Work and beyond

Why would he jump ship? He’s got a sweet gig now. If he became a heretic, he might keep his NYT gig[1], but he’d lose any other wingnut welfare checks.

[1] I don’t know what it takes to lose a columnist position there.

…dignity and equality will require both a reduction in total hours of work and an expansion in the range of social contributions regarded as work, beyond those that generate a market return

This is a key idea, it seems to me. It’s the only justification for your proposed new order that I can see resonating with the long term unemployed, or with those threatened by a devaluation of the jobs they still have, or those that they’ve prepared themselves to do. If you want to convince people that a service economy can be an adequate replacement for the manufacturing economy that we started outsourcing in a big way in the Eighties, this is the way to go. Setting the seal of social and economic approval on various kinds of do-goodery might even end once and for all those nasty right-wing populisms based on racial antipathies or a fear of so-called freeloaders and low-wage immigrants. Something to work on, at any rate, whenever the political opportunity presents itself.

Have any of the folks yammering about “the dignity of work” come out in support of a 100% inheritance tax, or does this concern about dignity somehow not apply to those who have done the hard work of being born into the right family?

Can someone explain why we would want to subsidize child-rearing *rather* than simply transfer an equivalent amount of income to the poor? Is the idea that the world is underpopulated, or that increased immigration is for some reason out of the question? I understand that child-rearing is difficult and important work. What I don’t understand is how people are forming a view of the optimal public subsidy for procreation.

Also:

Did he come to learn of that Keynes essay by reading an article of yours in Aeon, and then refer to the Keynes essay in his NYT piece without giving you a h/t?

Because that’s some really poor intellectual hygiene on his part. That’s the kind of cheap trick for making yourself look smarter that…well, that I suppose I have come to expect from Douthat, Goldberg (“can someone read Spinoza for me?”) and other wing-nuts.

I think Douhat’s difficulty in challenging his ideological backers is no more embarrassing that the reluctance of academic economists to declare the obvious incoherence of their discipline at a time when the freshwater/saltwater divide has revealed it to be a house divided against itself. Pick a policy issue, and you will find equally prominent economists in diametrically opposed positions. This is ridiculous.

The prestige of the econ0mics community now lies in ruins, largely because of the mutual professional courtesy extended among members of the club. Economists have successfully defended their individual institutional franchises at the expense of their collective public reputation.

Polanyi. He keeps coming up, and for good reason. His metaphor of embedding hasn’t resonated — possibly because it isn’t punchy enough for our Sabbath gasbags — but the insight behind it has endured. Which is embedded in what, which is the subset and which the superset, which the cart and which the horse. A value not expressed in dollars isn’t a value at all. Etc., etc. Weird that Graeber resurrected Polanyi’s switcheroo to great acclaim, only to fall victim to accusations of personality crimes. (Nota bene: I’m not trying to ignite a war over whether or not those accusations were justified.)

Ahem…. Where are Bruce Wilder and Bob McManus when we really need them? John C. Halasz? Anyone?

Douthat’s never going to jump ship unless the Democrats drift rightward enough to support a full-blown theocratic wing. The very core of Douthat’s existence is being the Pharisee praying in the Temple, in one of Jesus’ parables, and for all their faults, the Democrats simply don’t give anything like the cuddling the Republicans do to that way of life. It’s still hatemongering sneering even if you claim not to enjoy it.

As for the substance, my parents raised us to believe that there’s potential for value in all work, but also to have the Depression veteran’s skepticism that there’s any value in any given job as it actually exists. And as a zillion people have noted before, it’s not like we find all these blatherers volunteering to do the ugly dirty stuff themselves. They seem mostly to believe in the dignity of labor for people they don’t want trying to think or participate as citizens.

Try this, Straightwood.

The Efficiency of Drug Patents and Other Silly Things Economists Say
~

Plume: Read Aesop. In particular direct your attention to the grasshopper and the ant. Or Adam Smith’s discussion of the existence of beggars. Pre-agricultural societies had extremely limited ability to survive environmental dislocations. Specialization might render work’s relation to libidinal drives obscure, but was necessary to create civilization. Neurosis is the price of Bach.

In socialism labor and the division of labor will be enhanced, not eliminated. There was an article I saw a few years ago about a Russian family that moved to Siberia and lived alone. Their quality of life was abysmal: they engaged in endurance hunting of wild animals, had to plow by hand, and if one of them broke a leg, they would be crippled for life. Even if I lived on a tropical island with an upwelling offshore, failing to maintain my boat would mean starvation.

Birth control in pre-civilizational societies was only known on one island due to a property of the staple food reducing fecundity. Human populations were limited environmentally, a phrase that means starvation, predation, disease, miscarriage, accidents.

The question isn’t whether to abolish the formation of labor into capital. The question is who should benefit and direct it. We can’t end labor without killing billions of people by starvation. But we can ensure it benefits everyone.

P O’Neill: ” Krugman and others who are in the ring on this one are simply asserting that the 2.5 million FTEs are better off. . . . I’ve yet to see Krugman bring an iota of evidence or even interest in this issue. ”

The assumption, pretty much regardless of political bent, is that people are generally better off when they have more options. The ACA gives them the option to get health insurance without staying in their current job, or any job, and an expected 2.5 million will exercise the option to quit work. True, people can make bad decisions, but the expectation is that most of those who quit work will be doing what is better for them.

