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"The story of secular stagnation is that we have too little demand to keep the economy and the workforce fully employed." The standing assumption here is that

"The story of secular stagnation is that we have too little demand to keep the economy and the workforce fully employed." The standing assumption here is that it is obviously Right and Good for everyone to have a job and work and that the Government must, at all costs, do everything in its power to create jobs so that everyone can work. However, not everyone wants to do traditional work- some want to be caretakers to their family, some want to pursue alternative lifestyles such as homesteading, and yeah some just want to be supremely lazy. Assuming that it is always ultimately Right and Good to have jobs for everyone regardless of inclination and ability leads to crazy finagling to "create" jobs and to never even consider eliminating jobs by any means (such as dismantling Government agencies that have been shown to be completely useless cough cough TSA cough cough). Personally, I think having a base income for everyone in the US would boost the economy way more than job creation and assuming everyone should work. Eliminating homelessness, poverty, and hunger would ensure that every person in society lived at a high basic level of existence and would free up time, effort, and money that is currently tied up in serving the poor, hungry, and homeless. However, I cannot see that ever becoming a reality in the US so the point is probably moot.

sologoub 11y ago
The basic income would also enable government to tune the economy better - want more demand? Send out more money! However, I do think we can implement better short-term policy as well, with proper maternity/paternity/care leaves and longer overall vacations. Germany and other advanced economies have done so and have clear benefits. We can also improve the tax write offs for dependents, to make one parent staying home longer an option not just for those either really well of or really poor, but for most families.
- briandear 11y ago
  Would that not increase inflation? If everyone in my neighborhood can now afford to pay more, I can charge more.
  - cfontes 11y ago
    A tale from Brazil... A couple years ago we had absolutely no credit here, so the Government created an almost free credit line (from R$160k to R$300k) to be used to buy homes. This is a major problem here and was kind of a good move. As a consequence of that now every place is very expensive, because everybody has at least R$160k (except people like me that hate to borrow money) so places that went for R$50k (not nice ones) are now around R$250k, nice places that where on the range of R$300k are now around R$700k to a million. If you saved money before the credit line you are in a bad position now, back in 2007 It was possible for a graduate student to work, save and in a couple years buy a small apartment for R$50k in a low middle class neighborhood, nowadays you can't find anything for that amount of money not even in the really bad places, I am not sure it is the right solution, we just inflated prices and people still can't buy homes or they do and will have a debt for live. So I like that people have credit to buy their places but I hate seeing prices rise like that for no reason besides "But you can get a loan..."
    - marcosdumay 11y ago
      That was almost exactly like the real state bubble of every other country by the same time. Our just took a little longer to blow. It has absolutely no relation to how a market would react to BI. Home loans are targeted, BI isn't; home loans are granted for buying expensive goods, it should be very hard to buy anything expensive with BI. Too bad that you brought our experience with real state loans, instead of our experience with guaranteed income (biggest in the world), what is somewhat similar to BI, and could teach some good lessons. Fact is, people that choose to rely on guaranteed income moved to the poorest regions of the country. It would be great to see some data about how those regions fared.
      - cfontes 11y ago
        I can't say I know most countries real estate bubbles but I've lived in 3 and none had the exact same problem. I see a relation to how prices might behave as now the economy is flooded with free money while most people are still working and generating their own income. And I don't agree that we have the biggest "guaranteed income" ours is a very badly designed system (aimed at buying the poorest votes and deeply exploited) based on bad assumptions on the population and how to distribute wealth, that is why so much money is stolen from it. Without health and education investment, it's a short sighted project instead of a long run one which would aim to take those people out of misery. BI is for countries that have solved at least the basic educational and infrastructural problems otherwise it's just a waste of man power to build those.
lmm 11y ago
Basic Income could still mean massive inequality. Spreading the work around via healthy minimum levels of vacation and working hour limits seems like a good move whether we adopt BI or not.
- briandear 11y ago
  What's wrong with inequality? Serious question. If I work 70 hour weeks and make only a bit more than some guy working 20, why would I bother. Inequality is the key motivator for success: you want more than the other guy.
  - mc32 11y ago
    I think some kind of BI is inevitable. But like the gov't has stipulations when it sends federal monies to states, I think BI will also bring with it the danger of proscribing behavior. Ie you lose your BI for violations --whatever those may be, political, behavioral, etc.
    - facetube 11y ago
      It's already here in the US; Wisconsin has proposed both drug-testing welfare recipients – already demonstrated by other states to be a colossal waste of money – and limiting the kinds of food that one can buy using public assistance funds (e.g. an explicit prohibition on using the funds to buy shrimp).
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      That's why people want Unconditional Basic Income. Conditional, with lots of complex conditions, is what we have now as welfare, and while often helpful, it's also very often dehumanizing.
      - mc32 11y ago
        You're right a d I hope it is unconditional, but I'm not sure it will remain so given the power government interests can wield with this tool. Kind of like healthcare insurance, or any insurance for that matter. They all have incentives to act one way or another.
pif 11y ago
http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-11-02 http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-11-02
- ianmcgowan 11y ago
  That's an interesting question. How many actual people are involved in the production, transport and prep of food? Per 1000 consumers? How about 50 years from now?
  - tpeo 11y ago
    Way more people work in "the production, transport and prep of food", if the linkages between production processes are considered. Whereas in the 19th century a plow and a mule was perhaps all that was needed, and very little was needed beyond the services of the farmer's family and the eventual services of a blacksmith or a farrier, a current tractor is composed of myriad of parts, perhaps shipped by different places, produced by different machinery, all of which are also composed of many parts and so on. Agricultural firms also require legal services in order to deal with regulations and possible litigation, financial services in order to hedge against price changes, etc. So how many people do business in foodstuffs? All of them, maybe.
ianmcgowan 11y ago
Though BI isn't mentioned in the article, it does seem to hover around every paragraph. Not enough work for everyone because robots? Reduce the working week to 4-days (then 3, then 2, then...). It does sounds like a sane way to get from where we are to the Star Trek/Culture post-scarcity nirvana. Throw in fusion power for unlimited energy (or dramatically better solar), and baby you've got yourself a stew :-)
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
dibujante 11y ago
A basic level of income is just cutting out the middleman. "Make work" jobs are just a moral fig leaf that governments put on top of basic income because an unconditional basic income inevitably causes an uproar. "Why, I got a degree that interested me and am working a job I enjoy and making a lot of money, but that guy? He gets a trifling amount of money a year just to sit on his ass! Why, the indignity!" Most economists agree that directly handing money to people is completely effective economic policy. For cultural reasons, though, we have the fig leaf.
- hodwik 11y ago
  Most things we need people to do are not enjoyable. There has to be a way to get people to do the work that sucks. The two methods we have found are physical coercion or financial coercion.
  - dibujante 11y ago
    Yep. I'm a software engineer and like it, but you could pay me enough money to clean latrines instead. Minimum income probably will raise the price of shitty jobs. This will probably just speed up automation, but no one wanted those jobs anyways.
    - hodwik 11y ago
      I think you have it backwards. If all jobs got roughly the same remuneration, most people would take the easy fun job, as much as they claim otherwise. People don't leave their jobs as parking lot attendants because they're not challenged. They leave because they want to buy a new TV, a car, and some fly threads. If I could make as much reading all day in a little box, occasionally handing people their change, as I do in tech, I'm going to that parking lot. It's not the blue-collar jobs you'd have trouble filling. It's the lawyers, doctors, accountants, and so forth. Outside of the hobby careers (like tech, architect, etc.), most white-collar jobs suck terribly.
      - JamesBarney 11y ago
s73v3r 11y ago
"The standing assumption here is that it is obviously Right and Good for everyone to have a job and work and that the Government must, at all costs, do everything in its power to create jobs so that everyone can work." Yes, it is. And as much as people would like it to change, it's not going to change anytime soon. So we need to work and have jobs so that we can have places to live and food to eat.

