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Keynes said that the government paying people to dig holes and fill them up was sufficient to escape a liquidity trap. He didn't actually advocate nonproductive
by crdoconnor 8y ago
Keynes said that the government paying people to dig holes and fill them up was sufficient to escape a liquidity trap. He didn't actually advocate nonproductive work.
- ams6110 8y agoThere's tons of actual productive work that could be done though. Cleaning trash from streets and parks, filling potholes, fixing sidewalks, pulling weeds, painting over graffiti. These things would would make everyone's days a little nicer.
- monocasa 8y agoOr even stuff that has real meaning. Rebuilding our crumbling highway system, laying fiber to the home for a next gen telecoms infrastructure. Just going back to school and getting information job skills. Child care. The list goes on and on without resorting to telephone handset cleaners.
- vkou 8y agoFor some reason, even when people acknowledge that there is an endless amount of busywork work that could be done, the suggestions are always meaningless fluff. Cleaning up the parks? Yeah, that's better then sitting around on your ass, watching Netflix for 8 hours, but there's so much more that people could do... Which would, of course, compete with private industry.
- CountSessine 8y agoCleaning trash from streets and parks, filling potholes, fixing sidewalks, pulling weeds, painting over graffiti. These things would would make everyone's days a little nicer. Or even stuff that has real meaning Why do you think that maintaining safe and beautiful cities has no real meaning? Someone needs to do it. Is this just elitism?
- monocasa 8y agoKind of the opposite. The very idea of paying people to pull weeds on sidewalks screams of elitism when my state doesn't even have full day kindergarten, and some of the worst roads in the country (CO).
- crdoconnor 8y agoOh I agree. High unemployment and a lot of bullshit jobs doesn't mean that we've run out of things to do. It just means that employment is being deliberately repressed and the economic system has been morphed into dysfunctional beast that serves a tiny number of privileged people.
- dsego 8y agoThis exists, it's called public works programmes.
- digi_owl 8y agohttps://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_General_Theory_of_Employment,_Interest_and_Money https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_General_Theory_of_Employme... "If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it private enterprise on well tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is."
- crdoconnor 8y agoaaand the very next sentence... "It would indeed be better to build houses and the like" It also follows on from a criticism of the economic utility of digging up gold and then burying it in the ground, which is an economic analog of digging holes and filling them in. It won't be the first or the last time that quote gets taken out of context. Rich, white men with gold in the ground prefer your misinterpretation.
- digi_owl 8y agoI just copied wholesale what the wiki had. Nothing more, nothing less.