Comment by marcell
10 years ago
How about an alternate idea of "basic employment"? The government guarantees a job to anyone who wants one, but they do have to show up to work. These can be jobs that are at a loss, and are explicitly "make work" jobs. For example, cleaning up parks, repairing roads, etc. This may solve some issues with basic income: it's not "free" money, which doesn't present as much of a problem to people's values. It won't feel like a handout, and people will more easily transition back to a real job if they want.
The biggest turn off for me is that most UBI advocates seem to have the opinion that people freed from jobs will turn into philosophers or artists or otherwise make productive use of their time. I argue you don't really have to look very far to find the answer to that question: check out what an underemployed ~25yo from a small rust-belt town is up to. Chances are not a whole lot.
That's why I'm really in favor of a scheme like this. Ensure that people supported by the community at least give something back. Go a step further and increase funding for the arts so we can create jobs there too.
> check out what an underemployed ~25yo from a small rust-belt town is up to. Chances are not a whole lot.
The problems faced by small post-industrial towns are many, varied, and way outside the grasp of probably anyone on HN, but I'd be willing to bet that "underemployed", "rust-belt", and "small town" has a lot more to do with a person's lifestyle than the amount of free time they have.
You can't very meaningfully use someone's not making "productive use of their time" while lacking employment (and therefore income) as an argument against UBI. They don't have the income that might — yes, might — enable them to be their flavor of productive.
I suspect that a lot of people's flavor of productive might turn on "artist" or "writer" where very few will be interested in "coal mine equipment operator", or "customer service person for DELL." For the foreseeable future there will always be jobs people don't want to do that machines aren't capable of taking over.
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Another demographic to consider is retired people with pensions. Some of them waste it down the pub, others lead meaningful lives and describe these years as their happiest.
Why is it necessary for everyone to make productive use of their time?
> The government guarantees a job to anyone who wants one, but they do have to show up to work. These can be jobs that are at a loss, and are explicitly "make work" jobs. For example, cleaning up parks, repairing roads, etc.
We have something similar in Germany: "one-euro jobs". A long-term unemployed person (who usually collects 404€ of welfare, plus subsidies for the rent) can work in such a job for slightly over 1€ per hour. It's meant for people who need the routine of going to work everyday in order to have a realistic chance of re-entering the proper workforce.
I've only met few people who did one-euro jobs, but from what I've heard, it's never a nice experience. If all you have is a "make work" job, it doesn't make you feel much better than not having a job at all.
Then again, a lot of people seem to be content exercising a bullshit job [1] (like shuffling around memos in an office).
[1] The term "bullshit job" for a job that's obviously useless has been popularized by David Graeber, who claims (IIRC) at least 30% of employees exercise a bullshit job. I cannot find the original article at the moment, esp. because my Google stubbornly refuses to show me English results.
I think most of the problem with "one-euro jobs" is more that they're (a) "one-euro" than anything else and (b) treated as a temporary thing for people who are unable to find anything else.
There's a school of economists that proposes a Job Guarantee (called an Employer of Last Resort in their earlier writing, in analogy with the Lender of Last Resort). An absolutely crucial aspect of their proposal is that the jobs would be administratively treated like any other job at the minimum wage. That is, employees earn the minimum wage, and they pay their income taxes / receive tax credits / pay social and health insurance contributions like anybody else who earns the same wage. (The details of that obviously depend on the country.) Furthermore, the jobs are long-term by design.
The proposal makes a lot of sense in my book. At the very least, we have to get away from the ridiculous and cruel status quo where one part of public policy explicitly aims to generate unemployment[1] while another part of public policy is built on the assumption that unemployment is a failure of the individual.
[1] The intended transmission mechanism of the monetary policy rule of raising interest rate to prevent high inflation is that the raise in interest rate slows the economy and generates unemployment to avoid a wage-price spiral.
The article is here: http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ (click 'here' to remove the purple overlay).
I disagree with Graeber. Most "memo-shuffling" jobs serve a purpose -- organising thousands of people takes a lot of administration and management. Of course many of the administrators and managers could be removed, but figuring how to do so takes expert senior managers or management consultants (jobs Graeber decries as BS).
Graeber's basic fallacy is comparing capitalism to his ideal planned economy. In an ideal planned economy, there would be no need for sales and marketing, ergo sales and marketing add no value (he reasons). But planned economies don't work in practice, and most of these "B.S. jobs" exist to help coordinate an economy of independently acting, self-interested agents.
