Don't know why you're getting downvoted. This is a problem all wealthy countries face.
As GDP increases, you have to pay workers more or they will find more profitable work, as is being suggested in the article. That, or a lot of workers must not be allowed to reap the benefits of economic growth, and that will be tremendously destablilizing. The problem is, growing wages make domestic production less and less competitive with foreign production. So wealthy countries import goods from places with lower production costs.
So, as wealth increases, if you're trying to maintain any semblance of income equality, anything requiring human labour must increasingly get outsourced to cheaper countries. Wealthy countries can only competitively produce high-value goods and services that require e.g. massive capital investments and high levels of technical skill and education.
It follows that wealthy countries will eventually face a labour crisis: They have, as a historical leftover, a large class of labourers who no longer have employable skills, and can't even theoretically be re-trained into more current working roles, as there simply aren't enough of those to go around. "Productivity increase" is just another way of saying "more unemployment".
I'd like to propose a kind of trilemma here: High median wage, High employment, large population - Pick two. Having all of these can not be sustained IMO, and I think the current political upheavals in the west largely stem from this. You either have tremendous income inequality among workers, you have a large unemployed class, or you have a population consisting largely of highly-skilled specialists.
Yes, it's the problem a basic income proposes to solve. I'm intrigued by the idea, but I do wonder about the long-term economic effects of it.
It seems to me that at it's core, basic income would involve a transfer of wealth from companies and wage-earners to the unemployable. Isn't that just looking at the issues I described and going "oh well"? It doesn't seem to solve the competitivity problem.
Optimistically, basic income might enable enough workers to re-educate themselves into new roles that the result would be a net positive, but apart from that, I'm not really seeing how it changes the big picture.
Under basic income, you _always_ come out ahead when you work. you can take a dollar, or you can have a 2 dollar tax cut.
I've never personally been in the position, but i've met quite a few folks that refuse to take a job, because it screws up their benefits.
BI is not a panacea. There are folks out there that can copyedit 30 hours one week and none the next. There are employers who would love the extra occasional help. Unfortunately taking that job nullifies disability - even though they can't work a large fraction of the year.
Before widespread access to computers it made sense to just take the loss on those edge cases. There's really no excuse any more. I know a handful of examples may not be convincing, but i'd argue the existence of even one person means the big picture is pretty screwed up.
BI, again, might not be the answer. Sharp cliffs, creating situations where willing people are screwed over when they want to work is stupid. BI is a pretty obvious easy patch for those weird islands we've created in our current byzantine rule systems.
I don't disagree, but fixing edge cases in social securit, while important, wasn't really what was being discussed.
Sure, you could probably eke out some increased efficiency from basic income if it fixes the problems you describe without being too expensive. As far as the wider economic issues though, isn't it just kicking the can down the road a bit?
The big picture is that our society is predicated on continuous economic growth, and that's just not tenable in the long run. Basic Income may be a part of the answer, but we're going to need far bigger changes than that. What changes, I sure don't know.
> The big picture is that our society is predicated on continuous economic growth, and that's just not tenable in the long run.
On the other hand, US real GDP per capita grew 2%, year after year, for more than a century now. It is both the case that exponential growth is unsustainable, and that exponential growth has been sustained. Since exponential growth since industrial revolution is almost entirely responsible for current human welfare, we should try our hardest to continue it.
It's a mechanism to allow society to distribute wealth who aren't contributing through their labour. Which will become increasingly important as we transition into a world where labour is automated and we don't require most people's labour.
(I'd argue that we're already at the point where some people's labour is superfluous to society).
> basic income would involve a transfer of wealth from companies and wage-earners to the unemployable
Unemployed, but not necessarily unemployable. "unemployable" seems to suggest that these people don't have useful skills. But it may simply be that societal demand for labour decreases and thus people can't find employment even if there is nothing useful that needs doing...
As GDP increases, you have to pay workers more or they will find more profitable work, as is being suggested in the article. That, or a lot of workers must not be allowed to reap the benefits of economic growth, and that will be tremendously destablilizing. The problem is, growing wages make domestic production less and less competitive with foreign production. So wealthy countries import goods from places with lower production costs.
So, as wealth increases, if you're trying to maintain any semblance of income equality, anything requiring human labour must increasingly get outsourced to cheaper countries. Wealthy countries can only competitively produce high-value goods and services that require e.g. massive capital investments and high levels of technical skill and education.
It follows that wealthy countries will eventually face a labour crisis: They have, as a historical leftover, a large class of labourers who no longer have employable skills, and can't even theoretically be re-trained into more current working roles, as there simply aren't enough of those to go around. "Productivity increase" is just another way of saying "more unemployment".
I'd like to propose a kind of trilemma here: High median wage, High employment, large population - Pick two. Having all of these can not be sustained IMO, and I think the current political upheavals in the west largely stem from this. You either have tremendous income inequality among workers, you have a large unemployed class, or you have a population consisting largely of highly-skilled specialists.