An experimental program in Austria that creates work for the unemployed
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
if somebody asks an overinflated way-over productivity wage for cleaning toilets because of a supply shortage, this is considered being unethical and "unwilling to do the dirty work, while receiving benefits",
but asking a way way overinflated price for housing because of a supply shortage is considered good and healthy for the market and drives investment without shaming the investors for receiving undue housing benefits?
Why do we yell at people artificially shortening toilet cleaner supply, while at the same time not yelling at developers for artificially shortening housing supply?
Don't people need to live AND shit?
Looks like it is not about an economic argument after all. Seems like it’s again a pattern of abusing less privileged, weaker, less defensible people. Shaming them for what they naturally and humanly want - and which is the same what the privileged naturally want: To be able to say no, when they want to say no.
Where do these schemes of maliciously founded shame on false grounds come from? How did we start to listen to the voice of the psychopaths which want to divide us?
In the US and UK (and probably many other countries) the government has a default stance of allowing no or nearly no development without excruciatingly painful, expensive, and slow bargaining with city hall. The primary job of a developer is to get permission to build something.
The government is killing supply, not the developers.
But, how does it come, that these procedures to get building permits have been slowed down/bureaucratized to the point that it almost seems intentional?
Also, the anger is not about them intentionally shortening supply - it’s about them intentionally asking and taking the higher prices. Nobody forces them to take more than e.g. a 10% shortage signal markup, but we force people on the other side to wipe the floor with their dignity.
Time from project to building permit here in Lisbon can stretch to two years and vast tracts of land close to infrastructure are considered unbuildable by the municipality for no good reason. Also consider that developers need the government to work with them on roads, subways, sewers and others to be able to build.
In large parts of urbanised Asia where building more housing is encouraged this problem does not exist.
It is absolutely intentional.
Those who already have serious realty want its value to go up. They don't want any new development nearby which would compete with their realty, or otherwise lower its market value due to becoming less exclusive.
Completely incidentally, these same owners are well-off people who are ready to spend a lot of time and effort talking to the city hall, sponsoring election campaigns, etc.
I'd also add that the financial angle is in my view sometimes overstated; a lot of people just like their neighbourhood as it is and wish it would stay exactly like that forever. And that's perfectly understandable, if unfair on all the people who didn't win the historical lottery and end up with a single-family house in a nice street in (say) Berkeley.
NIMBY. Whomever owns the land/house right now wants it to go up in value which happens more if there is a lack of supply.
>Also, the anger is not about them intentionally shortening supply - it’s about them intentionally asking and taking the higher prices. Nobody forces them to take more than e.g. a 10% shortage signal markup, but we force people on the other side to wipe the floor with their dignity.
So in a free market if they sell for cost+10% then the first person they sell to will either rent it, airbnb it or sell it for market rates. The only difference is that now someone won a bit of a lottery versus the developer getting it. Of course they had to pay market rate for the land they built on so it's likely they're already selling at cost+N%.
The clear difference is who bears the cost of demanding an artificially high price. If you're asking an overinflated wage as a ploy to stay on unemployment, or to keep a low-effort make-work job, who bears the cost of that decision? Not the worker! By shunning gainful employment, he chooses to remain on the dole, for his own benefit and to the detriment of his neighbors--who are paying his bills. He also short-changes society, which could benefit from his employment through taxes paid, and by virtue of his doing work that's actually in demand. So it's unethical for this person to take money out of his neighbors' pockets (many of whom do dirty work) because he's too good to do his fair share.
The person who chooses to try to sell their house for a high price doesn't gain anything by setting too-high a price--quite the opposite! Every month they don't sell the property, they're paying the mortgage and insurance. So it's not unethical to set an artificially high price, since the seller is the one who pays in the end. If someone actually buys the house, then I'm not sure that you could say that the price was artificially high--the buying of the house indicates that the price was right.
> Why do we yell at people artificially shortening toilet cleaner supply, while at the same time not yelling at developers for artificially shortening housing supply?
