If you have a guaranteed job, can you be fired from it? If so are you cut off from all income for some period of time? If not, what stops somebody from turning up and having very low or no productivity and demotivating others?
What that's talking about is quite different. That's inability to fire from a private position, this is (approximate) inability to refrain from hiring for a public position. It's still, certainly, an interesting thing.
The writer doesn't justify his insistence that a Job Guarantee "IS NOT ‘MAKE-WORK’". It seems to me that if the primary purpose of a job is to provide work, then it is by definition make-work.
S/he says that government jobs would be those that benefit the community. It's not hard to come up with examples of those kinds of jobs - care for the elderly, cheap & healthy kitchens (like kitchens for the homeless, but for everyone instead), more repair and maintenance of infrastructure or new infrastructure (e.g. before WW2, German's increased employment by building highways throughout the country), culture and art events, recycling, running non-for-profit stores (for many basic items, the margin of the store is much greater than production costs) ...
IMO, that's much less make-work than advertising, sales and similar (basically, jobs that exist because your product is not good enough to sell itself).
These are also all examples of where adding a layer of bureaucracy to get paid ruins it. From what my parents (both GPs) told me, in the Netherlands we used to have a lot of volunteers helping out family members who needed extra support, and who simply got a fixed amount of extra money per month, no hassle. This had the extra benefit that it let nurses and doctors focus on the more difficult problems that they specifically were trained for.
Then the government decided things had to be more fair (we're talking early eighties), so people suddenly had to fill in forms defining exactly how many hours they spent on helping out family to get the amount of money they deserve. Or something like that. The point was that there was this new layer of bureaucratic administration. It was a disaster, and within a few years they rolled it back. By then however, a lot of volunteers had simply given up and stopped helping, and they did not come back. And in the last decade we made the same mistake all over again.
What's especially important to note was that under the new rules, people on average would have been paid more for their help - the old compensation was not nearly enough to cover the time and costs of the volunteers. And yet we ended up with less volunteers.
Almost all of the examples you mentioned are things people do for other reasons than the money; any monetary compensation should be more of a hassle-free symbolic gesture of appreciation, or it ruins the whole intrinsic motivation. People are irrational like that, and we need to respect that if we want to make this work.
I've done some voluntary work; sometimes one gets assigned to do work that could be automated at fairly trivial expense.
For example, I've been asked to:
* Fold letters, put them into envelopes, and manually address the envelopes.
* Deliver centrally-printed documents to people a long way from the printer.
* Manually sort paper files into alphabetical order.
* Sharpen colouring pencils by hand.
If "Job Guarantee" employees are effectively free labour, my fear is they'd end up being assigned to do jobs that would only cost a few hundred dollars to automate out of existence. It's my personal experience that doing such jobs manually is pretty unsatisfying (and economically inefficient to boot).
No, says the entrepreneur, having the government fix the roads stifles innovation and impedes the god-given right of some megacorp profiting.They should hire a company that in turn will hire the same people who would do the job, except with lower job security and cheaper wages.
And people wonder why the public always gets the short end of the stick.
There is a difference between, on the one hand, needing something done and hiring people to do it; and on the other needing to employ people and finding things for them to do.
As Randall Wray said: "There are lots of people who want to work but cannot find paying jobs. And lots of stuff that needs to be done. We’ve got a serendipitous problem here: bring the two together."
> These firms are under constant pressure to increase the workload, depress wages, and harden the working conditions of those workers as they engage in ruthless competition at the bottom of the wage pool. A JG program will not be run for profit; it will set the minimum wage and working conditions tolerated in the USA. We can choose to enforce humanitarian conditions and livable wages in the JG.
I think this is a really important quote from the article. In such a rich society (USA, Australia, Canada, Britain, wherever..) it seems sort of unnecessary that we'd force wages to be so low they are barely above the poverty line.
But I'm not entirely sure how this fits into a global economy. If workers in China are working for cents there is no way a similar industry in Australia can compete with a minimum wage of $18 an hour. We've seen this in textile manufacturing in particular.
I'm also not sure what the views will be when we've magically automated nearly everything. Eventually there is not going to be enough work for everyone. Will we finally decide that "work" isn't necessary for everyone and allow time to be spent on travel, family, and fun? Or will we invent things to do for the sake of contributing?
Just tossing out random thoughts I've had over the last few years.
> But I'm not entirely sure how this fits into a global economy. If workers in China are working for cents there is no way a similar industry in Australia can compete with a minimum wage of $18 an hour. We've seen this in textile manufacturing in particular.
This has been discussed to death here in Portugal. Portugal had, up until the 90s, a strong textile and shoe making industry. It moved to the east during the late nineties, early noughties. Strangely, the last five years have seen a renaissance.
Our cost of labor, while cheap in EU terms is orders of magnitude above eastern countries. The explanation for the resurgence of the industry is twofold: a) Cost of labor accounts for less than one third of final product cost; b) Logistics advantages can easily recover the cost difference. Think short lead times, work force adaptability, higher automation, lower defect ratios, smaller inventory. Couple this with fashion sticking less and less to two collections per year (and going for high adaptability during the season), and you get a competitive advantage China and Vietnam do not have.
I don't think they envision that being "the primary purpose" of the jobs being guaranteed. The notion is "find things of value that are not being compensated, employ people to do them". I am highly skeptical, however, that a government bureaucracy can consistently find such work in the face of a guarantee of employment. Yes, we can think of examples. But 1) many of those examples fade in the presence of a basic income (helping the poor is a for-profit activity when the "poor" can pay you to help them), 2) actually quantifying the number of opportunities these examples represent is nontrivial (it may have been done, but I haven't found it in this discussion), and 3) if these things genuinely provide value and we want them done then we can still pay people to do them without providing a job guarantee.
May unemployed people are so because the jobs available are not pallatable. Almost everyone I know that doesn't have a job could easily find work washing dishes or similar. How is this different from a job guarantee, at least for a large chunk of the population?
With basic income even the people filling those jobs now won't do them, forcing businesses to automate that workload and, as the article says, de-commoditizing the human labor force, and emphasizing a focus on technological solutions to previously "too cheap to automate" tasks.
Not only that. People need income, and thus the employer have an major advantage. With BIG people do not need the money to the same extend and thus evaluate the cost/benefit much more fairly. I'm not going to bust my ass off for 10$ an hour with zero benefits. On the other hand if the same job gave me 30$ I might not mind it.
