Hi, Chinese there.
AI is killing jobs; average labor productivity becomes negative because, with the expansion of the group/country/society/company, the management cost for hiring an employee is higher than their productivity.
This breaks the causal relationship between hard work/learning and a good salary.
People started to 躺平 because of the negative ROI of learning and working hard.
This has led to a degeneration of not only STEM or liberal arts education but also education for democratic citizenship.
I believe this is the reason why Americans elected Trump.
The critical point is if your labor is not required, you won’t get a job, and thus you need a reason to study, or people will stop learning and forget the history. A degenerated population leads to a degenerated society.
If studying itself becomes the way to get wages, it would fix the imbalance between labor supply and demand.
Having more consumption of learning is always better than having more consumption of addictive entertainment.
Human is easily caught in a vicious cycle of addictive entertainment.
Adding learning as a prerequisite of entertainment can help break that vicious cycle of degeneration.
Comments
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
Hi, Chinese there.
AI is killing jobs; average labor productivity becomes negative because, with the expansion of the group/country/society/company, the management cost for hiring an employee is higher than their productivity.
This breaks the causal relationship between hard work/learning and a good salary.
People started to 躺平 because of the negative ROI of learning and working hard.
This has led to a degeneration of not only STEM or liberal arts education but also education for democratic citizenship.
I believe this is the reason why Americans elected Trump.
The critical point is if your labor is not required, you won’t get a job, and thus you need a reason to study, or people will stop learning and forget the history. A degenerated population leads to a degenerated society.
If studying itself becomes the way to get wages, it would fix the imbalance between labor supply and demand.
Having more consumption of learning is always better than having more consumption of addictive entertainment.
Human is easily caught in a vicious cycle of addictive entertainment.
Adding learning as a prerequisite of entertainment can help break that vicious cycle of degeneration.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
Standardized tests are an extremely biased and unhelpful metric.
I’m curious. Do you think there is a world out there in which income and wealth perfectly reflects merit/input/hard work? What does this political order even look like?
Anyway. I think we fundamentally disagree on the purpose of an economy. For me it’s not to put everyone on a ladder of merit or to hand out goodies to the deserving like gold stars at school. It’s to allow society to function. It’s to provide people what they need to live and flourish as human beings.
To that end, the purpose of UBI is to allow everyone to get the basic goods needed for subsistence in a market economy. In short, to end severe poverty.
I do agree that the destruction of economic purpose and security for a lot of people is feeding sociocultural resentment that gave us populism in general, with Trump being a manifestation of cultural populism in the US.
I don’t think tying UBI to education is the way to go, though, simply because the purpose of UBI should be to fulfill basic needs rather than as a form of motivating particular outcomes.
But again, I do agree with the underlying principle of the post.