The fact that there is just not enough work do to anymore to keep the entire population employed clearly points in that direction.
The average American spends 1.74 hours/day doing household activities. Most of the middle and upper class would be willing to pay others to do some of those tasks, provided the price were sufficiently low.
There is plenty of work to be done. Unemployed Americans are just unwilling to accept those jobs at a price low enough that people are willing to pay it.
To put a technological spin on it - if you had a humanoid robot, would you be unable to find tasks for the robot to do?
> Unemployed Americans are just unwilling to accept those jobs at a price low enough that people are willing to pay it.
I don't understand what's wrong with that. Why shouldn't the price be high to get another person to clean up your detritus? What ill would befall society if everyone but the most brilliant (and ostensibly highly paid) had to clean up after themselves?
Or do you feel that only a certain type of person deserves the dignity of being paid well to clean someone else's toilet?
If there were a basic income guarantee, then the price might go up for cleaning toilets and other filth--if it already isn't high enough that a BIG wouldn't make a dent. But I think rich people would still find people to do the job if they paid enough regardless, so what's the big deal?
It's wrong that hardworking middle class/rich people are forced to support people who are unwilling to work to support themselves. If that's acceptable in your value system I won't be able to persuade you otherwise.
But I think it's important to be honest about this point.
Well, then I think your argument is entirely a moral one. It's axiomatic that BIG is wrong, because any potential free-rider problem creates an intolerable situation, correct?
This entire argument is a moral one. I'm just pointing out that if you value getting people on welfare back to work (which many proponents of Basic Income appear to, given that they argue Basic Income will do this), there are far more straightforward ways of making this happen which still provide income to the people who would be unemployed in the modern economy.
No, I think there are compelling arguments in favor of basic income that are entirely practical. For instance:
* In a capitalist, money-driven economy there are many socially beneficial activities that are not compensated (or are under-compensated), and therefore disincentivized. BIG would allow more people to partake of these activities (for instance, staying home to raise children, caring for elders, performing volunteer work, creating art, receiving an education).
* If any social welfare programs are to exist, they are most efficiently delivered through a direct cash transfer, rather than through a means-tested or other qualification-based process, reducing both waste and corruption by eliminating bureaucracy.
* If a BIG were high enough, no minimum wage would be necessary to reduce poverty, and it could therefore be eliminated. Thousands if not millions of jobs that do not exist today because of the minimum wage would come into existence.
* By ensuring a life-long minimum earnings level for individuals, a whole host of poverty-related social ills could be reduced including crime, addiction, illness and under-education.
* As more and more tasks otherwise performed by labor are automated and mechanized, existing social welfare systems, and society itself, will be strained by the needs of formerly-productive workers, as well as their families, who are affected by this transition. If such changes happen fast enough, the economy itself will not be able to adapt in creating new labor opportunities, and more worrying, in replacing their reduced purchasing power.
A BIG could make even long-term economic transitions less volatile, in large part by keeping consumption rates stable even in the face of massive and sustained unemployment. Furthermore, it should prove more adaptable to new economic and social circumstances than means-tested and qualification-based social welfare systems.
Your arguments for a BIG apply equally well to a BJG, if not more so.
If the basic jobs include socially beneficial activities, BJG provides an even greater incentive for those activities than a BIG.
A BJG is also a cash transfer, but with a single qualification process. Show up, do work, get paid. This reduces waste because you gain the product of people's work. With a BIG, Waste = transfers + admin overhead + disincentivized work. With BJG, Waste = transfers + admin overhead + disincentivized work - product of basic jobs.
Similarly, the BJG would eliminate poverty and ensure a life-long minimum earning level.
As for your hypothetical future where human labor is unnecessary, we'll switch to a BIG when we get there.
The preference for a Basic Income over a Basic Job is a moral one - most of the proponents of Basic Income believe people should be able to subsist on the fruits of other's labor if they choose not to work.
