If automation is really more efficient than employing workers, than letting firms automate instead of employing workers, taxing the firms, and providing goods to the non-workers with the taxes will actually be more efficient than any form of make-work labor-based economy.
> Those workers? They need to work.
They don't need jobs, they need goods and services. To the extent that their labor is an efficient method of production, its socially useful for them to work to get it. To the extent that it is not, however, it is socially costly to require them to do make-work to get it.
That math works fine, as we can verify by looking at the numerous prior societies that successfully did this. It's easy to overlook them, because they didn't call their workers "robots". They called them "slaves" or "serfs".
No money is going away. Say I have a factory today, and I have to pay x workers $7/hr. If my factory is big, that's a lot of money.
Now if I replace them all with robots, aside from the upfront and maintenance costs, I don't pay anybody anything. Now, a lot of people are going to say that the owner deserves to pocket the difference because he was innovative or reduced costs or whatever. But either way, notice the factory still makes the same amount of money. It just doesn't have to pay workers anymore.
So now we have a political debate, and you get all these people saying that those workers should just find a new job, and if they don't have the skills they're just lazy, don't deserve handouts, etc. I think it's sad that people think this way, but I'm not going to try to argue it because it's pointless. But if this side wins out, you'll find in the future that our country looks very 3rd world. A large wealth divide, lots of crime, little opportunity for advancement if you're not already wealthy.
So how do you stop that from happening? Well, the factory owner probably deserves something for being innovative, sure. But the people that lost their jobs do too. If we get to the point where the population is a lot larger than the job pool, you basically get to pick basic income or 3rd world. There's really no other option.
You can deny this all you want now - go ahead. If you want to do this, I'm not going to pretend I can convince you otherwise.
One more thing though - people have jobs today not because they inherently need them, it's because some entrepreneur needs to hire people to get things done. No business person wants to spend money to hire someone they don't have to, so if we get to the point where most jobs can be automated, then we have a mostly unemployed society. We can decide how we want to handle that, but we can't really stop it from happening.
>> No business person wants to spend money to hire someone they don't have to
This.
Every time I hear an organization brag about how many jobs they "create" I can't help but think about how much of an oxymoron that is. Any half-decent business owner wants to get a specific job done at the lowest cost possible -- if it can be done equally well themselves without paying anybody for anything, thats the best possible scenario. Bragging about creating jobs is basically bragging that your costs of production have gotten higher.
- Did the factory owner build these labor saving machines?
- Did the factory owner design the circuit boards or software powering these machines?
Wage Workers designed and built these machines. The factory owner has a certain skill set. These include administration, accounting, marketing, perhaps economics. But these skills are certainly no more difficult to acquire than those of an engineer or doctor.
The only reason an owner is able to extract so much wealth from his workers is the exploitation of private, productive property. He owns the factory, therefore he owns everything produced in that factory. This is the logic, and I believe we should oppose it.
>> To me, this sounds like a good case for a basic income guarantee
>Where will the money come from? The math doesn't work.
I'm assuming the OP is funding basic income from the businesses since they are replacing the human labor with automation. This could be a direct tax on businesses or a tax on dividends or something. I'm not arguing for or against this here.
The math does in fact work out if the cost of basic income is less than the productivity increase created by the increased automation.
> I'm assuming the OP is funding basic income from the businesses since they are replacing the human labor with automation.
Then he needs to do some math. There are just under 300 million people in the United States, for instance. He doesn't have to give all of them an income. Just tell me which demographic slice, and how much they're being given.
Either it's not "universal", or it's so low it's not income.
> This could be a direct tax on businesses or a tax on dividends or something.
Businesses would be asked to shoulder even more of the national revenue at that point. Unless you're suggesting that your $12,000/year universal income should be pissed away right back to the IRS... at which point it's not enough to survive on.
So they're shouldering all of burden of what used to be personal income tax, extra on top of it, and somehow will still have the money to buy the robots that will make it all happen?
The math just doesn't work.
> The math does in fact work out if the cost of basic income is less than the productivity increase created by the increased automation.
How do you intend to extract that extra revenue? Besides, this illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how it will all play out.
