| You know... janitorial work really is an excellent example: - Some labor is easy both to offshore and to automate -- e.g. factory work - Some labor can be offshored a lot more easily than it can be automated -- this causes at least a practical problem for the "nice UBI" countries. I'm struggling to think of particularly good examples... - Some labor can be automated more easily than it can be offshored, e.g. self-driving - Some labor is "rare enough" that it can potentially be well-paid -- my intuition says construction and repair, especially with the aid of machines But janitorial labor is low-status, is required constantly, needs to be done on-site, and is really hard for a robot. So a particularly good UBI test: how do you hire janitors? It's not necessarily impossible -- for example, if a few shifts of janitorial labor could double this "decent baseline," would people pick it up? Would this leave it affordable? |