Universal Basic Income
- Thread starter Husky_Khan
- Start date
a) The people and jobs are not in the same place.
b) The jobs are not suitable for the people available.
bintananth
behind a desk
A hypothetical of this:
A small shipyard which specializes in wooden hulled sailboats located in, say, Port Angeles, WA (pop. ~19.5k) finds that one of their offerings just became very popular with recreational boaters. They need 1,000 skilled woodworks to fill the flood of orders they're getting.
A large cabinet/wood furniture factory in, say, Wheeling, WV (pop. 26.5k) goes bankrupt and leaves 1,000 woodworkers with no job.
They'd be perfect for each other but are 2,600mi apart. The shipyard could hire local carpenters (not enough to go around) while the factory workers could look for local carpentry jobs (not enough to go around) without too needing to do much retraining.
That mismatch will take awhile to work out if the shipyard and unemployed woodworkers know about each other, which they almost certainly don't.
Doomsought
Well-known member
Except the jobs that are having problems being filled are for fast food and similar openings for unskilled labor. Universal income scheme give people without skills the ability to think that they are too good for unskilled labor, even when they are really only good enough for unskilled labor.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
So during COVID, we had the "Great Resignation" of people quitting, but in reality all but the early-retiring boomers came back, what we really saw was a "Great Reshuffle" as people leveraged their position to move to better jobs.
Due to a lot of boomers retiring, a huge number of openings formed at the upper levels due to long-time experienced employees leaving the market. This in turn meant that the level below got promoted early, and then the level below them and so forth. This means a lot of the squeeze is on the lower-level jobs. Anecdotally every fast-food joint in my hometown is severely understaffed and hiring for all shifts and positions, but they're offering the same wages they did pre-COVID because corporate hasn't gotten around to realizing they're never going to fill those positions, the labor market has collectively all moved one step up the later and this is going to continue to keep happening as more and more boomers retire.
On other levels, the labor simply doesn't exist. The US is attempting to expand its manufacturing base but even if every single unemployed person who had any manufacturing experience immediately signed up tomorrow, it would fill only 44% of the vacancies in the manufacturing job market. This squeeze started long ago, people have not wanted to go into manufacturing in the US because they both perceived that robots would make a manufacturing career obsolete, and any jobs that were left after the robots would go to China making a career in manufacturing a complete waste of time. Result: The US has been running for a very long time with an empty pipeline of new industrial workers and they can't fill the desired job slots no matter what.
At the same time, there's too many workers for other areas. Due to mass retirement and insane zoning law snarlups, construction work is at an all-time low and there's a glut of unemployed construction workers. So we're seeing both mass unemployment and mass labor shortages, but they're not in the same industries at the same time.
We're also seeing a major shift in business, 91% of people who were able to work remotely during the pandemic want to keep working remotely now that it's a proven successful formula, where al to of businesses and bosses don't like this and want to go back to the way things were. Thirty percent of office workers say they will quit and seek new work if forced into the 9-5 office routine after working remotely. This is badly exacerbated by the fact that there are still some places with closed schools and daycare facilities, which means the only way parents are able to work is by telecommuting. This in turn contributes to the glut of construction workers as with offices permanently closed, there's too many buildings looking for a purpose already.
Understanding America’s Labor Shortage: The Most Impacted Industries
American businesses are creating hundreds of thousands of jobs each month, yet a significant number of positions still remain unfilled, especially in the professional and business service sector.
www.uschamber.com
In general, I expect we're going to see some gradual sea-changes in how business works. The cheapest jobs aren't going to be filled, the labor crunch is just going to keep getting worse over the next decade as more and more boomers retire, and the days of easy credit are going to vanish as the boomers pull their savings out. Any business model that relies on abundant credit and cheap labor is going to either automate or go out of business because those things have gone bye-bye for at least a decade. People are not going to keep tolerating being told to put on a suit and tie and commute an hour each way to sit at a desk and be berated by their pointy-haired boss when they know full well they can just log on at home, get the same work done, and spend twice as much time with their families.
Doomsought
Well-known member
The sole qualification for most manufacturing positions is showing up without being obviously intoxicated. Robots cannot realistically replace these people, because of the sheer amount of engineering time that is required to make the robots do things right. Ten people who are not obviously on drugs are more easy to find than one technician with the qualifications to handle the specific type of robot corporate decided to buy. I have seen this in action, where there was a pair of deactivated robots on a door assembly line because they never managed to get the robot to put the parts on without damaging the doors. Something billy joe bob can do, even though he does meth in his spare time.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Yeah, everything you just said is bullshit, seasoned with ranting that looks a lot like typical anti-white "antiracism" against rural people.
