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Looking at my own society (Sweden), the idea of fixing unemployment by inventing job programs to employ people is a quite common idea. Sadly it has some big draw backs, one simply being that such large force of "free labor" is very attractive to be exploited. When there is no option to decline a job offer, some places will naturally abuse that and out compete those companies not getting free employees from the state. The Swedish government naturally have rules against such exploitation, but enforcement is a problem and far from 100%.

And I recall reading that there is statistics showing the rates of people improving their situations when working in such jobs, and if I recall right, its no better than compared to people who just get social aid and stay at home. This is one of the arguments in favor of universal basic income when its discussed here.

Reminds me of George Orwell:

>I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.

The desire to keep people employed is driven by fear, as its known that idle hands are the Devil's workshop.

That's rather obvious when you consider that no one has ever been afraid of rich people having leisure.

It has much less to do with money than you think. There are people who would be very dangerous if they had leisure time, rich or poor, for we're all the mob.

Do you think the fear is irrational?

Yes, because time and again we see that we're all the mob, and someone always has leisure, and money, and power, and it always ends badly. Ignoring that and pretending that the current order (whatever current happens to be) is somehow "ordained" or "natural" or "necessary" is a sop to the ego that's as old as the written word at least.

All examples of someone with power having leisure time ends badly?

I can see how what I wrote can be read that way, but I meant more that human history and the history of humans in power is not a positive history.

Ok I see.

Completely agree on your idea of a state of affairs being "normal"/optimal/best/whatever....getting everyone to agree on that principle would be a good start.

There are a lot of ways that we can address the problem of poverty, and workfare is a legitimate component of a multi-faceted approach, but I think we need to use it very cautiously. If the government has meaningful projects that it wants to accomplish regardless, then giving those jobs (and the training needed to do them) to the unemployed is by all means a good idea. The problem is that the line between workfare and make-work is blurry. If you pay people $16000/year to build the Hoover Dam, that's awesome. But if you pay people more than the job is worth to society, or pay people any amount to do jobs they will view as stupid or pointless, that's counterproductive. The government must ensure that the projects they undertake generate societal value on their own, considering the employment created only as a side-benefit. Furthermore, when you require that people work in order to receive benefits, you are effectively saying that whatever else they would rather be doing with their time is worth less than whatever you are having them do, and whatever you are paying them to do it. Not only is that depressing, the thing they might rather be doing could be something very valuable to society. This is the main argument in favor of universal basic income. The is no requirement that people work, nor is there a requirement that they be unemployed, or anything else in a laundry list of arbitrary requirements. Everyone gets the same amount of money no matter what and no perverse incentives are created.

In addition, "workfare" is a well-tested approach that has given good results in the past [1] [2]. What's to stop someone on UBI from joining a gang, anyway?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Works_Administration

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Writers%27_Project

Penalize their UBI for felony convictions. Doesn't have to be all, but UBI can make it a citizen's "job" to not do crime.

>do crime

This particular verb with the word crime--may I ask if you are an American? I've only ever heard people who are not from America say it this way. Americans always seem to say "commit" crime.

Problem with this is that you then create incentive for businesses to pay less for staff, knowing the government will pick up the tab. Alternatively, the government prescribes the work - But then I suppose you end up with jobs which don't motivate people to get out of bed in the morning and leaves them in the same cycle we're trying to prevent

I've always liked this idea, that the government has jobs of last resort that pay minimum wage. There's always something to do, even if it's just picking up litter.

Quite a few liberal cities are also quite dirty, especially in the poorer areas. I've always wondered why the government-helps-all-of-us types haven't put two and two together here to revitalize neighborhoods, reduce pollution, and give the unemployable opportunities to improve their lives.

I think there is potential for problems like you mention. This would depend on how the program was implemented.

The problem with the government inventing jobs out of thin air is that those jobs tend to be counter-productive - They add bureaucracy and slow everything down further - They add negative economic value.

Not if it creates demand.

Agree to some extent but as this thread's OP pointed out, there is always work to do - it's not inventing jobs. There is always a need for flooding reinforcement or landslide mitigation for example (I kinda cherry-picked these as it's becoming a pressing matter in my home country).

I would say that by comparison, the private sector does a better job lately at inventing (bullshit) jobs. The value wouldn't be negative. For example was the CCC negative?

Indeed, the US could use thousands of workers to fix our roads and bridges. Or to build renewable energy infrastructure. Problem is getting any of that funded, especially in today's political climate.

What if you'll be required to join a non-profit organization, with goals approved by the government(and possibly financed by it)?

Hopefully choosing such organization would lead to less exploitation and more community value, since there's less profit motive. Also less work on bullshit jobs and commercial crap.

And often, there can be some sort of competition between non-profits, which is helpful too.

Paying someone to pick up litter or replant trees would add more value to the world than many an adtech business.

Adtech businesses generate revenue.

For themselves, but not for society and civilization. Advertisements impose an external cost on society. Advertisements are a type of mental pollution. Like other types of pollution, there are laws and regulations on advertisements to protect society from the worst of public nuisances, negligence, and other damages.

I like this idea. Furthermore, it could be used as a preparation for basic income: one of the problem with BI is where do we get enough money ?

One solution is making things cheap.

And one way to make that happen, is by collaboratively creating assets that may have high fixed-cost, but very low variable cost - which what we'll need for BI.

For example, shared community fiber. or on a bigger scale - build together a city ?

Things like "free fiber" is thinking too small.

The "killer app" for making things cheaper is obvious.

Solve the housing crisis that effects every major city in the world, and you get rid of the biggest expense that humans pay.

It is not even that hard to solve from a technical perspective. Construction costs are pennies on the dollar, when compared to land costs.

The tough part is solving the political problem of convincing all the rich landowners to let us devalue their investment.

By definition, if we make housing cheap, we have destroyed the housing investment of a whole lot of really powerful people.

I agree. Maybe the solution is starting a city from scratch, on cheap land on the middle of nowhere, while building rules that will keep prices low.

EDIT:it seems that it's possible legally to start a city with your own rules(as long those doesn't conflict with US/state/county laws):

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bnzp3/e...

Indeed, you can view prescriptive or customary adoption of secondary and tertiary education (for one demographic) and the penal system (for another) as the state of the art social contract a la workfare. To all appearances, the US has been steadily drifting away from the welfare state model, so workfare seems like wishful thinking to me.