sologoub 11y ago

The basic income would also enable government to tune the economy better - want more demand? Send out more money! However, I do think we can implement better short-term policy as well, with proper maternity/paternity/care leaves and longer overall vacations. Germany and other advanced economies have done so and have clear benefits. We can also improve the tax write offs for dependents, to make one parent staying home longer an option not just for those either really well of or really poor, but for most families.

briandear 11y ago
Would that not increase inflation? If everyone in my neighborhood can now afford to pay more, I can charge more.
- cfontes 11y ago
  A tale from Brazil... A couple years ago we had absolutely no credit here, so the Government created an almost free credit line (from R$160k to R$300k) to be used to buy homes. This is a major problem here and was kind of a good move. As a consequence of that now every place is very expensive, because everybody has at least R$160k (except people like me that hate to borrow money) so places that went for R$50k (not nice ones) are now around R$250k, nice places that where on the range of R$300k are now around R$700k to a million. If you saved money before the credit line you are in a bad position now, back in 2007 It was possible for a graduate student to work, save and in a couple years buy a small apartment for R$50k in a low middle class neighborhood, nowadays you can't find anything for that amount of money not even in the really bad places, I am not sure it is the right solution, we just inflated prices and people still can't buy homes or they do and will have a debt for live. So I like that people have credit to buy their places but I hate seeing prices rise like that for no reason besides "But you can get a loan..."
  - marcosdumay 11y ago
    That was almost exactly like the real state bubble of every other country by the same time. Our just took a little longer to blow. It has absolutely no relation to how a market would react to BI. Home loans are targeted, BI isn't; home loans are granted for buying expensive goods, it should be very hard to buy anything expensive with BI. Too bad that you brought our experience with real state loans, instead of our experience with guaranteed income (biggest in the world), what is somewhat similar to BI, and could teach some good lessons. Fact is, people that choose to rely on guaranteed income moved to the poorest regions of the country. It would be great to see some data about how those regions fared.
    - cfontes 11y ago
      I can't say I know most countries real estate bubbles but I've lived in 3 and none had the exact same problem. I see a relation to how prices might behave as now the economy is flooded with free money while most people are still working and generating their own income. And I don't agree that we have the biggest "guaranteed income" ours is a very badly designed system (aimed at buying the poorest votes and deeply exploited) based on bad assumptions on the population and how to distribute wealth, that is why so much money is stolen from it. Without health and education investment, it's a short sighted project instead of a long run one which would aim to take those people out of misery. BI is for countries that have solved at least the basic educational and infrastructural problems otherwise it's just a waste of man power to build those.

