Another important point is that the relation between children, their parents and the society they live in would be changed in ways that are hard to predict.
See, the current assumption (or rather, the assumption that socially still stands but that is already shaken by the current lifespan augmentation) is that once a child is an adult, it won't be long before they will eventually see their parents either die (before modern medicine) or retire (the current paradigm), and have to replace them.
They will get hired fast, to get enough experience with their notional parents while those are still in the workforce, and then quickly be needed in a full-time, important gig.
It's also worth mentioning that the society, right now, is built on the idea that full-time stable jobs are widely available, on one hand, and a strict necessity for anyone to reach any kind of reasonable level of material comfort, social adjustment and general happiness. When not the only way to get basic human dignity.
That assumption is old as balls, and it's hard to see it surviving the current state of technology and medicine, let alone what's about to come.
So what will probably happen is that we'l keep telling people that working 40 hours a week in a job you had for the last, like, 5 years, is a basic necessity, yet that it's nearly impossible to get 'em, because old people are a) living forever b) holding on to those jobs because they're a strict requirement c) creating machines that do other people's 40hrs/week jobs.
So yeah, now that stable, full-time work has been overloaded with all that junk, the conditions that make this paradigm possible have to be saved whenever they're menaced. Sometimes I wonder whether I'm the only one here who thinks that the point of working is to make the world around me a better place, rather than a way to reach some kind of social status and incidentally keeping a relatively helpful system up and running.
With those prospects of limitless healthly lifespans, those limits would look like either
- capping the timespan people are allowed to work, so that they can't hog those precious, limited 40hrs/week stable jobs that young folks need to get some kind of implicit economic citizenship
- creating demand for those, by doing the old sorta-Keynesian thing and just creating jobs. This has worked great in the past, 'cause those jobs looked like building the Golden Gate, the Hoover dam, nailing down the basics of nuclear physics, getting jet engines to work, and then sending people on the freaking moon. But now it looks more like working as under-trained wannabe-SWAT police teams raiding teen's bedrooms for small-time weed deals, building the like five thousandth M1-A1 the USArmy doesn't need, and stuff like that.
My ideal, which I can't even seriously hold as I watch how most governments deal with their respective economic crises, is to strip that socioeconomic status away from stable employment.
I picture guaranteed basic income as the very first economic stepping stone of that project. See, I would gladly accept a basic living wage to stay home, cook for my family, take care of the house, and whatever, while dedicating exactly all, and not one second more, of my daily intellectually productive work timespan to something relevant, I don't know what. I think that, all things considered, I'd be more productive at my programming job working 3 hours per day than my current 8-ish.
But this is an socioeconomic rant I need to refine and turn into a set of attainable political measures, and then get off my butt and militate for them.
I can see a post-labour future, where automation has eaten so many jobs, and improved our quality of life so much, that noone really needs to work, you can have a job as a hobby if you want, but most people don't.
And as you point out, healthy elders won't retire. In a lot of countries there's talk of increasing the standard retirement age from 65, where it's been for many, many decades, which is a step in the completely wrong direction, since that just accelerates the job shortage. It's no coincidence that youth unemployment is higher than ever.
I can see the bright future, but I cannot see the way forward. Every political party is about keeping the status quo, keeping the 9-to-5-and-a-mortgage going, the left/right divide is about who owns the means of production, but both are firmly set on the notion that everyone should work. There are no incentives for existing power elites to change either. They will benefit immensely from the automation improvement, because the owners get all the profits, while the employees get less and less, since there's fewer and fewer of them.
It's interesting that the work week has been stuck at 8 hours for over a century, while worker productivity has increased magnitudes.
I don't know what to do, how to change this. What political steps need to be taken?
I think that what we need so desperately bad is a complete database of what goods and services are needed and demanded in our society as a whole, and what is the cost, in a standardized and comprehensive form, of those goods and services, as they are currently offered, whether in the official, monetary economy, or as stuff people do, and if possible, data on the evolution of those parameters over time.
For example: people need to eat, and they do that much eating at the McD's, and this costs that many socio-dollars, and then eat that many TV dinners, and do that much cooking, with an estimation in socio-dollars of how much time it takes to cook vs. how much to stop by the McD's to grab a burger.
And, let me get controversial: what was the evolution of that global cost as the traditional, implicit people responsible for cooking (women) started working full-time, too.
See, that wave of feminism represents a moment where the distribution of labour, and the shape of it, changed rather dramatically. It's hard to get a decent outlook on the economic effect of that event, which makes it hard to devise some form of public policy that would, at the same time, help our society solve the problems that probably appeared as a result, and to help society make the most of this new workforce.
My wet econodream is that we realize that we collectively spend an absurd amount of cold, hard cash on feeding ourselves, and that we'd save that much cold, hard cash by having a bunch of government-owned "restaurants" simply giving away (within some reasonable limit) good but ruthlessly efficient (in terms of labour, value of basic ingredients, nutricious value, taste, and even general convenience) meals to, like, anyone, at any time.
But we can't take any halfway decent decision at all without data. Which we don't have.
Although it appears that it might be happening.