Manufacturing is specifically short on skilled trained workers, because industries do not pay well-above-average wages for people whose only qualification is "Not actively on meth during the job interview."
The Hardest Manufacturing Jobs to Fill & How to Find Skilled Workers
As the manufacturing skills gap widens, skilled production positions are increasingly difficult to fill. Take a look at these tips for hiring machinists, operators and technicians.
www.staffmanagement.com
Edit:
Might as well keep throwing down memes. Here's some I found on an anti-America bad leftist meme site.
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Typhonis
Well-known member
You also have the machines that need to be run. I spent ten years 1995-2005 running a CNC router before the plant shut down. You not only have to know how to run the thing, which buttons to push , when. But also clean the tables off when the machine was done and reload it plus inspect the parts to make sure they were right. Fun fact in wood working you are granted a 1/32 of an inch in leeway.
So you need to know math, read a tape measure convert fractions to decimals and other things. I was lock out-tag out qualified. Which means I knew how to safely shut down the machine. You do not want someone drunk or on drugs running one of those.
Fun story the safe speed of a machine head was 9000 rpm. A manager was watching a programmer and told them to up the speed to 14,000. He looked at the manager and the manager said do it. The programmer did so and inserted a bit with 8 diamond blades. He turned the machine on and ducked behind some cover. The head disintegrated. They managed to find 6 of the 8 heads and most fortunately no one was hurt.
So you need to know math, read a tape measure convert fractions to decimals and other things. I was lock out-tag out qualified. Which means I knew how to safely shut down the machine. You do not want someone drunk or on drugs running one of those.
Fun story the safe speed of a machine head was 9000 rpm. A manager was watching a programmer and told them to up the speed to 14,000. He looked at the manager and the manager said do it. The programmer did so and inserted a bit with 8 diamond blades. He turned the machine on and ducked behind some cover. The head disintegrated. They managed to find 6 of the 8 heads and most fortunately no one was hurt.
Wonder how many of these are located in democrat run cities with their housing market so bubbled up that anyone moving there to work a minimum wage job like that would have to be insane as they would need to pay extra to work a shitty job in a miserable place to live.
The US, and global, work force and economy are, in some fairly basic ways, being fundamental restructured right now/in the near future.
1) The world had the Boomers. They were the largest generation as a percentage of population in all of human history on a global scale. They were also the first generation to grow up/come of age in what we could call the "modern" world (cars, TV, airplanes, effective medicine, telephones, etc.).
2) The Boomers, globally, did not have kids. Their large size combined with a lack of children and technological advances resulted in an absurd oversupply of capital.
3) The Boomers oversupplied the work force, keeping wages low as it was an employers market.
4) The Boomers are retired/retiring and as they do so they remove the largest and most skilled worker cadre the world has ever seen from the work force and remove the largest pool of capital the world has ever seen from the markets. Their replacements are the people who are ~25 years old right now (Gen X's kids) and this is the smallest generation that the world has ever had entering the work force to replace the largest generation the world has ever had, it is also inexperienced workers replacing the most experienced workers we have ever had.
5) The worlds current economic model does not work moving forward. It is based on an ever larger consumption base to utilize the goods and services produced by the population. Consumption is almost purely a product of population numbers and, globally, the population (in the appropriate age brackets and with the needed money) simply does not exist. It doesn't matter how much one produces if no one is around to buy what you produce. You are also going to have more retired individuals (who are, economically speaking, a substantial drain on the economy) than ever before while simultaneously having a smaller working population (as a percentage of the total population) than ever before.
6) Globalization is necessary to support basically every nation on the planet in the style that they have become accustomed (the US is the biggest exception) and it is built on an artificial foundation that is crumbling as we speak.
7) AI, automation, and technological solutions to the myriad problems all share a core commonality; they are incredibly capital intensive. The US has the resource, knowledge, and infrastructure base to drastically re-order its entire economy to take advantage of the new technologies but that isn't something anyone else is able to do.
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The US has a number of problems that it will need to deal with over the coming two decades but, compared to what the rest of the world faces it is a cake walk.
Fundamentally, the US probably has to wait 5 to 8 years before the problems become obvious enough and the political will strong enough to start really resolving them. But once the US does start dealing with the problems it will be a transformation ever bit as radical as what we did with WW2/Cold War.
