The unemployment part really concerns me. We are going to be automating so many people out of jobs and there is going to be no work or only minimum wage jobs out there for them. Whatever field the majority of them train to will be slammed with pay cuts as a glut of new workers gets added to the pool.
We really need to start implementing universal basic income
Ok let's say 300M jobs are affected, and we continue to get millions of new college graduates per year unable to find work. What's going to happen?
Maybe salaries will take a nosedive? Minimum wage for a junior developer, anyone?
Or maybe the people just won't accept it, and boycott companies.
If 300M people don't have jobs the economy will certainly stall.
Maybe we'll realize through this pandemic that a huge number of existing jobs are bullshit and totally unnecessary and finally start transitioning to a basic income.
I hope this doesn't set any sort of precedent. This is extremely short-sighted. Jobs will be lost, but we should look for real solutions that don't slow down the improvement of quality of life or the advancement of the human race in general. Maybe basic income?
If jobs continue disappearing due to robots and software and are not sufficiently replaced by new jobs, then we will end up with a lot of unemployed, poor people. At that point, we will either introduce some variant of UBI or we will have civil war.
Essentially, by keeping the basic income guarantee sufficiently low that most people don't want to do that. Note that having everyone want to work is not necessary or even necessarily desirable, you just need to be able to maintain a low enough dependency ratio that the working people don't have to sacrifice much more than what they gain from such system.
I personally think that the employment market for next few decades will continue to be characterized by endemic structural unemployment. We will continue to destroy jobs faster than they are created, through automation and efficiency improvements. What's going away especially quickly are the "middle-difficulty" kind of jobs -- between highly trained specialists and burger flippers. For a simple example, self-driving cars will soon revolutionize long-distance trucking. They won't eliminate the jobs completely, but they will significantly reduce their number. There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the USA. How do you retrain a 55-year old truck driver to be a software engineer? If you can't, should he go work at Burger King for a much lower wage instead? Maybe as a society we could just allow people like him the possibility of not working at that point?
As technology advances, I would assume that work will become more scarce. Taking this scenario to the extreme will mean that the majority of the world will at some point will be unemployed in the future. Some form of basic income will result.
It will be interesting to see what of two possibilities happen: mass unemployment or simply more bullshit jobs and steady state employment. I imagine when computers hit the scene people had the same feelings about losing their accountants and human calculators and secretaries and what not, yet there is not a huge population of out of work people, people are doing different roles. You might even argue that while a total headcount per business might go down, it might be balanced by more businesses emerging. Considering the Fed's dual mandate they might opt to incentivize bullshit job growth over some great society reset to either mass unemployment or a basic income utopia.
Do you still see this as the likelihood if as predicted by many futurists that 40% of jobs are displaced completely by 2030, and no sort of safety net like guaranteed basic income instituted?
I personally think we're headed for a crash that's more than just a depression but something on a whole different level. Dependent of course on automation / job losses / politics between now and 2030.
I think it’s safe to assume that this machine will be getting improvements. The “pick” part will surely also get automated at some point. It’s quite obvious to anybody who is willing to think about it for a while, to deduct that these kind of jobs will eventually all get automated.
What the various governments should be doing now, is to start preparing the society to a new reality in which no-skill and low-skill jobs are gone. This will happen at some point. What do we do about it? The only thing that is happening so far are various timid Universal Income pilots. But those often hit substantial political pressure and are being labeled as socialist or even communist, and therefore unacceptable. So how do we prepare?
I'm personally of the opinion that we must prepare for a society where unskilled jobs don't exist anymore. Evidently they'll be replaced by machines sooner or later. Cashiers, warehouse workers, harvesters... These jobs are soon going to join carriage drivers and lamplighters in history books.
That's clearly a big problem for our societies which seem to collapse when unemployment raises. It's also clear that not everybody will end up as a software engineer or neurosurgeon. So what's the solution? That's left as an exercise for the reader.
What would a society where only a tiny portion of the population needs to actively work to provide for everybody look like? An utopia for some, hell on earth for others.
I had this debate with people all the time, and it turns out I was wrong.
There WILL be jobs.
They were right about that, I believe.
It's just that they won't pay enough to be able to provide for yourself.
We have divisions of labor, because they work.
But your ability to sit in an office, type on a computer, answer phone calls, and go to meetings, only translates into your ability to feed yourself, clothe yourself, have a living space, because of supply and demand. Those skills are in short enough supply right now, that they have enough value... to trade with the people who make your food, clothing, housing.
But if you imagine that in the future, automation is going to make it so that smaller and smaller numbers of people are necessary to do your job (it's happening to Radiologists and Physicists, it can happen to anyone), then essentially there's far too many of you in the supply, so you won't be able to demand good wages.
On the other hand, it's not like the demand for food, clothing, and housing will drop. And even though the COST to make food, clothing, and housing will drop, THAT'S NOT HOW THINGS ARE PRICED. They are priced by their scarcity.
And the machines that make the food, clothing, and housing, are still going to be relatively expensive. (Lucky for the people who own them!)
So the people who own the machines will have you over a barrel. You need what they can make, and you have nothing they want in exchange.
Without Universal Basic Income, I think we'd have to resort to Socialism (literally, the government control of the means of production of basic needs like food, clothing, housing), in order to not have people starving in the streets.
OR
People will stop "dividing their labor," and they'll get good at taking care of themselves. Like the Amish. Farming. Sewing. Textiles. Chopping wood. I don't mean this sarcastically, there's nothing wrong with that kind of life. If you look at history, the Amish are very healthy in comparison to everyone else. Maybe they're more puritanical than any of us would accept, but their DIY, hands on, back to nature life isn't a crazy idea.
But if we do have Universal Basic Income, I think people will find ways to keep busy, and to make some extra money for luxuries.
Want to go to Disney World? Well, work in the record shop you like. Listen to tunes all day, discuss music with people with similar interests. You only earn about $2 an hour, but that's fine. It's all just gravy.
Want to be a Radiologist? That's great - use your UBI to pay for college. Earn tons of money. Go to Disney World all the time.
UBI + Progressive taxes just makes tons of sense to me.
Don't tax me much when I'm getting started in my career. Tax the crap out of me when I'm figuring out whether I can afford 5 weeks or only 4 at Disney World each year.
I honestly believe that many decades from now, 20 to 50 years, at least one industrialized country will have something like a Basic income guarantee.
It happened to Rome. When all of their work was done by slaves, the free Romans got bread and circuses on the government's dime.
I think we will reach a point where unemployment will just grow despite a growing economy. And it will steadily grow for months, then years, and over the years we'll go through a long and painful political process which I think will eventually result in a a Basic income guarantee.
At that point a staggering percentage of our economy will be 100% automated.
I am most focused on this scenario. I could easily see 10%+ unemployment as this technology makes its way into society. Companies will just not need as many people as they did before, and will be able to move much faster than was possible previously.
We are not ready politically for this level of change - there needs to be serious study/discussion of UBI or other kinds of safety net.
All of this is possible with today’s technology- never mind whatever the ensuing developments are.
Our “consolation prizes” are an information weapon that makes “Cambridge Analytica” look like a preschool and a highly capable assistant/tutor/work generator that allows white collar professionals to multiply their productivity by 1.5x+. This is what we have today.
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.
We really need to start implementing universal basic income
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