What Are You Doing Right Now? (166 Viewers)
- Thread starter ßöмßäяðîëя
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I think people will always need to work to some extent. Someone has to oversee what machines are doing. The question is: how much will we need to work? And what will it mean in our society, will our work still define us the way it does today?
Also, and I think this is a very important point, a lot of people simply won't be able to work because they will not be skilled enough. And not only not skilled enough in the sense that they are not trained for the work, but also in the sense that they do not have the intelligence necessary to do the work.
The way I see it, there will still be more goods & services produced than ever before, it's just a question of how to distribute them (you could argue a model where production doesn't rise very significantly due to a dramatically falling demand due to huge unemployment and therefore no customer base with money to spend, but that's not the scenario I think is likely to occur, at least not in the long run).
Previously, it was distributed via the exchange of labor for money. If in the future however there's be far too little available employment opportunities (or, in the words of neo-classic economics, "natural unemployment" rises to extreme heights), a different system is needed. There could then of course be a few varietes of solutions, one of them being to simply reduce work time, let's say to 15-20 hours a week, spreading the labor hours over a broader amount of people. However, as you've said, it's unlikely that everyone will have sufficient qualifications to perform the work needed, making this option not very viable.
A second approach, one I would be in favour of, would be to establish something like an unconditional basic income, with everyone receiving a "basic" amount of money every month without having to work - keep in mind here that in this scenario technological improvements have increased output dramatically while reducing the need for labor, so the major threat I see to growth is actually too little a demand due to a poor unemployed mass. There would still be incentive to work however, be it simply for an increased amount of money and luxury, as well as other, non-monetary incentives. These actually get overlooked very often in economics, but are very important imo, even disregarding financial issues, unemployed people are seldomly happy being unemployed. It sounds a bit silly at first, but work also gives sense and purpose to many people's lives, and especially seeing as plenty of the unpopular, low-skilled jobs people hate will be gone, I don't really see the problem of a too high amount of people getting complacent.
Previously, it was distributed via the exchange of labor for money. If in the future however there's be far too little available employment opportunities (or, in the words of neo-classic economics, "natural unemployment" rises to extreme heights), a different system is needed. There could then of course be a few varietes of solutions, one of them being to simply reduce work time, let's say to 15-20 hours a week, spreading the labor hours over a broader amount of people. However, as you've said, it's unlikely that everyone will have sufficient qualifications to perform the work needed, making this option not very viable.
A second approach, one I would be in favour of, would be to establish something like an unconditional basic income, with everyone receiving a "basic" amount of money every month without having to work - keep in mind here that in this scenario technological improvements have increased output dramatically while reducing the need for labor, so the major threat I see to growth is actually too little a demand due to a poor unemployed mass. There would still be incentive to work however, be it simply for an increased amount of money and luxury, as well as other, non-monetary incentives. These actually get overlooked very often in economics, but are very important imo, even disregarding financial issues, unemployed people are seldomly happy being unemployed. It sounds a bit silly at first, but work also gives sense and purpose to many people's lives, and especially seeing as plenty of the unpopular, low-skilled jobs people hate will be gone, I don't really see the problem of a too high amount of people getting complacent.
