A world without work

Sorry I didn't mean to suggest that at all. When I wrote "the ills of unemployment go well beyond the loss of income" that was my way of saying loss of income is the first-order outcome of losing a job, but there are more complicated effects to consider.

The reason I focus on the other effects is that, in deciding how government/culture might rearrange itself to replace work, I think it's critical to see that work is about more than money--and the benefit of work is about more than a paycheck. It is about esteem, flow, purpose, community, a sense of meaningfulness in life, and it's not clear to me that all of those things comes with a monthly government check; so it's useful to think of ways we could replace these values in the future.

Never forget Balkanization or fragmentation. For example 90% of the population has been permanently kicked out of big city coastal real estate and will never, ever, live there or own property there via hyperinflation in real estate prices.

Yet, the sun still rises in the east and 90% of the countries population lives on, under different goals and interests.

Its highly likely crony capitalism as we know it will never end and income wealth inequality will increase until almost no one owns everything, but as long as everyone else is alive, they'll just play a different game. Getting ahead of that trend is likely to be very useful. This gets into weird sci fi alt-future world "whuffie", etc, but when the game gets weird, the results get weird.

You can see echos of this in historical academic studies during economic depressions, here and otherwise. Once the economic system fragments, people figure out other things, in the old days, barter, for example. Or crime. In the future the NYSE and NASDAQ will likely continue to operate, yet be utterly irrelevant to maybe 99.999% of the population, who will consider craigslist, uber, or some new startup that doesn't exist to be the real "the market".

(edited to add, I really screwed up the above paragraph by failing to mention the NYSE will never go away, much like the once universal giants of the past, gold trade still goes on, fur trade, spice trade, virtually everything but the slave trade keeps right on running, just no longer important to much of anyone anymore)

Anyway the point is a good long term place for a startup to be is post-business as usual. As per the famous gawker article, startups trying to replace "mom" for rich coastal yuppies are very popular, but the future is likely owned by a startup that replaces the existing commodity trading system for most people, or replaces retail, or replaces package delivery or ...

The article flat out assumes that "If John Russo is right, then saving work is more important than saving any particular job. Industriousness has served as America’s unofficial religion since its founding. The sanctity and preeminence of work lie at the heart of the country’s politics, economics, and social interactions.", and that "Most people want to work, and are miserable when they cannot."

Put succinctly, the article poses as its fundamental thesis that unemployment itself leads to social degradation. But I could find no actual supporting evidence for that claim.

The Youngstown example is just as likely a posterchild for the alternative theory: the dangers of unmitigated poverty.

Now, I grant you, social pressures likely lead people to feel shame and so forth in the face of unemployment. But that just means a cultural shift away from the idolization of work is necessary, not that we must find some way to employ those folks who might truly be unemployable.

1. > This might prove true, but it’s an untestable hypothesis.

Only if you attribute raising children, maintaining your house, or other activities as equivalent going to a desk job every day. I don't believe this is the case - I believe there is a pretty significant difference in doing things because you want to (raise children, beautify your house), and because it's required to put a roof over your head and food in your cupboard.

Given that, you can see if the guilt will fade just by looking at stay-at-home mothers and fathers, or by looking at retirees. Being a retiree is not much different from being unemployed, other than society (and consequently the retirees themselves) viewing them as having "earned it".

2. I agree with benaiah here - "drinking with buddies every night" would get damned expensive, even when you have a job.

3. I won't disagree with you, but it's something which needs to be investigated and addressed.

5. My reading of that section revealed a viewpoint which seems to only view the role of the government as a job creator/maintainer, which doesn't strike me as sustainable. At least, no more sustainable than just paying people directly.

For example, the government created quite a few jobs as part of "the new deal" - but where are those jobs today? Where are the workforces to maintain our bridges, our roadways, and the other parts of our failing public infrastructure? Those jobs disappeared, those workers retired or had to find another job (or were disabled by the hard labor and became wards of the state in another way).

Forcing people to work to survive seems old fashioned, and completely incompatible with the coming future of automation. We can forestall the day of 80%+ unemployment, but that will only make the drop-off that much more steep when it actually arrives. I'd personally rather we try and do something about it now, while the overall unemployment numbers are still below 50%.

EDIT: Sorry, forgot to put this in earlier, but I do appreciate you taking the time to stop by and answer questions like these!

"Work" connotes a class distinction. Class is part of this.

Subjugation of workers and caste are the origin of the current system.

Who owns the machines? Who owns the land?

Does a human being have a natural right to live? To own his own small plot of land?

Are humans just like common animals, to be yoked or corralled?

Fundamentally the intellectual framework is driven by patronage of the highest caste which cannot help but maintain elitist, regressive, Darwnian, Malthusian worldviews to rationalize the inequality.

The life-giving moneyflow is primitive and its volume arbitrary and should be replaced by something more sophisticated, but there is no actual reason it could not be returned to its previous high rate if we make the right psychological adjustments.

Sustainability doesn't require halting development, it just needs smarter systems, like putting real science into economics or better adoption of common operational data exchange.