IN THE developed world, there is a lot of talk about “fake jobs.” A good example of this was when Elon Musk purchased Twitter.com with thousands of Twitter employees back in late 2022.
The response from detractors was that Musk had destroyed Twitter, and that the social media site was headed for imminent collapse.
Fast forward to today, and Twitter is still online.
What Musk did with Twitter revealed something many in the developed world had suspected: A lot of jobs are “fake jobs,” that is to say jobs that don’t increase productivity.
Fake jobs exist for several reasons, but basically they exist because of excess productivity, not for the lack of it. In a technologically sophisticated country, capital-intensive companies don’t need a lot of labor, but they still need to hire certain types of people to comply with legislature, PR, “inclusivity” and other reasons which are not directly related to productivity.
In response to these types of jobs is Universal Basic Income or UBI, which is a “government program that provides a fixed amount of money to every adult citizen, regardless of their income, resources, or employment status, on a monthly or yearly basis.”
The rationale is that it is better to just give people a certain amount of (free) money than to have them work a fake job, which would require paper work and scheduling and more fake jobs to sustain.
And if AI (artificial intelligence) should become a thing, we can expect this trend to accelerate. As machines take over production and manufacturing, workers can expect to take on more service jobs, a good portion of which are fake jobs.
To me, though, economic inefficiency is a preferable trade off to UBI.
The thing about UBI is that it is only applicable to developed and aging countries. The Philippines is neither of those things, and as such it is unlikely to be applied here (in the near future), and we should be thankful for that.
UBI may sound like a good idea but, assuming it works economically, it leads to dependence on government bureaucracy. It is voluntary servitude, and I am personally suspicious of any government that would offer me free stuff./PN
