12 ms·

Job Guarantee vs. Basic Income

33 points by seoguru 12y ago

a-saleh 12y ago
Is there some generic framework for these ideas? For example, if I simplify my country "social net", it basically is, that either you have job and pay taxes, or you don't have a job, and you can apply for government help. Then we have minimal wage requirement in our law. I know that a faction in our government argues, that this system has two main problems: 1) for low income people it might not be worth to search job, because often they would be paid just a little extra for large amount of work, than they alredy receive from welfare 2) employers complain, that because of high income taxes and other expeditures on employees it is not worth for them to employ people that recieve low salary. The party proposed to add a fixed sum of money negative income tax to the income tax rate as a quite elegant solution, resulting basicaly in BIG in the country. I wonder how well would that work, because at least it solves these two problems they stated.
jiggy2011 12y ago
If you have a guaranteed job, can you be fired from it? If so are you cut off from all income for some period of time? If not, what stops somebody from turning up and having very low or no productivity and demotivating others?
- dm2 12y ago
  I think Japan has something close to guaranteed job, their culture is somewhat different from American culture, it would be very interesting to study. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-illegal-japan-workers-are-sent-to-the-boredom-room.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-il...
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    What that's talking about is quite different. That's inability to fire from a private position, this is (approximate) inability to refrain from hiring for a public position. It's still, certainly, an interesting thing.
- seoguru 12y ago
  I think people could get fired from their job with cause and have a waiting period before being allowed to give it another try.
mhaymo 12y ago
The writer doesn't justify his insistence that a Job Guarantee "IS NOT ‘MAKE-WORK’". It seems to me that if the primary purpose of a job is to provide work, then it is by definition make-work.
- tomp 12y ago
  S/he says that government jobs would be those that benefit the community. It's not hard to come up with examples of those kinds of jobs - care for the elderly, cheap & healthy kitchens (like kitchens for the homeless, but for everyone instead), more repair and maintenance of infrastructure or new infrastructure (e.g. before WW2, German's increased employment by building highways throughout the country), culture and art events, recycling, running non-for-profit stores (for many basic items, the margin of the store is much greater than production costs) ... IMO, that's much less make-work than advertising, sales and similar (basically, jobs that exist because your product is not good enough to sell itself).
  - anon4 12y ago
    But who would want a human to do those things if a machine can do it better, faster and more efficiently?
    - vanderZwan 12y ago
      "Let the robots do the robotic work, let humans flourish creatively." - Matthew Taylor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDQosiH4VAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDQosiH4VAc
  - vanderZwan 12y ago
    These are also all examples of where adding a layer of bureaucracy to get paid ruins it. From what my parents (both GPs) told me, in the Netherlands we used to have a lot of volunteers helping out family members who needed extra support, and who simply got a fixed amount of extra money per month, no hassle. This had the extra benefit that it let nurses and doctors focus on the more difficult problems that they specifically were trained for. Then the government decided things had to be more fair (we're talking early eighties), so people suddenly had to fill in forms defining exactly how many hours they spent on helping out family to get the amount of money they deserve. Or something like that. The point was that there was this new layer of bureaucratic administration. It was a disaster, and within a few years they rolled it back. By then however, a lot of volunteers had simply given up and stopped helping, and they did not come back. And in the last decade we made the same mistake all over again. What's especially important to note was that under the new rules, people on average would have been paid more for their help - the old compensation was not nearly enough to cover the time and costs of the volunteers. And yet we ended up with less volunteers. Almost all of the examples you mentioned are things people do for other reasons than the money; any monetary compensation should be more of a hassle-free symbolic gesture of appreciation, or it ruins the whole intrinsic motivation. People are irrational like that, and we need to respect that if we want to make this work.
seizethecheese 12y ago
May unemployed people are so because the jobs available are not pallatable. Almost everyone I know that doesn't have a job could easily find work washing dishes or similar. How is this different from a job guarantee, at least for a large chunk of the population?
- rjbwork 12y ago
  With basic income even the people filling those jobs now won't do them, forcing businesses to automate that workload and, as the article says, de-commoditizing the human labor force, and emphasizing a focus on technological solutions to previously "too cheap to automate" tasks.
  - hvidgaard 12y ago
    Not only that. People need income, and thus the employer have an major advantage. With BIG people do not need the money to the same extend and thus evaluate the cost/benefit much more fairly. I'm not going to bust my ass off for 10$ an hour with zero benefits. On the other hand if the same job gave me 30$ I might not mind it.
    - dllthomas 12y ago
      "I'm not going to bust my ass off for 10$ an hour with zero benefits." Unless it's to an end I feel passionate about. Then I might do it for $5 or for free.
a-saleh 12y ago
"Under BIG, production drops, consumption rises, and so do prices. Suddenly, the value of the BIG grant has been eroded. Great success: the poor are still poor." I was under impression, that BIG works on assumption, that production doesn't drop, because the people that would consider not working are often the people that wouldn't produce as much. On the other hand, the rise in compsumption would be fueled by newly found buying power of the low income population, and that means bussinesses would care about them more. For employers BIG would basically mean a flat discount on all of the employees. And for government and people with low income it would mean a large reduction in byrocracy. -------- Unfortunately lots of these assumptions on BIG are somewhat culture dependent.
