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Comment by seoguru | Hacker News Reader

As Randall Wray said: "There are lots of people who want to work but cannot find paying jobs. And lots of stuff that needs to be done. We’ve got a serendipitous problem here: bring the two together."

He lists a number of ideas for jobs in this article: http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2014/01/07/bop-a-mole-2-j...

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But if people want to work (and I don't doubt many do), why force them to? Why we need to "ensure they are kept busy"?

All of this smells of replacing capitalist oppression with bureaucratic oppression. All for their own good, of course.

I start out inherently skeptical that the government could run a work program better than private industry.

That article dispels that concern and many others that I had about such a program. Thanks for sharing it!

> These firms are under constant pressure to increase the workload, depress wages, and harden the working conditions of those workers as they engage in ruthless competition at the bottom of the wage pool. A JG program will not be run for profit; it will set the minimum wage and working conditions tolerated in the USA. We can choose to enforce humanitarian conditions and livable wages in the JG.

I think this is a really important quote from the article. In such a rich society (USA, Australia, Canada, Britain, wherever..) it seems sort of unnecessary that we'd force wages to be so low they are barely above the poverty line.

But I'm not entirely sure how this fits into a global economy. If workers in China are working for cents there is no way a similar industry in Australia can compete with a minimum wage of $18 an hour. We've seen this in textile manufacturing in particular.

I'm also not sure what the views will be when we've magically automated nearly everything. Eventually there is not going to be enough work for everyone. Will we finally decide that "work" isn't necessary for everyone and allow time to be spent on travel, family, and fun? Or will we invent things to do for the sake of contributing?

Just tossing out random thoughts I've had over the last few years.

> But I'm not entirely sure how this fits into a global economy. If workers in China are working for cents there is no way a similar industry in Australia can compete with a minimum wage of $18 an hour. We've seen this in textile manufacturing in particular.

This has been discussed to death here in Portugal. Portugal had, up until the 90s, a strong textile and shoe making industry. It moved to the east during the late nineties, early noughties. Strangely, the last five years have seen a renaissance.

Our cost of labor, while cheap in EU terms is orders of magnitude above eastern countries. The explanation for the resurgence of the industry is twofold: a) Cost of labor accounts for less than one third of final product cost; b) Logistics advantages can easily recover the cost difference. Think short lead times, work force adaptability, higher automation, lower defect ratios, smaller inventory. Couple this with fashion sticking less and less to two collections per year (and going for high adaptability during the season), and you get a competitive advantage China and Vietnam do not have.

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