His theory is that we could all work part-time but instead we have created a self-justifying system of unnecessary jobs so we can afford unnecessary products. The glaring flaw in this argument is that people can take part-time jobs if they're happy with a lower standard of living. Many do, most don't.
Graeber is an avowed anarchist, so I don't think he's very keen on planned economies. People are forced into labor market participation because they can't meet their basic needs other ways, the police will squash these alternatives with violence.
If you are actually interested in what Graeber has to say instead of making up strawman arguments, you can read "Utopia of Rules".
If WWII (or other total war) hadn't happened, I wonder if the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration would still exist today and in what form.
I think it might be interesting to operate a live backup economy, a low-tech labor intensive one that could produce minimally adequate calories for the whole population for an extended period of time without electronics. This live backup economy would effectively set the minimum wage and be an employer of last resort, though it might be some people's first preference.
Its Communism/Socialism. Just to give two examples (from India) about how it ends up (1) Min. days employment guarantee to people in rural areas: Build a kutcha (made of mud, temporary, no asphalt) road. And build the road again after it rains. (2) Give everyone a job: Ten people operating a ferris wheel.
There is a reason why capitalism, competition, and corporations have managed to pull more people out of poverty than any other scheme. Of course a set of regulatory policies, socialist schemes, and worker protection laws are required to make sure that the focus is on the people.
(1) Min. days employment guarantee to people in rural areas: Build a kutcha (made of mud, temporary, no asphalt) road. And build the road again after it rains.
Sounds like a good thing in my book if the alternative would be higher unemployment and having no road at all.
And yes, in many cases, that would be the alternative. Even the US lacks infrastructure spending despite being one of the richest countries in the world.
Of course, in an ideal world, you'd build a proper solid road once, and afterwards pay people to do other kinds of work that are higher on the hierarchy of needs. But you can't just blindly criticize something for looking inefficient without properly considering the alternatives.
I don't think you'd find much purpose building the same road every week just because the state needs you to do something. It's not better than not working at all.
No, science has pulled people out poverty. Capitalism, like other forms of terrible economy systems happened to exist at the same time.
Economists have looked at this and concluded that the spread of market institutions like private property rights has accelerated poverty reduction, because of the effect it has on capital allocation and incentives.
Science isn't generated in a vacuum, and in any case, science alone doesn't generate goods/services. I strongly recommend you look at the evidence presented on the causes of global poverty reduction:
https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill...
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-glo...
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For that to be true all the socialist or communist states that have failed, or generally to live up to expectations, would have to be devoid of science. Which I'd posit isn't the case.
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Socialism is when workers own their means of production. What you described isn't socialism nor communism.
"workers owning the means of production" is neither necessary nor sufficient for socialism.
The only people who advance this peculiar definition are members of the American left, presumably as a way to define themselves out of being "socialist"!
French Wikipedia has a better definition: the elimination of inequality and social classes.
> The word "socialism" covers a very diverse set of currents of thought and political movements, whose common purpose is to seek social and economic justice. The original goal of socialism is to achieve the social equality, or at least a reduction of inequalities and, particularly for Marxists, to establish a society without social classes.
I guess you could say "socialism" is a label and not a description.
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It sounds like you're suggesting that the government provide a class of jobs to citizens and pay them a small wage for it. Not only does that sound very different from the idea and principles of basic income, but it also sounds suspiciously close to certain socio-economic models that have been tried, unsuccessfully, by other countries throughout history.
Examples? You probably only think you have some because you're over-extrapolating what the proposal really is about. Job Guarantee advocates usually advocate for it within a larger framework that is pretty much the same as we have today.
One of the closest examples of an actual Job Guarantee was the "jefes y jefas de hogar" program in Argentina after the crisis (Google it). It worked pretty well for what it intended; perhaps too well, to the point where it became politically unpopular due to traditional views on gender roles, and was eliminated because of that.
I think it is great they are studying UBI, but I agree with you in that giving people work is the way to go. I believe it goes by the term "workfare" (as opposed to welfare). There is always more work to do, the problem is people may not be willing to pay enough money to have it done. If the government is paying out the money anyway, there should be something productive coming from it. I think this is good for the country and for the people doing the work.
