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Imagine something that pays based on the work you do kind of like AWS Mechanical Turk but for physical work that benefits the public in a community. Basically,

Imagine something that pays based on the work you do kind of like AWS Mechanical Turk but for physical work that benefits the public in a community. Basically, if someone wants to work, there is always work available. The jobs could be paid at a market rate or, if society wanted to supplement the pay, it could be higher with the idea that investing in someone getting a work history will benefit society in the long run.

mrguyorama 9y ago
Who funds the pool of money that pays for the always open jobs, and who verifies the jobs were completed to satisfaction?
- markshead 9y ago
  Well, the discussion here was UBI so I guess the same magical pool that UBI would be paid from. :) Seriously though, the money that funds unemployment benefits and some other welfare programs would be a possibility because it seems a program like this should replace some of the money paid out in those programs. If we look back at the WPA program, the community that was benefiting (say they were building a stadium for the high-school) would pay for up to 1/3rd of the cost. Having a way to easily verify jobs is the hard part. If there is valuable work that can be done by low skill workers that was easy to verify, it seems like the market would have already created these jobs. I guess Mechanical Turk is an example of that happening. On the other hand, I think there are physical jobs that could be done like painting buildings in parks, picking up trash, etc. that would be valuable to a community but where the market is unlikely to create a solution. In the stuff I've read about the WPA, it sounds like having supervisors who cared about the quality of the work was one of their biggest problems too. On the other hand, Uber, TaskRabbit and others have found ways to quantify and judge the quality of work pretty well, so maybe there are ways to do this that just haven't been tried.

mrguyorama 9y ago

Who funds the pool of money that pays for the always open jobs, and who verifies the jobs were completed to satisfaction?

markshead 9y ago
Well, the discussion here was UBI so I guess the same magical pool that UBI would be paid from. :) Seriously though, the money that funds unemployment benefits and some other welfare programs would be a possibility because it seems a program like this should replace some of the money paid out in those programs. If we look back at the WPA program, the community that was benefiting (say they were building a stadium for the high-school) would pay for up to 1/3rd of the cost. Having a way to easily verify jobs is the hard part. If there is valuable work that can be done by low skill workers that was easy to verify, it seems like the market would have already created these jobs. I guess Mechanical Turk is an example of that happening. On the other hand, I think there are physical jobs that could be done like painting buildings in parks, picking up trash, etc. that would be valuable to a community but where the market is unlikely to create a solution. In the stuff I've read about the WPA, it sounds like having supervisors who cared about the quality of the work was one of their biggest problems too. On the other hand, Uber, TaskRabbit and others have found ways to quantify and judge the quality of work pretty well, so maybe there are ways to do this that just haven't been tried.