Even if you’re willing to work, some job offers are objectively pretty bad (let’s say it’s a five hour commute, the work is hazardous, and the salary isn’t enough for your food and medicine). Do you think people should die if they refuse such offers and better ones aren’t available? I’d prefer to legally define what constitutes a “reasonable” job for a given person, and allow anyone to walk into a government office and receive either a reasonable job offer or a welfare check. If the market is good at providing reasonable jobs, as some libertarians seem to think, then the policy is cheap because the government clerk can just call up Mr Market.
A refinement of your policy is to just deregulate the labor market so it can actually be good at providing “reasonable jobs”; then have the government office keep a regularly-updated survey of “reasonable job” wage rates, and if the wage rate is too low to be “reasonable”, give everyone who asks a check to make up the difference. If it turns out that there are no “reasonable jobs” at all then that wage rate is zero, so everyone who qualifies just gets the full welfare check. This system (a simple version of BI) avoids subsidizing these sorts of jobs, by just giving people that money instead.
I’d prefer to legally define what constitutes a “reasonable” job for a given person, and allow anyone to walk into a government office and receive either a reasonable job offer or a welfare check.
This proposal sounds to me like you are not aware of how our present system actually works.
The idea of a market economy isn’t that it’s the job of the government to hand out jobs. It’s not the role of the government to produce jobs. It’s rather employees who need labor to get things done, that they want to have done.
As a result, a person who seeks welfare is generally expected to apply to jobs a write job applications. Do you find the practice of telling a welfare recipient to write job applications to be wrong or do you just don’t know?
If the current system had no other benefits, except unemployment benefits which were available for a limited time and on condition of writing job applications, then yeah I’d consider it cruel and prefer mine. Mostly I was responding to entirelyuseless’s comment. They pointed out that UBI might hurt society by removing the incentive to work, so I tried to devise a similarly simple system that would support unemployed people without removing the incentive.
Yeah, I think it’s wrong that benefits run out after a certain time and you have to be writing job applications that whole time. I think “work or die” might be viewed as fair, because society needs work as entirelyuseless pointed out, but “find work or die” crosses the line into unfair.
Do you think people should die if they refuse such offers and better ones aren’t available?
No, but this is a strawman in any case. To a very good approximation, no one dies of hunger in the USA except some anorexics and victims of child abuse. That includes people who refuse such job offers; they do not die.
I would not necessarily be opposed to your proposal if it were fleshed out in a reasonable manner. I am not saying that we cannot do some specific things to make things better. That is different from attempting to replace the whole market system with a different system.
One thing you cannot do, however, is to make sure that only effort is rewarded and that luck is either evenly distributed or distributed only to poor people. Many people currently make efforts to put themselves in a position where they have a better chance of good luck, and if luck will not be rewarded, they will no longer make those efforts, so average utility will be lower.
I think a free market combined with benefits for poor people could go a long way in mitigating the “money-weighted utility” problem. It wouldn’t be neat, but we’re trying to optimize a complex thing. How much happiness should be given for free, and how much should be used as a carrot to make people create more happiness? That’s a question about human nature and there might not be any mathematically clean way to answer it.
Since we’ve had periods of almost full employment, it seems like almost everyone agrees to work if the job offers are good enough.
You are confused. Full employment is not defined as “everyone works”. Full employment is defined as “everyone who’s looking for work can find it”. People who are not looking for work are not counted as unemployed.
For example, at the moment the US unemployment rate is 4.7%. But the employment-population ratio is only a bit above 60%. So 40% of the US population between 15 and 64 does not work. But the unemployment rate is below 5%.
legally define what constitutes a “reasonable” job for a given person
That’s called “minimum wage”, isn’t it?
If the market is good at providing reasonable jobs
Nope.
The market is good at creating value and allocating resources in such a way as to maximize value produced. A job is a cost. You should prefer a lot of value and few jobs. That’s what high productivity of labour means.
Even if you’re willing to work, some job offers are objectively pretty bad (let’s say it’s a five hour commute, the work is hazardous, and the salary isn’t enough for your food and medicine). Do you think people should die if they refuse such offers and better ones aren’t available? I’d prefer to legally define what constitutes a “reasonable” job for a given person, and allow anyone to walk into a government office and receive either a reasonable job offer or a welfare check. If the market is good at providing reasonable jobs, as some libertarians seem to think, then the policy is cheap because the government clerk can just call up Mr Market.
A refinement of your policy is to just deregulate the labor market so it can actually be good at providing “reasonable jobs”; then have the government office keep a regularly-updated survey of “reasonable job” wage rates, and if the wage rate is too low to be “reasonable”, give everyone who asks a check to make up the difference. If it turns out that there are no “reasonable jobs” at all then that wage rate is zero, so everyone who qualifies just gets the full welfare check. This system (a simple version of BI) avoids subsidizing these sorts of jobs, by just giving people that money instead.
This proposal sounds to me like you are not aware of how our present system actually works.
The idea of a market economy isn’t that it’s the job of the government to hand out jobs. It’s not the role of the government to produce jobs. It’s rather employees who need labor to get things done, that they want to have done.
As a result, a person who seeks welfare is generally expected to apply to jobs a write job applications. Do you find the practice of telling a welfare recipient to write job applications to be wrong or do you just don’t know?
If the current system had no other benefits, except unemployment benefits which were available for a limited time and on condition of writing job applications, then yeah I’d consider it cruel and prefer mine. Mostly I was responding to entirelyuseless’s comment. They pointed out that UBI might hurt society by removing the incentive to work, so I tried to devise a similarly simple system that would support unemployed people without removing the incentive.
Why is it cruel to have to write job applications?
Yeah, I think it’s wrong that benefits run out after a certain time and you have to be writing job applications that whole time. I think “work or die” might be viewed as fair, because society needs work as entirelyuseless pointed out, but “find work or die” crosses the line into unfair.
No, but this is a strawman in any case. To a very good approximation, no one dies of hunger in the USA except some anorexics and victims of child abuse. That includes people who refuse such job offers; they do not die.
I would not necessarily be opposed to your proposal if it were fleshed out in a reasonable manner. I am not saying that we cannot do some specific things to make things better. That is different from attempting to replace the whole market system with a different system.
One thing you cannot do, however, is to make sure that only effort is rewarded and that luck is either evenly distributed or distributed only to poor people. Many people currently make efforts to put themselves in a position where they have a better chance of good luck, and if luck will not be rewarded, they will no longer make those efforts, so average utility will be lower.
I think a free market combined with benefits for poor people could go a long way in mitigating the “money-weighted utility” problem. It wouldn’t be neat, but we’re trying to optimize a complex thing. How much happiness should be given for free, and how much should be used as a carrot to make people create more happiness? That’s a question about human nature and there might not be any mathematically clean way to answer it.
You are confused. Full employment is not defined as “everyone works”. Full employment is defined as “everyone who’s looking for work can find it”. People who are not looking for work are not counted as unemployed.
For example, at the moment the US unemployment rate is 4.7%. But the employment-population ratio is only a bit above 60%. So 40% of the US population between 15 and 64 does not work. But the unemployment rate is below 5%.
That’s called “minimum wage”, isn’t it?
Nope.
The market is good at creating value and allocating resources in such a way as to maximize value produced. A job is a cost. You should prefer a lot of value and few jobs. That’s what high productivity of labour means.