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We also have the problem that people are forced to evaluate what activities would be productive for them in terms of the money paid to them, but it's debatable
by mlthoughts2018 8y ago
We also have the problem that people are forced to evaluate what activities would be productive for them in terms of the money paid to them, but it's debatable whether the aggregated signals of demand in a given economy truly reflect what people would believe are "important" or "needed" or "valuable" activities (using scare quotes specifically because obviously the whole debate revolves around how to determine the meaning of these types of terms).
My mom is an example. She works a highly menial and thankless job at a rural county courthouse in the Midwest, where she is paid an extremely small salary, given very few benefits, very little vacation time, and has no prospect for retirement, regular raises, career growth, etc. The courthouse could operate with probably 25% of the current staff, but they keep headcount artificially high because state funding and other programs depend on how many employees they have.
Largely, my mom is paid money to endure slight sexual harassment from small town attorneys and judges, and to do a tiny workload of clerical work. And the amount of money is barely enough for basic living in her area, even after accounting for the lower cost of living there.
It seems bang obvious that her employment is inefficient. The same exact thing happens for thousands of people in her area, whether in government, school jobs, private companies. There's just a ton of excessively meaningless work that companies or employers have ulterior reasons to sponsor with a paycheck even fully knowing that the labor itself is not productive or necessary at all.
I think if my mom knew she had a reasonable guaranteed basic income, she would volunteer her time at the local hospital, deliver meals to sick people, do more productive labor around her own home or through child care provided to my siblings and their children, perhaps create craft works to sell online, etc.
The net result could easily be that her overall labor productivity in the big picture sense would go way, way up after she is free to quit the essentially pure loss menial job and focus on things where she knows she can add actual, obvious value for people.
Unfortunately, I think most developed nations suffer this problem. Lots of jobs exist because of weird misaligned incentives on the part of the employer, who could truly not care less about the actual labor productivity of a bunch of employees and has them on the payroll for totally separate reasons.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- repolfx 8y agoMaybe your mom would, I'm sure she's a lovely woman. But I know from hard experience that a lot of people wouldn't. My ex lost her job at some point and was looking for a year for a new one. She became terribly depressed, just staying in bed and crying all day. I'd talk her out of it, she'd be OK for a while, and then get depressed again because she felt "useless" and "like a loser". I encouraged her, again and again, to go out and get a basic job even if it was menial, like waiting tables, or to volunteer for something, or to learn new skills, so at least she'd have something to do. But she refused to even look for jobs that weren't fancy middle class office jobs, volunteering was out of the question and her attempts at learning new skills were half-hearted at best. Jobs aren't just a source of money. They're a source of validation, every day. Take away the job and people don't magically become perfect citizens who spend all their time doing generic good. They can become lethargic and depressed. As, in fact, the article articulates w.r.t. the French system.
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoI've had long-term unemployment as well (over 18 months) and I think that is an entirely different phenomenon that's not connected to what people would do if they had some financial security of a basic income. Long term unemployment creates a type of inaction/depression for some people (this happened to me, and it sounds exactly like what happened to your ex partner). Because so much of my identity was bound up in what job I had, what career goals, how much money, etc., it made the feeling of being unemployed severely distressing. I really wanted to do things like volunteering, or even basic self-care like exercising, but I could not due to the distress of unemployment and the feeling like I absolutely had to find an "acceptably good" job (for social status) and neurotically do nothing but dedicate all my efforts towards that. If the status of having a basic income is a positive thing, like framing it as an opportunity to pitch in with civic duty and give back, I think it would satisfy the status and "sense of accomplishment" requirements for a lot of people. But either way, the extremely distressing feeling of long-term unemployment is really not comparable. I would say, for example, that what you observed from your ex partner does not give you any capability of predicting what your ex partner would have done with basic income during that unemployment period. The situations are just too drastically different.
- 8y ago
- marcosdumay 8y ago> I think if my mom knew she had a reasonable guaranteed basic income, she would volunteer her time at the local hospital, deliver meals to sick people... If everybody had a reasonable guaranteed basic income those people would be able to pay her for her services, so it wouldn't need to be voluntary.