> A world in which a healthy adult has the reasonable expectation of earning a decent living while working full-time at a market wage is absolutely a world in which the dignity of work is a useful social value to cultivate. In a world in which that is not a reasonable expectation, the dignity of work can be a harmful concept.
Interesting times ahead. It's going to be painful getting there, if we get there at all, but the idea of a Universal Basic Income seems to be getting more popular. (It wasn't so long ago it was pretty much pure sci-fi.) Particularly I guess as it begins to look like modern capitalism may not actually be good at providing jobs for everyone who needs one.
Potentially UBIs could be very good for the world, freeing people to work on things they personally desire and value, and in some ways redistributing the 'means of production' back to the little guy.
The idea of a basic income is still sci-fi. There just isn't that much money.
Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean no one will ever wash dishes at a restaurant, no one will pick up trash, no one will spend time wiring your house for internet, or fix your computer, or do a large swath of jobs. The argument that with UBI people will still do that only for more money is crazy, since the taxes would have to be so high to support UBI that the costs would dwarf what people could afford.
As these services collapse so to will higher paying ones; lets see a doctor get up early to wash the floors of her practice since she can't afford to hire a cleaning staff and still charge patients a reasonable rate.
> (It wasn't so long ago it was pretty much pure sci-fi.)
On the other hand full employment through monetary policy is pretty much science fact. Yet neither the United States nor the EU even pretend to pursue it. (China pretty much does, however. It works pretty well for them.)
It's not like providing a decent living for near everyone is this unsolved problem which, if could only we find the correct technocratic solution, we could just roll up our sleeves and implement.
The problem is that a lot of people are against doing it. At all.
Here's a simple if perhaps naive question. Suppose UBI is $x/yr. What's going to stop every apartment complex owner and every rental landlord from raising the cost of living on that property by $x/yr/tenant? Will the government start fixing prices? (I imagine that slightly more realistically all owners of physical resources, not just land owners, would raise prices as much as they can while still maintaining roughly the same profit percentage in order to compete with other owners to capture the new income, and so no single group of actors is likely to capture it all with one type of product.)
We do not yet have the technological foundation to feasibly implement a Banks'ian Culture-type "hard" UBI, and we barely have the beginning glimmers for even "soft" UBI like what many are discussing today. We lack energy production and management, AI, and nanotech for even rudimentary hard UBI, and even soft UBI is infeasible due to knock-on effects whose management is poorly-understood. Example: we already have a diabetes epidemic with low socioeconomic groups, and the obesogenic environment is not well studied enough to know if giving those groups more access to free time will improve outcomes. Will those groups on average use a soft UBI to improve their overall health, or will they choose poorly and the benefits of UBI blowback into exploding healthcare costs? No one really knows yet. I would like to believe that soft UBI would lead to better health outcomes, but that might simply be my own socioeconomic background speaking.
The few soft UBI trials commonly found in citations were too short-lived to tell whether we were simply observing a Hawthorne Effect at work or if the outcomes were sustainable.
Eliminating taxation and implementing a basic income payed for by new money created out of thin air, pegged to the GDP for the year, is how the world will deal with machines creating more wealth than we know what to do with, without people.
It's a direct form of wealth transfer that requires zero force, no "putting people in cages because they can't/don't pay" nonsense.
For social spending, you do the same: print new money that's a percentage of GDP, and let citizens allocate their share to various social causes (police, fire, education, natural disaster relief, etc.).
As a concrete example, if the USA produces 15 trillion in GDP for the year, you could print 3.75 trillion for basic income, and 3.75 trillion for social income. The 3.75 trillion for basic income would be split evenly among the 330 million people, amounting to $11,364 annually per person. Each person would also have $11,364 to allocate ("appropriate") for various social causes.
