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"Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea." I'm not sure I agree with this proposition. When I was in India, I noticed a large amount

"Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea." I'm not sure I agree with this proposition. When I was in India, I noticed a large amount of roadwork was being done by men with shovels and other fairly low tech. I asked about it, and was told, to paraphrase, "Sure, we could do it better and faster with machines, but it is better for society to provide employment to those who would otherwise be unemployed." It is laudable to provide people with the dignity of a job, even it it means some things don't run as efficiently as they could. While I doubt this would happen to me as a software engineer, I would certainly rather work and have my dignity that sit on my ass, collect basic income, and feel worthless.

stdbrouw 12y ago
Surely having a job is not the only way to be or feel like a dignified human being? And how long will you continue to feel dignified in a job that exists for the sole purpose of making you feel dignified but could really just as well be done by machines?
- aceperry 12y ago
  In an economy where there aren't a lot of jobs and a lot of poverty, just about any decent job would give someone dignity. In those economies, it's probably cheaper to have human labor than machines.
- TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
  “I have only twenty acres of land,” replied the Turk, “which my children and I cultivate. Our work keeps us free of three great evils: boredom, vice and poverty.” From Voltaire's Candide
woodman 12y ago
> I would certainly rather work and have my dignity... I've never felt any pride in busy work, I've always found it to be insulting. I would have thought everybody felt the same way, but I guess I would have been wrong.
- aaronem 12y ago
  Building a road isn't busywork; when it's done, there's a road where no road was before.
  - jjoonathan 12y ago
    It's busywork if a machine could do it faster, cheaper, and at comparable quality.
brandonmenc 12y ago
> It is laudable to provide people with the dignity of a job It's more dignifying to give someone a living wage, freeing their time so they can pursue useful work, than it is to waste their time by assigning them a dirt-shoveling make-work job that, in the end, grinds everything around them to a halt.
- gaius 12y ago
  What useful work could a manual labourer do, if you automated his job away tomorrow? It sounds harsh but not everyone can be a Javascript developer or whatever the current fashionable thing is. And what's to stop that useful thing being automated away next?
  - tormeh 12y ago
    The Free Market has been faced with this problem countless times, and each time the answer has been "the service sector". First we moved from agriculture to industry until agriculture, previously humanity's main occupation, became a small part of the economy. Now we move from manufacturing to services. It's not even a new phenomenon. It's been going on for a couple of decades now.
    - mtbcoder 12y ago
      I'm not following how the "service sector" is any kind of answer to the problems and issues we are facing with regards to automation and labour.
      - aceperry 12y ago
        It's not necessarily the answer, or even a good answer. But the service sector has been growing for a long time. And it has become one of the huge growth areas due to the software revolution. Just look at the types of jobs produced by Uber/Lyft/et al, and the many delivery services that are popping up. They're mostly low paying jobs for the most part, which in my mind, is not the answer to the destruction of jobs happening now.
rgbrenner 12y ago
"Sure, we could do it better and faster with machines, but it is better for society to provide employment to those who would otherwise be unemployed." And you believed that? It comes down to money -- there are plenty of people in India willing to work for essentially nothing, and so labor is cheaper than equipment. There's nothing altruistic here... businesses in the US or anywhere else would be happy to replace machines with people if people were willing to work for pennies.
- deleted 12y ago
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- pradn 12y ago
  There's actually many government programs in India that are expressly designed to provide guaranteed employment for laborers for a set number of days each year.
  - fragsworth 12y ago
    Then it should be no wonder why they, as a nation, have so much trouble catching up economically.
    - aceperry 12y ago
      I wouldn't blame India for its condition due to having a jobs program. They started off far down the hole when they became a nation after securing their freedom from colonization. They have progressed in many ways, including some of the best schools in the world (IIT), some of the best entrepreneurs and engineers, and some the most advanced technologies (nuclear weapons, modern military, space program). But there is large disparity between rich and poor, partly due to technology enriching some few. Kind of similar to what is happening here in the US, except that the US has/had a much large middle class.
      - fragsworth 12y ago
        > I wouldn't blame India for its condition due to having a jobs program. Sure, the jobs program alone probably can't do that much harm, but it is indicative of a bigger problem - that their people don't understand economics and vote in favor of things that are economically good.
realcoolguy 12y ago
I argue it's NOT laudable. What should happen instead is the road should be fixed more efficiently. It's not fair for those commuting on the roads to have to wait longer. It's not fair to those paying to have the roads fixed to pay more. If you want to do charity, then do charity. If you want to fix roads, then fix roads.
peapicker 12y ago
I knew I would hear these objections... and I still stand by my assertion in general.
- innguest 12y ago
  Care to share your rebuttals to the counterpoints that have been made to your argument? Is this just faith or opinion to you? Some folks in this world are concerned with what's better for people; should we just take your opinion or should we discuss arguments?
- e7mac 12y ago
