With a guaranteed income to fall back on, it would be much easier for jobs to rely on market forces for wage-setting, and not need a minimum wage. After all, potential employees would have a better choice.
True, but you do have to be careful of companies taking advantage of the state - think Walmart in the US and how many of their employees still rely on public assistance. Zero minimum wage had the potential to set up a near zero cost workforce if the minimum wage isn't actually enough to be picky with employment.
There's no inherent morality to the corporate bottom line (one of the biggest flaws in "free market" thinking is that if a theory is beautiful, it must also be moral). If corporations can get the government to help subsidize employment, they'll do so.
The only solution to exploitation is to make "do nothing" a viable alternative. Right now, in America at least, welfare is a difficult and humiliating process. Employment is the only way to have any dignity at all, and employers exploit that - they underpay for awful jobs, and force employees to rely on welfare anyway. And this isn't even considering all those whom, for whatever reason, aren't really able to work. Physical or mental health, family needs, and more can all impair the ability to do a job even if one is available, and the government supported alternatives are, again, difficult and humiliating.
If employers were forced to compete not against humiliation, but rather against choice, they'd have to make the jobs suck less and pay more. Even burger-flipping would need to start getting decent treatment, the kind those of us in high demand jobs have come to expect.
>> The only solution to exploitation is to make "do nothing" a viable alternative.
Yes. I've been leaning toward that idea. Retired people need to be able to do nothing, and why not most people? If you want to live in a small house and grow your own food, why should that be prevented? Property taxes need to be zero for people, and cost of living needs to be as close to zero as possible. Then you don't need higher wages or welfare for people to get by. Instead we give tax breaks to companies and tax the heck out of people. Then wonder how to support those who can't work, or don't have in-demand skills. Speaking of skills, how about low cost education instead of government backed free for all in tuition costs?
>There's no inherent morality to the corporate bottom line (one of the biggest flaws in "free market" thinking is that if a theory is beautiful, it must also be moral)
Actually they think something even more naive, that the individual immoralities and egoisms at play (maximizing individual profit) work out for the benefit of all in the end.
Generally speaking people make the argument that maximizing individual profit is inevitable. Socialist systems simply make the group of people that maximize individual profit very small.
In reality the difference between capitalism and communism has nothing to do with money, it is about control. In capitalism those with money (who made previously successful economic decisions) mostly decide. In communism the government (who are people too) decide directly.
The problem with government decisions/communism is that people always seem to refuse to accept reality in some way. Something must keep existing, and damn the economic impact. Then the impact becomes significant compared to the size of the economy, and the system dies.
Capitalism forces governments to accept the confines of reality (mostly), communism does not. This is unfortunately exactly the problem most socialist thinkers have with it. For example, climate change might be unsolvable under capitalism. What you don't realize is that this is a good thing, not a bad thing, as the only alternative is to expend all resources we have in a failed attempt at achieving that. The only thing that would happen if we did that, of course, is the collapse of our society. (just using this as an example, I'm not saying preventing climate change is unachievable)
Walmart isn't known for being a great place to work. If people can live at minimum without having to work, Walmart can kiss its artificially cheap workforce goodbye.
Yeah why work at a crappy McJob when you could instead do what you find interesting, making weird pottery and selling it on Etsy while relying on the minimum income to cover your rent and food?
I think a significant result of these sort of minimum income ideas would be an explosion in the amount of people that opt for risky entrepreneurial ventures (eg. a startup) instead of working bad jobs for the basic necessities. I think many people would rather make art or pursue other risky, generally low income, creative careers than do low skill, uninteresting work.
A result could be that companies offering low skill, minimum wage jobs could have to raise wages or improve their jobs in other ways in order to attract workers.
Most likely those jobs will be aggressively automated, with more investment that would be previously to make up for the higher cost of labor. Just as Uber openly wants to eventually get rid of their drivers, I don't see why fast food chains wouldn't want to have a fully automated drive through restaurant in 100 years. Either that or they will have to differentiate to produce more value by having a friendlier and higher quality staff, like one might see at Chick-fil-A
People don't think nearly aggressively enough about what "automated" means. In the 18th century, farmers were 90% of the labor force. By the end of the 19th, they were less than 40%. Now, they're around 2%.
Automation is not a new thing. Imagine if the people who built the pyramids had trucks.
I agree, but I am skeptical of the information age's ability to guarantee employment for a large proportion of the population relative to agriculture (when everyone had to work for there to be enough food) and industrialization (where industry required a large human labor force).
There was a commenter on HN who said once: "When cars replaced carriages, did the horses get new jobs?"
I'm curious how low that workforce could be paid, though.
I mean, lets pretend you get $400/w from the government, and you are okay living on that. Now lets assume you decide you want a new toy, or some general spending money. Your base government income has your rent and food paid for, but you want fun money.