- tomp 12y ago
  > the people that would consider not working are often the people that wouldn't produce as much. What do you mean? The jobs that suck the most and are paid the least are often the ones that absolutely have to be done (by a human), at least in the today's societies: garbage collector, construction worker, cleaners, store/fast-food workers, ...
  - warcode 12y ago
    All of the jobs you mention can be done by robots. Some of them can be done by robots TODAY.
    - tomp 12y ago
      Personally, I haven't seen any of the done by robots (except for Roomba, but that's not even cleaning - I'm talking about things like bathroom, trash, ... i.e. cleaning of corporate offices). Also, even if it's possible in the next decade, it will probably be much more expensive and capital intensive than human labor for quite some time.
  - a-saleh 12y ago
    Well. I remember a time, when every store in my country had a shop-keeper, that would hand you the goods over the counter. Usualy shop had one shopkeeper that tended to all of the shop (counter, refilling, e.t.c) Then somebody figured out, that if you introduce a one way door in, and one way out, you can have larger store tended by much smaller number of people. And now in some shops they replace three counters that had to have people with ten self-checkout counters and one guy doing oversight ...
viraptor 12y ago
I'm a bit confused about JG idea. Maybe it's different times now, but it reminds me of the old system in Poland where everyone doing something in their assigned work got paid. As a result, there were many people simply showing up for work and expecting to be paid. People on higher positions in common jobs often took the "I rule over customers" mentality. (think shop managers) Even worse for services, any public/government work, etc. The quality of work simply did not matter. There's even a saying people will still recognise, which means something close to: whether you stand or lay down, you're entitled to the wage. Sure, the political system was completely different, what you could spend your money on was limited, but... This image is in the back of my mind when people talk about JG - and I'm not sure why it wouldn't happen again.
- mynameishere 12y ago
  Sure, the political system was completely different There's your clue. The "job guarantee", as promoted by these people, is designed to get the political system changed to that of cold war-era Poland. In reality, basic income and every variant of it are extremely undesirable programs, unless they become somehow necessary--like chemotherapy. At some point, society is simply going to recognize that millions of people are useless (see previous clumsy metaphor) and deal with it. So you can give them their daily bread (basic income) or make them pretend to work for their daily bread (job guarantees). Anyway, we're already half way to basic income through a slew of programs from SNAP to Section 8 to SS disability benefits. It's weird how people are debating a resolved question.
  - bildung 12y ago
    So you can give them their daily bread (basic income) or make them pretend to work for their daily bread (job guarantees). Sure, but the latter tries to solve a different problem set. I think overlooking that is a big problem in the debate: the basic income side reduces jobs to the income generated. The full employment side (through JG, reduction in working hours and similar models) tries to solve more: For many people, a job provides meaning. And social affiliation. That may sound stupid to the creative, self-determined cohort visiting this site, but the ability to live a self-determined life is not something the majority of workers is able to do. I worked in the poorest part of Germany for a while. The real unemployment rate is at least 30% there. The unemployed get a de facto basic income. That is below the poverty line for Germany, but I personally could happily live my life with that money. I still would have enough plans and projects to fill a 40 hour "work" week with them. But having worked with the unemployed youth I know they see themselves as completely without prospects, without use. The sit around in their rual small towns watching TV, unable to do anything productive with their lives. These are the people models like JG aim at.
tn13 12y ago
You can no guarantee anything that requires resources without compromising interests/freedom/rights of some other class.
aidenn0 12y ago
"10. The poor and the unemployed want to work (here, here). And as my work on Argentina showed (9m14s), receiving income is the fifth reason why the poor wanted to work! Why do BIG advocates presume to know what’s better for the poor than the poor themselves? BIG does little for those who want to work." Earlier in the article, he claims that BIG will cause fewer people to work; if BIG reduces demand for jobs then surely those who want jobs will have an easier time finding them?
joepie91_ 12y ago
I feel like this article (and many like it) ignore the distinction between "wanting a job with a salary" and "wanting to have something to do". The reality is that you don't need to attach a 'salary' to a 'job' to get people to do something useful. Given the time and resources, they will do so of their own accord. Relatedly, a post I wrote on the topic of unemployment a while ago: http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2013/03/18/unemployment-is-inevitable-and-thats-not-a-bad-thing/ http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2013/03/18/unemployment-is-i...
- rahimnathwani 12y ago
  In that post, you wrote: "Unemployment is effectively an excess of manpower." If there is excess manpower, how can we explain the existence of unkempt lawns and trash on the streets?
  - joepie91_ 12y ago
    Quite simply; people on an individual basis can still think "meh, I don't feel like doing it". On the other hand you have people who enjoy doing such work - yes, they exist - and they are likely to either go "well I'm not getting paid for it", or they are getting paid for it but are assigned to doing it elsewhere. The general perception of "work" in a society greatly influences how productive people are. I can't even count the amount of times I've been told that I "don't do work" because I don't have a job with an employer, even though my working week is significantly longer than a regular one. Until that perception changes, people will keep being stuck with treating work this way.
