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This is preferable to Basic Income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Works_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Works_Administration / https

This is preferable to Basic Income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Works_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Works_Administration / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee For the following reasons: * It it proven and was highly successful during the previous depression. * We actually do have a lot of infrastructure which needs rebuilding and projects which would make all of our lives better (high speed rail, mission to mars, etc.) * People actually like to work - to feel useful. Basic Income will prevent the unemployed from starving but nearly ALL of them would rather have a guarantee of meaningful, stable, reasonably paid and respectable work than just getting paid to stay at home all day. The PWA provided that. There is actually a good example of a public works program that was turned into basic income (Plan Jefes in Argentina). Unexpectedly, large numbers of the people who were part of it CONTINUED to work at the jobs (things like caregiving) even though under the new basic income rules they no longer had to go.

rakoo 12y ago
> People actually like to work - to feel useful. There is this common misconception that basic income will make everyone stay home and do nothing useful. I think it's completely wrong, people (most of them) will continue to work; the huge difference is that they will not do it for the money, but for the actual effect it has. Your example shows it. You can also ask yourselves if chefs, musicians, programmers, mechanics would just grab the money and stay home; I don't believe so. Only those who do their job purely for revenues will stop... At least, that's my prediction (and hope). In other words, useless jobs (as in, not useful for others) will vanish.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Not to mention basic income is not a comfortable living. Folks will not work unless they can get paid enough to notice. Will that drive down entry-level salaries, or drive them up? Hm.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    Probably a little of both, depending on how much people want to do the work in question for other reasons.
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  >There is this common misconception that basic income will make everyone stay home and do nothing useful. Rather than answering supposedly common misconceptions that nobody on this thread actually had - answer me this instead: What is so wrong with giving the unemployed a JOB rather than just money? They need money, but they also want to work. During the last depression the PWA built tons of useful stuff, much of which we still use today. Why would Basic Income be better than doing that again?
  - orangecat 12y ago
    I'm skeptical that we have a significant number of useful projects today at which throwing unskilled labor would be useful. We saw a form of this in the last stimulus, where "shovel-ready" turned out not to be a thing.
    - crdoconnor 12y ago
      * High speed rail. * High quality housing projects in cities like San Francisco and New York to bring down the currently insane costs implying an insane level of demand. * America has plenty of crumbling infrastructure.
  - owenmarshall 12y ago
    I think you've set up a dichotomy where you can have the PWA or basic income. The best approach would be both: a basic income to provide people enough to survive (probably not so comfortably, but...). From there, you could have a PWA that focuses on infrastructure that features a strong training component and pays well, or you strike out on your own.
    - crdoconnor 12y ago
      Politically it kind of is a dichotomy. I see very little hope for Basic Income politically because the A) protestant work ethic is too deeply embedded in American culture and B) for many Americans the only outcome they would notice would be very high inflation. I'm not against the very idea of it and if there were a referendum for it tomorrow I would almost certainly vote yes, but I honestly think that its basic presumptions are wrong: * The the labor market today is allocating people to jobs efficiently. * That as a society we don't have enough useful work for everybody to do today. * That the government wouldn't efficiently allocate resources if it were to create jobs.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > I think it's completely wrong, people (most of them) will continue to work; the huge difference is that they will not do it for the money Of course they'll do it for the money -- at least, for a very long time until productivity is so high that the economy can provide a very comfortable lifestyle that most people are happy with without work (but that's going to take very high output with little labor, which we are nowhere close to and may never reach, given the way that experience drives expectations and expectations increase with output.) BI reduces the downside risk of unemployment or entrepreneurial failure, provides opportunities to transitionally opt-out of regular employment or income-earning activity for education or other personal development, etc., but it doesn't in any realistic near-term scenario make it so that the vast majority of the population isn't working (whether at wage labor or something more entrepreneurial) for money.
dllthomas 12y ago
I don't object to PWA style projects when we find things that we want to do. I don't think it's a sensible way to guarantee a job. As orangecat said downthread a bit, "shovel-ready" often isn't. I want to spend money to build the infrastructure we actually need. I don't want to throw money at boondoggles, which will be increasingly hard to avoid if we structurally have to keep pushing out projects whether or not we have anything that's actually 1) a good idea, and 2) ready to go. Edited to add: To be precise, when I say "throw money at", I really mean "throw physical resources and people's time at, while shifting power toward whoever organized it". Obviously I'm advocating paying out some of the money either way so that's not the difference.
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  >I want to spend money to build the infrastructure we actually need. I don't want to throw money at boondoggles I don't either, but there is no silver bullet to avoid boondoggles. Moving everything to the private sector certainly doesn't prevent them.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    Certainly not, but requiring any purchase decision be backed up by someone wanting the thing helps quite a bit. That's something that naturally follows in the private sector when we give people cash, and frequently happens in the public sector when things are working right, but is undermined by pressure to build out projects to "provide jobs" - and a guarantee makes that worse. I'll note again that I'm certainly well in favor of improving our infrastructure.
thedufer 12y ago
> People actually like to work - to feel useful Your argument seems to hinge on this, but I see no reason to believe it. There have been fairly long-term experiments on BI, and people who choose not to work do things they enjoy - learning to paint, going to school, etc. There weren't any problems with people "needing to work" but not being able to. > It it proven and was highly successful during the previous depression Much of the unskilled labor done by the CCC has since been automated into fewer skilled jobs. "It worked in a completely different world" doesn't convince me that it'll work in this one. > high speed rail, mission to mars, etc. See what I said re: unskilled->skilled labor shift. To what degree do you actually expect unskilled labor to move those programs along? They're held up by engineering problems, not labor shortages.
- zaccus 12y ago
  >There have been fairly long-term experiments on BI, and people who choose not to work do things they enjoy - learning to paint, going to school, etc. How are those things not work? They require focused effort, just the same as any job does. Does something not qualify as "work" just because it is enjoyable?
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    I think something does not qualify as "work", in the sense thedufer was using it, if you don't stand an appreciable chance of being paid for it. I think that's an important sense, but I agree that we need to be careful that this does not cause us to overlook or undervalue productive efforts where that isn't the case.
  - thedufer 12y ago
    I was using some implicit assumptions made by crdoconnor (without which the `"need to work" -> PWA > BI` implication falls apart). The first, that "work" implies something you can reasonably be paid for. And the second, that there's some dependence on others in order to do the work. Alternatively, you can re-word my argument if you'd like - the human need to work doesn't imply that BI is insufficient because people can find meaningful work on their own. I thought the first argument was clearer, but your comment forced me to think harder about the second - and in retrospect, I think it makes more sense put that way.

