Shocking 105 million Americans are not working – more than during COVID or the Great Recession (nypost.com)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by Sunflier@lemmy.world to c/news@lemmy.world

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With AI becoming increasingly integrated into “white-collar” industries, raising fears of mass job cuts, there have been calls to bring in a so-called universal basic income, or UBI — which pays people for merely existing.

However, Eberstadt warns that this would only worsen the number of dropouts in American society.

“Disruptive technologies in the past have been really great for people who have had skills,” he said. “Their productivity and incomes have gone up a lot.

“They’ve also displaced a lot of labor for people who don’t have skills. It looks like we’re going to be on that same track with AI, wherever it goes in the next 18 months or 10 years,” Eberstadt said.

“When Henry Ford came down the road, I don’t think that anybody had any idea what a combustion engine was going to do in mass-produced cars,” he said.

"But I would not like to see a guaranteed income, a UBI. Because I look at how men who are neither working nor looking for work say that they are spending their days now. And it is very depressing to see what they say they are doing. And I wouldn’t like us to be buying more of that,” he said.

“They are not engaged in civil society, not helping out around the house, not getting out of the house. Spending 2,000 hours a year in front of a screen. That’s a great warm-up act for becoming a statistic in deaths of despair,” he said.

This is basically a third of our population

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[-] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago

But, where we have no social net and will be left to starve and die in a ditch, at least the now surplus horses were put out of their misery.

Not in a lot of places. The farms went under, and the horses were let loose. Eastern Kentucky has a real problem with wild horses maiming themselves

this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2026

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