A World Without Work

Before industrial revolution, Queen Elizabeth I shut down innovation
1800’s, ‘luddites’ targeted entrepreneurs looking to automate work
Hours worked/year has decreased
Innovation either 1) substitutes , or 2) complements
- complements means 1) productivity, 2) bigger pie effect, 3) changing pie effect
ALM hypothesis;
- look at labour market in terms of ‘tasks’ not jobs
- rather than skill-level, look if the task if ‘routine’ or not
3 types of work;
1. Manual - assembly line is easiest to automate
2. Cognitive - legal contracts etc
3. Affective - stuff which requires feelings + emotions
Superiority assumption - in the past we’ve assumed robots will take low level work and humans will then slot into the superior work, this won’t always be true.
Education
- WHAT: stop teaching routine tasks, instead teach Comp Science/Applied Maths
- HOW: tailored tuition, or MOOC’s
- WHEN: constant reeducation to retrain in skills we don’t yet know about
Taxation
- of workers, is less important, as labor:capital decreases
- of robots, that replaces workers is v v difficult
- of capital, is v difficult in practise
- of business, more needs to be done here.
UBI - should be for all to avoid stigma, claimants should be required to make either an economic (work) or non-economic (community care) contribution.
Capital sharing, 1) reduces the need to income sharing, 2) narrows economic divisons