I think that much of the support of GBI comes from people dubious of technocratic competence. That is, there is much MORE involved in a jobs guarantee: you hav

I think that much of the support of GBI comes from people dubious of technocratic competence. That is, there is much MORE involved in a jobs guarantee: you have to actually come up with all those jobs. And you have to provide managers for them. And this whole system of employing people -- and you could pretty easily screw all that up. One kind of exciting thing that might happen in a GBI system is that maybe someone who right now can't get a job because, for example, he lacks skills or has a dubious past, could get a job paying something really, really low ($1 per hour, maybe), but it's all on top of his GBI, so he's marginally better off, and he could either prove that he was all along actually valuable, or learn things that make him a valuable worker, and then start up the income ladder. That seems much harder in a guaranteed job system. I mean, you could imagine how it might work in a guaranteed job system, where the guaranteed job does teach/prove generally useful skills, and where the guaranteed job is managed competently enough that private employers trust that people who have good performance ratings at the guaranteed job (or whatever) genuinely are good workers, but it's much less direct. The article is correct that it's a little insane to focus much on people living on GBI and writing a novel, and only marginally less insane to focus on people living on GBI and trying to, say, start a business that will genuinely prove to be economically expansionary, but I think it's less crazy to focus on people whose employability is currently below the floor of the minimum wage, but who might be worth taking a chance on at a very low wage.