18 ms·

The indignity of no work

133 points by benfreu 13y ago

rwmj 13y ago
A similar idea: When good ideas (like the Protestant Work Ethic) turn bad: http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2014/02/when-good-ideas-turn-bad.html http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...
mattdw 13y ago
> A world in which a healthy adult has the reasonable expectation of earning a decent living while working full-time at a market wage is absolutely a world in which the dignity of work is a useful social value to cultivate. In a world in which that is not a reasonable expectation, the dignity of work can be a harmful concept. Interesting times ahead. It's going to be painful getting there, if we get there at all, but the idea of a Universal Basic Income seems to be getting more popular. (It wasn't so long ago it was pretty much pure sci-fi.) Particularly I guess as it begins to look like modern capitalism may not actually be good at providing jobs for everyone who needs one. Potentially UBIs could be very good for the world, freeing people to work on things they personally desire and value, and in some ways redistributing the 'means of production' back to the little guy.
- dantheman 13y ago
  The idea of a basic income is still sci-fi. There just isn't that much money. Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean no one will ever wash dishes at a restaurant, no one will pick up trash, no one will spend time wiring your house for internet, or fix your computer, or do a large swath of jobs. The argument that with UBI people will still do that only for more money is crazy, since the taxes would have to be so high to support UBI that the costs would dwarf what people could afford. As these services collapse so to will higher paying ones; lets see a doctor get up early to wash the floors of her practice since she can't afford to hire a cleaning staff and still charge patients a reasonable rate.
  - argonaut 13y ago
    No. It does not mean no one will ever work as a dishwasher/etc. It just means that the market rate for dishwashers/etc. will be higher. This would be due to the supply curve for labor shifting. Certainly, some businesses will not be able to hire as many (or any) dishwashers/etc, but those that they do hire will have to be paid more. But that is a natural extension of decreasing the supply of labor. The higher price that businesses will pay for labor will also push them to invest in capital (automation).
    - Someone 13y ago
      You still have to find the money to pay that universal basic income. IIRC, the idea is to get that money by taxing capital and making it cheaper to hire people. As you indicate, getting it by taxing labor leads businesses to automate away labor, making it even harder to get that money from taxes on labor. Think of it: that $5 an hour job currently costs a company $10 an hour or so. Without taxes on labor, they could pay $7 for a win-win situation. Even paying $5 would still be win-win, as the employee would have his basic income plus the $5 an hour.
      - argonaut 13y ago
        Have you considered taxing both capital AND labor?
    - thelogos 13y ago
      But it's getting to the point where dishwashing might not even be available as a job. Right now, that's not the case yet. But it's not hard to imagine a future where it is. Many menial jobs are getting automated and it's just getting worse and worse. Soon, we will have to do something about it. These protests and revolutions are spreading like the plague. And social unrest is bad for everyone, including business. One day, it will become a necessity. Just look at countries like Japan and Korea. Too many over-qualified people and not enough jobs. People are hired to do menial task like tearing tickets out of machines and handing it to people in a car. Suicide in these countries are skyrocketing because of hyper-competition. In the rest of the world, these people don't commit suicide, they just gather into a big crowd and start protesting, violently. There is definitely enough money to make work. The goverment just has to be smarter about allocating its budget.
- Jach 13y ago
  Here's a simple if perhaps naive question. Suppose UBI is $x/yr. What's going to stop every apartment complex owner and every rental landlord from raising the cost of living on that property by $x/yr/tenant? Will the government start fixing prices? (I imagine that slightly more realistically all owners of physical resources, not just land owners, would raise prices as much as they can while still maintaining roughly the same profit percentage in order to compete with other owners to capture the new income, and so no single group of actors is likely to capture it all with one type of product.)
  - scotty79 13y ago
    That's the only thing I can see that can go wrong with basic income. I'd counter that with progressive property tax. So that if you own 5 accomodations, of which each can house a family, you might be better off with selling the sixth one than holding it, paying exorbitant tax and risking it might stay empty for too long. I would pump money earned from this tax back into basic income. Such tax might be beneficial even now in some places. In Japan and Italy so many properties were bought out by people intending to profit from the rent that price of accomodation rose to the point that most young people can't afford to live alone and stay with parents instead.
  - mattdw 13y ago
    An alternative to fixing prices would be just to compete. The government could start building its own housing, recouping the costs straight back from UBI rents, and simultaneously holding privately-owned market prices to a more reasonable level.
    - Jach 13y ago
      Would this work for utility companies too? How about mega food corps (http://www.miaatipx.com/corporations1.jpg http://www.miaatipx.com/corporations1.jpg as an example), who probably have very good statistics about what percentage of the population in an area regularly buys (and "can't live without") their products, and thus figure out the optimal price increases for each area? Gas? Cars? And what about the partners of all these other companies whose customers are other businesses not individuals, but are going to start charging more and expecting the customer business to pass it along to their individual customer -- refineries, mines, mills, graineries, farms, storage warehouses... (As I mentioned before, everyone who has anything to sell will want as big a piece of this new income that they can get and will raise prices to try and find out how much they can capture without starting to make less profit than before. Over infinite time and with everyone having perfect information of the market, I think $x/yr would become the new $0/yr.) Is it fair for me to think that universal basic income, if it has any chance of achieving its stated goals, is insufficient by itself at least when expressed as "give every living adult $x/yr" and nothing else? Now if the only effect of UBI is making a new $0 baseline and nothing else being changed on average, then it can't hurt that much by itself, so it may be worth trying in a limited area (such as a smaller country like the mentioned Switzerland) just to get an experimental result on record before trying it out on an economy the size of the US. But when you have to do all this other stuff to make UBI achieve its goals, like have the government build housing (it already does and has done that... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green), it makes me wonder why even bother with UBI itself and instead just get busy with the other things.
- djrobstep 13y ago
  Here is an interesting basic income calculator: http://mattbruenig.com/basicincomecalculator/ http://mattbruenig.com/basicincomecalculator/ Happily, it suggests lots of proverty reduction is achievable with a very manageable percentage of GDP.
  - lazyjones 13y ago
    That's far too simplistic and cannot be taken seriously. One of the first serious issues you'd have to consider is migration from other countries to your model country with basic income. There's billions of people out there who'd happily live on basic income in some first world country and I'd absolutely encourage them to do so, given what the first world's riches are built on (but I digress...).
- yourapostasy 13y ago
  We do not yet have the technological foundation to feasibly implement a Banks'ian Culture-type "hard" UBI, and we barely have the beginning glimmers for even "soft" UBI like what many are discussing today. We lack energy production and management, AI, and nanotech for even rudimentary hard UBI, and even soft UBI is infeasible due to knock-on effects whose management is poorly-understood. Example: we already have a diabetes epidemic with low socioeconomic groups, and the obesogenic environment is not well studied enough to know if giving those groups more access to free time will improve outcomes. Will those groups on average use a soft UBI to improve their overall health, or will they choose poorly and the benefits of UBI blowback into exploding healthcare costs? No one really knows yet. I would like to believe that soft UBI would lead to better health outcomes, but that might simply be my own socioeconomic background speaking. The few soft UBI trials commonly found in citations were too short-lived to tell whether we were simply observing a Hawthorne Effect at work or if the outcomes were sustainable.
  - loup-vaillant 13y ago
