We all tend to over value ourselves. That's probably not a bad thing if it has healthy limits. I have seen people convinced they "add value" when I can find no quantifiable way to justify the cost for the "value" they bring.

Having a paid job means you don't have to rely on the goodwill of someone or something else to get fed.

Automation is stripping the masses of the last speck of power they had.

Please, lie down, make yourself at ease...

How did we deal with horses in the beginning of the 20th century?

Good example for your argument, maybe, but I doubt it's going to win you many converts.

A UBI in Europe could mostly just replace current spending at similar levels, and thus would be comfortable enough in eg Germany or Scandinavia.

While UBI is more administratively efficient than means-tested benefit programs, it also inherently reaches a lot more people with its maximum benefit. I don't think there is any major country (there might be some small ones with a lot of money flowing in from the outside) that could sustainably keep UBI at any comfortable level rather than an alleviating severe poverty level at this time.

I'm pretty sure relying on your bosses to pay you a livable wage is precisely relying on good-will. If you're not able to strike or walk away, they've got no actual reason to do that.

Let's say we institute a UBI and 50% of jobs are eliminated through automation. Everyone has a basic standard of living, but those who still have jobs (who designs the robot?) have a much better standard of living (they would have to or why work?). Now you have a huge amount of income inequality and 50% of the population can't do a dam thing about their situation because there are no jobs.

The only way to fix that is to redistribute so much wealth that the incentive to work is basically eliminated. I think that's been tried before and it failed horribly.

The point is to raise the level of the bottom to something people can live on safely and with some level of dignity.

And with UBI in particular, it's to shift the impetus of your efforts from basic survival to improving your lifestyle from the lowest common denominator. People make shitty decisions with a gun to their head--with some room to experiment they'll usually be more successful.

Further, they might find other ways to individually create societal value (art, science, invention, philosophy) than just simply making their employer money. The only way you can do that right now is if you're already well-off or if some committee somewhere agrees what you're doing is valuable and subsidizes it. That's not a great way to innovate.

And they might not create value. Some people will sit at the bottom. But that needs to be OK--they do that now anyway while being a distinct drain on a society that wasn't built to accommodate that basic human nature. Nothing is perfect.

Most people work for their own self-validation if you give them a chance, though. Think we've all had that experience during time off where you're eventually compelled to do something productive just so you can know you did something.

So while some people might have their standard of living brought up, many (possible many more than would be brought up) will be forced down with the inability to pull themselves back up because of lack of jobs.

The best people, at least in industries where it fits, will move on to consult on the proper operation of the automation and others will become artisans doing highly crafted versions of what otherwise is mass-automated.

And some might move to other localities where the automation is too expensive to create or support. Automation has a cost relative to the market in which it's created and requires highly skilled people to create and maintain, whereas labor can be paid on a sliding scale based on their local cost of living and usually cost less than automation maintenance. That scales to low budgets better, especially if you don't produce quite so much of something as to hit the break-even point for automation.

UBI, in this context, is a mitigating strategy to keep the rest from becoming welfare recipients while they retrain or retire early. That would be a hell of a lot worse stigma than simply having a lower standing of living.

Automation mostly doesn't "eliminate jobs" (numerically; it certainly might eliminate job categories), it reduces the market clearing price of labor by providing a competing alternative.

Among the features of a mature UBI is replacing the combination of minimum wage and means-tested benefit programs as a means of ensuring that the "fully employed" and the less-fully-employed, respectively, are adequately supported. By displacing minimum wage, it actually reduces the degree to which reducing the market value of labor results in lost jobs.

Now, it doesn't eliminate income or wealth inequality, which is essential to maintain some incentive to engage productively with the economy for those who can, but its not a matter of nobody working, its a matter of mitigating the cost of a narrower class of people having high-value labor while the labor of the masses is increasingly low-value given the alternatives available.

But what if these wants and needs include contributing to society but there are not enough opportunities to do so?

While many people do jobs out of necessity, they also get an amount of satisfaction out of doing something with a purpose.

The biggest lie of our job-based corporate society is the belief that, unless you're doing a "job", you're not working.

But seriously, if we have too much people to work why not make scientists from all of them?

1. Change education system with the assumption that the default career is experimental science.

2. Change the workflow so that you don't need to be incredibly smart to prove you can be allowed to measure stuff and write the results down.

3. pay all these people to do science instead if of paying them the guaranteed income.

If we have to waste money at least "waste" them on something useful. Imagine the progress we could make if 50% of population worked as scientists. Imagine how different a society would look.

The problem would be real if society was mostly people that can't have any positive impact on science, but I don't think it's true, especially if we trained everybody with the listed assumptions.

Irrelevant. Which kind of "positive impact on science" would you expect from somebody with an IQ of 100 in the real world, as opposed to your hypothetical "society made up of Einsteins"?

Assign same experiments to 10 different teams all over the world to be sure. Would be actually better than unmotivated incredibly bright people hastily doing these experiments once.

