An Employment Shift is Coming

By |2020-10-06T18:01:56-04:00October 6th, 2020|Categories: Society|Tags: , , , , , |

The Coming Employment Shift What Happens When Work is Not Needed? I like to think I have a philosophical temperament. What does that mean? Well, among other things, it implies a capacity for detachment, for viewing the daily hustle and the short-term bustle from a distance, the birds-eye view. The Latin term for this is ‘sub specie aeternitatis,’ which means ‘from the aspect of eternity.’ Now I am not a philosopher. If I were, I would be spending most of my time wrestling with the Big Questions. You know, the questions we [...]

The Future of No Work

By |2020-08-05T17:35:14-04:00August 5th, 2020|Categories: Society|Tags: , , , , |

The Future of (No) Work - Part 2 Why a Universal Basic Income is Inevitable The video below, Humans Need Not Apply by CGP Grey is and should be, disturbing to those who absorb its well-presented facts and arguments. As I said in Part 1 - The Future of Work, we are certainly not prepared for the looming decimation of wage work it shows us, and we need to be. I am somewhat comforted by my historical frame of reference.  Wage work has only been intimately connected with our sense of self-worth [...]

Streamlining with UBI

By |2020-08-02T01:46:17-04:00August 2nd, 2020|Categories: Society|Tags: , , , , , |

Streamlining Government with UBI Fairness Left and Right As a good controversialist, I’m always on the lookout for arguments that strengthen my advocacy for a Universal Basic Income. I am particularly interested in ‘justice’ arguments because fairness, far more than feasibility, is the sticking point for many people who have not delved deeply into the intricacies of this immensely important policy prescription. I got thinking again about fairness while I was listening to a lengthy rant on the radio the other day that, on the surface, had nothing to do with UBI. [...]

UBI is Liberation

By |2020-07-22T20:25:55-04:00July 21st, 2020|Categories: Society|Tags: , , , , , |

Liberation Not Slavery Universal Basic Income Frees Us to Pursue Meaningful Contributions In one of the more thoughtless, knee-jerk, poorly researched commentaries I have seen in some time,  Chris Nelson, a writer for the Calgary Herald, purports to slay the dragon of creeping socialism by slamming Universal Basic Income.  Among other things, he said,  “Of course we are told handing out money to those below a certain income threshold will save cash because it negates other current social assistance programs. But it won’t. Schemes like this never do… ...So, introducing a basic national [...]

Universal Basic Income

By |2022-07-03T21:56:36-04:00June 23rd, 2020|Categories: Society|Tags: , , , |

Yes, a Universal Basic Income. The welfare state, as currently constituted, can’t handle what’s coming, and hasn't handled what's happened in the past forty years. The fragility of the structure has been evident for a while to those with eyes to see. It is not dealing effectively with the decline in permanent, well-paying, benefit-providing, full-time jobs. It is not responding well to the steady rise in income inequality since the 1970s. It is also wholly unprepared for the tsunami of job losses that are coming courtesy of what Martin Ford calls in his eponymous book, The Rise [...]

The Future of Work

By |2020-07-23T13:28:36-04:00May 10th, 2020|Categories: Society|Tags: , , , , , , |

The Future of Work - Part 1 Universal Basic Income In 1915 there were 22 million horses in the United States and most of them had jobs.  By 1960, there were 3 million horses in the U.S. bred mostly for the recreational pleasures of their human masters. Are we headed towards a future that sees large segments of the human workforce  permanently displaced like their former equine partners?  A future where workers do not migrate from one dying sector of the economy to a new and upcoming sector that needs the displaced [...]