  This is a typical greedy algorithm train of thought. Ignoring long term issues in favor of immediate short term feel-good solutions. How you can bring up Indian road maintenance methods as a standard bearer for good / positive policy is beyond me. This just leads to roads not getting fixed and the laborers stretching out the repair "job" as long as possible, which in most cases, is a very long time. By using these terrible and inefficient methods, the nation as a whole suffers, including the laborers. Of course, that loss is not immediately observable, and hence gets brushed under the carpet. If instead, the resources that are wasted on inefficiencies ends up channeled better, maybe not this exact generation, but hopefully the next generation of the same economic class could have a better shot at education and/or a better life. Your line "I hear these objections, but I still stand by my assertion" reminds me of the saying (translated to English) - "100 out of 80 (sic) people are cheats, yet my India is great"
  - peapicker 12y ago
    Interesting... I don't live in India, I'm born and raised in the US and live in Colorado. I don't actually think that India is great, either. But thanks for guessing. There are obvious problems either way... but to look at another commenter who posted the Voltaire quote, that is more along the lines of my thinking.
- aceperry 12y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree with your points and sentiment, but have one minor issue. It might actually be cheaper in that type of economy to have manual laborers than to use machinery which requires its own support infrastructure and much higher priced workers. That is one reason why many of the poorer countries don't have some of the more "efficent" and high volume machinery that are used in the industrialized countries.
jqm 12y ago
I would rather sit on my ass and feel worthless than do something inefficiently or something not needed and feel worthless. Never mind I don't usually feel worthless even when sitting on my ass because I find something to do.
enraged_camel 12y ago
>>While I doubt this would happen to me as a software engineer, I would certainly rather work and have my dignity than sit on my ass, collect basic income, and feel worthless. Actually, you say that because you are a software engineer: it's quite a dignified job. Digging ditches out in the desert is not.
- HeyLaughingBoy 12y ago
  I assure you this is not a troll, I'm trying to figure out your thought process. How is one dignified and the other not?
  - yellowapple 12y ago
    Because the latter is pointless when there already exist tools better suited to that task? The efforts of those road workers are effectively meaningless. Worthless. Moot. Their efforts would be better expended elsewhere - service jobs, creative occupations, the like - yet here they are, digging ditches for subsistence wages (at best) instead of doing something properly meaningful with their time on Earth and their energy. The idea in places like India that manual labor takes precedent is a symptom - I'd argue - of exposure to the lingering remnants of a very long-lived caste system; instead of pushing these laborers into more useful fields, there's a preference to relegate them to menial, worthless work under the guise of "public service" or "charity" in order to reinforce that system, whether deliberately or perhaps unconsciously. I can assure you that, of the many reasons to emphasize such manual labor, "dignity" of the laborers is not one of them in this case.
Meekro 12y ago
"Sure, we could do it better and faster with machines, but it is better for society to provide employment to those who would otherwise be unemployed." They could have employed even more people if they gave them spoons instead of shovels.
- jayfuerstenberg 12y ago
  Agreed. Let's take it one step further than let them use their fingernails. An honest day's work for all!
samselikoff 12y ago
I don't think the alternative is to sit around and do nothing. Economies are much more dynamic than that, and while it's true some may suffer in the short-run, it's wouldn't be like that forever. At one point the US was primarily an agrarian society, and more than 90% of labor worked on a farm. Imagine telling someone from that society that some day, tech would allow less than 2% of the workforce to produce many times more food than the current total output. I'm sure they would express a similar concern, though we know they'd be wrong.
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  >> "I'm sure they would express a similar concern, though we know they'd be wrong." I'm not so sure. The work they did contributed to society. There are plenty of people now being paid high amounts of money for made up, bullshit jobs that provide no benefit to society and create little to nothing.
  - digikata 12y ago
    Some of them might even be judged as getting paid for a net negative effect to society...
  - samselikoff 12y ago
    Absolutely, I wasn't saying that farmers in pre-industrial America didn't contribute anything. My point was that once tech displaced the majority of their jobs, they didn't all just sit around and not do anything. Technology freed up their labor from producing food and allowed them to produce things like automobiles, textiles and eventually computers. The idea that new tech will leave large parts of the population with absolutely nothing to do has been suggested before, but we still have no example of it actually happening, and in fact, far more examples of the reverse.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      Easy to say from the vantage point of history. But folks starved, died when their livelihood disappeared. http://webs.bcp.org/sites/vcleary/ModernWorldHistoryTextbook/IndustrialRevolution/IREffects.html http://webs.bcp.org/sites/vcleary/ModernWorldHistoryTextbook...
forloop 12y ago
So they were digging holes and filling them back up! Dignity! Probably would have been better to give them the money, and tell them not to base their identity on their employment status. If one in a thousand invented something new, that's a net benefit for society.
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andrewfong 12y ago
Collecting basic income doesn't preclude you from also working, if your current job becomes automated. Write a book. Learn to draw. Sell inefficiently produced but quirky hand-made widgets on Etsy. Or go back to school and learn to do something else. The whole point of basic income is to make those latter options feasible.
shas3 12y ago
