Outside a train station near Tokyo, hundreds of people cheer as Sohei Kamiya, head of the surging nationalist party Sanseito, criticizes Japan’s rapidly growing foreign population.
As opponents, separated by uniformed police and bodyguards, accuse him of racism, Kamiya shouts back, saying he is only talking common sense.
Sanseito, while still a minor party, made big gains in July’s parliamentary election, and Kamiya’s “Japanese First” platform of anti-globalism, anti-immigration and anti-liberalism is gaining broader traction ahead of a ruling party vote Saturday that will choose the likely next prime minister.
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A UBI is a necessity for societies going forward.
Basically, wealth inequality is so bad now that our economies and societies no longer serve the majority of people’s needs.
So wealth redistribution is required to fix the problem, the question after realizing that is how to go about it.
We can do a one time redistribution of wealth, but without fundamentally changing the system with regulations, incomes will inevitably become imbalanced again. This is what we did after the Great Depression with the jobs program that was the national parks and highway/railroad projects.
IMO it’s better to just stop treating money like it’s harmless to allow excess accumulation. It would be better if all wealth were perpetually redistribed via a UBI, this would permanently maintain wealth equality. This is similar to what we did after the Great Depression in regards to corporate tax rates and setting a maximum profit.
I think absolute ceilings and floors on income and wealth will be needed. The wealthy are basically black holes that destroys everything within reach, if given time. Preventing such singularities of excess will have to be through a system designed to give everyone UBI, while making jobs rewarding but with a fixed scope of wealth accumulation.
IMO, a system of classifying entire job classes, and giving them a fixed income rank, would make it harder for wage theft, hoarding, and corruption to happen. By making it so that everyone of a job class has a clear income regardless of location or hours, it will be easier to track who is unnaturally wealthy, thus their hoard can be more easily confiscated before it can do harm to society.
Also, through having fixed incomes, it might prevent inflation. Sellers will have to price according to income brackets, otherwise their goods cannot sell easily to a demographic. In the rankings that I proposed, a basic worker has $30k, while the highest earners get $60k after taxation. This essentially means that CEOs and other high-end careers are only double the value of a waiter’s income. Goods will have to be priced accordingly, making it harder for inflation to take place.
I personally don’t think it’s healthy for a society to force a caste system like that. And I’m not really sure there’s truth to the “if everyone gets paid the same then nobody will want to be a Dr” argument. People would still probably pursue more difficult work even without a profit incentive.
People absolutely pursue difficult work without the extra pay. Cuba has always had plenty of doctors .
It isn’t a caste thing. Typically, castes are all about locking people into a social strata forever. What I proposed includes education paying people for learning, which allows the students to be fully educated for the higher ranks of jobs, if they so choose. Also, people who work earn retirement pay at a 1:1 ratio of days worked - eventually, people get to quit working outright if they want, regardless of rank, simply because two or three decades of work is also fully paid retirement. People who quit working the high end jobs, coincidentally leave those jobs to other people.
In any case, there isn’t a huge gulf of incomes in the proposed system. The real-world elite of our time has over a 1,000x the income of an entry wage worker. Merely double the income for the hardest professions doesn’t even register in comparison. More importantly, the increased money for a high position is to reward the effort, risk, and knowledge needed to hold that position.
Over the next two centuries, I expect automation to make work into a leisure activity, rather than a necessity. Until utopia is obtained, however, we should try to reasonably reward people to work the more difficult jobs, simply out of pragmatic utility and humanity for society as a whole. By ensuring the pool of experts is large, we can spread thin the amount of hours each individual has to work, preventing burnout and allowing them all to live fulfilling lives.
It is a caste thing.
What happens when the majority decide they want more pay, pursue education, and oversaturate the good paying jobs?
Those are the conditions that led to STEM being completely oversaturated.
This beleif that a garbage man is somehow less important to society than doctors, is just capitalist propaganda…
ERK: Effort, Risk, Knowledge. We can have a body of researchers study each occupation, and assign it a rank according to what is required for the task. Provided the standards are objective - the amount of hours, the physical conditions a worker has to undergo, how much education is required to do a good job, and so forth are fairly consistent, we can fairly designate the rank of a job.
