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Comment by rdudekul | Hacker News Reader

Flexibility of choosing the type & the time of work seems like a win, in the gig (freelance) economy. However commoditization of such jobs could force the income down for many. This may result in the increase in the number of hours people work and that could result in health issues. With no health insurance & other benefits, overall quality of life could decrease for many. However Gig economy is here to stay.

In these conditions how can workers, government & businesses collaborate to provide better working conditions for those involved?

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Commoditization certainly will force incomes down. This has already happened in the arts, where most work is inherently project-based. The more accessible technology has become, the more people have been asked to work for free, because there's a perception that computers have made it all so easy, and more to the point, the ubiquity of computers means that specialist skills no longer seem exotic because they don't require the same sort of specialist equipment that they used to.

The freedom and flexibility is nice, but gigging as a lifestyle can often feel like even more of a rat race because there's no concept of job security, and also because there's a flattening effect so that you have a small number of managers, a larger number of technicians, and a lot of workers. That means promotion and career advancement become heavily tiered. So if you drive for a ride-sharing service and want to get ahead in life, your choices are to drive every waking hour to get money or study programming or management in hopes of getting an entry level job in the company that operates the ride-sharing platform, where your time and dedication as a drive will be considered worthless, if not an active barrier to hiring. I predict that that while we will see flatter hierarchies than in the stereotypical 20th century organization, there'll be a re-emergence of Victorian-style class divisions, because management will be in no hurry to admit the most skilled servants to their ranks.

> In these conditions how can workers, government & businesses collaborate to provide better working conditions for those involved?

Solid safety net. Universal/single payer healthcare. A living minimum wage. Social support when you're unable to assemble enough income to survive (its been proven that its cheaper to give the homeless housing than to pay for the resulting issues of not providing housing).

I'm a big fan of a basic income as a replacement to our existing welfare system, but this:

>its been proven that its cheaper to give the homeless housing than to pay for the resulting issues of not providing housing

is misleading and inaccurate. First, you could never prove something like this as the comparison is highly dependent upon the larger institutional framework a particular society is operating under. Second, even if it were demonstrably true in a given community at a particular point in time, there is no guarantee those same conditions would persist over time. That's not to say there aren't good arguments for providing housing or other forms of welfare, but we don't need to engage in overly sweeping or simplistic arguments to make that case.

> but we don't need to engage in overly sweeping or simplistic arguments to make that case.

Utah has shown, through data, that it is cheaper to provide housing directly to the homeless.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/housing-first-so...

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/home-free

Your claim is sweeping because you're taking the results from one particular case study and extrapolating it out into a generic claim. It's overly simplistic because you're not acknowedging the reality that these conditions could change or may not be applicable in other situations (assuming there were no flaws in the underlying case study analysis to begin with).

Edit: this comment was made in response to toomuchtodo's comment prior to editing stating their claim was neither sweeping nor overly simplistic

But isn't that how evidence in support of these these programs should be generated?

If not, how else can these programs be accurately evaluated prior to implementing on a more generic scale?

The idea is to find better solutions than we have now. The counterarguments you are raising sound to me like they could equally be applicable to any proposed solution. If we can't seriously consider something until we know it works in exactly the same conditions, I feel like nothing would ever change.

Let me know if I've read you wrong though.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with pointing to empirical evidence to support a claim (in fact, that is an excellent thing to do!). The issue I have with the original claim is that it isn't proven that giving away housing is a cheaper long-term solution than other forms of welfare. I certainly don't think we need to wait until something is proven to have an opinion or move forward in trying to make the world a better place (if we did, we would never take action in most cases), but we shouldn't present research in a way that disingenuously overstates our knowledge.

Cherry picking is allowed in contentious political questions.

Apparently.

There is a big moral hazard issue here as well. When you are working for minimum wage to rent the cheapest apartment in town why not become 'homeless' and get a house for free. I have no doubt that if you could eliminate the frauds from the system it would be cheaper, but I don't think you could.

What is a "fraud"?

The simple way to solve this is to offer housing free to all comers, but make it less attractive than existing options.

I'm sure logic like that works well on the playground and at the grateful dead concert, what about all the people who invested in property? What about the value of homes in general? Where would you even house all these people? It isn't always so simple.

