He says it works, but I say that at a pay rate of 1.5-5.0c/word, you'd have to be crazy to do it. Take this with a grain of salt; I'm probably a bit biased because the pay per "word" for software development is so much higher.
This is again someone who maybe can do something which can be done as gig easily online. This simply is not an option for most people. It is like saying, as a coder, that I can do a few $1000 a week so basic income at all is not needed as there are enough programming gigs. That is true (for now) but in these cases (and other brain jobs like legal advice, accounting etc) we are referring to a tiny piece of humanity; for now, and imho into the far future, the rest has no hope in hell of doing it.
While I agree that gig jobs can work fine for some, it is naive to say that because of it we would not need radically different solutions to replace other jobs.
It is also naive to say it is not a race to the bottom as hat is already happening across the board with gigs anyway.
The need for a radical solution lies in the far future. I know large numbers of educated professionals who clean their own homes but would be happy to pay $10-15/hour to have this problem solved. (I pay well over $15/hour, and need to turn to overseas folks for virtual labor.) Talking about the problem of human labor being obsolete during a time of labor scarcity is like worrying about mars being overpopulated.
As a very concrete way to think of it, consider the typical middle class lifestyle in India. Consider all the labor that is regularly outsourced - house cleaning, cooking, laundry, etc. If I want to eat a paan, buy a cigarette, or other snack/consumable, I only need to walk a city block or so before I can find someone willing to sell it to me. Any educated female can easily afford child care so she can work. My office has multiple servants to make life easier for the skilled labor employed therein; if you want maggie, momos or beer, just give them some cash and they'll bring it to you.
At the moment the problem in the US is labor scarcity. Robots haven't replaced these jobs, these jobs just don't get done.
When robots provide the same level of services to the US middle class, that would be a signal that we might need to think about something like a BI. Until then, BI is really solving the complete opposite problem to what we have.
> At the moment the problem in the US is labor scarcity. Robots haven't replaced these jobs, these jobs just don't get done.
Labor scarcity is another word for "there aren't enough people who want to work for less," and you describe it as if it's a good thing for society as a whole.
We have minimum wage for a reason, because with wages low enough to make a neighborhood chai-seller a possibility, it means that the lower limit of a societal standard of living plummets.
The fact that you present India, with its extreme income inequality, as an example of a country that provides an ideal lifestyle for you is indicative.
According to the BI proponents, we have a shortage of jobs. Yet prices are rising and work is simply going undone. That's completely the opposite of what would happen if they were right.
If you want to claim that less employment and lower production is a good thing, go ahead.
Your facts are also wrong; the US has a GINI of 41 (comparable to the UK or the Congo). In contrast, India has only 33.6 (comparable to France, Canada or Sierra Leone). India has absolute poverty which is a totally different problem.
> India has absolute poverty which is a totally different problem.
Good point, but it doesn't change my argument; your conveniences are made possible by the higher poverty / lower income of service providers.
> If you want to claim that less employment and lower production is a good thing, go ahead.
Do you believe that lowering standards of living by eliminating minimum wage is a good thing, because it "increases employment and production"?
For example: Mumbai's trash and recycling ecosystem is largely driven by a complex economy of ragpickers, sorters, and tiny recycling factories based in informal settlements (Dharavi, etc). Last time I checked (Summer 2014), the ragpickers are paid 5rs per kg, and on average collect about 10kg a day, making that around 50rs, $0.75, or 48% the cost of a Big Mac (or its equivalent, the Maharaja Mac) in India.
Would you really agree that someone who works all day to make 50% of a Big Mac be an ideal model of employment and societal economic policy, because they're working and thus raising employment and production?
Because that's what you're asking for if you're claiming that we need to stop a "labor shortage" in order to provide more low-cost conveniences.
I didn't say we should adopt India's economic system. I said that we have a labor scarcity, not a surplus, as demonstrated by all the work people would like to have done - and which other parts of the world demonstrate can be done - but which isn't being done (by humans or robots). Therefore a solution designed for a surplus is counterproductive.