Taxation is eliminated. Everyone is fed and sheltered. Growth in wealth is shared equally. Anarchists still get to keep all of the money they earn (remember: no taxation). IRS is gone. All of the tax-funded welfare programs are gone, but we've got plenty of money annually to dedicate to social welfare programs. People don't have to give money to the police if they care more about education. There's no need for a minimum wage, or tracking people's incomes. There's no downside (in terms of extra taxation and lost benefits) to working more. And on and on.
This is entirely doable today, at a purely technical/administrative level. Once robots are doing the work of the labor class, and 40% of the country literally has no jobs, and won't, ever—then it'll become a social necessity.
That's why the problems in this article don't keep me up at night: not only is the solution easy, it's far preferable and way more democratic and fair than what we have today.
For extra humanity, create a global currency, peg new money creation to the world's annual GDP, and do a basic and social income for everyone in the world equally, full stop.
In this scenario, the government would need to use physical force to ensure transactions are conducted through the inflating currency rather than barter or gold or bitcoin or foreign currency, etc.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. The taxes just become hidden in inflation instead of visible income taxes, and it becomes impossible to adjust taxes to different levels on different individuals (all dollars pay the same tax in lost value regardless who holds them or how much income they made that year.)
Since M0 is about 3.7 trillion, printing 7.5 trillion in cash would cause inflation of about 200% per year.
This would have obviously bad effects, causing people to great lengths to avoid holding cash. I think income or sales tax is the only way to distribute large amounts of money from the rich to the poor.
Since 1930 productivity in my home country Sweden has increased fivefold, mainly due to technical achievements. Does that mean that we work 20% of the time we did then? No it does not. Wealth has increased of course since the 1930s, and perhaps we want a higher material standard.
But also consider than since the 1970s productivity in Sweden has doubled. Does that mean we work 4 hour days instead of 8 hour days now? No, of course not. Instead, since the 1970s we work 100 hours more each year.
As a society i feel that we should be using the technical achievements to give us more time for the things and the people that we love. Is that too much to ask for?
Following a political conversation about 2 years ago, a very insightful left-wing commenter pointed out this:
"One of the biggest failures of Europe's socialism was the lack of any requirement to half the weekly working hours in 70s and 80s."
I wish this idea was more widely discussed, but still the mainstream idea is that more working, produce more value as if 'free time' does not hold any value.
It some scenarios is ridiculous. In Greece for example, the government trying to boost spending, opted for a law that allows commercial stores to open on Sunday. Before that it was illegal, you had to have a special permission to do that.
Of course, the problem is NOT the working hours. The problem is that people don't have money. Apparently the government thins that Greeks are waiting for Sunday to go buy sugar, milk and cigarettes. Says a lot about the level of contact that our (Greek here) politicians have with reality.
Europeans are already working a lot less hours than american. It's ridiculous that many Americans can't even get 2 weeks of vacation. Things are even more brutal in developed Asian countries, and that's why their suicide rate is so high.
Whenever I hear the phrase "the dignity of work", I'm reminded of Jeffrey Bernard's quote:
"As if there was something romantic and glamorous about hard work ... if there was something romantic about it, the Duke of Westminster would be digging his own fucking garden, wouldn't he?"
Anything more than 3 hours of work per day, equates slavery.
I don't think the above quotes are absolute, but are hard to argue against. However, I wouldn't expect any other approach from The Economist which content's quality has been growing logarithmically lately.
There are at least two major indignities connected to a conventional life and career. The first is that mainstream education is about winning prizes rather than learning what is interesting to you, for its own sake. The second is that most people don't particularly enjoy their jobs, they're only working for money.
Although there's still a taboo around not working, it can't last. The future, as Arthur C. Clarke said, is not full employment, but full-time playing. (Some of that playing will resemble what we now call 'research'.)
Meanwhile, there is work for anyone who has minimal food, shelter and web access. There are many unsolved problems out there and not just in open source software. With dignity galore, because they're important.