I’ve met people who expressed a sincere belief in the dignity of labor, almost all of them over the age of 70 with a diverse work history that included manual or farm labor. But from the current right wing this is just more cynical deflection. Witness the opposition to increasing the minimum wage, often ridiculing “burger flipping” as unworthy of decent compensation. I keep waiting for all the hedge fund managers, stock hustlers and conservative pundits to go Galt and leave the rest of us, unworthy as we might be, alone. Please?

Random nitpick:
npaid leave (12 weeks a year for mothers in firms with more than 50 employees, nothing for fathers) Actually, fathers are equally eligible for FMLA leave. (I took FMLA leave after each of my children were born, so I’m quite certain.)

Douthat’s argument is even more confused than you describe it. His premise is partly that “… the digital economy delivers rich rewards to certain kinds of highly educated talent, while revolutions in robotics eliminate many of today’s low-skilled, low-wage jobs”. The latter statement is misleading and illustrates the persistent tendency amongst pundits to equate “low-skilled, low-paid jobs” with “assembly-line work in factories that make consumer goods”. In fact the service-based economy has seen an explosion in low-wage jobs doing work that people used to do for themselves, from lawn mowing to dog-washing to childcare. (The question of whether these low-paid jobs are also “low-skilled”, is one that can’t be properly dealt with in a comment like this; but it’s significant that pundits like Douthat automatically assume they are simply because they don’t get high wages … as opposed, presumably, to something requiring “highly educated talent” such as churning out a few thousand words of pap for the “New York Times” every week).

The gaping hole in Douthat’s argument is that while he deplores the alleged permanent loss of jobs on the one hand, and maintains that work is good as an end in itself, he makes no suggestions about how the former is to be reversed in order to achieve more of the latter. But he knows that many of his less sophisticated ideological fellow-travellers are more than willing to supply the solution. As always, it lies in “labour market flexibility” and “entitlement reform”, meaning reduce the welfare safety net and the minimum wage to force ever more people to take crappy jobs for a few dollars an hour, in order to enjoy the dignity of avoiding starvation. That’s why they reacted so viciously to the CBO report; it’s evidence that despite all their frantic opposition, the damned liberals have made a tiny but positive step towards giving people the unalienable rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

P O’Neill: What gives Douthat the opening is that liberals are convinced they won the round over the CBO estimates simply by pouncing on the clownish misstatements . . . In the victory dance over the CBO round, I’ve yet to see Krugman bring an iota of evidence or even interest in this issue. Douthat at least is asking.

John Quiggin: detailed evidence on the effects future supply responses is a bit hard to come by

Lee A. Arnold: We can thank the CBO for starting this particular conversation, but all the evidence isn’t in, and there is a lot more to be seen.

It’s worth observing and reflecting on the extent to which this political discussion is a contest of dream worlds, projections of the future, where our reasoning accepts the constraints it likes and rejects the inconvenient truths, willy nilly. In politics, I’m not sure how many people can be brought together to share a dream world, or how long that sharing can last. Evidence may never matter, but the explanations attached to experience will matter.

It’s the contest over the explanation of experience, where the politics plays out.

Sadly, I think what John Quiggin, in his Aeon essay, called “market liberalism” — a “more neutral term” for the conservative-libertarian/neoliberal ideological policy consensus — remains the default, and effectively undisputed, framework for explaining economic experience. Undead, but still champion.

The liberal Democrat in the U.S. or the social democrat or labor party adherent in Europe is in a tough position, when they push 3rd and 4th best policies in compromise with plutocratic power mixed with the usual corruption, and then must “explain” their way through the confusion, numerous shortcomings, hardships and further erosion of economic security, which inevitably follow.

Does a utopian vision help the liberal or social democrat?

I guess I can see how it might help a bit in rallying the tribe. I’m not sure how it loosens the deathgrip of neoliberal ideology, which holds the mandarins and technocrats, and therefore establishment politicians, firmly in place, nor how it might advance liberals and social democrats in the direction of 2nd-best policy, which might actually turn out well, or be less ambiguous in its results.

The U.S. does have something like a basic income guarantee in Social Security disability claims. It’s a fairly sizeable number of people (more than 10 million). Not very utopian, but, I suppose, a political outlet of sorts. The usual array of political prejudices and pejoratives apply.

“but I would like to hear just once someone affirm what seems to me to be important and completely lost in the polarized arguments about the ACA. That it is not about access to health care.
It’s about access to profit-driven healthcare insurance.”

In the US that is a distinction without a difference Roy.

In the US that is a distinction without a difference Roy.

Polarized argument speaks.

I’ll have a bit more to say about the kind of technological determinism that seeks to explain labour market polarisation as arising from computers and the Internet a bit later.

Please say it soon! The relationship between technology, class, and employment is one of my great interests along with post-fossil energy. I don’t want to start yammering in this thread if there is going to be a separate post a little later.

“Polarized argument speaks.”
Sorry Bruce, I don’t understand this statement.

Watson Ladd #19,

I’m not seeing how your response is related at all to what I said, but, no matter.

Not saying we should abolish labor. I’m saying we should broaden how it’s defined — especially to include things done outside the employer/employee frame.

I’m also saying that since that frame has always been unjust, unfair, immoral and woefully out of balance, it’s long past time to change it to one where we work for ourselves and society, not to make a tiny fraction of the population rich.