shadowmint 12y ago
Interesting read, certainly some good points in there. ...but it doesnt address the fundamental issue: You cannot just invent jobs and be done with it. A colossal level of bureaucracy would be involved in: - picking what job was assigned to whom - ensuring jobs did not adversely affect or compete with commercial enterprise offering similar services* - managing training for jobs - managing quality of work in jobs - managing transport and infrastructure for the labor pool^ - disputes over 'fairness', 'quality of work', etc. Its not just messy; it would be a logistical nightmare. I cant take the suggestion seriously with addressing how you plan to administer such a system. (* if you think that wont be an issue, you're fooling yourself; ^obviously different area will have different labour requirements; its utterly naive to assume people would not have continually shift to new local areas where labour was seasonally required)
shadowmint 12y ago
Idly either JG and BIG implemented with a custom bitcoin fork and matched with government backed commodity stores (food, clothing, housing for govcoins) would be an interesting system. Particularly it would solve a number of inflation issues around BIG I imagine... (and motivate people to get off big on to a real job if they wanted luxury goods).
- dllthomas 12y ago
  Particularly for BIG, you would need some mechanism of determining uniqueness of users, ending payments to the deceased, &c. That does away with much of the benefit of a system like bitcoin, without some technologies that (as of yet) no one has figured out. If you can solve the relevant problems, then I agree it would be interesting!
k__ 12y ago
What about stuff that doesn't get paid but need people to work on it? There is much work to do in community work, free software or fine arts. The JG will probably only create jobs in the first category. With BIG all people can choose where they want to work and don't have to base their decision on the wage the job pays.
marvin 12y ago
Job guarantees kill one of the key advantages of basic income: Basic income allows us to dramatically reduce the overhead in social services and other administrative programs that choose who should get paid benefits and weed out those who abuse the system. In a world of guaranteed jobs, you would either have to maintain the administration or force sick people to work. Not to mention that basic income could have the huge economic advantage of allowing people to productively use their time to develop products and services they couldn't afford to before. Some of the earners of basic income will certainly do great things with their freedom, which will benefit everyone.
- sjtrny 12y ago
  I don't think Job Guarantee proponents are suggesting that the sick and disabled also have to work. They continue to receive welfare without any work requirements. I'm not a JG proponent, I just thought your comment was miscontrueing their position.
  - dasmoth 12y ago
    But to implement that, you still need some administration to work out who's eligible for welfare and who needs to work. Basic Income schemes potentially eliminate this requirement.
    - sjtrny 12y ago
      There will still be a need for admin/bureaucracy with BI. Some people will need extra benefits because of their circumstances and people will have issues (e.g. suddenly their payments stop). I'm not convinced BI will decrease the number of support people since more people will actually be using the service.
- pinkyand 12y ago
  there could be an allowance for people to work on open source stuff, or a project of their own that has some value .if would increase beaurocracy a bit but its possible .
motters 12y ago
If there were a basic income guarantee, which I'm in favour of, and if it were sufficient to fulfil my basic needs (food, clothing, housing, electricity) then I'd use second hand hardware and become a free software developer full time. I would be working, but what kind of work I was doing wouldn't be decided by anyone other than myself. I suspect that the JG schemes (one is proposed by the Labour party in the UK) would indeed be make-work schemes producing nothing much of value. If I had a BIG the kinds of software I'd work on would be: - Making self-hosting easy - Making encrypted communications easy for anyone to use - Mesh networking systems to diminish ISP dependency - Simulations of ecosystems, including climate modelling In other words I'd be able to work on things of real value rather than having to work on things of little value just to have basic needs met.
- S4M 12y ago
  I would tend to think like you, but what would probably happen with me is that I would try something cool that I'm interested in and could benefit others (I am now working on an intelligent software to teach maths to Junior High School/ High School, so I would probably do that), but without the economic incentive to deliver something tangible and usable, odds are that I would probably give up at some point after encountering something I can't solve, and most likely I would end up with an half assed project before trying something else. My guess is that the majority of the people would do just like that, and while we would probably have more Linus like people who start building things by sheer curiosity, we would lose lots of industrial work and research, and I am not sure we would end up winning. So I don't know. I am genuinely interested in the BIG, and think it could unleash the creativity of some people, but I am afraid the majority of us would just waste time into useless distractions. Maybe the BIG should last a given period (like one year), at the end of which it can be renewed if the beneficiary can prove that he or she has spent enough time on something "interesting" - it can be the kind of things you mention, something artistic, doing some studies, traveling, etc. The definition of "interesting" needs to be loose, but the beneficiary has to prove that he or she hasn't only been watching youtube and facebook.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    'The definition of "interesting" needs to be loose, but the beneficiary has to prove that he or she hasn't only been watching youtube and facebook.' Presuming that the time spent on youtube and facebook was not actually valuable (and I will quickly grant that there are ways to spend time on both that are not) I think this is part of a much larger issue we have with motivation and addictive/avoidant behavior. Push to "get a job" can help some people with this, but I think it's actually destructive to others; I think in general we need some better approach - which might be as simple as better mental health care (at the level of helping people meet their goals most effectively) but I'm open to ideas. I think this is needed whether we implement BIG or JG, or not.