This is a very skewed view of how things are for these construction workers. I'll give you the benefit of doubt that you have chosen a terrible example to make your point. But in general, 'jobs that don't come back' are usually replaced by higher skilled, more 'meaningful' jobs. It is related to the so called 'lump of labor fallacy'. See more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy and here in an NSF white paper on employment and technology, https://www.aeaweb.org/econwhitepapers/white_papers/David_Autor.pdf https://www.aeaweb.org/econwhitepapers/white_papers/David_Au... Now, on to the Indian construction worker. Their lot is pretty miserable. Anecdotes: there were two or three construction sites (homes and apartment buildings) that I witnessed first hand within a 1 block radius around my home in India in the approximately 10 years when real estate was booming, and I remember at least three severe injuries. They don't wear eye or face protection. There is dust everywhere. Children are usually brought up on the construction site because that's where the workers live. The children are routinely exposed to the same dust as their adult worker-parents. Some times children as young as 6 years old lend their hand in the manual labor. Now, let's ask this question: If they used more machines, would such terrible conditions continue to exist? The answer is obvious: a big resounding no. There would be fewer employees, higher skilled ones, higher wages, better work practices would follow. There is a reason we have the Jacquard loom and not a thousand weavers and seamsters and seamstresses. I would like to look for citations, but even a cursory Google Image search on Indian construction workers (vis a vis, say American construction worker) can show you how egregiously wrong your reasoning is.
- zenogais 12y ago
  Just wanted to point out that the lump of labor fallacy is not a fallacy in the same way a logical fallacy is - whether it is fallacious or not is dependent on what economics axioms you choose to accept. In fact, the history of the fallacy leaves it far from settled[1] [1]: http://econpapers.repec.org/article/tafrsocec/v_3a65_3ay_3a2007_3ai_3a3_3ap_3a279-291.htm http://econpapers.repec.org/article/tafrsocec/v_3a65_3ay_3a2...
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neonscribe 12y ago
"If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.” http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/ http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/
jallmann 12y ago
> When I was in India ... Useless jobs are endemic in India. Once, I was in a Mumbai apartment building with several elevators, and one of them had a full-time operator, despite being a normal, modern elevator. Why? "Because he needs a job." Many places in India, the lawn is "mowed" by a bunch of guys bending over with scythes. Not even when the job could be easily done by one person with a push mower. Why? "Jobs." And there's construction. Laundry. And so on... To be honest, India has so many people (and labor is so cheap) that I'm not sure what a better solution would be. Would the poorest still be able to make a living after being displaced by automation? I don't know enough about basic income to say how it could work in a nation of 1.2 billion people.
- aceperry 12y ago
  Funny that you mention elevator operator. When I moved to San Francisco, I saw a few elevator operators in some of the city's buildings. Where did you get the idea that the elevator operator in India had a job "Because he needs a job."?
  - jallmann 12y ago
    Because the friend I was with (who lived there) said so, after I asked about it. This elevator didn't need an operator. Especially considering it was one elevator among several other operator-less elevators. There are useless jobs everywhere though, including San Francisco. Was this an older building with a manually operated elevator? That would make more sense.
- jpatokal 12y ago
  I worked in an office in Delhi which had one of those automatic Nescafe machines: place cup under spout, press button, horrible coffee/tea comes out. There were two people employed, full time, to operate the machine. Boss-guy would ask for your order, worker-guy would operate the machine and would hand you your drink. They and the machine were in a little windowless supply cupboard niche, maybe 2 meters square, and boss-guy had a plastic lawn chair, while worker-guy did not. And yes, they were both very unhappy if you attempted to operate the machine yourself.
cottonseed 12y ago
Although I am one, I will never understand the mentality of the American worker. You would rather give up your time and freedom to have someone tell you want to do (and that's "dignified") rather than be given total freedom which with ... you would sit on your ass and do nothing? Is there really such an utter lack of creativity out there that that's the best use of your time you could think of if you didn't have to work?
- Kluny 12y ago
  Preach it. I can think of all kinds of things I'd like to do if I had the time. I'd travel to bike polo tournaments and supermoto races, and host races in my hometown. I'd employ lots of artists and musicians to advertise for my events and entertain people at them. I'd build absurdly impractical project cars and bikes and take them to shows. I'd build a fleet of "guest" bikes and drag a different group of friends on trail riding expeditions every week. I'd become a master chef and a master artist. I'd probably be much busier than I am now, and contribute more to my community than I am at the moment (currently styling some buttons on someone's website). In fact, I do all of these things in my free time anyway (try to, at least), but it's tough to do as much as I'd like because the best hours of my consciousness have to be spent at work.
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throwawaymsft 12y ago
Who's making you feel worthless? Write, draw, create, explore, build, do any of the things you'd normally do on the weekend.
MagicWishMonkey 12y ago
"If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing." - John Maynard Keynes
nradov 12y ago
Let's assume that as a society we're not going to let people starve to death or die of exposure. So that means we're going to have to use tax money to provide everyone with at least some minimal level of income whether we call it welfare, dole, or basic income. So let's turn the government into an employer of last resort. Even if people have no skills they can pick up litter or do basic landscaping in public areas for 30 hours per week. Since we're going to be paying them anyway I for one would at least like to get some value for my tax money. The point isn't whether robots could someday do those tasks more efficiently. Robots will always cost >0. Whereas the people will essentially be "free" since we we'll have to pay them anyway.
vineetraja 12y ago
This particular government scheme is now under criticism and proposed overhaul, which includes shifting the focus away from dig-and-fill kind of activities to more permanent ones.
maxerickson 12y ago
There's no dignity in it when someone else makes the decision (about what they do with their lives) for them.