"Under BIG, production drops, consumption rises, and so do prices. Suddenly, the value of the BIG grant has been eroded. Great success: the poor are still poor."
I was under impression, that BIG works on assumption, that production doesn't drop, because the people that would consider not working are often the people that wouldn't produce as much.
On the other hand, the rise in compsumption would be fueled by newly found buying power of the low income population, and that means bussinesses would care about them more.
For employers BIG would basically mean a flat discount on all of the employees.
And for government and people with low income it would mean a large reduction in byrocracy.
--------
Unfortunately lots of these assumptions on BIG are somewhat culture dependent.
> the people that would consider not working are often the people that wouldn't produce as much.
What do you mean? The jobs that suck the most and are paid the least are often the ones that absolutely have to be done (by a human), at least in the today's societies: garbage collector, construction worker, cleaners, store/fast-food workers, ...
Personally, I haven't seen any of the done by robots (except for Roomba, but that's not even cleaning - I'm talking about things like bathroom, trash, ... i.e. cleaning of corporate offices). Also, even if it's possible in the next decade, it will probably be much more expensive and capital intensive than human labor for quite some time.
Well. I remember a time, when every store in my country had a shop-keeper, that would hand you the goods over the counter. Usualy shop had one shopkeeper that tended to all of the shop (counter, refilling, e.t.c)
Then somebody figured out, that if you introduce a one way door in, and one way out, you can have larger store tended by much smaller number of people.
And now in some shops they replace three counters that had to have people with ten self-checkout counters and one guy doing oversight ...
If workers work less (and they are not "zero marginal product workers"), then that's one pressure pushing production down. The hope of many proponents of BIG is that other pressures push production up, but I don't know that it is clear that those would dominate (though given the modest drop in hours worked in experiments with basic income, I don't think it's unlikely).
Also, I have some trouble squaring this claim with the notion that BIG is an "inflation generator" as opposed to the stabilizing JG. If BIG raises prices, eroding the value of BIG, that erosion should slow the rise of prices; sounds like negative feedback, which is often (not always!) characteristic of self stabilizing systems.
I'm a bit confused about JG idea. Maybe it's different times now, but it reminds me of the old system in Poland where everyone doing something in their assigned work got paid. As a result, there were many people simply showing up for work and expecting to be paid. People on higher positions in common jobs often took the "I rule over customers" mentality. (think shop managers) Even worse for services, any public/government work, etc. The quality of work simply did not matter.
There's even a saying people will still recognise, which means something close to: whether you stand or lay down, you're entitled to the wage.
Sure, the political system was completely different, what you could spend your money on was limited, but... This image is in the back of my mind when people talk about JG - and I'm not sure why it wouldn't happen again.
Sure, the political system was completely different
There's your clue. The "job guarantee", as promoted by these people, is designed to get the political system changed to that of cold war-era Poland.
In reality, basic income and every variant of it are extremely undesirable programs, unless they become somehow necessary--like chemotherapy. At some point, society is simply going to recognize that millions of people are useless (see previous clumsy metaphor) and deal with it. So you can give them their daily bread (basic income) or make them pretend to work for their daily bread (job guarantees).
Anyway, we're already half way to basic income through a slew of programs from SNAP to Section 8 to SS disability benefits. It's weird how people are debating a resolved question.
So you can give them their daily bread (basic income) or make them pretend to work for their daily bread (job guarantees).
Sure, but the latter tries to solve a different problem set. I think overlooking that is a big problem in the debate: the basic income side reduces jobs to the income generated. The full employment side (through JG, reduction in working hours and similar models) tries to solve more: For many people, a job provides meaning. And social affiliation. That may sound stupid to the creative, self-determined cohort visiting this site, but the ability to live a self-determined life is not something the majority of workers is able to do.
I worked in the poorest part of Germany for a while. The real unemployment rate is at least 30% there. The unemployed get a de facto basic income. That is below the poverty line for Germany, but I personally could happily live my life with that money. I still would have enough plans and projects to fill a 40 hour "work" week with them. But having worked with the unemployed youth I know they see themselves as completely without prospects, without use. The sit around in their rual small towns watching TV, unable to do anything productive with their lives.
There are other ways to find meaning. For those who fail to do so in a job, BIG makes it less painful to step back and look for it elsewhere.
Of course there are, but you have to have a certain subset of competencies to find and use them. My point is that JG and similar models are directed at those people how lack these competencies.
True. Though of course you also need a certain set of competencies to hold a "guaranteed job" (or it ceases to provide much meaning, if it's just something people maybe show up to and don't get any work done), and if you have sufficient competencies then the guarantee is less necessary. All of that demarcates a region in person-space. It might be a region where there are a ton of people; I'm not convinced that it is, nor that those people aren't better helped in other ways (including, possibly, a BI that lets other people find meaning other ways, letting these people do that work).
So you can give them their daily bread (basic income) or make them pretend to work for their daily bread (job guarantees).
Aren't there other options? Imagine a ramped up EITC, where people have to get some job at some number of hours per week, in order to get benefits. They need to do something at some level of value for someone else.
But when capitalist talk about Job Guarantee, they do not want to reinstall the stable jobs of communist times. Regardless if there was work or profit, you had a job in DDR or Poland.
But they think about 1 Euro Jobs like those installed in Germany by the aSocial unDemocratic Party.
The result of the 1 Euro jobs here is that that those 1 Euro workers do the work of former employed people. Not as a worker, but as a state owned slave, for the benefit of capitalist who exploits them.
So its driving wages down to the bottom, because everybody fears losing his job, and accepts any shitty job, just to avoid becoming an 1 Euro slave worker. And those areas where 1 Euro slave workers are "employed" no longer pay living wages, because they can get workers for free.
PS: One of the most evil examples what this "Job Guarantee" might look like happened in the city of Oldenburg: The city just forced 1 Euro slaves to collect the waste, when waste collectors went on strike. Great Job Guarantee is a union killer. Thats exactly what the capitalist want.
