I'm not saying we need to "stop talking" about the current economic configuration, including asking the very well-put and timely question in your second sentence.

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.

That may be question of national security i.e. ability to defend against adversary. Let's imagine 30 years from now. World is not yet united and peaceful place. Nation focusing on social nenefits, leisure time, innovation and freedom could be as economically and technically advanced as other nation focusing solely on full employment.

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)

So you're saying that people should do busywork now, just in case we need to go to the factories to support tomorrow's war? Forgetting the fact that the factories are already automated, and going to war won't un-automate them, war is ever less likely and smaller in scale as global prosperity increases.

Which world do you live in? It seems like we are slowly inching closer and closer to world war 3.

Americans are more and more averse to going to war, which is why the USA is sending drones instead of people now. The situation is similar in Europe. Not so much in the other parts of the world, though.

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.

I'm guessing you're young? Seems like we were a lot closer to WW3 in the 1980s, and it's only been getting less likely since then. The US hasn't had a draft since 1973.

Well, that is how we quickly go to the argument of "Lets replace the complicated social security system with basic livable wage being handed out to ever-one." comoonlz known as universal basic income.

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)

>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

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.

We could raise taxes much higher with less economic impact, by solely taxing land rents.

(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.)

Not entirely true; the disadvantage to land taxes is that they discourage prospecting and finding things like oil. You can ameliorate that in a number of ways, but land taxes aren't entirely without their problems.

That's an interesting point. And yes, it's entirely fixable.

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.

Increasingly, "short term" disability is the stopgap for displaced blue collar workers. SSDI is rapidly becoming secret Welfare/the new deal:

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."

That is the right question to ask. You don't have to stop talking about jobs but whether or not you do, they will be gone. And we have to deal with it. I love these discussions about basic income and 'my tax moneyz' and 'I work for people who don't' (can't should be the word here but people always say don't) and all that other stuff, but give solutions then; how do you solve that given those jobs are gone and the people doing that kind of jobs cannot be 'reschooled' to other jobs (those jobs are gone too)?

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.