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> With a decent basic income scheme, i.e. the basic needs of the people taken care of, the job market would probably flip: You would have to pay people very wel
by marcamillion 13y ago
> With a decent basic income scheme, i.e. the basic needs of the people taken care of, the job market would probably flip: You would have to pay people very well for doing unpleasant work, and not so well for fulfilling jobs.
This is an interesting premise.
It would probably cause a lot of firms to be started, that compete to do those 'shitty jobs' - that could potentially drive the cost down and be done much better.
This experiment would be VERY interesting indeed.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- gaius 13y agoVery interesting to watch from another country. That is the real reason politics moves so slowly, because the usual results of political experimentation is mass starvation.
- ZenoArrow 13y agoPolitical experimentation usually leading to starvation... Have you got a high number of examples to back that up? I can only think of a handful.
- rmchugh 13y agoNever let facts get in the way of hyperbole.
- gaius 13y agoSure, Cambodia is one, North Korea, China in the 50s, Zimbabwe... Millions dead.
- pgeorgi 13y agoUniversal healthcare, social security and pensions in Germany (late 19th century): millions saved. And it's that big a political experiment that the most powerful country in the world still doesn't dare to replicate it in its entirety.
- powertower 13y agoUSSR. Millions lost.
- pgeorgi 13y agoUSA's New Deal: potentially millions saved from starvation. That's the problem with those comparisons: it's easy to point at the precise body count of radical experiments that went the wrong way, but quite hard to enumerate the lives saved due to those that worked out. Kind of survivorship bias in reverse. I'd guess the establishment and enforcement of sanitary standards (which, at the beginning, was considered quite radical) saved more people than all dictators of the world together managed to kill. But that's as hand-wavy as anything else in this subthread.
- gaius 13y agoYou can't know how it's going to play out or it's not an experiment...
- ZenoArrow 13y agoIn what way were Pol Pot era Cambodia and Mugabe era Zimbabwe political experiments? They were/are dictators! There's nothing remotely radical about dictatorships.
- nmcfarl 13y agoDictators are almost always radical. As a rule they tear down, or kill all of the people who oppose them. Which leads to a radical shifting of institutions in a country, to such a degree that post dictator, the places almost never revert to a state that resembles what they were like pre-dictator. Dictators consistently alter the course of history for the places they rule. --- I understand that you are saying that as we know the results, these things are not radical. I disagree, known results can be very radical.
- gaius 13y agoSure they were. Google "year zero". And Mugabe's experiment is seeing if "war veterans" make good farmers. Before he came to power Zimbabwe was called The Breadbasket Of Africa...