is responsible for just about E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G in E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E-'-S life!
> Under your proposed system in which the State provides basic income to each and every individual
> who decides how much each is given?
Hopefully economists, mathematicians, business & social services leaders. It's extremely complicated.
> Who will be the ones to actually control the means of production, and who will be the ones to actually control distribution of goods?
Will largely be decided already at that point, we're well on our way already.
As for your final question, as automation increasingly destroys jobs, there is going to be increasingly severe social unrest - only then will basic income start to be seriously discussed, and by that time many people will likely be worrying for their safety, even wealthy people.
When I say the population I am referring to a set of people who actually believes that colaboration and resource sharing is the best way to success.
This 'population' (countries), are the places I want to live. For example, I would never live in the USA, because you dont take care of each other, you are an individualist society.
I agree that it won't happen easily. Which is why I phrased it the way I did. But I do think that it must happen eventually (and really, it's just a stepping stone on the path to a post-scarcity society).
That's why I think basic income supporters should also be advocating for a land value tax to fund the basic income, which should really be rebranded as a "citizen's dividend". This shifts the source of funding from coming off "the backs of hard workers", to compensation for allowing others the privilege of denying you monopoly ownership over our collective land and natural resources. Rather than an "us vs. them" mentality, we're all collective shareholders of our land, and basic income then become's the dividend.
Regarding "hard work", we need to start seeing work as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. We need to focus more on what it is that's actually being accomplished rather than whether or not somebody's working hard. If society can operate without you needing to work hard, then hard work should be a choice.
People feel a natural obligation to be rewarded for their work. "Don't work, don't eat". The fact is, giving people a small income makes them inherently lazy. Lazy people don't like to work, but they will do just enough to get by, so if you give them a min amount of $, they'll do nothing. Others will look at that and say, "How come they get money for being lazy?" It actually acts as demotivation for people who would work some. The guy who isn't making much to begin with isn't rewarded - it only makes his labor less valuable. Does it make him strive harder to gain opportunity? Not really. People who have tried multiple times to jump over the hurdles in their economic careers won't feel that obligation to continue to jump if they have their precious safety net.
Is a safety net nice? Sure, but as much as it's nice, I know full well I wouldn't be sending out resumes or even looking for what I should be doing if I didn't feel some obligation to work, whatever that be from.
The idea of giving people a flat income sounds nice in theory, but that's all it is: in theory. Practically, I believe it fails to account for the basics of human nature after that point, which is why the idea wouldn't work in practice. That doesn't mean it isn't humanitarian, which is where I guess it shines for some people. After all, it's nice to think everyone is taken care of, much like social medical plans. But in both cases (income and medicare) I think it's the reverse solution to the problem: It's trying to raise people up rather than lowering the bar. Vague analogy, sorry, but maybe it makes sense?
>> I'm all for doing work, but never understood worship of hard work for hard work's sake.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, so let me try to answer this in a general way, for the sake of practice if nothing else. Personally, I view the body as being made to do work. It's very functional, well designed "equipment" - or at least better for all-purpose usage than anything humanity has ever created. Some people feel like they wouldn't be fulfilling their purpose without work. They wouldn't feel complete I guess. Notably, it is a personality-type thing, as there are types of people who enjoy doing much more than thinking, but everyone enjoys doing something, even if not work related. We'd get bored otherwise. Some people naturally associate the doing of things with working for a living. Some people find work to be therapeutic.
I'm rambling alot here trying to toss out ideas. Maybe I already answered the question in my feeble way.
What would you suggest to Walmart, Krogers, McDonald's workers and all Truck Drivers who will be displaced by automation in the next decade? Learn to code? Not everyone is cut out to be a coder, or has the money for education in the first place or the mentality to learn it online on their own.
Truck driver is probably the first job to disappear, this is also the #1 job in about 30 states. Truck drivers also touch many communities by travelling through po-dunk towns who's whole industry be it a couple mom and pop shops and a gas station IS because of truck drivers who frequent their route.
All of those communities will dry up, millions of truck drivers will be out of work. What do you expect people will do when they are starving, and the unemployment rises from 6% to 40-50%, by 2040?
There's currently an 83% chance that workers earning less than $20/hour will lose their job to automation in the future, and a 40% chance that those who earn between $20-40/hour will lose their job (forever to automation) in the not-to-distant future. Do you know anyone who falls in those ranges? Would you risk it all on 40-83% chance that your job will be here in 20-30 years?
What happens to the graduate who ends up graduating from medical school only to find out all doctors have been replaced by robots? They still have gargantuan loans and all, but zero employment options.
Source: http://www.geek.com/tech/middle-class-workers-are-losing-the...
> Truck driver is probably the first job to disappear, this is also the #1 job in about 30 states.
That's not really true. This misconception came about from an NPR journalist who drew an infographic that appeared to show that truck drivers were the most common job in each state[0]. In reality, that infographic used BLS data - the BLS subdivides other professions to provide more granularity. In other words, all that infographic showed was that the BLS considers "truck driver" to be a less specialized profession than "teacher" (which is separated into different roles of teachers).
