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Comment by ako | Hacker News Reader

Creating jobs is one thing, but creating meaningful jobs is something completely different.

In communistic days in eastern europe, everyone was employed, but most people had a lousy job, that involved very little effort.

The first time i came to the US, i got the same feeling, lots of meaningless jobs (lift boy, parking lot attendant, grocery store bag filler) that i didn't see in the Netherlands.

Are these meaningless jobs really better than universal basic income?

At least with UBI people can decide for themselves how they create a meaningful daily activity.

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Street promoters make me sad. If they can find no job they better stay at home and learn something new, but they have no time for it, so they are stuck doing useless, maybe even harmful, work.

I've met someone who spun a sign for a living... he was a huge stoner... I love weed, but he clearly smoked too much of it while his brain was still developing and he could barely hold a conversation... Now... maybe he was self-medicating or whatever... but the point was he failed out of high school, failed out of a few jobs... and then ended up spinning a sign because he really had no meaningful skill to contribute to society. (And I think he failed at showing up to work so he lost that job eventually...)

I suspect most people who are in really shit jobs are there because they have issues... they can't show up on time, they don't follow employment rules, or they have something just wrong with them (they are sex-offenders, or have untreated behavioral issues or whatever)... not the sort of people who should be empowered to just sit around. I will go so far as to say nobody who really has potential ends up spinning a sign for very long... they use the job to cover their rent, and they find a way to get a better job.

Anyway I don't want to come off as against a UBI, I but I've never met someone who benefited by sitting around doing nothing. I think it's bad for people to be lazy -- like fundamentally brain-rotting to sit around being idle. I like the idea of a UBI that's tied to doing something... anything... getting outside and picking up trash in the road ditches even... or getting vocational training (which we should find a way to make free)... or getting mental health treatment... Prove you have a regular paycheck, or prove you are clocking in 30 hours at some "just move your body" type of approved activity every week to qualify.

Agree.

While we are making recommendations about what people with issues should be doing with themselves, let me add, on the other end of the spectrum - overconfident, mindlessly ambitious characters in society, should be sent off to explore the deep sea, climb mountains etc. So that whatever random goal they are chasing has minimal impact on society at large.

At any given time, some fraction of people are going to be burnouts. That's just a fact. I think they still deserve a baseline of wellbeing, without judgment. If they use it to better themselves, great. If not, oh well. But we spend so much time and effort trying to pick the winners rather than simply giving people a minimal foundation.

For those of us with work ethic (the vast majority of everyone, to varying extents), our extra effort will be rewarded by the market, if we do something that other people find valuable, or intrinsically, if we're just doing what we love.

I think UBI have a hard time gaining traction in the US. You're asking me to pay higher taxes to have an outcome where someone can actually do less than they currently do to contribute to society.

UBI is a very interesting concept, but in order to sell it you'd have to have a phased approach... one of the phases I think would have to include some sort of checks and balances.

> Street promoters make me sad. If they can find no job they better stay at home and learn something new, but they have no time for it, so they are stuck doing useless, maybe even harmful, work.

If these people really have such a large earning potential if they were just learning something new, why not let coworkers get together and finance a fund: The worker (let's call him John Doe) will get his existing income for, say, 2 years, financed by the coworkers together. John Doe on the other hand is of course obligated to learn something new (what exactly is agreed upon beforehand). After these two years for the next, say, five years John Doe has to donate, say, 40% of his gross income back to the coworkers who financed him this opportunity. Both sides should be willing to agree on such a deal: John Doe gets his opportunity to learn new things and (hopefully) get a much better job afterwards and his coworkers will (hopefully) get a lot more money back than they originally invested.

These contracts are really hard to enforce, and is essentially selling equity in yourself. If you sell 100% of your own equity, that'd be pretty much slavery right? Some people (maybe justifiably) feel very uncomfortable with the idea of selling their own future equity. For one thing, it reduces the incentives for someone to work hard.

Yale did something like this in the 70s and finally killed it because of issues with how it was structured. Also it felt really unfair to high wage earners that they were sometimes paying multiples of what their tuition originally was.

Oregon is trying this out now [2].

[1] http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2001/03/27/70s-debt-program-fi...

[2] http://www.salon.com/2015/03/26/two_years_after_signing_of_l...

> For one thing, it reduces the incentives for someone to work hard.

If you work harder, you will still have more money - that's what % is about.

> Some people (maybe justifiably) feel very uncomfortable with the idea of selling their own future equity.

If they have a problem with that, then they should negate something like "40% for every gross dollar over 1000 per month". You are

> Also it felt really unfair to high wage earners that they were sometimes paying multiples of what their tuition originally was.