How much time is that fun money worth? Would you work a whole week for $50? What about $200?
I also wonder if there's a bit of a mental incentive to push you to better yourself. If you're working a week for $200, maybe you consider it a waste of your time. So, you fight for a better job, maybe through training or education. Now you've got plenty of fun money, but you also start to raise your base lifestyle (and income requirements).
I don't think any of these are absolutes of course, i'm just curious what would happen in these sort of environments. Everything i say here is a question, not an answer.
I believe most people want to do something valuable with their time. But valuable doesn't always translate 1:1 to fungible with money. Raising a child is work. Ministry is work. Volunteering is work. Art is mostly just hard work.
There's this concept throughout American politics, and I don't think it's at all true, that most people are just lazy thieves, and would happily sit on their butts watching reruns all day if they could sponge off others to do it. Of course, no one putting this theory forth thinks it applies to them - they want to work hard for the sheer pride of it.
I do, however, think there's a massive tradeoff of doing a dayjob that you hate to keep a roof over your head, versus doing something you love that won't really generate cash. I'd go farther and say many of the best-paying jobs pay well not because they're high-skilled, but rather because they're low-morality. If you're willing to do unethical things to people, you can make a lot of money, legally.
At any rate, if people want a better than minimum standard of living, they'll get a job. If they have an alternative, they're more likely to do a job they love. And a lot of people would do stuff they love for no "job" at all, if it was a choice.
> There's this concept throughout American politics, and I don't think it's at all true, that most people are just lazy thieves, and would happily sit on their butts watching reruns all day if they could sponge off others to do it. Of course, no one putting this theory forth thinks it applies to them - they want to work hard for the sheer pride of it.
What people will tell you about other people is much more reliable than what they'll tell you about themselves.
It'll be interesting if people can choose jobs freely and wages are purely determined by supply and demand, then those jobs people love to do tend to pay lower, while menial jobs people don't want to do tend to pay higher.
I have a lot of friends who are professional artists - musicians, actors, painters, etc. They are all very talented, hardworking, professional-minded people who could have much more lucrative jobs in the mainstream workforce.
That's norm. What's more interesting is that, if everybody gets choice, will some of blue-collar jobs such as janitors actually gets paid a lot more? Somebody has to do it, after all. (I'm not disgracing those jobs; as Prof. Maguire told Will in "Good Will Hunting", there's honor in it. But is it the case that their wage kept low because they're taken advantage of, having no other choices?)
One place to look for an answer is kids who live at home. They also have unconditional support from the family in terms of rent and food. But plenty of them are happy to flip burgers for some extra cash. There are of course many different situations they find themselves in, and it would be interesting to see how closely they decide things compared to adults on an unconditional grant.
Since most are looking at this from 1 direction (giving the poor additional money) you should consider the question from the other direction (having the wealthy pay more). Will the wealthy stop working as hard, earning less money or retire altogether?
>After all, potential employees would have a better choice.
And I would think employers who are looking for more motivated employees would benefit as well. And I hope the opposite is true for employers who are just looking for bodies at a low cost as the sole factor.
I'm interested to see how things will be a couple months after the program is in full bloom.
I think a lot of bad stuff gets done by employers when they reach such a state. It's very analogous to website owners who just want to create a volume of views, regardless of quality. Or to game companies that want to extract as much money from their players, regardless of the experience they are producing.
This touches on Taylorism ("scientific management"), one of the more horrible things that has happened to human society. Fredrick Winslow Taylor was the favorite industrial theorist of both the Harvard Business School and Josef Stalin, which should set off all alarms right there.
In Taylorism, "skills" are replaced with "processes". Employees are taught to do small, simple, repeatable, and thoroughly documented processes, without understanding of how the whole system works. This covers huge swaths of manual labor today - both factory labor and service jobs like fast food tend to be heavily Taylorized.
The value of Taylorism isn't that it's more efficient than relying on skilled workers. It's less efficient, and unashamedly so. But it has the side effect of disempowering the worker. Employees are now replaceable cogs, to be fired on a whim and replaced by the next warm body who can be taught the steps (and punished even for improving on them). Taylorism shifts the balance of power between employer and employee strongly in the employer's favor.
The only "safe" jobs in a Taylorized society are those that demand skills immune to Taylorizing, like engineering (and that's mostly because any job I do that can be replaced with a dumb human process can also be replaced with a program).
Or academia where people think that just because they can get a post-doc (doesn't matter what country), research assistant, volunteer, etc to do work of marginal value (yes, most papers and "research" out there wont move respective field forward at all) just because they have the skills. I think our societies are filled with this level of rot and the more/faster ways people put a flame thrower to such, the better.
