The root problem seems to be that we have made money (or rather, the ability to make some) an ends instead of a means.
I don't know how all of the 8 billion people on this planet can be expected to meaningfully contribute to something (that can't be done better and more cheaply for everyone by automation) and "earn" their money, without seriously crippling technological advancement (e.g. the advent of self-driving vehicles, or robot lawyers/doctors.)
Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.
Yes, that's largely what Disney does, repackage existing folklore in a way that modern society wants to consume.
At least the American culture is well aware of Fantasia and the brooms with buckets scene. Whatever earlier work? Only someone with specialist knowledge could tell you which work it had been derived from.
> Candelia is one of a number of so-called “Potemkin” companies operating in France.
> Everything about these entities is imaginary from the customers, to the supply chain, to the banks, to the “wages” employees receive and while the idea used to be that the creation of a “parallel economic universe” would help to train the jobless and prepare them for real employment sometime in the future, these “occupations” are now serving simply as way for the out-of-work to suspend reality for eight hours a day
Society fears a large unoccupied class. Whether that fear is warranted or not is a different thing.
It's absolutely warranted. I spent time in South Africa, specifically Johannesburg and Durban, and due to completely unrestricted immigration there is a massive unemployed population (there simply isn't enough work for all the people coming in to the country), and crime rates have gone through the roof.
"Idle hands are the Devil's workshop." Human beings do not naturally drift towards societally beneficial behaviour when lacking productive activities to engage in.
This puritanical belief makes the idea of Basic Income politically un-doable through most of the world, along with the belief that a living is something that must be earned through productive work.
> This puritanical belief makes the idea of Basic Income politically un-doable through most of the world, along with the belief that a living is something that must be earned through productive work.
It's just a framing problem.
For example, the Earned Income Tax Credit in the US is a small de facto UBI. If you eliminated all US welfare programs and used all the money to increase the amount of the EITC you will have effectively solved the problem.
In theory the EITC requires you to earn money, but if you eliminated the loss of welfare benefits that currently occurs if you report earning any amount of money, suddenly you'll discover that everybody everywhere has "income" from doing odd jobs for their friends and so on, most of which they've been doing the whole time in exchange for in-kind services but (illegally!) not reporting it as income because reporting it previously caused a net loss rather than a net gain.
Human nature isn't anywhere near as simplistic as economists tend to believe. That is why half the theories doesn't work in reality, people are far from the rational actors they're made out to be.
> immigration there is a massive unemployed population (there simply isn't enough work for all the people coming in to the country), and crime rates have gone through the roof.
The situation in South Africa is far more nuanced. Due to a sham government and a badly fractured education system, the immigrants to South Africa are generally more skilled and far more employable than many locals. The immigrants also open shops and are more entrepreneurial. There might be some crime from foreigners, but surely we don't need to go making blanket statements like this. This is the kind of thing said by mob leaders during buildup to xenophobic attacks, which surely you know actually take place in South Africa.
While I've never seen a graying Chia Pet before, I would've preferred a link to the NYT article [0] on which that blog post was based. The blog post wasn't even by him, it was just republished from ZeroHedge where it was credited to "Tyler Durden."
It's an interesting story, I had not heard of "practice firms" as a form of training for the unemployed. They don't really say how long people stay in the training program, I think one quoted person had been there for four months, which seems like a long time. "The success rate of the training centers is high. About 60 to 70 percent of those who go through France’s practice firms find jobs, often administrative positions, Mr. Troton said.
But in a reflection of the shifting nature of the European workplace, most are low-paying and last for short stints, sometimes just three to six months."
A better option would be to employ more people in the sciences. There is still a lot to be discovered and labs I have worked in have a range of work to be done from the low skilled cleaning glassware to high skilled design of experiments.
Is money really an end for anyone? People seem to have more interesting terminal goals: to win, to live in a well-regarded area, to have financial security in tough times, to get paid "what they're worth", to own nice things, to travel, to get to the front of the pack, to retire early, etc.
Those aren't necessarily very good goals, but they're more complicated and much harder to do away with than just lust for money.
