I don't see the problem. People wouldn't do the tasks if they didn't think it was beneficial to them.
Can we please do a little better than this? Actually learning something is more important than satisfying oneself with glib dismissals, which inevitably draw others into a sad cloud of dullness.
The other economist, startled, said, "what are you doing?"
The first economist said, "I'm picking up that $20 bill."
The other economist was bemused. "There can't possibly be a $20 there to pick up. Why, someone would have already picked it up!"
The first economist straightened up, and considered carefully the words of his colleague. Convinced that it must be his imagination, he nodded, and the pair of them walked off.
If we really think that someone is too incompetent to make a choice and remove the choice from them, then don't we have some duty to help them out?
For example, I want a child to go to school, not a job, and think them too incompetent to make the decision of which is better for them. In removing the option to work, I then have a duty to support them if they were needing the job to live (which is done by specific welfare for children or their parents).
But calling that a "choice" is like saying the mafioso holding a gun to your head is giving you the freedom to decide to follow his orders.
Which makes it society's responsibility, through regulatory mechanisms, to improve the workers options.
UBI is an example, but there are likely others, for example, a sovereign wealth fund as found in Alaska and Norway.
It would be nice if their government made up for the gap, but int he real world we have to deal with the possibilities they won't. So one has to deal with the ramifications of their choices that shouldn't and wouldn't happen in a good world but do happen in our world.
That's what YC is doing: https://basicincome.ycr.org/
They have 100s of millions to experiment with ... the average person does not.
> Every one advocating for UBI could ...
Advocacy (and voting) are the most power tools for shaping the future direction of society. It's very effective as a way of bringing change, and we have many examples in recent history of this being true. If it weren't, you wouldn't see huge amounts of money being given to Super PACs to advocate for political positions.
> start transferring them a portion of their income every month...
This is a rehash of the very tired, and baseless, cliche against higher taxes that says that those who support higher taxes should write a check to the IRS.
It's a fallacious argument, because redistribution only has societal impact when operating on a society-wide scale. The most significant example of this, the Great Society (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society) wasn't built on voluntary contributions to the government.
Individuals of normal means making marginal contributions does little to move the needle on the relevant societal problems in any significant way, whether those problems are infrastructure, poverty, health care, education, etc. These things, if they are done at all, have to be done at a societal scale, and that means via government methods of finance.
No, I flat out reject that notion. The fact that one must have a job to survive in this world removes the ability to chose "not having a job". The illusion of choice does not mean that all employment agreements are purely consensual, and as such there need to be many safeguards in place to prevent exploitation.
Yes, but hunger, not Amazon, is the one holding the threat over the person, and as of yet we have not found a way to change these fundamental aspects of nature/reality. You aren't going to remove threat, you are going to just make it become realized. Think of how some areas where child labor was reduced but the reasons behind children working weren't fixed resulted in children turning to far more dangerous and illegal labor that would near universally be considered a far worse option than sweat shop work.
If you were to shut down MTurk I don't think the people who rely on it for money would thank you.
Regulation should be introduced to fix specific issues, not just because there aren't any yet. Especially if it's filling an important financial gap for people with low incomes.
If working for MTurk isn't their best option, they'll pick one of their better options. It follows that, for people who do work on MTurk, MTurk is their best option.
It follows where an option at the margins causes problems it may need to be regulated to prevent abuse of those in dire straits or need. As already seems clearly necessary for things like Deliveroo etc.
Abuse of that nature is how we got a lot of our more civilised food, consumer and employment regulations. It's how we came to the hard-fought idea of a safety net that this generation is trying to shred.
Piecework is usually awful to workers. When you consider that minimum wage is about $0.25, chiseling workers out of such a small amount of money seems pretty awful.
What we need to do as a society is to protect the unsophisticated from scams that they are entirely unprepared to spot and avoid. Like bringing workers over from other countries, taking their passports, and basically turning them into slaves.
Compared to that, this is far less wretched hive of scum and villainy. But even wretched hives are better than no hive at all.
Elsewhere in this thread, the entire concept of employment regulation is called into question. The history of employment law goes back to child labor regulations. So if you reject all employment regulation, you also reject child labor regulation. This is a very fringe argument that is a nonstarter with basically everyone. If, on the other hand, you don't reject child labor regulations, then you accept the premise that employment regulation is sometimes necessary, and now we're just haggling over the details.
Did you miss that bit? The point of the comparison is to highlight the obviously fallacious reasoning that underlies the idea that someone's participation in something means it's beneficial to them.
Who are the "parents" in this case?
Also, the systems themselves certify high-performing workers over time, who then become eligible for higher-paying microtasks.
The fact that the only reason people work for MTurk is because they're desperate for money is hardly a criticism of MTurk. If anything, it's a criticism of everyone else in the world for not providing better ways to make money.
For example, the only reason homeless people queue up to get food from soup kitchens is because they're desperate for food, but that doesn't mean soup kitchens are bad because the queues can be long. (Hypothetical; I don't actually know if queues are typically long).
You're right that nobody had advocated any specific action and I merely assumed that everybody who was against microtask work was in favour of shutting it down. My mistake.
Did you read the article?
> For example, the only reason homeless people queue up to get food from soup kitchens is because they're desperate for food, but that doesn't mean soup kitchens are bad because the queues can be long. (Hypothetical; I don't actually know if queues are typically long).
Are you really drawing a comparison between skirting minimum wage laws and providing free food for homeless people?