a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
oecolampadius  ·  3489 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What do you think of a guaranteed Minimum Income?

I think we tend to overestimate the capacity of people to retrain for new jobs. Sure, in the example you brought up (auto to renewable energy), people moved from a manual labor job to a manual labor job, but what happens when we run out of manual labor jobs? What happens when we automate white-collar work? Will accountants, for instance, need to retrain to become programmers? Will manual laborers? I think that we'll eventually reach a point where we've made entire types of jobs obsolete, and thus made people who are only capable of being competitive in that field obsolete as well.

Transitional labor, I think, is a deferment of the problem, not a solution.