I'm not really sure what you mean here.
> Looks like it is not about an economic argument after all. Seems like it’s again a pattern of abusing less privileged, weaker, less defensible people.
This sort of self-righteous hysteria has no place on HN. Fiscal conservatives are not ghouls who abhor the poor and seek to harm them. The fact that you don't know or don't understand the economic argument doesn't mean there is no economic argument--it means you are uninformed. If you're actually interested in an introduction to the economic arguments underpinning fiscal conservatism, try reading "Economics in One Lesson" by Henry Hazlitt.
> Shaming them for what they naturally and humanly want - and which is the same what the privileged naturally want: To be able to say no, when they want to say no.
They're being shamed for the extraordinarily selfish expectation that society should pay 30K/year to save them from doing a yucky job. How many taxpayers does it take to fund this guy's make-work job? Based on a quick google search, you'd probably have to take every penny of tax revenue raised from 3-4 middle-class families. That's 4 families that forewent 30% of their income--and for what? So that one dude can save face? This is an egregious waste of resources and a giant middle-finger to the working class people who fund the Austrian welfare state.
> How did we start to listen to the voice of the psychopaths which want to divide us?
I find this to be hysterical in every sense of the word.
> if somebody asks an overinflated way-over productivity wage for cleaning toilets because of a supply shortage, this is considered being unethical and "unwilling to do the dirty work, while receiving benefits"...
they were alluding to a particular passage in the article:
> One program participant in his thirties told me that, while on unemployment benefits, he’d been offered a job cleaning toilets at a gas station; he’d decided that he didn’t want “that sort of job,” and had instead found work in the carpentry workshop.
So, I wasn't arguing against unemployment benefits in general. You're right, we pay unemployment benefits, and when we're out of work, we shouldn't feel bad for taking them, so long as we're using them in good faith--as temporary support, intended to tide us over until we can find gainful employment. The guy in the article was not using these services in good faith--he turned down honest work in order to keep his make-work gig (funded by taxpayers).
It's all supply and demand. If we need more housing, people need to move to places where housing is more available. There are plenty of small rural towns that have excess, cheaply priced housing. (In the Bay area, not so much.)
> Critics of labor-market programs such as the Job Guarantee argue that they enable precisely this sort of choice—they make it easier to decline work that one doesn’t like. One program participant in his thirties told me that, while on unemployment benefits, he’d been offered a job cleaning toilets at a gas station; he’d decided that he didn’t want “that sort of job,” and had instead found work in the carpentry workshop. If everyone were guaranteed a reasonably pleasant job, suited to their interests and needs and paying a living wage, who would do the grungy, difficult work? Austrian employers, like those in America, are currently having difficulty hiring people to take hard, poorly paid jobs; many of the workers in Austria who wash dishes or clean hotel rooms are immigrants from Eastern Europe, and during the pandemic many of them went home, some for good. Jörg Flecker, a sociologist at the University of Vienna who is evaluating the program in Gramatneusiedl, told me that pressure from employers could prevent its expansion across Austria. “Employers say, ‘There are so many unemployed. We have to have a tougher regime for them because we have jobs to fill.’ ”
>
> Lukas Lehner and Maximilian Kasy, economists at Oxford who are evaluating data from Gramatneusiedl, argue that competition with the private sector is a good thing. “I think, from an economic perspective, that argument doesn’t make much sense,” Kasy said, of the dirty-jobs view. “If they’re shit jobs, try to pay them as well as possible. Try to change the working conditions as much as possible until you reach the point that somebody wants to do them, or automate them if you can. And then, if nobody wants to do them, maybe we shouldn’t do them.” Kasy thinks that an important function of initiatives like job guarantees—and of universal basic incomes—is to improve the bargaining positions of people who want to change their lives. “Whether it’s abuse from an employment relationship, a bureaucrat in the welfare state, or a romantic relationship, the question is, What’s your outside option?” he said. “Having the safety of the basic income or a guaranteed job improves your outside option. If your boss is abusive, or doesn’t respect your hours, or is harassing you or whatever, you have the option to say no.”