I am not an unconditional advocate for Basic Income but I think that the idea is intriguing and could potentially be very efficient. I am not going to argue about what BI could or could not do but I would really like to see more experiments with it to have some tangible information. I would rather see that it fails than hope that it would work. Of course, I'll be delighted to see it work.
We had a couple of experiments. This article asserts all sorts of vague positive effects - the concrete effects are a 9-13% drop in working hours and an 8.5% decrease in hospital visits. Unfortunately, as usual with articles on this topic, primary sources are not cited.
Back of the envelope calculations are also useful. I did one a while back, you can steal the source code and build your own to at least determine affordability. The basic gist is that an inefficient targeted program is vastly cheaper than an efficient untargeted one.
We might talk instead about the dignity of endeavour for its own sake, or the dignity of contribution to society. Such phrases may seem to have the makings of a social infrastructure for socialism. Indeed they do, for a world in which machines can do much of the work will need to become more socialistic if it is not to become intolerably unequal.
You know we're in new territory when the Economist puts forward something like this without pulling it apart in the next paragraph and explaining why a free market solution is preferable.
I don't get the philosophy behind the "dignity of work". People primarily work in order to get paid, money they then spend on themselves or their families. Work is no more altruistic than going to clubs and having casual sex.
Society functions not because people feel compelled to work out of principal, but because if no one worked, the price of labor would go up until people were enticed to do it.
And it's also very strange that eroding the labor supply is painted as a "loss of jobs", when lowering the labor supply means more and better jobs for those who do want them.
Finally, the idea that making poor people better off is bad because they might work less, is ridiculous. What is society striving for in the first place, if not the benefit of its members? Sure, the disincentive to work creates real deadweight economic loss. But this loss has to be weighed against the gain to the people receiving the handouts. It seems pretty clear that the wrong balance between work incentive and reducing inequality was struck in the US, and Obamacare is helping to fix this.
This is slightly off topic. Work is rather a vague term. If you break it down into it's components: effort, compensation, social-benefit, etc. then you can start to assign relative merit to different kinds of work. For example financiers which might be categorised as: high compensation, low to moderate effort and low social benefit and janitors: low compensation, moderate effort, low compensation. Now you can start to make value judgements about how different types of work are rated or (should be) valued by the general public or society as a whole. You can also factor out the ideological or moral components attributed to work by various political factions and start to answer interesting questions such how much should teachers be paid and what jobs which are low compensation, low social benefit should we be automating as fast as possible.
If you allow competition the market will do this. Compensation also takes into account the joy the job provides, some jobs are relatively pleasant and thus pay less than some that are much worse.
As for automation, I completely disagree - we automate where we can get the biggest gain on output. So if something costs a lot or has high social benefit we should automate it as much as possible so that it can provide more benefits to more people.
There is a lot of joy to be had in doing something for someone, that they want done so much that they are willing to pay you for the work. After I've slogged 80 hours in a week on something, getting a huge fat check from my customer is a great joy, indeed.
Its not work that matters - its the formal exchange of value that occurs when someone pays you for something you've done for them, because they want to pay you that amount and are happy to do so.
The value of work is in the exchange - not the doing, not the acting, not the 'being a worker' mentality - but in actually receiving a great reward which prolongs ones own life and increased ability to survive in the world.
Fat checks are great! Work hard for them: even greater!
I would argue that many modern 1st world jobs are a form of pointless busy work. I am also concerned by the waste of resources and damage to the environment many of these jobs entail. Most of the truly important work (like food production) is achieved overseas or by a very small percentage of the population. The victorian "work ethic" way of thinking needs to be re-examined and possibly discarded as I do not think it is useful anymore, in fact I think nowadays it is detrimental.
A more exigent social philosophy for this age would be more focused on trying to achieve a more sustainable society.
I think there's several separate issues: Krugman correctly points out that work disincentives are different from job destruction. However there are different kind of work disincentives: it is certainly hard to view people working _just_ for healthcare (as opposed to switching jobs, retiring early, or starting their own business) as something positive. By all means, disentangling healthcare from employment is at least a worthy goal -- there are many artificial reasons which currently make non-employer health insurance (and non-insurance health care) far more expensive than would otherwise be.
