if somebody asks an overinflated way-over productivity wage for cleaning toilets because of a supply shortage,
this is considered being unethical and "unwilling to do the dirty work, while receiving benefits",
but asking a way way overinflated price for housing because of a supply shortage is considered good and healthy for the market and drives investment without shaming the investors for receiving undue housing benefits?
Why do we yell at people artificially shortening toilet cleaner supply, while at the same time not yelling at developers for artificially shortening housing supply?
Don't people need to live AND shit?
Looks like it is not about an economic argument after all. Seems like it’s again a pattern of abusing less privileged, weaker, less defensible people. Shaming them for what they naturally and humanly want - and which is the same what the privileged naturally want: To be able to say no, when they want to say no.
Where do these schemes of maliciously founded shame on false grounds come from? How did we start to listen to the voice of the psychopaths which want to divide us?
I agree with your sentiment, but your anger re: housing is misdirected. Developers do not short the housing supply. Like most businesses they make more in volume than they do in margin and would happily build more units at any price range if it was legal.
In the US and UK (and probably many other countries) the government has a default stance of allowing no or nearly no development without excruciatingly painful, expensive, and slow bargaining with city hall. The primary job of a developer is to get permission to build something.
The government is killing supply, not the developers.
I understand your willingness to attribute wrong behavior to the correct culprit.
But, how does it come, that these procedures to get building permits have been slowed down/bureaucratized to the point that it almost seems intentional?
Also, the anger is not about them intentionally shortening supply - it’s about them intentionally asking and taking the higher prices. Nobody forces them to take more than e.g. a 10% shortage signal markup, but we force people on the other side to wipe the floor with their dignity.
There's also many companies buying up as much real estate as possible for rent-seeking which inflates home ownership costs substantially (especially in my area).
It's all supply and demand. If we need more housing, people need to move to places where housing is more available. There are plenty of small rural towns that have excess, cheaply priced housing. (In the Bay area, not so much.)
> if somebody asks an overinflated way-over productivity wage for cleaning toilets because of a supply shortage, this is considered being unethical and "unwilling to do the dirty work, while receiving benefits", but asking a way way overinflated price for housing because of a supply shortage is considered good and healthy for the market and drives investment without shaming the investors for receiving undue housing benefits?
The clear difference is who bears the cost of demanding an artificially high price. If you're asking an overinflated wage as a ploy to stay on unemployment, or to keep a low-effort make-work job, who bears the cost of that decision? Not the worker! By shunning gainful employment, he chooses to remain on the dole, for his own benefit and to the detriment of his neighbors--who are paying his bills. He also short-changes society, which could benefit from his employment through taxes paid, and by virtue of his doing work that's actually in demand. So it's unethical for this person to take money out of his neighbors' pockets (many of whom do dirty work) because he's too good to do his fair share.
The person who chooses to try to sell their house for a high price doesn't gain anything by setting too-high a price--quite the opposite! Every month they don't sell the property, they're paying the mortgage and insurance. So it's not unethical to set an artificially high price, since the seller is the one who pays in the end. If someone actually buys the house, then I'm not sure that you could say that the price was artificially high--the buying of the house indicates that the price was right.
> Why do we yell at people artificially shortening toilet cleaner supply, while at the same time not yelling at developers for artificially shortening housing supply?
I'm not really sure what you mean here.
> Looks like it is not about an economic argument after all. Seems like it’s again a pattern of abusing less privileged, weaker, less defensible people.
This sort of self-righteous hysteria has no place on HN. Fiscal conservatives are not ghouls who abhor the poor and seek to harm them. The fact that you don't know or don't understand the economic argument doesn't mean there is no economic argument--it means you are uninformed. If you're actually interested in an introduction to the economic arguments underpinning fiscal conservatism, try reading "Economics in One Lesson" by Henry Hazlitt.
> Shaming them for what they naturally and humanly want - and which is the same what the privileged naturally want: To be able to say no, when they want to say no.
