Basic income

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.

underemployment is definitely cyclical

I have never understood why becoming a nurse/doctor meant you had to spend an exorbitant amount of money first. The US is all sorts of f'd up.

maybe it never gets to 0 (although I’ve never worked in one there are accounts of very tight labour market) but it absolutely varies across the business cycle

That's not unique to the US. xp

(Xp)

are you saying demand for education, training and health services has nothing to do with demography, or that demographics don't necessarily have a correlation with the business cycle?

permanently way-too-small number of teachers, regardless of the cycle

so one should argue for a permanently larger number of teachers regardless of the cycle :)

xp- i think the point is obvious but I am writing this from my phone so apologies if it is unclear. demographics are not driven by the business cycle in a significant way anymore. and especially not in the way you need for your argument :) easy to see: if teachers are hired under JG, there will be higher teacher/student ratio in 2009 than in 2006. why?

I guess I mean more generally that capitalism accepts (indeed welcomes) a huge under- or unemployed or pathetically underpaid population, and that meanwhile, again due to automation etc., there just isn't that much work to go around that's interesting to capitalism, versus the number of people on the planet. I think the strains and inequalities we're experiencing already, within the developed world and between the developed and developing world, reflect this as much or more than capital maneuvering to find the lowest priced labor. there is already more than enough of everything we need, and has been for ages - it's just horribly distributed - so to me the business cycle is in some sense illusory when it comes to real needs and real equity and the achieving of a good and just life for every person. for capitalism, what *counts* as employment is something that can be shifted around as part of this same cycle - when "jobs are scarce" you can get people to work under conditions that are morally unacceptable and counter to all the goals of justice that this conversation is presumably grounded on. but they "are employed."

put another way: suppose every country in the world mandated all employers provide 40 hour work week with a middle class salary and vacation and sick days and your basic package of midcentury union benefits. that is: if we ask the business cycle how things are going, but demand it only deal in *real* employment, as opposed to global sweatshop conditions and people cobbling together part-time gigs ---- *how many jobs would there actually be?* i think very very few compared to the world population. such a market economy would collapse immediately (not enough people able to buy the products). which is what i mean about underemployment being structural.

(also yeah, demographics - it would seem to me that the real need for teachers and doctors would be much more dependent on the population total than on the state of the market. idk?!)

haha I am also typing on a phone and trying to wrestle with way too big ideas beyond my ken, as a way to procrastinate grading midterms, so apoloigies if this is all ellipticial sophomoric b.s.

I assumed demographics were still cyclic. I'm not arguing from the same assumption that you're making about all these jobs being countercyclical. I'm intentionally conflating Doctor Casino's essential and necessary jobs with your busywork jobs because I believe in nussing, lebowski

there just isn't that much work to go around that's interesting to capitalism, versus the number of people on the planet. the strains and inequalities we're experiencing already, within the developed world and between the developed and developing world reflect this as much or more than capital maneuvering to find the lowest priced labor.

inequality is curiously decreasing globally and increasing nationally (see: anything by Branko Milanovic). i don’t know exactly what if anything this reflects about work that’s interesting to capitalism though. i don’t see any evidence that capitalism is losing or will lose its appetite for labour.

basically i think arguments for the 21st century safety net should not rely on robot automation apocalypse. i see why it captures the imagination but imo it’s mostly a distraction

we are already IN the robot automation apocalypse and have been for a long time imo

but if no one has any job - no money to buy what robots make - the robots will have no jobs either

we don’t discuss entropy in here that’s one of the rules

but if no one has any job - no money to buy what robots make - the robots will have no jobs either

we'll just make robots to buy stuff that other robots make, right?

we are already IN the robot automation apocalypse and have been for a long time imo

if you read a lot of early 80s home computer handbooks, they tend to be largely hypothetical, since people had no idea what anyone would/could DO with their own computer. there is always a section about the future, and more often than not that future is one in which computers do all the work while we are free to spend our time however we want. in a large way we are there but ofc they never factored in capitalism or the social taboo of unemployment.

Hey, let's make policy based upon an imagined future that conforms in simple fashion to our languorous or nihilistic desires rather than one based upon actual complicated contemporary reality and measurable short-/long-term trends.

xpost this is also how some people thought in the 1890s, and 1920s, and 1960s. it's been apparent for a long time that we SHOULD have already arrived at the point where everybody only needs to work a couple days a week or w/e. sorry this has been on my mind cause this past tuesday in architecture class we were teaching constant nieuwenhuys, whose imaginary future city "new babylon" depended on automated factories underground freeing up the population to spend all their time in play (a homo ludens derivative). the students' main concern was that you might eventually get bored and want to settle down someplace which would be hard without private property.

technology can also creat new jobs tho, such as in Charlie and the Chocolate factory when the dad went from making toothpaste to fixing the robot that makes toothpaste

we are already IN the robot automation apocalypse and have been for a long time imo

huh

kind of hard to find common ground without inhabiting a common universe ;)

yeah, i mean in the advanced post-industrial economies the amount of people not working is extremely low, as in historically low? (underemployed and underpaid though people may be)

well-compensated, enabling-the-good-life manufacturing jobs have virtually ceased to exist between automation on the one hand and exploitation of worldwide low-wage labor pools on the other. you see this as a cyclical change likely to be reversed, or imagine that those low-wage labor markets will eventually fight their way into an american postwar grand bargain w capital? which would be viable despite the need for far fewer workers for the same productivity? or.... what? just trying to pin down our universes here.

if they're underemployed and undercompensated why is that interesting? are we discussing basic income with the goal of catching a small number of people and bringing them up to... starvation wages? what ethic would motivate such a discussion?

well-compensated, enabling-the-good-life manufacturing jobs have virtually ceased to exist between automation on the one hand and exploitation of worldwide low-wage labor pools on the other. you see this as a cyclical change likely to be reversed, or imagine that those low-wage labor markets will eventually fight their way into an american postwar grand bargain w capital?

this will never be reversed and is sort of the great problem with any grand far-left scheme. take power in a single country and you are left with the whole system of production, distribution, logistics that is based entirely on exploiting low costs from world-wide markets.

having said that we are far away from the utopian idea of automation replacing labour whole-sale. most people, even in advanced countries which "don't make anything", still work, and will continue to do so. they might be working less, and they're fighting for scraps of a diminishing pie, but they're still working. UBI to me seems like a libertarians dream of providing just enough income for the increasingly immigrated workers of the future gig/0 hour contract economy to get by on so they don't explode

immiserated not immigrated

Here’s where my thinking on this took a turn. People generally have a fucked up, heavily abstracted and simplified idea of work imo. Work is moving stuff from one place to another, often delicately, frequently under dynamic conditions, while accepting and adapting to new information and prioritizing it based on lived experience and training sessions of varying vintage, and really trying not to damage yourself or others.

This is what a barista or a hack cabdriver or a warehouse worker does for hours; but if you stare at a screen all day you forget how much of the body and the mind are involved, you just think of it as dumb machines following instructions, and distill the complexity away.

all work really is is finding a way to get money from humans

“I love the president,” Mr. Dowd said in a telephone interview. “I wish him the best of luck. I think he has a really good case.”

hahahahahaha

shit wron gthread

https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21741586-team-scientists-undertakes-ambitious-experiment-which-could-change-thinking-about

get thee to Chicago?

https://theintercept.com/2018/07/16/chicago-universal-basic-income-ubi/

fuck you doug ford

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/01/ontarios-new-conservative-government-to-end-basic-income-experiment