
Basically flawed - tomaskazemekas
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21699907-proponents-basic-income-underestimate-how-disruptive-it-would-be-basically-flawed?cid1=cust/ednew/t/bl/n/2016062n/owned/n/n/nwl/n/n/E/n
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mpbm
It seems like a lot of the people who understand technology agree that some
form of UBI, sooner or later, is a given. On the other hand, a lot of the
people who don't understand technology, disagree that it's a given.

I think it's a given because technology reduces the need for labor in that it
allows fewer people to provide for the same needs. If we continue to rely on
"work as the main mechanism which allocates spending power" we'll run into a
huge problem when only a few people are "working."

If we just plain don't need everybody to work in order to provide for
everybody's needs...then we'll need a way OTHER THAN work to distribute the
stuff everybody needs. We'll either invent activities that aren't actually
work (like Japan assigning people to open doors) or we'll give people what
they need without asking them to work for it.

People who grok technology seem to agree on this conclusion even if they don't
arrive at it in quite the same way.

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tzs
I have an alternative proposal that almost gets to a guaranteed basic income
(GBI) over time, but with less disruption along the way. I call it guaranteed
basic goods (GBG).

The idea is that instead of the government giving money directly to people
(GBI), the government pays to research, develop, and implement automation of
the production of goods. The goal for each given good is to set up a
production and distribution chain that has very little human involvement, and
is publicly owned, with the output being given away to the public.

So, over time, good by good, things move from the market economy, where you
have to have a source of money in order to get them, to the public economy,
where they are produced publicly and you have a share of the output. For
instance, take food. There are several crops now whose production is largely
automated, with planting, fertilizing, watering, harvesting, and packaging
done by machine. We are at most a couple of decades away from automating much
of the distribution from farm to city.

Within 30 years we could have publicly owned mostly automated production and
distribution of sufficient food crops so that every citizen's share would be
enough to live well from.

Aside from housing, I see no reason that we cannot, within 40 years, have a
sufficient variety of goods produced this way that those who wish to can live
comfortably entirely on their share of the publicly owned factory and farm
output.

There will still be tasks that cannot be automated (at least for a very long
time), and so there will be a path for those who want more than is provided by
the public output to earn money to buy those things only available in the
market economy.

The automation will happen, getting rid of large classes of jobs completely
and in many others making it so 1 human can do what formerly required dozens.
The number of jobs created designing and maintaining the machines won't be
anywhere near the number eliminated, so we are going to have to find some way
to cope with very large unemployment.

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bradcumbers
Extremely short-sighted article.

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known
Rothschild and
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority)
will definitely oppose UBI

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creshal
> WORK is […] is the main mechanism through which spending power is allocated.

Is it now.

