This is a completely separate discussion than what people need to get by, or what they should be provided. It is far more straightforward to just provide/pay them directly from the government, than pretend that isn't happening and there is no cost by distorting markets and making customers pay anyway, as well as reducing competition.

Seeing exactly what companies do in reaction to not being able to hire based on supply and demand is quite difficult to measure. For example it can hit the poorer people because companies can't economically provide products for them, hence causing the poorer people to have to spend more on alternatives. Sometimes surveys find that minimum wage increases made no difference, but that then turns out to be survivorship bias - you can't survey companies that went out of business or left to go elsewhere.

The real problem is that market distortions are used to sweep under the rug a social policy, and to pretend that it doesn't cost people anything when it certainly does, and the poor/unemployed the most. If in favour of the social policy then just do it directly.

The real reason for contracting is that the paperwork is much simpler. You don't need an HR department. And the guy gets automatically laid off after a few months without the incident reflecting on either you or him, so there's less risk.

There's another side to it where you can hire a "contractor" on an n-month term, but instead of paying the contractor directly you go through a middleman who hires the contractor as an employee and provides (shitty) benefits and takes care of taxes.

The fact they are choosing to do it shows they have no viable alternative, which means things must be pretty bad where they are living

> A survey of workers on Mechanical Turk done by Panos Ipeirotis, an Associate Professor at the Stern School of Business at NYU, found that the majority of American workers are young, have at least some college experience, and have household incomes between $25,000 and $60,000.

It sounds like the majority of workers are supplementing their incomes, not relying on it.

> The rest make under $20 a week by working an hour or two per day. The most commonly cited reasons for using Mechanical Turk are to earn some extra spending money and productively use time that would otherwise be wasted watching television. One academic study that relied on Mechanical Turk workers filling out questionnaires noted that its American participants were “normally distributed in terms of socioeconomic status, with the average participant having completed some college and receiving a financial income between $37,500–49,999 per year.” This does not match up with the perception of exploited sweatshop labor - the poor who must accept low wages due to a lack of alternatives.

I guess it ought to be illegal for people to choose to make productive use of their time.

Next time, please read the article before parroting your ideological commitments.

Of course i'm coming entirely from a labor point of view, and i'll grant my grasp of economics is probably naive to say the least.

If the end goal was to produce some goods or services that are of benefit to people, while looking after employees, the environment and the local community, the world would be a much better place.

Of course, the stock market might not grow so fast, but that's just made up anyway. People struggling to buy food on paltry wages is not made up.

I suggest you try your experiment on sentient creatures that are not motivated by utility. I am unaware of any at this point, however.

Assertion based on facts not found in evidence. Just because they take remote jobs that can be done at their whim whenever they want doesn't mean they can't find a viable alternative. In fact, there aren't many jobs where those qualifications are met.

That is why this is slightly different. It is the micro payment for micro work.

Chillingly spoken like a true, cold-blooded functionary. Are humans mere "capital"? Is their worth decided by being "utilized"? Is that what the meaning of our existence is reduced to? Perhaps our robotic overlords will agree that such a determination fits each and all of us. Tarpaper shacks, dirty water, food scraps and, every now and then, a glance at the Sun when the heat and clouds of pollution part for a short moment.

Either that or our future could be much less deterministic and free-form through the elimination of such de-liberate prognoses. One way or another that viewpoint of humanity is doomed to extinction. I'll keep my fork packed, friend.

What is the incentive to do an online job and set your prices at the lowest possible legal limit? Surely nearly anything else you could do with a computer would be more valuable? I mean, if you get good enough playing computer games you can make more than minimum wage.

At least with transcribing english text you have some advantage by being a native english speaker.

I am a avid gamer, but I gave up forever in going pro, because practice to reach pro level is tiring, VERY tiring...

One pro player lived unoficially with me (actually, he lived somewhere else but hated his roomates, so he hanged around my house instead), he would arrive from university, sit on the computer, and play until 4 in the morning, eat delivery McDonald every day, drop on the floor (yes, the floor, not a bed, or a cushion, or anything like this), sleep, wake up at 7 and go to university (without taking a bath...)

Sometimes he would get too smelly or clearly lacked decent food, then I and other roomates would kick him out back to his house, and let him return about 3 days later.

He is a player I still don't enjoy playing against (Because he wipe the floor with me), but even with all that amount of ridiculous practice, and winning championships, he still do not got sponsors... Now he went to do something else, and play for fun only (and his performance decreased accordingly actually... during his pro years, I would lose 100% of the matches against him, now I only lose about 70% of them, and I am sure I don't improved, since I did not play for 2 years in a row and since my return I had in total about 30 matches, while a pro player could pull 20 practice matches in a day)

It is, in fact, especially convenient for those who buy this human capital to get it on the cheap.

I notice also that you're arguing that this project will allow machine learning to essentially capture this capital and get even more value out of it. Obviously those now selling their skill and knowledge for cheap will not get a cut of that result.