Our post-work future

People talk about a post-work and post-scarcity future. It all sounds rather breathless, science fiction, techno-utopian. The things is, we are already there--or at least at a point in our development in the first world, where what we need and genuinely want could be produced by something like 15-20 hours a week of labor.

But:
1) Advertising has been designed to pump up what are (for lack of a better term at the moment) "inauthentic" wants. (Marx lives!)
2) We don't have infrastructure to distribute the wealth we have so that regular people can subsist in such a society. (Universal basic income!)
3) Our culture hasn't developed so that people know how to meaningfully use their liberated time. Education is needed. It's not that the resources and opportunities aren't there (give or take, depending on the area of interest), it's just that we haven't evolved into thinking in those terms.

Anyway, this article in The Atlantic is an interesting look at the issues.

A World without Work

Basic Income Guarantee

Basic Income Guarantee - Priceonomics

Another positive after skeptical consideration take on the universal basic income.

Unconditional Basic Income

There are, to my mind, two big changes to the economy needed in order to make most people's lives better as well as put a significant dent in our environmental crises. The first is to eliminate or drastically curtail the power and role of corporations. The second is to institute a universal basic income.

Regarding the latter: there are a number of natural objections that leap to mind. Most notably two: it would be so expensive that it would not be feasible, and it would leave everybody with no incentive to work.

Along with other advocates of a universal basic income, I think these intuitively plausible objections are incorrect, and that we will see empirical proof of that as more studies (or actual implementations, if they come) are put into effect. The video below discusses what the speaker believes to be the first good, reliable study of a universal basic income and how the results counteract these intuitive "myths".