I think you're going to need social programs to make this transition, and I do favour support for social programs, but not pretending.... Again, governments can't stop this with monetary policy. It's coming anyway. By not recognizing it, you make the problem worse. You just tax people. On the top, people think they got a gift, and then you have to tax them more for social programs.
John Maynard Keynes wrote in his 1930s essay that we would be working 13 hours right now, and the reason why we haven't been, why we haven't followed this progression of technology down, is that we're on a hamster wheel, pulling asset prices up. Both sides of government—and this is not their fault—are talking about the same system instead of a systematic change. They're yelling at each other on both sides of the aisle and it's creating more division throughout society out of that yelling, because they're missing the fundamental point. Technology makes everything cheaper.
We're asking the wrong question. How do we support more.... I just heard about the infrastructure projects. That's awesome. Why infrastructure projects? Because you get a longer-term GDP gain, and they have always worked to get people back to work and produce longer-term GDP gain because roads got faster, right? People would shorten their commute time and you'd get a longer-term GDP gain.
Today, the superhighways of the future are all digital. The faster roads are the ones we're on right now—Zoom—and without recognizing that, the money is going to go into the wrong areas and we're going to make the problem worse.