    France's welfare system is already close to ABI. You have to fight bureaucracy, you're not eligible unless you have no revenue, and it's barely enough to survive, you're supposed to be actively looking for work, but it's there. We could start by simplifying the system, and replace that welfare system by an equivalent ABI (the salaries of currently working people will probably need some adjustments). It would be insufficient of course, but that would be a start.
- slurry 13y ago
  > (It wasn't so long ago it was pretty much pure sci-fi.) On the other hand full employment through monetary policy is pretty much science fact. Yet neither the United States nor the EU even pretend to pursue it. (China pretty much does, however. It works pretty well for them.) It's not like providing a decent living for near everyone is this unsolved problem which, if could only we find the correct technocratic solution, we could just roll up our sleeves and implement. The problem is that a lot of people are against doing it. At all.
smackay 13y ago
This is slightly off topic. Work is rather a vague term. If you break it down into it's components: effort, compensation, social-benefit, etc. then you can start to assign relative merit to different kinds of work. For example financiers which might be categorised as: high compensation, low to moderate effort and low social benefit and janitors: low compensation, moderate effort, low compensation. Now you can start to make value judgements about how different types of work are rated or (should be) valued by the general public or society as a whole. You can also factor out the ideological or moral components attributed to work by various political factions and start to answer interesting questions such how much should teachers be paid and what jobs which are low compensation, low social benefit should we be automating as fast as possible.
- dantheman 13y ago
  If you allow competition the market will do this. Compensation also takes into account the joy the job provides, some jobs are relatively pleasant and thus pay less than some that are much worse. As for automation, I completely disagree - we automate where we can get the biggest gain on output. So if something costs a lot or has high social benefit we should automate it as much as possible so that it can provide more benefits to more people.
  - smackay 13y ago
    There are many types of job where market forces cannot solve the problem. (Within the context of the Universal Basic Income) there may entire categories of types of job that could be created to solve social (in the most general sense) or civic problems. For example charitable or education related activities are low to no profit - or at least it is not easy to measure their benefit directly or immediately, but high social value in the sense that they mitigate future problem that result in increase expenditures or taxes and so have long term value. Since the market uses money and direct profit as a means to measure everything it simply cannot deal with this.
    - graphene 13y ago
      Two examples that invalidate your last sentence would be Khan Academy and Mozilla -- both very competitive places to get a job, yet they don't pay substantially above market; their mission is what draws employees in. Not all competitive forces are financial in nature. We could argue about the extent to which these nonfinancial competitive forces influence (or ought to influence) the market, but saying that they "simply cannot" seems false.
cwaniak 13y ago
There are these interesting developments that I noticed and I'm interested to see how many others noticed that: (1) Polarization of left vs right views among people in both US and EU (2) Sudden drastic turn to the right in many places in the EU while at the same time turn to the left in the US. It seems to me that since 1945 the US has been mostly right wing and is turning left radically, while the opposite is true in the EU.
- tjaerv 13y ago
  False dichotomy. There is more than one dimension. For starters, see the Nolan chart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart
- TeMPOraL 13y ago
  There's something to it. It's anecdotal, but looking at the trends in political discussions in Poland among my generation (folks in their 20s), it seems to me that they want changes in the very direction of what people in US have and complain about...
IvyMike 13y ago
I'm a cynical ass, but whenever I hear the phrase "the dignity of work" I can't help but sarcastically mentally add "yeah, work will set you free".
cwaniak 13y ago
Everybody in the USSR had job. But these jobs didn't produce any (usually) value to the society. Who wants to have a job like this? You want to do something valuable so you know that what you produce people are willing to pay for (vs. being forced to pay for it). It just seems much more healthy too.
- Broken_Hippo 13y ago
  I disagree. I don't think everyone wants or needs a valuable job, and to most people, this is an unobtainable dream. The truth is that most people I've met doing menial jobs are happy doing them IF they have enough money to cover necessities and do something enjoyable outside of work and their employer treats them fairly. This means that in the balance, their life is meaningful, even if their employment isn't. I also believe job satisfaction is completely independent of a job's contribution or value to society. Cleaning toilets has a definite societal benefit, but it is still menial work that requires little actual skill and is a job most people look for ways out of.
- conanbatt 13y ago
  That people are willing to pay for something does not indicate value. The same old story of price vs value. The last finantial crisis is a great example of being able to sell something without(or lesser) value. Value is a great market, but it is not directly proportional to value. Another example, is that if you are sick and about to die, the value of the cure for you is infinite, so you would pay everything you have an everything you will ever have if you had to. Value != Price.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >Everybody in the USSR had job. But these jobs didn't produce any (usually) value to the society. Well, they got a huge backwater, mostly agricultural country, into one of the big powers of the industrial era. And got to feed some hundends of million of people, have space exploration, very good physics and math, music and arts, and a lot more besides. So, it's a myth that these jobs didn't produce any value to the society. They just weren't as competitive as the west, but then again, they started from far worse and backwards conditions, in an a land which is cold and unhabitable as hell in large regions. And they had political BS to deal with too. Not every similar scheme will result in the same results. Stalinist politics and such is not a necessary byproduct of everybody having a guaranteed job.
kfk 13y ago
So we are saying that most of the people out there are of no use to the economy and thus, most probably, to society. Well, welcome to fascism 2.0, this vision is elitist, it creates a huge power lobby (the entity paying up the basic incomes...), and it sees people as sheep with no brains.
- Broken_Hippo 13y ago
  How exactly do you come up with that? I understand the concept, agree with it to a point (it is rather exaggerated) and I am no facist and do not have enough power, percieved or monetary, to be able to be an effective elitist. I'm anti-huge power lobby, unless you can find one that does much more good than harm. People are under pressure to be sheep already if you work one of these 'jobs'. I take the notion and look at how doing fixes could make society freer and better. My curiosity is how exactly you came to the conclusion of this being a facist and elitist idea?
  - kfk 13y ago
    > I'm anti-huge power lobby, unless you can find one that does much more good than harm This is the core of the thinking behind a dictatorship > People are under pressure to be sheep already if you work one of these 'jobs' What pressure? People are asked to work in exchange of money. Which means this system, however imperfect, still sees people as useful and productive and, thus, still gives them a chance And it's elitist because you are creating a clear division between those that are productive and those that bring no value and that actually are a negative investment (because they do "fake" jobs). You really think you can put a mentality like that in place without creating elitism and potentially an even more uneven society than today?
    - Broken_Hippo 13y ago
      I obviously didn't proofread that first one. I am in general against centralized power unless it does more good than harm. Healthcare, for example, holds power, but I'm surely convinced that the decentralized power that health insurance companies have is superior to government-managed health care that is done right (I'm in Norway now, and from what I can observe, works for the user's health benefit) Asked to work? Most of us Have to. At the bottom rungs, keep your mouth shut, dress like the accepted average, and fit in with the company's culture. No creativity or input actually needed. And no questions trying to learn things. You don't need to know what the management knows. This isn't pressure? How many 32 year olds working in fast food views their job as useful or productive? Using the 32 year old with the fast food as an example... do they feel they are valued? Likely not. Fake job, but it is a job. I somehow doubt this would change much.
jlangenauer 13y ago
