[ExI] retrainability of plebeians

[Damien Broderick]

At 11:28 PM 4/30/2009 -0400, Rafal wrote:

>  > If a universal income made it really hard
> > to employ people to do this, then it would provide incentive to
> > private industry (or a free project!) to automate the job once and for
> > all.
>
>### Since you would need to tax private industry into oblivion to
>provide an universal income guarantee, nothing would get automated.

The thread-context has been lost, I think. My sense is that this 
thread started as an enquiry into what happens as machines drive more 
and more people out of work--can such people be retained, and for 
what jobs? Even so, in my own long post summarizing early analyses of 
guaranteed income proposals, I cited one economist's estimate that 
introducing such a scheme in the 1960s or 1970s would have cost the 
equivalent of a small war. There has been a number of wars since 
then, large and small, paid for by taxpayers, yet private industry is 
still around (even if it's currently battered by other failures, 
usually of its own making).

Damien Broderick