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> There's a huge to-do list of jobs that need to be done at almost every level, from design and build of significant infrastructure in most countries around the
by welanes 10y ago
> There's a huge to-do list of jobs that need to be done at almost every level, from design and build of significant infrastructure in most countries around the world, to community-level support work.
But not the money to pay for these jobs.
> It would be perfectly possible to retrain the long term unemployed.
But who pays for this training?
> Allocating labor on the basis of whether or not traders and stock owners can profit in the short to medium term turns out to be an unintelligent way to strategise an economy.
Most companies are not publicly traded. These companies are not hiring the unemployed because they either don't need them or can't afford to (negative return on investment). The bottom-line matters to Mom & Pop stores as much as it does to big Corps.
- vkou 10y agoWho pays for those people to remain unemployed? They still have food, shelter, utilities...
- welanes 10y agoI don't think anybody pays them "to remain unemployed". But in most countries they receive social welfare while out of work. You could have them go break large rocks into smaller rocks if you have an ideological bent against people being unemployed but unless those rocks can be sold to somebody for more than what unemployment benefit is there's no incentive. Edit: Agree with the comments below. Rather than being idle there's many ways society could harness the skills and manpower of the unemployed for socially value adding, but perhaps not financially profitable, ventures.
- dkarapetyan 10y agoOP's point was they can do useful work but that useful work is not deemed worthy by the cult of the green pyramid with the eye so non-cult members pay the bill.
- foota 10y agoI think the point is that it's inefficient to pay people to do nothing when we could be paying them to do something.
- yummyfajitas 10y agoBut not the money to pay for these jobs....But in most countries they receive social welfare while out of work. See the contradiction here? We could put these people to work engaging in labor that is valuable, but not as valuable as the cost of their welfare. I.e. pay them $7.25/hour to do $5/hour worth of labor (net cost to society = $2.25/hour). Yet we don't. Instead we pay them to play video games (net cost to society $7.25/hour). https://bfi.uchicago.edu/news/scholar-profile/faculty-spotlight-erik-hurst https://bfi.uchicago.edu/news/scholar-profile/faculty-spotli...
- douche 10y agoBring back the CCC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps
- elihu 10y agoI would like to see something like that. Not as a replacement for welfare or unemployment compensation, but as a program where anyone who needs a job right now for whatever reason can get one easily. In the Portland area we have a large park (many square miles) that's being over-run by English ivy, and that's not going to be fixed without a lot of people going out and pulling it up by hand. If the city were to pay a bunch of workers with nothing better to do minimum wage it might be a lot cheaper than paying a team of regular permanent employees, and it could address part of the unemployment (and possibly some of the homelessness) problem.
- lastyearman 10y agoSo you would like government to compete in private markets with tax payers money?
- vkou 10y agoCommon infrastructure is typically not considered to be a private market.
- mjevans 10y agoSomeone has to, otherwise you pay for more people to house people in jail... (one way or another; retrain the poor for jobs that exist, enact a Basic Income Guarantee, make being poor a crime, or try to starve the poor which will drive them to crime).
- astazangasta 10y ago>But not the money to pay for these jobs. This is wrong, in my estimation. Money exists right now that is lying idle, and moreover the more money is used, the more becomes available. The past decade saw an enormous effort to dump money into the economy, to no avail. Nor is this new, there is even a name for this sort of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidity_trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidity_trap The problem is not the lack of money, the problem is that vast majority of capital is controlled by a small group of people with limited vision and pecuniary interests. These people will never allocate capital towards the enormous list of demands that go unfilled every day; nor should we expect them to. No one will build a road in your shitty small town just for your good health. The more we structure our economy to produce this situation (concentration of wealth), the less we will find that unexpressed demands are being met by that economy.
- jwatte 10y ago"But not the money to pay for these jobs." We, the society, make the money. We could decide today that this is financed, either through printing, or through taxing. No theoretical problem. Practically, those with the most resources have decided that they don't think we should take of those resources to support those with the least resources. But there's nothing inevitable about that. Historically, elite that are too powerful and too uncaring about the masses, end up on the guillotine/firing line/bottom of a pit.
- jwatte 10y ago"But not the money to pay for these jobs." We, the society, make the money. We could decide today that this is financed, either through printing, or through taxing. No theoretical problem. Practically, those with the most resources have decided that they don't think we should take of those resources to support those with the least resources. But there's nothing inevitable about that. Historically, elite that are too powerful and too uncaring about the masses, end up on the guillotine/firing line/bottom of a pit.