If more and more contribution is being done by a select few through advanced technology, what is the shrinking working class to do, learn to code?
What are the top winners of the current economy contributing as they disproportionately absorb more and more wealth? Especially as they dodge all tax.
VAT the companies, use it to fund a UBI. That money is going to immediately flow back into the economy as 60 - 80% live paycheck-to-paycheck.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_pilots
UBI is survival money. It's meant as a social safety net. It's not 'thrive' money.
But people want to thrive. So the theory is that people will continue to want jobs to advance themselves and their families.
Just with UBI the absence of a job is way less brutal.
It's also shrinks the government and allows companies to do layoffs with less brutal consequences to the people being laid off, which allows companies to adjust to economic conditions a lot more easily.
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Also, just like hunter gathering and farming ways of life were made obsolete by technology, this concept of a 'job' will potentially be made obsolete by technology in the future.
As automation and globalization increases and the number of jobs declines exponentially in the US and also around the world...the same value is being generated but the gains are only going to a few people.
Were going to have to figure out what to do with a ton of people who want to work but no jobs are available due to this legacy system.
UBI would allow people to expand their career paths since basic survival would not be on the line. Personally I've got minor health issues from being in front of a computer too much, would absolutely love switching it up with a more physicaly demanding job if I had UBI to make sure a drop in wages wasn't threatening my family's basic survival. This also assumes universal healthcare.
"You cannot have both an opt-in working class and an opt-in nonworking class and have a healthy society."
So I agree, but I do not think it would become a real problem. If it does become a problem we could implement a lottery system that swaps workers out every so often.
It doesn't make sense to worry about a fictional labor shortage when there is an excess of profit being captured by the wealthy. If a labor shortage actually existed that differential wouldn't exist, because it couldn't afford to.
You're referring to 2 different "labor shortages" at once there. The proposed labor shortage in the question "what if UBI were available at a life sustaining level" and the labor shortage caused by the current wealthy being able to opt out of labor. That the latter hasn't caused societal labor shortage issues is true but as you say it has been capturing a portion of the profit in a negatively impacting way and it's also on the order of 100x fewer participants than UBI would have. With that in mind it doesn't seem to be unreasonable to ponder what negative impact expanding such a concept 100 fold may have.
The goal of society should be to become post-scarcity. All of our technological progress has led in that direction. We currently just live in a period where the majority of the gains have been captured by very few people and that has allowed them to exploit human labor to enrich themselves vs. building a self-sustainable society. Engineered or not, I think that's the inevitable end game of continuing humanity.
Apart from needing those technologies to exist before being able to claim them as reasons there won't be a labor shortage with UBI this is still completely independent of rich people existing today without causing a labor shortage. Perhaps it's a funding source to prove out things like automation by redistributing said wealth but the existence of said wealth in the hands of a few is not prove lack of labor in all is sustainable. To do that you must actually prove the alternative means of production out - regardless if the wealthy exist.
The problem is that we are dependent on these zero sum games to regulate our economy and as a result these zero sum games end up consuming all our our productivity gains and making up a progressively larger share of the economy.
What are the circumstances that allow this behaviour from companies? It's a more complicated question than just "Why are companies behaving this way", that's easy. Greed, mostly, and because they can get away with it. I'm more interested in why they can get away with it. Too few, or unenforceable regulations? Too many available workers? Too many qualified or overqualified people fighting for too few jobs?
Honestly it's fine to not want a career, but you can't do nothing. We rely on people's work to get materials, build and heat homes, grow and distribute food. Society is built upon contribution. A UBI is not the answer because that's still just other people's labour. You cannot have both an opt-in working class and an opt-in nonworking class and have a healthy society.