71–80 of 198 posts
History has shown full employment does not work. The most famous example being communist countries such as the USSR. They achieved full employment, except that it was mostly useless labor. Sure, you have a job. But your job is to count buckets of nails by hand all day. When you're done with that you go back to the beginning and count them again. You'll get paid a pittance for your trouble. However, I would not call t…
History has shown full employment does not work. The most famous example being communist countries such as the USSR. They achieved full employment, except that it was mostly useless labor. Sure, you have a job. But your job is to count buckets of nails by hand all day. When you're done with that you go back to the beginning and count them again. You'll get paid a pittance for your trouble. However, I would not call t…
Who said that this is the only option? Why do people often believe the communists were doing the most optimal job possible when having full employment? That is nuts to assume.
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That’s why, as we strive towards the morally necessary system of universal unemployment (with robots doing all the work) we will need for the robots to create jobs for those who want them (and to convince the job holders of the importance of these ”jobs“). I mean this in all seriousness and am only sorry that I’m unkikely to live long enough to enjoy this paradise. Of course I’m one of those who loves to work.
Pretty sure the only way a robot is going to convince me that obvious makework is important is to do a lobotomy. Which I'd kind of prefer not to have. Maybe people should get over the idea that work should be their source of worth. Which I suspect they will manage to do within a generation or so.
Clearly they need to make it non-obvious make work in order to give those who want it adequate satisfaction. To you it will look like productive work but really it will simply be a game. In many small ways we are there already.
> Maybe people should get over the idea that work should be their source of worth.
I hope universal unemployment leads to a flourishing in poetry etc from people who delight themselves and (some of) their friends sharing and collaborating on all sorts of fun projects. They don't even have to be very good.
Life worked out pretty well before we outsourced our creativity to "professionals". Even the word "profession" has been hijacked by the industrial revolution.
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It is that signal, but are we ready to pay everyone more, even for low-skill jobs? How much more is everyone willing to pay for groceries? How much more for health care? For most people here, that won't matter, because paying 50% more for groceries would barely be noticeable, and neither would 50% more for health care be. But for society at large, that would kill many lifestyles.
While many large corporations declare record profits, I doubt that the person cleaning the toilets is really a major issue.
Look at nurses for example: you need plenty of them in hospitals and nursing homes, they are (in my opinion) severely underpaid. Raise their wages by 50%. You can make an educated guess how that will influence the price of healthcare or living in a nursing home.
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I don't disagree that it's exploitation, but I think you obscure a very complex problem with "nobody should be in such a weak position". I'm not sure any economic or legal arrangement could do away with weak positions like that entirely.
Re a very complex problem with "nobody should be in such a weak position". It is only complex if avoiding questions about the value of human dignity, and the inability of laissez faire capitalism to deliver that, need to be avoided.
> Work is a source of structure, esteem, and motivation, and its disappearance can lead to depression, anxiety, addiction, and interpersonal turmoil. So true
I don't think retired people are overloaded with depression, anxiety, addiction, and interpersonal turmoil. The fact that the lack of work / ability to sustain yourself leads to those things: those states of mind reflect the literal existential insecurity you must deal with. Because having a really shitty job that is just slightly less insecure kinda leads to the same thing.
In Soviet Union, they were. Among other things, universal employment shown to do the same as no employment: a lot of people binge drinking and not caring to do anything useful with their life. Work ethic problems surfaced in a bad way.
Drinking got so bad in the US that the government have to set a prohibition on it. Before prohibition, was the US in no employment or universal employment? I don't think there's a strong relationship to this, and the Soviet alcoholism came from something else -- maybe losing many family members or having been shipped far away from everyone you know by a totalitarian government. Or, the soviets never had a prohibition…
This is mostly due to the blandness of life, and partly due to almost absent survival-related risk and stress. Your income and housing is guaranteed, even if often crappy and small. Why bother?
These two paragraphs in particular stuck out to me: > Critics of labor-market programs such as the Job Guarantee argue that they enable precisely this sort of choice—they make it easier to decline work that one doesn’t like. One program participant in his thirties told me that, while on unemployment benefits, he’d been offered a job cleaning toilets at a gas station; he’d decided that he didn’t want “that sort of job…
I think this would cause a fundamental shift in our society. Who would want to work minimum wage server jobs when offered the same salary for something more rewarding? Who wants to do gruelling, poorly paid labouring on a construction site, if the alternative is training to be a craftsman for the same wage? Those jobs would either need to be paid much more attractively (pushing up the cost of restaurant food and cons…