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Alternately, we could just shit-can Reaganism. (in the US) We still have an energy and resource problem, and a decaying commons in the US. Raise tax rates back up to what they were before the 1980s, then use that money, NOT to hand out "for doing nothing", but to pay people to do the very real jobs of maintaining physical infrastructure or (and?) doing research and development into things like materials science, nuclear fusion, medicine/biology, etc. Some things, in some periods of time, work better in the public sector, and some in the private sector. Either extreme of saying everything should be private sector, or that the government should own everything, is foolish. Increasing public sector jobs would also spill over into demand for private sector services. I suppose this sounds a bit Keynesian, but I'm not saying "borrow the money", just that we tried things Reagan's way for a few decades, and it sucked. Live and learn. I'm not a big fan of "money for nothing", whether it's being on the dole, or just collecting dividends from grandpa's holdings. Yes, the nature of advancing technology means the particular jobs will change. I think we are still a few decades, if not more, from AI good enough to decide that it can just get rid of all of us and take care of itself :-) |