> Automation reduces the amount of skill required to do jobs, reducing both the amount, but also the value.
Which translates to one worker being able to produce the same output as what required multiple workers previously. And sure, you could hire three entry-level workers at $15/hour for the price of one specialist at $45/hour, but chances are high that the same automation that enables those workers to do the specialist's job at all also enables said specialist to do considerably more than merely triple one's output.
Even ignoring the above, automation doesn't cause demand to materialize out of thin air; if you're a widget manufacturer and your sales team is able to sell 10,000 widgets a day, then multiplying the daily output of each widget factory worker from 10/day to 100/day will necessitate one of four things:
1. Figuring out how to multiply customer demand at the current widget price
2. Slashing widget prices
3. Slashing factory headcount
4. Slashing factory wages
1, 3, and 4 all minimize COGS and thus maximize profit margins. Unfortunately, 3 and 4 are both much easier than 1 (since 1 typically entails considerable effort to execute), so those are the options most companies pick. Both represent a severe loss of worker income - and thus, both necessitate UBI to compensate.
> A land value tax is a great idea, but irrelevant to what I was saying.
Assessing where the tax burden lies - and the impacts on that tax burden on spending ability, and the impacts of that on demanded wages - is pretty darn relevant to what you're saying. If you're paying an extra 10% (or whatever) on everything you buy, then you're going to adjust your wage expectations accordingly.
> We need people to do low wage jobs. If they get some wages for free, we need to pay them more to do the jobs.
Good. We should be paying workers a lot more than they're currently getting. The American (and for that matter, global) working class has been chronically shafted under capitalism for centuries now; God forbid we get shafted a little bit less.
> If we pay them more, then we need to raise prices on the goods in order to not go bankrupt.
Or the management could take a pay cut. I have very little sympathy for the "but what about our profits?" argument when C-level execs of even small businesses are skimming enough money on the output of our labor to be able to afford multi-million dollar homes and fancy cars.
> It's just a naive thing to focus on this founder idea.
Doesn't seem any more naïve than the idea that workers will somehow manage to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" in a socioeconomic system deliberately designed to ensure we're never able to accumulate enough capital to do so (even at all, let alone without significantly impacting our physical and mental health in the process). Entrepreneurship currently skews hard toward those who already have money. That's a problem which in and of itself needs solved in order for a society to actually have any semblance of that "equality of opportunity" to which "laissez-faire" capitalists pay lip service; that maximizing the ability for working class people to start their own businesses (be it as individuals or cooperatively with others) happens to also at least partially alleviate outsourcing-induced job loss is a nice side benefit.
Which translates to one worker being able to produce the same output as what required multiple workers previously. And sure, you could hire three entry-level workers at $15/hour for the price of one specialist at $45/hour, but chances are high that the same automation that enables those workers to do the specialist's job at all also enables said specialist to do considerably more than merely triple one's output.
Even ignoring the above, automation doesn't cause demand to materialize out of thin air; if you're a widget manufacturer and your sales team is able to sell 10,000 widgets a day, then multiplying the daily output of each widget factory worker from 10/day to 100/day will necessitate one of four things:
1. Figuring out how to multiply customer demand at the current widget price
2. Slashing widget prices
3. Slashing factory headcount
4. Slashing factory wages
1, 3, and 4 all minimize COGS and thus maximize profit margins. Unfortunately, 3 and 4 are both much easier than 1 (since 1 typically entails considerable effort to execute), so those are the options most companies pick. Both represent a severe loss of worker income - and thus, both necessitate UBI to compensate.
> A land value tax is a great idea, but irrelevant to what I was saying.
Assessing where the tax burden lies - and the impacts on that tax burden on spending ability, and the impacts of that on demanded wages - is pretty darn relevant to what you're saying. If you're paying an extra 10% (or whatever) on everything you buy, then you're going to adjust your wage expectations accordingly.
> We need people to do low wage jobs. If they get some wages for free, we need to pay them more to do the jobs.
Good. We should be paying workers a lot more than they're currently getting. The American (and for that matter, global) working class has been chronically shafted under capitalism for centuries now; God forbid we get shafted a little bit less.
> If we pay them more, then we need to raise prices on the goods in order to not go bankrupt.
Or the management could take a pay cut. I have very little sympathy for the "but what about our profits?" argument when C-level execs of even small businesses are skimming enough money on the output of our labor to be able to afford multi-million dollar homes and fancy cars.
> It's just a naive thing to focus on this founder idea.
Doesn't seem any more naïve than the idea that workers will somehow manage to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" in a socioeconomic system deliberately designed to ensure we're never able to accumulate enough capital to do so (even at all, let alone without significantly impacting our physical and mental health in the process). Entrepreneurship currently skews hard toward those who already have money. That's a problem which in and of itself needs solved in order for a society to actually have any semblance of that "equality of opportunity" to which "laissez-faire" capitalists pay lip service; that maximizing the ability for working class people to start their own businesses (be it as individuals or cooperatively with others) happens to also at least partially alleviate outsourcing-induced job loss is a nice side benefit.