> Hughes is no basic income purist. He believes, for instance, that for this economic moonshot to be politically palatable, it would have to be tied to work. “Not just because it seems more intuitive for people,” he says, “but because work is a key source of purpose in our lives.”
The Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps are pretty close to what you are describing. Many of the parks, lakes, and stadiums in my town were built under those programs.
A guaranteed paycheck basically creates an incentive to not work very hard. Potential employers didn't look on WPA experience as being a positive thing. A Senate inquiry found that there didn't seem to be much incentive for a supervisor to expect or require good work from the workers.
If there were a way to quantify work to the point where everyone is getting paid for what they are contributing I think something like what you describe could work very well. Maybe the solution is a bunch of non-profit businesses that have the goal of creating jobs and breaking event. I think Good Will stores are supposed to do something like this.
Having a way to easily verify jobs is the hard part. If there is valuable work that can be done by low skill workers that was easy to verify, it seems like the market would have already created these jobs. I guess Mechanical Turk is an example of that happening. On the other hand, I think there are physical jobs that could be done like painting buildings in parks, picking up trash, etc. that would be valuable to a community but where the market is unlikely to create a solution.
In the stuff I've read about the WPA, it sounds like having supervisors who cared about the quality of the work was one of their biggest problems too. On the other hand, Uber, TaskRabbit and others have found ways to quantify and judge the quality of work pretty well, so maybe there are ways to do this that just haven't been tried.
For me, the goal is not to have everyone engaged in busywork. For me, the goal is to end mandatory work.
Freedom comes not when no one has anything to do, but when everyone gets to do what they want.
As for the second point, I would argue such a situation already exists in the private space. If Walmart is the only employer in your area, and you can't live on SS/Disability/Pension alone, you've got a similar situation -- work for a low wage or go hungry ad infinitum.
A public works program with a mandate to improve both the worker and the public good presents a more attractive alternative to a private corporation with little care for the individual worker.
Prisons, at least the one's I've visited, have no such mandate to improve prisoners, thus the forced labor.
What's the issue? You'd work, save money for awhile, then enroll in some school after a few years.
Your forced labor argument makes little sense to me. Particularly this argument: "which they don't have any realistic way to opt out of." Why not? You still have free time with a basic-employment job. Learn a skill in your free-time, and then get a job in that skill.
The real world doesn't work like this - most jobs above entry level require a college degree or some kind of professional certification. If you have kids to feed and rent to pay, that's a hard row to hoe. I know it's possible to somehow get a job based on self-reported self-training but that's rare. If it was that easy why do you suppose there are so many people that are working as dishwashers and cashiers? Maybe you just think they're lazy and stupid?
That is a clever way to avoid many of the key benefits of basic income, particularly its ability to improve the ability of the labor force to adapt organically by weakening the degree to which present minimal support and retraining for better prospects are at odds.
“Basic employment” may make sense as a solution to temporary economic downturns, where it amounts to simple countercyclical spending; unless the goal is to have an ever growing share of the population economically coerced into being a perpetual involuntary government labor force, it's not a good way of dealing with any long-term need.
Ideologies are epistemic pathogens.
Wikipedia has an excellent page about what the WPA administration accomplished over 8 years -- I think it's an idea worth reviving.
That's not the problem UBI is intended to address, and the WPA would be an exceedingly poor fit TO UBI’s problem.
* build your own sustainable house to code in a non-hyper inflated coastal city and keep it maintained/painted according to the local home owner's association CC&R's
* grow your own food sustainably at the local CSA
* don't get into trouble
* (optionally for additional income) teach others how to do the above
Population. It’s one of those things we all tend to stay the hell away from because in the past attempts to address it have been so toxic, and frankly it’s hard not to see attempts today being toxic. Having said that however, it just adds to the difficulty of the problem, it doesn’t make it any less real, pressing or important. A lot of the problems we have today are the result of having geometric growth in the numbers of people for a sustained period of time.
I’m not proposing a specific solution, I’m nowhere near that bright or compassionate. There are obvious pitfalls to avoid such as eugenics and outright genocide, but beyond that I don’t have any answers. Someone had better before the issue forces itself though, because when that happens we won’t get to choose from the best of the bunch of bad options.
Developed countries tend to have birth rates below the replacement rate for native born populations.
As much as people like to point out that humans have a problem with understanding exponential growth. There probably just as many people who have a problem extrapolating the growth of dynamic systems without understanding that growth rates are subject to feedback pressure.
...And how do you manage that for a fractious planet of many billions?
I'd like to see such a program for people who recently got out of jail, for example, or at least an addition to AmeriCorps that targets those individuals.
650,000 people get out of jail every year -- having a strong public works program could help those individuals get back to becoming functioning and contributing members of society.
Can't find a job? The government will guarantee you some baseline pay and give you a job and healthcare benefits almost unilaterally. You've still gotta show up and do your work, but you are guaranteed something to do.
It might be cleaning up roads and parks, building trails, washing streets, and planting trees, but it's a basic job that will provide you with enough money to get by.
There would be career counseling, skills-based training, and opportunities to manage other workers. Essentially, an Army without the guns; a group focused on not only improving the public environment, but also the part of the public employed by the program.