Basic income

[rocker-trader]

25% unemployment means business can lose 25% revenue decline. business that lose 25% of customers then lay off 25% of employees and it's dominoes effect. lay offs and loss of jobs always begin at the low level workers.
then the rich start to panic as the companies they've invested see decline in revenues and profits. etc.

companies like apple can see 25%-30% decline in global revenues as people who lose their jobs or incomes drop. the poor get poorer and the rich get less rich or lose a lot of net worth.

all business depend on customers buying stuff they don't need. or unnecessary stuf. well 80% of consumption or GDP is non-essential as covid 19 has said.

People don't need to buy tesla cars. etc don't need to travel. don't need to buy a lot of stuff. even grocery stores are decline, poor people with no money buy less food. etc. forget about overpriced 'organic stuff' in 'depression'

it's keynesian economics.

 

[Cuddles]

At some point though Yang's premise will play out. You get more and more automation and fewer and fewer blue collar jobs. You end up with a group of folks who may be hard working good people but either lack the intellect to be part of the knowledge economy or are aged out of it and lack the intellectual flexibility to become part of it. It's not good for our society or any of us to leave those people behind.
We're not there yet and we probably won't be there in a decade. But in 50 years at current rates....we'll definitely be there. Better to start thinking about solutions now. And IMHO we need to jettison the Puritan mindset equating painful hard work as inherently moral and not working as inherently immoral when thinking about solutions. Making people do meaningless jobs to make work for work's sake isn't the answer, again IMHO.

I have problems with people at work that oversell their qualifications & am better off automating their duties rather than spending the time doing the work for them. I reckon there's plenty of people who'd be out of a job if industry took automation more seriously. I'm not even sure if it's an intellect issue rather than a training/stubbornness issue. In any case, if it's costing us money keeping people like these around, we'd probably be better off w/UBI.