They're being shamed for the extraordinarily selfish expectation that society should pay 30K/year to save them from doing a yucky job. How many taxpayers does it take to fund this guy's make-work job? Based on a quick google search, you'd probably have to take every penny of tax revenue raised from 3-4 middle-class families. That's 4 families that forewent 30% of their income--and for what? So that one dude can save face? This is an egregious waste of resources and a giant middle-finger to the working class people who fund the Austrian welfare state.
> How did we start to listen to the voice of the psychopaths which want to divide us?
I find this to be hysterical in every sense of the word.
The person who's getting the welfare typically paid taxes too. Having good public services like an unemployment benefit - essentially a form of state-provided insurance - is in the interest of almost everyone, and especially those working class families you are so concerned with.
These two paragraphs in particular stuck out to me:
> Critics of labor-market programs such as the Job Guarantee argue that they enable precisely this sort of choice—they make it easier to decline work that one doesn’t like. One program participant in his thirties told me that, while on unemployment benefits, he’d been offered a job cleaning toilets at a gas station; he’d decided that he didn’t want “that sort of job,” and had instead found work in the carpentry workshop. If everyone were guaranteed a reasonably pleasant job, suited to their interests and needs and paying a living wage, who would do the grungy, difficult work? Austrian employers, like those in America, are currently having difficulty hiring people to take hard, poorly paid jobs; many of the workers in Austria who wash dishes or clean hotel rooms are immigrants from Eastern Europe, and during the pandemic many of them went home, some for good. Jörg Flecker, a sociologist at the University of Vienna who is evaluating the program in Gramatneusiedl, told me that pressure from employers could prevent its expansion across Austria. “Employers say, ‘There are so many unemployed. We have to have a tougher regime for them because we have jobs to fill.’ ”
>
> Lukas Lehner and Maximilian Kasy, economists at Oxford who are evaluating data from Gramatneusiedl, argue that competition with the private sector is a good thing. “I think, from an economic perspective, that argument doesn’t make much sense,” Kasy said, of the dirty-jobs view. “If they’re shit jobs, try to pay them as well as possible. Try to change the working conditions as much as possible until you reach the point that somebody wants to do them, or automate them if you can. And then, if nobody wants to do them, maybe we shouldn’t do them.” Kasy thinks that an important function of initiatives like job guarantees—and of universal basic incomes—is to improve the bargaining positions of people who want to change their lives. “Whether it’s abuse from an employment relationship, a bureaucrat in the welfare state, or a romantic relationship, the question is, What’s your outside option?” he said. “Having the safety of the basic income or a guaranteed job improves your outside option. If your boss is abusive, or doesn’t respect your hours, or is harassing you or whatever, you have the option to say no.”
> Austrian employers, like those in America, are currently having difficulty hiring people to take hard, poorly paid jobs
Sounds like a signal from the market that they are not paying enough. One might argue about how social welfare programs and / or importing cheap labor distort the labor market; but it doesn’t change the fact that jobs are the dregs of the labor market.
It is that signal, but are we ready to pay everyone more, even for low-skill jobs? How much more is everyone willing to pay for groceries? How much more for health care?
For most people here, that won't matter, because paying 50% more for groceries would barely be noticeable, and neither would 50% more for health care be. But for society at large, that would kill many lifestyles.
I thought society was supposed to have learned its lesson during the pandemic, that the "low-end" jobs are often the most critical. But it seems that John Q Public has the memory of a goddamned fruit fly.
So what do "we" do to make these jobs more tolerable, perhaps better-rewarded ? Nothing, apparently, because "we" wants the cheapest possibly everything.
If jobs that are tangibly important are still treating workers badly, simply because formal qualifications don't exist or are in oversupply, and then economic pressures push people into these crappy jobs despite poor pay & working conditions, then that's a sign that our oh-so-holy "market" is fundamentally dysfunctional, treating human beings like barely sentient Roombas-with-mops. Rant concludes here.
This will sound like a crazy commie rant to some people, but the trick that the powerful have played on is all is to think there's some natural market condition that is had for us to influence.