"who will do the unpleasant, demeaning work?"
"We only think it's unpleasant because we make it unpleasant. We can have clean, well lit factories. We just have to prioritize making that work more pleasant."
Giving people a real choice seems easier than regulating every possible kind of job.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
Especially https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge...
I'm not sure any economic or legal arrangement could do away with weak positions like that entirely.
> the cycle of "I'll take whichever bad choice is least bad right now because I'm desperate."
Welfare covers the basics and provides for a modest life, no desperation included.
If you work more, your benefits will be reduced until you earn enough to not get any benefits. Roughly 20% of people on benefits work, but make less than benefits, so they get the rest via benefits ("Aufstockung").
Furthermore, the "Aufstockung" means that effectively the tax payer is footing the bill for companies unwilling to pay a reasonable wage.
> Furthermore, the "Aufstockung" means that effectively the tax payer is footing the bill for companies unwilling to pay a reasonable wage.
In some cases, yes. But you can also view it as "we need to employ people, but their skills really aren't competitive, so it's better to give them some money from taxes than to give them 100% from taxes".
[1] Die Tafeln are a group of privately-run food banks in Germany: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafel_(Organisation) (no English Wikipedia article unfortunately)
It is only complex if avoiding questions about the value of human dignity, and the inability of laissez faire capitalism to deliver that, need to be avoided.
There are entire YouTube channels dedicated to it. Septic sucking is a function of capital costs not labor costs.
The manipulative behavior around hours and time off traps people in jobs and makes them “dirty jobs”.
I have a high fulutin’ tech gig, but I worked on farms and in retail in high school and college. The laws don’t protect workers, and the people who were working in those jobs for a living were beaten down and exploited because the employers could.
Sounds like a signal from the market that they are not paying enough. One might argue about how social welfare programs and / or importing cheap labor distort the labor market; but it doesn’t change the fact that jobs are the dregs of the labor market.
For most people here, that won't matter, because paying 50% more for groceries would barely be noticeable, and neither would 50% more for health care be. But for society at large, that would kill many lifestyles.
Look at nurses for example: you need plenty of them in hospitals and nursing homes, they are (in my opinion) severely underpaid. Raise their wages by 50%. You can make an educated guess how that will influence the price of healthcare or living in a nursing home.
Licensed vocational nurse don’t earn a huge amount.
Registered nurses (4 year degree+) make ok to good money.
Advanced practice nurses make good money overall. But they have post- graduate degrees and still don’t earn what a good senior developer does.
Based on the $49 charge for 5ml of sugar water to calm our newborn baby down so a nurse could draw his blood, probably not much.
(The nurse failed to draw his blood. After four or five failed attempts over several hours they eventually asked a nurse from the NICU to come over, who got it first try.)
Yes, that was the point. That the price of healthcare isn't based on the wages of the nurse.
Eventually it just becomes a physics problem. If $100 exist in the world, and one guy has $99, and you need to fund something that takes $2, you have to get $1 out of the rich guy somehow.
However this point also helps your argument: When you borrow you pay interest to someone richer. In a sense a combination of whoever you sent the money to, and the bank.
So change those unsustainable lifestyles then
The word "lifestyle" means more than beer, nice cars, and smoked-salmon-avocado-toast on vacation. It includes peoples' capability to invest in their future. I'm sure you can cite many examples of fools and their money being soon parted, but there are plenty of people doing everything right who are being screwed by inflation as well.
And if the prices are increasing 50%, then the low end pay increases must be a lot higher than 50%.
Your argument rests on an unspoken (and perhaps unrealized) premise that profits cannot be allowed to shrink; all costs must be passed to someone else.
Penicillin distorts the growth of bacteria.
This will sound like a crazy commie rant to some people, but the trick that the powerful have played on is all is to think there's some natural market condition that is had for us to influence.