stdbrouw 12y ago

Surely having a job is not the only way to be or feel like a dignified human being? And how long will you continue to feel dignified in a job that exists for the sole purpose of making you feel dignified but could really just as well be done by machines?

aceperry 12y ago
In an economy where there aren't a lot of jobs and a lot of poverty, just about any decent job would give someone dignity. In those economies, it's probably cheaper to have human labor than machines.
TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
“I have only twenty acres of land,” replied the Turk, “which my children and I cultivate. Our work keeps us free of three great evils: boredom, vice and poverty.” From Voltaire's Candide

woodman 12y ago

> I would certainly rather work and have my dignity... I've never felt any pride in busy work, I've always found it to be insulting. I would have thought everybody felt the same way, but I guess I would have been wrong.

aaronem 12y ago
Building a road isn't busywork; when it's done, there's a road where no road was before.
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  It's busywork if a machine could do it faster, cheaper, and at comparable quality.

brandonmenc 12y ago

> It is laudable to provide people with the dignity of a job It's more dignifying to give someone a living wage, freeing their time so they can pursue useful work, than it is to waste their time by assigning them a dirt-shoveling make-work job that, in the end, grinds everything around them to a halt.

gaius 12y ago
What useful work could a manual labourer do, if you automated his job away tomorrow? It sounds harsh but not everyone can be a Javascript developer or whatever the current fashionable thing is. And what's to stop that useful thing being automated away next?
- tormeh 12y ago
  The Free Market has been faced with this problem countless times, and each time the answer has been "the service sector". First we moved from agriculture to industry until agriculture, previously humanity's main occupation, became a small part of the economy. Now we move from manufacturing to services. It's not even a new phenomenon. It's been going on for a couple of decades now.
  - mtbcoder 12y ago
    I'm not following how the "service sector" is any kind of answer to the problems and issues we are facing with regards to automation and labour.
    - aceperry 12y ago
      It's not necessarily the answer, or even a good answer. But the service sector has been growing for a long time. And it has become one of the huge growth areas due to the software revolution. Just look at the types of jobs produced by Uber/Lyft/et al, and the many delivery services that are popping up. They're mostly low paying jobs for the most part, which in my mind, is not the answer to the destruction of jobs happening now.

