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There are some people who don't want to go back to work even when their jobs are returning. There might legit safety concerns in places like meat packing plants

There are some people who don't want to go back to work even when their jobs are returning. There might legit safety concerns in places like meat packing plants, but they can be addresses by those places spending the money on PPE and small modifications the plants. Musk has done it with his own companies. Politicians like Ocasio-Cortez actively told people they shouldn't go back to work even as places open back up. This is problematic because if enough people believe that, there is a risk of shortages for things like food. We over produce quite a bit in America, farms are heavily subsidized, and it's mostly school/restaurant food chain products that are being dumped right now (and many Americans are realizing for the first time we get totally different qualities of products than restaurants do), so it's not affecting us too badly yet. Hopefully it won't, but there needs to be a balance between any proposal for UBI or continued unemployment and restarting production systems that produce domestic goods we need to survive.

jakogut 6y ago
> and many Americans are realizing for the first time we get totally different qualities of products than restaurants do This is interesting, can you clarify what you mean?
hogFeast 6y ago
The only way that UBI can work is if you have a very strong labour market with high levels of flexibility. This is one of the tricky things about economic policy. If you are proposing UBI, you are likely to be the worst person possible to implement it. All the proponents see are upsides without the deep understanding of the downsides. A country which manages this well is Denmark. They have high levels of union membership, they have a true contributory unemployment insurance scheme that functions like UBI but they are also very savvy about capitalism/markets, and have one of the most flexible labour markets in the world (one of the few places on par with the US, maybe even ahead of). They understand that capitalism is the way you pay for all this stuff, it is the solution, not the problem. Very few political systems can make this leap. The same applies to the discussion around restarting. Lots of countries went hard on the lockdown rhetoric...and now, it is pretty hard to roll back. It is very concerning though. I don't think this is going to be some huge decade long disaster, things will get better. But there is a real possibility that a lot of supply gets destroyed in the meantime as the middle-class cocoons themselves at home out of fear.

jakogut 6y ago

> and many Americans are realizing for the first time we get totally different qualities of products than restaurants do This is interesting, can you clarify what you mean?

hogFeast 6y ago

The only way that UBI can work is if you have a very strong labour market with high levels of flexibility. This is one of the tricky things about economic policy. If you are proposing UBI, you are likely to be the worst person possible to implement it. All the proponents see are upsides without the deep understanding of the downsides. A country which manages this well is Denmark. They have high levels of union membership, they have a true contributory unemployment insurance scheme that functions like UBI but they are also very savvy about capitalism/markets, and have one of the most flexible labour markets in the world (one of the few places on par with the US, maybe even ahead of). They understand that capitalism is the way you pay for all this stuff, it is the solution, not the problem. Very few political systems can make this leap. The same applies to the discussion around restarting. Lots of countries went hard on the lockdown rhetoric...and now, it is pretty hard to roll back. It is very concerning though. I don't think this is going to be some huge decade long disaster, things will get better. But there is a real possibility that a lot of supply gets destroyed in the meantime as the middle-class cocoons themselves at home out of fear.