qwerta 12y ago
Employing someone is very expensive. You need to provide equipment, insurance, safety, management and work. It is much cheaper (less overhead) to just provide "existential minimum", lets say $7000 a year. I think root problem is in Americans mentality. Hard work is more valued than its outcome. Also some demographic groups are always treated as disposable garbage, they do not deserve support "just for being humans". Help is only for protected groups. Also corrupted political system prefers expensive solutions, since it increases its power and various kickbacks. You can not "extract" much money from an agency which just forwards social welfare payments (overhead around 2%).
firstOrder 12y ago
Unemployment is one of the pillars that capitalism is built on, it is a structural necessity for profits to exist, so any efforts to relieve it via reform are doomed to failure. Structural unemployment did not exist in Europe prior to Europe moving from feudalism to capitalism several centuries ago - structural unemployment is a creation of capitalism. One need only pick up the Wall Street Journal or Businessweek during times of low unemployment - there is great fear that unemployment is getting "too low", meaning everyone who wants a job can get a job. Since the purpose of capitalism is to generate profits for rentiers, this makes sense. The schemes mentioned here and being floated about in Slate and the like are done in anticipation of how to respond to a sudden, massive increase in unemployment for low-skilled workers in response to advances in things like AI. These schemes wouldn't contradict what I said before, because they would be due to an economic shift where the lever of unemployment for low skilled workers would mean less, since the increased quantity of unemployed would change the quality of what unemployment is. The threat of sudden mass unemployment would mean less to increasing profits, and could potentially cause social unrest. Like Larry Page's grandfather wandering around a GM plant with a weapon in his hand during the Flint sit-down strike. It's obvious that structural unemployment is a creation of capitalism, as it did not exist in centuries past. From reading the business press's fears of unemployment getting too low, it should be obvious that big business feels unemployment is an essential pillar of what they need to keep the system running as they wish. Despite this history and current expression of views, people seem to be blind to the reality that not only is the government not interested in helping unemployed people, but that it is actively promoting unemployment, and will fight and do anything to keep structural unemployment in place. It's not an accident trying to be fixed, the existence of ~0% unemployment is what would be seen as the accident, and any levers to throw some of those people out of work would (and have been) utilized. While this is the reality, the standard corporated owned and sponsored hegemonic press is of course oblivious to all of this. Unemployment isn't an accident government is trying to fix, when unemployment gets "too low" business and government actively work to increase unemployment among happily employed people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour
namlem 12y ago
This does raise some interesting points, though I am skeptical that the government could efficiently create guaranteed jobs. Though I suppose we have learned a lot since the days of communism, maybe with advanced computing and data analysis we could actually give everyone a useful job without too much administrative overhead. I mean, the US government could never pull something like that off, but perhaps a better-run government could.
ThomPete 12y ago
All I can say is that Job Guarantee is not working in Denmark and that the administrative overhead alone is insane.
- pinkyand 12y ago
  Can you expand on that please ?
perfunctory 12y ago
> 10. The poor and the unemployed want to work (here, here). And as my work on Argentina showed (9m14s), receiving income is the fifth reason why the poor wanted to work! > 13. The JG does precisely that: recognizes many people want paid work It looks as if the article confuses work and PAID work. Sure, BIG may lead to more people quitting their paid jobs. But it might actually increase the amount of unpaid, yet socially valuable, work.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
tiatia 12y ago
It is a question of time, until a robot, let's say priced about 10.000 US$ with the intelligence of a 12 year old child can replace the majority of labor, while working 24/7. IBM did not build Watson to win in Jeopardy I guess. Then what? I am more than pessimistic for the future. I take this as an opportunity to post some of my favorite blog posts. Enjoy! "There is No Steady State Economy (except at a very basic level)" http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-state-economy-except-at-a-very-basic-level/ http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-stat... Limits to Growth–At our doorstep, but not recognized http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growth-at-our-doorstep-but-not-recognized http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growt... Wealth And Energy Consumption Are Inseparable http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-consumption-are-inseparable.html http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-... Galactic-Scale Energy http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...
dllthomas 12y ago
"Yglesias may not realize it, but all serious academic support for BIG is based on the idea that many people will quit working" "BIG does little for those who want to work." These seem contradictory. Presumably those who want to work can fill positions vacated by the many people who quit working (but are still able to express their needs directly through the market).