Thats how they sell it, but the real goal was very different. To cite our former Chancellor Schröder:
" Wir müssen und wir haben unseren Arbeitsmarkt liberalisiert. Wir haben einen der besten Niedriglohnsektoren aufgebaut, den es in Europa gibt. Ich rate allen, die sich damit beschäftigen, sich mit den Gegebenheiten auseinander zu setzen, und nicht nur mit den Berichten über die Gegebenheiten. Deutschland neigt dazu, sein Licht unter den Scheffel zu stellen, obwohl es das Falscheste ist, was man eigentlich tun kann. Wir haben einen funktionierenden Niedriglohnsektor aufgebaut, und wir haben bei der Unterstützungszahlung Anreize dafür, Arbeit aufzunehmen, sehr stark in den Vordergrund gestellt. "
Translation by Google:
" We must and we have liberalized our labor market. We have built one of the best low-wage sectors, which is available in Europe. I advise all who deal with it, to deal with the realities apart, and not only with the reports on the circumstances. Germany tends to put his light under a bushel, even though it is the worst thing you can actually do. We have built a working low-wage sector, and we have in supporting payment incentives to take up work, provided very strong in the foreground. "
s/supporting payment incentives/if you do not accept the 1 Euro job, we cut your social security payment/
The result of this wage dumping can be seen in the Euro crisis. People around Europe become unemployed, and those states collect dept, as they can no longer escape German wage dumping, by lowering their currency.
If Ein-Euro-Jobs were used by Germany as a wage-dumping tactic then the euro crisis and consequential unemployment rise in the south of the continent would lead to increase in the number of people in Ein-Euro-Jobs in Germany. Now, since these people are counted as unemployed for statistical purposes this would mean unemployment figures in Germany would be soaring, too. However, the reverse is happening.
People who have an 1 Euro job, or are "educated" to write job applications are no longer counted as unemployed. This is a nice statistical trick to lower the high numbers.
And even then the long term unemployment is extreme, with a large north south and east west imbalance, e.g. Berlin 16,8%, Bremen (my home town) 14,3%, till Bayern with only 3,4%.
You also need to consider that export oriented wage dumping means to export unemployment. So those people who have an underpayed job here, cause unemployment in southern Europe.
I have no idea who this party is. But I do know that making up insulting names for groups is very destructive of any useful conversation. ("Lol, more like Worst Buy, amirite??")
"10. The poor and the unemployed want to work (here, here). And as my work on Argentina showed (9m14s), receiving income is the fifth reason why the poor wanted to work! Why do BIG advocates presume to know what’s better for the poor than the poor themselves? BIG does little for those who want to work."
Earlier in the article, he claims that BIG will cause fewer people to work; if BIG reduces demand for jobs then surely those who want jobs will have an easier time finding them?
I feel like this article (and many like it) ignore the distinction between "wanting a job with a salary" and "wanting to have something to do".
The reality is that you don't need to attach a 'salary' to a 'job' to get people to do something useful. Given the time and resources, they will do so of their own accord.
Quite simply; people on an individual basis can still think "meh, I don't feel like doing it". On the other hand you have people who enjoy doing such work - yes, they exist - and they are likely to either go "well I'm not getting paid for it", or they are getting paid for it but are assigned to doing it elsewhere.
The general perception of "work" in a society greatly influences how productive people are. I can't even count the amount of times I've been told that I "don't do work" because I don't have a job with an employer, even though my working week is significantly longer than a regular one. Until that perception changes, people will keep being stuck with treating work this way.
For example, if I simplify my country "social net", it basically is, that either you have job and pay taxes, or you don't have a job, and you can apply for government help.
Then we have minimal wage requirement in our law.
I know that a faction in our government argues, that this system has two main problems:
1) for low income people it might not be worth to search job, because often they would be paid just a little extra for large amount of work, than they alredy receive from welfare
2) employers complain, that because of high income taxes and other expeditures on employees it is not worth for them to employ people that recieve low salary.
The party proposed to add a fixed sum of money negative income tax to the income tax rate as a quite elegant solution, resulting basicaly in BIG in the country.
I wonder how well would that work, because at least it solves these two problems they stated.
Interesting read, certainly some good points in there.
...but it doesnt address the fundamental issue: You cannot just invent jobs and be done with it.
A colossal level of bureaucracy would be involved in:
- picking what job was assigned to whom
- ensuring jobs did not adversely affect or compete with commercial enterprise offering similar services*
- managing training for jobs
- managing quality of work in jobs
- managing transport and infrastructure for the labor pool^
- disputes over 'fairness', 'quality of work', etc.
Its not just messy; it would be a logistical nightmare.
I cant take the suggestion seriously with addressing how you plan to administer such a system.
(* if you think that wont be an issue, you're fooling yourself; ^obviously different area will have different labour requirements; its utterly naive to assume people would not have continually shift to new local areas where labour was seasonally required)
Idly either JG and BIG implemented with a custom bitcoin fork and matched with government backed commodity stores (food, clothing, housing for govcoins) would be an interesting system.
Particularly it would solve a number of inflation issues around BIG I imagine... (and motivate people to get off big on to a real job if they wanted luxury goods).
Particularly for BIG, you would need some mechanism of determining uniqueness of users, ending payments to the deceased, &c. That does away with much of the benefit of a system like bitcoin, without some technologies that (as of yet) no one has figured out. If you can solve the relevant problems, then I agree it would be interesting!
What about stuff that doesn't get paid but need people to work on it?
There is much work to do in community work, free software or fine arts.
The JG will probably only create jobs in the first category. With BIG all people can choose where they want to work and don't have to base their decision on the wage the job pays.
Job guarantees kill one of the key advantages of basic income: Basic income allows us to dramatically reduce the overhead in social services and other administrative programs that choose who should get paid benefits and weed out those who abuse the system.
In a world of guaranteed jobs, you would either have to maintain the administration or force sick people to work. Not to mention that basic income could have the huge economic advantage of allowing people to productively use their time to develop products and services they couldn't afford to before. Some of the earners of basic income will certainly do great things with their freedom, which will benefit everyone.
I don't think Job Guarantee proponents are suggesting that the sick and disabled also have to work. They continue to receive welfare without any work requirements. I'm not a JG proponent, I just thought your comment was miscontrueing their position.
But to implement that, you still need some administration to work out who's eligible for welfare and who needs to work. Basic Income schemes potentially eliminate this requirement.
