Basic income

seems pretty easy to me, just call it communism

^ bingo. you know it would be labeled as communism and mocked as giving everyone a broom and fifty feet of street to keep clean.

I don't think everyone needs to "work" for a "wage". I really need to move to a nordic country.

hope you're white, in that case

a jobs guarantee plus a decent safety net for disabilities is functionally equivalent to a basic income, no?

also wtf silby

"guaranteed" jobs to ppl who can't compete in the marketplace? literally buying votes from minorities because.. government work camps? um no thx lol

i don't know how ppl look at what is going on in the federal government and go "sign me up for much more of this in my own life please and thank you!"

yes we really do need more amazon dist centers or mcdonalds instead. GTFO of here

A lot of labor is done in life that isn't paid with a traditional salary. I am pro the St Hawking school of thought. As more jobs become automated this should free up from people from mindless labor but this won't happen because of the distribution of wealth and people seem to like to make other people suffer.

Not sure if silby's comment was a slam on nordic countries, on white people or on non-white people.

the marketplace doesn't have enough jobs and isn't willing to pay for them. we should actually all be working like two or three days a week for full salaries, but until we get to that point i'm down with throwing people to work doing all the shit that actually needs doing and which the market won't touch. build and fix public amenities and infrastructures. crumbling bridges, crumbling libraries, god knows how many parking lots that should be done over with pervious paving. manufacture and install solar panels. plant trees, fill sandbags for floods, build new subway lines. build housing. embiggen fire departments. give bureaucracies everybody hates dealing with the resources to adequately deal with their work in a pleasant environment and ppl will stop bitching about the dmv. massively fund the EPA and put people to work dealing with the massive backlog of superfund sites. establish glorious new state and national parks and build glorious WPA-type lodges and nature centers and bird-watching stations for them. train and fund the hiring of a few army divisions' worth of teachers to do something about the inequities of school class sizes. while you're at it, build and rebuild schools. kill the prison-industrial complex and put people to work tearing down prisons. i mean there is just so goddamn much shit that needs doing and we've basically been sitting on our asses about it since the stagflation era.

permanently enlargening government is not the same as job guarantee tho. JG is countercyclical full employment policy. the things Dr C wants to do are worth doing on the merits, you don’t need JG to do them

sure i'm just saying there are plenty of worthy things to make into guaranteed jobs, which are not going to be jobs unless they are guaranteed by the state. versus the snide right-wing intimation that government work is bad and we should look to things the market wants to do.

Dr Casino otm

Employ every available able-enough-bodied person in America building public transport.

^otm

Also intended to slam Nordic countries, sorry for horribly-formed “joke”

the guaranteed jobs are cyclical temporary jobs that will be created when unemployment increases then reigned in otherwise. lots/all of the ones you name seem either permanent/long-term or relatively urgent. JG is imo separate from arguments about, say, the optimal number of teachers or public transport, which should be argued for on the merits

public transport is easy to build, if you call it something other than "bus rapid transit"

unique appeal of JG imo is things like

-workers get non-pecuniary benefits from work (respect, dignity, feel like part of society, etc) so unemployment insurance $ can’t fully compensate for the pain of unemployment
-long-run unemployment creates hysteresis, recessions can create permanent output gaps
-removes/weakens ‘disciplinary’ dimension of firing

JG is countercyclical full employment policy. the things Dr C wants to do are worth doing on the merits, you don’t need JG to do them

If the jobs are not things that are justifiable on the merits, that are to be created at any given time in response to cyclical unemployment, what would these jobs consist of, exactly? If they are m/l "digging a hole and filling it up", why not just give people a basic income?

see my last post

i guess i can just c/p it

workers get non-pecuniary benefits from work (respect, dignity, feel like part of society, etc) so unemployment insurance $ can’t fully compensate for the pain of unemployment

obv thread premise is about getting us beyond paradigms like "able-bodied," and pushing toward the idea that in a world characterized by automation and massive (and massively ill-distributed) surplus, that living a good life should be tied to working 40+ hours a week at something. i'm very into that line and maybe my old-school socialist jobs program scheme is a bit reactionary in that context. maybe it could be a bridge though in some way. like eventually get to where the government highway-building and transit-laying jobs are idk 4 days a week and you retire at 45, keep opening up the space for alternatives to the current model. i do agree that jumping straight to "you shouldn't have to work at all to live" is going to be a tough sell for any number of reasons, and that addressing inequities through my unprecedentedly huge Jobs Program is likely more achievable than (or a necessary precondition to?) doing it through pure guaranteed income.