This matters because it leads to a generally lower quality of life.
Importation of cheap foreign labor distorts in the sense of reducing the wages of low-skilled native residents.
So what do "we" do to make these jobs more tolerable, perhaps better-rewarded ? Nothing, apparently, because "we" wants the cheapest possibly everything.
If jobs that are tangibly important are still treating workers badly, simply because formal qualifications don't exist or are in oversupply, and then economic pressures push people into these crappy jobs despite poor pay & working conditions, then that's a sign that our oh-so-holy "market" is fundamentally dysfunctional, treating human beings like barely sentient Roombas-with-mops. Rant concludes here.
> “If they’re shit jobs, try to pay them as well as possible. Try to change the working conditions as much as possible until you reach the point that somebody wants to do them, or automate them if you can. And then, if nobody wants to do them, maybe we shouldn’t do them.”
Seriously, if you can't find people to do those jobs then you're simply not paying them enough. This whole idea of intentionally disadvantaging people in order to force them to do what you want them to do is some comic book super villain thinking.
Robots.
That the answer. Pay people more to do the jobs nobody wants!
This is how America treats its teachers. Teachers want to do the job, so skimp on their pay and call it a budgetary victory.
Other countries will choose to value teachers, and pay them well, and generate more competition for positions, and reach a higher general level of qualifications & abilities.
Who would want to work minimum wage server jobs when offered the same salary for something more rewarding?
Who wants to do gruelling, poorly paid labouring on a construction site, if the alternative is training to be a craftsman for the same wage?
Those jobs would either need to be paid much more attractively (pushing up the cost of restaurant food and construction, in these examples), or - as quoted above - eliminated entirely.
I would be really interested to see how this would play out at scale.
The way this works is that the workers are commuting in from poorer neighborhoods on the outskirts, since they cannot afford to live in the rich communities that they serve because of the low salaries.
[0] 'http://pavlina-tcherneva.net/the-case-for-a-job-guarantee/'
Just add a debit card to the social security card citizens receive. They can use the debit card to withdraw up to a full-time minimum-wage amt of money per month. If they take the income, it's assumed they did some kind of proportional work. I don't think there's even any need to police it.
Simply characterizing it as employment and establishing the expectation that consumers of the program perform work for their country/community commensurate for what they withdraw is miles better than UBI in my opinion. Most people are honest, and frankly a lot of the people I know would work more hours than full-time, it'd just be volunteer-like work helping people and cleaning up around the neighborhood, and probably creating a lot of public art. Positive things to facilitate, and largely not things for-profit businesses would pay for.
It's also nice to couple it to the already established federal minimum-wage, which already has an (admittedly lacking) process for adjusting to keep up with inflation. We should ensure the minimum-wage reflects a minimum livable wage by modern standards, and guaranteed employment would always provide a worst-case income of a minimum livable wage.
I don't think we're lacking of good options for these style solutions. We're just lacking support in the general public for such a socialist-looking program. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and all that.
I am never surprised. When asked to put a dollar value on a program the overeducated go on bleeting about higher order non-sense. It's hard to take any of these academic exercises seriously. Especially when they spawn from fields as fraudulent as economics and social science.
Having Short-term unemployment is fine and a sign of a working economy where people move between companies. Long-term unemployment is something else entirely: it's a sign of people quitting the labor market and deciding not to contribute to society.
People here love Marx, yet they keep forgetting what he had to say on that issue: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". Long-term unemployment means you're not giving according to your ability (and thus shouldn't receive according to your needs).
Or there are literally not enough jobs because of failed economic policy. We have this situation in Germany right now. There are about 2 million job openings, and official statistics report about 2 million unemployed. That makes it sound like it's only a matching problem (i.e. if we just enticed the unemployed to retrain or relocate, everything would sort itself out). But the statistics are "optimized" to look nicer than they actually are: Unemployed over the age of 58 are just taken out entirely, as is everyone currently undergoing retraining. (It's a meme in Germany that the unemployment office will send people to Microsoft Word courses for the 10th time because being in the course means they don't show up in the statistic.)
