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How would you achieve this? I can only think of a few ways: - The government can force companies to give jobs to people they would not otherwise hire - The go

How would you achieve this? I can only think of a few ways: - The government can force companies to give jobs to people they would not otherwise hire - The government can invent unnecessary jobs and then hire people to do them. (The jobs would have to be unnecessary in order to be invented, because if they were necessary, they would already exist.) Both of these solutions are terrible, and I can't think of any others that are qualitatively different -- you either put people in existing jobs or create new jobs. The point of UBI, according to most of its proponents, is that it deals with a future of automation in which many people will not be able to find work.

colorint 10y ago
Are all social services unnecessary because they're created ex nihilo by the government? Most job guarantee programs involve looking at something like that, as well as things like art grants and infrastructure and maintenance and so forth.
frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
It would be the second and even though they may not be necessary, they would still be beneficial. See this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_732.pdf http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_732.pdf The rest of the world is finally catching up the advantage we made for ourselves post-WWII and combining that with technological change we're going to be facing a labor market with a lot of (at least frictionally) unemployed people. In that case you do what FDR did and hand them a shovel and tell them to improve their community.
maxerickson 10y ago
Basic mechanization makes it hard to put a lot of people to work physically, but there's all sorts of things that can be done that improve the world in small ways. Here's a dumb one: end "Adopt a highway" and pay people to clean up along roads.
abecedarius 10y ago
You're equating not-done-in-the-market with unnecessary. Public goods are hard to fund via markets -- for instance, if the U.S. military vanished tomorrow I don't think it'd be replaced by corporations competing to sign you up for defense against invasions by offering the best service at the lowest price. (This also shows a downside of governments providing public goods: we in the U.S. are buying way more "defense" than optimal.)

colorint 10y ago

Are all social services unnecessary because they're created ex nihilo by the government? Most job guarantee programs involve looking at something like that, as well as things like art grants and infrastructure and maintenance and so forth.

frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago

It would be the second and even though they may not be necessary, they would still be beneficial. See this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_732.pdf http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_732.pdf The rest of the world is finally catching up the advantage we made for ourselves post-WWII and combining that with technological change we're going to be facing a labor market with a lot of (at least frictionally) unemployed people. In that case you do what FDR did and hand them a shovel and tell them to improve their community.

maxerickson 10y ago

Basic mechanization makes it hard to put a lot of people to work physically, but there's all sorts of things that can be done that improve the world in small ways. Here's a dumb one: end "Adopt a highway" and pay people to clean up along roads.

abecedarius 10y ago

You're equating not-done-in-the-market with unnecessary. Public goods are hard to fund via markets -- for instance, if the U.S. military vanished tomorrow I don't think it'd be replaced by corporations competing to sign you up for defense against invasions by offering the best service at the lowest price. (This also shows a downside of governments providing public goods: we in the U.S. are buying way more "defense" than optimal.)