
The indignity of no work - benfreu
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/02/social-norms
======
mattdw
> _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.

~~~
dantheman
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.

~~~
AngrySkillzz
The U.S. currently spends about 2.3 trillion dollars on social welfare every
year. That's around $9,500 per adult per year, a pretty good starting point
(and cheaper to administer since you aren't means testing and can collapse all
of those other programs into one).

Combined with small tax increases or a cut in some of the U.S.'s other massive
expenditure programs (i.e. the military), we can pretty easily afford to pay
every adult U.S. citizen above the poverty level to do nothing.

~~~
harryh
Cutting social security benefits that pay the retired 10s of Ks per year in
order to give everyone, most of whom are by no means poor, 9.5k/yr absolutely
is sci fi level crazy talk.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
You get it back as tax from the non-poor so you don't actually spend the
money. Though if they have a bad year or decide to start a business, or write
a novel they are assured that I'll be there for them.

~~~
harryh
AngrySkillzz proposed funding BI by eliminating other programs (including
Social Security). You're saying we don't eliminate those programs and instead
fund BI by raising taxes?

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I'm sure you can find a basic introduction to the idea you're arguing against
somewhere on the web but basically, instead of giving money to the poor and
needy, you give it to everyone and those that earn a little give some of it
back in tax, at some point you earn enough to give it all back. Those in the
latter group cost you nothing, even though you've "given" them x thousand
dollars, so dividing (or multiplying) a dollar figure by population isn't
accurate.

~~~
harryh
Oh, so your BI is means tested.

OK ya, what you're arguing for and what most of the other folks around here
are arguing for isn't the same thing.

It's a little messy but we already pretty much have what you're talking about
with a patchwork of unemployment benefits, welfare, medicaid and various forms
of disability insurance.

~~~
_delirium
Means-testing is a wash on average, though: you keep the taxes of higher-
income people lower, but then don't give them the cash payment. This works out
better for very wealthy people (since tax rates are typically percentage-
based, while the payout is a fixed number), but worse for lower-middle-class
people, who get means-tested out of the payout but don't make enough to get
much tax savings. There's some cross-over point where it's exactly a wash.
Under the basic income system the idea is _not_ to means-test it, because
means-testing disincentivizes working (you lose your benefit once you make
"too much" in other income), and instead just net it out with tax rates above
a certain level. So at the crossover point you get a $10k BI but you pay $10k
more taxes; below that you come out ahead, and above that you're behind. The
current welfare system has the same general properties, but is much more
bureaucratic and has more of a "cliff" where you lose the benefit, instead of
it just slowly being eaten away by marginal tax rates.

~~~
harryh
OK sure, but if you're going to that, and not eliminate (or reduce) any
current gov't programs then you have to raise taxes. If you want't to give,
say 10k to each american that's 3.1 Trillion dollars which is more than the US
gov't raised in taxes last year.

The math doesn't work.

~~~
_delirium
Well, yeah, you'd raise taxes, to the point where it nets out on average. You
raise everyone's taxes by $10k on average, and give everyone $10k. At the
average income it's a wash. At the low end people were already getting welfare
and not paying much in taxes, so it's a wash for them too. At the lower-
middle-class to middle-class level it reduces the disincentive to work and
makes people better off. The only people who really lose out are at the very
top, people who make so much money that any percentage-based increase would
swamp the fixed gains (which is why, I would guess, they oppose it).

------
erichocean
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.

~~~
adrianbye
err.. your left wing viewpoints are showing..

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

~~~
toomuchtodo
Canadians seemed to handle it just fine.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome)

Mincome was an experimental Canadian basic income project that was held in
Dauphin, Manitoba during the 1970s. The project, funded jointly by the
Manitoba provincial government and the Canadian federal government, began with
a news release on February 22, 1974, and was closed down in 1979.

The purpose of this experiment was to determine whether a guaranteed,
unconditional annual income caused disincentive to work for the recipients,
and how great such a disincentive would be.