lmm 11y ago

Basic Income could still mean massive inequality. Spreading the work around via healthy minimum levels of vacation and working hour limits seems like a good move whether we adopt BI or not.

briandear 11y ago
What's wrong with inequality? Serious question. If I work 70 hour weeks and make only a bit more than some guy working 20, why would I bother. Inequality is the key motivator for success: you want more than the other guy.
- mc32 11y ago
  I think some kind of BI is inevitable. But like the gov't has stipulations when it sends federal monies to states, I think BI will also bring with it the danger of proscribing behavior. Ie you lose your BI for violations --whatever those may be, political, behavioral, etc.
  - facetube 11y ago
    It's already here in the US; Wisconsin has proposed both drug-testing welfare recipients – already demonstrated by other states to be a colossal waste of money – and limiting the kinds of food that one can buy using public assistance funds (e.g. an explicit prohibition on using the funds to buy shrimp).
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    That's why people want Unconditional Basic Income. Conditional, with lots of complex conditions, is what we have now as welfare, and while often helpful, it's also very often dehumanizing.
    - mc32 11y ago
      You're right a d I hope it is unconditional, but I'm not sure it will remain so given the power government interests can wield with this tool. Kind of like healthcare insurance, or any insurance for that matter. They all have incentives to act one way or another.

pif 11y ago

http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-11-02 http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-11-02

ianmcgowan 11y ago
That's an interesting question. How many actual people are involved in the production, transport and prep of food? Per 1000 consumers? How about 50 years from now?
- tpeo 11y ago
  Way more people work in "the production, transport and prep of food", if the linkages between production processes are considered. Whereas in the 19th century a plow and a mule was perhaps all that was needed, and very little was needed beyond the services of the farmer's family and the eventual services of a blacksmith or a farrier, a current tractor is composed of myriad of parts, perhaps shipped by different places, produced by different machinery, all of which are also composed of many parts and so on. Agricultural firms also require legal services in order to deal with regulations and possible litigation, financial services in order to hedge against price changes, etc. So how many people do business in foodstuffs? All of them, maybe.

ianmcgowan 11y ago

Though BI isn't mentioned in the article, it does seem to hover around every paragraph. Not enough work for everyone because robots? Reduce the working week to 4-days (then 3, then 2, then...). It does sounds like a sane way to get from where we are to the Star Trek/Culture post-scarcity nirvana. Throw in fusion power for unlimited energy (or dramatically better solar), and baby you've got yourself a stew :-)

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

dibujante 11y ago

A basic level of income is just cutting out the middleman. "Make work" jobs are just a moral fig leaf that governments put on top of basic income because an unconditional basic income inevitably causes an uproar. "Why, I got a degree that interested me and am working a job I enjoy and making a lot of money, but that guy? He gets a trifling amount of money a year just to sit on his ass! Why, the indignity!" Most economists agree that directly handing money to people is completely effective economic policy. For cultural reasons, though, we have the fig leaf.

hodwik 11y ago
Most things we need people to do are not enjoyable. There has to be a way to get people to do the work that sucks. The two methods we have found are physical coercion or financial coercion.
- dibujante 11y ago
  Yep. I'm a software engineer and like it, but you could pay me enough money to clean latrines instead. Minimum income probably will raise the price of shitty jobs. This will probably just speed up automation, but no one wanted those jobs anyways.
  - hodwik 11y ago
    I think you have it backwards. If all jobs got roughly the same remuneration, most people would take the easy fun job, as much as they claim otherwise. People don't leave their jobs as parking lot attendants because they're not challenged. They leave because they want to buy a new TV, a car, and some fly threads. If I could make as much reading all day in a little box, occasionally handing people their change, as I do in tech, I'm going to that parking lot. It's not the blue-collar jobs you'd have trouble filling. It's the lawyers, doctors, accountants, and so forth. Outside of the hobby careers (like tech, architect, etc.), most white-collar jobs suck terribly.
    - JamesBarney 11y ago

s73v3r 11y ago

"The standing assumption here is that it is obviously Right and Good for everyone to have a job and work and that the Government must, at all costs, do everything in its power to create jobs so that everyone can work." Yes, it is. And as much as people would like it to change, it's not going to change anytime soon. So we need to work and have jobs so that we can have places to live and food to eat.