Yes, but why school in particular? I learned far less when in school than when not in school, as in school I had too much busy work to have time to learn anything.
School gets you that piece of paper that employers tell you that you need in order to apply for a job, but it is not the only way to improve yourself or your value to the community.
I mean, that’s what a whole lot of people do, and then they get that piece of paper that says that they are better than the people who spent those 4 years working, even if they actually know less.
Would you say that someone that makes money off of collecting stock dividends is a parasite? You really like that word, but you only want to apply it to the people that you feel are “undeserving”, rather than many people who take far more from society, give far less, and are lauded for it.
I’m honestly not sure what your point is with just plonking down that graph.
Right now, sure, there’s lots of job openings, but that’s not always the case. Even in “normal” times, much less in a recession, there are generally more job seekers than jobs available to them.
Sometimes, sure, there are jobs available to someone, if they are able to move halfway across the country to where they are available. Even if someone is willing to leave everything, their family, friends and everything else behind, they often can’t afford it. Rather than a UBI, are you willing to fund relocation costs to get people to where the jobs are?
Also, a whole lot of those jobs are open specifically because they are in places where people who would work those jobs can’t afford to live. I’m sure that a restaurant in New York or LA needs a new busser or dishwasher, but there is no home within a 3 hour drive that that busser or dishwasher can afford to live in. Are you willing to pay for housing subsidies so that people can live in the places these jobs are available?
Point being, your graph has no context, and proves no point whatsoever, and certainly does not refute my point that automation is eliminating whole swaths of unskilled work, leaving unskilled workers with fewer jobs to do.
He or she may be a parasite, or maybe not. There are also employees in various firms who are definitely oxygen thieves whom society would be much better off paying to sit at home and drink beer on the couch, just so long as they do not continue to come into work and pessimize things, and they don’t want to be there anyway, parasites even though they draw a respectable salary.
It does not seem to go by wealth or income (or the lack of income). The problem is, would you, or could you or should you, be able to make such judgements?
Personally, I don’t want to make such judgements, and I don’t really trust others to do so either, which is why I’m for a UBI. I judge any human to be worthy of a dignified existence.
If someone wants to subject themselves to further judgement as to their worth in the “free market” to increase their quality of life beyond that, then I welcome those efforts.
There are issues with a UBI, for sure, that need to be worked out, but what I don’t understand is the argument that comes from, “What if everyone decided to live on the UBI and not work, how would society survive?”
And I always wonder if they are saying that, if given the chance, they would sit in a 8x6 room all day, eat nothing but beancurd and algae paste, and have access to 25 year old games and movies. If so, then I’m offering them their dream come true. If not, then why do they think that many others, much less everyone would?
Of course not. But I also wouldn’t let them free ride. Everyone should pull their own weight to the best of their ability. No one should get to go through life opting not to work while lobbying the government to force others to work more to provide for them.
Economics is the study of the allocation of goods under conditions of scarcity. Scarcity means we have to productively work for what we get, or other people will be forced to work for us.
You can make a case for collective work, I suppose. Communism at least recognizes that everyone work together.
But you cannot make a moral case for being born into a world where others must work to provide for your needs, while you refuse to work for yourself.
The amount that would be provided would be very minimal, and not cost the taxpayers much at all.
There are a whole lot of jobs out there that don’t put food on the table or widgets on the shelf. Strangely, these jobs often pay more than those who do work in producing the goods and services that you consume.
If people are not forced to get one of the jobs that are made available to them in order to survive, then they may well find other ways of enriching our community that are far superior than washing dishes.
Tell me, would you sit in a 6x8 room all day, and eat protein paste. You’d have access to the internet, but none of the premium content. Advertised content would also be minimal, as there is little point in advertising to you. Would you be content with such a life?
So, maybe you make a webcomic that a dozen people enjoy. That’s not something that makes a living, but you bring utility to those dozen people who are willing to pay enough to let you occasionally splurge on watching a new movie or . Or you play guitar at a local busking joint, picking up tips. Judging whether someone is worthy of existing based on how well they interact with for capitalism is a poor way of measuring worth, IMHO.
Or, you have two people. Both go to school, both work hard, and one ends up making millions as a CEO, and the other goes bankrupt. They both put in the same effort, it’s just that the former was lucky, and the latter was not.
Capitalism doesn’t reward people on their efforts, only on the results of those efforts, and those results are influenced by luck far more than the “successful” are willing to admit.
You might not be sure but I’m pretty sure everyone else has figured out that it and it’s friends are the sorts of data sets that one typically checks to avoid to making the ludicrously incorrect assertion that there isn’t enough work for people to do. Not only were nonfarm payrolls higher last month than all but 5 of the past 1000 months, but the unemployment rate is unusually low, whether we look at the headline rate or if we include the marginally attached, part time for economic reasons, etc. (e.g. U-6), and the number of job openings per unemployed is higher than has ever been measured. None of this is a big secret; it’s all right there, every month, at BLS dot gov.