rakoo 12y ago

> People actually like to work - to feel useful. There is this common misconception that basic income will make everyone stay home and do nothing useful. I think it's completely wrong, people (most of them) will continue to work; the huge difference is that they will not do it for the money, but for the actual effect it has. Your example shows it. You can also ask yourselves if chefs, musicians, programmers, mechanics would just grab the money and stay home; I don't believe so. Only those who do their job purely for revenues will stop... At least, that's my prediction (and hope). In other words, useless jobs (as in, not useful for others) will vanish.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Not to mention basic income is not a comfortable living. Folks will not work unless they can get paid enough to notice. Will that drive down entry-level salaries, or drive them up? Hm.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  Probably a little of both, depending on how much people want to do the work in question for other reasons.
crdoconnor 12y ago
>There is this common misconception that basic income will make everyone stay home and do nothing useful. Rather than answering supposedly common misconceptions that nobody on this thread actually had - answer me this instead: What is so wrong with giving the unemployed a JOB rather than just money? They need money, but they also want to work. During the last depression the PWA built tons of useful stuff, much of which we still use today. Why would Basic Income be better than doing that again?
- orangecat 12y ago
  I'm skeptical that we have a significant number of useful projects today at which throwing unskilled labor would be useful. We saw a form of this in the last stimulus, where "shovel-ready" turned out not to be a thing.
  - crdoconnor 12y ago
    * High speed rail. * High quality housing projects in cities like San Francisco and New York to bring down the currently insane costs implying an insane level of demand. * America has plenty of crumbling infrastructure.
- owenmarshall 12y ago
  I think you've set up a dichotomy where you can have the PWA or basic income. The best approach would be both: a basic income to provide people enough to survive (probably not so comfortably, but...). From there, you could have a PWA that focuses on infrastructure that features a strong training component and pays well, or you strike out on your own.
  - crdoconnor 12y ago
    Politically it kind of is a dichotomy. I see very little hope for Basic Income politically because the A) protestant work ethic is too deeply embedded in American culture and B) for many Americans the only outcome they would notice would be very high inflation. I'm not against the very idea of it and if there were a referendum for it tomorrow I would almost certainly vote yes, but I honestly think that its basic presumptions are wrong: * The the labor market today is allocating people to jobs efficiently. * That as a society we don't have enough useful work for everybody to do today. * That the government wouldn't efficiently allocate resources if it were to create jobs.
dragonwriter 12y ago
> I think it's completely wrong, people (most of them) will continue to work; the huge difference is that they will not do it for the money Of course they'll do it for the money -- at least, for a very long time until productivity is so high that the economy can provide a very comfortable lifestyle that most people are happy with without work (but that's going to take very high output with little labor, which we are nowhere close to and may never reach, given the way that experience drives expectations and expectations increase with output.) BI reduces the downside risk of unemployment or entrepreneurial failure, provides opportunities to transitionally opt-out of regular employment or income-earning activity for education or other personal development, etc., but it doesn't in any realistic near-term scenario make it so that the vast majority of the population isn't working (whether at wage labor or something more entrepreneurial) for money.