rgbrenner 12y ago

"Sure, we could do it better and faster with machines, but it is better for society to provide employment to those who would otherwise be unemployed." And you believed that? It comes down to money -- there are plenty of people in India willing to work for essentially nothing, and so labor is cheaper than equipment. There's nothing altruistic here... businesses in the US or anywhere else would be happy to replace machines with people if people were willing to work for pennies.

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pradn 12y ago
There's actually many government programs in India that are expressly designed to provide guaranteed employment for laborers for a set number of days each year.
- fragsworth 12y ago
  Then it should be no wonder why they, as a nation, have so much trouble catching up economically.
  - aceperry 12y ago
    I wouldn't blame India for its condition due to having a jobs program. They started off far down the hole when they became a nation after securing their freedom from colonization. They have progressed in many ways, including some of the best schools in the world (IIT), some of the best entrepreneurs and engineers, and some the most advanced technologies (nuclear weapons, modern military, space program). But there is large disparity between rich and poor, partly due to technology enriching some few. Kind of similar to what is happening here in the US, except that the US has/had a much large middle class.
    - fragsworth 12y ago
      > I wouldn't blame India for its condition due to having a jobs program. Sure, the jobs program alone probably can't do that much harm, but it is indicative of a bigger problem - that their people don't understand economics and vote in favor of things that are economically good.

realcoolguy 12y ago

I argue it's NOT laudable. What should happen instead is the road should be fixed more efficiently. It's not fair for those commuting on the roads to have to wait longer. It's not fair to those paying to have the roads fixed to pay more. If you want to do charity, then do charity. If you want to fix roads, then fix roads.

peapicker 12y ago

I knew I would hear these objections... and I still stand by my assertion in general.

innguest 12y ago
Care to share your rebuttals to the counterpoints that have been made to your argument? Is this just faith or opinion to you? Some folks in this world are concerned with what's better for people; should we just take your opinion or should we discuss arguments?
e7mac 12y ago
This is a typical greedy algorithm train of thought. Ignoring long term issues in favor of immediate short term feel-good solutions. How you can bring up Indian road maintenance methods as a standard bearer for good / positive policy is beyond me. This just leads to roads not getting fixed and the laborers stretching out the repair "job" as long as possible, which in most cases, is a very long time. By using these terrible and inefficient methods, the nation as a whole suffers, including the laborers. Of course, that loss is not immediately observable, and hence gets brushed under the carpet. If instead, the resources that are wasted on inefficiencies ends up channeled better, maybe not this exact generation, but hopefully the next generation of the same economic class could have a better shot at education and/or a better life. Your line "I hear these objections, but I still stand by my assertion" reminds me of the saying (translated to English) - "100 out of 80 (sic) people are cheats, yet my India is great"
- peapicker 12y ago
  Interesting... I don't live in India, I'm born and raised in the US and live in Colorado. I don't actually think that India is great, either. But thanks for guessing. There are obvious problems either way... but to look at another commenter who posted the Voltaire quote, that is more along the lines of my thinking.
aceperry 12y ago
I wholeheartedly agree with your points and sentiment, but have one minor issue. It might actually be cheaper in that type of economy to have manual laborers than to use machinery which requires its own support infrastructure and much higher priced workers. That is one reason why many of the poorer countries don't have some of the more "efficent" and high volume machinery that are used in the industrialized countries.

jqm 12y ago

I would rather sit on my ass and feel worthless than do something inefficiently or something not needed and feel worthless. Never mind I don't usually feel worthless even when sitting on my ass because I find something to do.

enraged_camel 12y ago

>>While I doubt this would happen to me as a software engineer, I would certainly rather work and have my dignity than sit on my ass, collect basic income, and feel worthless. Actually, you say that because you are a software engineer: it's quite a dignified job. Digging ditches out in the desert is not.