There will still be a need for admin/bureaucracy with BI. Some people will need extra benefits because of their circumstances and people will have issues (e.g. suddenly their payments stop). I'm not convinced BI will decrease the number of support people since more people will actually be using the service.
there could be an allowance for people to work on open source stuff, or a project of their own that has some value .if would increase beaurocracy a bit but its possible .
If there were a basic income guarantee, which I'm in favour of, and if it were sufficient to fulfil my basic needs (food, clothing, housing, electricity) then I'd use second hand hardware and become a free software developer full time. I would be working, but what kind of work I was doing wouldn't be decided by anyone other than myself. I suspect that the JG schemes (one is proposed by the Labour party in the UK) would indeed be make-work schemes producing nothing much of value.
If I had a BIG the kinds of software I'd work on would be:
- Making self-hosting easy
- Making encrypted communications easy for anyone to use
- Mesh networking systems to diminish ISP dependency
- Simulations of ecosystems, including climate modelling
In other words I'd be able to work on things of real value rather than having to work on things of little value just to have basic needs met.
I would tend to think like you, but what would probably happen with me is that I would try something cool that I'm interested in and could benefit others (I am now working on an intelligent software to teach maths to Junior High School/ High School, so I would probably do that), but without the economic incentive to deliver something tangible and usable, odds are that I would probably give up at some point after encountering something I can't solve, and most likely I would end up with an half assed project before trying something else.
My guess is that the majority of the people would do just like that, and while we would probably have more Linus like people who start building things by sheer curiosity, we would lose lots of industrial work and research, and I am not sure we would end up winning.
So I don't know. I am genuinely interested in the BIG, and think it could unleash the creativity of some people, but I am afraid the majority of us would just waste time into useless distractions. Maybe the BIG should last a given period (like one year), at the end of which it can be renewed if the beneficiary can prove that he or she has spent enough time on something "interesting" - it can be the kind of things you mention, something artistic, doing some studies, traveling, etc. The definition of "interesting" needs to be loose, but the beneficiary has to prove that he or she hasn't only been watching youtube and facebook.
'The definition of "interesting" needs to be loose, but the beneficiary has to prove that he or she hasn't only been watching youtube and facebook.'
Presuming that the time spent on youtube and facebook was not actually valuable (and I will quickly grant that there are ways to spend time on both that are not) I think this is part of a much larger issue we have with motivation and addictive/avoidant behavior. Push to "get a job" can help some people with this, but I think it's actually destructive to others; I think in general we need some better approach - which might be as simple as better mental health care (at the level of helping people meet their goals most effectively) but I'm open to ideas. I think this is needed whether we implement BIG or JG, or not.
I think the situation today is that many of us do waste time with unproductive distractions in the workplace. It's my observation that if you monitored people in offices much of the time what they're doing is not actually "working" in any meaningful sense, and when they are working the kinds of output which they're producing are not useful to many people. That kind of situation was of course famously satirised in the TV series "the office".
So I don't think it's a clear cut situation that wage labour automatically means a good and productive society and that BIG means a bad and unproductive one.
I totally agree with you that many of us could be more productive at their workplace, but they still could be less productive. In fact, let's say that someone productivity goes between 0 and 1, productivity 0 means that you don't do anything at all and just waste your time. Productivity 1 means being as efficient Carmack.
I would say that the current productivity is quite low for the employed people, maybe 0.1 in average, and follows some kind of log-normal distribution (all of this are super rough approximation). If we adopt BIG, we would have lots of people who will have 0 productivity (maybe 95% of the population, much more IMHO), and the rest will have a higher productivity.
Would we be better off? It's not clear to me, especially at the beginning - maybe after one generation people will get used to work on what they really like - but I would really like to see some experimentation in that direction.
Another thing to keep in mind is that BIG would be basic, and living on it would not be particularly luxurious. Unless you did things to supplement the basic income then you probably wouldn't be able to afford to buy or run a vehicle, go on foreign holidays, have the latest fancyphone or anything of that sort. So financial incentives would still exist for most people.
It's so hard to get people to understand the importance of the current Job Expectation not being relevant in the not too far distant future. Working as an old fashion wage-slave will be overshadowed by the coming wave of automation. Tens of millions of redundancies will occur just from self-driving cars. The notion a Job Guarantee will be outdated (if it isn't already), not to mention impossible & quite possibly harmful for technological progress.
I reckon people will become like you, working to improve the systems that support our infrastructure. Where the work of one provides for many. Where schooling isn't some odd prepping for ye old industrialization period but directly launching us into reinventing agriculture, energy grids, transportation, space exploration, production & knowledge. Where we will become not to a resource economy or a services economy. But a research, knowledge and engineering (automation) economy.
When everyone's expectations of conventional capitalism dies down. We will truly transform as a civilization.
I doubt we will all become engineers, scientists and technologists working on reinventing agriculture and energy grids in any foreseeable future (quite possibly any future at all). The wave of automation you're talking about has already been happening for a long time and is the reason we live in a services-based economy. We automate (and outsource) manufacturing, but increase the direct human-to-human exchanges called services.
Starbucks provides a startling example: making a coffee was automated a long time ago, but people still would rather have another person make their coffee. I'm pretty sure the same is true about hairdressers, stylists, nurses, personal trainers and glacier guides.
(Note: I'm not advocating a policy or direction, merely stating an observation)
True and it's a fair observation. But I'm sure that modern and future automation will create a fundamental shift in how we see ourselves. Understandable that it's jarring to most people. My biggest concerns are that not enough will change to accommodate this future. Given how customarily slow government is to accurately and appropriately re-access policies/laws when new technology dramatically changes our civilization. If I think enough about it I realize just how blindly optimistic this all is. Frankly thinking like this might be one of the reasons we may help us reach beyond the coal and sky.
You're probably right that this isn't the future we'll get. Just like that old prediction that the Radioisotope generator would power all electronics since it was the superior energy source at the time. Then Chernobyl hysteria changed our future. Probably just like some famous automated car crash that will likely occur. Or a neo-luddite media circus. Who knows what's gonna happen in 50 years.
I don't think automation means removing human interaction out of the picture. And I think people's desire for a person to do this work is going to subside as more interactions are personal instead of commercial. It'll free up us to do activities that are more creative, experimental & empathetic with each other. So if anything, it'd be redistributing human interaction into more social roles than compared to a face punching buttons and pulling levers.
