| HN Mirror

> Well, obviously it isn't needed today but you can always change the economy so that it becomes profitable enough to hire everyone.

That's the part that I don't understand. Like you're saying you could increase demand, so more people want more services and more products, implying the current set of employed people would now no longer be enough to keep up with this new demand, so they'd need to hire more. Ok, well assuming the latter is true, that the current set of employed people can't scale to higher demand, what still doesn't make sense to me is where would this higher demand come from and especially how would this new demand afford to spend more money? If everyone is unemployed, it seems only if the existing employed people spend more money can the demand increase, since the unemployed cannot afford to spend more anyways.

But why would the employed suddenly choose to spend like twice as much money? You'd need to come up with some innovative new product or service that is irresistible. (Side note: I believe this is actually where the US excels at. They're always creating new services and products, creating an accretion of the total set of things people want.)

So you've got this chicken and egg problem. The question is how do you bootstrap this?

I think one way is investing in new ventures. Give incentives to the currently employed to invest their money in an attempt at creating a new product or service that will in turn cause the other existing employed to spend more money (continue to spend on what they currently spend on + this new service or product). And that will create new jobs (hopefully), allowing more people to enter the pool of employed, and repeat this until you have full employment.

In this model though, we're relying on an infinite growth. Because the pendulum goes: create new spending habits, this leads to new jobs, now optimize production and offshore, this leads to job loss, now hope that we come up with some more growth that leads to even more spending habits, etc.

So it basically says, as soon as there's no longer any new shiny thing, the rich will just hord the money. So if you want the rich to redistribute their money, you need to give them shiny new things in exchange. And so you want to create policies that promote the creation of shiny new things.

Well, this model has worked pretty well to be honest. So I'm not going to criticize it too much. But I think we are seeing some of its downsides as well. It's based on a very unsustainable consumption model, that takes a big tole on the environment. And it might also have a maximum, maybe there is now so many shiny things, that the speed at which we can come up with even more shiny things that people would keep wanting is slowing down. (Also because you need the existing shiny things to continue to be sold as well, if you replace an old one by a new you didn't grow the pie, just changed hands).

And I believe that's the motivation for finding a different model that be more sustainable. Maybe UBI ain't it, but I understand the drive to search for one.