6 ms·

How about an alternate idea of "basic employment"? The government guarantees a job to anyone who wants one, but they do have to show up to work. These can be jo

• abannin 10y ago
  How very Keynesian.
• ng12 10y ago
  The biggest turn off for me is that most UBI advocates seem to have the opinion that people freed from jobs will turn into philosophers or artists or otherwise make productive use of their time. I argue you don't really have to look very far to find the answer to that question: check out what an underemployed ~25yo from a small rust-belt town is up to. Chances are not a whole lot. That's why I'm really in favor of a scheme like this. Ensure that people supported by the community at least give something back. Go a step further and increase funding for the arts so we can create jobs there too.
  • rosser 10y ago
    You can't very meaningfully use someone's not making "productive use of their time" while lacking employment (and therefore income) as an argument against UBI. They don't have the income that might — yes, might — enable them to be their flavor of productive.
    • vivekd 10y ago
      I suspect that a lot of people's flavor of productive might turn on "artist" or "writer" where very few will be interested in "coal mine equipment operator", or "customer service person for DELL." For the foreseeable future there will always be jobs people don't want to do that machines aren't capable of taking over.
      • joe_fro 10y ago
        I agree with this. What will be interesting though is to see if the wages of those jobs will increase because people won't want to do them, or if wages will decrease because there will be so many more people that aren't employed, and there may be a certain prestige to being employed to do any work at all.
        • dagw 10y ago
          I suspect that no matter how you slice things, there will always be people who don't qualify for UBI (probably anybody without citizenship or a green card), and that those people will end up working many of those jobs for low wages.
      • dllthomas 10y ago
        Yes, and it's a very good thing that a UBI system still allows the "coal mine equipment operator" to be paid for their work on top of the UBI.
  • thaumaturgy 10y ago
    > check out what an underemployed ~25yo from a small rust-belt town is up to. Chances are not a whole lot. The problems faced by small post-industrial towns are many, varied, and way outside the grasp of probably anyone on HN, but I'd be willing to bet that "underemployed", "rust-belt", and "small town" has a lot more to do with a person's lifestyle than the amount of free time they have.
  • johndoez 10y ago
    Another demographic to consider is retired people with pensions. Some of them waste it down the pub, others lead meaningful lives and describe these years as their happiest.
  • jpindar 10y ago
    Why is it necessary for everyone to make productive use of their time?
• thaumaturgy 10y ago
  It sounds like you're suggesting that the government provide a class of jobs to citizens and pay them a small wage for it. Not only does that sound very different from the idea and principles of basic income, but it also sounds suspiciously close to certain socio-economic models that have been tried, unsuccessfully, by other countries throughout history.
  • nhaehnle 10y ago
    Examples? You probably only think you have some because you're over-extrapolating what the proposal really is about. Job Guarantee advocates usually advocate for it within a larger framework that is pretty much the same as we have today. One of the closest examples of an actual Job Guarantee was the "jefes y jefas de hogar" program in Argentina after the crisis (Google it). It worked pretty well for what it intended; perhaps too well, to the point where it became politically unpopular due to traditional views on gender roles, and was eliminated because of that.
• generic_user 10y ago
  In addition there could be subsidy for for corporations and business that provide training certificate program material for entry level positions in there industries. This training could be offered on a voluntary basis at community colleges and broaden the positions available and offer more stimulating options then simply manual labour or service industry jobs.
• crooked-v 10y ago
  > more easily transition Why do you assume that people with their time taken by (almost certainly physically exhausting) make work jobs will have an easy time looking for other employment?
  • generic_user 10y ago
    Because they will be conditioned to a routine of getting up at 7am and getting to work by 9am putting in there hours and doing that five days a week. People underestimate how important this is. When you are out of work people have a tendency to adopt sporadic sleep habits and lifestyle. It can be a big shock just trying to get up at a set time each day and getting to specific place with the expectation that you have 8 hours of work to do.
