What happens if and when the full-time job goes away entirely?

Lest you think I’m gonna come out swinging re: automation, no, it’s not really that. I’ve done that before, tho!

Actually, by way of quick story before we get into this, in July ’19 I went to Richmond with some of my friends. Because that was eight months prior to COVID, I haven’t seen most of those people since — and because Trump vs. Biden plus adult responsibilities wedged that group anyway, who knows if I’ll see them again anytime soon?

Anyway, we were in this breakfast cafe joint in Richmond and broadly discussing life on a semi-hungover Saturday morning. Most people at the table had 2–3 kids, usually under 7. Somehow the idea of employment vs. unemployment and “full employment,” a term economists themselves barely understand, came up. It’s an amazing fact that everyone with kids automatically thinks their kids will be fine — is that love? — but one of the guys with three kids is like “Pfft, automation is bullshit, there will be jobs when my kids are 25.” In July ’19, I had just been piped out of this marketing agency job about seven weeks before and I was doing a shit-ton of day drinking, so I knew a bit about the “removal of vocational purpose from the male.” (That will be the title of a paper I eventually write.) We got pretty animated for 12 seconds, then I went back to my breakfast burrito, which was…