Yes, India is a poor nation. Virtually everyone there - including the software engineers - is poorer than a burger flipper in the US.
I would argue that the proof of the emergence of structural unemployment is not in the current rate of unemployment, but in how long it took for us to return to this level after the housing crisis.
So your claim isn't that jobs don't exist, but merely that it takes people time to find them.
How is a massive labor force disincentive like BI a solution to this problem at all? We already know that unemployment benefits make this problem worse: https://www.nber.org/papers/w20884 Why would BI - essentially permanent unemployment benefits - help?
If anything the solution to this problem is just making labor markets more flexible. E.g., NGDP targeting, making it easier to hire/fire workers, eliminating employer mandate in Obamacare, discouraging home ownership, etc.
> So your claim isn't that jobs don't exist, but merely that it takes people time to find them.
No, my claim is that it will take more and more time for new jobs to be created, and for laid-off workers to retrain for them. At the beginning of a recession, the jobs don't exist because they have been destroyed, and they are only re-created because the persistence of demand for goods and services--driven primarily by consumer demand--compels it.
I believe that at a certain point, in some future recession, that process will take so long, and will be so expensive, that supporting the levels of consumer demand necessary for economic recovery will be infeasible without government intervention at a scale even larger than what is envisioned with regards to basic income itself. That is, unless basic income is instituted first.
I would argue that the proof of the emergence of structural unemployment is not in the current rate of unemployment, but in how long it took for us to return to this level after the housing crisis.
So your claim isn't that jobs don't exist, but merely that it takes people time to find them.
How is a massive labor force disincentive like BI a solution to this problem at all? We already know that unemployment benefits make this problem worse: https://www.nber.org/papers/w20884 Why would BI - essentially permanent unemployment benefits - help?
If anything the solution to this problem is just making labor markets more flexible. E.g., NGDP targeting, making it easier to hire/fire workers, eliminating employer mandate in Obamacare, discouraging home ownership, etc.
[edit: here is non-paywalled link: http://econweb.umd.edu/~davis/eventpapers/ManovskiiEntension... ]