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The indignity of no work

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Re: The indignity of no work

#141

Post by dredmorbius »

smsm42 wrote: post #119
Edmond wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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 s…

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/...

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

Re: The indignity of no work

#142

Post by smsm42 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #141
smsm42 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

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 l…

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.

Re: The indignity of no work

#143

Post by dredmorbius »

dantheman wrote: post #4
mattdw wrote: post #2

> 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 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 hav…

There just isn't that much money.

There's as much money as the regulator of the currency cares to create. Money is fungible.

Money isn't real wealth, and you cannot create more resources than you have simply by creating new wealth tokens. However, if what's ailing you is that the exchange tokens aren't equitably distributed, that does turn out to be a problem that can be addressed, directly, by creating and distributing more money.

The incentive effects are an interesting case to contemplate, but the more I think about it, the more that chasing revenue-generating opportunities of themselves seems to be more a part of the problem than of the solution.

Re: The indignity of no work

#144

Post by smsm42 »

Edmond wrote: post #136
smsm42 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I think you are giving too much weight to the people getting something for free argument...the subsidies are income based, meaning a lot of these people were never going to be able to get insurance even at work. You can more or less tell who gets employer-based health insurance based what they're paid. I doubt too many people are going to stop working because they qualify for ACA subsidies, you still have a whole lot…

>>> I doubt too many people are going to stop working because they qualify for ACA subsidies

Equivalent of 2.5 million workers is too many or not too many?

>>> I see the ACA subsidies as a way to make people more proactive about their health and keep them out of emergency rooms which is significantly more costly to the system.

This is also proven not to be true. Having insurance, actually, raises usage of emergency rooms by 40%. See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/01/02/s... It was a nice theory, too bad it's not true. But repeating it now, when it is disproven by experiment, is just substituting ideology for facts. It is not going to get us in any place that is good.

>>> As far as older folks working less because they are not tied to their employers for healthcare I think this is a good thing.

What is special in older people that them not working is good? Is that that we want the most experienced workers to be removed from the workforce, so that the productivity would drop, because lower the productivity, richer we are? And when replacing experienced and productive workers with unexperienced workers with much lower output and who also are paid much less, while moving the experienced workers from productive work to tax-sponsored welfare (which the younger workers now have to support with their salary, which is lower to begin with but now becomes even lower from having to support older folks too) - so tell me again, where the good part starts in all this? Because I kind of fail to see it.

Re: The indignity of no work

#145

Post by dllthomas »

robotresearcher wrote: post #140
coldtea wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

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 )

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.

Re: The indignity of no work

#146

Post by smsm42 »

cmyr wrote: post #138
smsm42 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I currently live in Zambia, and employees are frequently provided housing; either housing or a housing allowance is standard in most contracts. This is obviously the extreme, but there are tons of people in the world for whom owning property is functionally if not legally impossible.

Why do they provide housing and not pay workers to rent the same housing? Why part of the salary must be designated "housing allowance" instead of just calling it "salary" and let the worker decide to spend it on housing?

Owning property outright might be hard to a lot of people, but there's an easy solution for it - renting. What you describe is functionally renting. The question is - why is it organized this particular way?

Re: The indignity of no work

#147

Post by alexeisadeski3 »

bluedino wrote: post #125
alexeisadeski3 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't gardening a popular hobby amongst the rich?

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

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

Yet they're both work.

Re: The indignity of no work

#148

Post by FLUX-YOU »

ronaldx wrote: post #73
dantheman wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

>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. Absolutely disagree. Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean that undesirable jobs (such as the ones you describe) will have to increase pay and conditions to correctly r…

> Doctors deserve to be paid according to their skill, yes, but at the moment have entrance requirements which are disproportionate to the job at hand.

I'm not a doctor, but sometimes I wonder if it's easier than it seems. It's not hard to diagnose the basic and obvious stuff and do good work by only addressing the basics. Repeating something like that doesn't take talent, but you do have to make sure you actually know it and the best way to do that is to have an external authority on the matter.

Sometimes I also wonder how much work has gone into keeping MDs an exclusive club by national societies and the gatekeeper schools for no other reason than to maintain exclusivity and prestige (and money). Do the requirements have studies to back them up, or did a council just decide with an informed opinion? Both are respectable, but I'm still suspicious there's artificial supply limiting going on.

Apart from that, you'd have to rewire America's litigious tendencies and opportunities, or else a flood of new doctors would make malpractice insurance skyrocket. That'll change the 'worth it' formula for sure.

Re: The indignity of no work

#149

Post by dllthomas »

kfk wrote: post #11

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.

We are saying that at some point, your time is more use to you than to us. That's hugely different than "your time is useless".

Re: The indignity of no work

#150

Post by lmm »

smsm42 wrote: post #87
strlen wrote: post #48

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…

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, the…

> Why it is hard to view working "just for healthcare" as positive? Is it hard to view working "just for money" as positive?

Working for the sake of something you want is a positive. Working just to avoid dying isn't.

> 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?

Because he's less happy, fulfilled and so on than he could otherwise be. If the amount he suffers by working is more than the cost of the taxation that would support him, then yes that's absolutely a negative.

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