4 ms·

Basic Job isn't a terrible idea mind you, it's just much more complex and fragile. It would require a lot of political will to constantly prune jobs that do mo

Basic Job isn't a terrible idea mind you, it's just much more complex and fragile. It would require a lot of political will to constantly prune jobs that do more harm than good, jobs that are degrading and meaningless (think of painting park grass with green paint), have enough jobs so everyone technically have one, and USSR had this Basic Job thing, everybody had a job but nothing got done because you couldn't get fired from one and not get an equal one. So best-performing workers adopted habits of worse-performing ones. Who watches the workers? Does she earn the same $7.25? Another problem is corruption. Easier and prettier Basic Jobs would be lucrative, everybody wanting to have them, and you will have bribes and kickbacks for landing on one. If unwilling to participate in corruption, you will only have a choice of worst ones. Everything can be fixed but it's very hard in total.

cheald 13y ago
It's worth reinforcing the point that a guaranteed job requires effectively zero economic output in order to receive a paycheck. If you are guaranteed a job, and we accept that people seek to maximize their income per unit of work done, then the maximization of that function is to do as little work as possible without losing the job. If you are guaranteed a job, then it effectively means that you can't be economically penalized for doing no work, so the most efficient personal approach is to just collect your paycheck and do no work. The threat of economic penalty for failing to work is an important incentive to actually contribute to economic output. I'm not sure why a basic job would be any better than a basic income since it would encourage people to collect income for no work performed, except that it would do so at risk and expense to the employer (and at damage to the employer's brand and reputation) rather than at expense to the tax paying populace as a whole.
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  I don't understand this. Why can't you be guaranteed a job, but you don't get paid if you don't do it? I don't see how paying people who refuse to work is a necessary part of a Basic Job Guarantee. Also, the purpose of this is for the unemployed to clean up and improve public parks, repair potholes and the like. Private employers are under no obligation to hire anyone.
  - guard-of-terra 13y ago
    A lot of unemployed are mentally ill, psychologically unstable or disabled people. How much oversight will you need to get any meaningful output from them? Yeah, they come and try to be useful, but they don't accomplish anything, you fire them, they either go to court or apply to another job they can't do. BIG solves this but Basic Job doesn't in the slightest.
    - yummyfajitas 13y ago
      The mentally ill and disabled are simply a different problem. Handing $1200/month in free money to a schizophrenic is not a solution either.
      - guard-of-terra 13y ago
        The whole idea is to decrease a number of "different problems" as much as possible. I don't know if it would help schizophrenics, but why not? At least it can get one off street by providing means to pay rent (which can be administred by his/her legal guardian).
notahacker 13y ago
An unmotivated, largely unsupervised park fence painter might not achieve much in the way of output for their $7.25 per hour, but importantly they aren't being paid $7.25 per hour to enjoy their chosen form of leisure. Which means that when someone in the private sector wants to pay them $8.50 per hour to work hard creating $10 per hour worth of value, they might actually consider saying yes. Any value the "basic jobs" themselves add to society is just a bonus. I don't see why the administration of "Basic Jobs" would be any more open to corruption than any other bureaucratic role, many of which administer things far more significant than next week's work assignment to people earning far more than $7.25 per hour. It doesn't seem unsurpassably difficult to design a set of rules to ensure that "basic jobs" are rotated and not too cushy or unpleasant; I'd actually see that as an easier task than calculating a level of "basic income" that doesn't grotesquely distort one or more of (i)low-end labour supply (ii)budget balance (iii)price inflation and (iv)rental yields on substandard property
- guard-of-terra 13y ago
  There are two kinds of people: those who escape work or are incapable for it, and those who work fairly (but may still be poor). Former are going to build a lot of bad fences, for $7.25, but business only want latter ones. And if you have Basic Jobs, they would indeed be working for $8.50 in poverty, but if you have Basic Income, those would be working for an equivalent of $7.25 from BI and everything their fence-needing employer can conjure on top of that, which will hopefully give them something around $15/hour, which might let them get out of poverty actually. Low-end labour supply is poor people. Low-end labour supply is people you pay not enough money for them to escape poverty. Any effective fight with poverty would involve disrupting the "low-end labour supply" as we know it today.

cheald 13y ago

It's worth reinforcing the point that a guaranteed job requires effectively zero economic output in order to receive a paycheck. If you are guaranteed a job, and we accept that people seek to maximize their income per unit of work done, then the maximization of that function is to do as little work as possible without losing the job. If you are guaranteed a job, then it effectively means that you can't be economically penalized for doing no work, so the most efficient personal approach is to just collect your paycheck and do no work. The threat of economic penalty for failing to work is an important incentive to actually contribute to economic output. I'm not sure why a basic job would be any better than a basic income since it would encourage people to collect income for no work performed, except that it would do so at risk and expense to the employer (and at damage to the employer's brand and reputation) rather than at expense to the tax paying populace as a whole.

yummyfajitas 13y ago
I don't understand this. Why can't you be guaranteed a job, but you don't get paid if you don't do it? I don't see how paying people who refuse to work is a necessary part of a Basic Job Guarantee. Also, the purpose of this is for the unemployed to clean up and improve public parks, repair potholes and the like. Private employers are under no obligation to hire anyone.
- guard-of-terra 13y ago
  A lot of unemployed are mentally ill, psychologically unstable or disabled people. How much oversight will you need to get any meaningful output from them? Yeah, they come and try to be useful, but they don't accomplish anything, you fire them, they either go to court or apply to another job they can't do. BIG solves this but Basic Job doesn't in the slightest.
  - yummyfajitas 13y ago
    The mentally ill and disabled are simply a different problem. Handing $1200/month in free money to a schizophrenic is not a solution either.
    - guard-of-terra 13y ago
      The whole idea is to decrease a number of "different problems" as much as possible. I don't know if it would help schizophrenics, but why not? At least it can get one off street by providing means to pay rent (which can be administred by his/her legal guardian).

notahacker 13y ago

An unmotivated, largely unsupervised park fence painter might not achieve much in the way of output for their $7.25 per hour, but importantly they aren't being paid $7.25 per hour to enjoy their chosen form of leisure. Which means that when someone in the private sector wants to pay them $8.50 per hour to work hard creating $10 per hour worth of value, they might actually consider saying yes. Any value the "basic jobs" themselves add to society is just a bonus. I don't see why the administration of "Basic Jobs" would be any more open to corruption than any other bureaucratic role, many of which administer things far more significant than next week's work assignment to people earning far more than $7.25 per hour. It doesn't seem unsurpassably difficult to design a set of rules to ensure that "basic jobs" are rotated and not too cushy or unpleasant; I'd actually see that as an easier task than calculating a level of "basic income" that doesn't grotesquely distort one or more of (i)low-end labour supply (ii)budget balance (iii)price inflation and (iv)rental yields on substandard property

guard-of-terra 13y ago
There are two kinds of people: those who escape work or are incapable for it, and those who work fairly (but may still be poor). Former are going to build a lot of bad fences, for $7.25, but business only want latter ones. And if you have Basic Jobs, they would indeed be working for $8.50 in poverty, but if you have Basic Income, those would be working for an equivalent of $7.25 from BI and everything their fence-needing employer can conjure on top of that, which will hopefully give them something around $15/hour, which might let them get out of poverty actually. Low-end labour supply is poor people. Low-end labour supply is people you pay not enough money for them to escape poverty. Any effective fight with poverty would involve disrupting the "low-end labour supply" as we know it today.