That's why I wrote "coworkers", so that it is not a "poor workers against big bank" scheme but "poor workers invest in one of their peer" - this is a lot more at eye level. If the coworkers agree to less - fine. If you are more on the social side: Why not simply invest the, say, 40% into financing the education of the next "poor worker"?

It's a matter of trust.

People in other societies do this all the time -- entire families in China, for example, will pay in invest in others' education or pay for them to emigrate to the US, with the understanding that if the person succeeds they will bring over other family members or send back money.

But do coworkers really know and trust each other so well to do this without enforcement mechanisms? Lawyers are extremely expensive, so while you theoretically have recourse to the law, in practice even drafting an airtight contract can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Again there's two problems: cultural (I think to most Americans it's a blow to pride admitting they need help from others), and also enforcing 'percentage of paycheck' contracts is difficult. Just see how much trouble people have enforcing alimony or child support payments, even when the case is 100% legally clear.

> People in other societies do this all the time -- entire families in China, for example, will pay in invest in others' education or pay for them to emigrate to the US, with the understanding that if the person succeeds they will bring over other family members or send back money.

Indeed I had this in the back of my mind when I suggested my idea.

> enforcing 'percentage of paycheck' contracts is difficult. Just see how much trouble people have enforcing alimony or child support payments, even when the case is 100% legally clear.

Alimony and child support payments are forced upon them from above - this is nothing that anybody would willingly agree to if he/she could choose freely. On the other hand: Getting financed to learn something new is something people would willingly agree to. And if after that they earn more than before even after "donating" the 40%, they are still better off than before.

You need a really big group of people to make that happen, because there will be failure cases at every stage of the process. In fact, you might even need an entire country to buy in.

Which is basically a description of what happens when countries provide free uni education...

How is this different to a student loan, in any meaningful sense.

> How is this different to a student loan

* Student loan is "poor student vs. large bank". My suggestion is "peers finance peer".

* Student loan have to be paid back completely (with interest, of course). In my suggestion you pay back a defined percentage of the gross income for a defined number of years. So the risk that the person will only get a badly paying job is not on the person that is financed, but on the financers. This in particular means that the person taking the "loan" will avoids the risk that he will need many more years than originally anticipated to pay back the "loan".

>Creating jobs is one thing, but creating meaningful jobs is something completely different.

* Hoover Dam

* Lincoln Tunnel

* LAX

* LaGuardia Airport

Just a few examples of things created by jobs created primarily to give people work.

>Are these meaningless jobs really better than universal basic income?

Would you rather pay somebody to build the next Lincoln Tunnel or pay for them to write some poetry and start an emo band?

Those things weren't created primarily to give people work, they were created to fulfill demand for electricity and transportation, respectively.

If no one needs to commute to work in Manhattan, then there is no need for a Lincoln Tunnel. If no one has business meetings or disposable income for leisure travel, then LAX and LaGuardia would be idiotic.

We do see this kind of stuff - huge infrastructure projects with no users - in China.

>Those things weren't created primarily to give people work

They absolutely were.

They were created under the auspices of the Public Works Administration (originally Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works) - part of the 1933 New Deal:

https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/1...

"Functions: Administered a comprehensive public works program to promote and stabilize employment."

>If no one needs to commute to work in Manhattan, then there is no need for a Lincoln Tunnel. If no one has business meetings or disposable income for leisure travel, then LAX and LaGuardia would be idiotic.

That does not change the fact that these infrastructure works were created primarily to give the unemployed jobs and wouldn't have existed without it.

>We do see this kind of stuff - huge infrastructure projects with no users - in China.

Some of the infrastructure is like that but most has enough users to justify its existence. Their infrastructure-building binge isn't crazy. Our intentional lack of infrastructural improvement (which is entirely about artificially throttling employment and wage growth) is crazy.

Even if they were created to give people work, what is wrong with "we might as well get something useful out of this untapped unemployment"?

Define "useful" to your heart's desire, be it Hoover Dam 2.0 or Snowflake Poetry.

Examples of work more for work's sake might be landscaping or cleaning up streets. There are loads of rest areas or urban median strips/verges that look really awful worldwide. We could easily give people some responsibility for maintaining those.

> Would you rather pay somebody to build the next Lincoln Tunnel or pay for them to write some poetry and start an emo band?

Would you rather pay somebody to build the next Bridge to Nowhere or pay them to start the next Apple?

Nobody is going to start the next Apple if you pay them. Nobody. Great progress and innovation only come out of great tribulation.

Because Jobs and Woz were impoverished third world peasants who created Apple with no help from their families, government or investors?