In general, there’s a scratch for every itch. There’s no dishonor in cleaning toilets, but if you’re aspiring to be a carpenter, it’s not an optimal choice.
The manipulative behavior around hours and time off traps people in jobs and makes them “dirty jobs”.
I have a high fulutin’ tech gig, but I worked on farms and in retail in high school and college. The laws don’t protect workers, and the people who were working in those jobs for a living were beaten down and exploited because the employers could.
>> If everyone were guaranteed a reasonably pleasant job, suited to their interests and needs and paying a living wage, who would do the grungy, difficult work? Austrian employers, like those in America, are currently having difficulty hiring people to take hard, poorly paid jobs; ma....
That the answer. Pay people more to do the jobs nobody wants!
This is the classic answer to the classic question about anarchy:
"who will do the unpleasant, demeaning work?"
"We only think it's unpleasant because we make it unpleasant. We can have clean, well lit factories. We just have to prioritize making that work more pleasant."
Also perhaps the least dignified work should be the highest paid? Unfortunately America has a sort of wealth cult going on that we dignify (and deify) those who are already wealthy.
> who would do the grungy, difficult work? Austrian employers, like those in America, are currently having difficulty hiring people to take hard, poorly paid jobs
> “If they’re shit jobs, try to pay them as well as possible. Try to change the working conditions as much as possible until you reach the point that somebody wants to do them, or automate them if you can. And then, if nobody wants to do them, maybe we shouldn’t do them.”
Seriously, if you can't find people to do those jobs then you're simply not paying them enough. This whole idea of intentionally disadvantaging people in order to force them to do what you want them to do is some comic book super villain thinking.
The criticism has some merit if the carpentry job was subsidized by the government whilst the toilet cleaning was not. Why should the latter be less deserving of a subsidy than the former? Ultimately, established social programs such as the EITC are intended to address this in a comprehensive, neutral way.
I think this would cause a fundamental shift in our society.
Who would want to work minimum wage server jobs when offered the same salary for something more rewarding?
Who wants to do gruelling, poorly paid labouring on a construction site, if the alternative is training to be a craftsman for the same wage?
Those jobs would either need to be paid much more attractively (pushing up the cost of restaurant food and construction, in these examples), or - as quoted above - eliminated entirely.
I would be really interested to see how this would play out at scale.
Restaurant food and construction are in the non-tradables sector, so we can just look at places where these jobs pay more by virtue of location - such as expensive city cores, particularly outside the U.S. Looks like they still have restaurants and construction and they're priced roughly the same as anywhere else, so paying low-skilled labor so much more can't be affecting them all that much.
Job guarantees make more sense to me than UBI; the government only has to pay for those who aren't employed elsewhere while it still sets a floor for the entire economy about how bad a job can be, squeezing out jobs that are worse than the JG jobs. But I'm still collecting facts and quite open to being wrong. On my list to read: 'The case for a job guarantee', Tcherneva.
It seems like a no-brainer to me for Social Security to include Guaranteed Employment of a full-time federal minimum-wage income position.
Just add a debit card to the social security card citizens receive. They can use the debit card to withdraw up to a full-time minimum-wage amt of money per month. If they take the income, it's assumed they did some kind of proportional work. I don't think there's even any need to police it.
Simply characterizing it as employment and establishing the expectation that consumers of the program perform work for their country/community commensurate for what they withdraw is miles better than UBI in my opinion. Most people are honest, and frankly a lot of the people I know would work more hours than full-time, it'd just be volunteer-like work helping people and cleaning up around the neighborhood, and probably creating a lot of public art. Positive things to facilitate, and largely not things for-profit businesses would pay for.
It's also nice to couple it to the already established federal minimum-wage, which already has an (admittedly lacking) process for adjusting to keep up with inflation. We should ensure the minimum-wage reflects a minimum livable wage by modern standards, and guaranteed employment would always provide a worst-case income of a minimum livable wage.
I don't think we're lacking of good options for these style solutions. We're just lacking support in the general public for such a socialist-looking program. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and all that.
