Saving the heartland: Place-based policies in 21st Century America | Hacker News Reader

Saving the heartland: Place-based policies in 21st Century America

brookings.edu

32 pointsDowwie19 comments

> The enormous social costs of non-employment suggests that fighting long-term joblessness is more important than fighting income inequality.

Isn’t joblessness a second order problem? What is the root cause? One’s ability to survive (basic necessities-wise) is limited by their ability to get and keep a job. Uncouple these two, via Basic Incone or something like it, and joblessness in and of itself is no longer a problem. Tough to do politically, since the prevailing Puritanical world view sees a living as something that must be earned.

>Uncouple these two, via Basic Income or something like it, and joblessness in and of itself is no longer a problem.

I don't think that's entirely true and I think equating contrary views with Puritanism is a cheap way to make it seem so.

Lots of people do take pride in their work, when we look at people who have lost their jobs in industries which aren't going to return there's not just the loss of income there's the loss of usefulness. There is a value to people in having a skill which you're good at, having a community (the workplace) which places some level of authority or trust in you to execute that task and then the ability to actually go and do that skill to recertify that trust/authority. Steel workers in Pennsylvania aren't just looking at a smaller paycheck for the rest of their lives, they're faced with potentially never being good enough at a useful task to ever get that sort of trust again and that itself can be corrosive to the human spirit.

Retrain them as park rangers, refund the preservation of America's wild life, fund research into outdoor living, go hunting on the weekends in flow with the wildlife preservation and environmental research. Bring the bacon home, keep America's ecosystem thriving, start figuring out how to get people out of unhealthy suburban/urban living, use long-term isolation wilderness research to pre-empt space colonization challenges, use our ecology studies to plan the terraforming of mars, terrform mars, repeat ecological policy on mars.

If a UBI was big enough, steel workers could go back to work. They could run a factory and make steel, at a loss, but it wouldn't matter because doing something useful (making steel) is decoupled from their livelihood.

And for the people who want to get that sense of usefulness another way (raising kids, teaching others how to make steel, playing video games, building houses) they would have the financial freedom to do so.

This is what Walmart does and all they get is people complaining about it.

Doesn’t that sound like an unaffordable loss?

I agree with everything you said. More clearly I’d say with something like Basic Income, joblessness is still a problem—but it becomes an inconvenience, a temporary lifestyle downgrade, or a bruised ego, rather than a pants-on-fire emergency which is what it is today.

It's more of an Old Testament "thou shalt not steal" worldview given that people on basic income would be mooching off of people that work.

Tough to do economically, since it takes a staggering amount of money to provide a Basic Income that's enough to actually survive on.

For many, in particular among those who aren't self-motivated, having a job provides much more than just a paycheck. For one's mental health, knowing you are contributing something back to society provides an enormous boost to your sense of self-worth, regardless of how big the paycheck is at the end of the day.

> contributing something back to society

It is really challenging to contextualize a lot of service industry jobs this way.

There are a lot of service industry workers workers who would disagree with you, and view your comment as smug elitism.

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/3_austi... for the actual paper

Fair warning: its 98 pages (!) long. It looks interesting though.

Compare the romantic concepts attached to rural poor, "heartland" we should "save", compared to the urban poor (I won't bother to list the terms). And note that for the urban poor, the solution is to erase them or get them out of sight, via gentrification, zoning, and other means.

I know that's not universally true and there are programs to help the urban poor, but it's hard to think of anyone romanticizing them.

At the extreme ends, anti-gentrification activism romanticizes concentrated poverty and class segregation.

I don't personally think that Brookings is a non-partisan actor. Maybe they were at some point. I'm really distrustful of their research and the people involved.

If it weren't presented as non-partisan, then I wouldn't feel the need to comment. I would just ignore it, like I ignore most center or right wing economics. (I know! What happened to the free exchange of ideas, right?)

As to the point of the article, I think my critique is just a general critique of marginal technocratic adjustments to taxes and means tested programs. I support universal programs and redistribution.

> I don't personally think that Brookings is a non-partisan actor.

"I don't think youdontknowtho is a non-partisan actor." What makes that more meaningful than just a string of UTF-8 encodings? What is the partisan bias that's being asserted? Much more interestingly and importantly, what basis is there for it?

You are correct. I'm not non-partisan.

Brookings is a think tank that provides intellectual cover for the capital-owning class. Just because it isn't paleo-conservative doesn't mean that it isn't a right wing group.

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