If indeed we have a shortage rather than scarcity (note the terms are not synonymous - a shortage is a quantity supplied below market clearing rates), then we should focus on the root causes of that shortage rather than simply ignoring the problem. Minimum wage might be one such cause, though I rather doubt it (market wages tend to be way above min wage). I suspect that if we have an actual shortage it's regulatory constraints [1] and work disincentives [2] that are the real problem.
[1] In the US people seem willing to sell cigarettes at convenient locations, much like in India. But we have the unfortunate habit of using violence to prevent this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner
[2] For instance, witness NPR's article on massive numbers of people committing disability fraud to avoid work. If we cracked down on disability fraud, some of those folks would have to return to the workforce. http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
>At the moment the problem in the US is labor scarcity. Robots haven't replaced these jobs, these jobs just don't get done.
Labor scarcity in the sense that there's not enough people who need work, or in the sense that there is not enough people who have the necessary skills? I would have to assume the latter. If that is the case, aren't most of these scarce skills the type which are used to service and maintain the very automation which would be used to implement a UBI?
>When robots provide the same level of services to the US middle class, that would be a signal that we might need to think about something like a BI.
Automation already provides a much higher level of services than human workers in many areas. Do we really want to wait to the very end of this process to begin the transition?
The work I'm describing is all minimally skilled labor.
Automation already provides a much higher level of services than human workers in many areas. Do we really want to wait to the very end of this process to begin the transition?
Right now our problem is too little labor, not too much. Maybe we should wait until we at least have enough labor before we take steps that will reduce the labor supply?
Note that according to the experiments which BI proponents cite as "successes", BI reduces labor supply by 10% or so (e.g. mincome reduced labor by 13%).
>Right now our problem is too little labor, not too much. Maybe we should wait until we at least have enough labor before we take steps that will reduce the labor supply?
At what point would you know there is enough labor and how would you measure that? It would have to be once a certain goal is achieved, correct? What is that goal?
I'm curious because in a time where there are 7 billion people I have rarely, if ever, seen someone say on the whole there are too many jobs and not enough laborers. Rather it's more often said that there are too many laborers and not enough jobs. Which is precisely the type of sentiment that drives anti-immigration xenophobia.
As a start, how about once we run out of unskilled work that people are willing to pay minimum wage for, but which isn't performed?
Concretely, I'd pay for twice weekly house cleaning if it cost me $7.25/hour. An actual housecleaning costs me about $50. Most middle class homes in India are cleaned daily, which suggests this is very achievable. Many working women would happily pay $7.25/hour for child care. Lots of folks would love a driver while they sit in the back of a car and work, as several of my work colleagues do. Etc.
Are there no tasks in your life that you'd be happy to pay $7.25 for a human to handle for you?
(India has a labor scarcity too. Why isn't someone cleaning up all the garbage?)
I'm curious because in a time where there are 7 billion people I have rarely, if ever, seen someone say on the whole there are too many jobs and not enough laborers. Rather it's more often said that there are too many laborers and not enough jobs. Which is precisely the type of sentiment that drives anti-immigration xenophobia.
This is because most of those folks simply want to protect a privileged position they were born into. Rather than competing in the labor market with a Mexican or Indian, they'd rather have someone threaten the Mexican with violence for the crime of economic competition.
The issue with KPIs is that it focuses attention on a single indicator, which is what most business in the world revolves around (a stock ticker is a good example). Businesses run in a holistic way tend to do better, such as those explained in Good to Great (productive paranoia + empirical creativity + fanatical discipline). The same holistic approach could be applied to our economy, but lots of moving parts is going to make it hard to tell when, or if, things need to be changed.
I expect a financial meltdown to be the thing that causes a revisit to exploring new business and economic models.
are you arguing that there is a moral difference between hiring someone to clean your house and hiring someone to change the oil in your car?
or are you arguing that consuming services provided by workers who are paid $12-$15/hr is immoral in and of itself, regardless of the service in question?
"I know large numbers of educated professionals who clean their own homes but would be happy to pay $10-15/hour to have this problem solved. (I pay well over $15/hour, and need to turn to overseas folks for virtual labor.) Talking about the problem of human labor being obsolete during a time of labor scarcity is like worrying about mars being overpopulated."