Whenever I hear the phrase "the dignity of work", I'm reminded of Jeffrey Bernard's quote: "As if there was something romantic and glamorous about hard work ... if there was something romantic about it, the Duke of Westminster would be digging his own fucking garden, wouldn't he?" http://www.rense.com/general56/thevirtueofidleness.htm http://www.rense.com/general56/thevirtueofidleness.htm
- alexeisadeski3 13y ago
  Isn't gardening a popular hobby amongst the rich?
  - theaeolist 13y ago
    Clipping, not digging.
  - bluedino 13y ago
    'Gardening' is quit a bit different than breaking your back to pick 200 bushels of oranges for 14 hours in 90 degree heat.
    - alexeisadeski3 13y ago
      And being a real estate agent is quite different from breaking your back picking oranges. Yet they're both work.
- lazyjones 13y ago
  Prince Charles showing off his worn-out gardening coat: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2291333/Countryfile-Prince-Charles-shows-coat-patches-complete-holes-tears.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2291333/Countryfile-... (he also wrote a couple of books about organic gardening)
- atmosx 13y ago
  Quoting Aristotle: All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind. Anything more than 3 hours of work per day, equates slavery. I don't think the above quotes are absolute, but are hard to argue against. However, I wouldn't expect any other approach from The Economist which content's quality has been growing logarithmically lately.
unicornporn 13y ago
Since 1930 productivity in my home country Sweden has increased fivefold, mainly due to technical achievements. Does that mean that we work 20% of the time we did then? No it does not. Wealth has increased of course since the 1930s, and perhaps we want a higher material standard. But also consider than since the 1970s productivity in Sweden has doubled. Does that mean we work 4 hour days instead of 8 hour days now? No, of course not. Instead, since the 1970s we work 100 hours more each year. As a society i feel that we should be using the technical achievements to give us more time for the things and the people that we love. Is that too much to ask for?
- thelogos 13y ago
  Europeans are already working a lot less hours than american. It's ridiculous that many Americans can't even get 2 weeks of vacation. Things are even more brutal in developed Asian countries, and that's why their suicide rate is so high.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    Here's the first ten countries in the list of countries by suicide. Greenland Lithuania South Korea Guyana Kazakhstan China Belarus Slovenia Hungary Japan Obvious caveats about national suicide stats apply.
    - thelogos 13y ago
      Obvious exception of the Eastern European countries. South Korea and Japan are notorious for the high suicide rate. The work hours in these countries are ridiculous. People literally get worked to death. Engineers pretty much devote their entire life to their company. There is no work-life balance. There is only work.
      - lgieron 13y ago
        > Obvious exception of the Eastern European countries. Why?
- 13y ago
fit2rule 13y ago
There is a lot of joy to be had in doing something for someone, that they want done so much that they are willing to pay you for the work. After I've slogged 80 hours in a week on something, getting a huge fat check from my customer is a great joy, indeed. Its not work that matters - its the formal exchange of value that occurs when someone pays you for something you've done for them, because they want to pay you that amount and are happy to do so. The value of work is in the exchange - not the doing, not the acting, not the 'being a worker' mentality - but in actually receiving a great reward which prolongs ones own life and increased ability to survive in the world. Fat checks are great! Work hard for them: even greater!
strlen 13y ago
I think there's several separate issues: Krugman correctly points out that work disincentives are different from job destruction. However there are different kind of work disincentives: it is certainly hard to view people working _just_ for healthcare (as opposed to switching jobs, retiring early, or starting their own business) as something positive. By all means, disentangling healthcare from employment is at least a worthy goal -- there are many artificial reasons which currently make non-employer health insurance (and non-insurance health care) far more expensive than would otherwise be. On the other hand, the individual mandate and increased price of even the most basic catastrophic coverage does seem to cut into disposable income, which (in a sense) has the equivalent effect of huge marginal tax hike: essentially as the salary increases, essential benefits decrease (no eligibility for food stamps, subsidizing housing, or subsidized healthcare), while taxes increase. Incentive to do anything other than get by decreases, strong incentives are created to cut out other "unavoidable" payments such as by moving to places with less expensive housing costs, even if at the cost of less employment opportunities. Replacing the system that offers increasingly little to honest working poor(1), but imposes regressive mandates to fund what are essentially transfers from working classes to middle-class senior citizens (e.g., medicare and social secure) with a a universal basic income (funded through income tax or perhaps a Georgist "rent tax") would help, but making it a political reality may be tricky but feasible ( see here for an interesting analysis from a "left-libertarian"/classic liberal perspective: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2014/01/the-positive-political-economy-of-the-basic-income-guarantee/ http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2014/01/the-positive-po... ) This does not automatically imply that various "mandates" of are always bad policy, the job of policy advocates should not be to hand-wave issues, but to present them in a way such that the public could make an informed choice. There are many times where Krugman does an excellent job of this (indeed, I'd imagine he rightly sees this as the very point of his NYT column); yet, it's odd that while Tyler Cowen (another trained economist) discusses this topic in a great deal in Great Stagnation and Average is Over, Krugman does not mention this and talks about what is really a related, but separate (even if important) matter of income inequality. Honestly, I don't see how income inequality (which is a serious danger for many reasons -- I don't mean to handwave it) has a role in this: if we raised the salary of teachers in Bay Area to that of software engineers, these salaries will still remain minuscule compared to that of top CEOs, but does anyone doubt that this would greatly increase teachers' job satisfaction? The problem with low pay isn't that someone is paid higher, the problem is that low (or no) pay makes life extremely stressful as basic needs and rudimentary wants are harder to fill: never mind being able to send kids to college, it's more about being able to afford a place where kids have a room to themselves while still having room to grade class papers after work -- one can't afford this on a teacher's salary in most parts of Bay Area. (1) This is what irks me a lot about the debate on this topic. It's one thing to argue that welfare programs are wrong because taxation is wrong (then your job is to prove that taxation is wrong), but if taxation is wrong why not first cut programs that impose a greater tax burden? Military and medicare spending each cost more than food stamps and don't seem especially under-funded, yet it's the food-stamps program that got cut.
yoha 13y ago
I am not an unconditional advocate for Basic Income but I think that the idea is intriguing and could potentially be very efficient. I am not going to argue about what BI could or could not do but I would really like to see more experiments with it to have some tangible information. I would rather see that it fails than hope that it would work. Of course, I'll be delighted to see it work. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Income
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  We had a couple of experiments. This article asserts all sorts of vague positive effects - the concrete effects are a 9-13% drop in working hours and an 8.5% decrease in hospital visits. Unfortunately, as usual with articles on this topic, primary sources are not cited. https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money-to-everyone/31639050894-e44e2c00 https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money... Back of the envelope calculations are also useful. I did one a while back, you can steal the source code and build your own to at least determine affordability. The basic gist is that an inefficient targeted program is vastly cheaper than an efficient untargeted one. http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic_job.html http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic...
prestadige 13y ago
There are at least two major indignities connected to a conventional life and career. The first is that mainstream education is about winning prizes rather than learning what is interesting to you, for its own sake. The second is that most people don't particularly enjoy their jobs, they're only working for money. Although there's still a taboo around not working, it can't last. The future, as Arthur C. Clarke said, is not full employment, but full-time playing. (Some of that playing will resemble what we now call 'research'.) Meanwhile, there is work for anyone who has minimal food, shelter and web access. There are many unsolved problems out there and not just in open source software. With dignity galore, because they're important.