Like the US needs basically an entirely new, top to bottom, electrical grid. Doing a full scale replacement wouldn't be that expensive, difficult, or time consuming (relatively speaking) but it is also practically impossible until Congress decides that it is necessary and overrides state, local, and federal regulatory red tape/hurdles. Congress has the power, tomorrow, to create one federal body that has permitting and regulatory authority for energy transmission projects and entirely preempts ALL other permitting and regulatory authorities in this area. When the US starts facing rolling blackouts, Congress will exercise that power in a heart beat and a trillion plus dollars will be thrown into rebuilding the entire electrical grid utilizing current generation best practices and technologies. The end result will be a far superior energy grid but it won't happen until after the problem becomes massive.
1) The world had the Boomers. They were the largest generation as a percentage of population in all of human history on a global scale. They were also the first generation to grow up/come of age in what we could call the "modern" world (cars, TV, airplanes, effective medicine, telephones, etc.).
2) The Boomers, globally, did not have kids. Their large size combined with a lack of children and technological advances resulted in an absurd oversupply of capital.
3) The Boomers oversupplied the work force, keeping wages low as it was an employers market.
4) The Boomers are retired/retiring and as they do so they remove the largest and most skilled worker cadre the world has ever seen from the work force and remove the largest pool of capital the world has ever seen from the markets. Their replacements are the people who are ~25 years old right now (Gen X's kids) and this is the smallest generation that the world has ever had entering the work force to replace the largest generation the world has ever had, it is also inexperienced workers replacing the most experienced workers we have ever had.
5) The worlds current economic model does not work moving forward. It is based on an ever larger consumption base to utilize the goods and services produced by the population. Consumption is almost purely a product of population numbers and, globally, the population (in the appropriate age brackets and with the needed money) simply does not exist. It doesn't matter how much one produces if no one is around to buy what you produce. You are also going to have more retired individuals (who are, economically speaking, a substantial drain on the economy) than ever before while simultaneously having a smaller working population (as a percentage of the total population) than ever before.
6) Globalization is necessary to support basically every nation on the planet in the style that they have become accustomed (the US is the biggest exception) and it is built on an artificial foundation that is crumbling as we speak.
7) AI, automation, and technological solutions to the myriad problems all share a core commonality; they are incredibly capital intensive. The US has the resource, knowledge, and infrastructure base to drastically re-order its entire economy to take advantage of the new technologies but that isn't something anyone else is able to do.
---
The US has a number of problems that it will need to deal with over the coming two decades but, compared to what the rest of the world faces it is a cake walk.
Fundamentally, the US probably has to wait 5 to 8 years before the problems become obvious enough and the political will strong enough to start really resolving them. But once the US does start dealing with the problems it will be a transformation ever bit as radical as what we did with WW2/Cold War.
Like the US needs basically an entirely new, top to bottom, electrical grid. Doing a full scale replacement wouldn't be that expensive, difficult, or time consuming (relatively speaking) but it is also practically impossible until Congress decides that it is necessary and overrides state, local, and federal regulatory red tape/hurdles. Congress has the power, tomorrow, to create one federal body that has permitting and regulatory authority for energy transmission projects and entirely preempts ALL other permitting and regulatory authorities in this area. When the US starts facing rolling blackouts, Congress will exercise that power in a heart beat and a trillion plus dollars will be thrown into rebuilding the entire electrical grid utilizing current generation best practices and technologies. The end result will be a far superior energy grid but it won't happen until after the problem becomes massive.
Terthna
Professional Lurker
My guess is that, besides sheer stubborn resistance to change, the main reason business want their employees to come back to working in an office is that working remotely gives the employee more power over their relationship with their employers. It's much more difficult, for example, to pressure someone into doing extra work for free over the phone or through email than it is in person, in a place that the employer has total control over.So during COVID, we had the "Great Resignation" of people quitting, but in reality all but the early-retiring boomers came back, what we really saw was a "Great Reshuffle" as people leveraged their position to move to better jobs.
Due to a lot of boomers retiring, a huge number of openings formed at the upper levels due to long-time experienced employees leaving the market. This in turn meant that the level below got promoted early, and then the level below them and so forth. This means a lot of the squeeze is on the lower-level jobs. Anecdotally every fast-food joint in my hometown is severely understaffed and hiring for all shifts and positions, but they're offering the same wages they did pre-COVID because corporate hasn't gotten around to realizing they're never going to fill those positions, the labor market has collectively all moved one step up the later and this is going to continue to keep happening as more and more boomers retire.
