Economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930 predicted that within 100 years, we’d only be working three hours a day, at most.
We’re a long way away from that. The average American adult still works 8.7 hours a day, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But Adam Westbrook, who produced this video essay on Fusion, says it’s only a matter of time before we reach the point where technology has made our need for most labor obsolete.
“Slowly but surely, Keynes’ prediction is starting to come true. … There’s an economic inevitability to all of this,” Westbrook says in the video.
The narrator is talking about what some consider the inevitable automation of jobs. Recent research suggest that nearly half of the jobs in this country could be automated within 20 years.
And when that happens, he says, the government will pay all Americans a monthly salary — whether they have a job or not.
Why? Because it will have to.
To keep the economy moving, we need people to buy things. And if most people don’t have jobs, the government will have to step in, Westbrook says.
“As long as future with mass technological unemployment is likely — a future where most people don’t have jobs — the day where we all get paid just to exist is all but inevitable,” he says in the video.
It also means that we’ll have more time to do things we actually like, he says — though the people he talked to in the video say that they’d likely still work.
Now, the merits of this whole theory are certainly debatable.
For one, the video estimates it would cost around $3 trillion a year to send every American a monthly check of $1,000 to $1,500 — a majority of our entire federal budget. It’s been argued that it would remove the incentive to work (though research on a trial program in Canada in the 1970s did not show that was necessarily the case.)
And The Economist has argued that the monthly check would help the poorest of the poor, but it wouldn’t actually reduce inequality:
Everybody from a homeless person to a middle-class teacher to a hedge-fund billionaire would receive the same cheque from the government. While the extra thousands would make the most difference to those on the bottom of the pile, the cash would be in lieu of all existing welfare benefits. And the income would not be sufficient to launch most of the poor into the lower middle class.
But Annie Lowery of the New York Times wrote in 2013 that replacing all welfare programs with a single check could be a more efficient way to help those who need it.
Housing vouchers have to be spent on housing, food stamps on food. Those dollars would be more valuable — both to the recipient and the economy at large — if they were fungible.