One of these “points” is not like the one I responded to. We are not getting to the point where there isn’t enough work for people to do. It isn’t true and you don’t have the data to support it.
Sam’s criterion seems totally production, not consumption. So the rich person who does nothing but booze all day is exactly equivalent to the one who gives away her money. It also seems that a person who is laid off and is now collecting unemployment is a parasite at the moment, the same as someone who never worked.
It’s a fatally flawed metric, but that’s hardly surprising.
Ah, but that’s not what I said. I said, with continuing advances in automation, we are getting to the point where there isn’t enough work to do. That’s not a statement about the past, or even about the present, but about the future.
And I also specifically spoke of the current labor shortage as being an exception to the overall trend.
I honestly don’t know what it is that you are saying is untrue here. Is automation not eliminating whole swaths of unskilled work?
It’s hard enough to make a living wage off of unskilled work, and that’s when you can find a job at all. Outside the current, and probably temporary, labor shortages, there is not enough demand for unskilled work for many to make a living wage out of it.
Interestingly, much of the low hanging fruit of skilled work is being taken over by computers, too.
There will always be stuff to be done, and people will always find ways to get that stuff done, but when it comes to jobs of producing widgets and farming food, those jobs are steadily declining. I think it better to allow people to find ways of contributing to society on their own than to force them to take whatever mind numbing job at whatever pay is available in order to not starve.
Could you better sum up your objection to my statement, because based on the responses you have given, I have the feeling that you have wildly misunderstood it.
Childcare is expensive, so is transportation, so is eating outside the home. For many people, the effort of working is not free.
So I do wonder at those who are entirely against the very notion of a UBI if they would rather pay for childcare and public transport, so that a person can go to a job that pays less than those would cost them?
Absolutely. And I wonder if a stay-at-home parent is considered a parasite in Sam’s world.
Before we had our first kid, just after I finished grad school and had a good job, we did this calculation and figured out that if my wife worked her salary would be small enough after all these expenses that it wouldn’t pay. That wouldn’t work for everyone.
we are getting to the point where there isn’t enough [unskilled] work for [unskilled] people to do.
when you wrote
we are getting to the point where there isn’t enough work for people to do.
?
The latter is not true; that’s my objection. Your initial post that I responded to said nothing about skill. If you meant something other than what you wrote, kindly let us know. Because the trend since far before my lifetime is for more and more work. I don’t know if the corrected and still unsupported statement is true or not but it’s at least not obviously wrong and wouldn’t have even prompted me to respond.
Eh, I consider unskilled workers to be people, too. I didn’t say “we are getting to the point where there isn’t enough work for [any] people to do.”
My point was that there are currently people, and there will be more people, whose work is not needed.
And skilled work is going as well. How many accountants got laid off in the 80’s when a desktop running Lotus 1,2,3 could replace tens of people doing bookkeeping? That was low hanging fruit, but the trend continues. My CPA has laid off about a third of their accounts in the ten years I’ve been using them, while taking on more clients, not because they changed their practices, but because more and more of the small businesses that they work for have(It takes a lot less time to process a business’s return when it’s all in a quickbooks file you email them than on a bunch of bank statements and receipts.
Now, that’s not to say that unskilled workers can’t get the skills they need to find a job that is in demand, unskilled doesn’t mean stupid, it just means that they don’t have in demand skills. However, an unskilled worker is going to have a much harder time getting those skills if they are spending their time competing for a smaller and smaller pool of jobs that pay less and less. Even a skilled worker, finding their skills overlapping with automation and competing against a computer, may find themselves not being able to make a living wage with their skills, so giving a chance to gain new skills, or try something entirely different, makes sense.
I’d say my statement is more clarified than corrected, and if you had asked for clarification rather than plonking down a link with no context as to what your point was, then it would have been more clear on your part as to what the issue you were taking was.
And the graph that you put out does support my point. Do you see those dips around 2001, 2008 and the more recent one at the beginning of 2020? Those may look like innocent little dips in a graph, but I know people who lost their homes due to those dips. I was almost one of them (Though the dip in 2020 was weathered better by many. Why? Because the government gave them money directly, kinda like a UBI.). Those are times when there was not enough work for everyone who wanted to work, and I see absolutely no guarantee that those will not repeat, nor that they will not become extended indefinitely in the future.
Unskilled people are a subset of all people. There is no trend in this country suggesting that we are approaching a point where there won’t be enough work for people to do. Yes, some individuals will be mismatched by skill and geography. This has always been true and I suspect always will be true. It’s part of why 20% of the population used to move each year and why people learn skills.