On the other hand, the individual mandate and increased price of even the most basic catastrophic coverage does seem to cut into disposable income, which (in a sense) has the equivalent effect of huge marginal tax hike: essentially as the salary increases, essential benefits decrease (no eligibility for food stamps, subsidizing housing, or subsidized healthcare), while taxes increase. Incentive to do anything other than get by decreases, strong incentives are created to cut out other "unavoidable" payments such as by moving to places with less expensive housing costs, even if at the cost of less employment opportunities. Replacing the system that offers increasingly little to honest working poor(1), but imposes regressive mandates to fund what are essentially transfers from working classes to middle-class senior citizens (e.g., medicare and social secure) with a a universal basic income (funded through income tax or perhaps a Georgist "rent tax") would help, but making it a political reality may be tricky but feasible ( see here for an interesting analysis from a "left-libertarian"/classic liberal perspective: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2014/01/the-positive-po... )
This does not automatically imply that various "mandates" of are always bad policy, the job of policy advocates should not be to hand-wave issues, but to present them in a way such that the public could make an informed choice. There are many times where Krugman does an excellent job of this (indeed, I'd imagine he rightly sees this as the very point of his NYT column); yet, it's odd that while Tyler Cowen (another trained economist) discusses this topic in a great deal in Great Stagnation and Average is Over, Krugman does not mention this and talks about what is really a related, but separate (even if important) matter of income inequality. Honestly, I don't see how income inequality (which is a serious danger for many reasons -- I don't mean to handwave it) has a role in this: if we raised the salary of teachers in Bay Area to that of software engineers, these salaries will still remain minuscule compared to that of top CEOs, but does anyone doubt that this would greatly increase teachers' job satisfaction? The problem with low pay isn't that someone is paid higher, the problem is that low (or no) pay makes life extremely stressful as basic needs and rudimentary wants are harder to fill: never mind being able to send kids to college, it's more about being able to afford a place where kids have a room to themselves while still having room to grade class papers after work -- one can't afford this on a teacher's salary in most parts of Bay Area.
(1) This is what irks me a lot about the debate on this topic. It's one thing to argue that welfare programs are wrong because taxation is wrong (then your job is to prove that taxation is wrong), but if taxation is wrong why not first cut programs that impose a greater tax burden? Military and medicare spending each cost more than food stamps and don't seem especially under-funded, yet it's the food-stamps program that got cut.
Why it is hard to view working "just for healthcare" as positive? Is it hard to view working "just for money" as positive? I.e. suppose that one works only because one needs money and otherwise he would spend his time playing Tetris, walking on the beach and reading medieval poetry. Why is it negative that he still works and not lives off other's money and other's work, involuntary taken?
If this is not negative, then how is it different for healthcare? It's the same money, only spent in a different way, mostly because american tax code is weird and the government tried to mess with pay arrangements repeatedly which gave birth to various fringe benefits including employer-sponsored healthcare. But at the end of it, it's the same money, isn't it?
>>> one can't afford this on a teacher's salary in most parts of Bay Area.
If you raise salaries for a wide class of employees - what do you think will happen to the housing prices? Also, where would the money come from? California has about 300K teachers. Each 10K of salary increase would cost 3 billion dollars (not counting pension costs, employer's part in taxes, etc. so actually more). Where those additional billions would come from?
The second and third highest paying districts are both located in Santa Clara County, which is also home to Silicon Valley. The average salary in the Mountain View-Los Altos Union district is $100,530, while Los Gatos-Saratoga Joint Union has an average salary of $92,636.
Considering other benefits like pensions, I'd say not so far from that of many software engineers.
So we are saying that most of the people out there are of no use to the economy and thus, most probably, to society. Well, welcome to fascism 2.0, this vision is elitist, it creates a huge power lobby (the entity paying up the basic incomes...), and it sees people as sheep with no brains.
