It's time we stop devising miserable busy-work schemes like the Government's "Youth Jobs PaTH". They do little more than entrench an outdated understanding of what it means to have a functioning economy, writes Tim Dunlop.

The Government's new "jobs" scheme, announced in this week's budget, is called Prepare-Trial-Hire (aka Youth Jobs PaTH), and it suffers from the same basic problem that makes their work-for-dole scheme next to useless: there aren't enough jobs.

Let me state the generally unstated but obvious fact: if there were enough jobs, we wouldn't need any of these schemes. We wouldn't need these so-called "pathways" to employment because, well, people could get a job.

Put simply, youth unemployment wouldn't have averaged 13.49 per cent between 1978 and 2016 if there were actual jobs to be had.

It is in the absence of jobs - work that pays people a decent living on an ongoing basis - that governments dream up schemes like PaTH. They are less about getting people into work than about policing the unemployed within ever-shifting parameters of discipline (bordering on cruelty at times), a process I explained at more length a few weeks back.

And there is something even more fundamental we have to consider.

All the talk about "jobs and growth" - which is the alleged focus of the budget - ignores the fact that both jobs and growth are confronting the structural limits of what the economy can provide.

That is to say, the presumption underpinning employment schemes like PaTH is that at some point in the future there will be decent, full-time jobs that will eventually lower unemployment.

What I am saying is that no such future exists.

The era of full-time work is coming to an end and we have to stop holding out the false promise that at some magical moment the jobs are going to reappear.

Why is the era of full-time employment coming to an end?

There are two key reasons. One is that climate change is bringing us up against the edge of what the earth can bear. (Or if you prefer, the limits of what the earth can bear has brought us climate change.)

This means that the extractive industries on which developed-world prosperity has been based - mining and fossil-fuel burning - are putting at risk the biological sustainability of a middle-class existence. Carbon pollution is heating the atmosphere to unsustainable levels, while the cataclysmic effect of "natural" disasters can set back regional development for years.

It follows that an economy based solely on that sort of growth is self-defeating.

The second reason the era of full-time employment is ending is technological. This goes beyond the simplistic notion that a robot might take your job (though in everything from manufacturing, to food preparation, to most of the professions including law, accounting, medicine and journalism, a robot will probably take your job).

It goes to the very nature of wealth creation itself, which is increasingly based in industries - finance, hi-tech, knowledge - that simply do not require large workforces.

Yes, some argue that the technology will create jobs as well as destroy them, and this is no doubt true. The question is, will there be enough of the new jobs to make up for the loss of the old ones?

I wouldn't hold my breath.

A report by the Oxford Martin School, for example, that looked at the number of jobs created by new technologies makes the point:

Because digital businesses require only limited capital investment, employment opportunities created by technological change may continue to stagnate as the US economy is becoming increasingly digitized.

More generally, a recent report by McKinsey & Company investigated the question of technological unemployment and looked at "roughly 2,000 individual work activities". They "assessed the requirements for each of these activities against 18 different capabilities that potentially could be automated" and then they "assessed the 'automatability' of those capabilities through the use of current, leading-edge technology."

Their conclusion?

The bottom line is that 45 per cent of work activities could be automated using already demonstrated technology. If the technologies that process and "understand" natural language were to reach the median level of human performance, an additional 13 per cent of work activities in the US economy could be automated. The magnitude of automation potential reflects the speed with which advances in artificial intelligence and its variants, such as machine learning, are challenging our assumptions about what is automatable. It's no longer the case that only routine, codifiable activities are candidates for automation and that activities requiring "tacit" knowledge or experience that is difficult to translate into task specifications are immune to automation.

And consider this: even if it remains economical for some businesses to continue employing humans, the growth in automation of various sorts means that humans will increasingly be competing against machines, and as author Norbert Wiener noted way back in the '50s: "[T]he automatic machine, whatever we think of any feelings it may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labour. Any labour which competes with slave labour must accept the economic conditions of slave labour."

Nonetheless, we shouldn't just presume this is all bad news. A world in which we all work less is not necessarily a worse world. As economist John Quiggin suggests:

The information economy allows us to abandon the 20th-century social model in which adults spend most of their days in an organised workplace. Instead, much of the value in the information economy is generated by informal interactions through various forms of social media. Combining this trend with steadily increasing productivity makes it possible to envisage a massive reduction in formal working hours, perhaps to the 15 hours a week envisaged by Keynes nearly a century ago.

To get there, we have to stop kidding ourselves that jobs are going to come back. Sure, there will be new forms of employment, and actually, the Government is right to point to the growth in skills that are likely to accompany the building of new submarines here. (We can only wish that instead of investing in submarines of dubious value, they had invested the $50 billion, or at least some of it, in renewable energy projects.)

But such advances are only going to be of limited value in employing large numbers of people.

Instead of this sort of wishful thinking, we have to confront the structural changes that are occurring under our noses and commit to finding systems for distributing wealth in ways other than expecting people to get a job.

This will almost certainly mean adopting some form of basic income - a guaranteed minimum wage paid to everyone regardless of whether they "work" in the traditional sense or not - though we are a long way from that being a viable political option.

Still, we are going to have face it sooner or later, as well as other fundamental changes to our usual ways of doing things.

The bottom line is this: schemes like PaTH are not a pathway to decent work but simply a form of discipline and punishment, a way of controlling the unemployed in the absence of actual jobs.

We have to stop reinventing these miserable busy-work schemes that do little more than entrench an outdated understanding of what it means to have a functioning economy, and start to embrace a future where a good life is no longer dependent on insisting that people look for jobs that do not, and will not, exist.

Tim Dunlop writes regularly for The Drum. His new book, The Future Is Workless, will be released in September 2016. You can follow him on Facebook and on Twitter.