And we can have our “division of labor” without having that employer/employee set up. We can have it without work defining who we are. As Marx said:

. . . to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner… without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”

Naturally, capitalists have always wanted to prevent people from working for themselves and their communities. They need wage slaves. And one of the mind-games they’ve always used is to try to guilt people into going to work for those capitalists. “You’re a no good, rotten, lazy slug if you don’t.” etc. etc.

I hope people wake up someday and see they’ve been had.

Bottom line for me: It’s waaaay past time we move to a community-based, small is beautiful, local is logical economy . . . . one that is flexible, optimizes free time for personal dreams and projects . . . . while ending immoral power and wealth imbalances between ownership and workers. We can very quickly end the latter imbalance by making everyone owner, with an equal share and equal voice.

Please have your webmaster fix your RSS feed.

Bruce Wilder #33; “It’s worth observing and reflecting on the extent to which this political discussion is a contest of dream worlds, projections of the future, where our reasoning accepts the constraints it likes and rejects the inconvenient truths, willy nilly.”

I think this is right. It is all pretty silly. With the caveat that the acceptance of any dream world is tantamount to a consumer preference, or a social preference, and that preference may make all the difference as to whether a step towards universal healthcare will, in reality, work. (If preferences weren’t “exogenous”, economics would be much more self-referential. I.e.economics the subject discipline would be seen to actively attempt to establish the preferences which it supposes the market to have “naturally”.)

“Healthcare-in-society” is an N-compartment complexity phenomenon, and ferreting out one or two connections (such as work incentives) to insist that this dominates the question is really non-computable and ludicrous.

… and looking at a steady decline in real income, is scarcely getting much in the way of dignity, let alone mobility or social equality.

But is real income really declining? I’ll bet you are relying on the CPI to reach that conclusion, but the CPI doesn’t do a very good job at measuring the hedonic component of inflation.

For example, an average new car today cost about 5 times as much as its counterpart 40 years ago. Hence 500% inflation, right? Look at it another way. How much would it cost in 1974 to buy a car comparable to today’s average new car?

There isn’t an answer to that question, because all the money in the world wouldn’t suffice. That means using monetary units risks meaninglessness in just about every realm affected to any significant degree by technology.

As it happens, in terms of time, in 1974 it took 23 weeks at the average wage to earn enough to purchase an average new car. In 2012 it took … 23 weeks.

But the 2012 version lasts at least twice as long, gets twice the gas mileage, requires very little maintenance, and has standard amenities that were only available, if at all, on luxury cars in 1974. The average new car requires something like 23% fewer work hours to own and operate than forty years ago.

The point here is that real income only makes sense in terms of what it gets. Income now gets a great deal more in many respects than it did even as little as forty years ago, so real living standards (which is what matters) have greatly increased over the period.

Matt (no. 47), the sweet spot for a basic income has these features:-

– With top up work, it would be enough to live on.

– With the basic income, people wouldn’t need much pay from top up work.

– With the ability to settle for lower pay, they would all be able to price themselves into enough top up work to get a decent income in total.

– As this is the level that matches the labour market externality better, neither materially undershooting or overshooting, G.D.P. would go up and so providing that wage subsidy via a basic income would be realistic.

You write “Right now the basic income is zero and therefore the incentive to get pay is even greater, but across the OECD there are millions more people seeking jobs than open positions available for job seekers”.

Yes, but they have to try for wages high enough to live on without any further supplement, so not enough work is available for all of them. Their incentive to seek it doesn’t translate into employers offering it.

You then write “Under these conditions, trying to fix unemployment by focusing on job-seekers instead of jobs is irrelevant at best and a diversionary/delaying/blame-shifting tactic at worst”.

But this works out the same as applying the effort at a different point, after a transition. Your objection is only valid in the short term – but because it is a serious problem, that is precisely why my personal preference is for a Negative Payroll Tax approach. However, since it was the question of a basic income that was brought up, I addressed that first.

Finally, you write ‘Or does lower the wages they would accept include scrapping minimum wages, so that everyone can have the “opportunity” to find a job underbidding offshore sweat shops?’

Strictly speaking, yes, if you went the basic income way. Before you bite my head off, on the one hand they would not be getting a sweat shop income, they would be getting a sweat shop income plus a basic income – even higher than minimum wages; and on the other hand, if instead you went the Negative Payroll Tax way, wages paid would not have to change at all (in fact, minimum wages would become meaningless since employers would have incentives to offer even higher wages anyway).

It also strikes me that the NBER Tennessee Medicaid study examines a sudden disenfranchisement from a Medicaid subsidy as causing employment increase, then assumes that it works the other way too: that Obamacare will cause disemployment.

But this brings up the objection that the sudden “disenrollment” from Tenncare might simply catch people who are in dire need of medical attention, perhaps through chronic illness or disability — and are now in dire need of a job.

Does anyone have some estimate of the percentage of the U.S. working-age population that receives Medicaid (not Medicare) and is in chronic need of it? They may be what is causing this statistic of Tenn. employment-uptick.

To put it another way, Douthat wrote, “One of the studies used to model the consequences of Obamacare… found a strong work disincentive while looking at a population of childless, able-bodied, mostly working-class adults.”

–But I think that this could also be the artifact of a persistent percentage of the population that needs continuous medical attention, and by nixing Tenncare we increase their transaction costs — and their fears. Since it could happen to anyone at anytime, Medicaid expansion and improvement is the way to go.

