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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

As a very concrete way to think of it, consider the typical middle class lifestyle in India. Consider all the labor that is regularly outsourced - house cleaning, cooking, laundry, etc. If I want to eat a paan, buy a cigarette, or other snack/consumable, I only need to walk a city block or so before I can find someone willing to sell it to me. Any educated female can easily afford child care so she can work. My office has multiple servants to make life easier for the skilled labor employed therein; if you want maggie, momos or beer, just give them some cash and they'll bring it to you.

At the moment the problem in the US is labor scarcity. Robots haven't replaced these jobs, these jobs just don't get done.

When robots provide the same level of services to the US middle class, that would be a signal that we might need to think about something like a BI. Until then, BI is really solving the complete opposite problem to what we have.

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> At the moment the problem in the US is labor scarcity. Robots haven't replaced these jobs, these jobs just don't get done.

Labor scarcity is another word for "there aren't enough people who want to work for less," and you describe it as if it's a good thing for society as a whole.

We have minimum wage for a reason, because with wages low enough to make a neighborhood chai-seller a possibility, it means that the lower limit of a societal standard of living plummets.

The fact that you present India, with its extreme income inequality, as an example of a country that provides an ideal lifestyle for you is indicative.

According to the BI proponents, we have a shortage of jobs. Yet prices are rising and work is simply going undone. That's completely the opposite of what would happen if they were right.

If you want to claim that less employment and lower production is a good thing, go ahead.

Your facts are also wrong; the US has a GINI of 41 (comparable to the UK or the Congo). In contrast, India has only 33.6 (comparable to France, Canada or Sierra Leone). India has absolute poverty which is a totally different problem.

> India has absolute poverty which is a totally different problem.

Good point, but it doesn't change my argument; your conveniences are made possible by the higher poverty / lower income of service providers.

> If you want to claim that less employment and lower production is a good thing, go ahead.

Do you believe that lowering standards of living by eliminating minimum wage is a good thing, because it "increases employment and production"?

For example: Mumbai's trash and recycling ecosystem is largely driven by a complex economy of ragpickers, sorters, and tiny recycling factories based in informal settlements (Dharavi, etc). Last time I checked (Summer 2014), the ragpickers are paid 5rs per kg, and on average collect about 10kg a day, making that around 50rs, $0.75, or 48% the cost of a Big Mac (or its equivalent, the Maharaja Mac) in India.

Would you really agree that someone who works all day to make 50% of a Big Mac be an ideal model of employment and societal economic policy, because they're working and thus raising employment and production?

Because that's what you're asking for if you're claiming that we need to stop a "labor shortage" in order to provide more low-cost conveniences.

I didn't say we should adopt India's economic system. I said that we have a labor scarcity, not a surplus, as demonstrated by all the work people would like to have done - and which other parts of the world demonstrate can be done - but which isn't being done (by humans or robots). Therefore a solution designed for a surplus is counterproductive.

If indeed we have a shortage rather than scarcity (note the terms are not synonymous - a shortage is a quantity supplied below market clearing rates), then we should focus on the root causes of that shortage rather than simply ignoring the problem. Minimum wage might be one such cause, though I rather doubt it (market wages tend to be way above min wage). I suspect that if we have an actual shortage it's regulatory constraints [1] and work disincentives [2] that are the real problem.

[1] In the US people seem willing to sell cigarettes at convenient locations, much like in India. But we have the unfortunate habit of using violence to prevent this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner

[2] For instance, witness NPR's article on massive numbers of people committing disability fraud to avoid work. If we cracked down on disability fraud, some of those folks would have to return to the workforce. http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

>At the moment the problem in the US is labor scarcity. Robots haven't replaced these jobs, these jobs just don't get done.

Labor scarcity in the sense that there's not enough people who need work, or in the sense that there is not enough people who have the necessary skills? I would have to assume the latter. If that is the case, aren't most of these scarce skills the type which are used to service and maintain the very automation which would be used to implement a UBI?

>When robots provide the same level of services to the US middle class, that would be a signal that we might need to think about something like a BI.

Automation already provides a much higher level of services than human workers in many areas. Do we really want to wait to the very end of this process to begin the transition?

The work I'm describing is all minimally skilled labor.

Automation already provides a much higher level of services than human workers in many areas. Do we really want to wait to the very end of this process to begin the transition?

Right now our problem is too little labor, not too much. Maybe we should wait until we at least have enough labor before we take steps that will reduce the labor supply?

Note that according to the experiments which BI proponents cite as "successes", BI reduces labor supply by 10% or so (e.g. mincome reduced labor by 13%).

https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money...

http://public.econ.duke.edu/~erw/197/forget-cea%20(2).pdf

For comparison, the great recession reduced labor supplied by 5%.

Under circumstances of labor scarcity, BI would be wildly counterproductive.

Implementing a BI now is like a fat person eating 5 cheeseburgers on the theory that they might starve in some distant apocalyptic future.

>Right now our problem is too little labor, not too much. Maybe we should wait until we at least have enough labor before we take steps that will reduce the labor supply?

At what point would you know there is enough labor and how would you measure that? It would have to be once a certain goal is achieved, correct? What is that goal?

I'm curious because in a time where there are 7 billion people I have rarely, if ever, seen someone say on the whole there are too many jobs and not enough laborers. Rather it's more often said that there are too many laborers and not enough jobs. Which is precisely the type of sentiment that drives anti-immigration xenophobia.

As a start, how about once we run out of unskilled work that people are willing to pay minimum wage for, but which isn't performed?

Concretely, I'd pay for twice weekly house cleaning if it cost me $7.25/hour. An actual housecleaning costs me about $50. Most middle class homes in India are cleaned daily, which suggests this is very achievable. Many working women would happily pay $7.25/hour for child care. Lots of folks would love a driver while they sit in the back of a car and work, as several of my work colleagues do. Etc.

Are there no tasks in your life that you'd be happy to pay $7.25 for a human to handle for you?

(India has a labor scarcity too. Why isn't someone cleaning up all the garbage?)

This is because most of those folks simply want to protect a privileged position they were born into. Rather than competing in the labor market with a Mexican or Indian, they'd rather have someone threaten the Mexican with violence for the crime of economic competition.

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