The whole giving people in Retirement homes electronics animal things to cover the basic human requirement of physical touch and simulated bonding would become unnecessary (hopefully). Since families lifetimes wouldn't be devastated/adsorbed by trying to sustain your bodies physical requirements and running the financial treadmill optimized by bankers.
"I doubt we will all become engineers, scientists and technologists" We don't need to all become those things. But to orient our education in new ways to supports primarily these groups and the rest of people learn value creating activities that support each other & themselves. There will probably be some kind currently unimaginable creatives economy where large parts of society are centered around art and media.
Yeah this turned into a huge stupid rant. Time to sleep the stupid off.
For instance, automation of carpentry won't destroy carpentry as a skill. Because people like doing these things and when they aren't forced do it. As a wage as it's often a creative outlet. Many love their jobs as a hobby but it just becomes work for a wage. Then the hobby become a chore and no longer satisfying or valuable personal time investment. Especially if we start considering how little time we have on Earth.
This could be as significant as the step from Slavery to Workers. Except instead of soft-choice, this would put voluntarism as the center piece. Which would then lead to society's institutions being also based on charity/voluntarism.
And those without your skillset will certainly collect garbage from public spaces, repave roads and fill in potholes, and all the other boring and unpleasant tasks that our civilization needs.
This is something I don't understand. All the potholes are filled, all government buildings are perfectly clean, no new infrastructure projects can be productively performed? Productively working women already have free child care provided? The government is already doing everything we want it to do, and there is no use whatsoever for low skill labor?
I don't know where you're living, but here in the UK the government only does a fraction of what ideally people would want and as time goes by it does less and less. There is indeed plenty of work to be done as you say, but typically you can't fulfil basic needs while doing those jobs which would enhance the neighbourhood. This is evidenced by the current phenomenon of the "working poor" (i.e. people who are working in the private sector but who still critically depend upon income from the state).
One can easily believe the proposition "we should be hiring more people to address public needs that are currently not well attended" and not believe "we should be promising to find some such thing for anyone who applies."
You and a lot of other people on HN are very self-driven and would definitely maintain or perhaps even increase their contribution to society and civilization if given a free ride. A lot of inventors and discoverers of yore were wealthy aristocrats who did precisely that. There were however a lot more other types of wealthy aristocrats who engaged in less productive activities (binge drinking, gambling, building personal militias, etc). When assessing a policy like basic income we need to consider how society will change, not only what we as individuals would end up doing.
I'm not saying the disadvantages outweigh the benefits of basic income. I'm undecided. But I'm also disappointed with how the risks are often brushed off.
Employing someone is very expensive. You need to provide equipment, insurance, safety, management and work. It is much cheaper (less overhead) to just provide "existential minimum", lets say $7000 a year.
I think root problem is in Americans mentality. Hard work is more valued than its outcome. Also some demographic groups are always treated as disposable garbage, they do not deserve support "just for being humans". Help is only for protected groups.
Also corrupted political system prefers expensive solutions, since it increases its power and various kickbacks. You can not "extract" much money from an agency which just forwards social welfare payments (overhead around 2%).
Unemployment is one of the pillars that capitalism is built on, it is a structural necessity for profits to exist, so any efforts to relieve it via reform are doomed to failure. Structural unemployment did not exist in Europe prior to Europe moving from feudalism to capitalism several centuries ago - structural unemployment is a creation of capitalism. One need only pick up the Wall Street Journal or Businessweek during times of low unemployment - there is great fear that unemployment is getting "too low", meaning everyone who wants a job can get a job. Since the purpose of capitalism is to generate profits for rentiers, this makes sense.
The schemes mentioned here and being floated about in Slate and the like are done in anticipation of how to respond to a sudden, massive increase in unemployment for low-skilled workers in response to advances in things like AI. These schemes wouldn't contradict what I said before, because they would be due to an economic shift where the lever of unemployment for low skilled workers would mean less, since the increased quantity of unemployed would change the quality of what unemployment is. The threat of sudden mass unemployment would mean less to increasing profits, and could potentially cause social unrest. Like Larry Page's grandfather wandering around a GM plant with a weapon in his hand during the Flint sit-down strike.
It's obvious that structural unemployment is a creation of capitalism, as it did not exist in centuries past. From reading the business press's fears of unemployment getting too low, it should be obvious that big business feels unemployment is an essential pillar of what they need to keep the system running as they wish. Despite this history and current expression of views, people seem to be blind to the reality that not only is the government not interested in helping unemployed people, but that it is actively promoting unemployment, and will fight and do anything to keep structural unemployment in place. It's not an accident trying to be fixed, the existence of ~0% unemployment is what would be seen as the accident, and any levers to throw some of those people out of work would (and have been) utilized. While this is the reality, the standard corporated owned and sponsored hegemonic press is of course oblivious to all of this. Unemployment isn't an accident government is trying to fix, when unemployment gets "too low" business and government actively work to increase unemployment among happily employed people.
This does raise some interesting points, though I am skeptical that the government could efficiently create guaranteed jobs. Though I suppose we have learned a lot since the days of communism, maybe with advanced computing and data analysis we could actually give everyone a useful job without too much administrative overhead. I mean, the US government could never pull something like that off, but perhaps a better-run government could.
> 10. The poor and the unemployed want to work (here, here). And as my work on Argentina showed (9m14s), receiving income is the fifth reason why the poor wanted to work!
> 13. The JG does precisely that: recognizes many people want paid work
It looks as if the article confuses work and PAID work. Sure, BIG may lead to more people quitting their paid jobs. But it might actually increase the amount of unpaid, yet socially valuable, work.
It is a question of time, until a robot, let's say priced about 10.000 US$ with the intelligence of a 12 year old child can replace the majority of labor, while working 24/7. IBM did not build Watson to win in Jeopardy I guess. Then what?
I am more than pessimistic for the future. I take this as an opportunity to post some of my favorite blog posts. Enjoy!
"There is No Steady State Economy (except at a very basic level)"
"Yglesias may not realize it, but all serious academic support for BIG is based on the idea that many people will quit working"
"BIG does little for those who want to work."
These seem contradictory. Presumably those who want to work can fill positions vacated by the many people who quit working (but are still able to express their needs directly through the market).