i do think that tying the jobs to how well the free market is doing at providing jobs (the reining-in model) is a step backwards. the thing about continued automation is that having massive unemployed or underemployed populations is basically structural unless the population itself drops severely i guess. there's too much surplus labor versus what the market needs, and that will continue to be true and moreso. capitalism at full employment is not going to ever be an equitable or even self-sustaining model for the planet. we shouldn't be looking to a cycle of stimulus packages or even keynesian pump-priming but recognizing that we face a permanent oversupply of labor versus essential needs, and have for a long time. the problem is distribution. i realize I sound like a 1930s planned-economy socialist in the saint-simonian tradition but maybe they were right about a lot of things.

however i also basically think there are SO many things worth doing on the merits (see list above) that we never have to get to digging a hole and filling it up. there are real problems! tbh tho I think this is why left-leaning and/or populist pols try to talk in terms of "our crumbling infrastructure" - they basically recognize the need for a jobs program but are afraid of being accused of hole-filling "government waste." but every schmoe agrees that fixing "crumbling bridges" is legit. we should just all be trying to raise the status of all these other important tasks (while fending off advances from corporations to exploit them as "public-private partnerships" ). my fellow americans, we urgently need to repair and replace our worn-out, smelly old school buildings with their cramped classrooms, rotten desks, busted sewer pipes, moldy textbooks - etc.

er that living a good life should NOT be tied to 40 hours etc

I don't know what "hysteresis" means in an economic context but I guess I have doubts about the amount of respect and dignity that would come with those sorts of jobs. There might be a way to just promote more respect for people who are collecting UBI without working idk. 3xp

the point is not to confuse arguments for permanently larger public sector or infrastructure spending (which should be made on merits) with the particular policy of a JG, which relies on neither. if the benefit of infrastructure exceeds cost, we should do it. if we need more teachers, we should hire them permanently. JG is about creating temporary jobs so that the govt can be an ‘employer of last resort.’

sorry that post got rewritten and rearranged a lot, it's probably a real mess

flopson: why not both? "I guarantee a job for everyone, and that's convenient because hoo boy there is so much shit that needs doing and the amount of that shit is only going to grow"

the answer is somewhere in the middle. It seems to me that your job guarantee has to cosplay as infrastructure investment and/or vice versa, otherwise we would already have both things, I think. And some guaranteed jobs would basically be "3 days a week in the library so that the assistant librarian can have the weekends off and the place is still fully staffed" type of stuff where people are backstopping apprentices or otherwise allowing (fellow) entry-level positions to enjoy a reasonable amount of time off.

xp and all that

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kduZLSyCU6s

Well, yeah, I guess UBI + part-time jobs guarantee would be pretty close to fully automated luxury communism

the marketplace doesn't have enough jobs and isn't willing to pay for them. we should actually all be working like two or three days a week for full salaries, but until we get to that point i'm down with throwing people to work doing all the shit that actually needs doing and which the market won't touch. build and fix public amenities and infrastructures. crumbling bridges, crumbling libraries, god knows how many parking lots that should be done over with pervious paving. manufacture and install solar panels. plant trees, fill sandbags for floods, build new subway lines. build housing. embiggen fire departments. give bureaucracies everybody hates dealing with the resources to adequately deal with their work in a pleasant environment and ppl will stop bitching about the dmv. massively fund the EPA and put people to work dealing with the massive backlog of superfund sites. establish glorious new state and national parks and build glorious WPA-type lodges and nature centers and bird-watching stations for them. train and fund the hiring of a few army divisions' worth of teachers to do something about the inequities of school class sizes. while you're at it, build and rebuild schools. kill the prison-industrial complex and put people to work tearing down prisons. i mean there is just so goddamn much shit that needs doing and we've basically been sitting on our asses about it since the stagflation era.

