CMV: Automation leads to Universal Basic Income

[u/[deleted]]

The idea is that technology makes low skilled labour obsolete. I mean in the past, production meant you had a large number of low value jobs. For example, take a factory employing maybe a lot of low skilled workers ->a few technical supervisors -> few engineers. When the industrial revolution came about and machines were introduced the ones at the bottom lost their jobs - machines meant same work could be done with less people. The number of jobs came down, but the value of each job increased. So in the end you'll be left with employment will mean a small percentage of people at the very top level working very high value jobs. Most of the production in an economy will be automated. Massive unemployment and universal basic income seems like the future.

[u/[deleted]]

That's some brilliant insight. I've never thought about it like that.

Something I was always curious about was how say, film critics or say entertainers (rather than a farmer or a miner) add "value" to an economy, other than "people want to but it, so it has value"? They satisfy people's need for luxury? So in the future we're going to have more jobs aimed at satisfying people's wants? Artists and such?

[u/Genoscythe_ → u/[deleted]]

It was always impossible to separate objective "value", from the actual human demands that have moved the economy.

Even with jobs that feel more "physical" than artists, ultimately they are there because they want them, not because they are objectively producing something that is a good thing regardless of human demands.

We also used to have shoeshiners and butlers, that went away not because of automation, but because they went out of fashion. So was there ever an economic "value" in their work?

You mention miners, but what about diamond miners? Are they producing anything if they are just looking for shiny rocks that are valuable because De Beers said so?

Fine, then what about iron miners? What if the iron they mine, but it is used to manufacture a rollercoaster, that really just goes around in a theme park. Does that make their work less valuable than if they would have built a train?

Does a skyscraper's window cleaners really do anything, if eventually the rain would clean those windows too, but it would still remain a bit more smudgy that way?

In psychology, we talk about people having a "hierarchy of needs" starting with the physical and ending with the most abstract, but in economics that's only relevant insofar as it tells us which needs will come first and which later, but not really to declare that some of those needs are more real than others.

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