What you are suggesting would not be guaranteed employment, it would be UBI wrapped in a lie. Ignoring problems with the system (i.e., fraud) would not address any of the reasons why there is not already UBI in the United States. Your idea is crazy beyond the Overton window.
Full employment never works. Famous example is the soviets. Neither can UBI be penciled into an actual economy. UBI would bankrupt the nation, so would a large scale job guarantee program as described.
I am never surprised. When asked to put a dollar value on a program the overeducated go on bleeting about higher order non-sense. It's hard to take any of these academic exercises seriously. Especially when they spawn from fields as fraudulent as economics and social science.
> UBI would bankrupt the nation, so would a large scale job guarantee program as described.
> When asked to put a dollar value on a program the overeducated go on bleeting about higher order non-sense.
Being overeducated, I'll take a shot: 6 million US unemployed x $15/hour x 2000 hours/year x 2 to cover benefits, SSI, Medicare, etc works out to 360 Billion. Which is about 1/4 of the defense department budget. A lot of money but not disproportionate to what we spend on other things.
I think there's room for distinguishing between full employment and job guarantees: providing a job for anyone who wants one doesn't have to be the same as requiring everyone to work.
> Programs don't need to be universal to work well.
Love this attitude! So often on HN we see responses like "It doesnt work in <this one case>, because <nuance>" ... To which it seems so obvious like "then dont do it in that case?"
The way I see it is competition. The government in a particular place sees that wages and conditions are poor so they offer guaranteed jobs with better wages and conditions - now companies have to compete for their workers. And if that sounds like a tax payer burden, consider that low wage workers tend to be net tax beneficiaries their whole lives, it probably saves the state money long term. You just get to exchange higher priced goods and services for lower tax (or more tax services).
One idea I've toyed with is that unemployment is actually a societal refusal to help eachother. Yes we all need sustenance, but consider something like this
If I'm laid off I can choose to still program. If I don't my time might simply be wasted (eg on videogames, netflix, or even job applications). But I can also choose to continue to program. Maybe by helping local businesses, contributing to FOSS etc. While I understand the near impossibility of it all, but we actually could continue to have lots of good things so long as folks refuse to stop working even if told they're no longer employed.
Obviously this fails the moment some unit in the chain refuses to participate, but I think in small ways it can actually blunt the pain felt in recessions/depressions by creating small communes of collusion amongst your social circle. You collude together to ensure that eachother gets what they need, at least amongst the valuable skills in the circle.
How do they pay for food, housing, and healthcare in this model?
A family member who is retired performs volunteer work (adjacent industry to what they did while employed) because their Social Security comfortably covers all of their expenses (and Medicare covers their healthcare). Without these age tested basic income and benefits (and me providing no cost housing), this would not be an option. They would be toiling in a bullshit job.
It's meant as a stop gap not to ride out a temporary situation like a recession or depression, not a permanent perfect solution.
But for example, if someone gets foreclosed on, up to some limit they can still reside with the pool, but perhaps now they're doing labor work for everyone, or they're being a child caretaker, or cooking etc.. ideally they have some trade skills to contribute.
I agree that the global economy and contemporary life has become sufficiently complex that it would not just be a non-change, but my point is kind like why do we have so many homeless families being kicked out, only for the house to sit empty (often rapidly depreciating for lack of maintenance) etc, sometimes its about seeing that if you contribute to the decline, your own decline becomes inevitable.
> creating small communes of collusion amongst your social circle. You collude together to ensure that eachother gets what they need, at least amongst the valuable skills in the circle
Exactly. What are a bunch of unemployed, skilled people with unmet needs to do? Sit on their hands and be content to get their UBI? No, you help yourself, and try to be part of a community that does the same. People can build, fix, teach, heal, transport, cultivate, we just need resources to do that, with a little help we can do most of it on our own. Probably we will benefit from smart materials, better batteries, robots and AIs that can help us be self reliant faster. It will be easier for the state to have a self reliant population. But some things will still need to remain, like chip factories, large industries and training the AI models.