Slatestarcodex found that database of cost-effectiveness of various public health measures, illnesses and drugs, measured in some acronym that looks seductively close to the philosophical definition of "utility"
Jobs are not a finite resource. More people = more jobs, and vice-versa. You make it seem like "jobs" just pop into existence, and then the labor force consumes however much of it it finds.
It's as if you can't conceive of the possibility that the two are intertwined and feed off one another in a constant feedback cycle. One method is "no job = no money = not a good idea to have kids = less workers". Another perhaps: "have job = have money = spend money = buy product = job needed to make said product". Or how about: "No job = try open a business"
Well yeah, but one thing that bugs me is that many structures, many businesses even, seem to have little purposes beyond making jobs pop into existence, by having bizarrely huge amounts of redundancy, red tape, or by having goals that seem counterproductive, or by being tolerated despite not having reached any relevant goal for a loooong time.
One of my main problem is that there is a huge bagage of material wealth and social status attached to those jobs that look, to me, right now, completely useless.
By tying that to the job itself, it makes it hard to assess the value of the work accomplished, independently of the fact that said job is stable and well-paid.
Hence,
It pisses me off when politicians announce not that some shit got done, but that jobs were created.
It pisses me off that the goal of working seems to be shifting from solving a problem to getting paid for it.
I'm young and stupid and idealistic and I'm angry with the world.
Or how about "No ownership of materials = no need for jobs", or at least no need for jobs in the usual sense. It's worth questioning whether possessions like money help us live rewarding lives or whether they hold us back (or both).
I'd say that it would be quite against what most would individuals would want. And if ownership/possession is indeed a natural concept that we as a species have, then you'd probably have to resort to some sort of pervasive government clamp down on instances of it occurring. And that would hardly be a utopia that most proponents of such a concept would make it out to be.
Whether it hold us back in general is not something we could easily answer. You could look at the communist (or any communal ownership concept for that matter) communes and mini-experiments that have been attempted in isolation over the years. As far as I know, they were all failures.
And these communal-ownership ideas can only operate and possibly chug along if they were to operate in complete isolation. Otherwise, free trade (as a black-market if it were banned) would quickly ruin the entire thing. You could argue that free-trade isn't even possible under a system of communal ownership, as there is no private property to trade with.
Back to your initial point about no possessions requiring no jobs. I'm not entirely sure what you're proposing there.
"I'd say that it would be quite against what most would individuals would want. And if ownership/possession is indeed a natural concept that we as a species have"
Do you really want ownership, or do you really want access? For example, if you could hire a car at no cost and at no inconvenience, what benefits would you gain from owning it?
See, the current assumption (or rather, the assumption that socially still stands but that is already shaken by the current lifespan augmentation) is that once a child is an adult, it won't be long before they will eventually see their parents either die (before modern medicine) or retire (the current paradigm), and have to replace them.
They will get hired fast, to get enough experience with their notional parents while those are still in the workforce, and then quickly be needed in a full-time, important gig.
It's also worth mentioning that the society, right now, is built on the idea that full-time stable jobs are widely available, on one hand, and a strict necessity for anyone to reach any kind of reasonable level of material comfort, social adjustment and general happiness. When not the only way to get basic human dignity.
That assumption is old as balls, and it's hard to see it surviving the current state of technology and medicine, let alone what's about to come.
So what will probably happen is that we'l keep telling people that working 40 hours a week in a job you had for the last, like, 5 years, is a basic necessity, yet that it's nearly impossible to get 'em, because old people are a) living forever b) holding on to those jobs because they're a strict requirement c) creating machines that do other people's 40hrs/week jobs.
So yeah, now that stable, full-time work has been overloaded with all that junk, the conditions that make this paradigm possible have to be saved whenever they're menaced. Sometimes I wonder whether I'm the only one here who thinks that the point of working is to make the world around me a better place, rather than a way to reach some kind of social status and incidentally keeping a relatively helpful system up and running.
With those prospects of limitless healthly lifespans, those limits would look like either
- capping the timespan people are allowed to work, so that they can't hog those precious, limited 40hrs/week stable jobs that young folks need to get some kind of implicit economic citizenship
- creating demand for those, by doing the old sorta-Keynesian thing and just creating jobs. This has worked great in the past, 'cause those jobs looked like building the Golden Gate, the Hoover dam, nailing down the basics of nuclear physics, getting jet engines to work, and then sending people on the freaking moon. But now it looks more like working as under-trained wannabe-SWAT police teams raiding teen's bedrooms for small-time weed deals, building the like five thousandth M1-A1 the USArmy doesn't need, and stuff like that.
My ideal, which I can't even seriously hold as I watch how most governments deal with their respective economic crises, is to strip that socioeconomic status away from stable employment.
I picture guaranteed basic income as the very first economic stepping stone of that project. See, I would gladly accept a basic living wage to stay home, cook for my family, take care of the house, and whatever, while dedicating exactly all, and not one second more, of my daily intellectually productive work timespan to something relevant, I don't know what. I think that, all things considered, I'd be more productive at my programming job working 3 hours per day than my current 8-ish.
But this is an socioeconomic rant I need to refine and turn into a set of attainable political measures, and then get off my butt and militate for them.