And what do you do when robots take all the jobs? Self driving cars alone are going to eliminate MILLIONS of jobs. As technology increases, there are going to be more people and less jobs, and there is no way to stop that other than giving people busy work, which is just evil. Eliminate welfare, eliminate minimum wage, and replace them with UBI.

Also, UBI isn't welfare, it's profit sharing. We all have shares in this giant corporation we call the United States, and they're just paying out dividends. You may not realize that UBI has been promoted by libertarians as the way to make welfare efficient and fair, removing all of the red tape and bureaucracy that sucks half the money out of the system. Welfare isn't going away no matter what you want, so why not work to make it suck a lot less?

He gives a ****, he's just oblivious to reality. Let's address the correct problem please, because going the other way just makes it worse.

Only if you make a bunch of assumptions some of which sound pretty hinky, particularly when you look at these graphs:

https://www.epi.org/publication/char...ge-stagnation/

Particularly this one:

I just also have an understanding of economics
I just also have an understanding of economics
I just also have an understanding of economics
I just also have an understanding of economics
I just also have an understanding of economics
I just also have an understanding of economics
I just also have an understanding of economics
I just also have an understanding of economics

Technology reduces the labor component of finished goods. That results in the same number of workers pursuing fewer jobs, which forces wages down. Not that other factors like increased worker skill and increased demand for goods can’t force wages up, resulting in a net increase. But that doesn’t alter the fact that technology devalues labor in the production function equation.

no it doesn't , in the same way that you need low amount of land to produce Google services but it's offices are still worth a ****load of money (and/or pay a very high rent).

It's not the same number of workers going for those jobs. Technology created new job which require high qualifications and so are played very well.

Technology destroys many jobs, create some, but doesn't lower wages.

UBI even in the eyes of people who despise welfare should be looked at as if it was by far the best kind of racket money to pay to the poor masses to avoid violent proletarian revolution (because it is).

Even 100% selfish and egotistical people should appreciate the need to pay to avoid being attacked in the street by angry mobs.

It lowered manufacturing job wages, it's going to eliminate grocery checker salaries all together. The technology jobs created are certainly high on the list of jobs to be automated, but until then you have Capital conspiring together to keep salaries low.

The next recession when we have real unemployment again they should just take all the unemployed manual laborers and offer them jobs working for the government repairing our godawful infrastructure. This **** worked great 80 years ago, why do we never learn from our past.

It would be interesting to see a New Deal from Trump. My guess would be he would find some way to **** it up and turn it into Super Welfare for construction companies and short term employment for white people.

Nope (this is only the most recent work on the topic, but this kind of results are pretty well established)

We study the impact of industrial robots on employment and wages in six
European Union countries, that make up 85.5 percent of the EU industrial
robots market. In theory, robots can directly displace workers from
performing specific tasks (displacement effect). But they can also expand
labour demand through the efficiencies they bring to industrial production
(productivity effect). We adopt the local labour market equilibrium
approach developed by Acemoglu and Restrepo (2017) to assess which of
the two labour market effects dominates. We find that one additional robot
per thousand workers reduces the employment rate by 0.16-0.20 percentage
points. Thus a significant displacement effect dominates. We find that the
displacement effect is particularly evident for workers of middle education
and for young cohorts. Our estimates, however, do not point to robust
and significant results on the impact of robots on wage growth, even after
accounting for possible offsetting effects across different populations and
sectoral groups

http://bruegel.org/wp-content/upload...er_02_2018.pdf

There is a problem in this line of thinking that wasn't a problem 80 years ago.

Today you need high-skilled workers to deal with the most relevant aspects of infrastructure building or repairing.

Still, labor costs as a percentage of costs of goods decrease.

I think a lot of people just assume UBI is going to simply be added to the current welfare state. Or if they don't, they just disingenuously argue as if it were to beat up the straw man rather than acknowledge the merits and reasonable idea that it is.

It's a shame too because the whole point of even suggesting UBI is to address multiple problems with one stone and hopefully get us to a point where efficiency allows us to cut the fat out of the welfare state over time. Or at least minimize its inevitable growth.

The poster is a troll who read Atlas Shrugged and blew his load. He's either a level 1 thinker or is pretending to be so he doesn't have to acknowledge that full bore lassez faire economics and libertarian utopias are things to be known and understood, but not implemented full bore.

I would just stop engaging this poster. I've seen hot takes in multiple posts and on two different threads now. Bar already cleared for troll status.

Unfortunately not all wealthy people think that deeply, or will ever have the need to. Angry mobs in pitchforks are always a possibility. However, nobody gives a **** about danger if they're either A) unaware of it, or B) don't think it can happen to them. It's human nature.

Politicians publicly maligned are getting verbally chased out of restaurants. Politicians are being shot at. Social media amplifies all the ugliness and negativity. It ****s with the collective human psyche. Especially if you have a conscience and empathy. The violence is going to get worse before it gets better, especially if the barrier to improvement is a giant wall of people arguing in bad faith and having so much power no consequence can be suffered. Even worse, the status quo provides incentive for it.