33 points by seoguru 12y ago

Is there some generic framework for these ideas? For example, if I simplify my country "social net", it basically is, that either you have job and pay taxes, or you don't have a job, and you can apply for government help. Then we have minimal wage requirement in our law. I know that a faction in our government argues, that this system has two main problems: 1) for low income people it might not be worth to search job, because often they would be paid just a little extra for large amount of work, than they alredy receive from welfare 2) employers complain, that because of high income taxes and other expeditures on employees it is not worth for them to employ people that recieve low salary. The party proposed to add a fixed sum of money negative income tax to the income tax rate as a quite elegant solution, resulting basicaly in BIG in the country. I wonder how well would that work, because at least it solves these two problems they stated.

jiggy2011 12y ago

If you have a guaranteed job, can you be fired from it? If so are you cut off from all income for some period of time? If not, what stops somebody from turning up and having very low or no productivity and demotivating others?

dm2 12y ago
I think Japan has something close to guaranteed job, their culture is somewhat different from American culture, it would be very interesting to study. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-illegal-japan-workers-are-sent-to-the-boredom-room.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-il...
- dllthomas 12y ago
  What that's talking about is quite different. That's inability to fire from a private position, this is (approximate) inability to refrain from hiring for a public position. It's still, certainly, an interesting thing.
seoguru 12y ago
I think people could get fired from their job with cause and have a waiting period before being allowed to give it another try.

mhaymo 12y ago

The writer doesn't justify his insistence that a Job Guarantee "IS NOT ‘MAKE-WORK’". It seems to me that if the primary purpose of a job is to provide work, then it is by definition make-work.

tomp 12y ago
S/he says that government jobs would be those that benefit the community. It's not hard to come up with examples of those kinds of jobs - care for the elderly, cheap & healthy kitchens (like kitchens for the homeless, but for everyone instead), more repair and maintenance of infrastructure or new infrastructure (e.g. before WW2, German's increased employment by building highways throughout the country), culture and art events, recycling, running non-for-profit stores (for many basic items, the margin of the store is much greater than production costs) ... IMO, that's much less make-work than advertising, sales and similar (basically, jobs that exist because your product is not good enough to sell itself).
- anon4 12y ago
  But who would want a human to do those things if a machine can do it better, faster and more efficiently?
  - vanderZwan 12y ago
    "Let the robots do the robotic work, let humans flourish creatively." - Matthew Taylor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDQosiH4VAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDQosiH4VAc
- vanderZwan 12y ago
  These are also all examples of where adding a layer of bureaucracy to get paid ruins it. From what my parents (both GPs) told me, in the Netherlands we used to have a lot of volunteers helping out family members who needed extra support, and who simply got a fixed amount of extra money per month, no hassle. This had the extra benefit that it let nurses and doctors focus on the more difficult problems that they specifically were trained for. Then the government decided things had to be more fair (we're talking early eighties), so people suddenly had to fill in forms defining exactly how many hours they spent on helping out family to get the amount of money they deserve. Or something like that. The point was that there was this new layer of bureaucratic administration. It was a disaster, and within a few years they rolled it back. By then however, a lot of volunteers had simply given up and stopped helping, and they did not come back. And in the last decade we made the same mistake all over again. What's especially important to note was that under the new rules, people on average would have been paid more for their help - the old compensation was not nearly enough to cover the time and costs of the volunteers. And yet we ended up with less volunteers. Almost all of the examples you mentioned are things people do for other reasons than the money; any monetary compensation should be more of a hassle-free symbolic gesture of appreciation, or it ruins the whole intrinsic motivation. People are irrational like that, and we need to respect that if we want to make this work.

seizethecheese 12y ago

May unemployed people are so because the jobs available are not pallatable. Almost everyone I know that doesn't have a job could easily find work washing dishes or similar. How is this different from a job guarantee, at least for a large chunk of the population?

rjbwork 12y ago
With basic income even the people filling those jobs now won't do them, forcing businesses to automate that workload and, as the article says, de-commoditizing the human labor force, and emphasizing a focus on technological solutions to previously "too cheap to automate" tasks.
- hvidgaard 12y ago
  Not only that. People need income, and thus the employer have an major advantage. With BIG people do not need the money to the same extend and thus evaluate the cost/benefit much more fairly. I'm not going to bust my ass off for 10$ an hour with zero benefits. On the other hand if the same job gave me 30$ I might not mind it.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    "I'm not going to bust my ass off for 10$ an hour with zero benefits." Unless it's to an end I feel passionate about. Then I might do it for $5 or for free.

a-saleh 12y ago

"Under BIG, production drops, consumption rises, and so do prices. Suddenly, the value of the BIG grant has been eroded. Great success: the poor are still poor." I was under impression, that BIG works on assumption, that production doesn't drop, because the people that would consider not working are often the people that wouldn't produce as much. On the other hand, the rise in compsumption would be fueled by newly found buying power of the low income population, and that means bussinesses would care about them more. For employers BIG would basically mean a flat discount on all of the employees. And for government and people with low income it would mean a large reduction in byrocracy. -------- Unfortunately lots of these assumptions on BIG are somewhat culture dependent.

