• The unskilled labour market is a lot of people. Using Canadian job data, assuming “service” jobs to be “unskilled” and “goods producing” to be “skilled” that’s 14M to 3M jobs.

        Take just 20% of the unskilled jobs market and turn it to skilled jobs you almost double it to 5.8M

        I don’t think you can almost double the skilled labour market and not have negative consequences, there’s not that much demand.

    • Then people will find new things to do. The extra man hours can be dedicated towards the manufacture of luxury products, art, and other less utilitarian items.

      I do worry about the transition period, however. Mass unemployment isn’t a permanent problem, but in the short term it can be a very severe problem.

      In the words of my old economics teacher, subsidizing a steel plant just because you don’t want to fire people may be inefficient, but do you really want to go walk in and tell a bunch of big steel workers their work is no longer worth it?