If homes lose value, so be it. And where would we house all of these people? ~500K people in the US are homeless [1], providing housing for 1/600th of the US population is not difficult.

[1] http://endhomelessness.org/library/entry/the-state-of-homele...

Well, do you buy property to live on it, or to "invest"?

Real estate speculators hardly seem to add any value to the economy.

Why do we care about people who treat property as an investment, rather than actually using the property?

Reconsider preconceptions of what cities and society can do for humanity.

Basic needs like clean water, sanitation, and streets could be extended to public housing and food. Public housing might be a bare minimum room in a crowded building on cheap land around urban areas with public transit connecting the community into the city.

1: Not everyone lives in cities. 2: Why am I paying for your housing and then having to either live in a slum, or buy one myself?

1: Correct, though since the majority of jobs, infrastructure, and population gravitates around urban areas, building further infrastructure near populated areas would be reasonable.

2: Why do societies agree to build and maintain public infrastructure projects like sanitation, water, roads, schools, etc?

There will always be the economy of WANTs, buy a house wherever you want!

Consider the excessive amount of tax money going into the Prison Industrial Complex economy, it seems a much better option to build low cost / public housing infrastructure and job training rather than prisons.

1: So, basically people who live in rural areas will subsidize the people who live in cities? Or will they just pay much lower taxes?

2: Sanitation? I have my own septic system.

Water? Well.

Roads? You mean the gravel thing that has tons of pot holes? It would not be feasible for me to do that alone. (private property and all)

Schools? Tell me how much a high school degree gets you in today's economy? I just don't see much ROI there.

I agree about the prison system, it should only have violent criminals and thieves but the savings should go to lower taxes for the poor and middle class.

I don't see any moral hazard. If anything, not providing housing for those who don't have it is the morally hazardous path.

This is usually a fair point to make, but you're pointing at neither the flaws in the underlying case study nor the weakness in generalizing Utah to a wider area. That's not really fair, especially since parent comment is providing data.

The parent comment is now significantly different from when I replied to it.

The articles were originally cited, but my response was in reference to their claim that their prior statement:

>its been proven that its cheaper to give the homeless housing than to pay for the resulting issues of not providing housing

...was neither sweeping nor overly-simplistic. The merits of the referenced case study--which may be an excellent case study--provide no grounds for refuting my claim that their prior statement was sweeping and overly-simplistic. Also, when making an argument based on extrapolated data, the burden for justifying extrapolation lies on the person making that argument.

Regardless, my only real point here is that the original claim (that giving people housing is cheaper than other forms of welfare has been "proven") is simply too powerful of a claim. It might be a good policy and it may in fact be cheaper, but it's incorrect to say any position on this topic has been "proven".

asift,

I did indeed edit my comment, removing my assertion that my claim was not sweeping and overly-simplistic (I wish HN would keep an edit history that was visible).

With that said, I still disagree with you. If an experiment takes place, and data is apparent, that data stands on its own merit; if that data can then be used to make a statement, its proof, not "sweeping and overly-simplistic".

You can disagree with me, that's fine. I believe, based on the data, that we should be giving housing to the homeless. If you don't agree, I encourage you to engage politically; I do, and I'm passionate about positive social change. I appreciate you engaging in discourse with me in a civil manner; it happens much less than I wish it would (in general).

I'm fairly new to HN, but I've found people here tend to be much more civil than most places on the web, which I think is great.

>if that data can then be used to make a statement, its proof

I'm not trying to be overly semantic, but I think "evidence" would be more appropriate than "proof" in this case. My claim was never that there isn't evidence that housing the homeless costs less than other welfare programs (or that I think it's something we shouldn't do), I just think you are being too forceful in your claim.

A community in Alberta, Canada has, in effect, ended homelessness [0]. The mayor claims[1] the cost of providing housing to someone is around CAD20,000, but the cost of a homeless person can be up to CAD100,000 - meaning that it's financially prudent for the municipality to proactively house people.

Both links are to press reports and don't provide any further information to back up the claims, but given that Medicine Hat and several other municipalities have taken up objectives of ending homelessness, I suspect it wasn't just for the warm fuzzies of giving people roofs over their heads. A lot of people (including the Mayor himself!) would have the same knee-jerk "they didn't earn it" response.

[0]: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/medicine-hat-on-brink-...