tomp 12y ago
> the people that would consider not working are often the people that wouldn't produce as much. What do you mean? The jobs that suck the most and are paid the least are often the ones that absolutely have to be done (by a human), at least in the today's societies: garbage collector, construction worker, cleaners, store/fast-food workers, ...
- warcode 12y ago
  All of the jobs you mention can be done by robots. Some of them can be done by robots TODAY.
  - tomp 12y ago
    Personally, I haven't seen any of the done by robots (except for Roomba, but that's not even cleaning - I'm talking about things like bathroom, trash, ... i.e. cleaning of corporate offices). Also, even if it's possible in the next decade, it will probably be much more expensive and capital intensive than human labor for quite some time.
- a-saleh 12y ago
  Well. I remember a time, when every store in my country had a shop-keeper, that would hand you the goods over the counter. Usualy shop had one shopkeeper that tended to all of the shop (counter, refilling, e.t.c) Then somebody figured out, that if you introduce a one way door in, and one way out, you can have larger store tended by much smaller number of people. And now in some shops they replace three counters that had to have people with ten self-checkout counters and one guy doing oversight ...

viraptor 12y ago

I'm a bit confused about JG idea. Maybe it's different times now, but it reminds me of the old system in Poland where everyone doing something in their assigned work got paid. As a result, there were many people simply showing up for work and expecting to be paid. People on higher positions in common jobs often took the "I rule over customers" mentality. (think shop managers) Even worse for services, any public/government work, etc. The quality of work simply did not matter. There's even a saying people will still recognise, which means something close to: whether you stand or lay down, you're entitled to the wage. Sure, the political system was completely different, what you could spend your money on was limited, but... This image is in the back of my mind when people talk about JG - and I'm not sure why it wouldn't happen again.

mynameishere 12y ago
Sure, the political system was completely different There's your clue. The "job guarantee", as promoted by these people, is designed to get the political system changed to that of cold war-era Poland. In reality, basic income and every variant of it are extremely undesirable programs, unless they become somehow necessary--like chemotherapy. At some point, society is simply going to recognize that millions of people are useless (see previous clumsy metaphor) and deal with it. So you can give them their daily bread (basic income) or make them pretend to work for their daily bread (job guarantees). Anyway, we're already half way to basic income through a slew of programs from SNAP to Section 8 to SS disability benefits. It's weird how people are debating a resolved question.
- bildung 12y ago
  So you can give them their daily bread (basic income) or make them pretend to work for their daily bread (job guarantees). Sure, but the latter tries to solve a different problem set. I think overlooking that is a big problem in the debate: the basic income side reduces jobs to the income generated. The full employment side (through JG, reduction in working hours and similar models) tries to solve more: For many people, a job provides meaning. And social affiliation. That may sound stupid to the creative, self-determined cohort visiting this site, but the ability to live a self-determined life is not something the majority of workers is able to do. I worked in the poorest part of Germany for a while. The real unemployment rate is at least 30% there. The unemployed get a de facto basic income. That is below the poverty line for Germany, but I personally could happily live my life with that money. I still would have enough plans and projects to fill a 40 hour "work" week with them. But having worked with the unemployed youth I know they see themselves as completely without prospects, without use. The sit around in their rual small towns watching TV, unable to do anything productive with their lives. These are the people models like JG aim at.

tn13 12y ago

You can no guarantee anything that requires resources without compromising interests/freedom/rights of some other class.

aidenn0 12y ago

"10. The poor and the unemployed want to work (here, here). And as my work on Argentina showed (9m14s), receiving income is the fifth reason why the poor wanted to work! Why do BIG advocates presume to know what’s better for the poor than the poor themselves? BIG does little for those who want to work." Earlier in the article, he claims that BIG will cause fewer people to work; if BIG reduces demand for jobs then surely those who want jobs will have an easier time finding them?

joepie91_ 12y ago

I feel like this article (and many like it) ignore the distinction between "wanting a job with a salary" and "wanting to have something to do". The reality is that you don't need to attach a 'salary' to a 'job' to get people to do something useful. Given the time and resources, they will do so of their own accord. Relatedly, a post I wrote on the topic of unemployment a while ago: http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2013/03/18/unemployment-is-inevitable-and-thats-not-a-bad-thing/ http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2013/03/18/unemployment-is-i...