HeyLaughingBoy 12y ago
I assure you this is not a troll, I'm trying to figure out your thought process. How is one dignified and the other not?
- yellowapple 12y ago
  Because the latter is pointless when there already exist tools better suited to that task? The efforts of those road workers are effectively meaningless. Worthless. Moot. Their efforts would be better expended elsewhere - service jobs, creative occupations, the like - yet here they are, digging ditches for subsistence wages (at best) instead of doing something properly meaningful with their time on Earth and their energy. The idea in places like India that manual labor takes precedent is a symptom - I'd argue - of exposure to the lingering remnants of a very long-lived caste system; instead of pushing these laborers into more useful fields, there's a preference to relegate them to menial, worthless work under the guise of "public service" or "charity" in order to reinforce that system, whether deliberately or perhaps unconsciously. I can assure you that, of the many reasons to emphasize such manual labor, "dignity" of the laborers is not one of them in this case.

Meekro 12y ago

"Sure, we could do it better and faster with machines, but it is better for society to provide employment to those who would otherwise be unemployed." They could have employed even more people if they gave them spoons instead of shovels.

jayfuerstenberg 12y ago
Agreed. Let's take it one step further than let them use their fingernails. An honest day's work for all!

samselikoff 12y ago

I don't think the alternative is to sit around and do nothing. Economies are much more dynamic than that, and while it's true some may suffer in the short-run, it's wouldn't be like that forever. At one point the US was primarily an agrarian society, and more than 90% of labor worked on a farm. Imagine telling someone from that society that some day, tech would allow less than 2% of the workforce to produce many times more food than the current total output. I'm sure they would express a similar concern, though we know they'd be wrong.

k-mcgrady 12y ago
>> "I'm sure they would express a similar concern, though we know they'd be wrong." I'm not so sure. The work they did contributed to society. There are plenty of people now being paid high amounts of money for made up, bullshit jobs that provide no benefit to society and create little to nothing.
- digikata 12y ago
  Some of them might even be judged as getting paid for a net negative effect to society...
- samselikoff 12y ago
  Absolutely, I wasn't saying that farmers in pre-industrial America didn't contribute anything. My point was that once tech displaced the majority of their jobs, they didn't all just sit around and not do anything. Technology freed up their labor from producing food and allowed them to produce things like automobiles, textiles and eventually computers. The idea that new tech will leave large parts of the population with absolutely nothing to do has been suggested before, but we still have no example of it actually happening, and in fact, far more examples of the reverse.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Easy to say from the vantage point of history. But folks starved, died when their livelihood disappeared. http://webs.bcp.org/sites/vcleary/ModernWorldHistoryTextbook/IndustrialRevolution/IREffects.html http://webs.bcp.org/sites/vcleary/ModernWorldHistoryTextbook...

forloop 12y ago

So they were digging holes and filling them back up! Dignity! Probably would have been better to give them the money, and tell them not to base their identity on their employment status. If one in a thousand invented something new, that's a net benefit for society.

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andrewfong 12y ago

Collecting basic income doesn't preclude you from also working, if your current job becomes automated. Write a book. Learn to draw. Sell inefficiently produced but quirky hand-made widgets on Etsy. Or go back to school and learn to do something else. The whole point of basic income is to make those latter options feasible.

shas3 12y ago

This is a very skewed view of how things are for these construction workers. I'll give you the benefit of doubt that you have chosen a terrible example to make your point. But in general, 'jobs that don't come back' are usually replaced by higher skilled, more 'meaningful' jobs. It is related to the so called 'lump of labor fallacy'. See more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy and here in an NSF white paper on employment and technology, https://www.aeaweb.org/econwhitepapers/white_papers/David_Autor.pdf https://www.aeaweb.org/econwhitepapers/white_papers/David_Au... Now, on to the Indian construction worker. Their lot is pretty miserable. Anecdotes: there were two or three construction sites (homes and apartment buildings) that I witnessed first hand within a 1 block radius around my home in India in the approximately 10 years when real estate was booming, and I remember at least three severe injuries. They don't wear eye or face protection. There is dust everywhere. Children are usually brought up on the construction site because that's where the workers live. The children are routinely exposed to the same dust as their adult worker-parents. Some times children as young as 6 years old lend their hand in the manual labor. Now, let's ask this question: If they used more machines, would such terrible conditions continue to exist? The answer is obvious: a big resounding no. There would be fewer employees, higher skilled ones, higher wages, better work practices would follow. There is a reason we have the Jacquard loom and not a thousand weavers and seamsters and seamstresses. I would like to look for citations, but even a cursory Google Image search on Indian construction workers (vis a vis, say American construction worker) can show you how egregiously wrong your reasoning is.

zenogais 12y ago
Just wanted to point out that the lump of labor fallacy is not a fallacy in the same way a logical fallacy is - whether it is fallacious or not is dependent on what economics axioms you choose to accept. In fact, the history of the fallacy leaves it far from settled[1] [1]: http://econpapers.repec.org/article/tafrsocec/v_3a65_3ay_3a2007_3ai_3a3_3ap_3a279-291.htm http://econpapers.repec.org/article/tafrsocec/v_3a65_3ay_3a2...