>...no use to the economy and thus, most probably, to society.
I think you made too big of a jump there. We are already being confronted with a situation where vast quantities of people are no use to the modern economy. The fact is technology is going to replace a lot of what we traditionally considered work. This does not mean that these people are worthless, they still hold social and cultural value to society (well, most people, there will always be people who are a drain on society, but we have that now and I don't think that will ever change).
>... it creates a huge power lobby...
We already have that. And to make matters worse, the current process of distributing welfare is highly political and manipulated by special interests. With a BI, the power stays in place, but at least the bureaucracy and special interests are removed from the process.
How exactly do you come up with that? I understand the concept, agree with it to a point (it is rather exaggerated) and I am no facist and do not have enough power, percieved or monetary, to be able to be an effective elitist. I'm anti-huge power lobby, unless you can find one that does much more good than harm. People are under pressure to be sheep already if you work one of these 'jobs'. I take the notion and look at how doing fixes could make society freer and better.
My curiosity is how exactly you came to the conclusion of this being a facist and elitist idea?
I'm confused by the idea that technology will somehow eventually render most of the population jobless. Why should this cause a breakdown of the capitalist system? These discussions seem to take this for granted without explaining why this is true.
It looks like technology will continue to allow more and more people to pursue business ventures that are less and less related to filling basic needs. We will still consume, we will still find ways to trade that are mutually beneficial. We will simply have a better standard of living. It seems the logical conclusion is that there will be more opportunity for everyone, not less.
Different jobs and different opportunity is not the same as no jobs and no opportunity.
It's all fun and games with the citizens basic income until the government hits hard times and has to think about what to cut. Having the vast majority dependent on income from a single, fallible organization is a recipe for disaster.
What dignifies people is autonomy. Someone intelligent enough to write for The Economist should be able to figure that out. That they couldn't (or chose not to) makes the article little more than propaganda.
Everybody in the USSR had job. But these jobs didn't produce any (usually) value to the society. Who wants to have a job like this? You want to do something valuable so you know that what you produce people are willing to pay for (vs. being forced to pay for it). It just seems much more healthy too.
There are these interesting developments that I noticed and I'm interested to see how many others noticed that:
(1) Polarization of left vs right views among people in both US and EU
(2) Sudden drastic turn to the right in many places in the EU while at the same time turn to the left in the US.
It seems to me that since 1945 the US has been mostly right wing and is turning left radically, while the opposite is true in the EU.
There's something to it. It's anecdotal, but looking at the trends in political discussions in Poland among my generation (folks in their 20s), it seems to me that they want changes in the very direction of what people in US have and complain about...
[+] [-] mattdw|12 years ago|reply
Interesting times ahead. It's going to be painful getting there, if we get there at all, but the idea of a Universal Basic Income seems to be getting more popular. (It wasn't so long ago it was pretty much pure sci-fi.) Particularly I guess as it begins to look like modern capitalism may not actually be good at providing jobs for everyone who needs one.
Potentially UBIs could be very good for the world, freeing people to work on things they personally desire and value, and in some ways redistributing the 'means of production' back to the little guy.
[+] [-] dantheman|12 years ago|reply
Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean no one will ever wash dishes at a restaurant, no one will pick up trash, no one will spend time wiring your house for internet, or fix your computer, or do a large swath of jobs. The argument that with UBI people will still do that only for more money is crazy, since the taxes would have to be so high to support UBI that the costs would dwarf what people could afford.
As these services collapse so to will higher paying ones; lets see a doctor get up early to wash the floors of her practice since she can't afford to hire a cleaning staff and still charge patients a reasonable rate.
[+] [-] slurry|12 years ago|reply
On the other hand full employment through monetary policy is pretty much science fact. Yet neither the United States nor the EU even pretend to pursue it. (China pretty much does, however. It works pretty well for them.)
