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> This is the reason that we need a wage for displaced workers. People who will probably never work again, due to lack of education or ambition. Are you sure i

> This is the reason that we need a wage for displaced workers. People who will probably never work again, due to lack of education or ambition. Are you sure it's a good idea to systematically reward a lack of ambition? > It's my belief that as a result of our efforts, our drive to untangle complexity, that there will likely be 50% unemployment in the US by the end of the next decade. Let's design for that. You proposed design will become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Putting people on a permanent wage because they will "probably never work again" will signal to those people that society considers them worthless. You will never produce anything of sufficient value for anyone to consider it worthwhile to feed you for the effort.

DuncanIdaho 15y ago
> Are you sure it's a good idea to systematically reward a lack of ambition? > You proposed design will become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Putting people on a permanent wage because they will "probably never work again" will signal to those people that society considers them worthless. You will never produce anything of sufficient value for anyone to consider it worthwhile to feed you for the effort. You provide question and the answer. The idea of universal income (which this proposed wage is a limited application of) is that you give everyone a bare minimum stipend, while encouraging people to go out and earn more if they want more. It wouldn't be event that expensive, considering what a modern social state already spends on its citizenry. In a sense, modern government is partially already a mechanism of universal income (many government employees are unfit for being productive in private sector).
- mseebach 15y ago
  So here's where I'm coming from: Putting food on the table as a result of your work is satisfying and a source of pride. Not being able to do it is shameful. This is a fundamental dynamic. While it's good that there's a safety net so slip-ups and bad luck won't put you in the street and kill your children, institutionalising that dynamic (effectively removing it) will have catastrophic effects on the values of society. These concerns are not crack-pot libertarian wet dreams, they were raised even by social democrats when the Nordic social democratic welfare states were designed. Britain has talked about anti-social behaviour and broken society for years (it's not just something David Cameron invented with his good-on-paper/WTF-IRL-"Big Society") - don't have that kind of language for it in Denmark, but the same dynamics are present.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    I guess to me that's not an interesting dynamic for a society that's advanced past subsistence farming. In subsistence farming, yes, you work to feed yourself. If you have modern 21st-century farming technology though, producing enough food to feed everyone takes only a few percent of GDP, not 100% of everyone's time. Why not just give it to everyone, since its cost is basically noise on modern economic scales anyway? Then find some more advanced goals for people to work at. If they really, truly, want nothing but a bare subsistence existence, and nothing else that modern society has to offer, then fine, let them sit around eating 2000 calories/day for free; maybe in the future robots will do all the work anyway, and lazy humans can just live off the munificence of their robot benefactors (we're halfway there). But an "advanced" society in 2011 where the reason people work is because they'll starve otherwise, despite the utter un-scarcity of food, now that seems like a pretty shameful dynamic. I'd be more interested in asking, rather than setting up artificial scarcity so that people have to work for the old scarce things (e.g. food) even though they aren't scarce anymore (there's only a distribution problem, not a scarcity problem), whether we can have a society where people work for something else. Maybe the answer's no, but to me that'd be a pretty sad answer.
    - mseebach 15y ago
      Putting food on the table is a metaphor that goes beyond food. Here are some statistics on Americans counted as poor: http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/09/understanding-poverty-in-the-united-states-surprising-facts-about-americas-poor http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/09/understandi... We have moved beyond subsistence farming and free food - "food on the table" means a lot more, including many scarce goods.
      - DuncanIdaho 15y ago
        Indeed, we should make a point of not wiping anybody's fanny. What I had in mind is a type of existence where one has bare minimum provided (shelter, food, clothing, access to information), but that also as a feature provides a social stigma. This institution should be viewed by society as a temporary stop or a final refuge a safety net if you will. You want tobacco? Go and work for it. You want booze? Go and work for it. You want PS3? Go and work for it.
- david927 15y ago
  I think this is one of the most important ideas being explored right now and could not only save families but also become a giant incubator for new research. (It may also require moving to a new form of government, such as a Direct Democracy, to implement.) It's an idea whose time has come.
  - mseebach 15y ago