> to "win" ... to get to the "front of the pack" etc.
and "making money" are all pretty much man-made measures of social success and self-worth, which would be meaningless in a post-scarcity society.
I mean, in some cultures, "winning" included having a large number of wives and slaves. In today's world, someone with such achievements would be out of place and seen as archaic.
What does it mean to "get to the front of the pack" when everybody can have [figuratively] everything and nobody needs to work?
Instead, success would (hopefully) be defined by what you can create and discover, or how many people you can entertain.
"Winning" and "getting to the front of the pack" would definitely still be relevant in a post-scarcity society. Material wealth would just stop being a proxy for those (although some forms of material wealth would always be scarce and usable as status signals, eg. unique works of art).
There is no post scarcity society without a post enlightened society.
Theres far too many people who will look at someone without a job and say "work harder, you moocher", and then argue using first order logic without any facts or context to say that all safety nets should be taken away to ensure that people dont become sloth like.
Add to that, the manipulation of the media, and manipulation by the media and you have the perfect constraints to ensure that people there will never be a post scarcity society.
> Instead, success would (probably) be defined by what you can create and discover, or how many people you can entertain.
That has actually already happened. Current marketing focuses strongly on enjoying non-expensive but creative lifestyle, instead of showing off wealth.
Maybe for regular Joes like you and me. But do you think the ultra rich are still just trying to buy comfort and things with the heaps of money they store up?
But even many of these jobs could be (and eventually will be) automated. I find the very concept of having to "find work for people" to be flawed. Why should people be expected to work bullshit (often soul destroyingly meaningless) unnecessary busy-work jobs?
I dont expect people to do anything they don't want to do. In contrast, it is the people complaining about work (e.g. BI proponents) who expect me to work in support of those who refuse to do so.
Also, cook, maid, trainer and paan wale - examples given in my blog post - are not bullshit jobs in any sense. They all directly contribute to the happiness of other human beings with no levels of indirection (unlike "good" jobs such as mine).
That's the fallacy though. You aren't expected to do anything to work in support of BI. The whole point is, with increasing automation that all of us don't have to work much anymore to make basic necessities.
Its an old way of thinking, that if anybody else has anything then I don't have it. The new world we're building is called 'post-scarcity' for a reason.
I don't know where that idea is coming from. There are a hundred million Americans under-employed and soon to be replaced with automation. This is an urgent issue.
Already clothes and basic food is so cheap as to be almost free here (the store cost is a fad/fashion tax; clothing is made in factories at pennies a garment).
Those people refuse to work as maids, caring for the elderly, picking crops (remember how we need immigrants to do jobs that Americans just won't do?) and similar.
They are not underemployed, they prefer not to work. Go read the article I linked.
> They are not underemployed, they prefer not to work. Go read the article I linked.
"Prefer not to work" is not a reasonable summary of the article. "Receive no benefit from working" is the real problem.
Not only do low income people in the US lose almost all of their earnings to government benefits phase outs, taking a job incurs expenses. You need transportation to the job, potentially to move to an area with an overall higher cost of living, pay someone to do things you can no longer do yourself because you're busy working, etc.
The result is that for low income people in the US, taking a job can easily cause you to lose money.
Which is the thing a UBI fixes, because there is no phase out other than normal taxes, so you keep >=70% of your earnings and taking a job will actually put more money in your pocket.
The problem is it doesn't actually cost less. The taxes you pay for your own UBI cost you nothing.
Meanwhile a basic job has the potential to be very expensive, because unlike a UBI you can't supplement it by working since you're spending your time doing the basic job, so it has to pay a living wage, which is more than the amount you would have to pay as a UBI. And then you will have people who choose the basic job when they would otherwise have chosen an economically productive real job since it's one or the other, which you then have to pay for while at the same time losing the tax revenue you would have had from them doing the real job.
And what happens if too many people choose the basic job so that there are too many unfilled real jobs? With a UBI you can reduce the amount to push more people into the labor force. With a basic job which workers can't supplement with a real job, reducing the amount causes them to starve.
Wait, a UBI won't pay enough to live off of? UBI beneficiaries will all die? That could be pretty cheap.
