Universal Basic Income: Automation Is Coming

[thomhartmann]

Automation is going to replace jobs in more and more market places, can universal basic income save us?

What will happen to our economy when millions of Americans are out of work, because their job has been replaced by a robot? 2020 presidential hopeful Andrew Yang is calling for a Universal Basic Income to stop the oncoming job losses automation will bring.

[leftofcool]

1. The problem here is how do you pay for this?

No jobs means no one is paying taxes. How do you support millions with a basic income if no one is paying in to help. Wouldn't it be better to create jobs for the future.

[patphil]

3. Bitcoin, of course!:-)

[genxlib]

2. This reminds me of my childhood

I distinctly remember how futurists would talk about how we would all work three days a week because technology was going to be so much more productive. They were deluded into thinking that the capitalists would share those gains with the workers. If a worker is able to do the job in half the time then the company will have half as many workers.

Automation will be an enormous problem for our economy the likes of which we have never seen. It is going to be hugely disruptive and probably worse than the industrial revolution and globalization when it comes to affecting the work force.

The idea of a basic income may have merit as a Utopian moral argument. But here on planet Earth, it is entirely unrealistic both politically and economically.

There is only one saving grace that will work to curb an economic system that displaces workers with robots. That is the loss of Consumers. It is tempting for companies to fire all of their living and breathing workers but what is the point if there is no one left to buy their products. To a certain degree, this has already happened with off-shoring. However, they have postponed the worst down side of lost consumers by loaning money to them to keep them spending. That is not a sustainable marketplace. It remains to be seen how the economy responds to these challenges. UBI won't be the answer.

[tclambert]

4. The idea we have to dispense with is that only the owners of the robots benefit from their labor.

Either through UBI or another mechanism, the productivity of the robots must be allocated to the people, not just to the corporations that own robots.

Human workers won't be able to trade their own labor for food, clothing, and shelter when robots can do all the work. Robots are willing to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without vacation or lunch breaks or pee breaks. Who can compete with that? Yet people need food, clothing, and shelter. And robots are perfectly able to make all those things for people. It is just a question of how you allocate the robots' time and effort, how much and when, for each person.

Do you assign a certain number of robots to support each person? Or do you give each person a budget of so many robot hours per week to order up whatever they want? Or do you give each person something that looks, smells, and folds like money to trade for some amount of robot productivity?

In such a world, why would we need corporations, profits, or people who inherit vast fortunes?

[tclambert]

5. "Imagine no possessions. I wonder if you can."