This is The Big One, the most important economic problem the world will face this century. Apparently we have passed the point where technological progress creates more jobs than it destroys. Every year the machines get better, and every year they take more human jobs. A class of desperate unemployables will grow and grow. The work-for-pay model isn’t going to work any more. What can be done? Universal Basic Income?
Y’know, you don’t have to squint all that hard to see this situation as a fulfillment of some of Marx’ predictions – increasing capital efficiency, resultant growth of an unemployed “industrial reserve army,” etc. Whether it leads to revolution is another question.
There’s a certain element in our society/government who just wishes all those inconvenient “desperate unemployables” would just go away and would happily leave them to starve and die in the margins of the world. I think we need to keep this mind as a real faction of society when designing whatever solution we eventually come up with. These are the same people who feel that by punishing the poor and making life more difficult you will somehow induce them to no longer be poor. The only time that has any chance of working at all is when there actually is a route out of poverty.
UBI is appealing but there is the problem of how do we pay for it?
If we have to have some work in peoples’ lives (if only to get buy-in for the rest of the program) maybe we could go to a standard 20 hour week or 10 hour week. Unfortunately, that won’t work in the US at present because you have to be “full time”, that is usually defined as 35-40 hours a week, to get things like health coverage (and even that might be crappy). If we had universal health coverage like a civilized country that might be more doable. Maybe a step-down of hours as a transition - moving first to 30-35 hours a week as full time, then 25-30, and so on until we reach whatever destination we have in mind.
Maybe revive the Works Progress Administration or expand the Jobs Corps with the aim to improve infrastructure (like Trump once claimed to care about). Drop the cap on Social Security withholding (or add a pro-rated withholding) for at least some of the funding.
People working on, let’s say, effective commercial fusion power plants do not have a master plan of getting all coal miners fired and turning them into “desperate unemployables”. The fact is, the mere fact of having a dangerous/crappy/unfulfilling job right now is no route out of poverty, and we can’t simply blame that on “technology”. Technology and industry is actually supposed to make it easier for everybody to have enough food, affordable clothing, better health, and more free time.
Your premise is flawed. Pre-pandemic, we had more jobs than we’d ever had, with median household income higher than it had ever been.
We can still debate the topic as a future hypothetical, if you like.