Also, you assume the economic value of a basic job is zero. Is providing child care for working women really worth $0? How about building infrastructure? In fact, this could be a net gain for the treasury if we replace overpaid government union workers with basic jobbers.
If you want to argue that the BJ is somehow more expensive than a BI, could you provide a back of the envelope calculation showing how that would work?
> Wait, a UBI won't pay enough to live off of? UBI beneficiaries will all die?
They will all find work, which they will be able to without a minimum wage.
Suppose it costs $18,000/year to live here and we have a $12,000/year UBI. Finding a job that pays $18,000/year is not possible for everyone but finding a job that pays $6,000/year is, so they don't die.
> Also, you assume the economic value of a basic job is zero. Is providing child care for working women really worth $0? How about building infrastructure?
It isn't that the value is zero, it's that the value is less than what you're paying them. Because otherwise it would just be a regular job.
And it is not likely that the government is going to find highly productive work for everyone rather than ending up with a lot of people digging holes and filling them back in. The whole "central planning doesn't work" thing.
> In fact, this could be a net gain for the treasury if we replace overpaid government union workers with basic jobbers.
If we could actually do that, i.e. find workers to do the same work for less money, then we could/should do it regardless.
> If you want to argue that the BJ is somehow more expensive than a BI, could you provide a back of the envelope calculation showing how that would work?
A UBI is purely redistributive. You aren't actually buying something, you're only moving money around. It only makes sense to talk about "cost" in the sense of net transfers with government for a given person. For the average person it costs nothing -- they pay $X in taxes and receive $X in UBI, net is zero. People at below average income are net receivers, so if you want to talk about what it "costs" it has to be what it costs to people with above average income.
Moreover, a UBI replaces both welfare/basic job and the progressive tax structure, because the effective tax rate as (taxes - UBI)/income is inherently progressive even with a uniform marginal tax rate. With a basic job you still need a progressive tax structure, which from the perspective of our above average income taxpayer means they then have to pay a higher marginal tax rate than lower income people.
And under both the current welfare system and a UBI, the effective rate paid by lower income people is negative. So unless you're willing to put in place a system that is less progressive than the existing one, a basic job would also have to be coupled with transfer payments to lower income working people. To be equally progressive the transfer payments would have to be the same as the UBI net of taxes.
So they end up costing "the same" until you get to the question of what happens to people who can't find a job that pays a living wage.
Then under a UBI, you let people find whatever job they can even if it doesn't pay a living wage, and let the UBI supplement it so they don't starve.
With a basic job, the government invents work for people.
In some kind of hypothetical sense these could cost the same amount as well. You have a job whose actual economic value is $6000, under a UBI you take the job for $6000 and get a $12,000 UBI, under a basic job the government pays you $18,000 to do the job and then has $6000 worth of productive work done which it can sell on the market or whatever.
But the underlying assumption is that the government is as good at finding productive work for you to do as you are. The bureaucracy itself will waste money, it won't optimize for job satisfaction or consider economically productive activity like providing child care for your own children, and it will have the incentive to invent less productive unskilled jobs for everyone rather than matching each person's abilities to the job. Fundamentally it assumes that the government is as efficient at the market at allocating work, which is hopelessly wrong.
On top of that, it makes the relative value of the basic job too high, so that people have no reason to choose a real job that pays $17K/year and produces >=$17K/year in real value over a basic job that pays $18K/year but only produces $4K/year in real value.
So how does a basic job cost more? Because with a UBI there is someone receiving $12K/year from the government while getting paid another $12K/year to do a job that creates $14K/year in economic value, and then pays $4K/year in taxes, so the government is net -$8K/year to this person. Whereas with a basic job the government is paying the same person $18K/year to produce $4K/year in economic value (which they prefer over the $12K/year real job), so the government is net -$14K/year to the same person, the person has $2K/year less in their pocket and there is $10K/year less economic value produced.
It doesn't. There are billions living on $365/year, after adjusting for the cost of living.
It isn't that the value is zero, it's that the value is less than what you're paying them. Because otherwise it would just be a regular job. And it is not likely that the government is going to find highly productive work for everyone rather than ending up with a lot of people digging holes and filling them back in. The whole "central planning doesn't work" thing.
