September 02, 2019
“The idea of guaranteed income is gaining traction, from the presidential debate stage to Silicon Valley, where tech titans such as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have promoted it as a way to fend off a gloomy future in which automation and climate change eliminate millions of jobs.”
This came up as a throwaway line in an article about a trial program for a guaranteed basic income. The problem is that the type of job losses being described here are 180 percent opposite from each other.
Job loss from automation is ostensibly from too much productivity — we don’t need workers. (There is zero evidence for this story, but no one ever said that Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk had a clue about the economy.) Job loss attributed to addressing climate change is the result of too little productivity. The story (most get this wrong) is that there is plenty of work for people to do, such as retrofitting buildings and installing solar panels, but that with less energy use, the economy is less productive, and therefore these jobs pay less and workers don’t want to do them.
This is all very tangential to the article, but a serious paper should get these points right if it is going to print them.
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