The robots are taking over, and they want your job.
Our nation’s economy is changing. From Lordstown, Ohio, to LaPlace, Louisiana, factories and plants are shutting down at a considerable rate as a result of automation. As a letter to the editor in The Post put it last week “Mini-robots are literally taking our jobs.”
What that letter gets wrong, however, is that a universal basic income (UBI) is a solution to the increasing economic threat of automation. The answer to declining factory jobs, instead, is to teach these people new skills for a new economy, not to let them become complacent under a system that incentivizes unemployment.
Universal basic income removes the incentive of work. It allows, as philosopher Elizabeth Anderson describes it, for people “to abjure work for a life of idle fun... [and] depress the willingness to produce and pay taxes of those who resent having to support them.” The source of that income has to come from somewhere. If only a fraction of society is paying in, how can we expect the money to be paid out?
The nation is currently facing a similar problem with other entitlements, such as Social Security and Medicare. The population paying in is too small to support those who are taking money out, which is why those programs are headed toward bankruptcy.
The estimated cost of implementing UBI in the US is a whopping $1.4 trillion, nearly $500 billion more than our nation spends on defense. Adopting such a policy would plunge our country into an even deeper debt, something the nation cannot afford.
The blacksmiths, coopers, and soda jerks have been automated away. When those jobs were in decline, the U.S. didn’t step in and offer them money, because automation is a naturally occurring economic process. For society to progress, the jobs people hold and the skills people have must do the same.
The natural conclusion is to encourage those who currently hold jobs that are in danger of being automated away to upskill, which is the process of teaching workers new skills.
It is no longer enough to demand workers do the same job over and over again for decades on end. Instead, they should be continually learning new skills that improve their performances and make them viable in a fast-moving economy.
The result of upskilling is a workforce that can adapt to industry changes, not one that is stagnant and immovable.
America, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. We need to come to grips with the realities of economics and start putting ourselves and our nation in a place to succeed.
Matthew Geiger is a freshman studying economics at Ohio University. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those of The Post. Want to talk to Matthew? Tweet him @Mattg444.
