> The costs of too many unemployed and underemployed is far too high on multiple levels including to those who are not in either group than any social or welfare net and it's absence leads to higly unstable and fractured societies.

Excellent comment.

Some points to consider:

* Poverty is not the problem. Westerners make a big deal out of poverty. They need to believe that poverty is the worst thing in the world and that buying things is the key to happiness. This is obviously not true and a stroll through the many slums of the world will reveal that some of the happiest people in the world are very, very poor. Marx was right about this.

* Unemployment is the problem. Unemployment really is the worst thing in the world. It's something that's difficult to really understand: unemployment is like an invading army of Mongols. Unemployment doesn't just destroy one life -- it destroys families and, on a large enough scale, it can destroy whole cities. It was unemployment that burned Detroit to the ground. It is unemployment that will destroy Baltimore [1]. I say again unemployment is a national security threat far more serious than anything else out there. Marx was right about this too.

* Welfare is the natural state of humanity. Again Western propaganda warps the truth. If you believe the propaganda America is full of self-made men who forged brilliant fortunes despite government interference. This is obviously a lie to even the most casual observers. Westerners benefit tremendously not just from parental welfare (seriously, look at college tuition prices) but they are the beneficiaries of an extraordinary historic investment. (Which, many would say, was itself the result of historic theft and literal slavery.) Marx was right again.

* The key point: feudalism is exactly what we have today. It's difficult to see this because there's so much propaganda in the way but I think people are starting to pick up on it. Certain people enjoy tremendous aid and support and all types of valuable welfare while others are thrown to the wolves. And it's not clear who is doing the choosing or how or even why. The numbers are breaking through though: the falling life expectancy, the total loss of socio-economic mobility [2] and the rapid decline of historical social norms. A historically unprecedented binge of private debt in the early 2000s managed to delay this but now the debt binge is over and what we're seeing is the emergence of an American serf class. (Or rather the normalization of serfdom -- arguably this is nothing new for minorities in many parts of the country.) Eventually the serfs may get angry but what's the worst that could happen? (Marx was probably right here too.)

I'm not a fan of basic income. Basic income can lessen the worst symptoms of the real disease -- mass un-and-under-employment -- but it isn't a cure. And I suspect in the end private producers will capture much of the basic income surplus either in the form of depressed wages or exporting the true costs somewhere else (probably the environment). People don't appreciate (1) the extraordinary lengths private producers will go to in order to avoid taxes and (2) how accommodating politicians are to help private producers and so (3) in the long run, in any conflict between private producers and private labor, private producers always win unless the government steps in to help labor.

(Remember the only reason governments exist at all is to protect against private predation. All of this comes back to the fact that feudalism works! For much of history, for thousands of years, most of the surplus was wholly captured by a few families.)

The right solution is probably something like a Job Guarantee [3]. There's a lot of details that need to be worked out but the basic principles are sound: (1) (involuntary) unemployment must be avoided and causes tremendous harm (2) the government is never going to run out of money and (3) there's always some productive work to be done even if that work is mispriced/underpriced/non-priced by the market. Let the government step in as the employer of last resort and at the least we could slow the bleeding.

It's too bad to see all this work being done on basic income. It's a very seductive idea and it has an element of the underpants gnome logic to it which is very hard to resist. (Step 1: Give people money Step 2: ???? Step 3: Profit!). Giving every citizen a job is a much harder problem and if you buy into the strong AI thesis that problem might not even seem worthwhile.

[1] http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/how-baltimores-young-blac...

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/social-m...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee