Then the government should either directly employ people or else provide them with an income, or some combination of these.
Yes, let's use the coercive power of the state to direct the bulk of people's daily lives. What could possibly go wrong?
What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?
51–60 of 310 posts
Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?
#52People forget History. The two times where labor was more valuable than capital. 1 | After the black death in Europe 2 | After the second world war Most of history's default was the gilded age, the roman empire survived for 600[1] years with having worse inequality than in the modern times. Usually the only way to reverse the trend is by a large scale elimination of significant portion of young people. [1] EDIT : cor…
[deleted]
Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who pays for those people to remain unemployed? They still have food, shelter, utilities...
I don't think anybody pays them "to remain unemployed". But in most countries they receive social welfare while out of work. You could have them go break large rocks into smaller rocks if you have an ideological bent against people being unemployed but unless those rocks can be sold to somebody for more than what unemployment benefit is there's no incentive. Edit: Agree with the comments below. Rather than being idle…
OP's point was they can do useful work but that useful work is not deemed worthy by the cult of the green pyramid with the eye so non-cult members pay the bill.
Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who pays for those people to remain unemployed? They still have food, shelter, utilities...
I don't think anybody pays them "to remain unemployed". But in most countries they receive social welfare while out of work. You could have them go break large rocks into smaller rocks if you have an ideological bent against people being unemployed but unless those rocks can be sold to somebody for more than what unemployment benefit is there's no incentive. Edit: Agree with the comments below. Rather than being idle…
I think the point is that it's inefficient to pay people to do nothing when we could be paying them to do something.
Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the problem is misallocation of labor. There's a huge to-do list of jobs that need to be done at almost every level, from design and build of significant infrastructure in most countries around the world, to community-level support work. It would be perfectly possible to retrain the long term unemployed for all but the most difficult design and management elements. They're not done because the metrics of Wall St…
> Allocating labor on the basis of whether or not traders and stock owners can profit in the short to medium term turns out to be an unintelligent way to strategise an economy. And yet, this turns out to be the most succesful strategy civilization has used so far.
[deleted]
Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Allocating labor on the basis of whether or not traders and stock owners can profit in the short to medium term turns out to be an unintelligent way to strategise an economy. And yet, this turns out to be the most succesful strategy civilization has used so far.
I think you are mis-attributing our current trajectory. Most of the scientific developments that are now powering the US knowledge economy came out of government (ARPA, etc.) funded labs. Allocating R&D funds based strictly on "whether or not traders and stock owners can profit in the short to medium term" is relatively new in the US (although you could argue it was the norm before we became a superpower). Our most e…
The OP was talking about labor allocation and you're talking about R&D allocation.
Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?
#57Side note: If college education was "free," it might encourage faster re-skilling and more "profitable" to society.
Except the actual cost of college is not free, and for a lot of material covered in colleges it is an extremely inefficient way to convey that information, in both time and monetary cost.
A large part of the problem is that, in a glut of labor, employers use degrees as litmus tests of commitment rather than ability. If you can just ignore anyone who doesn't have a bachelors, you will, because why not? But that doesn't mean the bachelors is, at the macroeconomic level, worth it to society to push everyone to get.
Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who pays for those people to remain unemployed? They still have food, shelter, utilities...
I don't think anybody pays them "to remain unemployed". But in most countries they receive social welfare while out of work. You could have them go break large rocks into smaller rocks if you have an ideological bent against people being unemployed but unless those rocks can be sold to somebody for more than what unemployment benefit is there's no incentive. Edit: Agree with the comments below. Rather than being idle…
But not the money to pay for these jobs....But in most countries they receive social welfare while out of work.
See the contradiction here?
We could put these people to work engaging in labor that is valuable, but not as valuable as the cost of their welfare. I.e. pay them $7.25/hour to do $5/hour worth of labor (net cost to society = $2.25/hour).
Yet we don't. Instead we pay them to play video games (net cost to society $7.25/hour).
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/news/scholar-profile/faculty-spotli...
Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?
#59Is the "infinite work hypothesis" finally ending?? The answer to "what happens to workers being replaced" has always been "they'll find jobs elsewhere, every time you make a job redundant you create other new jobs", what I've seen called the "infinite work hypothesis" where there will always be new work and the problem is agility, job training, not demand.
The Economist had some decent articles on this recently.
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21701119-what-history-...
Re: What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?
#60In the mid-west we have programmers 2 years out of school making $100k in places where the CPI is 90. What if we just have a massive misallocation of resources and people should be learning how to program, nurse, become doctors, plumbers, HVAC, or all the other jobs that pay incredibly well?