    The proportion of Danish citizens on some kind of transfer income: 60% (includes student stipends all the way to pensions) The value of new research undertaken by people on transfer income: very small, if any at all. The reason the idea requiring direct democracy is that it involves two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
    - _delirium 15y ago
      The second part doesn't seem correct; a huge amount of new development in Denmark is done by people on transfer income. For example, a number of research results that later were commercialized have come out of Masters theses (there's even a whole arrangement where you can do a thesis in collaboration with a company), and a number of companies were funded initially by some kind of government benefits, sometimes officially and sometimes unofficially (since you lose benefits once you're officially "working for a startup"). Even when the money doesn't go directly to the startup, it provides a backstop so people feel more free to take risks starting a company. I guess it'd be interesting to read a study quantifying it, but I'd be surprised if it were really true that not much research comes out of people on transfer incomes, especially if you include the people who used transfer incomes to bootstrap the early stages of a startup.
      - mseebach 15y ago
        So, student subsidies are the odd one out here, because they're not money you're given to survive, they're given in exchange for a specific activity. They do, however, count as transfer income, and the source I have for 60% didn't break it down. Yes, unemployment benefits can provide a backstop that enables entrepreneurship, but Denmark has more generous benefits than most other countries, yet the levels of entrepreneurship don't follow. Any other direct subsidy towards entrepreneurship (although often misguided) aren't transfer income in the sense being suggested by the GP. The people who can just sit around and come up with exciting new research or who can become successful entrepreneurs are generally also the kind of people who can get a job if they want or need one.
marquis 15y ago
>Are you sure it's a good idea to systematically reward a lack of ambition? Why the assumption that if you pay someone a living wage when their services are no longer needed, they won't continue to seek meaningful work, re-educate themselves or provide valuable services to the community? I come from a working class family, all of whom have the option to not work yet choose to do one or all three of the above out of a basic need to participate in their community and be valued.
- mseebach 15y ago
  I was quoting the GP: People who will probably never work again, due to lack of education or ambition. There exist plenty of large areas dominated by people who are, let's call it "empowered to provide meaningful services to the community". Yet, these areas are more often examples of urban decay than they are of thriving communities.
  - marquis 15y ago
    Really? Have you ever been involved with a school or pre-school for example? All my friends who are parents give hours a week to their children's upbringing in a communal manner, as just one example. I wonder if we aren't being brainwashed by a media that chooses to label us as a lazy species who are only good for watching television - because in the wider world as I've seen it this isn't the case at all.
    - CWuestefeld 15y ago
      Our instincts for fairness and obligations in the social contract evolved when we were organized into tribes. Thus, when we see members of our own tribe (i.e., those whose children are educated with our own) we instinctively feel drawn to contribute to their well-being. The same thing doesn't work for people outside our tribe. Evolutionarily speaking, these were rivals for our food or mates or whatever. So we don't feel the same compulsion to help outsiders. Here's a counter-example for you: I know several people (and I'm guessing that most of us do) that have exaggerated disability claims, so they're now "retired" and living off social security, when their disability isn't great enough to, e.g., run the machinery to dig a new septic tank. How many people do not try to minimize their tax burden? Isn't that another example demonstrating that people don't naturally contribute to the well-being of those outside their tribes?
politician 15y ago
Don't get me wrong -- I'm familiar with the idea that minimum wage laws and student loan programs increase the cost of goods and tuition as the various institutions realize that there is more money available and adjust their prices accordingly. No, I am not advocating a cash wage, what is needed is a wage that enables the holder to claim a fixed list of goods (e.g. food stamps allow the holder to buy food, not XBOX games). Likewise, I'm sure that the statistics show that giving money to the homeless to buy food is unlikely to produce positive outcomes, but giving them food or shelter directly is a more responsible option. I believe that a broad application of this same idea -- to provide a wage for displaced workers in the form of rights to claim an enumerated set of goods rather than indirectly via a cash stipend preserves the incentive structures present in the other areas of our economy while taking care of those left behind yet not undermining ourselves in the process. A final thought -- consider that an educated, well-fed population with a low infant mortality rate has fewer children. Therefore, a morally acceptable form of population control is available to us: feed and educate the populace. If we can do that, then we should be able to sustain 50% unemployment.