It allowed every family unit to receive a minimum cash benefit. The results
showed a modest impact on labor markets, with working hours dropping one
percent for men, three percent for wives, and five percent for unmarried
women.[1] However, some have argued these drops may be artificially low
because participants knew the guaranteed income was temporary.[2] These
decreases in hours worked may be seen as offset by the opportunity cost of
more time for family and education. Mothers spent more time rearing newborns,
and the educational impacts are regarded as a success. Students in these
families showed higher test scores and lower dropout rates. There was also an
increase in adults continuing education.[3][4] A final report was never
issued, but Dr. Evelyn Forget (/fɔrˈʒeɪ/) conducted an analysis of the program
in 2009 which was published in 2011.[4][5] She found that only new mothers and
teenagers worked substantially less. Mothers with newborns stopped working
because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies, and teenagers
worked less because they weren't under as much pressure to support their
families, which resulted in more teenagers graduating. In addition, those who
continued to work were given more opportunities to choose what type of work
they did. Forget found that in the period that Mincome was administered,
hospital visits dropped 8.5 percent, with fewer incidences of work-related
injuries, and fewer emergency room visits from car accidents and domestic
abuse.[6] Additionally, the period saw a reduction in rates of psychiatric
hospitalization, and in the number of mental illness-related consultations
with health professionals.[7][8]

------
unicornporn
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?

~~~
thelogos
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.

~~~
DanBC
Here's the first ten countries in the list of countries by suicide.

Greenland

Lithuania

South Korea

Guyana

Kazakhstan

China

Belarus

Slovenia

Hungary

Japan

Obvious caveats about national suicide stats apply.

~~~
thelogos
Obvious exception of the Eastern European countries. South Korea and Japan are
notorious for the high suicide rate. The work hours in these countries are
ridiculous. People literally get worked to death. Engineers pretty much devote
their entire life to their company. There is no work-life balance. There is
only work.

~~~
lgieron
> Obvious exception of the Eastern European countries.

Why?

------
jlangenauer
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?"

[http://www.rense.com/general56/thevirtueofidleness.htm](http://www.rense.com/general56/thevirtueofidleness.htm)

~~~
alexeisadeski3
Isn't gardening a popular hobby amongst the rich?

~~~
bluedino
'Gardening' is quit a bit different than breaking your back to pick 200
bushels of oranges for 14 hours in 90 degree heat.

~~~
alexeisadeski3
And being a real estate agent is quite different from breaking your back
picking oranges.

Yet they're both work.

------
prestadige
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.

------
yoha
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.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Income](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Income)

~~~
yummyfajitas
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.

[https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-
money...](https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money-to-
everyone/31639050894-e44e2c00)

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...](http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic_job.html)

------
allochthon
_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.

------
IvyMike
I'm a cynical ass, but whenever I hear the phrase "the dignity of work" I
can't help but sarcastically mentally add "yeah, work will set you free".

------
yetanotherphd
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.

~~~
Tycho
What does dignity have to do with altruism?

------
smackay
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.

~~~
dantheman
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.

~~~
smackay
There are many types of job where market forces cannot solve the problem.
(Within the context of the Universal Basic Income) there may entire categories
of types of job that could be created to solve social (in the most general
sense) or civic problems. For example charitable or education related
activities are low to no profit - or at least it is not easy to measure their
benefit directly or immediately, but high social value in the sense that they
mitigate future problem that result in increase expenditures or taxes and so
have long term value. Since the market uses money and direct profit as a means
to measure everything it simply cannot deal with this.

~~~
graphene
Two examples that invalidate your last sentence would be Khan Academy and
Mozilla -- both very competitive places to get a job, yet they don't pay
substantially above market; their mission is what draws employees in. Not all
competitive forces are financial in nature.

We could argue about the extent to which these nonfinancial competitive forces
influence (or ought to influence) the market, but saying that they "simply
cannot" seems false.

------
fit2rule
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!

------
everyone
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.

------
strlen
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...](http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2014/01/the-positive-political-
economy-of-the-basic-income-guarantee/) )

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
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?

But teacher's salary in Bay Are is not so far from software engineer's:
[http://rossieronline.usc.edu/teaching-salary-
california/](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.

~~~
Edmond
I think the difference is that prior to the ACA, you didn't have much of a
marketplace for the self insured, so you were artificially tied to your
employer for the group insurance coverage.

The ACA is apparently not perfect (I, like most people haven't read the law:)
) but I think anything that keeps people from becoming serfs is a good thing.

Your argument about healthcare being money in a different form is flawed. You
could make a similar argument for when people used to live in employer
provided housing because owning their own homes was impossible for most
people. I am sure not too many people would want to go back to serfdom because
after all a roof over your head is another form of being paid.

