What do we do if many people aren't working? - Wilsons Blog

Skip to content

What do we do if many people aren’t working?

To my previous post, "Why do we assume everyone should be working?", one of the more common and good responses was "well, if people don’t work, lots of bad things will happen". This is a very fair point, here are some of the good arguments I received:

Many people find joy and purpose in work, and would lose that.

Idle hands lead to more decline that we already worry about: Endless scrolling, glued to a screen, consuming misinformation, finding people to argue with.

Work means people see the real world, and without it people become disconnected, will vote for fanciful, unrealistic people and policies. They won’t understand how much other people contribute to the economy, and will feel entitled to their output.

We will stifle innovation, because even if machines can do the work, it’s very unclear if they can come up with new, good ideas.

Who will watch the machines and make sure they do what we want?

All these are valid, and I have myself written about this problem in the abstract, in one of my first breakthrough posts: "We’ve lost our respect for complexity". Near the end of that piece, I wrote:

[What do we do about it? …]

What? Don’t look at me like that? I didn’t promise you any solutions at the start of this text. It’s a complex problem, and it’d be genuinely ironic if I now gave you the fix-all solution. I have more respect for the problem than to try and do that in a blogpost.

I am now going to try to give you the fix-most-of-it solution in a blogpost. Go figure. One of the proposed solutions I have heard from others is essentially apprenticeships, internships, similar such things, funded in part by the state. One reason to do that instead of just more university is because I think we generally already feel more schooling having diminishing returns. Many people learn at a high level at university, hit the job market, and have to relearn a whole set of new stuff whilst forgetting what they learnt at uni (even if they got a job in the field they studied for!). Some countries already do this apprenticeship encouragement in part, cutting income taxes and even pension contribution requirements for people under a certain age (Sweden has something similar). It’s a decent solution but it has a specific problem, especially if AI lowers the slope of the task curve (see here for what that means).

Essentially that problem is The Paradox of Value. Even with stipends from the state, these internships will follow the curve of labor intensive tasks. This is good, even necessary, in many cases to encourage people to learn in fields where the economy actually needs people, but it also is the root cause of the problem in "we’ve lost our respect for complexity". So, we need to put some people into fields even if those fields are heavily automated. One example is, well, literal fields. Watch Clarkson’s Farm and you will realise what I mean, the average person knows little about farming and yet, every single person needs to eat. The Paradox of Value is what is standing in the way here, where things we dearly rely on are economically unimportant if the industry is mature and margins are small and automation is high in that area. So, we have to try and estimate "true" value, rather than market implied value. That’s a dangerous thing to try and do, get it wrong and you easily do more harm than good, but for this case we have no other choice.

There are three things that we need to balance:

What the market wants people to do: existing apprenticeship systems like in Sweden, and the current labor demand market serve this.

What people want to do: Things that are prestigious or are their passions. When people choose a uni major but then don’t end up working in the field, usually that means this was misaligned with point 1.

What our society relies on: This is the paradox of value mentioned above, currently very weakly served by curiosity and things like Clarkson’s Farm.

Let’s focus on 3 for a bit. The way that industry, academia, and government solve similar problems is by running shock scenarios. We ask "ok, things are running smoothly right now, but if crisis comes which industries are most affected, and how much is that effect multiplied by how much we need that industry to live?". Do this for a few possible crises, and farming, water supply, energy supply, logistical systems, payment systems, healthcare, and communication systems all come out on top for pretty obvious reasons. You don’t just get a ranking but a value.

I’m now going to go into a hypothetical constructed solution, it’s going to sound very different from anything we have right now, and it’s designed for an equally hypothetical world where machines can do a great many tasks. OK: Imagine then that we have a pot of money, taxed from scarce factors which if you want to know why you’d do that please read "Working on Economics with...