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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>If I had a BIG the kinds of software I'd work on would be:<p>- Making self-hosting easy<p>- Making encrypted communications easy for anyone to use<p>- Mesh networking systems to diminish ISP dependency<p>- Simulations of ecosystems, including climate modelling<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.
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?
What about stuff that doesn't get paid but need people to work on it?<p>There is much work to do in community work, free software or fine arts.<p>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.
Interesting read, certainly some good points in there.<p>...but it doesnt address the fundamental issue: You cannot just invent jobs and be done with it.<p>A colossal level of bureaucracy would be involved in:<p>- picking what job was assigned to whom<p>- ensuring jobs did not adversely affect or compete with commercial enterprise offering similar services*<p>- managing training for jobs<p>- managing quality of work in jobs<p>- managing transport and infrastructure for the labor pool^<p>- disputes over 'fairness', 'quality of work', etc.<p>Its not just messy; it would be a logistical nightmare.<p>I cant take the suggestion seriously with addressing how you plan to administer such a system.<p>(* 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)
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 $7000 a year.<p>I think root problem is in Americans mentality. Hard work is more valued than its outcome. Also some demographic groups are always treated as disposable garbage, they do not deserve support "just for being humans". Help is only for protected groups.<p>Also corrupted political system prefers expensive solutions, since it increases its power and various kickbacks. You can not "extract" much money from an agency which just forwards social welfare payments (overhead around 2%).
It is a question of time, until a robot, let's say priced about 10.000 US$ 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?<p>I am more than pessimistic for the future. I take this as an opportunity to post some of my favorite blog posts. Enjoy!<p>"There is No Steady State Economy (except at a very basic level)"<p><a href="http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-state-economy-except-at-a-very-basic-level/" rel="nofollow">http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-stat...</a><p>Limits to Growth–At our doorstep, but not recognized
<a href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growth-at-our-doorstep-but-not-recognized" rel="nofollow">http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growt...</a><p>Wealth And Energy Consumption Are Inseparable
<a href="http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-consumption-are-inseparable.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-...</a><p>Galactic-Scale Energy
<a href="http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/" rel="nofollow">http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...</a>
Is there some generic framework for these ideas?<p>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.<p>Then we have minimal wage requirement in our law.<p>I know that a faction in our government argues, that this system has two main problems:<p>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<p>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.<p>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.<p>I wonder how well would that work, because at least it solves these two problems they stated.
"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."<p>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.<p>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.<p>For employers BIG would basically mean a flat discount on all of the employees.<p>And for government and people with low income it would mean a large reduction in byrocracy.
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Unfortunately lots of these assumptions on BIG are somewhat culture dependent.
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".<p>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.<p>Relatedly, a post I wrote on the topic of unemployment a while ago: <a href="http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2013/03/18/unemployment-is-inevitable-and-thats-not-a-bad-thing/" rel="nofollow">http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2013/03/18/unemployment-is-i...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour</a>
"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."<p>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?
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.
> 10. The poor and the unemployed want to work (here, here). And as my work on Argentina showed (9m14s), receiving income is the <i>fifth</i> reason why the poor wanted to work!<p>> 13. The JG does precisely that: recognizes many people want <i>paid</i> work<p>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.
<i>"Yglesias may not realize it, but all serious academic support for BIG is based on the idea that many people will quit working"</i><p><i>"BIG does little for those who want to work."</i><p>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).
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.<p>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).
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?