DuncanIdaho 15y ago

> Are you sure it's a good idea to systematically reward a lack of ambition? > You proposed design will become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Putting people on a permanent wage because they will "probably never work again" will signal to those people that society considers them worthless. You will never produce anything of sufficient value for anyone to consider it worthwhile to feed you for the effort. You provide question and the answer. The idea of universal income (which this proposed wage is a limited application of) is that you give everyone a bare minimum stipend, while encouraging people to go out and earn more if they want more. It wouldn't be event that expensive, considering what a modern social state already spends on its citizenry. In a sense, modern government is partially already a mechanism of universal income (many government employees are unfit for being productive in private sector).

mseebach 15y ago
So here's where I'm coming from: Putting food on the table as a result of your work is satisfying and a source of pride. Not being able to do it is shameful. This is a fundamental dynamic. While it's good that there's a safety net so slip-ups and bad luck won't put you in the street and kill your children, institutionalising that dynamic (effectively removing it) will have catastrophic effects on the values of society. These concerns are not crack-pot libertarian wet dreams, they were raised even by social democrats when the Nordic social democratic welfare states were designed. Britain has talked about anti-social behaviour and broken society for years (it's not just something David Cameron invented with his good-on-paper/WTF-IRL-"Big Society") - don't have that kind of language for it in Denmark, but the same dynamics are present.
- _delirium 15y ago
  I guess to me that's not an interesting dynamic for a society that's advanced past subsistence farming. In subsistence farming, yes, you work to feed yourself. If you have modern 21st-century farming technology though, producing enough food to feed everyone takes only a few percent of GDP, not 100% of everyone's time. Why not just give it to everyone, since its cost is basically noise on modern economic scales anyway? Then find some more advanced goals for people to work at. If they really, truly, want nothing but a bare subsistence existence, and nothing else that modern society has to offer, then fine, let them sit around eating 2000 calories/day for free; maybe in the future robots will do all the work anyway, and lazy humans can just live off the munificence of their robot benefactors (we're halfway there). But an "advanced" society in 2011 where the reason people work is because they'll starve otherwise, despite the utter un-scarcity of food, now that seems like a pretty shameful dynamic. I'd be more interested in asking, rather than setting up artificial scarcity so that people have to work for the old scarce things (e.g. food) even though they aren't scarce anymore (there's only a distribution problem, not a scarcity problem), whether we can have a society where people work for something else. Maybe the answer's no, but to me that'd be a pretty sad answer.
  - mseebach 15y ago
    Putting food on the table is a metaphor that goes beyond food. Here are some statistics on Americans counted as poor: http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/09/understanding-poverty-in-the-united-states-surprising-facts-about-americas-poor http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/09/understandi... We have moved beyond subsistence farming and free food - "food on the table" means a lot more, including many scarce goods.
    - DuncanIdaho 15y ago
      Indeed, we should make a point of not wiping anybody's fanny. What I had in mind is a type of existence where one has bare minimum provided (shelter, food, clothing, access to information), but that also as a feature provides a social stigma. This institution should be viewed by society as a temporary stop or a final refuge a safety net if you will. You want tobacco? Go and work for it. You want booze? Go and work for it. You want PS3? Go and work for it.
david927 15y ago
I think this is one of the most important ideas being explored right now and could not only save families but also become a giant incubator for new research. (It may also require moving to a new form of government, such as a Direct Democracy, to implement.) It's an idea whose time has come.
- mseebach 15y ago
  The proportion of Danish citizens on some kind of transfer income: 60% (includes student stipends all the way to pensions) The value of new research undertaken by people on transfer income: very small, if any at all. The reason the idea requiring direct democracy is that it involves two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    The second part doesn't seem correct; a huge amount of new development in Denmark is done by people on transfer income. For example, a number of research results that later were commercialized have come out of Masters theses (there's even a whole arrangement where you can do a thesis in collaboration with a company), and a number of companies were funded initially by some kind of government benefits, sometimes officially and sometimes unofficially (since you lose benefits once you're officially "working for a startup"). Even when the money doesn't go directly to the startup, it provides a backstop so people feel more free to take risks starting a company. I guess it'd be interesting to read a study quantifying it, but I'd be surprised if it were really true that not much research comes out of people on transfer incomes, especially if you include the people who used transfer incomes to bootstrap the early stages of a startup.
    - mseebach 15y ago
      So, student subsidies are the odd one out here, because they're not money you're given to survive, they're given in exchange for a specific activity. They do, however, count as transfer income, and the source I have for 60% didn't break it down. Yes, unemployment benefits can provide a backstop that enables entrepreneurship, but Denmark has more generous benefits than most other countries, yet the levels of entrepreneurship don't follow. Any other direct subsidy towards entrepreneurship (although often misguided) aren't transfer income in the sense being suggested by the GP. The people who can just sit around and come up with exciting new research or who can become successful entrepreneurs are generally also the kind of people who can get a job if they want or need one.

