A response to a proposition regarding Basic Jobs vs Basic Income

This is a response to a very interesting article about how the benefits of a Universal Jobs Program would be better than a Universal Basic Income at addressing the possibility of mass unemployment in the future. You should go and read it.

People are talking a lot about Universal Basic Incomes because they are imagining a world where people will become obsolete. A world that is filled with superfluous unemployable people who must be fed. The author suggests that UBI is the favorite solution to imagine because the world is filled with people who don’t like to think very much. He offers an alternative: Universal Jobs Programs.

I think the first proposition, that people will become superfluous and unemployable, is a flawed one. Yes, AI and robots will make many career choices obsolete and put people out of work, but that doesn’t mean people will become unnecessary — or in other words completely lose all economic utility. AI and robots will increase human productivity which means that we will produce more per person than before. This does not necessarily lead to mass unemployment. We have historically failed to imagine how the future will be if and when the world becomes more productive. This has been a characteristic of human thought for centuries — we imagine that progress will only bring disaster. We fail to…