Is art that no one wants to pay for worth making people pay for?
That’s an astonishing question.
But the astonishment subsides, and then there’s just this sticky stuff on my shoes.
What is that?
Maybe it’s connected to the bizarre notion that women who full-time maintain homes and nurture children in those homes are getting paid “from somewhere”.
Because they have food and shelter?
Like how slaves get fed and sheltered, right? So paid. So not slaves.
Since slavery in the model you seem to be entertaining for this would be the complete absence of remuneration.
But then that would mean the only labor that fits the definition “slavery” would be being forced to work and having to feed and shelter yourself in addition. Not a tenable form of economic productivity, even for the most unrepentant master. Because of time and energy constraints and all.
Maybe that’s connected to the deceptive use of true but misleading stats like “23 weeks at the average wage”.
Are you looking around you here? We’re in the middle of some serious wealth redistributing, and it’s all going upward.
Phrases like “average wages” don’t really mean much of anything at the moment.
And the increased utility you use to justify the market-determined price of “average” cars fits the Bentley Flying Spur just as nicely. Worth every penny of its $220K sticker price. Because of advancements in technology etc.
Somewhere in there the reality of contemporary existence isn’t getting fully represented.
Maybe it’s just a smokescreen for “jettison the losers”?
Who are pretty much anybody not making those “average” wages. Which is more and more people.

[John Quiggin:] On your current comment, you mention math, but your argument appears to be one from incredulity “It is hard to imagine …”. Since you’ve read my article in full, you know that the math is spelt out there. If it’s wrong, why don’t you point out the error?

I just re-reviewed the article and didn’t find any math in particular, and nothing in regard to the life-cycle average work week; apologies if I failed to notice, or take on board.

I do have to cop to the argument from incredulity charge, but a great many assertions in that article seem to come without arguments. For instance, there seems to be an assumption, implicit in your pull-quote from Marx, that jobs have no particular skill or experience component. Is it true that one could be a surgeon in the morning, algebra teacher after lunch, and airline pilot in the evening? Do we really want to spend enough money training surgeons so that they only have to work 15 hours per week? Would they retain enough proficiency at 15 hours per week? My incredulity increases with nearly every example.

[Plume:] The median income in America for a single person is roughly 27K.

Wrong. It is $52,000

It’s disingenuous to try to claim that things are better for the rank and file today than they were during our only middle class boom (1947-1973).

Air conditioning, dishwashers, safer cars, better medical care …

There has been an incredible flattening of consumption over the last 40 years. Would you really rather drive a Maverick than a modern Focus?

Hey Skipper #62,

You attribute the wrong person to that quote. It wasn’t me. It’s Roy Belmont’s at #57.

My by now ritual complaint about the study of working hours over time. That there’s a general failure to distinguish clearly between unpaid working hours in household production and paid working hours in the market.

It’s not obvious at all that “working hours” increased with the industrial revolution. It is obviously clear that household production hours declined and market working hours increased.

For example, those claims that feudal peasants had 70 holidays a year and the like. The major fault with the calculation is obvious: animal owning peasants don’t get 70 days off a year. If they do then they’re not animal owning any more. What appears to have been done (and I’ve never actually been able to find the complete calculation that comes from, Juliet Schor I know, but I cannot find the actual paper….if anyone knows please do inform me) is to count the “market work” that had to be done. Those feudal obligations to the Lord in lieu of rent, but not the work that was done on the peasant’s own land or in that household.

The same point can be made about Keynes’ 15 hours. One recent set of numbers claimed that in the 1930s it took 65 hours of labour to run a household and now it takes two. That last number there sounds a little overcooked in an attempt to make the point but Hans Rosling makes much the same point with his story about the washing machine. Ha Joon Chang makes it about household technology in general.

Working hours have decreased since the 1930s. But it is those hours in unpaid household production which have.

P.M. Lawrence,

It appears that your fuller explanation of the Negative Payroll Tax is here: http://www.spectacle.org/0112/lawrence.html

I think we have a couple of deep differences that will prevent agreeing even about the problem, much less the solution, but I will elaborate since I may be mistaken.

The first is that you state the problem as one of avoiding social unrest at minimum cost — currently done through unemployment benefits, perhaps in the future done by a Negative Payroll Tax. I would frame the problem as one of equity: ensuring that people who start out only modestly more (wealthy, educated, skilled, lucky, diligent) than the median can’t compound that advantage over a lifetime or multiple generations to end up with orders of magnitude more wealth than their temporal/national peers*. Nobody spends a hundred times as long as the median in school, is a hundred times as intelligent, or works a hundred times as many hours per week. The limits to human variation are much narrower than the limits to income variation. If someone “earns” a hundred times the median wage, at best most of that surplus is luck and at worst it is loot stolen from the commons. Minimizing taxation may be orthogonal or counter to the goal of ensuring that there is not too large a gap in economic power between the median and the top.

The second disagreement is that I do not think that market employment is a good goal in and of itself. Productivity has been growing faster than employment at most times since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and I don’t want to fight that trend. I think it’s better to think about how to decouple employment and consumption, just as payroll and production have already diverged, than look for ways to force consumption and employment together again. We’re incentivizing a theme park version of employment if employers are negative-taxed to take on unwanted employees at token wages to perform unneeded work. I don’t think there’s any benefit to negative-taxing Boeing to take on a thousand more employees who will be assigned to solve sudoku puzzles or dig holes and refill them far from the aircraft.