Garbage men don’t require nearly as much training as a doctor, otherwise people die. In any case, a garbage man would likely be at the $60k rank, because it is harder than being a waiter. Lots of sitting and driving, with the odd garbage handling in person if something comes up. The biggest source of danger comes from crashes. Far as education goes, not much, I expect - mostly cartography of the route, scheduling, and so forth.
An immigrant worker would probably have their job class at $80k annual payout if they picked food. There is lots of exertion, sun, inclement weather, and so forth. The work itself isn’t dangerous nor requires an education, it is simply exhausting. Provided that 4 or so hours of a six hour shift are done before a hour-long noon lunch, the danger of heat exhaustion from the sun can be mitigated, especially if workers are given hats, water, and 5 minute breaks for each hour to recuperate. Hazard pay can be in effect during significant levels of rain, and appropriate gear mandated for those conditions.
As to STEM being oversaturated, I think that is incorrect. Rather, it is because corporations are hyper-fixated on crushing blood out of a stone to maximize perceived profit. Everyone in every working profession has to work longer and are paid less, because the companies force that to be the case. By deliberately creating ghost jobs, using maladjusted interviews, coercion, and so on, companies can artificially force workers to come to the table to beg for scraps. If there was a 6-hour workday, mandated vacations, and other ethical standards that are enforced, companies would have to employ many more STEM students to fill out the daily roster.
Ok you have shown me you don’t know what you are talking about and aren’t interested in learning.
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It’s been tested dozens of times, and every time it is tested, it shows people are happier and healthier, and so is their community.
So it does work and is possible, and it would fix a ton of problems.
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In every study they also witness no significant drop in labor participation, and it always enriches the local community. People become more altruistic, less stressed and agitated, family relationships improve. It’s good in pretty much every single way with no discernible downsides. Please look into more studies.
There isn’t going to ever be a study that is universal until we implement it universally, so there’s literally no way to test it in the way critics want, this argument is just baseless propaganda.
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How would you do the necessary task of redistributing the excess wealth of the rich to the poor in a way that leaves the rich in a position where they can’t accumulate and abuse their wealth again?
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I understand your position and i think that you say a respectable thought. I like the way you think but i think you’re still wrong. Let me explain:
The labor market is the mechanism through which wages are determined. Human labor is bought and sold on the labor market; that means there is supply and demand. Supply comes from workers who are willing to work, while demand comes from companies who seek to employ people.
Now, as is always the case on any market that is regulated by supply and demand, if there’s a higher supply, prices go down; while if there’s higher demand, prices go up. Prices in the context of the labor market are the price that is paid for an hour of human labor, i.e. the hourly wage.
Now, companies don’t have a constant demand for human labor at all. In fact, how much demand companies have for human labor depends largely on how much the company intends to grow. Imagine it like a house: Building a single house might take thousands of days of human labor (i.e. 8 employees for 120 days) for a single-family brick-built home, but maintaining that house takes significantly less labor (it was traditionally done by a single house-wife, and nowadays it’s done in the spare after-work hours). So, growth requires intense labor input, while maintenance does NOT.
The same is true for the economy. As long as the economy grows, it requires a lot of human labor input. You have to remember that the Great Fire of London happened in 1666, and that is the starting point for large, stone-built cities in the modern age (before that most houses were built out of wood). Also since roughly that time (1800) we have the industrial revolution which has created steam engines, cars, and basically every commodity that we have today. Building all of that up from scratch required a lot of human labor input, and that is why there was such a large demand for human labor. But today, we have all these commodities and companies already built up, and maintaining them requires rather little work, which is why the demand for human labor is declining. That is a natural development and not a human-chosen development. Growth comes to an end (see also the 1970s study The Limits to Growth that discusses that) because planetary boundaries are reached, and either we find new planets to settle or we won’t have growth; but without growth we will have less demand for human labor, and that means lower wages. And that’s what we’re already observing for the last 25 years: wages have continuously declined.
I don’t think that wages could go up again; unless you move to mars and start developing the planet all over again. That’s why UBI is necessary; because people still need resources to live.