Steven Pearlstein Quotes

Guaranteed income schemes can take various forms, but in the simplist the government sends every citizen an annual check in an amount sufficient to keep the worlf from the door when misfortune strikes, but not large enough to satisfy anyone's idea of a good life.

The Negro is trying to enter a social community and a tradition of work-and-income which are in the process of vanishing even for the hitherto privileged white worker Jobs are disappearing under the impact of highly efficient, progressively less costly machines.

This is … a time when there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever

The result [of more rapidly adopting technology] is likely to be more unemployment in the short term and perhaps greater inequality—a recipe for social instability. Economists are right to remind us that workers who are displaced by machine intelligence need not be condemned to long-term idleness. Given the infinite variety of human desires, there is always more work to be done. But society will need to facilitate social structures that help employees face a lifetime of job changes.

The impending destruction of jobs due to automation and AI technologies is definitely increasing the need for - and speed at which - we have to implement big solutions, such as a universal basic income.

The hope is that we'll continue to create jobs for the vast majority of people. But if the situation arises that this is less and less the case, then we need to rethink, how do we make sure that everybody can make a living?

As a technologist, I see the trends, and I see that automation inevitably is going to mean fewer and fewer jobs. And if we do not find a way to provide a basic income for people who have no work, or no meaningful work, we’re going to have social unrest that could get people killed. When we have increasing production - year after year after year - some of that needs to be reinvested in society.

The minimum wage in Denmark is about twice that of the United States, and people who are totally out of the labor market or unable to care for themselves have a basic income guarantee of about $100 per day.

Despite all the political sound and fury, little service-sector offshoring has happened to date. But it may eventually amount to a third Industrial Revolution, and industrial revolutions have a way of transforming societies.

We believe that the federal government is responsible to give every man employment or a guaranteed income.

living wage

Read the story of the new invention for picking cotton. It may not be perfect yet, it may not work so well in hilly country as on the plains, but it is just a question of time before it is improved. More men and women out of work. Unless we have sense enough to sit down and discuss how to use this new invention and many others, so as to bring happiness, comfort and leisure to human beings and not unemployment, starvation and despair, then we deserve the hard times which surely will come our way.

Suppose, … that the making of the new machinery affords employment to a greater number of mechanics, can that be called compensation to the carpet makers, thrown on the streets?

Political Economy regards the proletarian ... like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being.

There is the freedom from want, despair and psychological insecurity that would come from having income sufficient to provide the necessities of life. But there is also the freedom to choose not to work for a time in order to take care of family members, pursue a passion, acquire education or contribute to a worthwhile community project. There is the freedom to start a new business with an uncertain future, the freedom to say yes to a job that pays little but yields joy and satisfaction — and the freedom to say no to a job that pays too little or is demeaning and unpleasant. Why, they ask, should such freedoms be reserved only for the wealthy?

A moderate tax on robots, even a temporary tax that merely slows the adoption of disruptive technology, seems a natural component of a policy to address rising inequality. Revenue could be targeted toward wage insurance, to help people replaced by new technology make the transition to a different career.

Technology magnifies differences, and it's been replacing or obviating jobs for a long time. But what happens as that case accelerates? I'm not one of these doomsayers who says, 'There will be no jobs.'

The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.

The optimism that many felt in the 1960s over labour-saving technology is giving way to a fearful question: 'Will your labour be good for anything in the future? Or will you be replaced by a machine?'

Many of the technologies that are now racing ahead most rapidly, replacing human workers in factories and offices with machines, making stockholders richer and workers poorer, are indeed tending to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth.

As hardware doubles its density every 18-24 months, courtesy of Moore's Law, and as software eats the world, technology will replace a broad swathe of jobs outright - from burger-flippers to diagnosticians - and atomize many others from full-time positions into gigs performed by many fungible workers. Tech, in short, will eat jobs.

There was a Gallup poll that said something like 70 percent of people in the United States do not enjoy their job - they work to put food on the table and get insurance to survive. So, what happens when technology can do all that work for us and allow us to actually do what we enjoy with our time?

Globalization has redefined the competition for employment and incomes in the United States. Tradeoffs will have to be made between the two.

We are entering a new phase in human history - one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population.

History is full of examples of poorer nations that become wealthy by exploiting their comparative advantage in cheap labor to become globally competitive in a range of manufacturing industries.... If robots are expected to take over many of the menial jobs currently performed by people, the concern should not be for the working class in wealthy countries but for the billions living in the developing world who will now have lost the only established ladder out of poverty.