82 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadhttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-il...
IMO, that's much less make-work than advertising, sales and similar (basically, jobs that exist because your product is not good enough to sell itself).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDQosiH4VAc
Then the government decided things had to be more fair (we're talking early eighties), so people suddenly had to fill in forms defining exactly how many hours they spent on helping out family to get the amount of money they deserve. Or something like that. The point was that there was this new layer of bureaucratic administration. It was a disaster, and within a few years they rolled it back. By then however, a lot of volunteers had simply given up and stopped helping, and they did not come back. And in the last decade we made the same mistake all over again.
What's especially important to note was that under the new rules, people on average would have been paid more for their help - the old compensation was not nearly enough to cover the time and costs of the volunteers. And yet we ended up with less volunteers.
Almost all of the examples you mentioned are things people do for other reasons than the money; any monetary compensation should be more of a hassle-free symbolic gesture of appreciation, or it ruins the whole intrinsic motivation. People are irrational like that, and we need to respect that if we want to make this work.
For example, I've been asked to:
* Fold letters, put them into envelopes, and manually address the envelopes.
* Deliver centrally-printed documents to people a long way from the printer.
* Manually sort paper files into alphabetical order.
* Sharpen colouring pencils by hand.
If "Job Guarantee" employees are effectively free labour, my fear is they'd end up being assigned to do jobs that would only cost a few hundred dollars to automate out of existence. It's my personal experience that doing such jobs manually is pretty unsatisfying (and economically inefficient to boot).
And people wonder why the public always gets the short end of the stick.
He lists a number of ideas for jobs in this article: http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2014/01/07/bop-a-mole-2-j...
That article dispels that concern and many others that I had about such a program. Thanks for sharing it!
I think this is a really important quote from the article. In such a rich society (USA, Australia, Canada, Britain, wherever..) it seems sort of unnecessary that we'd force wages to be so low they are barely above the poverty line.
But I'm not entirely sure how this fits into a global economy. If workers in China are working for cents there is no way a similar industry in Australia can compete with a minimum wage of $18 an hour. We've seen this in textile manufacturing in particular.
I'm also not sure what the views will be when we've magically automated nearly everything. Eventually there is not going to be enough work for everyone. Will we finally decide that "work" isn't necessary for everyone and allow time to be spent on travel, family, and fun? Or will we invent things to do for the sake of contributing?
Just tossing out random thoughts I've had over the last few years.
This has been discussed to death here in Portugal. Portugal had, up until the 90s, a strong textile and shoe making industry. It moved to the east during the late nineties, early noughties. Strangely, the last five years have seen a renaissance.
Our cost of labor, while cheap in EU terms is orders of magnitude above eastern countries. The explanation for the resurgence of the industry is twofold: a) Cost of labor accounts for less than one third of final product cost; b) Logistics advantages can easily recover the cost difference. Think short lead times, work force adaptability, higher automation, lower defect ratios, smaller inventory. Couple this with fashion sticking less and less to two collections per year (and going for high adaptability during the season), and you get a competitive advantage China and Vietnam do not have.
All of this smells of replacing capitalist oppression with bureaucratic oppression. All for their own good, of course.
Unless it's to an end I feel passionate about. Then I might do it for $5 or for free.
I was under impression, that BIG works on assumption, that production doesn't drop, because the people that would consider not working are often the people that wouldn't produce as much.
On the other hand, the rise in compsumption would be fueled by newly found buying power of the low income population, and that means bussinesses would care about them more.
For employers BIG would basically mean a flat discount on all of the employees.
And for government and people with low income it would mean a large reduction in byrocracy. -------- Unfortunately lots of these assumptions on BIG are somewhat culture dependent.
What do you mean? The jobs that suck the most and are paid the least are often the ones that absolutely have to be done (by a human), at least in the today's societies: garbage collector, construction worker, cleaners, store/fast-food workers, ...
Then somebody figured out, that if you introduce a one way door in, and one way out, you can have larger store tended by much smaller number of people.
And now in some shops they replace three counters that had to have people with ten self-checkout counters and one guy doing oversight ...
Also, I have some trouble squaring this claim with the notion that BIG is an "inflation generator" as opposed to the stabilizing JG. If BIG raises prices, eroding the value of BIG, that erosion should slow the rise of prices; sounds like negative feedback, which is often (not always!) characteristic of self stabilizing systems.
There's even a saying people will still recognise, which means something close to: whether you stand or lay down, you're entitled to the wage.
Sure, the political system was completely different, what you could spend your money on was limited, but... This image is in the back of my mind when people talk about JG - and I'm not sure why it wouldn't happen again.
There's your clue. The "job guarantee", as promoted by these people, is designed to get the political system changed to that of cold war-era Poland.
In reality, basic income and every variant of it are extremely undesirable programs, unless they become somehow necessary--like chemotherapy. At some point, society is simply going to recognize that millions of people are useless (see previous clumsy metaphor) and deal with it. So you can give them their daily bread (basic income) or make them pretend to work for their daily bread (job guarantees).
Anyway, we're already half way to basic income through a slew of programs from SNAP to Section 8 to SS disability benefits. It's weird how people are debating a resolved question.
Sure, but the latter tries to solve a different problem set. I think overlooking that is a big problem in the debate: the basic income side reduces jobs to the income generated. The full employment side (through JG, reduction in working hours and similar models) tries to solve more: For many people, a job provides meaning. And social affiliation. That may sound stupid to the creative, self-determined cohort visiting this site, but the ability to live a self-determined life is not something the majority of workers is able to do.
I worked in the poorest part of Germany for a while. The real unemployment rate is at least 30% there. The unemployed get a de facto basic income. That is below the poverty line for Germany, but I personally could happily live my life with that money. I still would have enough plans and projects to fill a 40 hour "work" week with them. But having worked with the unemployed youth I know they see themselves as completely without prospects, without use. The sit around in their rual small towns watching TV, unable to do anything productive with their lives.
These are the people models like JG aim at.
Of course there are, but you have to have a certain subset of competencies to find and use them. My point is that JG and similar models are directed at those people how lack these competencies.
Aren't there other options? Imagine a ramped up EITC, where people have to get some job at some number of hours per week, in order to get benefits. They need to do something at some level of value for someone else.
But they think about 1 Euro Jobs like those installed in Germany by the aSocial unDemocratic Party.