And then there's also the issue of people working part-time who actually want a full-time job. When you add all that up, we have around 4 million unused FTEs in Germany competing for 2 million open positions. That cannot possibly add up. If the politicians were serious about getting everyone into a job (which they sure say a lot into microphones), economic policy would need to be changed to incentivize job creation a whole lot more (e.g. by cutting down on NIMBYism in the construction and renewable energy sectors).
In all seriousness it’s because employers hold nearly all of the bargaining power and mindshare. The recent focus on central banks raising interest rates to decrease economic activity with inflation as a primary target and restraining wage growth as a secondary target shows that decreasing workers’ average bargaining position is official government policy. In the US they sugarcoat it by saying they’re trying to control inflation and only have unemployment go up marginally. In New Zealand they’re more explicit and say tens of thousands of people need to become unemployed to stabilize inflation.
Being overeducated, I'll take a shot: 6 million US unemployed x $15/hour x 2000 hours/year x 2 to cover benefits, SSI, Medicare, etc works out to 360 Billion. Which is about 1/4 of the defense department budget. A lot of money but not disproportionate to what we spend on other things.
I'm gonna take a long shot and say your education did not cover that part of world history.
If so that's fine. Programs don't need to be universal to work well.
Love this attitude! So often on HN we see responses like "It doesnt work in <this one case>, because <nuance>" ... To which it seems so obvious like "then dont do it in that case?"
Hey doctor, my back hurts when I do X.
Then stop doing X
If I'm laid off I can choose to still program. If I don't my time might simply be wasted (eg on videogames, netflix, or even job applications). But I can also choose to continue to program. Maybe by helping local businesses, contributing to FOSS etc. While I understand the near impossibility of it all, but we actually could continue to have lots of good things so long as folks refuse to stop working even if told they're no longer employed.
Obviously this fails the moment some unit in the chain refuses to participate, but I think in small ways it can actually blunt the pain felt in recessions/depressions by creating small communes of collusion amongst your social circle. You collude together to ensure that eachother gets what they need, at least amongst the valuable skills in the circle.
A family member who is retired performs volunteer work (adjacent industry to what they did while employed) because their Social Security comfortably covers all of their expenses (and Medicare covers their healthcare). Without these age tested basic income and benefits (and me providing no cost housing), this would not be an option. They would be toiling in a bullshit job.
But for example, if someone gets foreclosed on, up to some limit they can still reside with the pool, but perhaps now they're doing labor work for everyone, or they're being a child caretaker, or cooking etc.. ideally they have some trade skills to contribute.
I agree that the global economy and contemporary life has become sufficiently complex that it would not just be a non-change, but my point is kind like why do we have so many homeless families being kicked out, only for the house to sit empty (often rapidly depreciating for lack of maintenance) etc, sometimes its about seeing that if you contribute to the decline, your own decline becomes inevitable.
It sounds like how you wish he world to be, not how it is.
Is there a typo in there? I'm not getting it.
This is fairly unlikely for someone who is depressed. Enthusiasm is very important and often in short supply.
Also, entitled customers will repel volunteer labor. Being paid is in part compensation for putting up with annoying strangers.
This is absolutely the case. It takes "second" (or more like 100th) order thinking to recognize that you're part of an ecosystem that will be less well if you stop contributing just because you're not being paid. The faith part is that you will continue to have your needs (not necessarily wants) met through reciprocity -- which is a basic human psychological trait, so not the worst gamble.
Exactly. What are a bunch of unemployed, skilled people with unmet needs to do? Sit on their hands and be content to get their UBI? No, you help yourself, and try to be part of a community that does the same. People can build, fix, teach, heal, transport, cultivate, we just need resources to do that, with a little help we can do most of it on our own. Probably we will benefit from smart materials, better batteries, robots and AIs that can help us be self reliant faster. It will be easier for the state to have a self reliant population. But some things will still need to remain, like chip factories, large industries and training the AI models.
