Three great articles and one great book have been published recently concerning basic income.
The first is Its Time for Technology to serve all mankind. Excerpt:
“Imagine a year where… technology destroys jobs but also creates new and better jobs, is discovered to no longer be true. Instead, machines permanently displace human labor, and what new jobs are created, are mostly worse jobs.
“An ever decreasing percentage of the population is employed, and for a majority of those left in the labor market, incomes decrease, hours worked increase, monthly income variance grows more extreme, time between jobs grows, jobs themselves become more akin to tasks, employer-provided benefits become more rare…
“What year do you predict such a future comes to pass? 2030? 2040? 2050 and beyond if even then?
“The answer will vary nation by nation, but in the US, the answer is right around 1990. Yes, it already happened. It’s not in the future. It’s in the past.”
I have been thinking along the same lines, and in the future hope to write more on the many specifics of why I think this, and the article does offer some compelling reasons to think this.
The second is The Monsters Inc Argument for basic income.
The third is Basic Income, not Basic Jobs; which does a great job of making the argument against a federal job guarantee.
Finally, a book called Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber came out, expect a review soon. The core thesis is that about half of all jobs are meaningless busywork, that this situation emerged from the growth of technology, and that basic income is the best answer to this dilemma.
