Basic income

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

Rushkoff has an interesting take:

https://medium.com/s/powertrip/universal-basic-income-is-silicon-valleys-latest-scam-fd3e130b69a0

I like it, to some degree. Giving low-level workers an ownership stake (in the form of stock options/RSUs, I guess?) in their companies is better than just asking the government to cut a check. However, this doesn't get us out of the cycle of having to work, which I think is a big piece of UBI. Also, why not just pay the workers a better salary? Tying worker pay to company performance is great when companies are growing, but if we want to create a sustainable future, we should be trying to wind down economic systems that require ever-accelerating growth.

we had a seminar on the pre-analysis plan for ycombinator's UBI project by one of the ppl working on it the other week, v cool

Yeah? Tell me more...

uhh it's been a couple weeks and i didn't take notes so this is all off memory, but they're doing it in 2 states (but they couldn't tell us which) targeting people all across the income distribution although focusing on lower-income (for power purposes), rural and urban areas, a pretty huge control group (with some clever compensation schemes to keep everyone answering their surveys). seemed very well designed. they've already done a pilot in oakland to dry run a lot of the logistical stuff. costs tens of millions of dollars

Cool thx

every once in a while i run into an idea so idiotic that i just have to share it. especially when it's not my idiotic idea!

However, Fuller didn’t just shut down the idea of UBI. While he asserted that UBI, as we have known and defined it, isn’t a correct fit for our current world, he stated that there are other, more realistic solutions—ones that truly address the issues that stem from advancing technology.

Fuller suggested that, as we continue to get farther into the data-driven technological age, one solution could be to force companies to pay for the information that they currently take from us for nothing. “We could hold Google and Facebook and all those big multinationals accountable; we could make sure that people, like those who are currently ‘voluntarily’ contributing their data to pump up companies’ profits, are given something that is adequate to support their livelihoods in exchange.”

So, instead of the government doling out standard salaries to all citizens, which is basically what UBI calls for, people would be financially compensated for the data that they give to companies by these very same companies. This could mean that social media giants and other websites that ask for your personal information would have to fairly compensate you for the information that they take from you.

https://futurism.com/ubi-universal-basic-income-alternative

https://www.dosomething.org/facts/11-facts-about-hunger-us

being paid for the data you provide to social media companies is actually a good idea, but it wouldn't be remotely a UBI-sized sum under any realistic scenario

One cent for every stepMILF search you do on Pornhub.

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/finland-bares-personal-tax-data-on-national-jealousy-day/

Great story, thanks! I kind of agree with the Fins, but I can't even imagine how that would ever happen/work in the USA.

“These particular executives have destroyed their reputation,” he said. “I would be surprised if they didn’t care. Finland is a small society. There is a sense that as long as you’re a Finn, you’re always a Finn. They will show up at Christmas at Helsinki Airport, they will be recognized, and they will feel it in people’s eyes: the disrespect.”

Minimum wage, but relevant to thread...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/21/magazine/minimum-wage-saving-lives.html

A living wage is an antidepressant. It is a sleep
aid. A diet. A stress reliever. It is a contraceptive,
preventing teenage pregnancy. It prevents
premature death. It shields children from neglect.

all credit to @loggedtheFUCKon pic.twitter.com/JbI0AvVWOW

— Emotional Stress Animal (@moleculesofyou) April 18, 2019

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/why-universal-basic-income-is-a-bad-idea-by-daron-acemoglu-2019-06

Daron Acemoglu is smart, BUT http://crookedtimber.org/2019/06/09/how-to-debate-universal-basic-income/

He ignores that it may empower workers relative to employers, since a UBI improves the quality of the exit options of the workers. His arguments that basic income would make people politically passive are exactly the opposite from the assumptions that basic income advocates make, and as far as I can tell these are things one cannot predict, either way. He assumes that holding a job is in itself a good thing (which arguably depends on whether it is good/decent work or not).

This is an expert demolition of the mainstream automation discourse by @abenanav. Low demand for labor isn't explained by robots taking your job, but by overcapacity, stagnation, and the loss of manufacturing as the economy's growth engine. https://t.co/FvksF6aa8A

— Ben Tarnoff (@bentarnoff) October 11, 2019

(sorry the article is paywalled ironically)

i suppose pasting paywalled things from journals is not kosher on ilx? (i have access and am reading now)

paste it but rot-13 it first for airtight opsec

Is new left review on sc1-h|_|b