3 ms·

> At least if people who can't be matched with genuinely productive jobs stay on their couches all day they're not actively sabotaging the productivity of the r

> At least if people who can't be matched with genuinely productive jobs stay on their couches all day they're not actively sabotaging the productivity of the remaining market economy. You're forgetting that these people can still vote. I can imagine a lot of ways that promises of bread and circuses could be used to form them into a dangerous voting bloc.

philipkglass 9y ago
Any more dangerous a voting bloc than if the government gives them the same stuff but makes them perform a worthless pseudo-job to get it? If there are jobs that actually need doing by human labor, and the able-bodied unemployed can do them, having government guarantee jobs to the able-bodied unemployed seems better than guaranteeing income detached from labor. But sending people to perform work that machines plus skilled operators do faster or better, to busy their idled hands, is a cure worse than the disease. There are a lot of cases where introducing untrained human labor into an existing production process has a marginal productivity less than zero. Adding random people to a process that doesn't need more people, or needs people with specific skills, isn't just poor value for effort. It's negative value for effort. Every additional hour that somebody who doesn't know what they're doing tries to "help," they're destroying more. These caveats only apply if people are assigned pointless jobs that they're not even good at. It's destructive to replace high-productivity mechanized agriculture with random unemployed wielding hand tools. It's safe, though still IMO insulting and a bad idea, to make people perform some pointless but harmless pseudo-white-collar job like adding up columns of random numbers with pencil and paper. It actually adds value (though perhaps not a lot) if governments can assign jobs that people can actually perform competently and that machines aren't great at yet, like collecting litter.

philipkglass 9y ago

Any more dangerous a voting bloc than if the government gives them the same stuff but makes them perform a worthless pseudo-job to get it? If there are jobs that actually need doing by human labor, and the able-bodied unemployed can do them, having government guarantee jobs to the able-bodied unemployed seems better than guaranteeing income detached from labor. But sending people to perform work that machines plus skilled operators do faster or better, to busy their idled hands, is a cure worse than the disease. There are a lot of cases where introducing untrained human labor into an existing production process has a marginal productivity less than zero. Adding random people to a process that doesn't need more people, or needs people with specific skills, isn't just poor value for effort. It's negative value for effort. Every additional hour that somebody who doesn't know what they're doing tries to "help," they're destroying more. These caveats only apply if people are assigned pointless jobs that they're not even good at. It's destructive to replace high-productivity mechanized agriculture with random unemployed wielding hand tools. It's safe, though still IMO insulting and a bad idea, to make people perform some pointless but harmless pseudo-white-collar job like adding up columns of random numbers with pencil and paper. It actually adds value (though perhaps not a lot) if governments can assign jobs that people can actually perform competently and that machines aren't great at yet, like collecting litter.