A basic income is a great idea...it would also be a good idea to completely remove the profit motive from health care. A social safety net that includes a living wage, guaranteed higher education, and retirement is completely possible if you don't spend so much on defense and intelligence.
I'm no economist but at some point aren't we going to become so productive that there won't be enough need for workers. Are we maybe at that point now? If every single person wanted to work there would not be enough jobs to support that. So what happens in the future? Some people have jobs and are rich while the rest are in poverty and can't eat? I don't think society could function with that many people not having an income. If it came down to it and I had to kill you for my family to survive then I'd hate to tell you which one I would choose.
This same argument has been repeated for literally centuries now, and it always turns out wrong in the long run.
Imagine if we could run the entire world economy with only 5% of the workers. Pandemonium? No, it has already happened before. Agriculture was the whole economy, the rest was rounding error. Virtually all workers worked in agriculture. Now we produce all that and much more with something less than 5% of the workforce.
Having no more work to do necessarily means that everybody already has everything they want. It's not a meaningful risk.
Most of already do work so esoteric that our ancestors wouldn't possibly believe you could base a real economy around it. Yet here we are. Our descendants will do things that similarly boggle us.
In the 19th century, for instance, there was a class of physical laborers whose numbers in the USA reached the tens of millions. But as technology--particular the combustion engine and fossil fuel refining--took off, they became surplus unusable labor that literally was more valuable being turned into glue, or letting them starve to death.
Yeah, horses.
"But it's different this time! Horses aren't people!" you say. Sure, things are always different. But you're burying the actual argument into the assumptions you're making: that people are infinitely moldable and infinitely trainable, and every person is capable of creating value in modern economies.
It's not some logical contradiction for "people want more stuff" and for "the most useless, marginal workers can't provide value by participating in the economy" to both be true. Dismissing the second idea requires a bit more than a pat answer.
Even excluding government policies like a minimum wage and required healthcare benefits, lots of people are simply too expensive to employ. Anytime you hire someone, it adds administrative costs. It adds management costs. And the more marginal the worker, the more they need to be managed and administered. At some point any value they could hypothetically provide is outweighed by the cost of employing and managing them and the risk that something they do could expose you to substantial costs, and it's simply cheaper to replace that labor with capital.
In a capital rich environment, and in economies where complex organizations can fail catastrophically because of a single node failure, it's simply far too risky to employ a certain class of people. We already do that with many of criminal backgrounds, the physically disabled, and people with substantially reduced mental capabilities. New technology has simply expanded that unemployable class to include lots of people who just don't have much going for them, at least in terms of providing economic value that's legible to corporations and the State.
I'll grant your premise, for the sake of argument.
So where's the big negative fallout? If the set of unemployable people has been growing for centuries, where is the mass starvation and misery? How can it be possible that the 20th century -- well into the process you describe -- saw a burgeoning middle class in the West, and then later a burgeoning middle class in Asia?
Clearly the benefits of productivity growth have been bigger than the overhead required to support the people who cannot contribute.
I'm not arguing that everybody is infinitely retrainable. I think the biggest problem we face is several generations of existing people with completely obsolete mindsets, who are too old to relearn.
Your whole argument is written in terms of employment at a job. But that's precisely part of the mindset that is obsolete. The idea that "getting a job" is the best option for most people is historically recent and already dying. There are plenty of other ways to organize an economy, and there's plenty of historical precedent for the idea that common people can successfully operate far more independently than they do under the industrial model. In a capital rich environment, you teach people to be capitalists, and let a million independent experiments blooms.
The alternative is you keep teaching people to defer to the boss, and the boss evolves into the Lord, and we go back to serfdom. That could happen too.
Assumptions about what "average people" are capable of need to be judged against the system that's training those people. Our present system was consciously designed to make them into good industrial widgets. But the malleability of children is absurdly high, and from directly experience I see no reason you couldn't turn nearly all of them into creative capitalists.