If you actually look at the number of truck drivers in each state and compare that to the size of the labor force in each state, it's a lot smaller.[1]
>If we look at data that is consistently disaggregated into the most detailed nonfarm occupations, retail salesperson is the most common job in 42 states. In four other states (Alabama, Louisiana, Maryland and Vermont), cashier is the biggest occupation. Fast-food worker is tops in two states: Kentucky and Ohio.
Wow, seems like worse news to me. The number of self-driving trucks on the road today is probably low to zero, but the number of non-grocery retail stores closing every year, largely due to competition from Amazon (but also stagnant wages keeping demand low), is clearly in the thousands. I don't think it would be crazy to predict closings and automation within the stores that remain (e.g. Amazon Go) driving a collapse in jobs over the next decade.
> Wow, seems like worse news to me. The number of self-driving trucks on the road today is probably low to zero, but the number of non-grocery retail stores closing every year, largely due to competition from Amazon (but also stagnant wages keeping demand low), is clearly in the thousands
Maybe, but clearly the net effect is positive, because unemployment has fallen by half since 2010, and is in fact currently below NAIRU levels[0]. So every job that has been lost has been replaced by more than one, on average.
(Before someone says "yes, but that's because the labor force participation rate has fallen" - that's another common remark that misses the point altogether. The economy has expanded during this timeframe, and while labor participation is a secondary concern, it's not a proximate one. If people are able to afford the choice not to work during a period of time in which the economy has expanded, that's unambiguously a good thing, even if it's not always the best case. Increasing participation in the labor force is often a goal, but not in and of its own sake. Unlike controlling excess unemployment or preventing GDP contraction, which are basically always bad, a drop in labor force participation is a more ambiguous signal of economic health).
[0] In other words, one could actually make the argument that unemployment is currently too low - although this would be a bit of a moot point, as it's still within measurement error of the NAIRU and has been for the last 13 months.
I've met very very few genuinely lazy people. I've come to realise that people who may appear lazy are usually somehow impaired or beaten down. In one way or another, they have lost or never gained faith in their ability to push through, and have fallen into "don't expect much, try to survive" mode.
> People feel a natural obligation to be rewarded for their work ...
If people are actively demotivated by seeing others idle and surviving, who cares? Provided that we as a society can afford basic income (including after it's been established and it's having various impacts on the workforce), it's no loss if people stop working. And there's only so much basic income could ever give you; it'll make the necessities of life free (or rather paid for), but if you want things beyond necessities (including any positional good), you'd still want to look for work.
> Is a safety net nice? ...
If we can afford to provide a basic income, you don't need to work -- unless the economy goes so pear-shaped that we stop being able to afford a basic income. (And this seems unlikely, since automated factories won't be offered a basic income. If anything, basic income might increase consumer demand...)
> The idea of giving people a flat income ...
I'd emphasize that this income will grow if you work -- and that it won't be enough to buy positional goods, by definition. You can keep body and soul together on a basic income, but to live better you'll have to find a way to engage with the economy. (And the presence of a hammock-grade safety net will give you more options, not fewer. Live on oatmeal and vegetables, and buy stock with your food savings; or work for years on a project that might or might not pay off.)
> I'm not sure what you mean by this ...
"Made to do work" could mean any number of things. Tribal warfare, hunting, gathering, and social climbing are certainly things humanity has evolved to do; subsistence farming, artisanal crafts, and management are close enough that we're pretty good at them; but factory work, we're just plain not adapted to. Keeping strict schedules, doing small parts of a large whole, and repeating a single task for a long period of time: these are learned skills at best for humanity, and that's why such jobs get automated.
> Some people feel like they wouldn't be fulfilling their purpose ...
They can find jobs and keep working. UBI isn't the end of employment, just the provision of support. Think of it as reverting to the economic structure of the classical world or the American South, except that this time the only slaves are robots.
I guess our ideas of how it would be implemented are different. Let's consider it from a practical perspective. What's the basic level of income? Right now, minimum wage helps some people (where cost of living is low) and not others (where cost of living is high), so asking this quantitatively, how much would you propose basic income be, assuming the dollar stays put? Of course, we have to get Congress to even pass such measures in a way that actually helps society, but let's ignore the government problem for our theorizing.
Second, what do you project would be future salaries? I know, that's very difficult to say, but let's toy with the idea since it's important that such salaries have an impact on whether people actually step out into the workplace... or if the sorts of jobs available are even something they can do.
Third, exactly where does this money come from? The rich have money, but it's awfully hard to get them to part with it. They're usually crafty enough to manipulate the system. The government can't keep printing money (without taking it out) because that makes it worthless. Money doesn't just magically appear when the economy "gets going". Let's not assume imports are going to decrease (at least not for this theorizing, even if Trump gets his way), or at least we should pretend that imports and exports balance out. I say this assuming that we might apply Basic Income at a global level, at which point "import" and "export" become meaningless. Money can't just cycle because the fact is, some people are in control of the resource supply and others aren't. On a small, small level, capitalism is like this: If we have two people, Mr A and Mr B, and Mr A has the resource supply, the way Mr B gets anything is if he works for Mr A, and Mr A pays him for the resources. Basic Income at this level would be taking from Mr A to give to Mr B some small, but significant amount, for just existing. Does Mr A get a stipend/basic income? And supposing Mr B works more. I wonder at what point would Mr B become like Mr A where he gets taxed more. Already we've seen companies move their headquarters to places like Singapore to avoid the heavy corporate taxing. I have no doubt that the rich (who can afford to move) will be glad to leave this country to find havens where their wealth is unaffected but from which they can still suck the wealth of other nations. Taxing laws here are critical because there are usually loopholes to get around it.