Nor do I think Boeing will substantially change its production processes to purchase more labor and less productive capital when labor is made relatively cheaper. Humans working with simple tools are slower than specialized machinery at completing tasks, but more importantly cannot operate to the same standards of precision and repeatability. If it were just a matter of number of widgets finished per hour per worker there might be a smooth trade-off between capital and labor, but that describes few actual production scenarios. How long does it take an unskilled worker with simple tools to reproduce an hour’s output from computer-controlled machinery built for a role? Forever. Not possible. Erroneous assumption embedded in question.

*I’m not really on board with 100% income equality, both because there are observable differences in productivity among peers and because I think (bounded) incentives to compete can be good. But once we hit 100-fold differences in compensation between able people working in the same polity and the same year, I think we are well past variations explicable by everything plausibly called “merit.”

“And it is probably outside of the sphere of things likely to be discussed by serious people.”

Don’t you mean Serious People notskeaky?

Matt (no. 73) wrote:-

… you state the problem as one of avoiding social unrest at minimum cost — currently done through unemployment benefits, perhaps in the future done by a Negative Payroll Tax.

What I was trying to do was describe – historically – the problems faced by the powers that be, as experienced by them, to explain why they chose to do something about the problems; I wrote:-

Unemployment benefits started out from things like the Elizabethan Poor Laws and Bismarck’s Welfare State, not simply out of charity but from a hard headed realism that wanted to buy off the social unrest that was already around and growing because there were ever more people without either adequately paid work or personal subsistence resources, a cost that includes higher levels of “crime of necessity”…

That doesn’t mean that I myself see the problem as simply one of “avoiding social unrest at minimum cost”, it’s that I wanted to set the background up by showing where the people who acted were coming from. For them, starving peasants were no problem, but revolting peasants were. Sure, the peasants themselves undoubtedly saw a problem, but they couldn’t do anything about it directly – but their murmurings threatened even higher levels of unrest that might develop into full-fledged revolt, and that presented a problem to those in a position to make a difference.

So, I’m afraid you’re reading my factual description as my own personal position, when I was careful to stay detached so as not to frighten the horses with what I wrote. It’s like a fan coming up to a novelist and accusing him of the views he makes his characters act out.

So, when you then write:-

I would frame the problem as one of equity: ensuring that people who start out only modestly more (wealthy, educated, skilled, lucky, diligent) than the median can’t compound that advantage over a lifetime or multiple generations to end up with orders of magnitude more wealth than their temporal/national peers*.

… that may be true, it may matter to you, it might (for all you know one way or the other) matter to me, but – as my mother used to say – it has nothing to do with the price of fish. This sort of “right action” can only be put in motion with the levers of power, precisely because that is what they are (which is itself a condemnation of the sort of broader system that is like that in the first place, when you stop to think about it).

For you and me, most likely, the only personal action other than putting our messages in bottles on the off chance they will reach and move those who can act, is to batten our personal hatches and – perhaps – try and set up community-based alternatives verging on Distributism. That course would also work, in the end and after an even longer transition, but it could very easily fail along the way, say by getting misdirected, and it is even less likely that either of us could ever get enough traction that way anyway. The only reason I mention it is because you want to frame the problem as one starting with you (or me), personally, and that looks like the only one on offer for that – but it’s a longer shot than I would ever recommend, short of desperate need.

Then you write:-

The second disagreement is that I do not think that market employment is a good goal in and of itself. Productivity has been growing faster than employment at most times since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and I don’t want to fight that trend.

But on the one hand, that is often an artefact of just what factors are being measured (100 workers making 100 widgets become 20 without work and 80 workers making 90 widgets – widget:worker productivity has risen!), and on the other hand much of this is driven by the defective externalities and in turn increases their leverage, much as your heart will grow to compensate for increased resistance in your lungs and then your lung capillaries will strengthen in the face of greater local blood pressure, and then … until it can’t any more (congestive heart failure; appendicitis also follows a similar vicious circle). So you may not want to stop the world to get off it, but – unless you can at least slow its wild career – when it crashes you will get off, roughly, if you are still on it then.

We’re incentivizing a theme park version of employment if employers are negative-taxed to take on unwanted employees at token wages to perform unneeded work. I don’t think there’s any benefit to negative-taxing Boeing to take on a thousand more employees who will be assigned to solve sudoku puzzles or dig holes and refill them far from the aircraft.

Nor do I think Boeing will substantially change its production processes to purchase more labor and less productive capital when labor is made relatively cheaper. Humans working with simple tools are slower than specialized machinery at completing tasks, but more importantly cannot operate to the same standards of precision and repeatability. If it were just a matter of number of widgets finished per hour per worker there might be a smooth trade-off between capital and labor, but that describes few actual production scenarios.

But where do you get the idea that that is what would happen? It’s a failure of imagination on a par with the Jetsons to think that “after” would be much the same as “before”, only with a few add ons. Just as the first motorcars did indeed look like carriages with motors bolted on, because people’s thinking had to start there, but they rapidly changed to something more coherent, so also industry would change in response to labour that had newer, lower marginal costs; it wouldn’t be just the same actual work done in the same way with the same labour inputs, with a bolted on token force on the side. And, of course, the Boeing issue is not the heart of it; you can have Boeing style activities as well as other sorts, just as Brazil has other things as well as Embraer, things that are far from capital intensive. Boeing wouldn’t change much – but the hypertrophy that pushes everything towards their approach, that makes other activities hypertrophy on capital even when they aren’t inherently capital intensive, that would stop.

