It might also spur governments to do more to stay competitive in a sustainable way, e.g. investing more in education.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-glob...
The only solution in elite policy circles is to spend more. The reality is we spend plenty, but we have a structure that makes it difficult to experiment. The problem is exacerbated because the most influential members of the upper classes can bypass the problem by either paying for private schools or by taking advantage of our neo-feudal school districting system and buy into exclusive neighborhoods with "public schools" — which are open to anyone who can swing a $1M mortgage!
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-gender-gap-boys-lagging/
Add in the fact that blue collar jobs are declining, most men are going to ask what is the point of trying. The answer they get back from society is one that they are unneeded.
[1] http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-healthcare-comparison-20...
The fact that many people are becoming unemployable is no fault of their own, and it's not the business' fault that don't need their labor. But as a society we need to decide what to do about it, because covering our ears and closing our eyes and yelling LALALALA and pretending it doesn't exist or will go away on its own is only going to make the problem worse.
Never mind that if every other business followed suit, they would destroy their customer base...
Bernie would have been a great UBI candidate.
Total private land value in the US is in the trillions.
Google and Apple could hardly make a dent in paying for a UBI.
Social Democracy!
>Landowners don't make profits from automation as much as corporations do.
Much of that land value is due to demand for space rather than productivity. Corporations generate wealth by adding value (at least theoretically) and benefit greatly from automation, so there is cash flow to tax.
Google and Apple are hardly the only corporations. They were just convenient examples of those who are successful at large-scale tax evasion and yet enjoy a generally good public image, along with Amazon, Facebook, et al.
Giving up actually makes sense. Drugs give back that feeling of satisfaction that has gone missing from people's lives.
EDIT: I changed up the first sentence to be less political as the downvotes reminded me HN is probably not the place for that sentiment.
It's ridiculous, because clearly automation and IT have increased output by huge factors; but clearly a number of forces (increased competition due to female candidates entering the workforce and lower-class candidates getting good education; adjustment of consumer prices over two salaries per family; etc etc) made it so that, on average, we "work" more for less pay. The work might be lighter on our bodies, and we all have running water in our homes, but apart from that we are not actually improving that much.
"We all have running water" is also a huge understatement on the improvements that have been made to American living conditions over the last several decades. As a nation we have bigger and better homes, safer and more reliable cars, cleaner air and water, unlimited access to knowledge, and the list goes on and on.
I was struck by my grandmother's stories about the sheer amount of totally manual labour she had to do in the early years of her marriage. Now I have automatic washer/dryers and don't have to make all my food from total scratch.
Inconveniently they get freed and you now have to pay them, worse they vote against you and without sufficient votes you are no longer viable and liable to lose the corruption money.
If only you could shake down the annoying population regularly and you know put them in their place wherein their place is a prison cell wherein you can work them for free again and take away their inconvenient vote.
Disenfranchisement has always been a tool as long as voting has been a thing in America. Its only a bold claim if you missed the last few hundred years.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/28/crack-powder-senten...
So, the law may not make much difference in whether employers take felons, but it makes a huge difference in who is a felon.
It is, therefore, clearly intended that it continue, whether or not it was originally intentional.
It's definitely an uncomfortable and politically-incorrect claim, but I don't think it's a very bold one (in the sense of being a tenuously-supported leap of logic).
As I'm sure you know, the US has a very long history of racial bias in incarceration, going all the way back to the Civil War and before. Once black people were given the vote by the Fourteenth Amendment, Southern states took to underhanded means to re-disenfranchise them. Literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, etc. Any arbitrary voting requirement they could manufacture that "just happened" to exclude more blacks than whites was fair game.
It was (and still is) bad enough to force a federal law to try to clamp it down, the Voting Rights Act of 1965[2], considered one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation.
After that, Nixon declared the War on Drugs ostensibly to reduce drug use, which it has been famously ineffective at. John Erlichman, his domestic policy advisor at the time later claimed:
> The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two
> enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m
> saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war
> or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with
> marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we
> could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their
> homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the
> evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
In 2010, black people made up 13% of the US population, but 40% of the incarcerated. Black people are imprisoned at something like 5 times the rate of white people.[4]
See also:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/opinion/the-racist-origin...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/virgini...
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jul/13/felon-voting-l...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_the_War_on_Drugs#cite...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_in_the_United_States_crim...
WTF. I wouldn't spend too much time defending this if I were you.
I'm sure it's not the whole story but I think it's reasonable enough to assume it will be a contributing factor for many.
I have never heard of peer pressure being a contributing factor in unemployment, does it work for employment, too? Cuz maybe that would make it a confounding variable.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23773049 http://web.media.mit.edu/~tod/media/pdfs/EmotionalContagion....
I think the idea that unemployment may be socially transmissible to a degree is pretty reasonable. Part of the fear of unemployment is fear of social rejection, due to negative views about unemployment. If others in your peer group are unemployed, that component of the motivation is ameliorated. There are other, stronger, motivations to be employed of course. But it's an effect I would expect to see at the margin.
And yes, I would absolutely expect it to work for employment. I see nothing confounding about that.
The men aren't working because they're either injured or unemployed. Then, because their life sucks, the are more likely to turn to drugs.
Saying "opioids explain unemployment" has it exactly 100% backwards.
The average guy with a job, a house, wife, and 2.2 kids isn't going to get hooked on opioids. His life is already full.
Im interested on what there stance towards the DAO is going to be. A Contract-golem replacing CEOs - that's there audience being replaced. Wonder if they are going to stay Neo-Liberal while the Revolution they spawned eats them.
Why? There's plenty of money to spread around in the drug wars too.
Empty mind is devils workshop.
"Opioid use COULD explain 20%..."
Seems backed up by this part of your quote:
"I don’t know if it’s causal or if it’s a symptom of long-running economic maladies..."
The title implies exactly what was quoted.
> “I do think it is related to declining labor-force participation among prime-age workers,”Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said in a July Senate hearing when asked about the crisis. “I don’t know if it’s causal or if it’s a symptom of long-running economic maladies that have affected these communities and particularly affected workers who have seen their job opportunities decline.”
Edit: added the full quote.