His recommendations seem ridiculous. Why force employment when it offers no real return except keeping an anachronistic standard of 40 hr/week employment?
For the same reason we in America force people to buy private health insurance rather than having a national health service, which all the evidence suggests would be both more cost-effective and provide an overall better quality of service: it allows The System to adapt to changing times without anybody having to admit that anything has actually changed.
People fear change -- a lot. So proposals that start with "first, admit that sweeping change is necessary" tend to get less support than do those that let the old forms be preserved, even if they've become completely meaningless.
A centralized system could (on paper) be cheaper, but I don't trust the federal government not to screw it up. I'm not even saying I like the current system - or the pre-ACA system either - but I am not convinced that our government is corruption-free enough to be any good at handling that much money.
Is the US government so much worse than governments of other countries which have nationalized healthcare? Why would you trust them to run the biggest military in the world, including a large military healthcare system, if they are that incompetent?
> we in America force people to buy private health insurance rather than having a national health service, which all the evidence suggests would be both more cost-effective and provide an overall better quality
You lost me at the 'evidence suggests' but. Cost effectiveness of the private system has been clearly debunked. Quality is questionable too but harder to measure comprehensively, and I know in some areas is good.
I agree -
He is right that robots will take over jobs, but it is ridiculous to suggest that we should go backwards and beg employers to choose humans over robots. Instead, automation will bring about a new standard of wealth and living - people won't have to focus on the "boring" jobs anymore. This has already happened with farming - the US used to be 50 percent farmers, now it is less than 2 percent. With enough automation, food and housing could be "free" - at least for the basic standard of living (I'm not preaching communism). The real problem will be how to control population growth once food and housing are taken for granted. At least, thats the only feasible solution I see moving forward, I have no idea how else you would cater to "unskilled" workers without moving backwards.
I am likewise confused by this, I would think that something like universal income would be the logical response to this but removing minimum wage just seems like a way for the poor to get poorer and the rich to get richer. I'm just a developer so I don't know if removing the minimum wage would be good for the economy in fact IIRC raising the minimum wage helps the economy (Again I am not an economist). Could someone smarter in these areas expand on this?
I'd argue that - to some extent - "work" in the traditional, contemporary sense is good for people.
Now it's 4:30 EST so maybe I'll get downvoted for this, but I do think the idea of getting up at a prescribed time and doing a prescribed thing ostensibly for the benefit of something helps keep us satiated in some odd aspect of humanity.
What I feel like will happen is the very nature of work will change - obviously it will be a long time before robots can self-innovate, so we'll have some period wherein it will still be our responsibility to think "next step" (even if we're not thinking it).
The problem, of course, is not everyone is qualified to contribute to that end - what happens to those people in the relatively short timespan I can't say. They won't be in a position to enjoy some sort of universal acceptance of leisure as the way we spend our time.
>"Why force employment when it offers no real return "
That's a reductionist [1] way to look at it. But I believe the bottom line is that a high unemployment rate is harmful to everyone and hence there is an incentive to try to avoid that situation. A high unemployment rate decreases the sales, it would impact negatively the prices (hurting the middle class) and even the rich 1% of the population would prefer to have more people with money that buy goods.
His recommendations are not a solution either since the big government model is not sustainable (and I would argue that communist regimes are an example of that).
There is an open question about if anybody can be trained to execute properly any task (i.e to write programs) but in any case the low income jobs are going to require more skills for sure. I suspect that software development is going to the low wage job of tomorrow.