On other levels, the labor simply doesn't exist. The US is attempting to expand its manufacturing base but even if every single unemployed person who had any manufacturing experience immediately signed up tomorrow, it would fill only 44% of the vacancies in the manufacturing job market. This squeeze started long ago, people have not wanted to go into manufacturing in the US because they both perceived that robots would make a manufacturing career obsolete, and any jobs that were left after the robots would go to China making a career in manufacturing a complete waste of time. Result: The US has been running for a very long time with an empty pipeline of new industrial workers and they can't fill the desired job slots no matter what.
At the same time, there's too many workers for other areas. Due to mass retirement and insane zoning law snarlups, construction work is at an all-time low and there's a glut of unemployed construction workers. So we're seeing both mass unemployment and mass labor shortages, but they're not in the same industries at the same time.
We're also seeing a major shift in business, 91% of people who were able to work remotely during the pandemic want to keep working remotely now that it's a proven successful formula, where al to of businesses and bosses don't like this and want to go back to the way things were. Thirty percent of office workers say they will quit and seek new work if forced into the 9-5 office routine after working remotely. This is badly exacerbated by the fact that there are still some places with closed schools and daycare facilities, which means the only way parents are able to work is by telecommuting. This in turn contributes to the glut of construction workers as with offices permanently closed, there's too many buildings looking for a purpose already.
Understanding America’s Labor Shortage: The Most Impacted Industries
American businesses are creating hundreds of thousands of jobs each month, yet a significant number of positions still remain unfilled, especially in the professional and business service sector.
In general, I expect we're going to see some gradual sea-changes in how business works. The cheapest jobs aren't going to be filled, the labor crunch is just going to keep getting worse over the next decade as more and more boomers retire, and the days of easy credit are going to vanish as the boomers pull their savings out. Any business model that relies on abundant credit and cheap labor is going to either automate or go out of business because those things have gone bye-bye for at least a decade. People are not going to keep tolerating being told to put on a suit and tie and commute an hour each way to sit at a desk and be berated by their pointy-haired boss when they know full well they can just log on at home, get the same work done, and spend twice as much time with their families.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
I would generally agree. My eldest sister was one of the "early retirement" boomers and from her own story, the bosses demanded everybody come back to the office because they were afraid if they quit leasing the office building, they wouldn't be able to lease another one later, and if they were already paying for the lease the bosses felt that was a waste unless they had people coming into the building to use the offices.
So yeah, a lot of stubborn resistance. Probably also a certain amount of ego involved in being able to see all those workers scurrying to their command, rather than just getting impersonal emails with all the work done but no other human being subservient.
I've also personally seen or heard a few middle managers expressing concerns that people working from home might have worked faster and gotten their work done early instead of working the full hours, which is kinda peak PHB behavior but sadly common.
Typhonis
Well-known member
You also have the 'Quiet Quitter' phenomenon that businesses in the US hate. This is where people will only work 9-5, hate having to do overtime and absolutely hate doing work for free. Arriving thirty minutes early, leaving an hour late hoping it gets you a promotion only to see someone from outside the company being given the job. I can see why it is popular.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Yes, the same behavior pattern is called Tang Ping in Asian countries. A lot of modern youth are rejecting the materialist outlook on the world and seeking to live more simply while rejecting all the methods the managerial class have used to extract unpaid work from them.
KilroywasNOTHere
"BEEP!"
Well I mean yeah, the corporate scumbags have shown unless you rub shoulders with the top brass you're going to get paid peanuts, and thanks to inflation and regulation short of a legally Grey hustle your social mobility is next to nill. So why bother? We are essentially living in an age of debt slavery except unlike the olden times our slavemasters feel no obligation to feed us well and give us high standards of living because thanks to automation and unfettered immigration, labor is cheap and replaceable. "You don't want to work for the pleasure of working for me, fine there are dozens of machines and cheap immigrants out there just waiting to replace you."
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The best counterargument I've heard against UBI comes from George Hotz, who was on the Lex Fridman podcast:
I find myself in agreement with Hotz that driving cost of living into the ground would probably be the best way to effectively help people. That said, the flip side of driving cost of living into the ground is making sure that people can get the money they need to survive.
If businesses either can't create enough jobs in a given area, pay enough money to make family generation sustainable, decentralize and go to where the workers are, and/or adapt to the workers' demands for remote/hybrid work, then UBI is probably going to happen anyway, because the other option is just letting people die.
Article: George Hotz(02:58:40) Oh well, I think charity is bad, right. So what is charity but investment that you don’t expect to have a return on? Right.
Lex Fridman(02:58:48) But you can also think of charity as you would like to see… So allocate resources in optimal way to make a better world.
