Nick Palmer wrote:
In Britain unemployment and "welfare" cases get money. Many think
that this encourages those who are on welfare because they are lazy
or alcoholics etc to throw the money away where they shouldn't i.e
down the pub or the bookies. There is a fair bit of truth in this.
I think there is a lot of truth to that, judging by the people I know
on welfare. I think the U.S. Food Stamp system is best. They do not
give out money or actual food, but only a limited-use debit card. You
can only use it to buy food, not alcoholic drinks or anything else.
This is better than giving out groceries because people can choose
whatever food they like.
I think they should increase the cash value of food stamps and make
them more widely available. My hope for the distant future is that
they will hand them out for free the way they distribute library
cards today, with no social stigma attached.
I doubt there will be actual plastic cards in the future. Just
electronic credits. Sooner or later people will have rfid chips
implanted in them. Food items and all other goods will have them in a
few years. This will do away with checkout lines and cashiers. You
will be able to walk into a store, gather up groceries and stuff in a
shopping cart, and as you go out the door the computers will tabulate
everything in the cart simultaneously and charge it to your account.
There is an IBM television ad showing this, in which some guy stuffs
steaks down his leather jacket, and as he is leaving the manager
comes up to him and says: "Excuse me sir, you forgot your receipt." See:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZYY85IyDNM&feature=related
This is going to happen sooner than people think, and it will mean
millions of unemployed cashiers. As I said, the whole scheme of
employing people to do work is breaking down. Since the 19th century,
commentators have worried that machines will put us all out of work.
It has not happened, and many economists say the idea is silly
because we can always invent new jobs, but I disagree. The demand for
labor is not unlimited. We cannot go on making up new kinds of jobs
forever; sooner or later we will have our fill of entertainment and
the Internet. Machines already do many things that we used to think
only people capable of. I conclude that sooner or later the machines
will put most people out of work.
This reminds me of the peak oil controversy. Since the turn of the
20th century, some experts have been predicting that oil supplies
would peak and start to decline. Most of these predictions were
premature, although US oil production peaked around 1975 and has
fallen by half. Anyway, the optimists, or "cornucopians" as Deffeyes
calls them, say that because experts were wrong in the past, they
must be wrong now, and oil will not peak. Some say it will never
peak! I have read a few commentators in respectable mainstream media
claiming that the US has unlimited supplies of oil and we are simply
not looking hard enough. These people have no grasp of physical reality.
- Jed
