Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

While true it's important to point out that salaries are rising and most for the lowest income.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-wage-growth-for-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/01/02/minimum-w...

It's worth discussing subgroups. An unemployment rate of 5% is probably fine if it is uniformly distributed; but we know it's not.

Some subgroups, like minorities and young adults, have been plagued by much higher numbers which are a problem. Someone who can't get a foothold in the job market will likely have lifelong challenges.

A rate of 3.5% almost certainly mean improvement for these subgroups.

The market is not some emergent natural phenomenon. It is a construct to facilitate human interaction. We already heavily circumscribe the “free market” and I don’t understand reactions to market failures that amount to “Well we can’t do anything about that”. Of course we can, it exists for us, not the other way around.

note: this is an "old man yelling at clouds" post. I hope readers can consume it in a way that they find valuable to their current perspectives.

I have experiences with many jobs that were not enjoyable. By "not enjoyable", I don't only mean they were dull office jobs. I had a lot of jobs in my early twenties, often through temp agencies but not always: working in warehouses, working as a manual laborer in large institutional buildings (moving furniture etc), two different jobs working on factory assembly lines, working in old office buildings to pull network cable through ceilings and floors, working on receiving docks, etc. Well over ten or fifteen jobs, as they tended to last for a summer, or a few months or weeks. As someone with computer skills and ultimately a pretty promising career ahead of me, I always had the sense in these temp jobs that they were just that, "temporary". However, most everyone I worked with in these roles were not there as temps, they were the people for whom life had worked out such that these kinds of jobs were close to the best they were going to get. There is no amount of "hard work" that someone in these roles can apply to move to a new station in life, there are too many strikes against them: educational, cognitive/developmental, health-wise, criminal backgrounds, etc. that make it extremely unlikely they would ever have much better of a station in life. And like me, all of these people were entirely aware of this element of who they were; they were the "lifers".

One of the worst jobs I had which I could only handle for about two weeks was working in a factory that manufactured rolls of ink ribbon for line printers and typewriters. My job was to be handed a large metal bar called the "spindle" onto which I would pull out 30 or so rolls, stick all the rolls onto the spindle with spacers in between them, then hand them off to this other woman who had whatever minor skill was required to put this spindle into the machine that would roll the ink ribbon onto them. You do this in a dark and smelly factory for 8 hours a day. This job was for me, a valuable experience, as I can look back on it with all the perspective offered by doing that kind of job. But for all the other folks working in that place including the woman who I handed the spindle off towards, that was it for them. They were all at most high school grad or less, they were people for whom there were no opportunities. The job paid minimum wage. They were "lifers". These people are counted as part of "the employed". But they live paycheck to paycheck with minimal benefits or health care, in a dangerous and unhealthy environment, low life expectancy, poor nutrition, all of it. I don't consider low employment numbers to be very interesting when one notes how miserable life is for so many of the "employed".

Why does it make sense to force private industry to provide a UBI? A minimum wage job puts a floor on what can be paid and this fundementally distorts the labor market. If a job does not provide enough value to the employer to meet minimum wage it will not exist for very long. This rules out many types of work where the value is hard to capture and pushes all of that work into the domain of either being funded by government or non-profits. This also potentially prevents labor participation by certain categories of handicapped individuals who have the potential to provide value to society and experience satisfaction in their work but can't compete in a marketplace distorted by a minimum wage.

If anything, a UBI enables low-wage work, especially when that work provides satisfaction to the employed. It also can increase economic productivity because the labor market will be able to distribute labor more efficiently.