In the past it took a big investment to do something like workfare (like building the Hoover Dam), but now just about anyone could do work by sitting at a computer. It could be anything from project management (there would be a lot of that, with the system itself), accounting, "customer" support, or even helping supervised learning for AI research (by identifying cats).
And you could even allow people to identify the work they want to do, if the have something worthwhile they want to do.
> more easily transition
Why do you assume that people with their time taken by (almost certainly physically exhausting) make work jobs will have an easy time looking for other employment?
Because they will be conditioned to a routine of getting up at 7am and getting to work by 9am putting in there hours and doing that five days a week.
People underestimate how important this is. When you are out of work people have a tendency to adopt sporadic sleep habits and lifestyle. It can be a big shock just trying to get up at a set time each day and getting to specific place with the expectation that you have 8 hours of work to do.
I don't know why you are being down voted. I think you are right on. I grew up in West Virginia and escaped to Silicon Valley. I know people there who spend some time not working and then eventually lose the ability to hold a job at all. It is sad. Those people aren't lazy, they are normal. Many people on hacker news are the unusual (or exceptional) ones who would continue doing the same thing they are currently doing even if they weren't getting paid. I would.
> When you are out of work people have a tendency to adopt sporadic sleep habits and lifestyle.
How did people survive before 9-5 jobs, then? Or, more drastically, before the beginning of agriculture? (Honest question.)
I (PhD student) have a rather irregular/flexible schedule: Sometimes I'm at the institute at 9 am, sometimes at 11 am (but on the other hand I'm very often still at the institute at 8:00 pm). I believe I work a lot - but I'm the kind of person who strongly prefers a flexible instead of regular schedule.
TLDR: A regular schedule is just drilled into your mind. It is much more important how much you work (if there are not very good reasons for the schedule).
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You sure seem to place a lot of value in getting up at 7 am and being a butt in a seat five days a week. Why is that? You say it is important, but you don't provide an argument for why it is important.
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Cleaning parks and repairing roads will be done via park cleaning and road repairing robots unfortunately.
The jobs have to be something that can't be automated yet still meaningful. My suggestion is make new jobs in politics. More robots means more political arguments over how to govern them.
They should create extra political positions whenever there is an unemployment problem. It would be just like work but you don't have to produce anything. You just argue amongst yourselves. Make new laws. Repeal old laws. It's very social too.
I think makework is tremendously destructive to the dignity work affords.
"Make work" programs like this built the Hoover Dam and the Brooklyn bridge.
Fortunately these days the market has people doing "real, dignified work" like sitting in call centers harassing people to repay loans while that infrastructure ages and crumbles.
If those are providing tremendous value, as is I think your implication, then it's not "makework" as I would use the term. I have no objection to finding projects we want done and hiring people to do them (I may or may not object to the individual projects). I object to demanding someone spend their time on things that benefit no one so that they "have a job".
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There's no dignity in work, there's dignity in creating value, which not all work does. Private companies are quite capable of generating useless makework (If you haven't experienced this personally, I envy you).
"Basic employment" sounds a lot like "the military" (or, in the USA, national guard etc). While they don't accept literally anyone, they will take mostly anyone and give them a job that they can perform reasonably well. Sometimes this is flying planes, but more often it's mopping floors and keeping track of inventory. To paraphrase a friend, the military can take somebody that's dumb as fuck and fit them into a little box where they perform one simple task well.
Unfortunately it also comes with a substantial loss of rights, which will probably become a feature of universal basic income programs anyway...
German has the so called "1 Euro jobs" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_opportunities_with_add... It's a job where you have to show up, cleaning up parks is one example, but essentially you're 99% on welfare. People in this program aren't counted as unemployed.
> People in this program aren't counted as unemployed.
That's a major motivation for this program from the POV of politicians. It drives down the unemployment stats which is considered very important by public opinion.
In addition there could be subsidy for for corporations and business that provide training certificate program material for entry level positions in there industries.
This training could be offered on a voluntary basis at community colleges and broaden the positions available and offer more stimulating options then simply manual labour or service industry jobs.
How about an employer based basic income, where the government subsidizes X dollars per year, per employee. Seems like it would fit right in with an employer based healthcare.
Do you feel that employer based health care has been a success?
So a profit subsidy then.
My fear is that people would get stuck in such a program for life - they wouldn't have much opportunity to learn skills that could help them find a different job
How very Keynesian.