Those things weren't created primarily to give people work, they were created to fulfill demand for electricity and transportation, respectively.

If no one needs to commute to work in Manhattan, then there is no need for a Lincoln Tunnel. If no one has business meetings or disposable income for leisure travel, then LAX and LaGuardia would be idiotic.

We do see this kind of stuff - huge infrastructure projects with no users - in China.

>Those things weren't created primarily to give people work

They absolutely were.

They were created under the auspices of the Public Works Administration (originally Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works) - part of the 1933 New Deal:

https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/1...

"Functions: Administered a comprehensive public works program to promote and stabilize employment."

>If no one needs to commute to work in Manhattan, then there is no need for a Lincoln Tunnel. If no one has business meetings or disposable income for leisure travel, then LAX and LaGuardia would be idiotic.

That does not change the fact that these infrastructure works were created primarily to give the unemployed jobs and wouldn't have existed without it.

>We do see this kind of stuff - huge infrastructure projects with no users - in China.

Some of the infrastructure is like that but most has enough users to justify its existence. Their infrastructure-building binge isn't crazy. Our intentional lack of infrastructural improvement (which is entirely about artificially throttling employment and wage growth) is crazy.

Even if they were created to give people work, what is wrong with "we might as well get something useful out of this untapped unemployment"?

Define "useful" to your heart's desire, be it Hoover Dam 2.0 or Snowflake Poetry.

Examples of work more for work's sake might be landscaping or cleaning up streets. There are loads of rest areas or urban median strips/verges that look really awful worldwide. We could easily give people some responsibility for maintaining those.

> Would you rather pay somebody to build the next Lincoln Tunnel or pay for them to write some poetry and start an emo band?

Would you rather pay somebody to build the next Bridge to Nowhere or pay them to start the next Apple?

That's not really a fair response to the parent's comment, but I suppose the parent's comment was entirely charitable to the proposed hypothetical either.

A more rigorous question with which to start (though maybe a bit leading...) would be:

Would you rather pay qualified labor force participants to do labor/construction/civil engineering, or would you rather pay the same number of qualified participants to start high growth technology companies?

The nice thing about this question is that it lends itself to empiricism - we can figure out the most rational answer by looking at the ratio of successes to failures in each category of achievement. To put it very precisely: at what percentage of successes out of total attempts are we willing to choose to fund extremely rare but huge successes that employ a lot of people over very consistent but modest successes that employ only the workers and a smaller ongoing number in the long term?

I haven't actually done the math, but my intuition (which could be wrong!) is that it makes more sense to pay for people to e.g. fix America's insanely expensive and inefficient transportation system than to pay for them to sit in a garage and try to "innovate." Then again, you could argue that America's transportation projects are inefficient and expensive because they support an elaborate jobs program already :)

> That's not really a fair response to the parent's comment, but I suppose the parent's comment was entirely charitable to the proposed hypothetical either.

That was the point.

> Would you rather pay qualified labor force participants to do labor/construction/civil engineering, or would you rather pay the same number of qualified participants to start high growth technology companies?

To which the answer is almost certainly, both. Because we need roads and infrastructure, but we also need a safety net, and they are not the same thing.

> I haven't actually done the math, but my intuition (which could be wrong!) is that it makes more sense to pay for people to e.g. fix America's insanely expensive and inefficient transportation system than to pay for them to sit in a garage and try to "innovate."

Literally starting a multibillion dollar company is obviously not the one most people are going to do. But a UBI also lets you quit your terrible job and still pay rent while attending community college, so you can get a better job tomorrow. Or use the safety net go to a new place where you're more likely to find better employment opportunities. Or start a normal small business that nobody ever expects to be Apple or Walmart but after a couple years will be able to pay you a middle class wage.

And the best part is that you have self-interested people figuring it out for themselves.

>That was the point.

That was actually my point.

>But a UBI also lets you quit your terrible job

A guaranteed job that isn't horrible makes terrible jobs better since employers will have to compete to keep their employees.