~~~
smsm42
I'm not sure - how paying for your own needs with your own earned money is
"becoming serf" and why getting rid of the necessity for work in order for
your needs to be paid for is a good thing?

>>> You could make a similar argument for when people used to live in employer
provided housing because owning their own homes was impossible for most
people.

When and where there was such time? If you refer to real slaves or serfs -
they couldn't own property not because it wasn't affordable but because they
did not have rights to own anything, being property themselves. Nobody argues
for that. However, earning one's own housing or food or clothing or healthcare
is in no way serfdom - it is a natural state of a person, the alternative
being somebody else earning them and you just take them because you're too
good to work, unlike that other guy. But what if that other guy thinks the
same? If nobody has to work to earn their own living - who'll be supplying all
these nice things you feel so entitled to enjoy?

~~~
dredmorbius
_When and where there was such time?_

Now in many cases: farmworker housing, worker barracks in some industries,
particularly mining, energy, and sometimes forestry or other remote work (say,
employee compounds for US oil workers in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the
Middle East). Factory barracks are commonplace in China and other developing
nations. Railroad workers, sailors, and other travelling employees are often
lodged by their employers. I've also seen more than one startup in which there
was a corporate apartment, though that was usually used on a fairly short-term
basis by new hires, or in some cases, by founders or remote employees when
travelling to other sites.

One of the earlier examples of this was the Fuggerei in Augsburg, Germany,
though more strictly it was an example of social worker housing:
[http://www.lonelyplanet.com/germany/bavaria/augsburg/sights/...](http://www.lonelyplanet.com/germany/bavaria/augsburg/sights/other/fuggerei)

The "Company Town" Wikipedia article offers more information on the practice.
Within the US it's largely associated with extractive industries, as I noted,
arising in the mid 1800s and largely dying out by the 1950s:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town)

~~~
smsm42
Company towns existed not because housing were unaffordable but because there
were no infrastructure in the place where company needed it to be before they
came there. In your own link it says the company rented out and old off the
property once built, thus negating the claim ownership or renting this
property was not possible.

~~~
dredmorbius
_because there were no infrastructure in the place_

Not necessarily. Farmworker housing is offered in areas where there are
alternatives, but the needs of the worker population often don't match the
needs of growers: periodic work, a mobile workforce, and a concentrated area
in which work crews can be picked up and dropped off, as well as a generally
below-market income for the tenant population. Similarly, modern worker
factory housing often exists to support a large migrant population.

The question I was answering wasn't the "why" but the "when", most
specifically that _it 's still happening now._

~~~
smsm42
"It" that is happening now is not "it" we were discussing. Clearly, if you're
catering to migrant population, homeownership is not a good solution for them.
It's like saying hotels exist in New York because nobody can afford a house in
New York. That's not the reason - the reason is that whoever needs to live in
New York for two weeks won't buy a house there, unless he's a crazy
billionaire. Worker housing exists, but it does not exist because otherwise
workers couldn't find a place to live and thus making workers enslaved by the
housing owners. It exists because it is a cost-effective solution for
providing housing needs of the temporary workers, and it is natural for the
employer that needs the workers to take care of their housing in the most
efficient manner - thus reducing both their own costs and costs for the
workers. It has very little to do with housing affordability and workers
somehow being "serfs".

~~~
dredmorbius
I disagree. The situation describe continues to exist both in the US and (more
particularly) outside it. It's not always structured to make the employees
utterly dependent and in debt to employers, though (usually for lower-skilled
workers) this does remain the case, and is a key argument against "company
towns" or other forms of employer-supplied housing in the absence of other
competitive housing markets.

And the point you're trying to make about immigrant or periodic labor is
_precisely_ the problem that applies to serfs: they lack the means (or legal
ability) to make their own discretionary housing arrangements.

For higher-skilled workers, who have other employment options, this typically
isn't the case. Also where employees who operate under union or similar
collective bargaining arrangements.

------
kfk
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.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
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?