One difficulty is that many societies are very individualistic. People are isolated. It's not enough to say that your skills are valuable in the abstract. There needs to be work that's obviously worth doing, and this requires either demonstrated demand or a leap of faith.
This is fairly unlikely for someone who is depressed. Enthusiasm is very important and often in short supply.
Also, entitled customers will repel volunteer labor. Being paid is in part compensation for putting up with annoying strangers.
This is absolutely the case. It takes "second" (or more like 100th) order thinking to recognize that you're part of an ecosystem that will be less well if you stop contributing just because you're not being paid. The faith part is that you will continue to have your needs (not necessarily wants) met through reciprocity -- which is a basic human psychological trait, so not the worst gamble.
People would do that if they could afford to... They need to be able to survive though. So it's rather our refusal to help them than their "refusal" to do anything...
That’s why, as we strive towards the morally necessary system of universal unemployment (with robots doing all the work) we will need for the robots to create jobs for those who want them (and to convince the job holders of the importance of these ”jobs“).
I mean this in all seriousness and am only sorry that I’m unkikely to live long enough to enjoy this paradise. Of course I’m one of those who loves to work.
I don't think retired people are overloaded with depression, anxiety, addiction, and interpersonal turmoil.
The fact that the lack of work / ability to sustain yourself leads to those things: those states of mind reflect the literal existential insecurity you must deal with.
Because having a really shitty job that is just slightly less insecure kinda leads to the same thing.
I think these programs are very positive. One thing that worries me today is the reductive way we talk about work often. On the one hand there's the "just give them cash, let the market figure it out" aspect that just reduces work to a commodity, on the other there's the 'all work is terrible' mentality. Oddly enough both have a sort of similar disregard for work in a way.
There's really a lack of discussion about the meaning-giving and social aspect of work and how to actively design work in communities. I wonder whether the parallel decline of both traditional labor and religious groups had a strong impact on the perception of work because those were the two main camps resisting that reductive mentality.
If you don't want work to be treated as a commodity, then you need to stop coupling it tightly to how you make your living (the problem being that we're not yet quite technologically ready to do that...).
If work is so "meaning-giving and social", then people will presumably do it even if they don't have to do it to eat, and even if the boss isn't breathing down their necks.
I sort of disagree with that. Work can provide meaning if its entirely voluntary, but for many people the fact that it's necessary, sustaining and vital is part of what makes work meaningful. An important aspect of the value of work is that if you didn't do your work, there's real consequences to that. Otherwise very quickly you go from work to something that is more like a game or a hobby in nature. And while games and hobbies are great, they don't really fulfill the same need. On the boss part I agree of course, but that's an orthogonal issue.
Readit News
if somebody asks an overinflated way-over productivity wage for cleaning toilets because of a supply shortage, this is considered being unethical and "unwilling to do the dirty work, while receiving benefits",
but asking a way way overinflated price for housing because of a supply shortage is considered good and healthy for the market and drives investment without shaming the investors for receiving undue housing benefits?
Why do we yell at people artificially shortening toilet cleaner supply, while at the same time not yelling at developers for artificially shortening housing supply?
Don't people need to live AND shit?
Looks like it is not about an economic argument after all. Seems like it’s again a pattern of abusing less privileged, weaker, less defensible people. Shaming them for what they naturally and humanly want - and which is the same what the privileged naturally want: To be able to say no, when they want to say no.
Where do these schemes of maliciously founded shame on false grounds come from? How did we start to listen to the voice of the psychopaths which want to divide us?
In the US and UK (and probably many other countries) the government has a default stance of allowing no or nearly no development without excruciatingly painful, expensive, and slow bargaining with city hall. The primary job of a developer is to get permission to build something.
The government is killing supply, not the developers.
But, how does it come, that these procedures to get building permits have been slowed down/bureaucratized to the point that it almost seems intentional?