Furthermore, by contributing to FOSS or volunteering your programming skills you are devaluing other programmers' careers.
So how many hours per week do you believe we should be allowed to waste whilst still being a valid member of society?
So true
I mean this in all seriousness and am only sorry that I’m unkikely to live long enough to enjoy this paradise. Of course I’m one of those who loves to work.
A bonsai is as much work as shining shoes.
Maybe people should get over the idea that work should be their source of worth. Which I suspect they will manage to do within a generation or so.
Clearly they need to make it non-obvious make work in order to give those who want it adequate satisfaction. To you it will look like productive work but really it will simply be a game. In many small ways we are there already.
> Maybe people should get over the idea that work should be their source of worth.
I hope universal unemployment leads to a flourishing in poetry etc from people who delight themselves and (some of) their friends sharing and collaborating on all sorts of fun projects. They don't even have to be very good.
Life worked out pretty well before we outsourced our creativity to "professionals". Even the word "profession" has been hijacked by the industrial revolution.
There are limits to how much you can fool people, no matter how smart you are.
Meanwhile robots do all the serious piloting, imaging, exploration, and other research.
The fact that the lack of work / ability to sustain yourself leads to those things: those states of mind reflect the literal existential insecurity you must deal with.
Because having a really shitty job that is just slightly less insecure kinda leads to the same thing.
There's really a lack of discussion about the meaning-giving and social aspect of work and how to actively design work in communities. I wonder whether the parallel decline of both traditional labor and religious groups had a strong impact on the perception of work because those were the two main camps resisting that reductive mentality.
If work is so "meaning-giving and social", then people will presumably do it even if they don't have to do it to eat, and even if the boss isn't breathing down their necks.
I guess you can get past commodification in the narrow sense with enough market and social restructuring, but I can't see how you can get what you're asking for here without forcing everybody else to work for no good reason other than to support your preference.
Not an immediate problem, of course...
Problem solved, right? Now people don’t have an excuse to not work anymore.
Maybe make those jobs less poorly paid ?
You can look at high skilled workforces like in Sweden, where there just aren't a lot of the entry level jobs you see in the U.S. So there aren't so many people working in landscaping or providing personal services, and people do more things for themselves. It's unusual to hire house cleaners, nannies, etc. If you are painting your house, you are going to have a hard time hiring people to help you, or hiring someone to come by and wash your windows. If there is a factory that requires lots of low skilled work, it doesn't open in Sweden -- only the highly automated factories open there.
So that's fine, it's a high-wage, high skilled economy in which all workers are expected to be productive -- and Swedish workers are highly productive. People are expected to have strong skill levels and a high educational level, so they can provide a lot of value and get paid well (here, we are ignoring the issue of taxes, because it's still a high wage earned by the workers even if they only get half of it after tax).
Which is great, until you admit a large number of immigrants without skills. Now, you can't absorb them into your labor force. Or until you realize you have a lot of structural unemployment and it takes much longer for laid off workers to re-enter the labor force. In the U.S., we absorb migrants easily and have much lower rates of long term unemployment - but then people complain about migrants doing low skilled jobs and some workers being taken advantage of since they don't earn high salaries.
Bottom line, there are trade offs, and while you can't please everyone, you can at least make them aware of the trade offs. All I can think of is that it's good to have both places like Sweden that tend to require high skills and places that have low skill/low pay jobs mixed in with the high pay/high skill jobs, so that low skilled workers can still find employment. The whole world can't work like Sweden, but it's also good that places like Sweden exist.
This created a somehow funny effect, were many just did the absolute minimum on the job.
Corrupt hellhole, that country.
Just like here then.
Isn't this where the old joke about Communism came from? "You pretend to work, and we pretend to pay you"?
I think unemployment simply can't be solved in a capitalist society, as it would expose a major contradiction of liberist economies.