You obviously tracked down some of my material that is out there on the internet. Here is an excerpt from a monograph I am working on that covers this (the monograph is on a wider area, and I have hopes it may grow up to be a book):-

… I anticipate results from adopting a Negative Payroll Tax working out along the following lines and with roughly the following timing:-

– Apprenticeship schemes would become realistic; we could expect a rapid reduction in youth unemployment. As mentioned in the main text in section XVII, “PULLING IT ALL TOGETHER”, point 14, this labour market externality has led to training currently being neglected; formerly, the indenture system operated as a Coasian solution to this. I anticipate that improvements in this area would be among the first to appear following the introduction of a Negative Payroll Tax, since there is always a present need for the trained that is based in the future rather than the present, i.e. apprentices are not taken on for their immediate usefulness as driven by current markets for their production but for their future usefulness, a benefit which is set against their current costs – which a Negative Payroll Tax would help. So this should start to show up as early as the first one or two batches of new school leavers.

– Downsizing schemes would become far less realistic; we could expect a rapid halt to many of them, or for them to become systems to vary remuneration packages rather than retrench employees entirely. Although this would start to happen within one or two planning cycles, perhaps six months to a year, it would be a negative thing – a thing not happening – so it would not be very visible at first.

– We could expect some non-jobs to be created as tax losses, which would gradually transfer the unemployed to the private sector as competition led to lower administrative costs than in the social security system, effectively privatising the social security system over time. This would happen comparatively slowly, because although the incentives for this would be in place immediately, with no delay while business needs for workers picked up, by the same token firms would be reluctant to take on people who would be redundant and would start to impose costs if the tax break system were ever changed to cease to cover those people. Firms’ cynical but well founded fear of such changes by governments would thus provide a “stickiness”, which could be expected to last for perhaps as little as two years or as much as five years until – and if – the sustainability of a Negative Payroll Tax had been demonstrated in practice by keeping it operating for long enough for it to become relied on. But as the scheme is constructed to be budget neutral for governments, they would incur no overall cost from keeping it going until results started to show (although both the A.T.O. and the D.S.S. would receive less once they did start to show!).

– The barely employable and long term unemployed would gradually be placed in industry in the same way as the genuinely unemployable, but they would be genuinely contributing, at least in a small way. There would not be an arbitrary and distinct separation from the regularly employed. Helping them back into work would not undermine the work ethic, as the only wage rate effectively guaranteed is the bare minimum provided by social security. At first this would proceed slowly, because of the same stickiness just mentioned, but within a year or so something else would start to take effect: the G.D.P. gains from lower overall costs and higher production, along with the funds reaching a growing labour force, would start to increase effective consumer demand – and firms’ sales would pick up, raising their need for productive workers whom they could mobilise realistically by then. Another way of describing the same thing is that a Negative Payroll Tax would provide increased consumer demand through something analogous to a Pigou or Real Balance Effect (ref 104) behind the veil of its virtual wage subsidy, one that would be more visible with a Distributist style Coasian approach. This, along with the previous paragraph’s mechanism effectively privatising the social security system, counters the objection that no matter how cheap workers became, firms still would not hire them unless and until they could produce something for which there was a market; this process would start to grow the market too, on a time scale that would show results in a year or so (Professor Kim Swales’s modelling [ref 97] indicates that, as my work suggested, both G.D.P. and employment levels increase – G.D.P. about half as much as employment levels in percentage terms).

If this journey into “freedom” and FUNemployment is so desirable, why was there so much noise back in October when we had a (partial) government “shutdown” ?

Don’t government employees need “freedom” and the joys of FUNemployment too.
.. or was it that they still got paid after the shutdown that ruined it for them ?

Regarding the 15 hour work week, do you believe this is an actually useful target? I have seen some studies on productivity (usually on the topic of workers working too much), but I remember productivity/hour peaking in the 30-40 hrs/week range. Is it really a good idea to hope France and Germany reverse recent trends and lead the way to the <30 hr work week? It doesn't seem like a good bet for total life cycle leisure and 35 hrs/week with several weeks of vacation per year seems reasonable, at least to me. This is entirely subjective though.

Random nitpick:

Unpaid leave (12 weeks a year for mothers in firms with more than 50 employees, nothing for fathers) Actually, fathers are equally eligible for FMLA leave. (I took FMLA leave after each of my children were born, so I’m quite certain.)

This is true, and at least some states have laws that piggyback on FMLA. Connecticut, for instance, adds 4 weeks, so you can take 16 weeks total.

One thing I didn’t know before having kids is that the laws are written to provide 16 weeks of leave per family, which meant that when I wanted to take FMLA after my wife, she had already used up our allowance, as we work for the same company (if we had worked for different companies, I guess the issue never would have come up). Thankfully, the people slightly up the foodchain from me are decent folks and approved personal leave for me instead (though this comes with less protection).

“This is true, and at least some states have laws that piggyback on FMLA. Connecticut, for instance, adds 4 weeks, so you can take 16 weeks total.”

Which is still ridiculous. I get a year in my job, pretty much fully paid. Everyone should get at least that.

MPAVictoria: “Which is still ridiculous. I get a year in my job, pretty much fully paid. Everyone should get at least that.”