You mean the middle class?

yes that's often the case

No teflon, I mean a specific subset of the middle class.

Like, your solution to the next recession-cum-unemployment is to hire a lot of people to repair/rebuild infrastructure. Problem is most of them, even if middle class, decently educated (many especially if so) are really useless in infrastructure work as it is arranged today.

You need years of specialized experience just to avoid having a negative productivity

It's always the case. As automation decreases the demand for labor and the supply remains the same, wages decline. That decrease can be and often is offset when those displaced workers find comparatively paying jobs. But when they don't, the gap widens.

Again, no, bold is not true. Labour share declining <> wages declining.

Also "often the case" remains true, as you have several increment in labour share even with more automation (which always increases), in your graph.

Also, labour share is affected by a lot of things. It's almost certain for example that the decline of unions played a bigger role than automation for the decline of the labor share.

You can also reason on the side of capital: if there is more capital deployed with an almost fixed labor supply, it's of course normal that capital share increases. That could be true while wages go up AND return on capital goes down by the way.

That's the saving-glut way to look at recent macro dynamics. Too much capital going after too few opportunities. Labor share declines, capital share goes up but not enough to maintain returns, so capital returns go down too.

https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/...-the-U-S-45086
What Explains the Decline of the U.S. Labor Share of Income? An Analysis of State and Industry Level Data
Summary: The U.S. labor share of income has been on a secular downward trajectory since the beginning of the new millennium. Using data that are disaggregated across both state and industry, we show the decline in the labor share is broad-based but the extent of the fall varies greatly. Exploiting a new data set on the task characteristics of occupations, the U.S. input-output tables, and the Current Population Survey, we find that in addition to changes in labor institutions, technological change and different forms of trade integration lowered the labor share. In particular, the fall was largest, on average, in industries that saw: a high initial intensity of “routinizable” occupations; steep declines in unionization; a high level of competition from imports; and a high intensity of foreign input usage. Quantitatively, we find that the bulk of the effect comes from changes in technology that are linked to the automation of routine tasks, followed by trade globalization.

https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Pu...7/wp17167.ashx
V. CONCLUSION AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS
We found technology—as measured by the intensity of routinization of job tasks—to have significant explanatory power and to be the principal driver of state and industry level differences in the labor share. While we found estimates of the impact on the labor share of the potential to offshore occupational tasks to be persistently imprecise, we did consistently find the actual cross-border movement of commodities, including imported inputs, to matter greatly for labor share dynamics. Changes in union density—capturing labor market institutions—are also statistically significant. In terms of magnitudes, we found that technological progress explains 44 to 57 percent of the (within) decline in the labor share when looked at across all estimated empirical specifications. Global/international factors, captured by import competition and usage of foreign inputs, jointly explain between 41 to 51 percent of the decline depending on model specification, but in virtually all specifications, this joint contribution never exceeds that of technology. Unionization matters quantitively, but it ranks third after technology and combined international factors. We also found human capital, particularly education, to have contributed positively to labor share dynamics, and prevented an otherwise steeper decline.

Ok i had different sources (more dated) that gave 29% to union membership, while yours estimate 19

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4132920...n_tab_contents

I stand corrected as IMF is more prestigious and because the paper you linked is more recent.

But anyway even these estimates are around half, which is 1.5% of shift from labour to capital in 14 years if i read correctly, because of technology (which is mainly automation but not only that, as defined in your link).

Back to the other claim though, this is not about wages.

Btw i found this which seems interesting

The OECD also wonders whether the labour share of income has declined, and answers that it depends on whether you measure it using a production- or income-based approach. The former adopts a producer perspective with gross income as a reference. The latter adopts a consumer perspective with net income as a reference, taking account of depreciation and including taxes and subsidies as perceived by final consumers. Using the production perspective, the OECD can confirm a statistically significant but small decline in the labour share across OECD countries over the past two decades. But this appears to result mainly from a rise in the gross capital share caused by rising depreciation rates. Accordingly, there is little or no decline in the labour share from an income perspective, where income is measured net and after depreciation.

http://bruegel.org/2017/04/the-decli...are-of-income/

I’m looking at it through the lens of whether UBI would mitigate or exasperate the labor to productivity gap. So share and wages are equally relevant for me. The way I see it, the last thing we want to do is decrease productivity just to narrow the gap.

But the productivity gap (if by that you mean the gap between increasing productivity and stagnant take-home wages) is a wage issue not a labour share issue.

And while that gap is significant for the US it doesn't seem to be the standard elsewhere, while the labour share has declined some almost everywhere.

But for the "gap", we have 3 elements that reduce it alot already in the data:

1) using the same inflation rate for both indexes reduces the gap a lot (CPI is higher than GDP deflator)

2) Non-monetary benefits have to be accounted for, this reduces the gap a little

3) Baumol disease could have been reduced in effect for some reason, and many sectors don't have a greatly increased productivity (think waiters? truck drivers? it's the same job it was 40y ago); so in the past they were affected by baumol and those wages increased anyway a lot, nowadays something could have interrupted that strange phenomenon.