My interpretation of which is that yummyfajitas feels that labor is scarce and therefore overly expensive at $15/hour.
>My interpretation of which is that yummyfajitas feels that labor is scarce and therefore overly expensive at $15/hour.
Okay, I can see that. Your response was kind of an aggressive way of putting it, but yes I agree that it is kind of rude to complain that the market rate for menial labor is higher than you'd like, and to say that there is a labor shortage when the prevailing wage for unskilled work is still below what a reasonable standard of living costs, considering what that means for the less fortunate.
On the other hand, it's pretty reasonable to say "I'll by services up to $x per hour, but not above that."
This is a lot of the 'basic income' debate, because obviously, giving people survival-level money is going to dramatically decrease their willingness to do unpleasant jobs for survival level money. Personally, I kind of like that, as it removes a lot of what I think of the consent problem of capitalism... remove the threat of starvation, yes, and some people won't work at all, sure, but you also remove the moral comparison between work and slavery, and a lot of the anguish and ethical issues that come with firing someone.
On the factual side of things, I wonder where parent commenter lives; as far as I can tell, it's pretty easy to get the cheaper sort of manual labor done for $15/hr in silicon valley. If you are paying more than that for a cleaning service, either you are a generous employer willing to pay above market wages (perhaps to secure a trusted person over the long term) or you are using a service that is eating up most of the difference.
I love how a chronically ill homeless single mother (at least as of the last time I heard about Michele's personal situation) is being compared to Marie Antoinette, solely because she dares to hold a political view outside the received wisdom.
Gig work that works (perhaps), but only for US citizens. I wonder why they impose that restriction, seeing that they also state that as a contractor (giggler?) you are responsible for all your own tax issues.
In the US, you have to present information for an I-9 form when starting a new job. This is to prevent people without work authorization from working. The penalties for an employer to skip this step or otherwise hire unauthorized workers are very stiff. That's likely the reason for the restriction. It keeps them in the bounds of the law for the US.
Sounds like a reasonable guess, but strikes me as the lazy way out... other sites (Amazon comes to mind) manage to find ways around similar issues with an "I am not a US citizen/resident" option (which may or may not require additional documentation for verification.)
They're certainly entitled to do whatever they want, but it looks to me like opening up a significant opportunity for someone to clone their business model in the rest of the world and beat them at their own game.
It could also be simply that this means they only have to (try to) keep up with the law in one country, vs. many if they try to allow non-U.S. citizens. If it's a one-person (or at least not-many-people) show then keeping up with legal requirements/liabilities in one country is already a big deal.
One guess off the top of my head -
Limiting to US is a quick way to screen for writers that have experience in US English (which their clients expect). It's not perfect, but it does a good first pass of removing individuals that speak different dialects of English.
One big bottleneck for this service is the editing/grading - so reducing the time spent on that task is essential if you are trying to make money.
Actually, Textbroker is not just for U.S. citizens. If you go to their site, they take freelancers in multiple countries. You cannot live just anywhere, but they do serve more than just the U.S.
Interesting, but I don't buy the juxtaposition against basic income, which really is designed to solve a different problem. No technical reason they couldn't co-exist.
I think that gig work and basic income are very complementary. If we ever get a basic income I think gig work will explode: much more demand for it from workers who are much less interested in making extended commitments for work but still interested in occasionally picking up extra cash on the side, and a reduced need for regulation on the employer's side since it's so much easier for giggers to say 'no'.
Somehow, I think she has different wage expectations than the average person: "I made over $2000 last year at freelance writing. Nearly half of it was earned in the last quarter of the year."
34 comments
[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 87.4 ms ] threadJust make sure camel case counts as separate words. I made $5 for writing an empty class LazyAbstractEnterpriseAutoScalingStringFactoryProxyImpl
While I agree that gig jobs can work fine for some, it is naive to say that because of it we would not need radically different solutions to replace other jobs.