Where do you live?

“Where do you live?”

Canada.
/I do not want to get anymore specific sorry.

@DaveL: I loved The Diamond Age but it has been years since I read it. I don’t recall how differentiated technological capabilities were supposed to be preserved. If you really have anything-builders then copying manufactured goods made from common elements should be roughly as easy as copying music is today and as hard to stop. The main danger of having replicator-like technology, as I see it, is that anyone with a grudge and enough patience can commit violence with weapons from hand guns all the way to crude nuclear bombs. Only weapons whose implementation details have been kept secret — like advanced nuclear weapons, B-2 bombers, and some chemical and biological weapons — remain inaccessible to the killer with an anything-builder and a library card. I seem to recall a woman in The Diamond Age blowing herself up with great force at one point, so maybe Stephenson’s solution was to accept that even mass killings will sometimes happen and try to make it easy for survivors to rebuild.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Iain M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds, and Marshall Brain have all grappled with the problem of post-scarcity violence in their fiction and solved it with ubiquitous surveillance plus either hyper-vigilant machines (mundane automated defenses in KSR’s 2312*, godlike guardians in the Culture) or implanted neural controls that can disable a violent human like a stolen car (Blue Remembered Earth, Manna). The Minds aren’t believable, direct neural intervention seems set up for turnkey totalitarianism, and other defenses are likely to be partial at best. Still, unmet needs kill a lot of people right now, albeit less spectacularly. It’s possible that a post-scarcity world with no more preventable deaths from tropical diseases or infant malnutrition still has longer life expectancy on average even if the flip side is that every few years someone blows up a city.

*And (spoiler) these can be fooled by the right sort of attack.

I found the passage I remembered:

One of the Boers, a wiry grandmother with a white bun on her head and a black bonnet pinned primly over that, conferred briefly with the Boer leader. He nodded once, then caught her face in his hands and kissed her.

She turned her back on the waterfront and began to march toward the head of the advancing column of Celestials. The few Chinese crazy enough to remain along the waterfront, respecting her age and possible madness, parted to make way for her.

The negotiations over the boat appeared to have hit some kind of snag. Carl Hollywood could see individual hoplites vaulting two and three stories into the air, crashing headfirst into the windows of the Cathay Hotel.

The Boer grandmother doggedly made her way forward until she was standing in the middle of the Bund. The leader of the Celestial column stepped toward her, covering her with some kind of projectile weapon built into one arm of his suit and waving her aside with the other. The Boer woman carefully got down on both knees in the middle of the road, clasped her hands together in prayer, and bowed her head.

Then she became a pearl of white light in the mouth of the dragon. In an instant this pearl grew to the size of an airship. Carl Hollywood had the presence of mind to close his eyes and turn his head away, but he didn’t have time to throw himself down; the shock wave did that, slamming him full-length into the granite paving-stones of the waterfront promenade and tearing about half of his clothes from his body.

Some time passed before he was really conscious; he felt it must have been half an hour, though debris was still raining down around him, so five seconds was probably more like it. The hull of the white yacht had been caved in on one side and most of its crew flung into the river. But a minute later, a fishing trawler pulled up and took the barbarians on board with only perfunctory negotiations. Carl nearly forgot about Spence and almost left him there; he found that he no longer had the strength to raise the Colonel’s body from the ground, so he dragged him on board with the help of a couple of young Boers- identical twins, he realized, maybe thirteen years old. As they headed across the Huang Pu, Carl Hollywood huddled on a piled-up fishing net, limp and weak as though his bones had all been shattered, staring at the hundred-foot crater in the center of the Bund and looking into the rooms of the Cathay Hotel, which had been neatly cross-sectioned by the bomb in the Boer woman’s body.

This is some nano-handwaving explosive that is apparently non-nuclear but more powerful than any currently known chemical explosive.

Uranium is present in sea water and rocks all over the world, albeit at very low concentrations compared to commercially viable ores. The research on extracting from super-low-grade uranium sources such as these is fairly well developed and published openly. The risk isn’t that you can build a nuclear bomb straight from the Feed but that you use it to build uranium extraction and enrichment machines. In a post-scarcity world the main difference between getting uranium from conventional ore and sea water is how long you have to wait. Only detection and preemption remain viable strategies against nuclear proliferation: sanctions are basically meaningless in a post-scarcity world and mutually assured destruction is a far weaker deterrent.

someguy88 @90 Me @94
I noticed that you specifically mentioned the 1930s (i.e. the depression – what a great comparison point!). So it would have to be my grandfather not my father – but he did exactly the same thing. Relative prices have changed enormously, but people lived much better in the past than you think they did.

“My father sent five kids to university and bought a house in the suburbs of a major city on a median income. Find me todays low income folks doing this. You people are nuts.”

It seems a little odd to be comparing median with low income. By definition low will be below median.

By definition low will be below median.

Clearly not. In a society with a small very very rich elite and the majority on the same subsistence wage , the median income will be a low income, probably way below the mean.

P.M. Lawrence @96
Yes, that is roughly what I was getting at. Simple comparisons based on price indexes really don’t tell you much over long periods of time. Price is not value.

“Clearly not. In a society with a small very very rich elite and the majority on the same subsistence wage , the median income will be a low income, probably way below the mean.”