― lol dis stance dunk (Doctor Casino), Wednesday, March 21, 2018 10:30 PM (twenty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Agreed 100%. Now reckon with the difficulty of the geographic, cultural, and educational mismatches between the jobs that need doing and the people seeking work, not to mention the political problem of convincing the right voters in a socially-divided society that the program and its fiscal impact will benefit them rather than others. I'd love to put everyone in America to work repairing and building new subways, but that isn't going to mean anything to people who live in Mansfield, OH or Stevens Point, WI, and buses probably won't mean much either.

not sure if there is a particular point in the 3 paragraph Dr C post to reply to, but it hits on a lot of points that frequently come up in UBI/JG debates on the more speculative futurist ends of the left. too /science fiction/ for me personally but ymmv

Idk those places but it seems to me that people in small- to medium-sized American cities and rural communities might benefit most from more public transportation. xp

silbys comment was a very accurate description of nordic countries, btw

unique appeal of JG imo is things like

-workers get non-pecuniary benefits from work (respect, dignity, feel like part of society, etc) so unemployment insurance $ can’t fully compensate for the pain of unemployment
-long-run unemployment creates hysteresis, recessions can create permanent output gaps
-removes/weakens ‘disciplinary’ dimension of firing

― flopson, Wednesday, March 21, 2018 11:04 PM (nineteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Right. It does create social-equality questions about public vs private employment that could go in the same direction as the tax debate, but I think it's worth trying (and not only because a relative is a bigwig at CBPP).

why not both? "I guarantee a job for everyone, and that's convenient because hoo boy there is so much shit that needs doing and the amount of that shit is only going to grow"

― lol dis stance dunk (Doctor Casino), Wednesday, March 21, 2018 7:19 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

in that case i prefer to argue for doing the things on the merits, and figure out the # of people you need, prioritize, etc, than to shoehorn it into a JG.

hysteresis = long term unemployed become permanently unemployable

Most jobs are filling a hole btw. Except you are in an office and mentally doing it while reading non-related shit on the internet.

otm

also "shoehorning" JG and infrastructure investment + similar jobs that need fucking doing is fine I don't see why they have to be separate. The idea that people from rural areas won't relocate for a decent job is mildly ridiculous to put it kindly.

i keep thinking about the new deal, maybe because i'm thinking so much in terms of brick-and-shovel kinds of jobs and we still benefit so much from shit that got built back then...... but I don't know enough of the history of how the WPA and CCC and so on were conceived - did they work up from identifiable and prioritizable tasks, or begin with the goal of putting people to work, and then scramble to identify specific shit they could work on? of course that was widely perceived as an urgent emergency situation, a perception that probably needs to be cultivated/consciousness-raised regarding the current state of capitalism...

politically I think you just need some blanket categories that people buy into ("crumbling infrastructure" e.g., but several more like that) and then you can work out the details, while fending off rhetoric about hole-filling, bridges to nowhere, and how you haven't drawn up a detailed enough list of "shovel-ready" projects to satisfy the particular conservative columnist who is pretending to just be concerned about the details and not the premise.

Pervy paving is something that can be done everywhere, and also something that will also probably nearly-similarly-universally (outside Houston, NoLA, and a few places in the MS river system deltas) raise the hackles of those who don't want their habits interrupted for a liberal/Chinese plot or whatever. But a lot of people are dancing around the bigger issue of the viability of smaller municipalities when the industrial or extractive economic models that sustained them for decades go by the wayside. This whole debate is about how to temporarily prop them up to ease what may be an inevitable move to the cities that's going to happen globally.

My pet program is to build skateparks across America. Will probably drive up demand for healthcare too.

The point I was raising was "maybe we should just not require people to fill so many holes to get paid instead of digging even more holes to make people fill up so they can get paid" but I'm actually open to the idea that there is something respectable and character-building about filling holes. 2xp

The idea that people from rural areas won't relocate for a decent job is mildly ridiculous to put it kindly.

― El Tomboto, Wednesday, March 21, 2018 11:35 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think there's a lot of evidence that a lot of people past their 20s or maybe 30s are psychologically/culturally unwilling if not economically 'unable' to do so today. I say that as a major champion of move-to-the-fucking-city-already.

why i don’t like shoehorning: the supply of JG jobs is going to vary with the business cycle. so there will fewer teachers/nurses at the peak of a business cycle than in trough. seems to me both the ethical and economic argument for optimal number of teachers/nurses is it should NOT vary with the business cycle. so you have to find things that don’t have that property to be JG jobs. not saying those don’t exist, but many of the proposals dont think about this at all

i think a useful distinction for this discussion to savour is Jobs Bill vs Jobs Guarantee.

optimal supply of many of these jobs does vary somewhat with the business cycle; when there is a boom, there is another kind of boom, and 3-6 years later you need more teachers than before, and 60 years after that, you need more nurses. No?

no

I mean the current system maintains a permanently way-too-small number of teachers, regardless of the cycle. May as well go high. But again I'm proceeding from the assumption that underemployment is *not* cyclical, but actually a permanent feature.