Also, the anger is not about them intentionally shortening supply - it’s about them intentionally asking and taking the higher prices. Nobody forces them to take more than e.g. a 10% shortage signal markup, but we force people on the other side to wipe the floor with their dignity.
It's all supply and demand. If we need more housing, people need to move to places where housing is more available. There are plenty of small rural towns that have excess, cheaply priced housing. (In the Bay area, not so much.)
The clear difference is who bears the cost of demanding an artificially high price. If you're asking an overinflated wage as a ploy to stay on unemployment, or to keep a low-effort make-work job, who bears the cost of that decision? Not the worker! By shunning gainful employment, he chooses to remain on the dole, for his own benefit and to the detriment of his neighbors--who are paying his bills. He also short-changes society, which could benefit from his employment through taxes paid, and by virtue of his doing work that's actually in demand. So it's unethical for this person to take money out of his neighbors' pockets (many of whom do dirty work) because he's too good to do his fair share.
The person who chooses to try to sell their house for a high price doesn't gain anything by setting too-high a price--quite the opposite! Every month they don't sell the property, they're paying the mortgage and insurance. So it's not unethical to set an artificially high price, since the seller is the one who pays in the end. If someone actually buys the house, then I'm not sure that you could say that the price was artificially high--the buying of the house indicates that the price was right.
> Why do we yell at people artificially shortening toilet cleaner supply, while at the same time not yelling at developers for artificially shortening housing supply?
I'm not really sure what you mean here.
> Looks like it is not about an economic argument after all. Seems like it’s again a pattern of abusing less privileged, weaker, less defensible people.
This sort of self-righteous hysteria has no place on HN. Fiscal conservatives are not ghouls who abhor the poor and seek to harm them. The fact that you don't know or don't understand the economic argument doesn't mean there is no economic argument--it means you are uninformed. If you're actually interested in an introduction to the economic arguments underpinning fiscal conservatism, try reading "Economics in One Lesson" by Henry Hazlitt.
> Shaming them for what they naturally and humanly want - and which is the same what the privileged naturally want: To be able to say no, when they want to say no.
They're being shamed for the extraordinarily selfish expectation that society should pay 30K/year to save them from doing a yucky job. How many taxpayers does it take to fund this guy's make-work job? Based on a quick google search, you'd probably have to take every penny of tax revenue raised from 3-4 middle-class families. That's 4 families that forewent 30% of their income--and for what? So that one dude can save face? This is an egregious waste of resources and a giant middle-finger to the working class people who fund the Austrian welfare state.
> How did we start to listen to the voice of the psychopaths which want to divide us?
I find this to be hysterical in every sense of the word.
> Critics of labor-market programs such as the Job Guarantee argue that they enable precisely this sort of choice—they make it easier to decline work that one doesn’t like. One program participant in his thirties told me that, while on unemployment benefits, he’d been offered a job cleaning toilets at a gas station; he’d decided that he didn’t want “that sort of job,” and had instead found work in the carpentry workshop. If everyone were guaranteed a reasonably pleasant job, suited to their interests and needs and paying a living wage, who would do the grungy, difficult work? Austrian employers, like those in America, are currently having difficulty hiring people to take hard, poorly paid jobs; many of the workers in Austria who wash dishes or clean hotel rooms are immigrants from Eastern Europe, and during the pandemic many of them went home, some for good. Jörg Flecker, a sociologist at the University of Vienna who is evaluating the program in Gramatneusiedl, told me that pressure from employers could prevent its expansion across Austria. “Employers say, ‘There are so many unemployed. We have to have a tougher regime for them because we have jobs to fill.’ ”
>
> Lukas Lehner and Maximilian Kasy, economists at Oxford who are evaluating data from Gramatneusiedl, argue that competition with the private sector is a good thing. “I think, from an economic perspective, that argument doesn’t make much sense,” Kasy said, of the dirty-jobs view. “If they’re shit jobs, try to pay them as well as possible. Try to change the working conditions as much as possible until you reach the point that somebody wants to do them, or automate them if you can. And then, if nobody wants to do them, maybe we shouldn’t do them.” Kasy thinks that an important function of initiatives like job guarantees—and of universal basic incomes—is to improve the bargaining positions of people who want to change their lives. “Whether it’s abuse from an employment relationship, a bureaucrat in the welfare state, or a romantic relationship, the question is, What’s your outside option?” he said. “Having the safety of the basic income or a guaranteed job improves your outside option. If your boss is abusive, or doesn’t respect your hours, or is harassing you or whatever, you have the option to say no.”