Umm, yes, sorta. Given that we don’t count negative income numbers (all those entrepreneurs trying to make a go of it!) in our income averages therefore the mean income will always be above the median income.

Because there is a bound for income of $0 and no upper limit. Thus, ineluctably, the median will be below the mean.

In fact, given the way that we measure incomes (ie, not including negative ones) it would be astonishing to find a society in which the median income was above the mean one.

Agreed, this is what I am told is true: proof that I am wrong is welcomed.

But on the one hand, that is often an artefact of just what factors are being measured (100 workers making 100 widgets become 20 without work and 80 workers making 90 widgets – widget:worker productivity has risen!), and on the other hand much of this is driven by the defective externalities and in turn increases their leverage, much as your heart will grow to compensate for increased resistance in your lungs and then your lung capillaries will strengthen in the face of greater local blood pressure, and then … until it can’t any more (congestive heart failure; appendicitis also follows a similar vicious circle). So you may not want to stop the world to get off it, but – unless you can at least slow its wild career – when it crashes you will get off, roughly, if you are still on it then.

I think your widgets and workers example is off in that it implies that global production of goods is contracting while jobs are contracting even faster. It is actually the case that production of goods is increasing, but jobs are increasing more slowly or sometimes contracting. As an example, the International Iron and Steel Institute report for 2006 showed that US employment of workers in steel production went from 204,000 in 1990 to 151,000 in 2000. Cross referencing with USGS statistics on steel production, US raw steel production was 90 million tonnes in 1990 and 102 million tonnes in 2000. Over a decade output rose 13%, employment fell 26%, output per worker went up over 50%.

It’s not just in the West, either. Chinese manufacturing, though less capital-intensive than corresponding production in the West, is more capital-intensive than it was in the West at a historically comparable level of wages because the capital keeps improving while humans are much the same. If you could bring all the jobs back to the West that used to fill the store shelves of the West, you would find that the refrigerator factory or textile mill would have fewer jobs to offer now than it did when it shut down in 1983, even if it’s making more product per year now. Even if you repealed the minimum wage, I don’t think that the production of metals, food staples, chemicals, fuels, electricity, or most manufactured goods can offer mass employment the way they did a couple of generations ago.

What specifically are some fields that could return working-age people to the labor participation rates seen in the West at the turn of the millennium, assuming even that the minimum wage were repealed and low-wage workers relied on government instead of employer to top them up to a living wage? I have had this discussion about the future of mass employment with a number of libertarians — not that I think you’re a libertarian, what with proposing substantial new government programs — and the answer is always “human wants are infinite, therefore the market will always provide full employment and if it doesn’t then government is to blame.” I’m hoping to get more specific and testable predictions one of these days.

“Because there is a bound for income of $0 and no upper limit. Thus, ineluctably, the median will be below the mean.”

0. 3. 3. Median 3. Mean 2. U r an idiot. Qed.

Finally, you are posing a conclusion without an argument. Inequality is bad. OK, but compared to what? A college kid from a poor neighborhood gets to the NFL, and has a five year career during which he is in the top 1%. What do you want to do, take it all away? Surgeons invest in years of medical school and residency. How much of their income do they deserve? Was Steve Jobs paid too much?

More importantly, does growing wealth at the top have any impact on what the bottom earns?

Yes, inequality is troubling. But blaming capitalism for it is a lot like shooting the messenger, all the while ignoring that everything else that has been tried makes the poor far worse off.

Every nation in the “very high” group of the Human Development Index is a mixed market economy, but they have considerably different levels of inequality, so hopefully that puts to rest the idea that you have to go completely outside capitalism or make the poor worse off to reduce inequality.

Anyone who has been on the Internet for a couple of years knows how this “just asking questions” game goes. Ask a few simple questions in defense of the status quo. Start on one foot, for example asking for evidence that transfers from high income earners to low income earners could be in some sense technically efficient at improving the lot of the poor. Once the evidence has been assembled — which may be laborious enough all on its own to occupy the rest of the conversation — shift to the other foot, asking how it could be moral to take something that one person earned and give it to another. This would require another novella-sized essay to address comprehensively, and one wonders why the question of technical efficiency even came up if the questioner considered the process morally illegitimate in the first place. By way of contrast, anti-war activists don’t try to make the case that there are more technically efficient methods of killing, and pretend that they object only to the overpriced methods used by the Pentagon.

Of course the real purpose of just asking questions is obstruction and delay. Once both one-sentence questions have been answered with sufficient rigor, almost everyone has stopped paying attention to the discussion and anyone who answered with care looks like a long-winded bore to the casual observer. It’s like the litany of short, malformed questions requiring long, nuanced answers abused by Young Earth Creationists to challenge evolution.

“assasinations (eg Rosa Luxemborg)” → “assassinations (eg Rosa Luxemburg)”

reason?

More like pure OT mood affiliation. I picked 1930 because well that is when Keynes’ idea was published. Pretty nefarious of me huh? If it makes you feel better use 1927 as the baseline. I didn’t set the terms of comparison as income. Again that was Keynes not me. I am just using the terms that have been set.

Income is not everything and today versus yesterday is not an exact apple to apple comparison. If I were too suggest that poverty is less about income and more about life narrative and outcome, most CT commentators would gladly burn me alive for being an evil warlock. [figuratively of course]

All of which is OT. As incomes rise our definition of what constitutes a decent income changes. Which means that nobody will be working 15 hours a week anytime soon.