In the current New York Review of Books, Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps has an interesting essay titled "What Is Wrong with the West’s Economies?" (source:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/aug/13/what-wrong-wests-economies/).
In it, he argues that Western economies have generally failed at "inclusion" (defined as "access to jobs offering work and pay that provide self-respect"). He goes on to write
He goes onto the notion of "flourishing"( defined as "using one’s imagination, exercising one’s creativity, taking fascinating journeys into the unknown, and acting on the world"),and how current Western economies act to deter such human activity.
The essay ends with
Phelps is not some "leftist" ideologue, but a well-known and very accomplished mainstream economist. His ideas in the essay are thought provoking and well-worth the read. His demarcation that economics is about efficiency is something all competent and honest economists understand and try to practice.
I don't agree at all. This is just neo-ludditism. Inefficiency for the good of mankind is completely idiotic. He focuses too much on the importance of feeling like a productive member of the community. That everybody needs a job. No, they don't. Not everybody is necessary.
That is besides the point.
Of course not everyone is neccesary. But everyone has a fundamental human need to BE neccesary. More importantly, society has a fundamental social need for everyone to contribute something
to it.
So if people aren't needed as hamster-wheel laborers, they must be needed for SOMETHING. Mothers, fathers, teachers, gardeners, artists, poets, adventurers, whatever. That's just human nature: when we don't have a productive outlet, we turn our attention inwards and become stagnant, and that is unhealthy for society and for individuals.
People need to work. Not because WE need them to work, but because they need to be needed.
I think we need to rethink why we work at all. As digitalisation continues and the robot revolution breaks-through this situation will only become increasingly extreme. Finding meaning from work and only flourishing because of work will in the future be a luxury.
Unlikely. The greater possibility is that people who still have something meaningful to do will hoard the resources of society and those "unnecessary people" will be increasingly pushed to the fringes of society and the economy, ignored and uncared about, until something tips the balance to a crisis point.
That's either an economic crisis -- e.g. the consumer market collapses because there are too few buyers to sustain demand and too little demand to justify the supply, vicious spiral, rinse and repeat -- or a social upheaval where public law and order breaks down under the strain of constant food riots.
The alternative, of course, is to use technology to make sure everyone has something productive (or productive-seeming) to do with their lives. Which is more or less the point of this article, and it is a valid one. Show me a society is willing to write off huge chunks of its population as "unnecessary" with nothing of value to contribute to it, and I'll show you a society that is tired of existing.
I think we should keep the focus on wealth accumulation and efficiency, but just make work optional through basic income. Everybody wins.
Basic income is good. But only when coupled with BASIC EMPLOYMENT or at least the opportunities thereof. This for people who decide they want a little more out of life than "Basic," and who want to CONTRIBUTE a little more to society than "nothing."