Yes the way we do science would need to change but I think it's for the better. It's not like most of the work post-docs do isn't menial.

At lower real hourly wages. Which is the effect of automation competing with human labor, it doesn't outright destroy jobs, it just reduces the market-clearing price of the forms of labor it is able to compete with.

But the constant drone of "create jobs" at every political debate? The yardsticking of every public policy measure against how many "jobs" it will "create" or "destroy"? A central bank with a mandate not to simply implement fair and simple currency regulations, but to actually manipulate the money supply so as to "create jobs"?

This is not just a discussion; it's an obsession. And I posit that it's as much about a moralistic work ethic (and a bunch of other things) as it is about any sound economic theory.

We need to move on to new ideas about automation, economics, and sustainability.

But they will be substantially different when facing difficult realities of war: those benefits as well may be cut and those people should go to factories, computers, fields, whatever occupation current war needs.

How do you explain a whole generation of people that their allowance will not be paid? How do you tell them that their occupation will be unpleasant? How do you train millions of people discipline, relevant skills, command-and-control?

No major nation wants to lose next war, so we are locked in full employment race.

(sorry for bad english)

A reasonable explanation could be proximity: When the war takes place in their own country, people are more likely to pick up guns instead of waiting for drones to be sent.

If one looks at it from economic-theory or game-theory perspective it sounds like a solution to many problems, nobody knows yet if that would work in practice though, especially on large scale.

As far as I know, open questions that remain are:

- Will we be able to afford it? Sort of back-of-the-napkin calculations can show, that if we introduced i.e UBI in Germany for everybody (80 mil) on a level of minimum wage (1473 E ?), it would eat their federal budget for Ministry of Health and Social Security and Ministry of Economics and Labour

- What would be the unintended consequences? (i.e on small scale uneployment rose by single digits, but we can't really tell what will happen on country scale)

>- Will we be able to afford it? Sort of back-of-the-napkin calculations can show, that if we introduced i.e UBI in Germany for everybody (80 mil) on a level of minimum wage (1473 E ?), it would eat their federal budget for Ministry of Health and Social Security and Ministry of Economics and Labour

In what way is that an unanswered question?

Every single debate about this has any number of people pointing out that you would adjust taxes so that for most people the UBI + tax increases would be net neutral with perhaps slightly higher marginal taxes at the top.

Every single discussion about UBI also somehow has any number of people pretending this point has never been raised and insisting that the cost of UBI will be UBI_Amount * Population.

This isn't even taking into account the reduction in existing social programs which would presumably be replaced by UBI.

(Land prices go up, as other taxes go down, as you can see on the Swiss/German border. Taxing land rents has no economic deadweight loss, since the supply of land is fixed.)

At the most crude, you could separate natural resources from the rest of the land rights, people already do that.

By the way if memory serves right Germany, which doesn't have general land taxes, already doesn't let you own mineral resources below your land by default. Would be interesting to see what effect that regulation already has on people prospecting.

http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/disabili...

States love it because it comes out of federal budgets, and feds love it because it's a social security net that doesn't have the pejorative inklings of "welfare."

It doesn't really matter what you 'think' about things; they'll happen and there is not very much to do about it; we (humanity) have to come up with a way not to let these (most?) people die in the streets while there are no jobs. And of course, once that is accepted, make sure not everyone hangs themselves or others out of boredom. Not saying this will happen next year, but within 100 years for sure.

Some things, like trucks, will happen faster than others and that's why (parts of) this needs to be fixed now instead of when it already happened.

I for one would be happy when this 'stress of needing to have a job' goes away for future generations: I like what I do and i'll do it forever, but the stress to 'have a job' was pushed way too hard by parents, schools, university and society as a whole. And the 'failure' of not having a job too.

Umm -- what these people are "obsessed" with is feeding their families, paying for their mortgages and their children's education, and perchance, scraping together some semblance of a soft landing for when they hit retirement age (approaching for many of them like an... oncoming truck).

If you have (realistic) proposals for how they're going to manage this (forced) transition, by all means please come forth with them. Portmanteau words aren't going to help.

Of course it is. Just like not exploiting people was always straightforward and doable, just like feeding and clothing the poor of the world is doable. Something being doable isn't enough for it to be done, sadly.

While I agree that "chores" are not an end of itself, and think we will always (have to) find things to be creative and skillful about, even if food, shelter and medicine grew on trees, I think everything else staying the same increased automation alone will not lead there. Why would it?

> Let's take robots on assembly lines: If it's used to free up the workforce for more creative work, say, controlling production, making decisions about it, finding creative ways to act and so on, then it's to the good. If it's used as a device to maximize profit and throw people into the trashcan, then it's not good.

-- Noam Chomsky ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kICLG4Zg8s&t=14m49s )

> If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

-- Stephen Hawking ( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama... )

https://www.thevenusproject.com/