It's not like providing a decent living for near everyone is this unsolved problem which, if could only we find the correct technocratic solution, we could just roll up our sleeves and implement.
The problem is that a lot of people are against doing it. At all.
[+] [-] Jach|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yourapostasy|12 years ago|reply
The few soft UBI trials commonly found in citations were too short-lived to tell whether we were simply observing a Hawthorne Effect at work or if the outcomes were sustainable.
[+] [-] djrobstep|12 years ago|reply
http://mattbruenig.com/basicincomecalculator/
Happily, it suggests lots of proverty reduction is achievable with a very manageable percentage of GDP.
[+] [-] erichocean|12 years ago|reply
It's a direct form of wealth transfer that requires zero force, no "putting people in cages because they can't/don't pay" nonsense.
For social spending, you do the same: print new money that's a percentage of GDP, and let citizens allocate their share to various social causes (police, fire, education, natural disaster relief, etc.).
As a concrete example, if the USA produces 15 trillion in GDP for the year, you could print 3.75 trillion for basic income, and 3.75 trillion for social income. The 3.75 trillion for basic income would be split evenly among the 330 million people, amounting to $11,364 annually per person. Each person would also have $11,364 to allocate ("appropriate") for various social causes.
Taxation is eliminated. Everyone is fed and sheltered. Growth in wealth is shared equally. Anarchists still get to keep all of the money they earn (remember: no taxation). IRS is gone. All of the tax-funded welfare programs are gone, but we've got plenty of money annually to dedicate to social welfare programs. People don't have to give money to the police if they care more about education. There's no need for a minimum wage, or tracking people's incomes. There's no downside (in terms of extra taxation and lost benefits) to working more. And on and on.
This is entirely doable today, at a purely technical/administrative level. Once robots are doing the work of the labor class, and 40% of the country literally has no jobs, and won't, ever—then it'll become a social necessity.
That's why the problems in this article don't keep me up at night: not only is the solution easy, it's far preferable and way more democratic and fair than what we have today.
For extra humanity, create a global currency, peg new money creation to the world's annual GDP, and do a basic and social income for everyone in the world equally, full stop.
[+] [-] allochthon|12 years ago|reply
This is entirely doable today, at a purely technical/administrative level.
Perhaps. But from a political standpoint, it's utopian and most unlikely in the near term.
[+] [-] aianus|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Houshalter|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yetanotherphd|12 years ago|reply
This would have obviously bad effects, causing people to great lengths to avoid holding cash. I think income or sales tax is the only way to distribute large amounts of money from the rich to the poor.
[+] [-] adrianbye|12 years ago|reply
have a look at what happens to indigenous groups that are given handouts.. massive alcoholism.. obesity.. huge problems.
people will have to work and improve themselves. the struggle in life is important along with risk taking.
but, the dynamics of pay may change to compensate for the amount of leverage we can get today in society
[+] [-] unicornporn|12 years ago|reply
But also consider than since the 1970s productivity in Sweden has doubled. Does that mean we work 4 hour days instead of 8 hour days now? No, of course not. Instead, since the 1970s we work 100 hours more each year.
As a society i feel that we should be using the technical achievements to give us more time for the things and the people that we love. Is that too much to ask for?
[+] [-] atmosx|12 years ago|reply
"One of the biggest failures of Europe's socialism was the lack of any requirement to half the weekly working hours in 70s and 80s."
I wish this idea was more widely discussed, but still the mainstream idea is that more working, produce more value as if 'free time' does not hold any value.
It some scenarios is ridiculous. In Greece for example, the government trying to boost spending, opted for a law that allows commercial stores to open on Sunday. Before that it was illegal, you had to have a special permission to do that.
Of course, the problem is NOT the working hours. The problem is that people don't have money. Apparently the government thins that Greeks are waiting for Sunday to go buy sugar, milk and cigarettes. Says a lot about the level of contact that our (Greek here) politicians have with reality.