stefan_kendall 13y ago
"Maybe the jobs are gone forever" - Good analysis, economist. This article is full of bullshit 'maybes' and aggressive 'income inequality' overtones. I don't know how this garbage gets onto HN.
- forgottenpass 13y ago
  I don't know how this garbage gets onto HN. The only unique aspect of this piece is it strikes a nerve with you. I know how it gets here, because HN is jam packed with "analysis" that doesn't make any stronger of a case for itself. Vague wishy-washy "Maybe the jobs are gone forever" level points are taken at face value when the rhetoric is headed to more agreeable conclusions.
squozzer 13y ago
What dignifies people is autonomy. Someone intelligent enough to write for The Economist should be able to figure that out. That they couldn't (or chose not to) makes the article little more than propaganda.
hifier 13y ago
I'm confused by the idea that technology will somehow eventually render most of the population jobless. Why should this cause a breakdown of the capitalist system? These discussions seem to take this for granted without explaining why this is true. It looks like technology will continue to allow more and more people to pursue business ventures that are less and less related to filling basic needs. We will still consume, we will still find ways to trade that are mutually beneficial. We will simply have a better standard of living. It seems the logical conclusion is that there will be more opportunity for everyone, not less. Different jobs and different opportunity is not the same as no jobs and no opportunity.
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  What those people will do that we can not create machines that do it cheaper, faster and better?
  - hifier 13y ago
    So these machines will spontaneously appear?
    - marcosdumay 13y ago
      If we get there, machines will build them, obviously.
      - hifier 13y ago
        I'm not sure if your comment is in jest. But in a world where machines are primary, the thinkers, the innovators, what use is this discussion at all?
- VLM 13y ago
  You may find a study of history to be interesting. What you describe sounds like the European post-western-roman empire dark ages not utopia. How do you intend to consume if none of the consumers have money anymore? How do you intend to trade if the market is polluted by expensive middlemen and centralized .gov pre-selecting the winners and losers? If the standard of living were better in a non-monetary economy in theory, how come it never works that way in practice? Opportunities require money and power to take advantage of them, without either they will not be lost. Why wasn't the (first) Great Depression a paradise on earth? No one had jobs or money. New high technology all over the place. So why exactly would the second Great Depression be any better than the first, if its of basically the same form? Even worse, recall the interesting economic hack used to "fix" the first one? All you need is a world war, and for the survivors, its gets better.
everyone 13y ago
I would argue that many modern 1st world jobs are a form of pointless busy work. I am also concerned by the waste of resources and damage to the environment many of these jobs entail. Most of the truly important work (like food production) is achieved overseas or by a very small percentage of the population. The victorian "work ethic" way of thinking needs to be re-examined and possibly discarded as I do not think it is useful anymore, in fact I think nowadays it is detrimental. A more exigent social philosophy for this age would be more focused on trying to achieve a more sustainable society.
yetanotherphd 13y ago
I don't get the philosophy behind the "dignity of work". People primarily work in order to get paid, money they then spend on themselves or their families. Work is no more altruistic than going to clubs and having casual sex. Society functions not because people feel compelled to work out of principal, but because if no one worked, the price of labor would go up until people were enticed to do it. And it's also very strange that eroding the labor supply is painted as a "loss of jobs", when lowering the labor supply means more and better jobs for those who do want them. Finally, the idea that making poor people better off is bad because they might work less, is ridiculous. What is society striving for in the first place, if not the benefit of its members? Sure, the disincentive to work creates real deadweight economic loss. But this loss has to be weighed against the gain to the people receiving the handouts. It seems pretty clear that the wrong balance between work incentive and reducing inequality was struck in the US, and Obamacare is helping to fix this.
- Tycho 13y ago
  What does dignity have to do with altruism?
allochthon 13y ago
We might talk instead about the dignity of endeavour for its own sake, or the dignity of contribution to society. Such phrases may seem to have the makings of a social infrastructure for socialism. Indeed they do, for a world in which machines can do much of the work will need to become more socialistic if it is not to become intolerably unequal. You know we're in new territory when the Economist puts forward something like this without pulling it apart in the next paragraph and explaining why a free market solution is preferable.
erichocean 13y ago
Eliminating taxation and implementing a basic income payed for by new money created out of thin air, pegged to the GDP for the year, is how the world will deal with machines creating more wealth than we know what to do with, without people. It's a direct form of wealth transfer that requires zero force, no "putting people in cages because they can't/don't pay" nonsense. For social spending, you do the same: print new money that's a percentage of GDP, and let citizens allocate their share to various social causes (police, fire, education, natural disaster relief, etc.). As a concrete example, if the USA produces 15 trillion in GDP for the year, you could print 3.75 trillion for basic income, and 3.75 trillion for social income. The 3.75 trillion for basic income would be split evenly among the 330 million people, amounting to $11,364 annually per person. Each person would also have $11,364 to allocate ("appropriate") for various social causes. Taxation is eliminated. Everyone is fed and sheltered. Growth in wealth is shared equally. Anarchists still get to keep all of the money they earn (remember: no taxation). IRS is gone. All of the tax-funded welfare programs are gone, but we've got plenty of money annually to dedicate to social welfare programs. People don't have to give money to the police if they care more about education. There's no need for a minimum wage, or tracking people's incomes. There's no downside (in terms of extra taxation and lost benefits) to working more. And on and on. This is entirely doable today, at a purely technical/administrative level. Once robots are doing the work of the labor class, and 40% of the country literally has no jobs, and won't, ever—then it'll become a social necessity. That's why the problems in this article don't keep me up at night: not only is the solution easy, it's far preferable and way more democratic and fair than what we have today. For extra humanity, create a global currency, peg new money creation to the world's annual GDP, and do a basic and social income for everyone in the world equally, full stop.
- aianus 13y ago
  In this scenario, the government would need to use physical force to ensure transactions are conducted through the inflating currency rather than barter or gold or bitcoin or foreign currency, etc.
  - erichocean 13y ago
    That's possible, sure, but I think it's very unlikely for purely structural reasons (the best kind IMO). Because everyone will have this currency by default, natural market forces will causes businesses to want to sell things in that currency (people have it, and want to spend it). The currency itself is stable (tied to GPD growth, not politician's whims). Once some businesses decide to take it (and they will, see above), then those businesses getting that income will also spend it at other businesses who accept that income, making those businesses even more successful, causing other business to also accept the currency, and so on. And remember: everyone has some of this currency. Who is going to have it, and not spend it? I'd venture to say the percent of people flushing their basic income down the toilet is in the low single digits at best. It's a virtuous cycle, and no force should be needed to keep it going. Think about it: who in their right mind would move to another currency that wiped out their entire existing and future wealth? As another commenter pointed out, $11K a year is like having $500K in wealth paying out an annuity. Who would voluntarily give that up for some alternate currency that makes them poor? Even today, look at how hard it is to modify a social welfare scheme. It's not because the government has guns and the desire to use them, it's because people really, really rely on social stability. But yes, you're right of course: like all fiat money schemes, it only works because people want it to work. IMO people will want this to work, and furthermore: it's in each individual person's self-interest that it works.
sbmassey 13y ago
It's all fun and games with the citizens basic income until the government hits hard times and has to think about what to cut. Having the vast majority dependent on income from a single, fallible organization is a recipe for disaster.

