Abdullah Ranginwala

Idiotic take. Falling for a fixed jobs fallacy is economic illiteracy. “Who will eat the food, the tractors?” UBI won’t be needed. It’s a misunderstanding of demands and consumer psychology. When the marginal cost of supply falls, owners of excess can nearly give it away for something. Could be a stone ground flour yippie croissant or extra dance lessons for your ten year old. This is before factoring in collective pressure, lowering barrier to entry, the commodification of supply chain. Supply requiring less and less labor results in the value of what automation produces falling. This is exactly what tractors did to food. We need to understand that “jobs” are a proxy for “I have excess of something I want less than what I can get in exchange.” Time is the primary thing people are willing to trade. If they have insane supply of Barbie dolls they don’t value having excess of, and it required little time to produce, they can easily trade it with low risk. What this does is make the value of time go up. Artist becomes a living wage, instead of “starving.” Don’t believe this? Check the price of Taylor Swift concert tickets. Believing the government needs to step in and reallocate is the same dumbass thinking the progressives had more than a century ago. They tried, caused the Great Depression like idiots. Just because you can’t see what people will demand, doesn’t mean there will be zero demand for human time, and require UBI. If we could predict these demands we’d all invest and become rich. But the market is organic and the future is murky. Don’t fall for the fixed pie fallacy.