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neonscribe 12y ago

"If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.” http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/ http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/

jallmann 12y ago

> When I was in India ... Useless jobs are endemic in India. Once, I was in a Mumbai apartment building with several elevators, and one of them had a full-time operator, despite being a normal, modern elevator. Why? "Because he needs a job." Many places in India, the lawn is "mowed" by a bunch of guys bending over with scythes. Not even when the job could be easily done by one person with a push mower. Why? "Jobs." And there's construction. Laundry. And so on... To be honest, India has so many people (and labor is so cheap) that I'm not sure what a better solution would be. Would the poorest still be able to make a living after being displaced by automation? I don't know enough about basic income to say how it could work in a nation of 1.2 billion people.

aceperry 12y ago
Funny that you mention elevator operator. When I moved to San Francisco, I saw a few elevator operators in some of the city's buildings. Where did you get the idea that the elevator operator in India had a job "Because he needs a job."?
- jallmann 12y ago
  Because the friend I was with (who lived there) said so, after I asked about it. This elevator didn't need an operator. Especially considering it was one elevator among several other operator-less elevators. There are useless jobs everywhere though, including San Francisco. Was this an older building with a manually operated elevator? That would make more sense.
jpatokal 12y ago
I worked in an office in Delhi which had one of those automatic Nescafe machines: place cup under spout, press button, horrible coffee/tea comes out. There were two people employed, full time, to operate the machine. Boss-guy would ask for your order, worker-guy would operate the machine and would hand you your drink. They and the machine were in a little windowless supply cupboard niche, maybe 2 meters square, and boss-guy had a plastic lawn chair, while worker-guy did not. And yes, they were both very unhappy if you attempted to operate the machine yourself.

cottonseed 12y ago

Although I am one, I will never understand the mentality of the American worker. You would rather give up your time and freedom to have someone tell you want to do (and that's "dignified") rather than be given total freedom which with ... you would sit on your ass and do nothing? Is there really such an utter lack of creativity out there that that's the best use of your time you could think of if you didn't have to work?

Kluny 12y ago
Preach it. I can think of all kinds of things I'd like to do if I had the time. I'd travel to bike polo tournaments and supermoto races, and host races in my hometown. I'd employ lots of artists and musicians to advertise for my events and entertain people at them. I'd build absurdly impractical project cars and bikes and take them to shows. I'd build a fleet of "guest" bikes and drag a different group of friends on trail riding expeditions every week. I'd become a master chef and a master artist. I'd probably be much busier than I am now, and contribute more to my community than I am at the moment (currently styling some buttons on someone's website). In fact, I do all of these things in my free time anyway (try to, at least), but it's tough to do as much as I'd like because the best hours of my consciousness have to be spent at work.

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throwawaymsft 12y ago

Who's making you feel worthless? Write, draw, create, explore, build, do any of the things you'd normally do on the weekend.

MagicWishMonkey 12y ago

"If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing." - John Maynard Keynes

nradov 12y ago

Let's assume that as a society we're not going to let people starve to death or die of exposure. So that means we're going to have to use tax money to provide everyone with at least some minimal level of income whether we call it welfare, dole, or basic income. So let's turn the government into an employer of last resort. Even if people have no skills they can pick up litter or do basic landscaping in public areas for 30 hours per week. Since we're going to be paying them anyway I for one would at least like to get some value for my tax money. The point isn't whether robots could someday do those tasks more efficiently. Robots will always cost >0. Whereas the people will essentially be "free" since we we'll have to pay them anyway.

vineetraja 12y ago

This particular government scheme is now under criticism and proposed overhaul, which includes shifting the focus away from dig-and-fill kind of activities to more permanent ones.

maxerickson 12y ago

There's no dignity in it when someone else makes the decision (about what they do with their lives) for them.