133 points by benfreu 13y ago

rwmj 13y ago

A similar idea: When good ideas (like the Protestant Work Ethic) turn bad: http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2014/02/when-good-ideas-turn-bad.html http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...

mattdw 13y ago

> A world in which a healthy adult has the reasonable expectation of earning a decent living while working full-time at a market wage is absolutely a world in which the dignity of work is a useful social value to cultivate. In a world in which that is not a reasonable expectation, the dignity of work can be a harmful concept. Interesting times ahead. It's going to be painful getting there, if we get there at all, but the idea of a Universal Basic Income seems to be getting more popular. (It wasn't so long ago it was pretty much pure sci-fi.) Particularly I guess as it begins to look like modern capitalism may not actually be good at providing jobs for everyone who needs one. Potentially UBIs could be very good for the world, freeing people to work on things they personally desire and value, and in some ways redistributing the 'means of production' back to the little guy.

dantheman 13y ago
The idea of a basic income is still sci-fi. There just isn't that much money. Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean no one will ever wash dishes at a restaurant, no one will pick up trash, no one will spend time wiring your house for internet, or fix your computer, or do a large swath of jobs. The argument that with UBI people will still do that only for more money is crazy, since the taxes would have to be so high to support UBI that the costs would dwarf what people could afford. As these services collapse so to will higher paying ones; lets see a doctor get up early to wash the floors of her practice since she can't afford to hire a cleaning staff and still charge patients a reasonable rate.
- argonaut 13y ago
  No. It does not mean no one will ever work as a dishwasher/etc. It just means that the market rate for dishwashers/etc. will be higher. This would be due to the supply curve for labor shifting. Certainly, some businesses will not be able to hire as many (or any) dishwashers/etc, but those that they do hire will have to be paid more. But that is a natural extension of decreasing the supply of labor. The higher price that businesses will pay for labor will also push them to invest in capital (automation).
  - Someone 13y ago
    You still have to find the money to pay that universal basic income. IIRC, the idea is to get that money by taxing capital and making it cheaper to hire people. As you indicate, getting it by taxing labor leads businesses to automate away labor, making it even harder to get that money from taxes on labor. Think of it: that $5 an hour job currently costs a company $10 an hour or so. Without taxes on labor, they could pay $7 for a win-win situation. Even paying $5 would still be win-win, as the employee would have his basic income plus the $5 an hour.
    - argonaut 13y ago
      Have you considered taxing both capital AND labor?
  - thelogos 13y ago
    But it's getting to the point where dishwashing might not even be available as a job. Right now, that's not the case yet. But it's not hard to imagine a future where it is. Many menial jobs are getting automated and it's just getting worse and worse. Soon, we will have to do something about it. These protests and revolutions are spreading like the plague. And social unrest is bad for everyone, including business. One day, it will become a necessity. Just look at countries like Japan and Korea. Too many over-qualified people and not enough jobs. People are hired to do menial task like tearing tickets out of machines and handing it to people in a car. Suicide in these countries are skyrocketing because of hyper-competition. In the rest of the world, these people don't commit suicide, they just gather into a big crowd and start protesting, violently. There is definitely enough money to make work. The goverment just has to be smarter about allocating its budget.
Jach 13y ago
Here's a simple if perhaps naive question. Suppose UBI is $x/yr. What's going to stop every apartment complex owner and every rental landlord from raising the cost of living on that property by $x/yr/tenant? Will the government start fixing prices? (I imagine that slightly more realistically all owners of physical resources, not just land owners, would raise prices as much as they can while still maintaining roughly the same profit percentage in order to compete with other owners to capture the new income, and so no single group of actors is likely to capture it all with one type of product.)
- scotty79 13y ago
  That's the only thing I can see that can go wrong with basic income. I'd counter that with progressive property tax. So that if you own 5 accomodations, of which each can house a family, you might be better off with selling the sixth one than holding it, paying exorbitant tax and risking it might stay empty for too long. I would pump money earned from this tax back into basic income. Such tax might be beneficial even now in some places. In Japan and Italy so many properties were bought out by people intending to profit from the rent that price of accomodation rose to the point that most young people can't afford to live alone and stay with parents instead.
- mattdw 13y ago
  An alternative to fixing prices would be just to compete. The government could start building its own housing, recouping the costs straight back from UBI rents, and simultaneously holding privately-owned market prices to a more reasonable level.
  - Jach 13y ago
    Would this work for utility companies too? How about mega food corps (http://www.miaatipx.com/corporations1.jpg http://www.miaatipx.com/corporations1.jpg as an example), who probably have very good statistics about what percentage of the population in an area regularly buys (and "can't live without") their products, and thus figure out the optimal price increases for each area? Gas? Cars? And what about the partners of all these other companies whose customers are other businesses not individuals, but are going to start charging more and expecting the customer business to pass it along to their individual customer -- refineries, mines, mills, graineries, farms, storage warehouses... (As I mentioned before, everyone who has anything to sell will want as big a piece of this new income that they can get and will raise prices to try and find out how much they can capture without starting to make less profit than before. Over infinite time and with everyone having perfect information of the market, I think $x/yr would become the new $0/yr.) Is it fair for me to think that universal basic income, if it has any chance of achieving its stated goals, is insufficient by itself at least when expressed as "give every living adult $x/yr" and nothing else? Now if the only effect of UBI is making a new $0 baseline and nothing else being changed on average, then it can't hurt that much by itself, so it may be worth trying in a limited area (such as a smaller country like the mentioned Switzerland) just to get an experimental result on record before trying it out on an economy the size of the US. But when you have to do all this other stuff to make UBI achieve its goals, like have the government build housing (it already does and has done that... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green), it makes me wonder why even bother with UBI itself and instead just get busy with the other things.
djrobstep 13y ago
Here is an interesting basic income calculator: http://mattbruenig.com/basicincomecalculator/ http://mattbruenig.com/basicincomecalculator/ Happily, it suggests lots of proverty reduction is achievable with a very manageable percentage of GDP.
- lazyjones 13y ago
  That's far too simplistic and cannot be taken seriously. One of the first serious issues you'd have to consider is migration from other countries to your model country with basic income. There's billions of people out there who'd happily live on basic income in some first world country and I'd absolutely encourage them to do so, given what the first world's riches are built on (but I digress...).
yourapostasy 13y ago
We do not yet have the technological foundation to feasibly implement a Banks'ian Culture-type "hard" UBI, and we barely have the beginning glimmers for even "soft" UBI like what many are discussing today. We lack energy production and management, AI, and nanotech for even rudimentary hard UBI, and even soft UBI is infeasible due to knock-on effects whose management is poorly-understood. Example: we already have a diabetes epidemic with low socioeconomic groups, and the obesogenic environment is not well studied enough to know if giving those groups more access to free time will improve outcomes. Will those groups on average use a soft UBI to improve their overall health, or will they choose poorly and the benefits of UBI blowback into exploding healthcare costs? No one really knows yet. I would like to believe that soft UBI would lead to better health outcomes, but that might simply be my own socioeconomic background speaking. The few soft UBI trials commonly found in citations were too short-lived to tell whether we were simply observing a Hawthorne Effect at work or if the outcomes were sustainable.
- loup-vaillant 13y ago
  France's welfare system is already close to ABI. You have to fight bureaucracy, you're not eligible unless you have no revenue, and it's barely enough to survive, you're supposed to be actively looking for work, but it's there. We could start by simplifying the system, and replace that welfare system by an equivalent ABI (the salaries of currently working people will probably need some adjustments). It would be insufficient of course, but that would be a start.
slurry 13y ago
> (It wasn't so long ago it was pretty much pure sci-fi.) On the other hand full employment through monetary policy is pretty much science fact. Yet neither the United States nor the EU even pretend to pursue it. (China pretty much does, however. It works pretty well for them.) It's not like providing a decent living for near everyone is this unsolved problem which, if could only we find the correct technocratic solution, we could just roll up our sleeves and implement. The problem is that a lot of people are against doing it. At all.

