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Well putting aside that you might be making a kind of post-hoc fallacy there with your equation; Is reducing labor supply really a bad thing? Most developed c
by adwf 10y ago
Well putting aside that you might be making a kind of post-hoc fallacy there with your equation; Is reducing labor supply really a bad thing?
Most developed countries have unemployment permanently somewhere between 5-10% or even more during recession. Some, like Spain, have closer to 25%. Reducing labor supply may be the only answer.
It's not that I don't agree with you in principle. But you can only gain productivity if there are things for people to do. The fact of modern society is that we are running out of jobs.
- yummyfajitas 10y agoReally? Child care is easily available to working mothers? House cleaning services are cheap and readily available to all skilled workers? Professionals sit in the back of their car working on their laptop while a driver watches the road? There are lost of things to do. We have a situation of labor scarcity, not a surplus. Complaining about a labor surplus right now is like a 350lb man eating french fries on the theory that he might starve in the future.
- adwf 10y agoFor the correct pay, yes. Some jobs aren't paid enough for people to do and still afford to live. Basic income actually fixes that by giving people a baseline to live off, upon which their salary can build.
- yummyfajitas 10y agoIf those jobs "aren't paid enough for people to afford to live" then India should be full of a billion rotting corpses. I was there last week and I feel like I would have noticed the apocalypse. A much better solution than BI would be a guaranteed job and/or an expanded EITC. These solutions - while not sounding as cool and hipster as BI - have no labor disincentive and cost a lot less.
- adwf 10y agoPutting aside the absurd comparison of living costs in a 3rd world country vs 1st world... India is filled with a ton of misery. It's the only country in the world where I saw dead people just lying in the gutter. The Mumbai slum was one of the worst places I've ever been and you want to hold that up as some sort of ideal? That people should just live down to that level instead of striving for better? If it wasn't for the Indian government welfare programs, that slum would be filled with rotting corpses.
- yummyfajitas 10y agoI didn't hold it up as an ideal. I held up the middle class experience there as an example of what happens when labor isn't scarce. You seem to think I'm endorsing having very few goods and services. I'm not. On the contrary, I oppose policies like BI which will reduce goods and services available.