Fourth, how would this look with immigration? Seems - just from my observations - a number of liberals would like both immigration and things like Basic Income. These ideas seem opposed to me, since immigration doesn't necessarily bring much wealth, as it's often the poor who immigrate (assuming no wars or famine and such that drive people from their homeland, and those could be factored in, at least with Basic Income on a national scale). (I'm ignoring here, the fraction of people who immigrate just 'cause they like the country).
Why do you think it doesn't? If I'm getting a free hand-out, I don't need to work as hard to get the necessities, which is why I go to work in the first place.
His labor from his point of view, not from the economy's point of view. Certainly labor from him is good for the economy. But for him, he already has what he needs, so there's not as much incentive to get more. Sure, there will always be people who want more, but they may pursue alternatives to [what I'd call] standard, ethical labor in order to gain those ends.
Excuse me? I don't work because I think I should have to. I work despite that. I work so other people can someday benefit from, you know, FULLY AUTOMATED GAY SPACE LUXURY COMMUNISM and all that.
I'm a supporter of basic income as an experiment but it is interesting to think about alternatives. Is basic income simply a stepping stone to some kind of Star Trek post-scarcity utopia where there is no concept of money or wealth at all?
We survived the industrial revolution, is it not just human nature to adapt?
One example I recently discussed with friends was the idea that most truck drivers may soon be out of jobs due to automation. Since this is a highly specialized skill it would be hard for those workers to find alternative work without learning an entirely new skill set. But would it be feasible for those drivers to simply buy self driving trucks much like they already buy their conventional trucks and simply enjoy their lives while the truck drives itself? So even if self-driving trucks show up tomorrow is it necessary to pay truck drivers just to live? Can we offer an incentive like retraining to those drivers?
Is basic income actually the solution or do we need to take a harder look at things like the income gap and a tax structure that strongly favors investment in creating actual value (goods and services) instead of wealth for the sake of wealth (investments).
Truck drivers can't simply buy self-driving trucks and kick back while the truck does all the work. That would require them to still be paid the same amount, and if trucking companies still had to pay everyone the same amount then why even bother with the self-driving trucks? Or more generally, why would the trucking company even keep the truck driver on as an employee, when it would be cheaper for them to just buy the self-driving truck and use it, instead of leasing it from the truck driver?
Many truck drivers own their own trucks and contract for the carriers so those are the ones that could buy self-driving trucks.
Regarding pricing I'm not so sure. If you run a trucking company and contract out driving to individual drivers that own their own vehicles you are paying for the service to get the cargo to its destination, you aren't paying for a person as much as a service.
I do agree though that in this situation truck owners would make less money but they would also have more opportunity to do something like purchase additional trucks or do other work such as last-mile driving to supplement the loss in long-haul income.
> Many truck drivers own their own trucks and contract for the carriers so those are the ones that could buy self-driving trucks
Except they probably couldn't, because the carriers are going to lease self-driving trucks from specialized agencies that will exist exactly for that purpose, as they won't want the administrative costs of dealing with individual owners (which makes some sense when it's an owner/operator as an alternative to hiring a driver and buying/leasing a truck separately, but none when the truck is self-operating.)
So, since no one is going to be likely to pay them for use of the self-driving truck, there's no anticipated income stream with which to finance the purchase.
Somebody has to make those leasing agencies. That will create some jobs, but it is easy to see how 1 person can easily handle 3 fully automated trucks even without the typical logistics that big companies bring to the table. If this cost reduction causes 3x as much stuff to be shipped it won't be a short term problem, but I find that unlikely.
Flatbed and LTL freight prices will fall through the floor. You can't yet automate those kinds of freight because the cargo is so diverse and handling isn't something AI can do yet.
The word is "serf", but your claim makes no sense anyway. A serf is not someone who receives money from their government. In fact, the whole point of Basic Income is you get the money even if you don't do any work at all, which is basically the complete opposite of a serf.
You're actually paying them to not riot. Serfs provided the core of a relatively stable body politic. They could be called on for war. They didn't have much economic power individually. They could be pushed around by the powers that be. They were also largely disarmed (Hillary and Obama).
BI == Serfs until the government can implement either forced sterilization or State assisted suicide.
For those down voting, picture the US if there was no welfare state. What would all of those people do if they didn't have the state to keep them fed just enough to not riot or declare war on their government? The answer to that question is not improve policies to balance environmental stewardship with pro-business expansion.
In practice, I think many of those people would probably just die of starvation or exposure, unless some charitable NGO picked up the tab. I don't have enough statistics to say whether it'd be most such people.