The result of the 1 Euro jobs here is that that those 1 Euro workers do the work of former employed people. Not as a worker, but as a state owned slave, for the benefit of capitalist who exploits them.
So its driving wages down to the bottom, because everybody fears losing his job, and accepts any shitty job, just to avoid becoming an 1 Euro slave worker. And those areas where 1 Euro slave workers are "employed" no longer pay living wages, because they can get workers for free.
PS: One of the most evil examples what this "Job Guarantee" might look like happened in the city of Oldenburg: The city just forced 1 Euro slaves to collect the waste, when waste collectors went on strike. Great Job Guarantee is a union killer. Thats exactly what the capitalist want.
The purpose of the program is definitely not to create an army of slave workers for the German state.
The so called "Ein-Euro-Jobs" are intended to help people on long-term unemployment benefits to become active and grow accustomed to regular work.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_opportunities_with_addi...
" Wir müssen und wir haben unseren Arbeitsmarkt liberalisiert. Wir haben einen der besten Niedriglohnsektoren aufgebaut, den es in Europa gibt. Ich rate allen, die sich damit beschäftigen, sich mit den Gegebenheiten auseinander zu setzen, und nicht nur mit den Berichten über die Gegebenheiten. Deutschland neigt dazu, sein Licht unter den Scheffel zu stellen, obwohl es das Falscheste ist, was man eigentlich tun kann. Wir haben einen funktionierenden Niedriglohnsektor aufgebaut, und wir haben bei der Unterstützungszahlung Anreize dafür, Arbeit aufzunehmen, sehr stark in den Vordergrund gestellt. "
Translation by Google:
" We must and we have liberalized our labor market. We have built one of the best low-wage sectors, which is available in Europe. I advise all who deal with it, to deal with the realities apart, and not only with the reports on the circumstances. Germany tends to put his light under a bushel, even though it is the worst thing you can actually do. We have built a working low-wage sector, and we have in supporting payment incentives to take up work, provided very strong in the foreground. "
s/supporting payment incentives/if you do not accept the 1 Euro job, we cut your social security payment/
The result of this wage dumping can be seen in the Euro crisis. People around Europe become unemployed, and those states collect dept, as they can no longer escape German wage dumping, by lowering their currency.
And even then the long term unemployment is extreme, with a large north south and east west imbalance, e.g. Berlin 16,8%, Bremen (my home town) 14,3%, till Bayern with only 3,4%.
You also need to consider that export oriented wage dumping means to export unemployment. So those people who have an underpayed job here, cause unemployment in southern Europe.
Should Germany act against its own interest and not export its unemployment?
I have no idea who this party is. But I do know that making up insulting names for groups is very destructive of any useful conversation. ("Lol, more like Worst Buy, amirite??")
Earlier in the article, he claims that BIG will cause fewer people to work; if BIG reduces demand for jobs then surely those who want jobs will have an easier time finding them?
The reality is that you don't need to attach a 'salary' to a 'job' to get people to do something useful. Given the time and resources, they will do so of their own accord.
Relatedly, a post I wrote on the topic of unemployment a while ago: http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2013/03/18/unemployment-is-i...
If there is excess manpower, how can we explain the existence of unkempt lawns and trash on the streets?
The general perception of "work" in a society greatly influences how productive people are. I can't even count the amount of times I've been told that I "don't do work" because I don't have a job with an employer, even though my working week is significantly longer than a regular one. Until that perception changes, people will keep being stuck with treating work this way.
For example, if I simplify my country "social net", it basically is, that either you have job and pay taxes, or you don't have a job, and you can apply for government help.
Then we have minimal wage requirement in our law.
I know that a faction in our government argues, that this system has two main problems:
1) for low income people it might not be worth to search job, because often they would be paid just a little extra for large amount of work, than they alredy receive from welfare
2) employers complain, that because of high income taxes and other expeditures on employees it is not worth for them to employ people that recieve low salary.
The party proposed to add a fixed sum of money negative income tax to the income tax rate as a quite elegant solution, resulting basicaly in BIG in the country.
I wonder how well would that work, because at least it solves these two problems they stated.
...but it doesnt address the fundamental issue: You cannot just invent jobs and be done with it.
A colossal level of bureaucracy would be involved in:
- picking what job was assigned to whom
- ensuring jobs did not adversely affect or compete with commercial enterprise offering similar services*
- managing training for jobs
- managing quality of work in jobs
- managing transport and infrastructure for the labor pool^
- disputes over 'fairness', 'quality of work', etc.
Its not just messy; it would be a logistical nightmare.
I cant take the suggestion seriously with addressing how you plan to administer such a system.
(* if you think that wont be an issue, you're fooling yourself; ^obviously different area will have different labour requirements; its utterly naive to assume people would not have continually shift to new local areas where labour was seasonally required)
Particularly it would solve a number of inflation issues around BIG I imagine... (and motivate people to get off big on to a real job if they wanted luxury goods).
There is much work to do in community work, free software or fine arts.
The JG will probably only create jobs in the first category. With BIG all people can choose where they want to work and don't have to base their decision on the wage the job pays.
In a world of guaranteed jobs, you would either have to maintain the administration or force sick people to work. Not to mention that basic income could have the huge economic advantage of allowing people to productively use their time to develop products and services they couldn't afford to before. Some of the earners of basic income will certainly do great things with their freedom, which will benefit everyone.
If I had a BIG the kinds of software I'd work on would be:
- Making self-hosting easy
- Making encrypted communications easy for anyone to use
- Mesh networking systems to diminish ISP dependency
- Simulations of ecosystems, including climate modelling
In other words I'd be able to work on things of real value rather than having to work on things of little value just to have basic needs met.
My guess is that the majority of the people would do just like that, and while we would probably have more Linus like people who start building things by sheer curiosity, we would lose lots of industrial work and research, and I am not sure we would end up winning.
So I don't know. I am genuinely interested in the BIG, and think it could unleash the creativity of some people, but I am afraid the majority of us would just waste time into useless distractions. Maybe the BIG should last a given period (like one year), at the end of which it can be renewed if the beneficiary can prove that he or she has spent enough time on something "interesting" - it can be the kind of things you mention, something artistic, doing some studies, traveling, etc. The definition of "interesting" needs to be loose, but the beneficiary has to prove that he or she hasn't only been watching youtube and facebook.