rahimnathwani 12y ago
In that post, you wrote: "Unemployment is effectively an excess of manpower." If there is excess manpower, how can we explain the existence of unkempt lawns and trash on the streets?
- joepie91_ 12y ago
  Quite simply; people on an individual basis can still think "meh, I don't feel like doing it". On the other hand you have people who enjoy doing such work - yes, they exist - and they are likely to either go "well I'm not getting paid for it", or they are getting paid for it but are assigned to doing it elsewhere. The general perception of "work" in a society greatly influences how productive people are. I can't even count the amount of times I've been told that I "don't do work" because I don't have a job with an employer, even though my working week is significantly longer than a regular one. Until that perception changes, people will keep being stuck with treating work this way.

shadowmint 12y ago

Interesting read, certainly some good points in there. ...but it doesnt address the fundamental issue: You cannot just invent jobs and be done with it. A colossal level of bureaucracy would be involved in: - picking what job was assigned to whom - ensuring jobs did not adversely affect or compete with commercial enterprise offering similar services* - managing training for jobs - managing quality of work in jobs - managing transport and infrastructure for the labor pool^ - disputes over 'fairness', 'quality of work', etc. Its not just messy; it would be a logistical nightmare. I cant take the suggestion seriously with addressing how you plan to administer such a system. (* if you think that wont be an issue, you're fooling yourself; ^obviously different area will have different labour requirements; its utterly naive to assume people would not have continually shift to new local areas where labour was seasonally required)

shadowmint 12y ago

Idly either JG and BIG implemented with a custom bitcoin fork and matched with government backed commodity stores (food, clothing, housing for govcoins) would be an interesting system. Particularly it would solve a number of inflation issues around BIG I imagine... (and motivate people to get off big on to a real job if they wanted luxury goods).

dllthomas 12y ago
Particularly for BIG, you would need some mechanism of determining uniqueness of users, ending payments to the deceased, &c. That does away with much of the benefit of a system like bitcoin, without some technologies that (as of yet) no one has figured out. If you can solve the relevant problems, then I agree it would be interesting!

k__ 12y ago

What about stuff that doesn't get paid but need people to work on it? There is much work to do in community work, free software or fine arts. The JG will probably only create jobs in the first category. With BIG all people can choose where they want to work and don't have to base their decision on the wage the job pays.

marvin 12y ago

Job guarantees kill one of the key advantages of basic income: Basic income allows us to dramatically reduce the overhead in social services and other administrative programs that choose who should get paid benefits and weed out those who abuse the system. In a world of guaranteed jobs, you would either have to maintain the administration or force sick people to work. Not to mention that basic income could have the huge economic advantage of allowing people to productively use their time to develop products and services they couldn't afford to before. Some of the earners of basic income will certainly do great things with their freedom, which will benefit everyone.

sjtrny 12y ago
I don't think Job Guarantee proponents are suggesting that the sick and disabled also have to work. They continue to receive welfare without any work requirements. I'm not a JG proponent, I just thought your comment was miscontrueing their position.
- dasmoth 12y ago
  But to implement that, you still need some administration to work out who's eligible for welfare and who needs to work. Basic Income schemes potentially eliminate this requirement.
  - sjtrny 12y ago
    There will still be a need for admin/bureaucracy with BI. Some people will need extra benefits because of their circumstances and people will have issues (e.g. suddenly their payments stop). I'm not convinced BI will decrease the number of support people since more people will actually be using the service.
pinkyand 12y ago
there could be an allowance for people to work on open source stuff, or a project of their own that has some value .if would increase beaurocracy a bit but its possible .

motters 12y ago

If there were a basic income guarantee, which I'm in favour of, and if it were sufficient to fulfil my basic needs (food, clothing, housing, electricity) then I'd use second hand hardware and become a free software developer full time. I would be working, but what kind of work I was doing wouldn't be decided by anyone other than myself. I suspect that the JG schemes (one is proposed by the Labour party in the UK) would indeed be make-work schemes producing nothing much of value. If I had a BIG the kinds of software I'd work on would be: - Making self-hosting easy - Making encrypted communications easy for anyone to use - Mesh networking systems to diminish ISP dependency - Simulations of ecosystems, including climate modelling In other words I'd be able to work on things of real value rather than having to work on things of little value just to have basic needs met.

S4M 12y ago
I would tend to think like you, but what would probably happen with me is that I would try something cool that I'm interested in and could benefit others (I am now working on an intelligent software to teach maths to Junior High School/ High School, so I would probably do that), but without the economic incentive to deliver something tangible and usable, odds are that I would probably give up at some point after encountering something I can't solve, and most likely I would end up with an half assed project before trying something else. My guess is that the majority of the people would do just like that, and while we would probably have more Linus like people who start building things by sheer curiosity, we would lose lots of industrial work and research, and I am not sure we would end up winning. So I don't know. I am genuinely interested in the BIG, and think it could unleash the creativity of some people, but I am afraid the majority of us would just waste time into useless distractions. Maybe the BIG should last a given period (like one year), at the end of which it can be renewed if the beneficiary can prove that he or she has spent enough time on something "interesting" - it can be the kind of things you mention, something artistic, doing some studies, traveling, etc. The definition of "interesting" needs to be loose, but the beneficiary has to prove that he or she hasn't only been watching youtube and facebook.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  'The definition of "interesting" needs to be loose, but the beneficiary has to prove that he or she hasn't only been watching youtube and facebook.' Presuming that the time spent on youtube and facebook was not actually valuable (and I will quickly grant that there are ways to spend time on both that are not) I think this is part of a much larger issue we have with motivation and addictive/avoidant behavior. Push to "get a job" can help some people with this, but I think it's actually destructive to others; I think in general we need some better approach - which might be as simple as better mental health care (at the level of helping people meet their goals most effectively) but I'm open to ideas. I think this is needed whether we implement BIG or JG, or not.

