That's why I'm really in favor of a scheme like this. Ensure that people supported by the community at least give something back. Go a step further and increase funding for the arts so we can create jobs there too.
The problems faced by small post-industrial towns are many, varied, and way outside the grasp of probably anyone on HN, but I'd be willing to bet that "underemployed", "rust-belt", and "small town" has a lot more to do with a person's lifestyle than the amount of free time they have.
We have something similar in Germany: "one-euro jobs". A long-term unemployed person (who usually collects 404€ of welfare, plus subsidies for the rent) can work in such a job for slightly over 1€ per hour. It's meant for people who need the routine of going to work everyday in order to have a realistic chance of re-entering the proper workforce.
I've only met few people who did one-euro jobs, but from what I've heard, it's never a nice experience. If all you have is a "make work" job, it doesn't make you feel much better than not having a job at all.
Then again, a lot of people seem to be content exercising a bullshit job [1] (like shuffling around memos in an office).
[1] The term "bullshit job" for a job that's obviously useless has been popularized by David Graeber, who claims (IIRC) at least 30% of employees exercise a bullshit job. I cannot find the original article at the moment, esp. because my Google stubbornly refuses to show me English results.
There's a school of economists that proposes a Job Guarantee (called an Employer of Last Resort in their earlier writing, in analogy with the Lender of Last Resort). An absolutely crucial aspect of their proposal is that the jobs would be administratively treated like any other job at the minimum wage. That is, employees earn the minimum wage, and they pay their income taxes / receive tax credits / pay social and health insurance contributions like anybody else who earns the same wage. (The details of that obviously depend on the country.) Furthermore, the jobs are long-term by design.
The proposal makes a lot of sense in my book. At the very least, we have to get away from the ridiculous and cruel status quo where one part of public policy explicitly aims to generate unemployment[1] while another part of public policy is built on the assumption that unemployment is a failure of the individual.
[1] The intended transmission mechanism of the monetary policy rule of raising interest rate to prevent high inflation is that the raise in interest rate slows the economy and generates unemployment to avoid a wage-price spiral.
I disagree with Graeber. Most "memo-shuffling" jobs serve a purpose -- organising thousands of people takes a lot of administration and management. Of course many of the administrators and managers could be removed, but figuring how to do so takes expert senior managers or management consultants (jobs Graeber decries as BS).
Graeber's basic fallacy is comparing capitalism to his ideal planned economy. In an ideal planned economy, there would be no need for sales and marketing, ergo sales and marketing add no value (he reasons). But planned economies don't work in practice, and most of these "B.S. jobs" exist to help coordinate an economy of independently acting, self-interested agents.
His theory is that we could all work part-time but instead we have created a self-justifying system of unnecessary jobs so we can afford unnecessary products. The glaring flaw in this argument is that people can take part-time jobs if they're happy with a lower standard of living. Many do, most don't.
If you are actually interested in what Graeber has to say instead of making up strawman arguments, you can read "Utopia of Rules".
I think it might be interesting to operate a live backup economy, a low-tech labor intensive one that could produce minimally adequate calories for the whole population for an extended period of time without electronics. This live backup economy would effectively set the minimum wage and be an employer of last resort, though it might be some people's first preference.
There is a reason why capitalism, competition, and corporations have managed to pull more people out of poverty than any other scheme. Of course a set of regulatory policies, socialist schemes, and worker protection laws are required to make sure that the focus is on the people.
Sounds like a good thing in my book if the alternative would be higher unemployment and having no road at all.
And yes, in many cases, that would be the alternative. Even the US lacks infrastructure spending despite being one of the richest countries in the world.
Of course, in an ideal world, you'd build a proper solid road once, and afterwards pay people to do other kinds of work that are higher on the hierarchy of needs. But you can't just blindly criticize something for looking inefficient without properly considering the alternatives.
Science isn't generated in a vacuum, and in any case, science alone doesn't generate goods/services. I strongly recommend you look at the evidence presented on the causes of global poverty reduction:
https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill...
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-glo...
Did you read the articles I linked? What was your takaway from them?
Obviously after implementing BI the economy may not adhere to previous economic models since youre changing part of it.
What scientific studies would you reccomend? I dont consider ted talks to be a rigorous science community and I dont think its conjecture that products are designed for the people who will ultimately pay for them.
>Economists have looked at this and concluded that the spread of market institutions like private property rights has accelerated poverty reduction, because of the effect it has on capital allocation and incentives.
This isn't specifically about BI. My point is that you're wrong to claim economic systems don't matter. You're applying very little critical thinking and intellectual integrity to this debate. What do you think you'll accomplish by lying to others and yourself?
>You linked christian science monitor and an economist fluff peice fta: "take a bow capitalism," yea - quality, unbiased, non-ideological sources here. /s
Both are considered highly credible media sources. Do you think they are lying when they state that the spread of market institutions is responsible for the largest reduction in poverty in world history?
As for the TED talk, are you aware of who Paul Romer is? Do you know why he is considered credible? Did you watch the talk he gave, and the explanations he provided for why poverty has declined in various countries?
I didn't and won't watch your video source. I dont think cs and economist are lying just that one has christian in the name which says somthing about their preexisting political bias and I'm not lying to anyone, the economist article was definitely a fluff peice which even the most highly credible media institutions can produce.
Putting your head in the sand and being optimistic is not going to make the potential problems of forcible redistribution go away.
When the evidence suggests that a particular idea is a bad one, even if that idea seemed wonderful at first, a d even if that idea is wildly popular, it has to be discarded, for the sake of society.