Skilled work is not “going”. Individual jobs of any type “go” and new ones arrive. While demand for different types of jobs changes, it grows on average. For every position lost in the 80s, more than one was created. That’s why we had 40% more jobs in April than we did when the 80s ended.
We have had recessions and will have recessions. They have no bearing on the overall trajectory, and their existence does not mean “we are getting to the point where there isn’t enough work for people to do.” Job numbers have grown and are growing as the population and economy grow. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t help people who need help, but making an argument for that help should be based on sound arguments backed by data, not by the notion that we’re running out of work.
If that person inherited a factory and then layed about expecting others to runnit for him, I would be very critical. That person isn’t a parasite, because they have means to support themselves and do 't have to force others to do it. But they are squandering an inheritance which is a failing of a different sort.
Well, let’s get that on the table. What do you think is the correct amount of a UBI? Does the ‘universal’ mean every adult gets it? And how are you going to pay for it? With borrowed (printed) money? Do you get now that when you print money it acts as a tax on mostly the poor and lower classes through inflation?
Name one. Name a job that doesn’t produce anything of value but which pays more than one which does. I’m honestly curious as to what those might be. And presuming that someone is paying to have those jobs done, what is the value they get out of them?
It’s the ONLY way of measuring worth in the sense of productive activity. If your busker is not making enough to live, then someone is provid8ng that person a living. Perhaps they have to forego their own dreams because they have to work more now to afford the higher taxes, or because their purchasing power is declining because we are supporting buskers with printed money.
When there isn’t enough to go around, how do we decide who gets to follow their dreams and who has to work harder so that others may busk or make webcomics that do 't have an audience big enough to support them?
I think success is highly coordinated with hard work, and not so much with ‘luck’, while recognizing that some people are ndeed the victims of bad luck or the beneficiaries of good luck. That’s part of life.
But I am not against safety nets. People who physically or mentally cannot work f need to be supported. One of the things against a UBI is that in a world of limited resources, supporting the able-bodied-but-unwilling will necessarily cut into the amount of support.
How do you feel about your busker if his lifestyle requires a person with ALS to take a cut to their benefits?
It’s a fatally flawed strawman. You put words in my mouth I never said.
A rich person who does nothing all day but asks no one to support them is not a parasite. They may be lazy, greedy, selfish, or whatever, but they aren’t living off the work of others who don’t want to voluntarily provide it. An inheritance is different, as it reflects the wishes of the person who created the resources in the first place and who has a right to decide how it will be dispersed. I say this as someone who never received a nickel of inheritance money.
And a person who is laid off and actively seeking employment is not a parasite, even if they are collecting social assistance. To be clear - there is nothing wrong with accepting social assistance if you truly need it, but if you are on it your primary task should be to work to get off of it as soon as you can to the best of your ability.
Also, your ‘that’s hardly surprising’ remark seems remarkably like a backhanded personal shot in a forum where it doesn’t belong.
It was industrialization that removed whole swaths of unskilled labor. Automation is replacing skilled and semi-skilled labor as well as unskilled labor.
The majority of workers used to be involved in the production and distribution of food. Many of tyem were unskilled, living in remote areas with few job opportunities. Today, almost all those jobs are gone. And yet, the people managed to find new work under very challenging circumstances. Some started companies, some retrained, many moved off the farm in search of opportunity. Why? Because they HAD to. If they had been given permanent social assistance instead, some would have remained on dead farms and become the wards of the state. But desperation forced them to seek new lives, and ultimately they and the country were better off for it.
Things that are hard to automate do not correlate with salary. It’s possible that automation will soon replace diagnosticians, stenographers, graphics artists, and lots of other skilled jobs. There’s no chance automation will soon replace residential construction workers, road crews, cleaning staff, installers, and many other low skilled jobs.
Automation will also not replace most existing factory jobs, since they either are already automated or they are either too small, too poorly capitalized or too disorganized to automate, or they make bespoke items that are very hard to automate. I worked in this field and know what I’m talk8ng about. There is currently a massive shortage of factory workers, and the industry expects that trend to continue.
The effort of working is never free. That’s why it’s ‘work’, and why people have to pay you to do it. Opportunity cost must be paid for.
We have social programs to help those that are truly needy. A UBI is Universal, which means that the available resources are split between those who truly need it and those who don’t.
I am truly confused as where UBI proponents think the money is going to come from. The U.S. has run up against its borrowing and spending limits. Printing more money will just drive up inflation. Billionaires don’t have enough money to support this. How much do you think a UBI should be, and how do you think it should be paid for? Because it helps no one if you print money and hand it around. Actually, it helps asset owners. The poor people you are trying to help will get hammered.