~~~
kfk
> I'm anti-huge power lobby, unless you can find one that does much more good
> than harm

This is the core of the thinking behind a dictatorship

> People are under pressure to be sheep already if you work one of these
> 'jobs'

What pressure? People are asked to work in exchange of money. Which means this
system, however imperfect, still sees people as useful and productive and,
thus, still gives them a chance

And it's elitist because you are creating a clear division between those that
are productive and those that bring no value and that actually are a negative
investment (because they do "fake" jobs). You really think you can put a
mentality like that in place without creating elitism and potentially an even
more uneven society than today?

~~~
Broken_Hippo
I obviously didn't proofread that first one. I am in general against
centralized power unless it does more good than harm. Healthcare, for example,
holds power, but I'm surely convinced that the decentralized power that health
insurance companies have is superior to government-managed health care that is
done right (I'm in Norway now, and from what I can observe, works for the
user's health benefit)

Asked to work? Most of us Have to. At the bottom rungs, keep your mouth shut,
dress like the accepted average, and fit in with the company's culture. No
creativity or input actually needed. And no questions trying to learn things.
You don't need to know what the management knows. This isn't pressure? How
many 32 year olds working in fast food views their job as useful or
productive?

Using the 32 year old with the fast food as an example... do they feel they
are valued? Likely not. Fake job, but it is a job. I somehow doubt this would
change much.

------
rwmj
A similar idea: When good ideas (like the Protestant Work Ethic) turn bad:

[http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...](http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2014/02/when-
good-ideas-turn-bad.html)

------
hifier
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.

~~~
VLM
You may find a study of history to be interesting. What you describe sounds
like the European post-western-roman empire dark ages not utopia.

How do you intend to consume if none of the consumers have money anymore? How
do you intend to trade if the market is polluted by expensive middlemen and
centralized .gov pre-selecting the winners and losers? If the standard of
living were better in a non-monetary economy in theory, how come it never
works that way in practice? Opportunities require money and power to take
advantage of them, without either they will not be lost.

Why wasn't the (first) Great Depression a paradise on earth? No one had jobs
or money. New high technology all over the place. So why exactly would the
second Great Depression be any better than the first, if its of basically the
same form? Even worse, recall the interesting economic hack used to "fix" the
first one? All you need is a world war, and for the survivors, its gets
better.

~~~
hifier
I've either terribly represented my thought, or you have grossly misunderstood
my statement.

I am arguing FOR a capitalist system. I'm saying I don't understand why the
article authors will assume it is going to break down because of technological
advances. It has not thus far.

Edit: I see that my second statement in my first reply is poorly written. I
meant "this" to refer to technological advancement, not to joblessness.

------
sbmassey
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.

------
squozzer
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.

------
cwaniak
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.

~~~
coldtea
> _Everybody in the USSR had job. But these jobs didn 't produce any (usually)
> value to the society._

Well, they got a huge backwater, mostly agricultural country, into one of the
big powers of the industrial era. And got to feed some hundends of million of
people, have space exploration, very good physics and math, music and arts,
and a lot more besides.

So, it's a myth that these jobs didn't produce any value to the society. They
just weren't as competitive as the west, but then again, they started from far
worse and backwards conditions, in an a land which is cold and unhabitable as
hell in large regions. And they had political BS to deal with too.

Not every similar scheme will result in the same results. Stalinist politics
and such is not a necessary byproduct of everybody having a guaranteed job.

~~~
robotresearcher
Russia was a leading world power long before the creation of the USSR. Your
"backwater" was:

"One of the largest empires in world history, stretching over three
continents, the Russian Empire was surpassed in landmass only by the British
and Mongol empires."

(Wikpedia -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Empire](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Empire))

~~~
dllthomas
While it's true that Russia was a major world power, the passage you quote
only really establishes that it was large, which would be true of a "huge
backwater" too.

------
cwaniak
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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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...

------
stefan_kendall
"Maybe the jobs are gone forever" \- Good analysis, economist. This article is
full of bullshit 'maybes' and aggressive 'income inequality' overtones.

I don't know how this garbage gets onto HN.

~~~
forgottenpass
_I don 't know how this garbage gets onto HN._

The only unique aspect of this piece is it strikes a nerve with you. I know
how it gets here, because HN is jam packed with "analysis" that doesn't make
any stronger of a case for itself. Vague wishy-washy "Maybe the jobs are gone
forever" level points are taken at face value when the rhetoric is headed to
more agreeable conclusions.