smackay 13y ago

This is slightly off topic. Work is rather a vague term. If you break it down into it's components: effort, compensation, social-benefit, etc. then you can start to assign relative merit to different kinds of work. For example financiers which might be categorised as: high compensation, low to moderate effort and low social benefit and janitors: low compensation, moderate effort, low compensation. Now you can start to make value judgements about how different types of work are rated or (should be) valued by the general public or society as a whole. You can also factor out the ideological or moral components attributed to work by various political factions and start to answer interesting questions such how much should teachers be paid and what jobs which are low compensation, low social benefit should we be automating as fast as possible.

dantheman 13y ago
If you allow competition the market will do this. Compensation also takes into account the joy the job provides, some jobs are relatively pleasant and thus pay less than some that are much worse. As for automation, I completely disagree - we automate where we can get the biggest gain on output. So if something costs a lot or has high social benefit we should automate it as much as possible so that it can provide more benefits to more people.
- smackay 13y ago
  There are many types of job where market forces cannot solve the problem. (Within the context of the Universal Basic Income) there may entire categories of types of job that could be created to solve social (in the most general sense) or civic problems. For example charitable or education related activities are low to no profit - or at least it is not easy to measure their benefit directly or immediately, but high social value in the sense that they mitigate future problem that result in increase expenditures or taxes and so have long term value. Since the market uses money and direct profit as a means to measure everything it simply cannot deal with this.
  - graphene 13y ago
    Two examples that invalidate your last sentence would be Khan Academy and Mozilla -- both very competitive places to get a job, yet they don't pay substantially above market; their mission is what draws employees in. Not all competitive forces are financial in nature. We could argue about the extent to which these nonfinancial competitive forces influence (or ought to influence) the market, but saying that they "simply cannot" seems false.

cwaniak 13y ago

There are these interesting developments that I noticed and I'm interested to see how many others noticed that: (1) Polarization of left vs right views among people in both US and EU (2) Sudden drastic turn to the right in many places in the EU while at the same time turn to the left in the US. It seems to me that since 1945 the US has been mostly right wing and is turning left radically, while the opposite is true in the EU.

tjaerv 13y ago
False dichotomy. There is more than one dimension. For starters, see the Nolan chart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart
TeMPOraL 13y ago
There's something to it. It's anecdotal, but looking at the trends in political discussions in Poland among my generation (folks in their 20s), it seems to me that they want changes in the very direction of what people in US have and complain about...

IvyMike 13y ago

I'm a cynical ass, but whenever I hear the phrase "the dignity of work" I can't help but sarcastically mentally add "yeah, work will set you free".

cwaniak 13y ago

Everybody in the USSR had job. But these jobs didn't produce any (usually) value to the society. Who wants to have a job like this? You want to do something valuable so you know that what you produce people are willing to pay for (vs. being forced to pay for it). It just seems much more healthy too.

Broken_Hippo 13y ago
I disagree. I don't think everyone wants or needs a valuable job, and to most people, this is an unobtainable dream. The truth is that most people I've met doing menial jobs are happy doing them IF they have enough money to cover necessities and do something enjoyable outside of work and their employer treats them fairly. This means that in the balance, their life is meaningful, even if their employment isn't. I also believe job satisfaction is completely independent of a job's contribution or value to society. Cleaning toilets has a definite societal benefit, but it is still menial work that requires little actual skill and is a job most people look for ways out of.
conanbatt 13y ago
That people are willing to pay for something does not indicate value. The same old story of price vs value. The last finantial crisis is a great example of being able to sell something without(or lesser) value. Value is a great market, but it is not directly proportional to value. Another example, is that if you are sick and about to die, the value of the cure for you is infinite, so you would pay everything you have an everything you will ever have if you had to. Value != Price.
coldtea 13y ago
>Everybody in the USSR had job. But these jobs didn't produce any (usually) value to the society. Well, they got a huge backwater, mostly agricultural country, into one of the big powers of the industrial era. And got to feed some hundends of million of people, have space exploration, very good physics and math, music and arts, and a lot more besides. So, it's a myth that these jobs didn't produce any value to the society. They just weren't as competitive as the west, but then again, they started from far worse and backwards conditions, in an a land which is cold and unhabitable as hell in large regions. And they had political BS to deal with too. Not every similar scheme will result in the same results. Stalinist politics and such is not a necessary byproduct of everybody having a guaranteed job.

kfk 13y ago

So we are saying that most of the people out there are of no use to the economy and thus, most probably, to society. Well, welcome to fascism 2.0, this vision is elitist, it creates a huge power lobby (the entity paying up the basic incomes...), and it sees people as sheep with no brains.

Broken_Hippo 13y ago
How exactly do you come up with that? I understand the concept, agree with it to a point (it is rather exaggerated) and I am no facist and do not have enough power, percieved or monetary, to be able to be an effective elitist. I'm anti-huge power lobby, unless you can find one that does much more good than harm. People are under pressure to be sheep already if you work one of these 'jobs'. I take the notion and look at how doing fixes could make society freer and better. My curiosity is how exactly you came to the conclusion of this being a facist and elitist idea?
- kfk 13y ago
  > I'm anti-huge power lobby, unless you can find one that does much more good than harm This is the core of the thinking behind a dictatorship > People are under pressure to be sheep already if you work one of these 'jobs' What pressure? People are asked to work in exchange of money. Which means this system, however imperfect, still sees people as useful and productive and, thus, still gives them a chance And it's elitist because you are creating a clear division between those that are productive and those that bring no value and that actually are a negative investment (because they do "fake" jobs). You really think you can put a mentality like that in place without creating elitism and potentially an even more uneven society than today?
  - Broken_Hippo 13y ago
    I obviously didn't proofread that first one. I am in general against centralized power unless it does more good than harm. Healthcare, for example, holds power, but I'm surely convinced that the decentralized power that health insurance companies have is superior to government-managed health care that is done right (I'm in Norway now, and from what I can observe, works for the user's health benefit) Asked to work? Most of us Have to. At the bottom rungs, keep your mouth shut, dress like the accepted average, and fit in with the company's culture. No creativity or input actually needed. And no questions trying to learn things. You don't need to know what the management knows. This isn't pressure? How many 32 year olds working in fast food views their job as useful or productive? Using the 32 year old with the fast food as an example... do they feel they are valued? Likely not. Fake job, but it is a job. I somehow doubt this would change much.