dllthomas 12y ago

I don't object to PWA style projects when we find things that we want to do. I don't think it's a sensible way to guarantee a job. As orangecat said downthread a bit, "shovel-ready" often isn't. I want to spend money to build the infrastructure we actually need. I don't want to throw money at boondoggles, which will be increasingly hard to avoid if we structurally have to keep pushing out projects whether or not we have anything that's actually 1) a good idea, and 2) ready to go. Edited to add: To be precise, when I say "throw money at", I really mean "throw physical resources and people's time at, while shifting power toward whoever organized it". Obviously I'm advocating paying out some of the money either way so that's not the difference.

crdoconnor 12y ago
>I want to spend money to build the infrastructure we actually need. I don't want to throw money at boondoggles I don't either, but there is no silver bullet to avoid boondoggles. Moving everything to the private sector certainly doesn't prevent them.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  Certainly not, but requiring any purchase decision be backed up by someone wanting the thing helps quite a bit. That's something that naturally follows in the private sector when we give people cash, and frequently happens in the public sector when things are working right, but is undermined by pressure to build out projects to "provide jobs" - and a guarantee makes that worse. I'll note again that I'm certainly well in favor of improving our infrastructure.

thedufer 12y ago

> People actually like to work - to feel useful Your argument seems to hinge on this, but I see no reason to believe it. There have been fairly long-term experiments on BI, and people who choose not to work do things they enjoy - learning to paint, going to school, etc. There weren't any problems with people "needing to work" but not being able to. > It it proven and was highly successful during the previous depression Much of the unskilled labor done by the CCC has since been automated into fewer skilled jobs. "It worked in a completely different world" doesn't convince me that it'll work in this one. > high speed rail, mission to mars, etc. See what I said re: unskilled->skilled labor shift. To what degree do you actually expect unskilled labor to move those programs along? They're held up by engineering problems, not labor shortages.

zaccus 12y ago
>There have been fairly long-term experiments on BI, and people who choose not to work do things they enjoy - learning to paint, going to school, etc. How are those things not work? They require focused effort, just the same as any job does. Does something not qualify as "work" just because it is enjoyable?
- dllthomas 12y ago
  I think something does not qualify as "work", in the sense thedufer was using it, if you don't stand an appreciable chance of being paid for it. I think that's an important sense, but I agree that we need to be careful that this does not cause us to overlook or undervalue productive efforts where that isn't the case.
- thedufer 12y ago
  I was using some implicit assumptions made by crdoconnor (without which the `"need to work" -> PWA > BI` implication falls apart). The first, that "work" implies something you can reasonably be paid for. And the second, that there's some dependence on others in order to do the work. Alternatively, you can re-word my argument if you'd like - the human need to work doesn't imply that BI is insufficient because people can find meaningful work on their own. I thought the first argument was clearer, but your comment forced me to think harder about the second - and in retrospect, I think it makes more sense put that way.