The only people who advance this peculiar definition are members of the American left, presumably as a way to define themselves out of being "socialist"!
French Wikipedia has a better definition: the elimination of inequality and social classes.
> The word "socialism" covers a very diverse set of currents of thought and political movements, whose common purpose is to seek social and economic justice. The original goal of socialism is to achieve the social equality, or at least a reduction of inequalities and, particularly for Marxists, to establish a society without social classes.
I guess you could say "socialism" is a label and not a description.
"...said Marx, what we observe historically is that only one class of persons has always owned or monopolized the means of production throughout history. This condition of ownership over the means of production is the single most fundamental fact of the materialistic theory of history since it is this that leads to the division of society into economic classes." [Morrison, Marx, Durkheim, Weber: Formations of Modern Social Thought, p. 44, paraphrasing Marx, The Germany Ideology, pp. 8-13.]
"...it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these social classes warring with each other are always the products of the relations of production and exchange -- in a word, of the economic relations of their epoch; that therefore the economic structure of society always forms the real basis, from which, in the last analysis, the whole superstructure of legal and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period is to be explained." [Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, p. 72.]
"The proletariat seizes state power and to begin with transforms the means of production into state property. But it thus puts an end to itself as proletariat, it thus puts an end to all class differences and class antagonisms and thus also to the state as state." [Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, p. 93.]
tl;dr--In the analysis of Marx and Engels, ownership of the means of production is what divides economic classes; economic relations are the basis upon which are founded all social and political relations in society; in the struggle between those who own the means of production and those who do not, it is by the proletariat seizing the means of production that class differences are eliminated in society.
So "ownership of means of production" is simply the next step, an answer to an inevitable question that would arise from French Wikipedia's definition.
One of the closest examples of an actual Job Guarantee was the "jefes y jefas de hogar" program in Argentina after the crisis (Google it). It worked pretty well for what it intended; perhaps too well, to the point where it became politically unpopular due to traditional views on gender roles, and was eliminated because of that.
In the past it took a big investment to do something like workfare (like building the Hoover Dam), but now just about anyone could do work by sitting at a computer. It could be anything from project management (there would be a lot of that, with the system itself), accounting, "customer" support, or even helping supervised learning for AI research (by identifying cats).
And you could even allow people to identify the work they want to do, if the have something worthwhile they want to do.
Why do you assume that people with their time taken by (almost certainly physically exhausting) make work jobs will have an easy time looking for other employment?
People underestimate how important this is. When you are out of work people have a tendency to adopt sporadic sleep habits and lifestyle. It can be a big shock just trying to get up at a set time each day and getting to specific place with the expectation that you have 8 hours of work to do.
How did people survive before 9-5 jobs, then? Or, more drastically, before the beginning of agriculture? (Honest question.)
TLDR: A regular schedule is just drilled into your mind. It is much more important how much you work (if there are not very good reasons for the schedule).
You are projecting your very unique and overachieving situation onto a world which is in quite the opposite position. The vast majority of the people that will end up in work programs have at best a high school degree. Many of them not even that and possibly some criminal or drug history. Or bad employment history.
~80% of the employment in the US is in the service industry. That is where most people are going to find employment.
These programs are not designed for PhD students they are designed for people who have had a hard time getting the basics straight like holding a job. Staying on the right side of the law. And making the right choices which You and I take for granted.
I know some people who are unemployed for a long time and/or have trouble getting a job or not getting fired soon after they get a job. I respect their problems. What I will never accept is why they aren't using the lot of free time that they have for example to learn a foreign language, learn computer programming or something similar. It's not that money is the problem: For language learning there is Duolingo or Memrise, for web programming there exists freeCodeCamp, etc. It's also not that there is a lack of people that they could ask for help if they really needed it: For programming or mathematics they could ask me if they really have trouble understanding, for language learning I would be willing to help them finding people they could ask etc.
I can accept that people have bad luck and end up in a shitty situation. But as I see it, many unemployed people are simply lazy.
Willpower is a very hard thing to master. Procrastination is a part of everyones life. Distractions are everywhere. People get sucked into watching TV. Playing sports. Video games, gambling etc, etc.
Also depression can be a big part of it. People get depressed and that can be very debilitating. Many people do not want to admit that they are depressed and would rather just shut themselves off from the world.
Some very smart and wealthy people end up dropping out of university or loosing all of there money and sleeping in the streets.
For some people that might end up in a work program simply having the responsibility of getting to work on time and having some obligations gives them a sense of order and purpose that can turn around there whole perspective and set them back onto a productive path.
More than 1/3rd of US adults are obese.
I agree that for some people routine would be helpful.
The jobs have to be something that can't be automated yet still meaningful. My suggestion is make new jobs in politics. More robots means more political arguments over how to govern them.
They should create extra political positions whenever there is an unemployment problem. It would be just like work but you don't have to produce anything. You just argue amongst yourselves. Make new laws. Repeal old laws. It's very social too.
Fortunately these days the market has people doing "real, dignified work" like sitting in call centers harassing people to repay loans while that infrastructure ages and crumbles.
Exactly why did you immediately jump to the presumption that agencies like the PWA that guaranteed jobs for all Americans would result in work that benefited no one?
Further, the major difference between a "guarantee" and not comes when we've run out of useful things to hire for.
Unfortunately it also comes with a substantial loss of rights, which will probably become a feature of universal basic income programs anyway...
That's a major motivation for this program from the POV of politicians. It drives down the unemployment stats which is considered very important by public opinion.
This training could be offered on a voluntary basis at community colleges and broaden the positions available and offer more stimulating options then simply manual labour or service industry jobs.