George Hotz(02:59:00) And probably almost always, that involves starting a company, right, because-
Lex Fridman(02:59:04) More efficient,-
George Hotz(02:59:05) If you just take the money and you spend it on malaria nets, okay, great. You’ve made a hundred malaria nets. But if you teach-
Lex Fridman(02:59:13) A man, how to fish.
George Hotz(02:59:14) Right?
Lex Fridman(02:59:15) Yeah. No, but the problem is teaching amount how to fish might be harder. Starting a company might be harder than allocating money that you already have.
George Hotz(02:59:22) I like the flip side of effective altruism; effective accelerationism. I think accelerationism is the only thing that’s ever lifted people out of poverty. The fact that food is cheap. Not, “We’re giving food away because we are kindhearted people.” No, food is cheap. And that’s the world you want to live in. UBI, what a scary idea. What a scary idea. All your power now? If money is power, your only source of power is granted to you by the goodwill of the government. What a scary idea.
Lex Fridman(02:59:54) So you even think long term, even-
George Hotz(02:59:57) I’d rather die than need UBI to survive. And I mean it.
Lex Fridman(03:00:04) What if survival is basically guaranteed? What if our life becomes so good?
George Hotz(03:00:08) You can make survival guaranteed without UBI. What you have to do, is make housing and food dirt cheap. Right? And that’s the good world. And actually, let’s go into what we should really be making dirt cheap, which is energy. Right. That energy that… Oh my God, that’s…
(03:00:27) I’m pretty centrist politically. If there’s one political position I cannot stand, it’s deceleration. It’s people who believe we should use less energy. Not people who believe global warming is a problem, I agree with you. Not people who believe that the saving the environment is good, I agree with you. But people who think we should use less energy, that energy usage is a moral bad. No, no. You are asking, you are diminishing humanity.
Lex Fridman(03:00:54) Yeah. Energy is flourishing. Creative flourishing of the human species.
George Hotz(03:00:59) How do we make more of it? How do we make it clean? And how do we make… How I pay 20 cents for a megawatt hour instead of a kilowatt hour?
I find myself in agreement with Hotz that driving cost of living into the ground would probably be the best way to effectively help people. That said, the flip side of driving cost of living into the ground is making sure that people can get the money they need to survive.
If businesses either can't create enough jobs in a given area, pay enough money to make family generation sustainable, decentralize and go to where the workers are, and/or adapt to the workers' demands for remote/hybrid work, then UBI is probably going to happen anyway, because the other option is just letting people die.
No, the biggest reason is that employees are massively less productive working from home than in the office. Somewhere between ten and thirty percent less so as a general rule.
It's also a massive security concern, although many businesses basically ignore that because their security policies are utter crap in the first place.
On the other hand, the employees are generally going to win the fight. Work from home gives people, on average, another two hours per day of useful time and saves them, on average, approximately two hundred dollars per week (gas, wear and tear on the car, day care, eating at home vs. eating out, etc.). Businesses can also realize per employee cost savings via work from home but that is longer lag and doesn't balance out as a general rule.
Work from home is a great way to give an employee an effective raise without an increase to salary. It also ends up being effectively tax free. The result of all these factors combined (plus many others) is that employees will take less pay from another employer if they can work from home and the job market is generally tight enough that they will be able to find a job that lets them work from home (at least the majority of the time) for the same pay.
Trying to force employees back into the office is generally a losing fight that you are better off not having, despite the productivity gains that would be realized via the workforce being back in the office.
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Work from home also really screws over new hires (especially ones inexperienced in a given job) and team development. On the plus side, it reduces HR issues substantially.
King Arts
Well-known member
Again so what? We are moving towards most of the population being unnecessary to work. Imagine if Star Wars style droids were created tireless workers who don’t require wages and are decently intelligent. In that scenario they would end up doing all the work except programming and making new droids possibly. If there is no UBI in that scenario then there are two options the rich who control the droids wipe out 90 percent of humanity, or two the people rebel and some form of communist dictatorship arises. Ironically this is probably the one time in history where the communist replacement is better than what came before. Again a UBI will be necessary and no amount of Protestant work ethic will prevent that.
That’s going to happen no matter what. Better to get a comfy slavery than death by killbit or forced labor slavery.
That's when you let them go and find new employees that will come in to work.
King Arts
Well-known member
You aren’t doing nothing though, you are playing video games. Those things cost money. Sure with a UBI you could buy one or two occasions. But if you want to buy more, go to a nice restaurant, or go get a prostitute you’d need more sources of money. And that’s why a UBI won’t make many people be neets. People don’t live to work they work to live not survive live that means above the bare essentials.