[pw0ncakes]

What's missed here is that being fired, for a lot of people, has real consequences. I don't think I'd take a job where I thought there was a 1/3 chance I'd be fired in the next 6 months.

If you're a startup, you're hiring people who understand the lack of job security. If you're a large company, there's no excuse for firing 1/3 within 6 months: you can move people around until they fit. If you're getting rid of more than 10% in the first 6 months, you're doing something wrong.

My thought: we should have a real safety net (including universal healthcare and a basic income that everyone gets, even the gainfully employed millionaires) and then allow companies to hire and fire whomever they want, because no one's life gets ruined by the loss of a job. But this would be a radical departure from the society we currently have.

[hga]

Is there any hire at will (which as a term of art includes firing and leaving at will) European country with socialized medicine and the dole?

I told that plenty that make it so difficult to fire a person that they have high youth unemployment rates (e.g. France), but the above three with a strong "Protestant work ethic" might work out well. Or the incentive structure, if a lifestyle on the dole is too good for too many people, might be disastrous in the long term.

I'm inclined to think the latter will be the outcome but wonder if we have any tests of the proposition.

[Tichy]

In Germany i think it is easy to fire employees in the first 6 months (probation period). A probation period of up to 2 years might be possible, but I am not sure (there was a lot of discussion about this some time ago).

One thing that happens is that some low-level jobs have high fluctuation. Especially as the government pays some additional money for some jobs in the first couple of months (which seems extremely absurd to me). So some clever employers fire their employees once the government subsidization has expired...

[cabalamat]

> Is there any hire at will (which as a term of art includes firing and leaving at will) European country with socialized medicine and the dole?

Britain probably qualifies to some extent, because employees cannot claim unfair dismissal if they were sacked before they'd been working for an employer for one year.

[contextfree]

Northern Europe?

[hga]

Could you name a country?

As far as I know (and I admit I don't really), don't they all make it hard to fire someone, at least after a trial period?

What about Denmark?

They're supposed to have a private sector that's way above average for Western Europe, but I don't know or remember about firing policies or if they have a dole.

Dole as in any able bodied man who isn't working can draw government payments that provide an acceptable level of living.

At will means anyone not in a contract can be fired at any time for any reason (well, you can disallow a few narrow ones like getting pregnant in most situations).

[pw0ncakes]

Or the incentive structure, if a lifestyle on the dole is too good for too many people, might be disastrous in the long term.

Within about 50 years, due to technological advancements, we'll have 20-40% paid employment (not unemployment) and there'll need to be some sort of dole.

Personally, I think it would be great to have a society where people don't need to work. The people who only work because they have to wouldn't be working, which means that the people who are working are those with ambition and talent, and only those.

[gaius]

They believed that in the 1950s too, and it sure wasn't true in the 2000s.

[hga]

The arch-conservative and historian part of me tells me in reply that "The Devil finds work for idle hands." For a pre-Christan example of this, look no further than Rome's initial "bread and circus" period.

The wealth gained from the Republic's Third Punic War had an ultimately disastrous result in all sorts of ways.

That said, you're absolutely right, we will someday have a true post-scarcity society, although the near total suppression of real nanotech research in the last quarter century makes me leery of predicting any dates.

[hugh3]

What do you mean by "the near total suppression of real nanotech research in the last quarter century"?

[hga]

Spend some time on this site: http://e-drexler.com/

Start with this item at the end of the home page: Changing the narrative in the U.S.

In short, "the establishment", e.g. existing chemists appropriated the buzz Drexler created while not actually doing what he was promoting for the usual parochial reasons plus in many cases a genuine and legitimate fear of what his style nanotech will bring about.

[hugh3]

Right, so the failure of significant progress towards Drexler's vision must be due to some kind of secret conspiracy of physicists and chemists rather than, say, the fact that atom-by-atom assembly is ridiculously hard?

I should probably vaguely mention that my PhD work was not entirely disconnected from the idea of fabricating devices by placing individual atoms in locations with sub-nm precision. I suppose I should be offended that nobody let me in on the fact that we're supposed to be suppressing that kind of work.