Presuming that the time spent on youtube and facebook was not actually valuable (and I will quickly grant that there are ways to spend time on both that are not) I think this is part of a much larger issue we have with motivation and addictive/avoidant behavior. Push to "get a job" can help some people with this, but I think it's actually destructive to others; I think in general we need some better approach - which might be as simple as better mental health care (at the level of helping people meet their goals most effectively) but I'm open to ideas. I think this is needed whether we implement BIG or JG, or not.
So I don't think it's a clear cut situation that wage labour automatically means a good and productive society and that BIG means a bad and unproductive one.
I would say that the current productivity is quite low for the employed people, maybe 0.1 in average, and follows some kind of log-normal distribution (all of this are super rough approximation). If we adopt BIG, we would have lots of people who will have 0 productivity (maybe 95% of the population, much more IMHO), and the rest will have a higher productivity.
Would we be better off? It's not clear to me, especially at the beginning - maybe after one generation people will get used to work on what they really like - but I would really like to see some experimentation in that direction.
I reckon people will become like you, working to improve the systems that support our infrastructure. Where the work of one provides for many. Where schooling isn't some odd prepping for ye old industrialization period but directly launching us into reinventing agriculture, energy grids, transportation, space exploration, production & knowledge. Where we will become not to a resource economy or a services economy. But a research, knowledge and engineering (automation) economy.
When everyone's expectations of conventional capitalism dies down. We will truly transform as a civilization.
Starbucks provides a startling example: making a coffee was automated a long time ago, but people still would rather have another person make their coffee. I'm pretty sure the same is true about hairdressers, stylists, nurses, personal trainers and glacier guides.
(Note: I'm not advocating a policy or direction, merely stating an observation)
You're probably right that this isn't the future we'll get. Just like that old prediction that the Radioisotope generator would power all electronics since it was the superior energy source at the time. Then Chernobyl hysteria changed our future. Probably just like some famous automated car crash that will likely occur. Or a neo-luddite media circus. Who knows what's gonna happen in 50 years.
I don't think automation means removing human interaction out of the picture. And I think people's desire for a person to do this work is going to subside as more interactions are personal instead of commercial. It'll free up us to do activities that are more creative, experimental & empathetic with each other. So if anything, it'd be redistributing human interaction into more social roles than compared to a face punching buttons and pulling levers.
The whole giving people in Retirement homes electronics animal things to cover the basic human requirement of physical touch and simulated bonding would become unnecessary (hopefully). Since families lifetimes wouldn't be devastated/adsorbed by trying to sustain your bodies physical requirements and running the financial treadmill optimized by bankers.
"I doubt we will all become engineers, scientists and technologists" We don't need to all become those things. But to orient our education in new ways to supports primarily these groups and the rest of people learn value creating activities that support each other & themselves. There will probably be some kind currently unimaginable creatives economy where large parts of society are centered around art and media.
Yeah this turned into a huge stupid rant. Time to sleep the stupid off.
For instance, automation of carpentry won't destroy carpentry as a skill. Because people like doing these things and when they aren't forced do it. As a wage as it's often a creative outlet. Many love their jobs as a hobby but it just becomes work for a wage. Then the hobby become a chore and no longer satisfying or valuable personal time investment. Especially if we start considering how little time we have on Earth.
This could be as significant as the step from Slavery to Workers. Except instead of soft-choice, this would put voluntarism as the center piece. Which would then lead to society's institutions being also based on charity/voluntarism.
This is something I don't understand. All the potholes are filled, all government buildings are perfectly clean, no new infrastructure projects can be productively performed? Productively working women already have free child care provided? The government is already doing everything we want it to do, and there is no use whatsoever for low skill labor?
I'm not saying the disadvantages outweigh the benefits of basic income. I'm undecided. But I'm also disappointed with how the risks are often brushed off.
I think root problem is in Americans mentality. Hard work is more valued than its outcome. Also some demographic groups are always treated as disposable garbage, they do not deserve support "just for being humans". Help is only for protected groups.
Also corrupted political system prefers expensive solutions, since it increases its power and various kickbacks. You can not "extract" much money from an agency which just forwards social welfare payments (overhead around 2%).
The schemes mentioned here and being floated about in Slate and the like are done in anticipation of how to respond to a sudden, massive increase in unemployment for low-skilled workers in response to advances in things like AI. These schemes wouldn't contradict what I said before, because they would be due to an economic shift where the lever of unemployment for low skilled workers would mean less, since the increased quantity of unemployed would change the quality of what unemployment is. The threat of sudden mass unemployment would mean less to increasing profits, and could potentially cause social unrest. Like Larry Page's grandfather wandering around a GM plant with a weapon in his hand during the Flint sit-down strike.
It's obvious that structural unemployment is a creation of capitalism, as it did not exist in centuries past. From reading the business press's fears of unemployment getting too low, it should be obvious that big business feels unemployment is an essential pillar of what they need to keep the system running as they wish. Despite this history and current expression of views, people seem to be blind to the reality that not only is the government not interested in helping unemployed people, but that it is actively promoting unemployment, and will fight and do anything to keep structural unemployment in place. It's not an accident trying to be fixed, the existence of ~0% unemployment is what would be seen as the accident, and any levers to throw some of those people out of work would (and have been) utilized. While this is the reality, the standard corporated owned and sponsored hegemonic press is of course oblivious to all of this. Unemployment isn't an accident government is trying to fix, when unemployment gets "too low" business and government actively work to increase unemployment among happily employed people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour
> 13. The JG does precisely that: recognizes many people want paid work
It looks as if the article confuses work and PAID work. Sure, BIG may lead to more people quitting their paid jobs. But it might actually increase the amount of unpaid, yet socially valuable, work.
I am more than pessimistic for the future. I take this as an opportunity to post some of my favorite blog posts. Enjoy!
"There is No Steady State Economy (except at a very basic level)"
http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-stat...
Limits to Growth–At our doorstep, but not recognized http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growt...
Wealth And Energy Consumption Are Inseparable http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-...
Galactic-Scale Energy http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...
"BIG does little for those who want to work."
These seem contradictory. Presumably those who want to work can fill positions vacated by the many people who quit working (but are still able to express their needs directly through the market).