1) We need a radically different one now - one that shifts the burden *off" labor and back on to asset owners - especially land owners (there is literally only an economic upside to taxing them more).
2) somebody still has to fix those robots.
3) if control over the economy were wrested from oligarchs and were put under democratic control, the economy wouldnt be geared towards frittering away billions on trying to deskill, dehumanize and eliminate labor.
Not necessarily. If the manufacturing of robots can be made cheap enough it may be cheaper to replace broken robots with new ones and send the broken ones off to be recycled rather than fix them.
The shift you're describing in #3 needs to happen. But it doesn't have to be all at once. We can start practicing now and let it be "pretend" until we're comfortable enough with it to start turning our backs on the real economy in favor of the alternative.
CirclesUBI is an attempt at getting that alternative rolling. It ain't perfect but I think it's a good start.
I take issue with point three. Assuming that democratization of private goods is a good thing, we’d want to deskill so to speak. We’d want to pursue automation. I doubt the majority of citizens would want know how to maintain the automation.
This argument always gets made, but I don't think it works.
If 10 factory workers are replaced with 1 robot, the technician job created will not go to any of the people displaced by the robot. It goes to someone privileged enough to have gone to robot-mechanic school. We then avoid all mention of those 10 factory workers and pretend they never existed. We tell ourselves they landed on their feet, after finding lower-paying work amidst rising inflation-- but don't dare follow up with them because we don't want to learn otherwise.
"So let's subsidize mechanic school, make it free!" you say. "Those people can retrain to become mechanics!" Sure. Except the promises of tech have proven to be lies, and every generation of it is more demanding than the one before. "This guy knows computers" used to mean you could put some numbers in a spreadsheet and make a pivot table. Then, maybe HTML. Everything else followed.
Even auto mechanics-- you can't just understand how ICE works, now there's an electrical system. Now there's a computer. Now there are two drivetrains. Now there's also an optional all-electric system, requiring an electrical specialization. Now there's a network interface. And some self-driving tech (robotics). You have to understand the whole stack to keep up, and not everyone has what it takes to do that. And if you don't keep up, someone younger will, as you're able to service less of the market and watch your potential customer base dry up. You bring in partners and have to split everything with them, which doesn't advance either of you as much as it holds you both back.
My grandfather bought an apartment building (multiple units!) with the money he earned painting fucking lightposts. My dad was a network engineer, which he worked hard at, and paid for a middle-class life. That stopped being enough very shortly after I started working, and now we're all supposed to compete with "full-stack engineers" hopped up on amphetamines and doing the job of ten people-- just to live paycheck-to-paycheck, while your spouse also works, with the spectre of AI on the horizon poised to replace both jobs with schizophrenic parrots. Thankfully I bought a house right before the COVID price explosion, but the generations after me aren't so lucky. They're pretty fucked. Unfortunately they blame us, our parents, or their parents for this mess, ignoring the fact that while some of us are more upstream than others, we're all being swept in the same direction. If only the kids would direct their anger not at the Boomers, but at the oligarchs throwing coins at us from the shore and telling us to swim faster.
This idea that aging people can just infinitely "retrain" into fields that take longer and longer to achieve basic competence in is not founded in reality or history. Again, my grandfather bought an entire apartment building from wages earned watching paint dry. That was what he retrained into, after doing whatever gypsies do for 40 years before they're chased out of their host country. It was a job that required nothing more than a pulse, no degree required, no continuing education needed. Since then, the promise of tech was supposed to make our lives easier, but nothing is easier now. Everything is more expensive, less repairable, more competitive, and more difficult in every way. We're competing with people on the other side of the planet for jobs in our own cities, and competing with Chinese and Saudi billionaires (and domestic REITs) just to buy a home.
But that leads into your point 3:
> 3) if control over the economy were wrested from oligarchs and were put under democratic control, the economy wouldnt be geared towards frittering away billions on trying to deskill, dehumanize and eliminate labor.
We've let the hogs become too fat. We're feeding them our grain reserves while we starve, then turn our knives on each other as we fight the emaciated hordes for the promise of bones and gristle. This is not how the human-pig relationship is supposed to work.
I always wondered: how did the late middle-aged coachmen of England make a living when the railroad boom arrived in the mid 1800s? Even Charles Dickens did not seem to care about them. I can hardly believe that they "retrained" to become locomotive pilots.
Automation is a wonderful thing, it reduces cost, errors, labor and time. But we need to think of ways of paying pensions or such for the immediate generation who lose their jobs. There are also future generations who would have been gainfully employed in a low-skill job which will now be left out. I am not sure what to do about them except education at a younger age.
> Again, my grandfather bought an entire apartment building from wages earned watching paint dry.
It's not sustainable, or even just possible on a larger scale. You can't have people doing simple, low paid jobs owning apartment buildings, as that means there'd need to be a 100+ million apartment buildings (or investments of comparable value) in America.
2) somebody still has to fix those robots.
3) if control over the economy were wrested from oligarchs and were put under democratic control, the economy wouldnt be geared towards frittering away billions on trying to deskill, dehumanize and eliminate labor.