Gates and Zuckerberg were literally going to Harvard on trust fund money, no effort at all was required of them, butthey had the privilege of resourceful parents with high expectations. If we replace resourceful parents with high expectations by a resourceful society with high expectations, the children that have shitty parents wont have a choice but to do better, that's what happened for my father.

That's not really a fair response to the parent's comment, but I suppose the parent's comment was entirely charitable to the proposed hypothetical either.

A more rigorous question with which to start (though maybe a bit leading...) would be:

Would you rather pay qualified labor force participants to do labor/construction/civil engineering, or would you rather pay the same number of qualified participants to start high growth technology companies?

The nice thing about this question is that it lends itself to empiricism - we can figure out the most rational answer by looking at the ratio of successes to failures in each category of achievement. To put it very precisely: at what percentage of successes out of total attempts are we willing to choose to fund extremely rare but huge successes that employ a lot of people over very consistent but modest successes that employ only the workers and a smaller ongoing number in the long term?

I haven't actually done the math, but my intuition (which could be wrong!) is that it makes more sense to pay for people to e.g. fix America's insanely expensive and inefficient transportation system than to pay for them to sit in a garage and try to "innovate." Then again, you could argue that America's transportation projects are inefficient and expensive because they support an elaborate jobs program already :)

> That's not really a fair response to the parent's comment, but I suppose the parent's comment was entirely charitable to the proposed hypothetical either.

That was the point.

> Would you rather pay qualified labor force participants to do labor/construction/civil engineering, or would you rather pay the same number of qualified participants to start high growth technology companies?

To which the answer is almost certainly, both. Because we need roads and infrastructure, but we also need a safety net, and they are not the same thing.

> I haven't actually done the math, but my intuition (which could be wrong!) is that it makes more sense to pay for people to e.g. fix America's insanely expensive and inefficient transportation system than to pay for them to sit in a garage and try to "innovate."

Literally starting a multibillion dollar company is obviously not the one most people are going to do. But a UBI also lets you quit your terrible job and still pay rent while attending community college, so you can get a better job tomorrow. Or use the safety net go to a new place where you're more likely to find better employment opportunities. Or start a normal small business that nobody ever expects to be Apple or Walmart but after a couple years will be able to pay you a middle class wage.

And the best part is that you have self-interested people figuring it out for themselves.

>That was the point.

That was actually my point.

>But a UBI also lets you quit your terrible job

A guaranteed job that isn't horrible makes terrible jobs better since employers will have to compete to keep their employees.

How do you guarantee a non-terrible job to people with minimal skills?

And how do you finance it? With a UBI you don't have to pay as much because people can supplement it with an actual job even if pays less than current minimum wage, and everyone who works is offsetting part or all of their own cost by paying taxes. 100% of people can collect the UBI because most of them will still be working and paying taxes, and if they don't it's only because the amount is too high.

What if 85% of people choose the "basic job", and the only way to change that is to either make the "basic job" degrading or have it pay less than a living wage?

>How do you guarantee a non-terrible job to people with minimal skills?

Don't overwork them, don't be unreasonable towards them, don't disrespect them and pay them a living wage to do some sort of meaningful work (e.g. care work).

This isn't that hard. The US has done it before.

>And how do you finance it?

There's a hundred different ways.

>With a UBI you don't have to pay as much

You have to pay more because it goes to everybody instead of just the unemployed and you don't get anything in return for that money.

>What if 85% of people choose the "basic job"

That's kind of like asking "what if programmers all gave up their jobs at once to become cleaners?".

> the only way to change that is to either make the "basic job" degrading

A "basic job" can establish a floor on job quality and wages. Private employers will respond to this market force by paying more and treating people better and they will complain bitterly about it.

I'd be happy enough if there were no apple. Overpriced crap, reality distortion field and an egomaniac running a wage fixing cartel operating the whole thing. No thanks.

I'll take some high speed rail though, please. Perhaps 100,000 new affordable apartments in New York and San Francisco too. Unless you think that there's no need and people wouldn't want them?

Is there a reason we can't have both?

It's not actually possible to solve it the other way anyway. It's not 1929 anymore. Modern construction jobs require trained workers with trade licenses who demand middle class salaries and benefits. That is a lot more expensive per-person than a UBI.

So if you have a legitimate project like that, go hire some of those people and do the work. But what about everybody else?

>Is there a reason we can't have both?

If you mean UBI and a job guarantee, I suppose not, however it's going to cause inflation to spike pretty high.

>It's not 1929 anymore

It actually kind of is. Wages have stagnated, the wealth of the 1% has ballooned, infrastructure is crumbling and the far right is on the rise.

>Modern construction jobs require trained workers with trade licenses who demand middle class salaries and benefits. That is a lot more expensive per-person than a UBI.

