So this seems like a better point to discuss, as well as whether a UBI will eventually provide a solution.
I look at the economy and I see statistics with job growth mostly in low-paid, part-time, service jobs, and stagnant wage growth for most workers. I look at myself, unemployed for most of the period since college and even now being subsidized by my mother. I look at my mother, and see how she makes a decent income but works well over forty hours a week. And I look at my father, my brother, and the kind of job that I'm trying to get after grad school: starting salaries that are at least in the high five figures, great benefits, and jobs that involve working forty hours and going home.
My father and brother have jobs in the emerging Quaternary Sector of the economy. Historically, when the Secondary Sector (manufacturing) replaced the Primary Sector (farming) and currently with the Tertiary Sector (services) replacing the Secondary Sector, the new sector has long hours and shit wages. The Secondary Sector ultimately ended up with reasonable hours and good wages, but I don't think that we will see the same thing with the Tertiary Sector. The reason is the aforementioned Quaternary Sector.
The goal of the Quaternary Sector is to increase productivity. Increased productivity means fewer people can do the same low-skilled work. Now if everybody could just switch to the Quaternary Sector, there would be no problem; we'd see a shift to the Quaternary sector and enjoy the benefits of ever-increasing productivity. But I'm not convinced that everybody is capable of becoming part of the Quaternary sector. Based on my experience with undergrads in the University (the best and the brightest in the state, mind you) I'm convinced that some people just don't have the right mental framework to solve even relatively simple problems, much less come up with creative solutions to complex ones.
So the Quaternary sector is going to continue to decrease the demand not just for "low-skilled" labor, but for most labor that doesn't involve creative and on-the-spot thinking, even for "skilled" jobs. We're already seeing this in computer science, where creative work continues to pay well, but an influx of people with some programming skill has depressed the wages of "mere" programmers.
Now, to my mind, the ideal solution would be to reduce the number of hours people work in tandem with the rise of productivity. But that is not going to happen, because even if the average person doesn't see a benefit to the rise in productivity, the investing classes do. Not only are they not going to pay two people the wages of one to work twenty hours a week; they don't like to pay two people the wages of two, and increasingly try to find people who can do the work of two people on the wages of one. (My mother had this experience at her old company, I did at my job in Turkey, and I know several TCSers have dealt with that long term.) This is for somewhat skilled jobs. In unskilled jobs--where benefits are one of the most expensive things about full-time employees--they hire three people to do the job of two part time and with no benefits.
Meanwhile, companies are getting pickier about who they employ. I was employed for 14 months out of the five years after I graduated. I looked up employment statistics for adults with autism, and something like 75% were neither in work nor college three years after graduation. Most adults with autism I know have either never worked, or worked only part-time service jobs briefly before getting fired because autism and customer service are not a good mix. Avi is the only adult with autism I know who has done well in this regard, and he sensibly decided to join the Quaternary Sector, where problem-solving skills are vital and social skills are almost superflous. That is now what I'm trying to do too.
But other people, with problems like ADHD, schizophrenia, or just plain old depression and anxiety, are also finding it increasingly difficult to hold down a job and don't have the Quaternary sector as a possibility. I certainly know of several people on TCS in this category. As demand for labor goes down and companies get pickier, I imagine that the pool of unemployed will only increase.
The unemployed end up subsidized either by family, the government, or both. So too do a lot of people working part-time service jobs on wages inadequate to support themselves independently. I imagine that the cost of subsidizing both unemployed and underemployed will only go up, as productivity increases and labor (other than certain in-demand specializations) becomes increasingly cheap.
So this brings me to the idea of the Universal Basic Income. I remember being shocked the first time I heard it, because I heard it from a Libertarian, and it seems at first glance like the most un-Libertarian thing in the world. However it actually makes sense from a Libertarian perspective: you do away with the bureaucracy which provides social services and just give everyone a lump sum. Assuming that the cost of subsidizing the unemployed and underemployed increases, this will look increasingly attractive.
And yet I still imagine it will be a hard sell. Not for practical reasons (though I don't think it's practical now, I believe it eventually will be), but for moral reasons. It involves A. giving everybody money and B. saying nobody has to work. While many countries have equivalents of the Earned Income Credit, you have to work to get it, the amount of money you actually get is quite small (I got three hundred dollars last year as a result of the EIC), and it applies only to people who aren't making much money.
So I guess the questions I have for y'all are:
- How realistic is my view of the future economy?
- Will a UBI be economically viable in the future?
- Would it be possible to sell it, assuming a slow decline of employment figures and wages rather than a sudden crisis?
- What do you think of the idea?