I didn't intend to suggest we see mass starvation and misery now, simply that a larger and larger proportion of the population of working-age population would fall out of the workforce. Which we've seen for men for decades, and women as well recently. We've dealt with this by a hodgepodge of measures, from a hacky attempt to patch those weak portions of the labor market using SSDI; to kids living in their parents' basements and sharing their family health insurance; to extending unemployment for periods much longer than it was originally designed; to encouraging early retirement. We've muddled through, basically. As the tendency intensifies, it'd be worthwhile to figure out a solid way to rationalize and optimize all those programs.
Your other points I'm in broad agreement with. More and more of the economy will shift from hierarchical, institution-oriented "jobs" to something more freeform. This effectively amounts to shifting management and monitoring costs to the individual instead of the organization, which I think makes loads of sense and is a practice that'll end up outcompeting others. I don't think the average worker will end up screwed in the next ten or thirty years. I'd expect that a surprisingly large number of them will be working in autonomous jobs outside of corporate environments.
But many of those new freeform activities will be marginal, and many of them will involve barter as compensation or even be wholly uncompensated.
So, I'm not so sanguine about the bottom 20%: even if we do manage to revamp our education system to deal with contemporary economic problems better (a huge, giant if that'd take decades to implement), it'll take time to replace the whole workforce (40 years!), and there will always be students who end up performing significantly below average. Retraining programs of older workers haven't shown exceptionally promising results, either.
One of the things I like a lot about the Basic Income is that it provides a way for those displaced workers to experiment with new ways of work without the vigilant eye of the State trying to shove them into legible, easily-taxed, and controlled corporate employment.
Are you saying that we will continue to invent things to do in exchange for money? I feel like there has to be a point that you can't do that. I guess it would have been insane to think that people would be sitting in offices making comments on news forums most of the day.
> it would also be a good idea to completely remove the profit motive from health care.
If I had a fatal disease with no known cure, I want a system that makes whoever finds the cure filthy rich. That's my best chance at survival. If anything, I want a system with even more profit motive.
Why would anyone care about curing your fatal disease if they are profit driven? They should be able to make more money working on widespread non-fatal problems, like erectile disfunction or baldness.
Ah yes, the old "it'll work, we just need more money, promise!". We've been hearing that one since the beginning of the democratic form of governance. Guess you haven't looked at the recent graphs of US budget spending, otherwise you would have figured out that "more money" doesn't necessarily solve the problem.
Hint: Most, if not all, the additional money gets eaten up by newly created bureaucracy.
Please expand on that - I personally think for-profit health care is one of the most ill-conceived ways of doing business I have ever heard of. Saving people's lives but only in ways that are investor-friendly?
healthcare innovation requires enormous investment. How should society pick healthcare problems to focus on, and how will we know a solution when we see it? The distributed price signal is an elegant mechanism for solving this problem and has worked to guide innovation in many other areas of human endeavour.
We can do better, though. For example, if poor people are hit harder by something, there might be less "price signal" than if a few rich people are sick.
You can reduce it, and you can try to amplify other motivations. But if you're developing a new drug, why wouldn't you market it to people who can pay you more for it?
You can't save every life - no one is immortal. And in the decision of what care to give to which people, money will always be one factor. This is probably amplified in non-life-threatening situations since personal trainers and nutritional consultants will probably not be covered by collective health plans.
Some technology will be too expensive to provide, or some procedure will require skills that are too rare. They will command high prices. And you can't find enough doctors, hospital administrators, drug researchers etc for a whole country without finding some greedy/rational ones who will do better work for more pay.
How about "guaranteed job training?" That way, if you wish to pursue a career that does not require a post-secondary degree, you can prepare yourself for that career just as well as the white collar worked who spends four years studying post-modern poetry.
N.B.: I have degrees in philosophy and writing, so I'm criticizing the study of the liberal arts.