jlangenauer 13y ago

Whenever I hear the phrase "the dignity of work", I'm reminded of Jeffrey Bernard's quote: "As if there was something romantic and glamorous about hard work ... if there was something romantic about it, the Duke of Westminster would be digging his own fucking garden, wouldn't he?" http://www.rense.com/general56/thevirtueofidleness.htm http://www.rense.com/general56/thevirtueofidleness.htm

alexeisadeski3 13y ago
Isn't gardening a popular hobby amongst the rich?
- theaeolist 13y ago
  Clipping, not digging.
- bluedino 13y ago
  'Gardening' is quit a bit different than breaking your back to pick 200 bushels of oranges for 14 hours in 90 degree heat.
  - alexeisadeski3 13y ago
    And being a real estate agent is quite different from breaking your back picking oranges. Yet they're both work.
lazyjones 13y ago
Prince Charles showing off his worn-out gardening coat: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2291333/Countryfile-Prince-Charles-shows-coat-patches-complete-holes-tears.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2291333/Countryfile-... (he also wrote a couple of books about organic gardening)
atmosx 13y ago
Quoting Aristotle: All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind. Anything more than 3 hours of work per day, equates slavery. I don't think the above quotes are absolute, but are hard to argue against. However, I wouldn't expect any other approach from The Economist which content's quality has been growing logarithmically lately.

unicornporn 13y ago

Since 1930 productivity in my home country Sweden has increased fivefold, mainly due to technical achievements. Does that mean that we work 20% of the time we did then? No it does not. Wealth has increased of course since the 1930s, and perhaps we want a higher material standard. But also consider than since the 1970s productivity in Sweden has doubled. Does that mean we work 4 hour days instead of 8 hour days now? No, of course not. Instead, since the 1970s we work 100 hours more each year. As a society i feel that we should be using the technical achievements to give us more time for the things and the people that we love. Is that too much to ask for?

thelogos 13y ago
Europeans are already working a lot less hours than american. It's ridiculous that many Americans can't even get 2 weeks of vacation. Things are even more brutal in developed Asian countries, and that's why their suicide rate is so high.
- DanBC 13y ago
  Here's the first ten countries in the list of countries by suicide. Greenland Lithuania South Korea Guyana Kazakhstan China Belarus Slovenia Hungary Japan Obvious caveats about national suicide stats apply.
  - thelogos 13y ago
    Obvious exception of the Eastern European countries. South Korea and Japan are notorious for the high suicide rate. The work hours in these countries are ridiculous. People literally get worked to death. Engineers pretty much devote their entire life to their company. There is no work-life balance. There is only work.
    - lgieron 13y ago
      > Obvious exception of the Eastern European countries. Why?
13y ago

fit2rule 13y ago

There is a lot of joy to be had in doing something for someone, that they want done so much that they are willing to pay you for the work. After I've slogged 80 hours in a week on something, getting a huge fat check from my customer is a great joy, indeed. Its not work that matters - its the formal exchange of value that occurs when someone pays you for something you've done for them, because they want to pay you that amount and are happy to do so. The value of work is in the exchange - not the doing, not the acting, not the 'being a worker' mentality - but in actually receiving a great reward which prolongs ones own life and increased ability to survive in the world. Fat checks are great! Work hard for them: even greater!

strlen 13y ago

I think there's several separate issues: Krugman correctly points out that work disincentives are different from job destruction. However there are different kind of work disincentives: it is certainly hard to view people working _just_ for healthcare (as opposed to switching jobs, retiring early, or starting their own business) as something positive. By all means, disentangling healthcare from employment is at least a worthy goal -- there are many artificial reasons which currently make non-employer health insurance (and non-insurance health care) far more expensive than would otherwise be. On the other hand, the individual mandate and increased price of even the most basic catastrophic coverage does seem to cut into disposable income, which (in a sense) has the equivalent effect of huge marginal tax hike: essentially as the salary increases, essential benefits decrease (no eligibility for food stamps, subsidizing housing, or subsidized healthcare), while taxes increase. Incentive to do anything other than get by decreases, strong incentives are created to cut out other "unavoidable" payments such as by moving to places with less expensive housing costs, even if at the cost of less employment opportunities. Replacing the system that offers increasingly little to honest working poor(1), but imposes regressive mandates to fund what are essentially transfers from working classes to middle-class senior citizens (e.g., medicare and social secure) with a a universal basic income (funded through income tax or perhaps a Georgist "rent tax") would help, but making it a political reality may be tricky but feasible ( see here for an interesting analysis from a "left-libertarian"/classic liberal perspective: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2014/01/the-positive-political-economy-of-the-basic-income-guarantee/ http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2014/01/the-positive-po... ) This does not automatically imply that various "mandates" of are always bad policy, the job of policy advocates should not be to hand-wave issues, but to present them in a way such that the public could make an informed choice. There are many times where Krugman does an excellent job of this (indeed, I'd imagine he rightly sees this as the very point of his NYT column); yet, it's odd that while Tyler Cowen (another trained economist) discusses this topic in a great deal in Great Stagnation and Average is Over, Krugman does not mention this and talks about what is really a related, but separate (even if important) matter of income inequality. Honestly, I don't see how income inequality (which is a serious danger for many reasons -- I don't mean to handwave it) has a role in this: if we raised the salary of teachers in Bay Area to that of software engineers, these salaries will still remain minuscule compared to that of top CEOs, but does anyone doubt that this would greatly increase teachers' job satisfaction? The problem with low pay isn't that someone is paid higher, the problem is that low (or no) pay makes life extremely stressful as basic needs and rudimentary wants are harder to fill: never mind being able to send kids to college, it's more about being able to afford a place where kids have a room to themselves while still having room to grade class papers after work -- one can't afford this on a teacher's salary in most parts of Bay Area. (1) This is what irks me a lot about the debate on this topic. It's one thing to argue that welfare programs are wrong because taxation is wrong (then your job is to prove that taxation is wrong), but if taxation is wrong why not first cut programs that impose a greater tax burden? Military and medicare spending each cost more than food stamps and don't seem especially under-funded, yet it's the food-stamps program that got cut.

yoha 13y ago

I am not an unconditional advocate for Basic Income but I think that the idea is intriguing and could potentially be very efficient. I am not going to argue about what BI could or could not do but I would really like to see more experiments with it to have some tangible information. I would rather see that it fails than hope that it would work. Of course, I'll be delighted to see it work. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Income

yummyfajitas 13y ago
We had a couple of experiments. This article asserts all sorts of vague positive effects - the concrete effects are a 9-13% drop in working hours and an 8.5% decrease in hospital visits. Unfortunately, as usual with articles on this topic, primary sources are not cited. https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money-to-everyone/31639050894-e44e2c00 https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money... Back of the envelope calculations are also useful. I did one a while back, you can steal the source code and build your own to at least determine affordability. The basic gist is that an inefficient targeted program is vastly cheaper than an efficient untargeted one. http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic_job.html http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic...

prestadige 13y ago

There are at least two major indignities connected to a conventional life and career. The first is that mainstream education is about winning prizes rather than learning what is interesting to you, for its own sake. The second is that most people don't particularly enjoy their jobs, they're only working for money. Although there's still a taboo around not working, it can't last. The future, as Arthur C. Clarke said, is not full employment, but full-time playing. (Some of that playing will resemble what we now call 'research'.) Meanwhile, there is work for anyone who has minimal food, shelter and web access. There are many unsolved problems out there and not just in open source software. With dignity galore, because they're important.