It's good to know that there is no possible use the government can come up with for labor, and that every program that liberals are currently proposing (child care for working women, pre-K, infrastructure spending) is wasteful. I didn't know that.
I'm still waiting for your back of the envelope calculation. Be sure to include the labor disincentive effects of the BI, which was 9% in the Mincome experiment.
> It doesn't. There are billions living on $365/year, after adjusting for the cost of living.
That wouldn't feed an adult for half that long in the US, to say nothing of lawful living quarters or healthcare or transportation.
And even if true, how does it help you? It would allow both the amount of the UBI and the wage of the basic job to be proportionally less, but the necessary amount of the UBI would still be smaller -- at that cost it could be negligible, given that the number of people who can't find a job in the US that would pay $0.18/hour would be nearly if not literally zero.
> It's good to know that there is no possible use the government can come up with for labor, and that every program that liberals are currently proposing (child care for working women, pre-K, infrastructure spending) is wasteful. I didn't know that.
You can't use "building infrastructure" as a basic job because it's already a real job. The benefit of doing the work exceeds the cost of doing the work so it would/should be done regardless of a basic job program and can't be used to create jobs on top of that, unless the additional jobs couldn't otherwise be justified because they provide less public benefit than they cost.
And how is "child care for working women" or "pre-K" better for those people than the equivalent amount of cash which they can use to buy those things or not as they choose? If anything it will make those things worse because a subsidized government option would bankrupt private alternatives that would otherwise provide better service or lower true cost.
> I'm still waiting for your back of the envelope calculation. Be sure to include the labor disincentive effects of the BI, which was 9% in the Mincome experiment.
Was the last paragraph of the previous post not satisfactory?
"Labor disincentive effects" is just a pejorative way of saying that some people may choose to consume their own labor/time rather than selling it to a third party, which is not actually a problem. Your link points out that the "decline" was primarily young mothers and college students. People choosing to spend more time with their children and their studies. How is that bad?
By comparison a basic job directly displaces private labor with less efficient government labor. That's why it costs more -- people will choose a basic job that pays $8 but only produces $2 in value over a private job that pays $6 and produces $7 in value, and now you have higher expenses, less productive value and lower tax revenue.
Choosing to care for your own children over working for someone else doesn't do that because people only make that choice when they get more value from it than the wages they would receive from the other work. They're literally paying themselves (in opportunity cost) to do child care. The ability to do that isn't a cost, it's an efficiency gain.
The only sense in which it's a cost at all is that self-labor is typically untaxed, which is a policy decision that we could make the other way in theory, but we're probably better off not because it implicitly subsidizes self-labor which is generally meritorious (e.g. no transportation costs, no principal-agent problems, no paperwork).
Maybe many people would not develop the wish to buy fashionable clothes, a bigger car or a faster smartphone if there weren't adverts and people all around us suggesting that that's the right thing to do.
I hope that humans aren't intrinsically consumerist, but I honestly don't know. Does anybody know if research has been don one this topic?
You have it backwards. Advertising works because advertisers know what people want. And people WANT social status.
"We even find that relative income is
more important than absolute income in explaining individual well-being. More
precisely, we find that the income relative to individuals’ own cohort working in
the same occupation group and living in the same region matters for happiness" [1]
"To the conspicuous consumer, such a public display of discretionary economic power is a means of either attaining or maintaining a given social status." [2]
These conspicuous consumers are only fooling themselves. If my neighbor spends 4x on his car compared to me, it certainly doesn't make me feel inferior in any way. If anything it makes me feel sorry for him -- must be overcompensating for some other shortcoming.
Yes I've read Veblen so I understand the theory and psychology behind these tactics that advertising exploits (especially luxury advertising), but there are plenty of people, men and women, for whom such shallow status markers have no effect.
These conspicuous consumers... are a very important part of the economy :) Think about how many engineering and design jobs there are just creating fancier/faster/prettier/etc versions of basic goods. And if the consumer if happy, whats wrong? A lot of that money would just be sitting in a bank somewhere otherwise. Yes, I know some people would donate it to charity.