[1]: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-e...

Thank you for contributing an additional data point!

> A living minimum wage.

Meh. The idea that "people should be able to earn a living wage" is fine but does not always imply that it should be illegal to work for less, and structuring the economy such that this is the case can have ill effects too: it can eliminate entry-level positions and worsen unemployment, which seriously damages one's ability to improve his career later. It also impacts youths and retirees, neither of whom are working as their primary means of support, and community organizations/nonprofits who might benefit from time to time from a little more manpower than a pure volunteer solution might be able to provide.

Economic growth, and the employment opportunities it affords, are a far better way to improve economic opportunities than legislation is.

> It can eliminate entry-level positions and worsen unemployment, which seriously damages one's ability to improve his career later.

> It also impacts youths and retirees, neither of whom are working as their primary means of support

These are old canards.

The law already has adequate provision for limiting laws to the 21-65 age bracket, for probationary periods of employment, and for discounting wages based on value provided by the employer (example: students pay tuition for education, of which a large component is actually labor).

Yes that's what the robber barons keep repeating, but why not think of businesses and employee wages in terms of percentage of the profits generated?

Fast food employees earning $15 an hour can still be profitable [ http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/28/pf/north_dakota_jobs/ ]

> Yes that's what the robber barons keep repeating,

Screw the robber barons - and, while you're at it, screw the progressive politicians and labor unions too. This is what the goddamn labor economists keep repeating.

Except the ones that are well regarded, as pointed out by a reply to your post by mattybrennan ....

Don't forget in the oil towns that pay $11+/hour for fast food workers, the menu prices are 30% higher as well

Yeah, and in those towns, rent is insanely high for the area as well. Is that because fast food workers are being paid $11+/hour?

Or is it possibly that the managers know that the oil people have crazy amounts of money, and they're trying to squeeze as much of it out of the oil people as they can?

True, but what happens if $15 is the break even point between having a robot do the job vs a human? Did we just help the minimum wage works by dumping all of their jobs and replacing with a fleet of robots and 1 high paid robot fixer?

I am all for the end goal of let the robots do the work, give everyone goods, ala Star Trek.. but not sure on the way to get there. Something has to fundamentally change. Is it the 40 hour workweek? Is it living wage?

Structure to economic systems — segment basic needs (food, housing, education, transportation) as provided with "basic income credit", separate from the normal cash economy of WANTs and luxuries.

Maybe a combination? I wonder if the privatisation of utilities might come back to bite countries (further) in that it removes an angle to solving these problems.

Perhaps the risk of a living wage (influx of freeloaders for one thing) is reduced if the provision is more in terms of basic rights like power for heating, cooling and cooking, water for drinking, washing and cleaning, and communication (base-level internet/wi-fi). Ideally extend it to basic food rights.

I would like to see far more done to reduce costs of sourcing/cooking healthy food as a base-level option for people. Might be achieved through density (compactus-style growing sleeves), layering (underground growing), robotics, automated transport (self-driving trucks), etc.

Allowing workers to be paid less doesn't result in more jobs, it just results in more profits for fewer people. http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21586578-americas-inco...

http://www.pkarchive.org/cranks/LivingWage.html > This theoretical prediction has, however, been hard to confirm with actual data. Indeed, much-cited studies by two well-regarded labor economists, David Card and Alan Krueger, find that where there have been more or less controlled experiments, for example when New Jersey raised minimum wages but Pennsylvania did not, the effects of the increase on employment have been negligible or even positive. Exactly what to make of this result is a source of great dispute. Card and Krueger offered some complex theoretical rationales, but most of their colleagues are unconvinced; the centrist view is probably that minimum wages "do," in fact, reduce employment, but that the effects are small and swamped by other forces.

the increase on employment have been negligible or even positive

Very interesting.

So the supply curve is sloped the other way than what microeconomic theory supposed?

Really?

I'm sorry, but I don't buy any of that for a second. Further, youth employment should not be considered more important than the employment of people who DO need to support themselves.

So basically, things that will not happen in the US anytime soon.

Stop tying health insurance to employment. One way or another, the tax loophole for health insurance needs to go away. This benefits both the salaried worker (easier to switch jobs and get a raise) and the freelance worker (doesn't have to unfairly pay higher rates).

Unionization of skilled workers..?

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