I mostly worry about this scenario of not enough work for everyone because too many people in my country (USA) will probably be unwilling to support a universal living wage.
A social safety net improves the lives of everyone because of lower crime and a generally more civil society.
The trick will be to provide life long educational and vocational resources. Hopefully almost everyone would want to produce extra value for society and improve their own material life style. There would still be room for very capable people to be "rich" and generally rewarded for skills and hard work.
So, a pure meritocracy with rewards layered on top of a minimal universal ling wage sounds good to me.
I agree that the universal living wage is problematic because it sends out a signal of "You don't have to work" in a world where clearly work still needs to be done.
There are alternatives, though, such as the Employer of Last Resort or Job Guarantee style concepts. They recognize that what we are actually seeing is that there is a lot of useful work that could/should be done outside of the purely economic sphere, but this work isn't being done because the people who would benefit the most from it cannot afford it. Hence the idea to just offer everybody a job at a fixed wage (this wage would be similar to a minimum wage), paid for by government and organized by local communities, non-profits, etc.
Obviously, the devil's in the details, but the idea deserves similar visibility as the universal living wage because it essentially solves the same problem, but possibly in a better way and without destroying the social contract surrounding work.
The economists that advocate such a program typically say yes.
After all, the basic idea is that it would be an offer to those who are both able and willing to work. If you don't show up to work, then clearly that's pretty good evidence that you're not actually willing, hence you can be fired.
(If you are unable to work, then some other social safety net should catch you. If you are able but unwilling to work, well, opinions differ on how much society owes you in that case, and clearly this is one of the uncomfortable but important distinctions between ULW and ELR/JG...)
I don't know, it sounds too communistic-utopian. While communism is not a bad thing, and utopias are theoretically a great idea, humans thrive on opportunity and individualism. The world isn't a fair place by nature. Attempting to equalize everyone's talents and source of income, and not allowing them to be rewarded for whatever they pursue seems to cause less incentive for education.
Give the average Joe two choices: He can sit at home, make a decent $70,000 every year while he can comfortably watch TV, golf, and do many things that require little mental facility. Give him another option, where he gets the same income, but he has to study, become skilled at a craft, progress intellectually, and be an accomplished man.
"golf, and do many things that require little mental facility"
Does golf really require that little mental facility? Would Tiger Woods agree with you?
People are extremely unpredictable in what they do with their leisure time. Over 10 years of working to encourage and develop amateur creators in the film world has left me with the conviction that we simply don't know what would happen if 100% of a Western country's people didn't need to work to survive any more.
We'd almost certainly hit a sudden epidemic of depression, to start with. Tim Ferriss' book "The Four Hour Work Week" has a fascinating section on surviving the transition to not having to work any more - it's harder than you'd think.
But subsequently? A surprising amount of popular activities in leisure time right now are actually very mentally engaging. Both watching and playing sports are actually reasonably mentally engaged activities for a lot of people - try memorising half the statistics that the average baseball fan has at his fingertips and see how far you get. The most popular drama television is getting more complex and sophisticated, not less. And of course games are actively mentally engaging, and increasingly creative - Minecraft's the biggest gaming sensation since World of Warcraft.
The fact that the two biggest gaming sensations of the last decade are ones in which the primary activities are a) working with groups of up to 40 other people to complete complex, challenging, multifaceted choreographed tasks and b) building massive structures up to and including 1-1 replicas of goddamn cathedrals does not lead me to believe that most of the population doesn't like to use their brain.
Add to that the fact that there's actually a startlingly large number of amateur musicians, painters, writers, bloggers, artisans, chefs and similar pursuits out there. Here's a link - http://www.amateurorchestras.org.uk/ - to a list of the 1,121 amateur ORCHESTRAS in the UK, for example.
You might see a very interesting world develop after about 10 years.
This is completely irrelevant to whether or not the structure of our society is or should be fair.
> Give the average Joe two choices: He can sit at home, make a decent $70,000 every year while he can comfortably watch TV, golf, and do many things that require little mental facility. Give him another option, where he gets the same income, but he has to study, become skilled at a craft, progress intellectually, and be an accomplished man.
Ought we to strictly forbid inheritance, then? And if so... what do we instead do with all the money?
First, I don't think people advocating a guaranteed minimum income are talking about setting it anywhere near $70,000. The choice would be more like--here's $25k a year to cover the basics. Now you're free to work part time, or start your own business to earn extra, and if you want to make $70k you're probably going to need to work full time.
Second, we already try to ensure a guaranteed minimum income, but in an indirect way. Instead of giving people money directly, we force employers to do it through minimum wage laws, and other regulations.
- Without the need to be forced through employment-preparation school, rather than study what takes their fancy and learn at a natural speed,
- without the need to pick a higher education on the basis of practicalities like earning potential,
- without the burden of a day job and the constant distraction of making ends meet,
... this would not be a society of couch potatoes. It would be a society of vocations and learning. In school did you really want to be a concert pianist, but had to settle for grinding out C# in a bank? In this society you'd get to be a concert pianist.
A couch potato is what you get if you sap someone's energy and available time with a 9-to-5 and then offer them broadcast entertainment produced by a small class of specialists.
Idea is that you don't loose your universal wage for any reason. So in you scenario you can get 70k if you do nothing or 70k plus what you are worth on the job market of companies that sell to consumers that all have at least 70k at their disposal.
If humans only need enough productive labor to engage 10% of the population, who cares if only the 10% (to use your number) that are engaged by "being productive" are productive?
A social safety net improves the lives of everyone because of lower crime and a generally more civil society.
The trick will be to provide life long educational and vocational resources. Hopefully almost everyone would want to produce extra value for society and improve their own material life style. There would still be room for very capable people to be "rich" and generally rewarded for skills and hard work.
So, a pure meritocracy with rewards layered on top of a minimal universal ling wage sounds good to me.