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Comment by lukifer | Hacker News Reader

I agree wholeheartedly, including on basic income, with one more detail: as long as people are being paid, why not pay them for "unprofitable" work?

Firstly, pay people to go to school. Any subject, useful or not, for as long as they like. The education and mental fitness of the populace is a deep reservoir of Real Wealth.

Secondly, pay (more) people to do community service work: visiting the elderly, cleaning up parks, tutoring kids, etc.

And last, those people still work in the few remaining market jobs: have them work fewer hours! There will always be those who want 40+ hour weeks, but for everybody else, distribute up the same workload over a larger number of people with 20-32 hour work weeks. More people employed, who are less stressed, and a healthier society due to more time to self-improve and spend with family.

Income is only one part of the sociological phenomenon called "jobs". People also want to feel useful.

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Regarding your last point, it basically ignores everything about the "mythical man month" concept. Work and productivity are usually not evenly divisible into discrete chunks. When we had an economy dominated by factory work, where workers attached Widget A to Bracket B, you could divide things fairly evenly between workers.

But today most jobs that aren't just physical labor benefit from having employees around more often. They stay up to date more easily, they can communicate what they learn more quickly, they can code for hours straight without the interruption of leaving at 2pm (not to mention all the interruptions due to meetings that would have to be compressed into shorter workdays to keep them up to date).

There are also economic benefits of longer work days. A smaller fraction of a person's time is spent commuting (in aggreggate, cleaning up the roads and reducing carbon emissions due to fewer workers per company). And in the US, where we have decided to couple a person's insurance and benefits with his or her employer, the non-salary costs associated with an employee are a very significant component of the total cost of that employee, companies have a big disincentive to hire a large number of people, even when the work can be evenly divided into small chunks.

> Regarding your last point, it basically ignores everything about the "mythical man month" concept.

This is true. I would propose that we are, or will become, wealthy enough to absorb any inefficiency.

> There are also economic benefits of longer work days.

I agree with this as well. In fact, I think we'd be much better off with norms of 3x8, 3x10, 4x8, etc. A work week of 5 half-days would be deeply sub-optimal. (Maybe these are just my own biases.) :)

I completely agree.

I've also wondered why there aren't more people participating in those sorts of community service activities spontaneously - clearly it is difficult being unemployed, but surely doing something of value is more rewarding than watching television?

Mostly because the unemployment system compels you to prove you're looking for work, and volunteering throws up a red flag saying, "I'm not looking for work, I'm dilly-dallying around volunteering for arts groups and children's scouting, ahahaha!"

transportation costs. as well as having less time to look for work.

> as long as people are being paid, why not pay them for "unprofitable" work?

What you're describing is very similar to the "full employment" of Soviet bloc countries.

So what? A thousands other details of politics, culture, and economic structure are vastly different. Soviets also had police and military and schools: should we automatically not do those things either?

We do pay people to go to school already, there are a multitude of retraining programs available for older workers. But as in this article I think the people in question are the reason for these programs not working, the one factory worker in this article didn't like school so he stopped going and went on disability. With that kind of attitude it's going to be hard to help people.

why not create jobs for these things? not for going to school though. why does someone need incentive to learn and train for a better job? something like that seems like it could be abused too.

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