"but there are plenty of people, men and women, for whom "
Sorry, I didn't mean to generalize all people. I should have said "a large portion of people".
who expect me to work in support of those who refuse to do so.
Not all people who make money work for it. What about those people who earn tons of money collecting economic rents on all the capital and other property they own? By paying economic rents to these people, the rest of us are supporting their lavish lifestyles while many other people struggle to keep a roof over their heads.
> What about those people who earn tons of money collecting economic rents on all the capital and other property they own?
I love how all these revolutionary fantasies always start with the same concept "these greedy capitalist pigs do nothing and get all the money!", as if everything was given to them to just profit from; and even if you want to play the inheritance card, as if their ancestors got the same benefit.
I didn't say they do nothing, I said they don't work for it. Travis Kalanick is a billionaire but he didn't get that money by driving millions of people around in his own car; he paid people (with investor money, no less) to do it for him. You can talk all you want about the huge risk involved in growing a startup but guys like Kalanick will never end up on a street corner holding a filthy cardboard sign.
I favor eliminating the regulations that allow rent seekers to profit - NIMBY rules in coastal cities, taxi and other labor protectionism, etc. I even favor taxes on signalling activities, such as getting a degree.
I am all in favor of eliminating rents, as distinguished from investment income (which is not a rent).
The rents mostly go to the banks, who create the loans out of nothing and win either way. Your rent might go to a landlord but to compete in the bidding on the building he must lend as much as anyone else from a bank.
That ability to mortgage land should be shared among society if anything is to get better. The question is how the 'state' handles any foreclosure in a politically acceptable way when home owners would use their voting power to cajole their way out of giving anything up when they get greedy and over extend. Right now the state offloads this to the banks as the bad guy debt collectors, giving them the benefits of foreclosed assets.
I am all in favor of eliminating rents, as distinguished from investment income (which is not a rent).
Eh, tons of the money made on Wall Street is not really investment income but stuff like management fees, so-called 20 and 2 fees, interest on loans, arbitrage from high-frequency trading, etc.
Management fees are labor income. Interest is investment income. I have no desire to eliminate any of this, except for the portions that are economic rents.
As an example of the portion that is a real rent, consider the management fees you pay on 401k investments over and above the management fees paid on equivalent public symbols. (E.g., my last 401k's S&P index fund cost 30 or 40 bps more than SPY.) I favor eliminating this rent by banning 401k's.
"rent seeking" and capitalism only differ in that a rent seeker strives to rig the system to maintain for themselves a profit whereas in capitalism it is assume that all profits will drop to zero with competition, and one must chart new territory to regain profitability. Hence if you can maintain your profit (like Apple) then you are probably a rent seeker and not a capitalist.
I don't find it flawed at all. The Public Works Administration (PWA) during the depression put many able-bodied men (and women?) to work, and built many public facilities - including parks - that we all benefit from today. I don' think the men and women who participated in PWA considered it "soul destroyingly meaningless". But perhaps there was a different work ethic then.
What's with the "bullshit jobs" thesis I see around HN these days? How is working as a cook for a software engineer less bullshit than writing software? At the end of the day the cook can point to something he has done, right?
There are plenty of unnecessary jobs, especially in large companies (anecdotal, I have friends working in a local bank and from what I hear, they could easily replace half their workforce with one or two actually competent people -- and before anyone questions this, these are people who created a database table with 7000! columns) and government.
A "bullshit" job is one created only for the purpose of creating a job. That is, its unnecessary or redundant and only exists because we've decided that people need jobs and we don't have enough "necessary" or "socially contributing" jobs.
There are also lots of factory, agriculture, logistics, manual labour jobs that I believe will soon (next 10 to 20 years) be replaced by automation, be it robotics, self-driving vehicles or software. It also seems to me that the jobs that are in my opinion most likely to be automated are the ones that currently employ the largest amount of people.
If they're not a burden on the rest of society, then there's nothing wrong with that. I take issue with able-bodied people not working, and collecting welfare while contributing nothing - which is a problem worth billions of dollars in my country.