    • wolfgke 10y ago
      I (PhD student) have a rather irregular/flexible schedule: Sometimes I'm at the institute at 9 am, sometimes at 11 am (but on the other hand I'm very often still at the institute at 8:00 pm). I believe I work a lot - but I'm the kind of person who strongly prefers a flexible instead of regular schedule. TLDR: A regular schedule is just drilled into your mind. It is much more important how much you work (if there are not very good reasons for the schedule).
      • generic_user 10y ago
        Are you going to apply for a job trimming hedges or cleaning up tables at a restaurant whey you finish your degree? You are projecting your very unique and overachieving situation onto a world which is in quite the opposite position. The vast majority of the people that will end up in work programs have at best a high school degree. Many of them not even that and possibly some criminal or drug history. Or bad employment history. ~80% of the employment in the US is in the service industry. That is where most people are going to find employment. These programs are not designed for PhD students they are designed for people who have had a hard time getting the basics straight like holding a job. Staying on the right side of the law. And making the right choices which You and I take for granted.
• virtuabhi 10y ago
  Its Communism/Socialism. Just to give two examples (from India) about how it ends up (1) Min. days employment guarantee to people in rural areas: Build a kutcha (made of mud, temporary, no asphalt) road. And build the road again after it rains. (2) Give everyone a job: Ten people operating a ferris wheel. There is a reason why capitalism, competition, and corporations have managed to pull more people out of poverty than any other scheme. Of course a set of regulatory policies, socialist schemes, and worker protection laws are required to make sure that the focus is on the people.
  • mempko 10y ago
    No, science has pulled people out poverty. Capitalism, like other forms of terrible economy systems happened to exist at the same time.
    • aminok 10y ago
      Economists have looked at this and concluded that the spread of market institutions like private property rights has accelerated poverty reduction, because of the effect it has on capital allocation and incentives. Science isn't generated in a vacuum, and in any case, science alone doesn't generate goods/services. I strongly recommend you look at the evidence presented on the causes of global poverty reduction: https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-billion-people-have-been-taken-out-extreme-poverty-20-years-world-should-aim http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill... http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-global-war-on-poverty http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-glo...
      • thatcat 10y ago
        Engineering produces solutions to the problem the economy presents it. Its only going to solve the problems of poor people to the degree they can afford to pay for the goods and services designed. This could be a benefit of BI, redirecting some engineering focus from earners to non earners, who tend to live more economically sustainable lives by necessity.
• mtmail 10y ago
  German has the so called "1 Euro jobs" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_opportunities_with_additional_expenses_compensation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_opportunities_with_add... It's a job where you have to show up, cleaning up parks is one example, but essentially you're 99% on welfare. People in this program aren't counted as unemployed.
  • majewsky 10y ago
    > People in this program aren't counted as unemployed. That's a major motivation for this program from the POV of politicians. It drives down the unemployment stats which is considered very important by public opinion.
• coderzach 10y ago
  How about an employer based basic income, where the government subsidizes X dollars per year, per employee. Seems like it would fit right in with an employer based healthcare.
  • laretluval 10y ago
    Do you feel that employer based health care has been a success?
  • crdoconnor 10y ago
    So a profit subsidy then.
• mlinksva 10y ago
  If WWII (or other total war) hadn't happened, I wonder if the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration would still exist today and in what form. I think it might be interesting to operate a live backup economy, a low-tech labor intensive one that could produce minimally adequate calories for the whole population for an extended period of time without electronics. This live backup economy would effectively set the minimum wage and be an employer of last resort, though it might be some people's first preference.
• gpsx 10y ago
  I think it is great they are studying UBI, but I agree with you in that giving people work is the way to go. I believe it goes by the term "workfare" (as opposed to welfare). There is always more work to do, the problem is people may not be willing to pay enough money to have it done. If the government is paying out the money anyway, there should be something productive coming from it. I think this is good for the country and for the people doing the work. In the past it took a big investment to do something like workfare (like building the Hoover Dam), but now just about anyone could do work by sitting at a computer. It could be anything from project management (there would be a lot of that, with the system itself), accounting, "customer" support, or even helping supervised learning for AI research (by identifying cats). And you could even allow people to identify the work they want to do, if the have something worthwhile they want to do.
• dllthomas 10y ago
  I think makework is tremendously destructive to the dignity work affords.