It is also naive to say it is not a race to the bottom as hat is already happening across the board with gigs anyway.
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0we_c3Ob8Ds/UrDEMjcK3MI/AAAAAAAAE...
Also relevant: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/13/this-...
The need for a radical solution lies in the far future. I know large numbers of educated professionals who clean their own homes but would be happy to pay $10-15/hour to have this problem solved. (I pay well over $15/hour, and need to turn to overseas folks for virtual labor.) Talking about the problem of human labor being obsolete during a time of labor scarcity is like worrying about mars being overpopulated.
How far in the future? What KPI would we look at to know when there is a need for a new solution to replace our legacy economic model?
At the moment the problem in the US is labor scarcity. Robots haven't replaced these jobs, these jobs just don't get done.
When robots provide the same level of services to the US middle class, that would be a signal that we might need to think about something like a BI. Until then, BI is really solving the complete opposite problem to what we have.
Labor scarcity is another word for "there aren't enough people who want to work for less," and you describe it as if it's a good thing for society as a whole.
We have minimum wage for a reason, because with wages low enough to make a neighborhood chai-seller a possibility, it means that the lower limit of a societal standard of living plummets.
The fact that you present India, with its extreme income inequality, as an example of a country that provides an ideal lifestyle for you is indicative.
If you want to claim that less employment and lower production is a good thing, go ahead.
Your facts are also wrong; the US has a GINI of 41 (comparable to the UK or the Congo). In contrast, India has only 33.6 (comparable to France, Canada or Sierra Leone). India has absolute poverty which is a totally different problem.
Good point, but it doesn't change my argument; your conveniences are made possible by the higher poverty / lower income of service providers.
> If you want to claim that less employment and lower production is a good thing, go ahead.
Do you believe that lowering standards of living by eliminating minimum wage is a good thing, because it "increases employment and production"?
For example: Mumbai's trash and recycling ecosystem is largely driven by a complex economy of ragpickers, sorters, and tiny recycling factories based in informal settlements (Dharavi, etc). Last time I checked (Summer 2014), the ragpickers are paid 5rs per kg, and on average collect about 10kg a day, making that around 50rs, $0.75, or 48% the cost of a Big Mac (or its equivalent, the Maharaja Mac) in India.
Would you really agree that someone who works all day to make 50% of a Big Mac be an ideal model of employment and societal economic policy, because they're working and thus raising employment and production?
Because that's what you're asking for if you're claiming that we need to stop a "labor shortage" in order to provide more low-cost conveniences.
If indeed we have a shortage rather than scarcity (note the terms are not synonymous - a shortage is a quantity supplied below market clearing rates), then we should focus on the root causes of that shortage rather than simply ignoring the problem. Minimum wage might be one such cause, though I rather doubt it (market wages tend to be way above min wage). I suspect that if we have an actual shortage it's regulatory constraints [1] and work disincentives [2] that are the real problem.
[1] In the US people seem willing to sell cigarettes at convenient locations, much like in India. But we have the unfortunate habit of using violence to prevent this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner
[2] For instance, witness NPR's article on massive numbers of people committing disability fraud to avoid work. If we cracked down on disability fraud, some of those folks would have to return to the workforce. http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
Labor scarcity in the sense that there's not enough people who need work, or in the sense that there is not enough people who have the necessary skills? I would have to assume the latter. If that is the case, aren't most of these scarce skills the type which are used to service and maintain the very automation which would be used to implement a UBI?
>When robots provide the same level of services to the US middle class, that would be a signal that we might need to think about something like a BI.
Automation already provides a much higher level of services than human workers in many areas. Do we really want to wait to the very end of this process to begin the transition?
Automation already provides a much higher level of services than human workers in many areas. Do we really want to wait to the very end of this process to begin the transition?
Right now our problem is too little labor, not too much. Maybe we should wait until we at least have enough labor before we take steps that will reduce the labor supply?
Note that according to the experiments which BI proponents cite as "successes", BI reduces labor supply by 10% or so (e.g. mincome reduced labor by 13%).
https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money...
http://public.econ.duke.edu/~erw/197/forget-cea%20(2).pdf
For comparison, the great recession reduced labor supplied by 5%.
