Re:Time for a Guaranteed Basic Income?
by dllthomas on Sunday January 24, 2016 @04:40PM
(#10964148)
> I doubt this. There's plenty of pressure for automation now, and I don't see wages increasing as being the final straw to accelerate automation research.
It's not a question of final straws or dramatic thresholds, but of a constellation of smaller decisions.
If I have to pay my workers $X, it's worth investing in automation that amortizes out to less than $X. If workers demand $2X, then two things follow:
First, more existing solutions in the marketplace are likely to be worthwhile. There may be economies of scale, where this would help lower the cost of similar automation. At an extreme, there may be tools available that could cost <$X if they were being bought by the whole industry, but between $X and $2X in the case where no one is yet buying them.
Second, if I'm considering building automation tools, there are more things I can expect to successfully bring to market if workers are being paid more. And so I am more able to raise funds to do research into that automation.
These kinds of things should lead to an increase in automation as compared to the status quo. It may not be dramatic, but I'm not sure it needs to be dramatic.
> I expect the group of workers that have negative marginal productivity (or, less marginal productivity than their salary) is chiefly those people that are good at fooling the system into thinking they're productive, and not necessarily intersecting heavily with the group of people that would leave under BI.
I think that's plenty possible. But note that we don't require that most of the negative-marginal-product workers leave, just that a large enough portion of leaving workers be negative-marginal-product.
> But this is very low confidence.
Certainly, as was my example in the first place :)
> how do you protect against a vicious cycle of "inflation->BI increases-> higher wage demand->inflation"?
As I've said elsewhere, I think this is a concern. It's my understanding that the result of a BI that is too high for a society to support would precisely be rapid inflation. I propose protecting against the cycle you describe by refusing to raise the BI level in response to inflation, which lets the (real) BI fall to a sustainable level if we set it too high. Growing BI at (or slightly above) targeted inflation seems appropriate. Growing it with observed (or expected) inflation seems dangerous.
It's not a question of final straws or dramatic thresholds, but of a constellation of smaller decisions.
If I have to pay my workers $X, it's worth investing in automation that amortizes out to less than $X. If workers demand $2X, then two things follow:
First, more existing solutions in the marketplace are likely to be worthwhile. There may be economies of scale, where this would help lower the cost of similar automation. At an extreme, there may be tools available that could cost <$X if they were being bought by the whole industry, but between $X and $2X in the case where no one is yet buying them.
Second, if I'm considering building automation tools, there are more things I can expect to successfully bring to market if workers are being paid more. And so I am more able to raise funds to do research into that automation.
These kinds of things should lead to an increase in automation as compared to the status quo. It may not be dramatic, but I'm not sure it needs to be dramatic.
> I expect the group of workers that have negative marginal productivity (or, less marginal productivity than their salary) is chiefly those people that are good at fooling the system into thinking they're productive, and not necessarily intersecting heavily with the group of people that would leave under BI.
I think that's plenty possible. But note that we don't require that most of the negative-marginal-product workers leave, just that a large enough portion of leaving workers be negative-marginal-product.
> But this is very low confidence.
Certainly, as was my example in the first place :)
> how do you protect against a vicious cycle of "inflation->BI increases-> higher wage demand->inflation"?
As I've said elsewhere, I think this is a concern. It's my understanding that the result of a BI that is too high for a society to support would precisely be rapid inflation. I propose protecting against the cycle you describe by refusing to raise the BI level in response to inflation, which lets the (real) BI fall to a sustainable level if we set it too high. Growing BI at (or slightly above) targeted inflation seems appropriate. Growing it with observed (or expected) inflation seems dangerous.