qwerta 12y ago

Employing someone is very expensive. You need to provide equipment, insurance, safety, management and work. It is much cheaper (less overhead) to just provide "existential minimum", lets say $7000 a year. I think root problem is in Americans mentality. Hard work is more valued than its outcome. Also some demographic groups are always treated as disposable garbage, they do not deserve support "just for being humans". Help is only for protected groups. Also corrupted political system prefers expensive solutions, since it increases its power and various kickbacks. You can not "extract" much money from an agency which just forwards social welfare payments (overhead around 2%).

firstOrder 12y ago

Unemployment is one of the pillars that capitalism is built on, it is a structural necessity for profits to exist, so any efforts to relieve it via reform are doomed to failure. Structural unemployment did not exist in Europe prior to Europe moving from feudalism to capitalism several centuries ago - structural unemployment is a creation of capitalism. One need only pick up the Wall Street Journal or Businessweek during times of low unemployment - there is great fear that unemployment is getting "too low", meaning everyone who wants a job can get a job. Since the purpose of capitalism is to generate profits for rentiers, this makes sense. The schemes mentioned here and being floated about in Slate and the like are done in anticipation of how to respond to a sudden, massive increase in unemployment for low-skilled workers in response to advances in things like AI. These schemes wouldn't contradict what I said before, because they would be due to an economic shift where the lever of unemployment for low skilled workers would mean less, since the increased quantity of unemployed would change the quality of what unemployment is. The threat of sudden mass unemployment would mean less to increasing profits, and could potentially cause social unrest. Like Larry Page's grandfather wandering around a GM plant with a weapon in his hand during the Flint sit-down strike. It's obvious that structural unemployment is a creation of capitalism, as it did not exist in centuries past. From reading the business press's fears of unemployment getting too low, it should be obvious that big business feels unemployment is an essential pillar of what they need to keep the system running as they wish. Despite this history and current expression of views, people seem to be blind to the reality that not only is the government not interested in helping unemployed people, but that it is actively promoting unemployment, and will fight and do anything to keep structural unemployment in place. It's not an accident trying to be fixed, the existence of ~0% unemployment is what would be seen as the accident, and any levers to throw some of those people out of work would (and have been) utilized. While this is the reality, the standard corporated owned and sponsored hegemonic press is of course oblivious to all of this. Unemployment isn't an accident government is trying to fix, when unemployment gets "too low" business and government actively work to increase unemployment among happily employed people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour

namlem 12y ago

This does raise some interesting points, though I am skeptical that the government could efficiently create guaranteed jobs. Though I suppose we have learned a lot since the days of communism, maybe with advanced computing and data analysis we could actually give everyone a useful job without too much administrative overhead. I mean, the US government could never pull something like that off, but perhaps a better-run government could.

ThomPete 12y ago

All I can say is that Job Guarantee is not working in Denmark and that the administrative overhead alone is insane.

pinkyand 12y ago
Can you expand on that please ?

perfunctory 12y ago

> 10. The poor and the unemployed want to work (here, here). And as my work on Argentina showed (9m14s), receiving income is the fifth reason why the poor wanted to work! > 13. The JG does precisely that: recognizes many people want paid work It looks as if the article confuses work and PAID work. Sure, BIG may lead to more people quitting their paid jobs. But it might actually increase the amount of unpaid, yet socially valuable, work.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

tiatia 12y ago

It is a question of time, until a robot, let's say priced about 10.000 US$ with the intelligence of a 12 year old child can replace the majority of labor, while working 24/7. IBM did not build Watson to win in Jeopardy I guess. Then what? I am more than pessimistic for the future. I take this as an opportunity to post some of my favorite blog posts. Enjoy! "There is No Steady State Economy (except at a very basic level)" http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-state-economy-except-at-a-very-basic-level/ http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-stat... Limits to Growth–At our doorstep, but not recognized http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growth-at-our-doorstep-but-not-recognized http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growt... Wealth And Energy Consumption Are Inseparable http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-consumption-are-inseparable.html http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-... Galactic-Scale Energy http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...

dllthomas 12y ago

"Yglesias may not realize it, but all serious academic support for BIG is based on the idea that many people will quit working" "BIG does little for those who want to work." These seem contradictory. Presumably those who want to work can fill positions vacated by the many people who quit working (but are still able to express their needs directly through the market).