The future of work and income is uncertain. According to some experts, automation will one day make full-time paid employment a thing of the past. In any case, our system of work and income is undergoing dramatic changes, with technology and policy reforms allowing working arrangements to become much more flexible in many sectors, often with the result of more precarious employment. Technological changes also create skills gaps within the labour market, with effects on income distribution.
Various policy responses have been proposed to help us face these changes: a negative income tax, a citizen’s dividend, a universal basic income, a state-sponsored jobs guarantee, and other sorts of radical wage- and income-support policies. And the Covid-19 crisis led to many radical income-support policies being promoted and in some cases brought in as emergency measures. It also revealed how much fierce disagreement exists among the proponents of these various policies.
Understanding these problems and assessing these policy responses requires inquiring into core normative claims about value and fairness and as to the concepts of work, entitlement, welfare, and related notions. The Future of Work and Income project seeks to advance research in these areas, including on specific questions as:
- What should count as employment?
- When is somebody entitled to an income, and why?
- How are purely economic costs and benefits to be weighed against others?’
Events
- Conference: The Ethics of Choosing and Refusing Work, 21 February 2025, University of Edinburgh.
- Conference: “The Future of Work and Income”, 12-14 December 2023
- Public debate: “A Job Guarantee for Scotland?”, 11 December 2023
- Workshop: “All Work and No Play”, 16-18 September, 2021
- Workshop: “Universal Basic Income and the Meaning of Work”, 25-26 February 2021, online
Publications and Works in Progress
- Theron Pummer and Ben Sachs-Cobbe, “Taking Jobs and Doing Harm”, in progress
- Ben Sachs-Cobbe, “Sorry about Your Diagnosis, but There’s Good News about Your Pension”, in progress
- Ben Sachs-Cobbe, “Why Enable the Elderly to Stop Working?”, in progress
- Ben Sachs-Cobbe, [Untitled paper about welfare conditionality], in progress
- Ben Sachs-Cobbe and Alex Douglas, ‘Meritocracy in the Political and Economic Spheres’, Philosophy Compass 19 (2024): e12955
- Ben Sachs-Cobbe, ‘Recent Work on Meritocracy’, Analysis Reviews 81 (2023): 171-85
- Ben Sachs-Cobbe, ‘Problems for the Living Wage Movement’, International Journal of Applied Philosophy 36 (2022): 123-43
- Deryn Thomas, Ben Sachs, and Alex Douglas, ‘Why We Can’t Have It All When It Comes to the Future of Work’, Justice Everywhere, 3 March 2022
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Ben Sachs, ‘We Need to Work Out what We Really Want from a Job’, The Times (Scotland Edition), 23 February 2022
Teaching
- Undergraduate honours module, “PY4657: Philosophy of Economics”—taught by some combination of Alex Douglas, Joe Millum and Ben Sachs-Cobbe (sometimes taught jointly with EC4427)
- Undergraduate honours module, “PY4660: Work, Entitlement, and Welfare”—taught by Ben Sachs-Cobbe
Funding
- (2020) Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Networking Grant to support “The Future of Work and Income”: £24,000 awarded to Alex Douglas (P.I.) and Ben Sachs-Cobbe (C.I.)
- This grant supported the creation of an interdisciplinary network of researchers and a set of events and media contents designed to bring them together and disseminate their research. This included three of the events mentioned above, a website/database, a series of video interviews, and a series of informational videos.
- (2020) Scots Philosophical Association Conference Grant, to support “Universal Basic Income and the Meaning of Work) online workshop (see above): £750 awarded to Ben Sachs-Cobbe and Alex Douglas
People
- Alex Douglas (St. Andrews Philosophy, project co-leader)
- Ben Sachs-Cobbe (St. Andrews Philosophy, project co-leader)
- Deryn Thomas (St. Andrews/Stirling Postgraduate Philosophy Programme)
- Theron Pummer (St. Andrews Philosophy)
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