Presidential election, 2016

[Bob Butler 54]

(11-14-2016, 08:07 AM)Odin Wrote: Increasing technologically-driven productivity has a depressing effect on both wages and the employment rate, which hurts demand, which depresses economic growth. This is technological unemployment, something noted as early as Marx, and it is only going to get worse over time as automation becomes even more widespread. This has been masked for a century by the increasingly dominance of white collar jobs, but now even many of these jobs are beginning to be automated away, eventually everyone who isn't a super-genius with a graduate degree, or someone who does a highly skilled trade that cannot be automated, will be left jobless.

We as a society have only 2 choices: a universal basic income or complete social breakdown, there are no other alternatives.

Do you mean universal minimum basic income, that everyone is assured a living wage?  Or is the minimum to be equal to the maximum, that everyone gets the same wage?

But I agree with the basic premise stated above.  Automation is severely impacting the economy and culture.

I see our having certain sacred cows, notably the 40 hour work week and retirement around age 65.  These are New Deal numbers, suitable for mid 20th level technology and the period's large number of manufacturing jobs.  While these numbers are dated, they are more or less cast in cultural cement.  With the factors you mention above and such sacred cows remaining fixed, there are more people looking for more hours than there are hours available.  Basic supply and demand results in non-living wages for those who do get the jobs.  

I've long wanted someone to crunch numbers to ask how many hours work needs to be done, what set of hours per year and years per career will satisfy this, and what would be the minimum wage have to be to assure that with reduced hours workers can get by.

But rather than increased wage/hour and decreased hours we're going with increased hours and decreased wage per hour.  That seems to me to be the entirely wrong direction if we are going to avoid social breakdown.  Also, lots of folks are pushing for less regulation and government intervention.  Remaking the work week to give most everyone a living wage will require the opposite.