[+] [-] thelogos|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlangenauer|12 years ago|reply
"As if there was something romantic and glamorous about hard work ... if there was something romantic about it, the Duke of Westminster would be digging his own fucking garden, wouldn't he?"
http://www.rense.com/general56/thevirtueofidleness.htm
[+] [-] lazyjones|12 years ago|reply
(he also wrote a couple of books about organic gardening)
[+] [-] atmosx|12 years ago|reply
All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.
Anything more than 3 hours of work per day, equates slavery.
I don't think the above quotes are absolute, but are hard to argue against. However, I wouldn't expect any other approach from The Economist which content's quality has been growing logarithmically lately.
[+] [-] alexeisadeski3|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prestadige|12 years ago|reply
Although there's still a taboo around not working, it can't last. The future, as Arthur C. Clarke said, is not full employment, but full-time playing. (Some of that playing will resemble what we now call 'research'.)
Meanwhile, there is work for anyone who has minimal food, shelter and web access. There are many unsolved problems out there and not just in open source software. With dignity galore, because they're important.
[+] [-] yoha|12 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Income
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|12 years ago|reply
https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money...
Back of the envelope calculations are also useful. I did one a while back, you can steal the source code and build your own to at least determine affordability. The basic gist is that an inefficient targeted program is vastly cheaper than an efficient untargeted one.
http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic...
[+] [-] allochthon|12 years ago|reply
You know we're in new territory when the Economist puts forward something like this without pulling it apart in the next paragraph and explaining why a free market solution is preferable.
[+] [-] IvyMike|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yetanotherphd|12 years ago|reply
Society functions not because people feel compelled to work out of principal, but because if no one worked, the price of labor would go up until people were enticed to do it.
And it's also very strange that eroding the labor supply is painted as a "loss of jobs", when lowering the labor supply means more and better jobs for those who do want them.
Finally, the idea that making poor people better off is bad because they might work less, is ridiculous. What is society striving for in the first place, if not the benefit of its members? Sure, the disincentive to work creates real deadweight economic loss. But this loss has to be weighed against the gain to the people receiving the handouts. It seems pretty clear that the wrong balance between work incentive and reducing inequality was struck in the US, and Obamacare is helping to fix this.
[+] [-] smackay|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dantheman|12 years ago|reply
As for automation, I completely disagree - we automate where we can get the biggest gain on output. So if something costs a lot or has high social benefit we should automate it as much as possible so that it can provide more benefits to more people.
[+] [-] fit2rule|12 years ago|reply
Its not work that matters - its the formal exchange of value that occurs when someone pays you for something you've done for them, because they want to pay you that amount and are happy to do so.
The value of work is in the exchange - not the doing, not the acting, not the 'being a worker' mentality - but in actually receiving a great reward which prolongs ones own life and increased ability to survive in the world.
Fat checks are great! Work hard for them: even greater!