  • crdoconnor 10y ago
    "Make work" programs like this built the Hoover Dam and the Brooklyn bridge. Fortunately these days the market has people doing "real, dignified work" like sitting in call centers harassing people to repay loans while that infrastructure ages and crumbles.
    • dllthomas 10y ago
      If those are providing tremendous value, as is I think your implication, then it's not "makework" as I would use the term. I have no objection to finding projects we want done and hiring people to do them (I may or may not object to the individual projects). I object to demanding someone spend their time on things that benefit no one so that they "have a job".
      • crdoconnor 10y ago
        >I object to demanding someone spend their time on things that benefit no one Exactly why did you immediately jump to the presumption that agencies like the PWA that guaranteed jobs for all Americans would result in work that benefited no one?
        • dllthomas 10y ago
          It wasn't presumption. It was my understanding of the word that was used. Further, the major difference between a "guarantee" and not comes when we've run out of useful things to hire for.
  • twoquestions 10y ago
    There's no dignity in work, there's dignity in creating value, which not all work does. Private companies are quite capable of generating useless makework (If you haven't experienced this personally, I envy you).
• kahrkunne 10y ago
  My fear is that people would get stuck in such a program for life - they wouldn't have much opportunity to learn skills that could help them find a different job
• majewsky 10y ago
  > The government guarantees a job to anyone who wants one, but they do have to show up to work. These can be jobs that are at a loss, and are explicitly "make work" jobs. For example, cleaning up parks, repairing roads, etc. We have something similar in Germany: "one-euro jobs". A long-term unemployed person (who usually collects 404€ of welfare, plus subsidies for the rent) can work in such a job for slightly over 1€ per hour. It's meant for people who need the routine of going to work everyday in order to have a realistic chance of re-entering the proper workforce. I've only met few people who did one-euro jobs, but from what I've heard, it's never a nice experience. If all you have is a "make work" job, it doesn't make you feel much better than not having a job at all. Then again, a lot of people seem to be content exercising a bullshit job [1] (like shuffling around memos in an office). [1] The term "bullshit job" for a job that's obviously useless has been popularized by David Graeber, who claims (IIRC) at least 30% of employees exercise a bullshit job. I cannot find the original article at the moment, esp. because my Google stubbornly refuses to show me English results.
  • IsaacL 10y ago
    The article is here: http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ (click 'here' to remove the purple overlay). I disagree with Graeber. Most "memo-shuffling" jobs serve a purpose -- organising thousands of people takes a lot of administration and management. Of course many of the administrators and managers could be removed, but figuring how to do so takes expert senior managers or management consultants (jobs Graeber decries as BS). Graeber's basic fallacy is comparing capitalism to his ideal planned economy. In an ideal planned economy, there would be no need for sales and marketing, ergo sales and marketing add no value (he reasons). But planned economies don't work in practice, and most of these "B.S. jobs" exist to help coordinate an economy of independently acting, self-interested agents. His theory is that we could all work part-time but instead we have created a self-justifying system of unnecessary jobs so we can afford unnecessary products. The glaring flaw in this argument is that people can take part-time jobs if they're happy with a lower standard of living. Many do, most don't.
    • substack 10y ago
• gluggymug 10y ago
  Cleaning parks and repairing roads will be done via park cleaning and road repairing robots unfortunately. The jobs have to be something that can't be automated yet still meaningful. My suggestion is make new jobs in politics. More robots means more political arguments over how to govern them. They should create extra political positions whenever there is an unemployment problem. It would be just like work but you don't have to produce anything. You just argue amongst yourselves. Make new laws. Repeal old laws. It's very social too.
• xkcd-sucks 10y ago
  "Basic employment" sounds a lot like "the military" (or, in the USA, national guard etc). While they don't accept literally anyone, they will take mostly anyone and give them a job that they can perform reasonably well. Sometimes this is flying planes, but more often it's mopping floors and keeping track of inventory. To paraphrase a friend, the military can take somebody that's dumb as fuck and fit them into a little box where they perform one simple task well. Unfortunately it also comes with a substantial loss of rights, which will probably become a feature of universal basic income programs anyway...