Under circumstances of labor scarcity, BI would be wildly counterproductive.
Implementing a BI now is like a fat person eating 5 cheeseburgers on the theory that they might starve in some distant apocalyptic future.
At what point would you know there is enough labor and how would you measure that? It would have to be once a certain goal is achieved, correct? What is that goal?
I'm curious because in a time where there are 7 billion people I have rarely, if ever, seen someone say on the whole there are too many jobs and not enough laborers. Rather it's more often said that there are too many laborers and not enough jobs. Which is precisely the type of sentiment that drives anti-immigration xenophobia.
Concretely, I'd pay for twice weekly house cleaning if it cost me $7.25/hour. An actual housecleaning costs me about $50. Most middle class homes in India are cleaned daily, which suggests this is very achievable. Many working women would happily pay $7.25/hour for child care. Lots of folks would love a driver while they sit in the back of a car and work, as several of my work colleagues do. Etc.
Are there no tasks in your life that you'd be happy to pay $7.25 for a human to handle for you?
(India has a labor scarcity too. Why isn't someone cleaning up all the garbage?)
I'm curious because in a time where there are 7 billion people I have rarely, if ever, seen someone say on the whole there are too many jobs and not enough laborers. Rather it's more often said that there are too many laborers and not enough jobs. Which is precisely the type of sentiment that drives anti-immigration xenophobia.
This is because most of those folks simply want to protect a privileged position they were born into. Rather than competing in the labor market with a Mexican or Indian, they'd rather have someone threaten the Mexican with violence for the crime of economic competition.
The issue with KPIs is that it focuses attention on a single indicator, which is what most business in the world revolves around (a stock ticker is a good example). Businesses run in a holistic way tend to do better, such as those explained in Good to Great (productive paranoia + empirical creativity + fanatical discipline). The same holistic approach could be applied to our economy, but lots of moving parts is going to make it hard to tell when, or if, things need to be changed.
I expect a financial meltdown to be the thing that causes a revisit to exploring new business and economic models.
or are you arguing that consuming services provided by workers who are paid $12-$15/hr is immoral in and of itself, regardless of the service in question?
"I know large numbers of educated professionals who clean their own homes but would be happy to pay $10-15/hour to have this problem solved. (I pay well over $15/hour, and need to turn to overseas folks for virtual labor.) Talking about the problem of human labor being obsolete during a time of labor scarcity is like worrying about mars being overpopulated."
My interpretation of which is that yummyfajitas feels that labor is scarce and therefore overly expensive at $15/hour.
Okay, I can see that. Your response was kind of an aggressive way of putting it, but yes I agree that it is kind of rude to complain that the market rate for menial labor is higher than you'd like, and to say that there is a labor shortage when the prevailing wage for unskilled work is still below what a reasonable standard of living costs, considering what that means for the less fortunate.
On the other hand, it's pretty reasonable to say "I'll by services up to $x per hour, but not above that."
This is a lot of the 'basic income' debate, because obviously, giving people survival-level money is going to dramatically decrease their willingness to do unpleasant jobs for survival level money. Personally, I kind of like that, as it removes a lot of what I think of the consent problem of capitalism... remove the threat of starvation, yes, and some people won't work at all, sure, but you also remove the moral comparison between work and slavery, and a lot of the anguish and ethical issues that come with firing someone.
On the factual side of things, I wonder where parent commenter lives; as far as I can tell, it's pretty easy to get the cheaper sort of manual labor done for $15/hr in silicon valley. If you are paying more than that for a cleaning service, either you are a generous employer willing to pay above market wages (perhaps to secure a trusted person over the long term) or you are using a service that is eating up most of the difference.
It's also like saying "Let them eat cake!"
They're certainly entitled to do whatever they want, but it looks to me like opening up a significant opportunity for someone to clone their business model in the rest of the world and beat them at their own game.
edit: spelign
One big bottleneck for this service is the editing/grading - so reducing the time spent on that task is essential if you are trying to make money.