Guaranteed Minimum Agriculture: Why Basic Jobs Might Fare Better Than UBI

* Triborough Bridge

* Griffith observatory in LA

* LaGuardia

* LAX

Is this really worse than those market-driven jobs created to harass people to pay debts, build McMansions where nobody wants them or create social networking sites for dogs?

Paying half of farmer's wages to make small scale farming more tenable and accessible is not digging holes and filling them again.

In New England, there are lots of hobby farmers who would love to do it full time but cannot support themselves + a few employees to scale it into a full time thing. This might not create farmers from scratch where there are none, but it could make New England farmers + farms more like the Swiss: Small scale but still viable, distributed, and well, subsidized.

The number of elders will only increase in most of the world over the next few decades and no automation could replace the human touch, or even physical dexterity, in the near term. Granted the people performing the job would need training and perhaps some supervision from professionals, but much of the work requires the skills like empathy and physical agility that most humans are endowed with (despite being left dormant from lack of practice by some).

The same sorts of skills are needed as part of a program that would be useful for mitigating the homeless problem as well.

I think the point being made in the original post is that modern agriculture has a lot of problems and this is a way to address some of those. Producing local foods in a sustainable way requires more labor and a more distributed structure, with many more individuals involved directly in the process. Market gardeners around the world produce high quality foods without millions of dollars of equipment. Anyone can be taught enough to be highly useful in this role.

Subsistence farming that's augmented to produce a little surplus can be an only somewhat skilled job that can be done by everyone with relatively little capital. Pre-potato famine Irish peasants and many pastoral peoples throughout history demonstrated that subsistence farming can be done for basically nothing.

Unskilled laborers are more hindrance than help, and will be sent off to the "back 40" to indulge in mindless busywork.

If granted land, such unskilled laborers could probably satisfy most of their needs. The Pareto principle would rear it's ugly head again, and the top 20% of such farmers would out-produce and could be paid to "redistribute" food.

From the article: From some psychologists’ points of view, one of the worst things you can do to someone who is suffering from addiction or loss of hope is to give them no-strings-attached money, when what they really need is regularity and the responsibility that comes from having a purpose, even if its simply a job or a station.

Another thing that the an early 1800's Irish model might indicate, is that such a model might have serious problems. There is a far cry between the culture of German expatriate famers or the self-reliant farmer of colonial New England on the one hand and the early 1800's Irish peasant from the same time. Huge social problems accompanied the potato famine Irish diaspora. Up to and including unimaginable squalor, neighborhoods where sewage and garbage sat stagnant and out in the open, where police were afraid to travel in groups of less than 6, and the rule of law was abridged by shadow criminal/terrorist governments that could even conduct their own trials and executions.

From the article: This is not the kind of thing you can catch with a UBI pilot, but it is the kind of thing that you can answer by asking a more obvious question: Are wealth and poverty inter-generational? Of course they can be. As a society, we should be careful to not put a system in place that accidentally entrenches poverty when the initial goal was to alleviate it. A child growing up in a Basic Job household almost certainly has a better shot at life than a child growing up in a UBI household, with parent(s) who might have never worked.

The article might be putting the cart before the horse. People who have been given the right human capital through their culture can pull themselves up in a few generations. (This is the case for Chinese immigrants all over the world throughout history.) People who do not have that human capital must then gain it through a process of cultural transmission or assimilation. This assimilation does not have to be complete, and the group can still retain their cultural heritage and distinctiveness. Again, the story of the Irish diaspora is a good model for this. The power of culture is tremendous, and the cultural transformation will not be easy.

Education needs massive reform as well anyway.

Ultimately you don't know how to farm, so you need the farmers working a full week. Adam Smiths rules of specialisation still apply.

You need to give up your time so those you rely on to produce stuff will give up theirs. Or they won't bother.

While there is definitely truth in this statement, there is still a spectrum of work to do on modern farms and plenty of it isn't highly skilled. This is especially true on farms that are optimized for high margin vs. volume. For example, organic or local farm to table places.

If you're totally incapable of work, the US has a program for that today, its called SSI, Supplemental Security Income. Not to be confused with Social Security or SSDI, this program is paid for with income taxes, not social security taxes. There are ~5 million people in the US on SSI.

Has there been any research into how to set up UBI that actually remains politically/bureaucratically stable? It seems like any implementation would be extremely vulnerable to media cycles highlighting the plight of some poor single mother who didn't spend her UBI wisely and now can't feed her kids, or a rich billionaire who pocketed his UBI rather than giving it to charity. It doesn't matter how infrequent these cases are, it would happen a nonzero amount of times and that's enough to get media stories trending about it. In the face of that, people would start wanting to build in exceptions or adjustments, at which point you end up with the expensive bureaucracy again.

And the people who misallocate their UBI and can't afford food? It seems what UBI supporters truly desire is a maternal figure in their lives.

I own shares that have already been issued. I've paid a certain price for them. I will not give my shares to someone else for free, and I will not tolerate more shares being issued for frre because that will devalue my own shares.

This idea of freely distributed shared equity ownership is a nonstarter since equity is only created when people pay for it.

It's true some people are unsuited to industry, and some people are unsuited to child care or elder care. These still are not getting done nearly at the levels we'd like, though.

How is adding one more option feudalism?

(1) You are strategically wrong, in that having policy goals (e.g., UBI) and talking about them front and center has always been instrumental in building labor/populist movements.

(2) You are factually wrong about the current context, in that the US has substantially and political relevant populist factions (both the energization of the one on the right and the alienation of the one on the left were key factors in the 2016 election.)

> like Switzerland, where 55% of farmer income comes from the state