Sounds like a signal from the market that they are not paying enough. One might argue about how social welfare programs and / or importing cheap labor distort the labor market; but it doesn’t change the fact that jobs are the dregs of the labor market.
For most people here, that won't matter, because paying 50% more for groceries would barely be noticeable, and neither would 50% more for health care be. But for society at large, that would kill many lifestyles.
So what do "we" do to make these jobs more tolerable, perhaps better-rewarded ? Nothing, apparently, because "we" wants the cheapest possibly everything.
If jobs that are tangibly important are still treating workers badly, simply because formal qualifications don't exist or are in oversupply, and then economic pressures push people into these crappy jobs despite poor pay & working conditions, then that's a sign that our oh-so-holy "market" is fundamentally dysfunctional, treating human beings like barely sentient Roombas-with-mops. Rant concludes here.
Penicillin distorts the growth of bacteria.
This will sound like a crazy commie rant to some people, but the trick that the powerful have played on is all is to think there's some natural market condition that is had for us to influence.
The manipulative behavior around hours and time off traps people in jobs and makes them “dirty jobs”.
I have a high fulutin’ tech gig, but I worked on farms and in retail in high school and college. The laws don’t protect workers, and the people who were working in those jobs for a living were beaten down and exploited because the employers could.
That the answer. Pay people more to do the jobs nobody wants!
Deleted Comment
"who will do the unpleasant, demeaning work?"
"We only think it's unpleasant because we make it unpleasant. We can have clean, well lit factories. We just have to prioritize making that work more pleasant."
> “If they’re shit jobs, try to pay them as well as possible. Try to change the working conditions as much as possible until you reach the point that somebody wants to do them, or automate them if you can. And then, if nobody wants to do them, maybe we shouldn’t do them.”
Seriously, if you can't find people to do those jobs then you're simply not paying them enough. This whole idea of intentionally disadvantaging people in order to force them to do what you want them to do is some comic book super villain thinking.
Who would want to work minimum wage server jobs when offered the same salary for something more rewarding?
Who wants to do gruelling, poorly paid labouring on a construction site, if the alternative is training to be a craftsman for the same wage?
Those jobs would either need to be paid much more attractively (pushing up the cost of restaurant food and construction, in these examples), or - as quoted above - eliminated entirely.
I would be really interested to see how this would play out at scale.
Robots.
[0] 'http://pavlina-tcherneva.net/the-case-for-a-job-guarantee/'
Just add a debit card to the social security card citizens receive. They can use the debit card to withdraw up to a full-time minimum-wage amt of money per month. If they take the income, it's assumed they did some kind of proportional work. I don't think there's even any need to police it.
Simply characterizing it as employment and establishing the expectation that consumers of the program perform work for their country/community commensurate for what they withdraw is miles better than UBI in my opinion. Most people are honest, and frankly a lot of the people I know would work more hours than full-time, it'd just be volunteer-like work helping people and cleaning up around the neighborhood, and probably creating a lot of public art. Positive things to facilitate, and largely not things for-profit businesses would pay for.
It's also nice to couple it to the already established federal minimum-wage, which already has an (admittedly lacking) process for adjusting to keep up with inflation. We should ensure the minimum-wage reflects a minimum livable wage by modern standards, and guaranteed employment would always provide a worst-case income of a minimum livable wage.
I don't think we're lacking of good options for these style solutions. We're just lacking support in the general public for such a socialist-looking program. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and all that.
I am never surprised. When asked to put a dollar value on a program the overeducated go on bleeting about higher order non-sense. It's hard to take any of these academic exercises seriously. Especially when they spawn from fields as fraudulent as economics and social science.
