Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
<i>Labor market conditions are not acts of God, nor inevitable. They are shaped by policies, investments, and institutions.</i><p>This is a point I keep trying to make about UBI and seemingly utterly failing. It isn&#x27;t &quot;inevitable&quot; that automation will lead to high rates of chronic unemployment.<p>I&#x27;ve been quiet of late on HN. I often am around Christmas time, but I also wonder if I&#x27;m just fed up with feeling like it&#x27;s completely pointless.<p>Due to so-called <i>identity politics</i>, if I give my opinion about various things, it is seen as &quot;political&quot; in a way that it isn&#x27;t for people who aren&#x27;t me. There seems to be no amount of provisos or hedging my bet that adequately protects me from ridiculous personal attacks for speaking at all.<p>I&#x27;m skeptical that articles like this one are at all a reasonable picture of what&#x27;s going on with the economy. I&#x27;m skeptical because I&#x27;m one of those poor people that makes too little money in the new economy and I&#x27;m quite clear this is the happy, shiny version of my life where unicorns fart rainbows.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong. I&#x27;m certainly sick to death of being poor, struggling to make ends meet, etc. I&#x27;m sick to death of the classism and gender issues that help keep my financial problems alive.<p>But the reality is that I&#x27;m supposed to be dead. My life isn&#x27;t supposed to work <i>at all.</i><p>I have a genetic disorder and I have been getting myself well for a lot of years when that isn&#x27;t supposed to be possible at all. It&#x27;s been possible because of doing low paying gig work and my income is as low as it is in part because I don&#x27;t work that much.<p>I hesitate to admit that because I know from long experience that people are quick to latch onto a detail like that and use it to justify making zero effort to address other issues, like classist and sexist BS that is also part of the problem.<p>Many years ago, I read a study that measured real world things like how many meals per day someone got. The conclusion was that less than one half percent of Americans were <i>poor</i> by the standards of less developed countries like India.<p>Similarly, I was a military wife for many years and found that it was nigh impossible to compare military compensation packages to civilian ones. A large part of the value of military compensation is in &quot;benefits,&quot; not cash pay. It&#x27;s very much an apples to oranges comparison and it&#x27;s damn near impossible to articulate.<p>I&#x27;m unconvinced that we have a good means to adequately measure and understand current quality of life as compared to historical norms. I&#x27;m dirt poor and I&#x27;m currently broadcasting to the globe via a cheap ass smartphone and free membership on a public forum. That same smartphone holds multiple games, serves as my personal library and more.<p>When I was a military wife, we had multiple bookcases lining the walls of our living room. They held hundreds of books and, later, dozens of boxes from software that came with a paper booklet and a CD or floppy to install it.<p>I currently live in an SRO. My life could not work at all if I still needed hundreds of books and physical storage for software<p>It wouldn&#x27;t work because I don&#x27;t have the money for more space. It wouldn&#x27;t work because papers make me sick. It wouldn&#x27;t work for a long list of reasons.<p>I don&#x27;t think we have any idea how to measure how much of our lives have moved from physical goods to virtual ones and how that presents itself to the eyes of the world as seeming poverty because we own so much less physically. To my mind, it&#x27;s like magic. It&#x27;s like having a DnD bag of holding for books, software and more.<p>Life is different these days. We don&#x27;t have any idea how to incorporate that fact into our metrics for measuring things like poverty.<p>I desperately want the US to fix its health care issues and housing problems. These are very real problems that very negatively impact the country and weigh especially heavily on the lower classes who have less money.<p>But I am less convinced that the trend of low paid work, whether from jobs or gig work, is really some kind of evil, malicious, abusive trend where rich people are being intentionally awful to line their pockets at the expense of everyone else. I think it&#x27;s far more complicated than that and I don&#x27;t think it gets acknowledged at all. I don&#x27;t think we are even discussing that angle, in part because no one wants to suggest that poverty isn&#x27;t really a problem or be accused of implying such by wondering out loud about some of this stuff.<p>I can afford to occasionally comment on it because I&#x27;m already a social outcast that everyone thinks is crazy. I&#x27;m not risking that much.<p>But anyone with any kind of &quot;nice life&quot; and decent reputation either has zero idea how the other half lives or has no real choice but to keep such thoughts private lest they be accused of being up to something nefarious.