How do you guarantee a non-terrible job to people with minimal skills?

And how do you finance it? With a UBI you don't have to pay as much because people can supplement it with an actual job even if pays less than current minimum wage, and everyone who works is offsetting part or all of their own cost by paying taxes. 100% of people can collect the UBI because most of them will still be working and paying taxes, and if they don't it's only because the amount is too high.

What if 85% of people choose the "basic job", and the only way to change that is to either make the "basic job" degrading or have it pay less than a living wage?

>How do you guarantee a non-terrible job to people with minimal skills?

Don't overwork them, don't be unreasonable towards them, don't disrespect them and pay them a living wage to do some sort of meaningful work (e.g. care work).

This isn't that hard. The US has done it before.

>And how do you finance it?

There's a hundred different ways.

>With a UBI you don't have to pay as much

You have to pay more because it goes to everybody instead of just the unemployed and you don't get anything in return for that money.

>What if 85% of people choose the "basic job"

That's kind of like asking "what if programmers all gave up their jobs at once to become cleaners?".

> the only way to change that is to either make the "basic job" degrading

A "basic job" can establish a floor on job quality and wages. Private employers will respond to this market force by paying more and treating people better and they will complain bitterly about it.

I'd be happy enough if there were no apple. Overpriced crap, reality distortion field and an egomaniac running a wage fixing cartel operating the whole thing. No thanks.

I'll take some high speed rail though, please. Perhaps 100,000 new affordable apartments in New York and San Francisco too. Unless you think that there's no need and people wouldn't want them?

Is there a reason we can't have both?

It's not actually possible to solve it the other way anyway. It's not 1929 anymore. Modern construction jobs require trained workers with trade licenses who demand middle class salaries and benefits. That is a lot more expensive per-person than a UBI.

So if you have a legitimate project like that, go hire some of those people and do the work. But what about everybody else?

>Is there a reason we can't have both?

If you mean UBI and a job guarantee, I suppose not, however it's going to cause inflation to spike pretty high.

>It's not 1929 anymore

It actually kind of is. Wages have stagnated, the wealth of the 1% has ballooned, infrastructure is crumbling and the far right is on the rise.

>Modern construction jobs require trained workers with trade licenses who demand middle class salaries and benefits. That is a lot more expensive per-person than a UBI.

Just guaranteeing paid work to the ~30% unemployed is far cheaper than giving a stipend to every person in the United States.

Even if you include the cost of materials it's not going to come close.

> If you mean UBI and a job guarantee, I suppose not, however it's going to cause inflation to spike pretty high.

Not a job guarantee, just normal government spending on infrastructure projects, as compared with the underinvestment we've seen over the past decades.

> It actually kind of is. Wages have stagnated, the wealth of the 1% has ballooned, infrastructure is crumbling and the far right is on the rise.

What I mean is we're no longer willing to put unskilled workers in dangerous jobs with no training and stand by while they get killed or kill other people because they don't know what they're doing or they lack the disposition to work safely with industrial equipment.

> Just guaranteeing paid work to the ~30% unemployed is far cheaper than giving a stipend to every person in the United States.

Only if you count the taxes someone "pays" but immediately gets back as a UBI as "costing money". If you use the same accounting that gets used for means-tested programs, the "cost" of a UBI turns negative for everyone making a below average income and costs about the same as existing means-tested programs for people with above average incomes (depending obviously on the amount of the UBI).

Nobody is going to start the next Apple if you pay them. Nobody. Great progress and innovation only come out of great tribulation.

Gates and Zuckerberg were literally going to Harvard on trust fund money, no effort at all was required of them, butthey had the privilege of resourceful parents with high expectations. If we replace resourceful parents with high expectations by a resourceful society with high expectations, the children that have shitty parents wont have a choice but to do better, that's what happened for my father.

Because Jobs and Woz were impoverished third world peasants who created Apple with no help from their families, government or investors?