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Originally Posted by CaramonLS
Governments needed to start looking at this problem yesterday. This is going to come quick and it is probably going to hurt.
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Pro-labour organizations have been lobbying to raise awareness of this issue for a long time. The problem is the government of yesterday didn't want to listen, hopefully the current government takes it a little more seriously.
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Originally Posted by Jason14h
100 years ago 95% of the workforce worked in farms. They all (most) lost their jobs to automation.
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Do you have a source for the 95% claim? I agree a lot of farmers lost their jobs to automation but realistically if 95% of the workforce was working as farmers you'd think the only commodity at that time would be food.
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The problem isn't job loss, its job creation. Fewer and fewer people are out there creating new jobs and industries.
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The problem is a combination of both. If we kept the status quo and employers continue to automate to reduce their labour costs, for many companies there will eventually be a tipping point where their labour cost savings will be smaller than the losses in business revenue driven by a dwindling consumer base.
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I see 2 reasons:
1. The standard of living has risen across the world, but a lot in the developed world. People don't need a lot of money to be entertained and content. The drive to 'takes risks to better ones life" just aren't there in a risk vs reward as much as they were.
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I believe the problem goes much deeper than that. We have established a system that essentially takes away people's ability to "take risks and better ones life". Things have changed a lot even since I entered the workforce 15 years ago, you can't just go to a bank with a really great business idea and expect to get the funding you need. If you don't have the money but want to further your education for the chance to better your life, you have to take on an enormous amount of debt which will hold you back financially long after you finish your classes. Combine that with the fact that in a lot of cases you have no guarantee of employment or what your income will be after upgrading your education and it creates a situation that is lose/lose.
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2. To many public jobs/an increasing % of people in public jobs. Public jobs never have driven innovation or new industry job creation.
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I disagree with the logic behind this. The population is increasing as well, so even if the percentage of public sector employment is rising that doesn't mean there are fewer people to drive innovation or job creation in the private sector. Do the math, if a population of 1M people that has 10% public sector employed and 90% private sector employed, if that population doubles to 2M people and the percentage of public sector employment rises to 20%, you would still have an over 50% increase in the total number of people employed in the private sector so in theory innovations and job creation should still be growing at a faster rate.
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We need to figure out how to get back to people being entreprenuers and creating new industries to replace the jobs being lost by automation.
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The problem is once you reach the point where you have already created almost all necessary industries, where do you go from there? When hollywood production companies can't think of any new ideas, they just remake an old movie to continue doing business, but that's not exactly possible when it comes to innovation and job creation. Once a business idea is thought up it will be copied until the market won't allow for anymore growth and then it's just there sustaining the growth it created, it can't be repackaged expecting the same return.
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Regarding basic income and how to pay for it. In theory we already support basic income for most people, it is just wrapped up in red tape and government programs. If we could prove it is cheaper to kill these programs and just give people to $$, it could totally work. But that would kill more jobs and the government has created an industry of moving money to people.
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It can't be done cheaper. Taking away the funding from government programs to pay for a basic income doesn't work without increasing taxation. Otherwise what happens is the tax payers paying for the basic income lose their services so that other people can afford to pay for those services while also being left to pay for those same services themselves. The problem then becomes when these services are privatized, the costs are no longer fixed, so you get caught in a situation where basic income and the taxes to fund it continually need to be increased with a continually shrinking tax base to draw funds from.