This, exactly. As technology continues to move forward and make things even more efficient, I would expect this gap to continue to widen. I'm confused as to why anyone would want it to remain linked. As the gap widens, the demand for Universal Basic Income will rise and gobble up the working class and, eventually, even the most complicated jobs, until money is considered worthless and all basic needs are met by robots. Given the option to have robots do all the work and humans reap all the benefits (besides skynet), who wouldn't take it?

> As the gap widens, the demand for Universal Basic Income will rise and gobble up the working class and, eventually, even the most complicated jobs, until money is considered worthless and all basic needs are met by robots.

The problem here is that nobody knows when we'll get there, if at all. UBI seems like a solution designed for a society where most people have been displaced from the need to work, but it doesn't look like society is there yet. In the meantime we still have people who are struggling to even exist. If the gap to achieve Full Automation in most sectors is multiple generations, you might long reach social unrest before you can even "justify" UBI from a political perspective.

Right now billions in capital investment haven't quite mastered the art of getting cars to navigate roads by themselves, and some industry leaders (Waymo CEO) are skeptical we'll ever get level 5 autonomous cars. And this is all for one single and self-contained task in the human existence (which doesn't even rely on human appendages! try to imagine automating handiwork).

If 70% of people are without work, UBI is an obvious solution. But if 1-10% of people are without work and 40-60% are paid peanuts for shit jobs, what's the solution? If UBI is still best here, how do we justify that to society without appealing to Full Automation?

A possible justification is crime.

I believe it is cheaper to pay someone enough money to allow them to survive and educate themselves, than to put them in a position where they weigh the risk of being caught with a crime with the risk of them/loved ones dying due to not having enough wealth to purchase the things they need.

Currently progress leads to more poverty as wealth is concentrated to landowners collecting rent. Every increase in productivity is consumed by increases in rent payment. Holding land and waiting for it to become valuable is absolutely insane to me. It is theft from the common good to allow that speculation of land, out premium finite resource.

Without land and labor combined their would exist no capital.

By taxing land value, increases in productivity are swallowed up by increases in taxes, leading to increases in social wellbeing.

I believe, along with most people who would call themselves Georgists, that private property is theft from the public

If you look at the results of welfare programs, it would be hard to argue that they reduce crime. Crime isn't just about subsistence money. For a certain segment of the population, it's the only way to make significant amounts of money and also to get some sort of respect, status and power.

If criminals could just be educated and get jobs and become ordinary members of society, then our social programs would work. They don't, because from a sober perspective, if you're already a criminal (or so inclined), then crime is more attractive and ordinary members of society appear as the powerless suckers they really are.

Indeed, the collective bargaining power of employees is less than it used to be. This will likely become more and more an issue in the current century as the benefits of automation will line mostly the pockets of the owning class. The current concept of fairness of pay and trust in market forces is evident in these comments as well. I think at some point there needs to be some adjustment there. Maybe that will happen before the middle class disappears completely.

>Maybe that will happen before the middle class disappears completely.

I doubt it will. How much of human history even contained a 'middle class'? What tells us that it's anything more than just a blip on the radar and an odd one-off outlier?

This is a very important point. The graphs in the original article -- especially when taking into account those from other countries -- essentially shows that at some point the increase of productivity is due to automation, and that the human component in the workplace is becoming less relevant.

> However, wages (like all other prices) in a market are set by supply and demand.

This should be the case, but minimum wage laws completely screw up the market. The unintended consequences of minimum wage result in almost the opposite effect of what they are intended to achieve. They keep wages artificial low, and increases in minimum wage push the costs of all goods and services upwards, as well as cause disemployment.

Wages have been "accidentally" coupled to minimum wage policies which is why there is less correlation with productivity. How this article can be so long and barely mention its effects baffles me.

The article devotes significant time toe discussing the effect of minimum wage policy under point 8. He makes a convincing argument that it doesn't explain much of the effect.

"significant time?" The author dismisses it in a single paragraph because of a single chart which shows that stagnation is not only among the lowest earners. Yet the same chart clearly shows that the same level of stagnation is not present among highest earners. Minimum wage laws do not just affect minimum wage earners. They affect everyone. Minimum wage earners are hit the worst, despite the laws being intended to help them.

It also affects inflation, which the author posits as the leading cause of stagnation (misprediction of inflation). Minimum wage causes inflation, and the effects of it are unpredictable, because you don't know who is going to raise their prices to make up the additional employment costs, or who is going to lose their jobs because smaller businesses downsize because they can't afford the increased minimum wage costs.