I think your assumption that government can provide guaranteed (productive) jobs to everyone at any time is dead wrong. This sounds much more like a communist nightmare then BIG does as it would almost certainly introduce a massive dysfunctional bureaucracy to manage all those jobs.
I don't expect all the jobs to be productive. Some will, some won't. The productive jobs will generate returns, while the unproductive ones (e.g., digging and refilling holes) will merely serve as a disincentive for people to use the BJG.
The disincentive is important - the goal of the BJG is that ideally, no one will use it. Unlike a BIG, laziness is no longer an option.
"socially beneficial activities that are not compensated" -- doesn't apply equally well.
"most efficiently delivered through a direct cash transfer, rather than through a means-tested or other qualification-based process" -- doesn't apply equally well.
"no minimum wage would be necessary to reduce poverty" -- doesn't apply equally well.
"ensuring a life-long minimum earnings level for individuals" -- doesn't apply equally well.
"the economy itself will not be able to adapt in creating new labor opportunities" -- doesn't apply equally well.
Amazingly, that's each and every point. Not a single one applies equally well.
Basic Job is worse because some individuals cannot get jobs simply because they are not productive enough - forcing them upon employees would be worse for the economy than giving them an income to live on
Unwilling? Unable, unwilling to see their own ability or a mix of both. It's difficult to get their confidence back and escape their own emotional/social prison that they are in. Whether it's something of a choice or an unfortunate situation is arguable, but it's a fact nonetheless.
The point of the guaranteed minimum is precisely to make this kind of jobs even more expensive, so that people are not forced into unfulfilling jobs by economic necessity.
I mean, if you don't need to clean other people's houses to survive, you sure as hell will not do it, unless it pays enough to make your life significantly better. Someone would have to pay me in the millions to work as a maid for a year.
With a minimum revenue of $2000 a month for example, the incentive would be very low to do this kind of work for less than say $100 an hour, since it would only marginally increase your standard of living.
In the long run this should work towards automatization of these tasks by producing an economic incentive. And at least the robots won't suffer from mental and physical conditions due to a bad work environment.
"Unemployed Americans are just unwilling to accept those jobs at a price low enough that people are willing to pay it."
The whole point of BIG is that people will begin accepting low-paying or even altruistic jobs once they won't lose social security over it. Everything they earn over BI is premium, why not snatch it?
Let me emphasize that I'm not arguing for the current welfare system. I'm arguing that replacing it with a Basic Job is superior to both the current system and a Basic Income.
Much like a Basic Income, a Basic Job also gives you an incentive to work. No work => no pay. People will accept a $10/hour house cleaning job because it's better than a $7.25/hour Basic Job. In contrast, with a Basic Income, the choice is $7.25/hour equivalent for watching TV, or maybe twice that for working hard. Many people will be happy to live without working.
Additionally, society gains the benefit of the public works created by people working the Basic Job. We gain cleaner parks, better infrastructure, etc. (Unless you want to claim that US infrastructure is as good as it could possibly be...)
This seems to me like a disguised return of slave work.
In my value system, forcing people to do unfulfilling work to be able to feed themselves is nowhere near a positive.
Paying people to stay at home is not ideal, but it's the least terrible, just like democracy is the least terrible form of government we've experienced yet.
And, with an education system that works, it contributes to solving the problem over generations.
Plus, I don't see what the problem is with people not working, as long as society can support it. I'd rather support poor unemployed people than nearly anything else governments spend their cash on these days.
Basic Job isn't a terrible idea mind you, it's just much more complex and fragile.
It would require a lot of political will to constantly prune jobs that do more harm than good, jobs that are degrading and meaningless (think of painting park grass with green paint), have enough jobs so everyone technically have one, and
USSR had this Basic Job thing, everybody had a job but nothing got done because you couldn't get fired from one and not get an equal one. So best-performing workers adopted habits of worse-performing ones. Who watches the workers? Does she earn the same $7.25?