Being overeducated, I'll take a shot: 6 million US unemployed x $15/hour x 2000 hours/year x 2 to cover benefits, SSI, Medicare, etc works out to 360 Billion. Which is about 1/4 of the defense department budget. A lot of money but not disproportionate to what we spend on other things.
If so that's fine. Programs don't need to be universal to work well.
Love this attitude! So often on HN we see responses like "It doesnt work in <this one case>, because <nuance>" ... To which it seems so obvious like "then dont do it in that case?"
If I'm laid off I can choose to still program. If I don't my time might simply be wasted (eg on videogames, netflix, or even job applications). But I can also choose to continue to program. Maybe by helping local businesses, contributing to FOSS etc. While I understand the near impossibility of it all, but we actually could continue to have lots of good things so long as folks refuse to stop working even if told they're no longer employed.
Obviously this fails the moment some unit in the chain refuses to participate, but I think in small ways it can actually blunt the pain felt in recessions/depressions by creating small communes of collusion amongst your social circle. You collude together to ensure that eachother gets what they need, at least amongst the valuable skills in the circle.
A family member who is retired performs volunteer work (adjacent industry to what they did while employed) because their Social Security comfortably covers all of their expenses (and Medicare covers their healthcare). Without these age tested basic income and benefits (and me providing no cost housing), this would not be an option. They would be toiling in a bullshit job.
But for example, if someone gets foreclosed on, up to some limit they can still reside with the pool, but perhaps now they're doing labor work for everyone, or they're being a child caretaker, or cooking etc.. ideally they have some trade skills to contribute.
I agree that the global economy and contemporary life has become sufficiently complex that it would not just be a non-change, but my point is kind like why do we have so many homeless families being kicked out, only for the house to sit empty (often rapidly depreciating for lack of maintenance) etc, sometimes its about seeing that if you contribute to the decline, your own decline becomes inevitable.
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Exactly. What are a bunch of unemployed, skilled people with unmet needs to do? Sit on their hands and be content to get their UBI? No, you help yourself, and try to be part of a community that does the same. People can build, fix, teach, heal, transport, cultivate, we just need resources to do that, with a little help we can do most of it on our own. Probably we will benefit from smart materials, better batteries, robots and AIs that can help us be self reliant faster. It will be easier for the state to have a self reliant population. But some things will still need to remain, like chip factories, large industries and training the AI models.
Furthermore, by contributing to FOSS or volunteering your programming skills you are devaluing other programmers' careers.
This is fairly unlikely for someone who is depressed. Enthusiasm is very important and often in short supply.
Also, entitled customers will repel volunteer labor. Being paid is in part compensation for putting up with annoying strangers.
This is absolutely the case. It takes "second" (or more like 100th) order thinking to recognize that you're part of an ecosystem that will be less well if you stop contributing just because you're not being paid. The faith part is that you will continue to have your needs (not necessarily wants) met through reciprocity -- which is a basic human psychological trait, so not the worst gamble.
So how many hours per week do you believe we should be allowed to waste whilst still being a valid member of society?
So true
I mean this in all seriousness and am only sorry that I’m unkikely to live long enough to enjoy this paradise. Of course I’m one of those who loves to work.
A bonsai is as much work as shining shoes.
Maybe people should get over the idea that work should be their source of worth. Which I suspect they will manage to do within a generation or so.
The fact that the lack of work / ability to sustain yourself leads to those things: those states of mind reflect the literal existential insecurity you must deal with.
Because having a really shitty job that is just slightly less insecure kinda leads to the same thing.
There's really a lack of discussion about the meaning-giving and social aspect of work and how to actively design work in communities. I wonder whether the parallel decline of both traditional labor and religious groups had a strong impact on the perception of work because those were the two main camps resisting that reductive mentality.
If work is so "meaning-giving and social", then people will presumably do it even if they don't have to do it to eat, and even if the boss isn't breathing down their necks.