stefan_kendall 13y ago

"Maybe the jobs are gone forever" - Good analysis, economist. This article is full of bullshit 'maybes' and aggressive 'income inequality' overtones. I don't know how this garbage gets onto HN.

forgottenpass 13y ago
I don't know how this garbage gets onto HN. The only unique aspect of this piece is it strikes a nerve with you. I know how it gets here, because HN is jam packed with "analysis" that doesn't make any stronger of a case for itself. Vague wishy-washy "Maybe the jobs are gone forever" level points are taken at face value when the rhetoric is headed to more agreeable conclusions.

squozzer 13y ago

What dignifies people is autonomy. Someone intelligent enough to write for The Economist should be able to figure that out. That they couldn't (or chose not to) makes the article little more than propaganda.

hifier 13y ago

I'm confused by the idea that technology will somehow eventually render most of the population jobless. Why should this cause a breakdown of the capitalist system? These discussions seem to take this for granted without explaining why this is true. It looks like technology will continue to allow more and more people to pursue business ventures that are less and less related to filling basic needs. We will still consume, we will still find ways to trade that are mutually beneficial. We will simply have a better standard of living. It seems the logical conclusion is that there will be more opportunity for everyone, not less. Different jobs and different opportunity is not the same as no jobs and no opportunity.

marcosdumay 13y ago
What those people will do that we can not create machines that do it cheaper, faster and better?
- hifier 13y ago
  So these machines will spontaneously appear?
  - marcosdumay 13y ago
    If we get there, machines will build them, obviously.
    - hifier 13y ago
      I'm not sure if your comment is in jest. But in a world where machines are primary, the thinkers, the innovators, what use is this discussion at all?
VLM 13y ago
You may find a study of history to be interesting. What you describe sounds like the European post-western-roman empire dark ages not utopia. How do you intend to consume if none of the consumers have money anymore? How do you intend to trade if the market is polluted by expensive middlemen and centralized .gov pre-selecting the winners and losers? If the standard of living were better in a non-monetary economy in theory, how come it never works that way in practice? Opportunities require money and power to take advantage of them, without either they will not be lost. Why wasn't the (first) Great Depression a paradise on earth? No one had jobs or money. New high technology all over the place. So why exactly would the second Great Depression be any better than the first, if its of basically the same form? Even worse, recall the interesting economic hack used to "fix" the first one? All you need is a world war, and for the survivors, its gets better.

everyone 13y ago

I would argue that many modern 1st world jobs are a form of pointless busy work. I am also concerned by the waste of resources and damage to the environment many of these jobs entail. Most of the truly important work (like food production) is achieved overseas or by a very small percentage of the population. The victorian "work ethic" way of thinking needs to be re-examined and possibly discarded as I do not think it is useful anymore, in fact I think nowadays it is detrimental. A more exigent social philosophy for this age would be more focused on trying to achieve a more sustainable society.

yetanotherphd 13y ago

I don't get the philosophy behind the "dignity of work". People primarily work in order to get paid, money they then spend on themselves or their families. Work is no more altruistic than going to clubs and having casual sex. Society functions not because people feel compelled to work out of principal, but because if no one worked, the price of labor would go up until people were enticed to do it. And it's also very strange that eroding the labor supply is painted as a "loss of jobs", when lowering the labor supply means more and better jobs for those who do want them. Finally, the idea that making poor people better off is bad because they might work less, is ridiculous. What is society striving for in the first place, if not the benefit of its members? Sure, the disincentive to work creates real deadweight economic loss. But this loss has to be weighed against the gain to the people receiving the handouts. It seems pretty clear that the wrong balance between work incentive and reducing inequality was struck in the US, and Obamacare is helping to fix this.

Tycho 13y ago
What does dignity have to do with altruism?

allochthon 13y ago

We might talk instead about the dignity of endeavour for its own sake, or the dignity of contribution to society. Such phrases may seem to have the makings of a social infrastructure for socialism. Indeed they do, for a world in which machines can do much of the work will need to become more socialistic if it is not to become intolerably unequal. You know we're in new territory when the Economist puts forward something like this without pulling it apart in the next paragraph and explaining why a free market solution is preferable.

erichocean 13y ago

Eliminating taxation and implementing a basic income payed for by new money created out of thin air, pegged to the GDP for the year, is how the world will deal with machines creating more wealth than we know what to do with, without people. It's a direct form of wealth transfer that requires zero force, no "putting people in cages because they can't/don't pay" nonsense. For social spending, you do the same: print new money that's a percentage of GDP, and let citizens allocate their share to various social causes (police, fire, education, natural disaster relief, etc.). As a concrete example, if the USA produces 15 trillion in GDP for the year, you could print 3.75 trillion for basic income, and 3.75 trillion for social income. The 3.75 trillion for basic income would be split evenly among the 330 million people, amounting to $11,364 annually per person. Each person would also have $11,364 to allocate ("appropriate") for various social causes. Taxation is eliminated. Everyone is fed and sheltered. Growth in wealth is shared equally. Anarchists still get to keep all of the money they earn (remember: no taxation). IRS is gone. All of the tax-funded welfare programs are gone, but we've got plenty of money annually to dedicate to social welfare programs. People don't have to give money to the police if they care more about education. There's no need for a minimum wage, or tracking people's incomes. There's no downside (in terms of extra taxation and lost benefits) to working more. And on and on. This is entirely doable today, at a purely technical/administrative level. Once robots are doing the work of the labor class, and 40% of the country literally has no jobs, and won't, ever—then it'll become a social necessity. That's why the problems in this article don't keep me up at night: not only is the solution easy, it's far preferable and way more democratic and fair than what we have today. For extra humanity, create a global currency, peg new money creation to the world's annual GDP, and do a basic and social income for everyone in the world equally, full stop.

aianus 13y ago
In this scenario, the government would need to use physical force to ensure transactions are conducted through the inflating currency rather than barter or gold or bitcoin or foreign currency, etc.
- erichocean 13y ago
  That's possible, sure, but I think it's very unlikely for purely structural reasons (the best kind IMO). Because everyone will have this currency by default, natural market forces will causes businesses to want to sell things in that currency (people have it, and want to spend it). The currency itself is stable (tied to GPD growth, not politician's whims). Once some businesses decide to take it (and they will, see above), then those businesses getting that income will also spend it at other businesses who accept that income, making those businesses even more successful, causing other business to also accept the currency, and so on. And remember: everyone has some of this currency. Who is going to have it, and not spend it? I'd venture to say the percent of people flushing their basic income down the toilet is in the low single digits at best. It's a virtuous cycle, and no force should be needed to keep it going. Think about it: who in their right mind would move to another currency that wiped out their entire existing and future wealth? As another commenter pointed out, $11K a year is like having $500K in wealth paying out an annuity. Who would voluntarily give that up for some alternate currency that makes them poor? Even today, look at how hard it is to modify a social welfare scheme. It's not because the government has guns and the desire to use them, it's because people really, really rely on social stability. But yes, you're right of course: like all fiat money schemes, it only works because people want it to work. IMO people will want this to work, and furthermore: it's in each individual person's self-interest that it works.

sbmassey 13y ago

It's all fun and games with the citizens basic income until the government hits hard times and has to think about what to cut. Having the vast majority dependent on income from a single, fallible organization is a recipe for disaster.