The increased productivity will happen simultaneously with a reduced demand (no one can afford to buy the products). We'll get all sorts of fluctuations, but eventually the robot owners realize that they don't need to sell things to remain wealthy. The robots are the perfect slave, and they turn raw materials (which the wealthy own) directly into luxury products. Why sell something for cash, to turn around and use the cash to buy luxury products that you can just have made to order?
This even avoids all sorts of taxes. If you have no income, there is no income tax.
A better way to envision this is to think "soon, the important and rich people won't need you at all". Well, maybe not the audience here at HN, I imagine there are lots of robot software types reading my comment. You guys have a few more decades, I think.
All this is based on the fact the the effectiveness of automation at a given price point is growing.
If I replace 100 employees with a machine that has a TCO of $100k yr and I was paying them each $30k. I am $2900k ahead, should the government require I supply $15k basic income for 30 people I would still be $1640k ahead, not to mention less overhead for HR, recruiting etc.
The real trick is in distributing this burden so the businesses benefiting from the automation are paying it.
The main problem is that a lot of the middle income jobs will disappear or be replaced with low income jobs that won't pay a living wage. At the same time need for highly skilled people will increase and therefore pay for the highly skilled will increase.
The Nordic system falls apart in this situation. The unemployed do not have an incentive to work in a low paying job, if welfare pays the same.
A system where everyone is guaranteed a basic goverment income that isn't affected by your other income incentivises work and produces a more productive system overall.
> Where will the money come from? The math doesn't work.
This is of course a ridiculous argument when the parameters of the discussion haven't even been established.
For example, we could get rid of all our social services and use the outlays and administrative costs on a basic income (minus the administrative costs of the basic income itself). That might not be a good idea for various reasons, but there's no law of mathematics preventing it.
But quite a bit of that was paid for through personal income tax. So you're not saving anything there... it will be money you no longer have to pay for universal income with.
When you do the numbers, no matter what you cut, there's not enough to go around. You either make it not universal (in which case what little political support there is evaporates) or you make it so low that it's not enough for someone to live in a cardboard box eating Chinese-melamine-poisoned dogfood.
The math doesn't work. Your taxbase is eroding at a faster rate than your employment.
To make a basic income work you need to change what you are taxing. If the premise is that work is no longer necessary, it no longer makes sense to have a tax system that taxes primarily labor income (both as "income tax" and then again to provide benefits in the form of "payroll tax") most heavily and gives preferential lower rates (as "income tax", and excludes entirely from taxation to support major benefit programs) to capital income. You have to shift your revenue base to focus on taxes on capital income as the primary source of revenue (especially if, in addition to funding basic income, you also want to slow the transition away from employment-as-a-norm -- heavily taxing employment encourages that transition by making employing people expensive for what the employee receives.)
The current tax system is based on the premise of employment-as-a-near-universal norm as much as any other feature of society is.
Currently, the total wealth of the US is somewhere around $100 Trillion. If we abandoned income tax for wealth tax (say 10% flat tax), everyone would get a check for ~$30,000 to ~$35,000, a year (2014). This would stimulate GDP growth and thereby increase future national wealth.
The challenge, of course, would be the logistics of taxing wealth over income. But, we'd be reducing the operational cost and size of government significantly, so we could afford the additional logistical costs.
The math doesn't work at the moment, but if robots take over the jobs, we'll have the same amount of production, it just won't be people doing them. So if you fund basic income with a tax on the corporations doing that production, and give the money to the people who would have been doing the work, we'd have about the same overall balance of payments as now.
That assumes the robots don't cost a significant fraction of what employees did, but long-term I think that's a good assumption, and shorter-term it just means the people will make less than they did as employees.
> we'll have the same amount of production, it just won't be people doing them. So if you fund basic income with a tax on the corporations doing that production
Those corporations will have less revenue. There won't be many blue-collar types buying new clothes dryers and bigscreen televisions. They can reduce prices to try to increase demand, but there on the wrong side of some sort of reverse Laffer curve.
Where will the money come from? The math doesn't work.
> If we don't need people to work,
This is at the heart of the confusion. There is no "we". Other people do not need the workers. Those workers? They need to work.