I’ve never found this line of reasoning particularly persuasive. There’s a saturation point where adding more writers and artists to a society stops improving things, because there’s just so much material created for every niche interest that everyone in the market is satisfied. I can’t seriously imagine that flooding the market with two or three times more material, most of it of lower quality than what already exists (since presumably the most talented artists are already the most likely to be creating art) would substantially improve things.
And a similar, but slightly different logic applies to scientists. We all like to believe that there’s only one little step between ourselves and wealth and prestige, but that isn’t true. Most successful scientists are extremely intelligent individuals who have labored for years in their fields. There aren’t many people smart enough to reach that level who haven’t already, and there are also only a small amount of people who the willpower to make it that far. If we remove the driving force that makes people succeed (a fear of poverty and failure), we’ll wind up with fewer scientists, not more.
The gist of this spiel comes down to the fact that good things in life don’t come easily. The quality of life argument is interesting, but empirical research seems to indicate that people who work are happier than those who don’t. If we change society so that people don’t have to work, we’ll wind up with a huge population of unhappy people who don’t work or contribute to society. Yeah, maybe once in a while someone will do something incredible with their free time, but most people who live off a guaranteed income will just wallow in unproductivity.
ETA: I see you mentioned that most people wouldn’t really do anything special if they received a guaranteed income, which is similar to what I’m saying. I guess the argument comes down to whether the handful of people who might achieve something spectacular outweighs a huge decrease in GDP and a huge expansion of government spending.
What about the people who claim they want a job but don’t want to actually work? Plenty of those people exist right now in all types of work environments. What happens when someone just doesn’t show up to work for three days straight and finally pops in about noon on Friday afternoon really hung over but claiming they are back for their guaranteed job? What if they do show up but spend the whole day surfing porn and talking with their friends? You can impose rules for that but then it is mostly just a regular job (presumably with less pay) but not truly guaranteed.
It seems to me that a truly guaranteed system of jobs would just recreate the worst parts of the old Soviet job model while strict rules for eligibility would undermine the proposed intentions and create economic conflicts with private enterprise.
And if people are guaranteed a job, how o you get rid of folks who are doing a crappy job? Seems like you’re just better off guaranteeing a stipend to everyone and then let the market sort out the employment needs.
In a sense though, if you include the currently unemployed in the denominator of the productivity calculation, having them produce something instead of nothing will increase productivity. Especially if they have good skills and training, which some did, especially during the depths of the recession. I think this isn’t the technical definition of productivity, but it is true in a sense.
I’m missing something. What are these people who are employed for the principal reason of insuring that they have jobs supposed to do?
Here is DC, there’s been a long-running program where any DC high school student is guaranteed a summer job working for the DC government. It’s an incredibly important program to poor families, and a key part of Marion Barry’s legacy. However, the rumors I have heard is that very few of the summer jobs are productive in terms of returning something of value to the taxpayer. Everyone knows it’s just not feasible to fire any of these kids, so the kids sometimes don’t really do anything, and the employing offices often don’t task them with doing anything.
So the students get experience in, say, working at the Department of Recreation, but it isn’t a given that they have gotten experience writing memos, filing, dealing with customers, etc.
So under this proposal, what are the employees going to do?
I’m fine with making sure everyone gets a job, not that everyone keeps a job.
Wouldn’t spending unemployment money on people working be better than spending it on them being idle? And we can ensure that they have the time (and incentive) to look for “real” jobs.
I said that this would help with the bias against the unemployed problem. On the flip side of this, employers can be legitimately biased against those who had a guaranteed job and lost it.
The real question is whether or not we should use FEMA funds to do a trial run in Washington DC. We could call it, AmericaWorks or something clever like that.
I have to say, this does bring to me something I hadn’t thought about. Whether you like QE or not, it’s been the policy for about 5 years. What if, instead of using that money to buy financial assets, they used it for works/jobs programs?
Would the net effect have been different? Does it matter (economically) what the government does with the “extra” money it prints?
Wildly incorrect.
The US has actually been “printing money” since 1932. If you do the math, you’ll find out that even though we have had mostly gentle inflation, the dollar has lost approximately 90-95% of its value since then.
And we have had inflation in recent years. It’s simply been much lower than average.
That is pure hokum, all countries are resource constrained, there is only varying degrees of constraint. The US has huge amounts of resources but they are not infinite. In the US inflation was at 14% in 1980, so inflation is certainly possible in this country.
We are currently in a low inflation environment but that does not mean inflation is no longer possible, put an MMTer in charge and inflation would shoot up like rocket.
It is, in essence, a streamlined “workfare” type system. It has the advantage that it’s not just welfare, it also provides job training and possibly education that people can use later to actually get a non-welfare job. As an additional bonus, the government can get some work done on their dime rather than just hand it out. So it provides benefits to both people and the government.