Another problem is corruption. Easier and prettier Basic Jobs would be lucrative, everybody wanting to have them, and you will have bribes and kickbacks for landing on one. If unwilling to participate in corruption, you will only have a choice of worst ones.
Everything can be fixed but it's very hard in total.
It's worth reinforcing the point that a guaranteed job requires effectively zero economic output in order to receive a paycheck. If you are guaranteed a job, and we accept that people seek to maximize their income per unit of work done, then the maximization of that function is to do as little work as possible without losing the job. If you are guaranteed a job, then it effectively means that you can't be economically penalized for doing no work, so the most efficient personal approach is to just collect your paycheck and do no work.
The threat of economic penalty for failing to work is an important incentive to actually contribute to economic output.
I'm not sure why a basic job would be any better than a basic income since it would encourage people to collect income for no work performed, except that it would do so at risk and expense to the employer (and at damage to the employer's brand and reputation) rather than at expense to the tax paying populace as a whole.
I don't understand this. Why can't you be guaranteed a job, but you don't get paid if you don't do it? I don't see how paying people who refuse to work is a necessary part of a Basic Job Guarantee.
Also, the purpose of this is for the unemployed to clean up and improve public parks, repair potholes and the like. Private employers are under no obligation to hire anyone.
A lot of unemployed are mentally ill, psychologically unstable or disabled people. How much oversight will you need to get any meaningful output from them? Yeah, they come and try to be useful, but they don't accomplish anything, you fire them, they either go to court or apply to another job they can't do.
BIG solves this but Basic Job doesn't in the slightest.
The whole idea is to decrease a number of "different problems" as much as possible. I don't know if it would help schizophrenics, but why not? At least it can get one off street by providing means to pay rent (which can be administred by his/her legal guardian).
An unmotivated, largely unsupervised park fence painter might not achieve much in the way of output for their $7.25 per hour, but importantly they aren't being paid $7.25 per hour to enjoy their chosen form of leisure. Which means that when someone in the private sector wants to pay them $8.50 per hour to work hard creating $10 per hour worth of value, they might actually consider saying yes. Any value the "basic jobs" themselves add to society is just a bonus.
I don't see why the administration of "Basic Jobs" would be any more open to corruption than any other bureaucratic role, many of which administer things far more significant than next week's work assignment to people earning far more than $7.25 per hour. It doesn't seem unsurpassably difficult to design a set of rules to ensure that "basic jobs" are rotated and not too cushy or unpleasant; I'd actually see that as an easier task than calculating a level of "basic income" that doesn't grotesquely distort one or more of (i)low-end labour supply (ii)budget balance (iii)price inflation and (iv)rental yields on substandard property
There are two kinds of people: those who escape work or are incapable for it, and those who work fairly (but may still be poor).
Former are going to build a lot of bad fences, for $7.25, but business only want latter ones. And if you have Basic Jobs, they would indeed be working for $8.50 in poverty, but if you have Basic Income, those would be working for an equivalent of $7.25 from BI and everything their fence-needing employer can conjure on top of that, which will hopefully give them something around $15/hour, which might let them get out of poverty actually.
Low-end labour supply is poor people. Low-end labour supply is people you pay not enough money for them to escape poverty.
Any effective fight with poverty would involve disrupting the "low-end labour supply" as we know it today.
The infrastructure around ensuring the Basic Jobs were available is not trivial. Finding tasks to do, providing transport, checking that job-takers were actually doing the requirements, managing staff (including things like providing uniforms) - these things are not small items on a grand scale. Basically you're talking about creating a new tier of low-paid public servants.
The average American spends 1.74 hours/day doing household activities. Most of the middle and upper class would be willing to pay others to do some of those tasks, provided the price were sufficiently low.
http://www.bls.gov/tus/tables/a1_2012.pdf
There is plenty of work to be done. Unemployed Americans are just unwilling to accept those jobs at a price low enough that people are willing to pay it.
To put a technological spin on it - if you had a humanoid robot, would you be unable to find tasks for the robot to do?