Just guaranteeing paid work to the ~30% unemployed is far cheaper than giving a stipend to every person in the United States.

Even if you include the cost of materials it's not going to come close.

> If you mean UBI and a job guarantee, I suppose not, however it's going to cause inflation to spike pretty high.

Not a job guarantee, just normal government spending on infrastructure projects, as compared with the underinvestment we've seen over the past decades.

> It actually kind of is. Wages have stagnated, the wealth of the 1% has ballooned, infrastructure is crumbling and the far right is on the rise.

What I mean is we're no longer willing to put unskilled workers in dangerous jobs with no training and stand by while they get killed or kill other people because they don't know what they're doing or they lack the disposition to work safely with industrial equipment.

> Just guaranteeing paid work to the ~30% unemployed is far cheaper than giving a stipend to every person in the United States.

Only if you count the taxes someone "pays" but immediately gets back as a UBI as "costing money". If you use the same accounting that gets used for means-tested programs, the "cost" of a UBI turns negative for everyone making a below average income and costs about the same as existing means-tested programs for people with above average incomes (depending obviously on the amount of the UBI).

Yes, but it depends on how people see or interpret their jobs. If you really see meaning in bagging someone's groceries, then it's valuable. If you see meaning in giving people the stop/go signal at a garage in Japan, then it's meaningful.

If one goes to Japan, one might think one sees a number of geriatrics doing needless or meaningless jobs --on the other hand, if you look carefully, for many of these people that simple job gives them meaning in life. They actually take pride in doing their job dutifully and faithfully with pride --things someone from the US would scoff at or think ridiculous. So, it just requires a re-framing.

> In communistic days in eastern europe, everyone was employed, but most people had a lousy job, that involved very little effort.

I find this hard to believe. Why would a job "in communistic days" be different from, well, a job?

Because there was a job for everyone. Government had to create a job for everyone.

See: http://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-19-1-a-...

"In the workplace, almost everyone had a job. Wages,however, lagged far behind those in the Western democracies. A common joke was, "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." But rents, goods, and services were far cheaper than in the West."

> job for everyone

You are implying that this was dictated by political rather than economical reasons, but that may be not entirely correct.

> we pretend to work

This is true - for some workers. Thing is, the Western society in not and has never been different in this regard. And, some of the "job creation" policies could exacerbate the problem even more.

Yes, some jobs are the same here.

The main question is: do you create a job because there's some work to be done, or do you create a job because somebody needs a job?

Do you have an evidence of the latter, or this is purely hypothetical? (An honest question.)

Common knowledge, see earlier link, some googling will easily give you more info.

Lots of older people in Easter Europe think communistic days were better and wish they could go back: state provided housing, education, healthcare and a job. Not great, but basic (as in basic income).

>Wages,however, lagged far behind those in the Western democracies.

Eastern Communist states were essentially reduced to rubble after WW2. This did make building to the same economic level as an entirely untouched America, or even West Germany (which was deluged with aid and given preferential trading terms), something of a challenge.

Because the state created (and paid for) jobs to make sure everyone's nominally employed. It was essentially a form of UBI, although there were different levels and amounts for different people.

>I find this hard to believe.

You don't have to "believe it". Just buy and read a few historical accounts, and/or biographies of people that lived through those regimes.

In wasn't that a job in "communistic days" was different from a modern job, it was that in those days productivity wasn't that high anyway neither was purchasing power, so there was little use for jobs to make things or offer services that people couldn't afford.

All the same, everybody was supposed to automatically have a job, hence the creation of tons of mostly idle bureaucratic job positions.

At the heart of the communist was the belief that the entire country with all its people can be managed and orchestrated. This translates to a very static universe, where you are born, given an assignment and are suppose to stay in the same place until you die or the state changes their mind. Everything was a number in a spreadsheet, how many doctors given are will have, how much bread you need to bake and how much toilet paper shoul be produced. The last one turned out to be the symbol of communism failure, they did some math and decided X amount of toilet paper should be produced, but sadly people wanted more. Huge shortfall of toilet paper began and it started being a valued asset. Such over-planned world doesn't really work well with human ambitions, it doesn't really matter if you job is meaningful or not, having very little choice will likely cause stress and make you unhappy. To make things worse promotion was only possible if you were a party member and was seen as valuable and loyal. The whole thing was more than just automatically giving people jobs, it's been about total control, job creation was one of the tools. I don't think it's easy to directly compare it with UBI if someone wants to make such analogy. UBI doesn't restrict you the same way, it might even be seen as opposite - liberating people from being forced into low paid jobs where you generate very little value and it's hard to progress your skills and income.

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