We tell people they have to work or they're parasites and don't deserve to have their basic needs covered, but at the same time we need a mass of them to be out of work, in order to be able to exploit the rest.
So much of our lifestyle is built on exploitation of the working class, be it local or foreign.
Then there’s banking, oil, and other resources. And of course the audacity to veto countries schengen membership unless more control over these is granted. Hiding behind made up excuses.
> So far, a hundred and twelve people have used the Job Guarantee, as the program is known, to find work; at least fifty more are expected to do so before 2024, when the program is scheduled to end. Participants complete an eight-week training course, then receive a job offer; they’re free to decline it without losing their unemployment benefits, but so far everyone who’s been offered a job has chosen to work.
This is insane on principle when scaled up to a society. You can get trained, be offered a job (under the assumption of livable pay), and then can refuse it and stay on the government tit? NO. ABSOLUTELY NOT. This will never work. It's the BS machinations of an overeducated academic trying to prove a point. If you accept tax payer funded job training you should be obligated to take the first job, in that field, that pays you the minimum liveable wage. Otherwise it's anarchy.
> Sven Hergovich, the regional director of the Public Employment Service of Lower Austria, essentially agrees with this analysis. He thinks that rising demands for productivity and efficiency mean that, now and in the future, not everyone will be able to find a job without support. “There are not sufficient jobs available for all of the long-term unemployed,” he told me. “In fact, we have only two options. Either we finance long-term unemployment, or we create a job guarantee.”
Some people are useless. This is not any different than any other time in history. There are people who, if it wasn't for menial work, would actually be fundamentally useless by the definition of the term. The internet calls these people NEETS. They are generally burdens on society and IMO we should just let nature run it's course. They will either starve or skill up. Either way, society wins.
Omigod! Not ANARCHY!
> just let nature run it's course. They will either starve or skill up.
You sound nice.
I actually agree with you about universal employment being a crock. Just do a UBI already. Not only will that work better, but it will have entertainment value when your head explodes.
Who said that this is the only option? Why do people often believe the communists were doing the most optimal job possible when having full employment? That is nuts to assume.
Among other things, universal employment shown to do the same as no employment: a lot of people binge drinking and not caring to do anything useful with their life. Work ethic problems surfaced in a bad way.
They were also huge. Community level programs like this can be much more functionally democratic and uplifting.
This is just false.
In the USSR life expectancy went from 30 years in 1925 to 69 years in 1990[0]. On the other hand, in the US it started declining in 2015 without having recovered yet[1].
In the USSR, "In 1926, the literacy rate was 56.6 percent of the population. By 1937, according to census data, the literacy rate was 86% for men and 65% for women, making a total literacy rate of 75%"[2].
The USSR was also the first country in the world to legalize abortion, and it championed gender equality. In the meantime the US is going in the direction of banning abortion once again.
I have yo ask you, what you do mean by "conditions of the people"?
- [0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041395/life-expectancy-...
- [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-...
- [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_the_Soviet_Union
Maybe USA is on the same track.
What a nonsensical comparison. Lol.
> I have yo ask you, what you do mean by "conditions of the people"?
Probably talking about the fact that the situation got so bad Gorbachev initiated such major reforms that the USSR collapsed. No biggie. Lol.
Not really answering my question here, just making some pointless humor.
Curious how all primary metrics for the population fell after the USSR got dissolved by Gorbachev. It's not a mistery that 70% of Russians approve Stalin anyway, guess they're still brainwashed after so many years, right?
I don't think there's a strong relationship to this, and the Soviet alcoholism came from something else -- maybe losing many family members or having been shipped far away from everyone you know by a totalitarian government.
Or, the soviets never had a prohibition to change up what people drink
This is mostly due to the blandness of life, and partly due to almost absent survival-related risk and stress. Your income and housing is guaranteed, even if often crappy and small. Why bother?
The trauma is passed down over time, but the alcoholism even more so. Alcoholic parents are gonna have a lot of alcohol around the house available for teens to party and drink with, to develop a habit and dependence