marquis 15y ago

>Are you sure it's a good idea to systematically reward a lack of ambition? Why the assumption that if you pay someone a living wage when their services are no longer needed, they won't continue to seek meaningful work, re-educate themselves or provide valuable services to the community? I come from a working class family, all of whom have the option to not work yet choose to do one or all three of the above out of a basic need to participate in their community and be valued.

mseebach 15y ago
I was quoting the GP: People who will probably never work again, due to lack of education or ambition. There exist plenty of large areas dominated by people who are, let's call it "empowered to provide meaningful services to the community". Yet, these areas are more often examples of urban decay than they are of thriving communities.
- marquis 15y ago
  Really? Have you ever been involved with a school or pre-school for example? All my friends who are parents give hours a week to their children's upbringing in a communal manner, as just one example. I wonder if we aren't being brainwashed by a media that chooses to label us as a lazy species who are only good for watching television - because in the wider world as I've seen it this isn't the case at all.
  - CWuestefeld 15y ago
    Our instincts for fairness and obligations in the social contract evolved when we were organized into tribes. Thus, when we see members of our own tribe (i.e., those whose children are educated with our own) we instinctively feel drawn to contribute to their well-being. The same thing doesn't work for people outside our tribe. Evolutionarily speaking, these were rivals for our food or mates or whatever. So we don't feel the same compulsion to help outsiders. Here's a counter-example for you: I know several people (and I'm guessing that most of us do) that have exaggerated disability claims, so they're now "retired" and living off social security, when their disability isn't great enough to, e.g., run the machinery to dig a new septic tank. How many people do not try to minimize their tax burden? Isn't that another example demonstrating that people don't naturally contribute to the well-being of those outside their tribes?

politician 15y ago

Don't get me wrong -- I'm familiar with the idea that minimum wage laws and student loan programs increase the cost of goods and tuition as the various institutions realize that there is more money available and adjust their prices accordingly. No, I am not advocating a cash wage, what is needed is a wage that enables the holder to claim a fixed list of goods (e.g. food stamps allow the holder to buy food, not XBOX games). Likewise, I'm sure that the statistics show that giving money to the homeless to buy food is unlikely to produce positive outcomes, but giving them food or shelter directly is a more responsible option. I believe that a broad application of this same idea -- to provide a wage for displaced workers in the form of rights to claim an enumerated set of goods rather than indirectly via a cash stipend preserves the incentive structures present in the other areas of our economy while taking care of those left behind yet not undermining ourselves in the process. A final thought -- consider that an educated, well-fed population with a low infant mortality rate has fewer children. Therefore, a morally acceptable form of population control is available to us: feed and educate the populace. If we can do that, then we should be able to sustain 50% unemployment.