Quote:
Originally Posted by Red Slinger
This is something I've been thinking about in conjunction with UBI. If the average full-time work went from 40 hours a week to say 30 hours does that mean that more people could be employed to cover the 25% drop in hours worked per week? I'm not sure that the correlation would be anywhere near 25% more employment but I'm guessing the level of unemployment (for those that can and want to work) would decrease substantially. This would reduce EI payments, increase payroll taxes collected by the government and also would likely decrease the amount of other social programs (social services, policing, emergency services, etc.) If you combine this with a guaranteed basic income that is enough to not starve but not enough to not want to work it could potentially alleviate some of the budgetary and societal issues governments face.
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That would help. But the deeper problem is that some people aren't capable of doing much more than routine labour, and routine labour is going to be increasingly automated out of existence.
The meritocratic notion that everyone should strive to be skilled knowledge-workers ignores the reality that a great many people simply aren't suited - either cognitively or temperamentally - to being skilled knowledge-workers. We haven't asked ourselves as a society what role those who are weaker cognitively or socially are going to play in the emerging economy because we can't admit those deficiencies even exist.