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Published 7 years ago by manix with 1 Comments

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  • leweb
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    And this is a huge problem I see with the current situation. I don't like Trump, but I understand and sympathize with the reasons people voted for him. If you asked me, Sanders would have been a much better answer to those concerns but it's way too late to have that discussion. Now, here's the thing: a lot of working class people are pissed because they've been having a very hard time getting jobs, they're being screwed by "free" trade treaties that outsource their jobs elsewhere, they feel they have to compete with immigrants who will do their job for a fraction of the cost, and the "left"-wing party who was supposed to be defending their rights is instead enthusiastically kissing Wall St. and billionaire's ass. This is a repetition of what's happened in other countries, and I'm not going to go over it again.

    Now, let's set aside the issue of whether Trump will deliver on his promises. The real problem is this: a lot of working-class people have skills that are or will become irrelevant in the near future. Technological advances are making a lot of jobs unnecessary, and it's only going to get worse. Let me be clear, this is not a result of the working-class people being shitty or incompetent, but a result of science and technology growing at an unprecedented rate in history.

    How do you resolve this conflict? I see two extreme possibilities: One, you somehow outlaw technology, so that the jobs cannot be replaced and the people working those jobs stay happy. The problem with this is, once the genie is out of the bottle, it's extremely hard to put him back in. If you have machines that can do a job faster, cheaper, and more effectively than a human, it would be difficult (and contrary to modern economics) to prevent them from prevailing. And this gets hard over time, fast. An alternate version of this option is to somehow educate everyone who has no marketable skills as a result of technology, so that their skills become valuable. But this would create an oversupply of qualified people, which would lead to the same lack of jobs.

    Option two is to accept the fact that machines are replacing most of our jobs, and just give people a universal basic income so they don't need to work. This faces a massive cultural barrier. Most people in the US have this classical Protestant ideology where work is the source of virtue, and not working is a sign of moral failure. You see this all the time, everywhere: people bragging about how little they sleep because of how hard they work, commenting on how they never get any days off, etc., and being commended on this by their peers. In this context, telling people that they should get paid without doing any work reeks of welfare, which is a bad word suggesting that the receiver is a lazy-ass drug addict who abuses the system at the expense of the hard-working taxpayers. But you see, the people whose jobs are being lost to technology are not quitting work because they want to sit on their ass doing meth all day, they do because they have no alternative and, furthermore, society has no alternative. If we were to accept this simple fact without being judgemental, the universal basic income solution would be a perfect exit to the current political situation. But it's not going to happen any time soon. I'm certainly not holding my breath waiting for Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress to implement it.

    So we're in a quandary where the old economic assumptions have been swept much faster than we c...

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