[+] [-] everyone|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strlen|12 years ago|reply
On the other hand, the individual mandate and increased price of even the most basic catastrophic coverage does seem to cut into disposable income, which (in a sense) has the equivalent effect of huge marginal tax hike: essentially as the salary increases, essential benefits decrease (no eligibility for food stamps, subsidizing housing, or subsidized healthcare), while taxes increase. Incentive to do anything other than get by decreases, strong incentives are created to cut out other "unavoidable" payments such as by moving to places with less expensive housing costs, even if at the cost of less employment opportunities. Replacing the system that offers increasingly little to honest working poor(1), but imposes regressive mandates to fund what are essentially transfers from working classes to middle-class senior citizens (e.g., medicare and social secure) with a a universal basic income (funded through income tax or perhaps a Georgist "rent tax") would help, but making it a political reality may be tricky but feasible ( see here for an interesting analysis from a "left-libertarian"/classic liberal perspective: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2014/01/the-positive-po... )
This does not automatically imply that various "mandates" of are always bad policy, the job of policy advocates should not be to hand-wave issues, but to present them in a way such that the public could make an informed choice. There are many times where Krugman does an excellent job of this (indeed, I'd imagine he rightly sees this as the very point of his NYT column); yet, it's odd that while Tyler Cowen (another trained economist) discusses this topic in a great deal in Great Stagnation and Average is Over, Krugman does not mention this and talks about what is really a related, but separate (even if important) matter of income inequality. Honestly, I don't see how income inequality (which is a serious danger for many reasons -- I don't mean to handwave it) has a role in this: if we raised the salary of teachers in Bay Area to that of software engineers, these salaries will still remain minuscule compared to that of top CEOs, but does anyone doubt that this would greatly increase teachers' job satisfaction? The problem with low pay isn't that someone is paid higher, the problem is that low (or no) pay makes life extremely stressful as basic needs and rudimentary wants are harder to fill: never mind being able to send kids to college, it's more about being able to afford a place where kids have a room to themselves while still having room to grade class papers after work -- one can't afford this on a teacher's salary in most parts of Bay Area.
(1) This is what irks me a lot about the debate on this topic. It's one thing to argue that welfare programs are wrong because taxation is wrong (then your job is to prove that taxation is wrong), but if taxation is wrong why not first cut programs that impose a greater tax burden? Military and medicare spending each cost more than food stamps and don't seem especially under-funded, yet it's the food-stamps program that got cut.
[+] [-] smsm42|12 years ago|reply
If this is not negative, then how is it different for healthcare? It's the same money, only spent in a different way, mostly because american tax code is weird and the government tried to mess with pay arrangements repeatedly which gave birth to various fringe benefits including employer-sponsored healthcare. But at the end of it, it's the same money, isn't it?
>>> one can't afford this on a teacher's salary in most parts of Bay Area.
If you raise salaries for a wide class of employees - what do you think will happen to the housing prices? Also, where would the money come from? California has about 300K teachers. Each 10K of salary increase would cost 3 billion dollars (not counting pension costs, employer's part in taxes, etc. so actually more). Where those additional billions would come from?
But teacher's salary in Bay Are is not so far from software engineer's: http://rossieronline.usc.edu/teaching-salary-california/
The second and third highest paying districts are both located in Santa Clara County, which is also home to Silicon Valley. The average salary in the Mountain View-Los Altos Union district is $100,530, while Los Gatos-Saratoga Joint Union has an average salary of $92,636.
Considering other benefits like pensions, I'd say not so far from that of many software engineers.
[+] [-] kfk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyoung|12 years ago|reply
I think you made too big of a jump there. We are already being confronted with a situation where vast quantities of people are no use to the modern economy. The fact is technology is going to replace a lot of what we traditionally considered work. This does not mean that these people are worthless, they still hold social and cultural value to society (well, most people, there will always be people who are a drain on society, but we have that now and I don't think that will ever change).
>... it creates a huge power lobby...
We already have that. And to make matters worse, the current process of distributing welfare is highly political and manipulated by special interests. With a BI, the power stays in place, but at least the bureaucracy and special interests are removed from the process.
[+] [-] Broken_Hippo|12 years ago|reply
My curiosity is how exactly you came to the conclusion of this being a facist and elitist idea?
[+] [-] dllthomas|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rwmj|12 years ago|reply
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...
[+] [-] hifier|12 years ago|reply
It looks like technology will continue to allow more and more people to pursue business ventures that are less and less related to filling basic needs. We will still consume, we will still find ways to trade that are mutually beneficial. We will simply have a better standard of living. It seems the logical conclusion is that there will be more opportunity for everyone, not less.
Different jobs and different opportunity is not the same as no jobs and no opportunity.
[+] [-] sbmassey|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squozzer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cwaniak|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cwaniak|12 years ago|reply
It seems to me that since 1945 the US has been mostly right wing and is turning left radically, while the opposite is true in the EU.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjaerv|12 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart