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> My policy preference would be a law that creating a universal wage subsidy of $7.75 an hour, thus guarantees every worker a total wage of at least $15 an hour.

I really like this idea. Lately I've been thinking about minimum wage laws (SF, $15/hr min wage, etc) and something about it rubs me the wrong way. It feels like minimum wage laws are a convenient way for governments to take all the credit for improving the lot of the poor, while making others (companies) pay for it. It also feels like it disproportionately impacts small business owners, who are already stretched pretty thin.

Implementing a minimum wage like that, where part of the burden is on the government, and comes out of tax revenues (which can be collected in a more progressive fashion) really appeals to me

Yes, exactly. The economic right wing has a valid point, that many small business owners cannot bear the burden of a higher minimum wage. Asking a factory owner who is barely making payroll due to competition from China to boost his wages could be a death knell. The money for wage increases needs to come from those who are the big winners in the winner-takes-all-games that are technology and globalization.

Also, the value of min wage needs to be mapped on some topography of need. A $15/hr in SF or NYC is paltry due to the geographic localization of other prices--higher cost of living. Meanwhile, hiring 16 year in some middle-america towns probably shouldn't be dictated by "rich people's problems" imported from New York or California. All that being said, I also like the top-posters idea about adding a subsidy to basic negotiated/market wages. Because ultimately everything is simply a negotiation. And the non-work-related subsidy is something people can use to "walk"--so it's effective leverage as a tool of last resort.

If SF or NYC wants a higher wage, the city could augment the subsidy out of its own tax coffers.

I am however, very much against the idea of taxing a machinist in Alabama to subsidize wages in NYC.

I am also amenable to the idea of having the subsidy only be for those over 18, or people who are supporting families.

But I do think it is reasonable to provide $15 jobs in middle America. Right now, young people feel a compulsion to head to NYC/SF/DC to gain access to these job markets, which feed off the money surplus from winner-take-all-industries. I would rather that the money get spread around more, and that once again a decent middle class life would be easy to obtain in what is now known as the rust belt.

Right now we tax workers in NYC to subsidize people on in Alabama. (NYC gets < $0.60 for every $1 of federal taxes collected; Alabama gets > $2).

It's true that rural areas get a lot of farm and energy subsidies - but those subsidies also lower prices for those of us that live in the cities.

You do realize that every time minimum wages are raised like this the cost(s) are simply passed on through to the consumers. The net effect is that the cost base rises with the wage base, so no one actually gets ahead - the nominal price point is just set to a higher figure.

I don't believe this is actually true. Compare the cost of living and minimum wage in Sydney, Australia with comparable cities in the US(San Francisco for example) or Canada(Vancouver). The cost is about the same for most things despite Sydney having a much higher minimum wage.

I'm not entirely sure this is true. Anecdotally, things seemed to be more expensive in Sydney. I wish I had better data, but I find this comment difficult to accept blindly. Actually, a quick Google shows some data supporting my experience, but I can't vouch for the data quality so I am not linking. If anyone else has anything worth adding, I'd welcome more information.

http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?coun...

Thats where I got my data.

Minimum wage in SF is $8/hr. Minimum wage in Sydney is $16.87 so more than twice that.

I use to live in Sydney and it was very expensive. But not much more expensive than comparable cities.

Often they can't be passed on due to competition so the businesses employ less people instead.

..."job of last resort" program...

But why? Why is it so necessary that everyone spend their days working? Why not just allow the structurally unemployed to pursue whatever it is that they want to do? I'm not saying we have to give them all mansions and butlers, but why do we have to make up fake, worthless jobs for them to do? It seems as though overall human happiness would be better optimized by allowing them to stay home or perhaps contribute to society in other ways than clocking in for a 9-to-5. The goal shouldn't be for all of humanity to be employed, the goal should be for all of humanity to have happy lives.

I answered that same question here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7907937 I think most people are not natural aristocrats. They are not going to be tinkering in their home laboratories, crafting programming languages or writing ebooks. I fear that most people will degenerate in every manner if not subjected to the discipline of work. They will end up drinking and playing video games all day long. Furthermore, I think most people want to work, it provides purpose and fulfillment.

That said, as long as I'm social engineering a solution to the nation's problems, why not try an A/B test? Try giving the money away with no strings attached in one city or state (far away from me please) and see what happens. I am just more pessimistic about human nature than you are, so I do not think it will end well. I think there is a lot of evidence about the problems of idleness from the history of welfare and housing projects.

A compromise would be to make one of the "make work" options be an artistic or technological fellowship. So if you went to your employment office for your make work, and said you were working on an art project or new programming language, they would pay you to do that, you would just have to show some progress along the way.

> Try giving the money away with no strings attached in one city or state (far away from me please) and see what happens.

My Alma Mater did that in the 70s. The results were unequivocably positive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome

"However, some have argued these drops may be artificially low because participants knew the guaranteed income was temporary."

That negates the experiment. There is little incentive to quit your job or loaf when the free money is only temporary. It may also take years for the effects to be felt, as social norms break down gradually. Also, there is a big, big difference between doing this policy in a small town in Canada, where there can be social pressure to not free-load, and where you have a population with a strong cultural work ethnic, versus enacting this policy in a large, heterogeneous city.

The degeneration you fear sounds like a fine alternative to me. I'd rather deal with happy drunks than stressed out angry workers. Idleness doesn't bother me. The crime you allude to is usually committed by the young men who have no income in those situations and result to crime to obtain funds.

For reference, this is what I fear: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/world/europe/10britain.htm...

<quote>

>In its four most deprived neighborhoods, some 30 percent of the residents of working age are considered “economically inactive,” neither holding jobs nor looking for them.

> "The housing projects in Wythenshawe represent an extreme pocket of social deprivation and alienation. But the problems here — a breakdown in families, an absence of respect for authority, the prevalence of drugs, drunkenness, truancy, vandalism and petty criminality — are common across Britain."

> Bringing home her groceries recently, Jane Leach, a 46-year-old caregiver for the elderly, described a typical weekend evening on the small grassy area that serves as a park of sorts between two rows of houses on her street. The youths start coming after 6, she said, dozens of them, boys and girls, mostly in their teens. They get drunk, take drugs, harass the residents, steal cars, urinate and defecate in the gardens, smash beer bottles on doorsteps, fight, pass out.

> When she tries to intervene, Ms. Leach said, the youths yell abuse at her. When she tells them to get off her car, they tell her there is nowhere else to sit. Recently, youths slashed every tire on 12 cars up and down the street, she said. When her partner was smashed in the face by a 14-year-old, Ms. Leach said, the police took 45 minutes to respond.

</quote>

The article blames the stealing to some extent on poverty. But these people are not impoverished in the classical sense of the world. They have food, healthcare, and decent housing. I'm sure they have access to libraries where they could have a near infinite supply of books. Maybe they cannot afford vacations or fancy entertainment systems, but under any sort of basic income for not working scheme, people would face such limits in income.

And also, even if you could turn these people into less violent and vulgar idlers, as a first order moral principle, I do not want a world that looks like idiocracy or the ship in Wall-E.

being unemployed, with no access to resources you can use to build things, is a very different environment than being unemployed with full access to things you can build.

"...social deprivation and alienation."

I think this part is important, though. The poor in our society are alienated and often cut-off from the larger society and culture. If unemployment was a socially accepted norm I do not think you would see this, I think you would see more people acting like "natural aristocrats".

On the other hand, I don't necessarily disagree with you entirely. Maybe people do need to work, it is possible. In that case, my solution would be to find the absolute minimum that people "need" to work in order to remain socially-balanced and force them to work that much, preferably doing something that contributes to the general welfare.

Spending more money on college is just a wealth transfer from tax payers to upper middle class teachers and administrators.

This is the case in the United States. In several places in Europe, however, it is a different story. Higher education is cheap or even free and schools are not bloated with a glut of unnecessary bureaucrats and administrators.

> not bloated with a glut of unnecessary bureaucrats and administrators

In America, Education is about standardizing thought & systematically removing novelty from the students. That requires bureaucrats & administrators to ensure that the novelty is systematically removed on schedule.

Higher education in the US is also plenty cheap if you look at state schools and community colleges. I took the path of going to a state school and escaped with a very small amount of debt.

But that isn't popular to talk about. Instead, we blindly assume every school is $40K+ a year. (And indeed, some people are brazen enough to pay such costs.)

I went to the best physics program in Sweden. It was pretty amazing and at something like $50 per year essentially free. In addition, the government provided ~$300 per month in assistance plus a low interest ~$900 loan.

Any good policy or form of governance (including socialism) will look bad if executed poorly.

>In the last sixty years, a tremendous amount of money has been poured into education.

That wouldn't be the last sixty years of explosive innovation and social growth, would it?

You mean the most inventive and creative sixty years in all of human history?

The problem now is that universities have become degree mills and social networking clubs. The subscription fees are insane, and because education has become commoditised, and too much of the process exists to exploit students instead of educating them, the results are becoming ever-more mediocre.

But it would surely be possible to make useful adult education a part-time thing, with the rest of the time spent on useful work.

It's not as if there aren't enough jobs that need to be done in healthcare, infrastructure maintenance, childcare, teaching, and all the other work that counts towards social, not investor, dividends.

Unfortunately these jobs are deemed 'too expensive' and 'a drain on resources' - which is code for 'we're not going to make money from them in the next six months, so fuck everyone.'

That wouldn't be the last sixty years of explosive innovation and social growth, would it? You mean the most inventive and creative sixty years in all of human history?

The sixty years prior were pretty explosive too - we got the car, airplane, nitrogen fixation, radios, etc.

In my observation, you maximize returns to education when a) 90+% of people are literate in terms of both words and math b) ~20% of your population has a good trade education and/or apprenticeship c) 5-10% of your population has a good technical education (engineering, accounting, medicine, etc.). Beyond that, there are diminishing returns. The benefit of giving 50% of your population a "business and communications" "education" at State U is pretty low. Especially when that "education" is really just a four year party.

The U.S. was probably at maximal educational efficiency in the 1950's. And we are getting a lot of benefit from the small percentage of education that is actually technical. But the marginal, additional, dollars spent since then, IMO, have had little impact.

1) If we moved from theoretical/general teachings in college and focused on apprenticeship, the benefits of universal education would be clearly noticeable.

2) My policy preference ... of at least $15 an hour. Why does everybody need to work? Just look around your own company, (arbitrarily) less than 50% of your workforce creates (arbitrarily) 95% of the value. We would save money by paying the rest to stay home.

3) The way productivity is being enhanced by technology means that sooner or later, only a small part of the population will make the workforce, and they will create more value than all of us are creating now. The only question at that point will be how will this value/profit be shared and benefit the "unproductive" population.

Just look around your own company, (arbitrarily) less than 50% of your workforce creates (arbitrarily) 95% of the value.

That was not the case at my last company, as we were quite cutthroat about cutting away deadwood. But the company was in the marketing space, so arguably the entire company could just stay home and society would be no worse off.

But to answer your question - why does everybody need to work? Because most people are not natural aristocrats. They are not going to be tinkering in their home laboratories, crafting programming languages or writing ebooks. I fear that most people will degenerate in every manner if not subjected to the discipline of work. They will end up drinking and playing video games all day long. Furthermore, I think most people want to work, it provides purpose and fulfillment.

If we needed to create work on a massive scale (as opposed to just a stop gap for particular disadvantaged people) I would prefer that the government create some sort of massive, purposeful project. For instance, I'd love to see the U.S. president throw down the gauntlet and challenge China and the EU to race to Mars. (Although I'm not actually sure how many jobs such an endeavor would actually create).

In the last sixty years, a tremendous amount of money has been poured into education

I wrote about adjacent issues in "Why can’t we solve poverty, or solve it through schools?", which got started in emails and Hacker News comments on the issue (http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2014/05/17/why-cant-we-solve-p...).

In addition, and as I discuss in the post, right now we can't "solve" poverty because poverty is a moving metric, usually defined as a percentage of income, rather than as an absolute value.

Thanks for your comment.

In addition, and as I discuss in the post, right now we can't "solve" poverty because poverty is a moving metric, usually defined as a percentage of income, rather than as an absolute value.

Yes, and this reminds me a point I left out. We also need to look for ways to reduce the cost of living for the basic stuffs of life. In many ways a poor person now is wealthier than 40 years ago. However, the cost of living needed to simply live in society as a semi-normal person has also gone up dramatically. Most people cannot to work, or take a cheap moped to work, because the entire transportation structure was designed for cars. If everyone else is driving a three ton steel machine, you need to drive one too, and better get one with airbags and a four-star crash rating. Similarly, zoning laws have made even small homes in locations near healthy job markers quite expensive. Healthcare is much better now, but there is no option to pay Costa Rican healthcare prices for Costa Rican health quality. It's all or nothing.

The economy is also missing old-school solutions like boarding houses or dorm living for adults, that provide a very cost effective way for single adults to save money while working entry level jobs. Such accommodations now violate zoning laws.

Right now economic policy is geared around GDP and per capita GDP. I would prefer for the key metric we judge economic progress by to be the ratio between the most basic cost of living for a normal person (a two bedroom home near jobs, a food basket with protein and vitamins, transportation costs of getting to work, healthcare coverage that will cover major health problems, amortized costs of education needed to land that median wage job, etc. etc.) divided by the median income for a full time worker. We both need to focus on keeping the basic cost of living down as much as we focus on keeping wages up.

>> "... because the entire transportation structure was designed for cars. If everyone else is driving a three ton steel machine, you need to drive one too, and better get one with airbags and a four-star crash rating."

It's almost like the man designed it this way so as to incentivize you to borrow money from him to buy cars. The only thing stopping something like that would be the fact that the auto industry didn't historically have vast domestic political power and close ties to high finance... wait a second...

"The Man" does not exist, although interest groups certainly do, and the Iron Law of Oligarchy always holds, and I'm always willing to entertain conspiracy theories. But my impression is that the highway system was built because folks like Robert Moses and Ike genuinely thought it was the right thing to do. Cities were in fact massively overcrowded, jammed with congestion, and to be able to escape the tenements of New York and to be able to have the complete freedom to go anywhere in the countryside and have a picnic in a state park was an amazing advancement. What evidence do you have that the main driver behind car culture was conspiracy?

I'm pretty sure it's just the complex result of simple evolutionary forces and small benign decisions, and not the result of some malicious intelligent design.

Sure, a lot of stuff will get cheaper, but how are you gonna pay for that without any income? I speculate that countries in Europe will choose some form of Minimal Activity available for everybody. The transition faze will hurt. A lot.

As an adult-life on-boarding process, why not compulsory service? At least then, every person is guaranteed to have contributed at least something to society.

Money has beenb poured into education, but not spent on actually teching people.

check out the budgets for the universities, and tell me where the money has gone.

Ok, but those who just do not want to be assigned a productive task, what would you do with them?

Then they go hungry. When they are ready to work and to eat, their local employment office will be ready with a job and a paycheck. But in the meantime, they need to stay off my lawn. I am a believer in anti-vagrancy laws, so I think with the "jobs for everyone" comes enforcement against sleeping on street benches and panhandling.

Your plan depends on everyone being able to work. There are a lot of illnesses and disabilities(physical and mental) that make that assertion not true. Would you have these people starve?

No, I said very clearly in my original comment that everyone gets a job, even schizophrenics and quadriplegics. There is something that everyone can do. If you are physically disabled you can monitor security cameras or transcribe city council recordings or something. If you are mentally disabled you can still probably pick up trash in city parks. There is some make work job available for almost anybody. The only exception would be the extreme mentally ill, who would need to be treated and provided supportive housing as they are now. But if you are mentally able, but just unwilling, then you go hungry. Or maybe you get a soup kitchen and a bed in a shelter. But in someway it will be unpleasant and hard, so as to disincentivize sloth.

Is sweeping streets a way of fulfilling your highest purpose in life?

We live in an age of abundance. Why not allow people to create what they want to create? Art, music, love, good feelings in the community, etc.

Here's a good story on a dystopia & utopia in an age with automated machinery, less jobs, & more overall abundance.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Do you have any experience with people with mental illnesses or disabilities? "Everyone can work, we can find a job for everyone" just seems like something that could only be claimed from a position of ignorance. Further shown by your suggestion of having them pick up trash. People with a lot of mental illnesses aren't incapable of working due to a lack of skills.

It really depends on the mental illness. Most mentally ill people could do something, most of the time. What exactly they could do would depend on the particular illness. Many are not currently hireable because even one episode a week is enough to get them fired. Some are not currently hirable because they have been out of the workforce for so long, that they have lost a bunch of habits. I think that could be remedied.

But, as I said, if they are really incapable of any possible employment, then they should get treatment and supportive housing.

This sounds horribly like the old Soviet Union, where everyone had a right to a job, whether you liked it or not.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7908527

What you are describing is prison workshops.

I'm not sure how both you and rodgerd could mis-comprehend me so badly.

What I am describing is exactly how things work in the U.S. now, except that if you cannot find a job and your benefits run out, the government will give you a job. The free market for all other jobs still exists. You don't have to take a job if you do not want to. The only difference between the current America and my proposal, is that in the current America if you cannot find a job you go without food and shelter, while in my proposal you always have the option of getting a job. I do not know if you are trolling or arguing in bad faith, but I don't know how you guys are spinning this as some prison camp or soviet style thing.

How does it differ from Soviet full employment?

Also the discussion isn't about a comparison with how the US is now. It's about how to deal with a future where much less work is needed.

Suggesting that when humanity finally conquers scarcity, we should institute a mandatory full employment program where people must do unnecessary make-work jobs or face starvation in the streets is a totalitarian nightmare of the most inhumane order.

So your lawn is a public street bench?

Show them a documentary about the working environment of the lower class in China.

Support them as a society. There will always be a tiny % that won't or can't work. Unless you want to let them die you will spend more money and effort trying to find the people abusing the system then you will spend on their abuses.

A basic law of economics is that whatever you spend money on you get more of. Spending money on paying for the abuses will only get you more abuses.

What is the name of that law? I'm not familiar with it.

The reason this isn't a problem is that not working gets boring really quickly and people want luxuries they can't get on basic income.

Define 'productive task.'