Yes, a few people are going to slack off. We already know that. But this is not unique to government employment. Perhaps some sort of system could be used to reassign people who are seen as nonproductive - e.g. if you are workfared to proofread technical documentation on fighter jets for your minimum citizen’s dividend but you actually spend all day watching cat videos, the government can reassign you to build dikes on Alaska’s northern shore. Maybe you’ll like that better, or maybe you’ll learn your lesson and actually do some work. Or maybe you’ll quit and forfeit your workfare payment. Whatever floats your boat I guess…
I agree that it would be better for people to be working than not. But I don’t want to burden private industry with folks they don’t need/want. Better to make able bodied folks work part time at jobs like cleaning the streets or whatever. And I say part time, because people not working should be spending a good amount of their “free” time looking for real jobs.
When I hear “guaranteed jobs” this is more along the lines of what I’m picturing. Scrubbing graffiti off of buildings, picking up litter, shoveling snow, etc. Those people will more skill and greater ability can repair bridges and roads, maintain vehicles for the city and the like. People who need to be in an indoor environment or have worked their way up from graffiti scrubbing can clean schools and office buildings, organize book drives for the library, etc. I don’t envision private companies being forced to hire people but instead having stuff actually get done in a community.
These are interesting points. I feel (based on discussions I’ve had with people lately) that if someone would actually mentor those young people they could be productive. I’ve heard too many people complain about hiring interns and how they (the interns) had no work ethic or ambition. It seems that people my age (30+) forget that you have to TEACH young people in their first jobs what work ethic is and you also have to teach them professionalism. Instead of whinging about how they won’t work, the older workers need to coach them about what is expected and then discipline or reward accordingly.
Other thoughts I have about the guaranteed job idea is that a good starting place would be to lean on employers to actually hire people and stop holding out for purple squirrels and rainbow unicorns. Too many companies want Google-level expertise when all they really need are moderately good people. Too many moderately good people are unemployed because of these snotty attitudes by companies. I have also seen first hand (and heard about other examples) a company put out a job opening with unnecessarily purple squirrel requirements, interview some people, discard them all and then cancel the project that the job was for because they “couldn’t find anybody qualified”. I have two thoughts about that: 1) either the project wasn’t all that important after all, 2) can’t help wondering if they cut off their corporate nose to spite their corporate face.
MANY more people in the U.S. would be gainfully employed if companies would stop this idiocy.
Who do you think is best qualified to make that decision-- private sector hiring managers or government bureaucrats?
It seems that whenever we have these discussions, many people make the assumption that there is some objective agency that is able to make the “right” decisions that private industry can’t.
Right. And people who are scrubbing graffiti off buildings all day are learning, or at least demonstrating, a work ethic. Get a few years of this and they can apply somewhere else with a good work history. It helps eliminate the “Can’t get a job without experience, can’t get experience without a job” problem that is prevalent today. No experience? Ok, go do workfare for two or three years, then go apply for jobs that require experience.
Of course, those that, for whatever reason, are good workers but don’t succeed in finding private employment can have advancement opportunities within workfare. E.g. promotion from graffiti scrubber to senior graffiti scrubber to graffiti scrubber foreman to District Manager of Graffiti Scrubbing to Chief Beautifying Officer (CBO).
There can even be professional tracks. E.g. did you graduate from nursing school, get licensed, but can’t find a job? You can workfare at an STD clinic in a poor neighborhood. If you really do have mad leet nursing skillz, you’ll show them and will be able to get hired for the nursing job you really want in a year or two. If your nursing skills suck balls, you’ll get reassigned to scrub graffiti.
I definitely agree that business should not be forced to hire people. Tax incentives maybe, but they don’t seem to work well because a new person is added that is not needed for a short term advantage. I believe WPA was pure government.
When the economy improves business will start hiring out of need, not edict. That is a lot better.
If you think that business doesn’t hire like JcWoman describes, you haven’t seen enough hiring. I have a friend who is a headhunter in the pharma industry, and she complains about exactly this. Especially during the recession companies had employee fantasies and would leave good candidates hanging for months out of fear that someone better was out there. We have some equally stupid behavior internally.
Just to be clear, you are recommending that government bureaucrats do the hiring for private companies? Because if you’re not, I’m not sure why you are seemingly objecting to my post. I’m not asking which will do a perfect job, I’m asking which will do a better job.
Speaking only for myself, I wasn’t advocating that government do the hiring for businesses. But I would like for someone to slap them upside the head, shake them until their eyeballs roll and convince them that they do NOT need to hold out for the fifteenth rightmost standard deviation expertise in the whole U.S. population before making a job offer. All I’m saying is that when companies do this, and then whinge about lack of qualified candidates, and it’s really hard to respect them in the morning. They are making their own beds, so they should lay in them. Except it’s not that easy because it has huge societal and economic impact.