Bill Mitchell — UBI–the hopeful not the surrender

I have long disagreed with Guy Standing about the solutions to unemployment. 20 years ago we crossed paths on panels and in the literature where he would argue that UBI was the way forward and I would argue that it was a neoliberal plot and that, instead, we needed to push for job creation. My view has always been that to surrender to the neoliberals on their claim that governments cannot generate sufficient jobs to satisfy the desires for work of the unemployed was a slippery slope. Standing continues to publish his fiction. In his latest Social Europe article (January 15, 2020) – Building a progressive alliance in Britain – he seeks to integrate UBI proposals with a recovery plan for British Labour. My view is that would not help Labour recover from the shots they fired into their own feet in the period before the December election by listening to the likes of Standing and those who advocated the Fiscal Credibility Rule and the reneging on the Brexit commitment. Standing’s aversion to job creation is in contradistinction with a recommendation from the Wetenschappelijke Raad Voor Het Regeringsbeleid (WRR or in English, The Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy) to the Dutch government to deal with the challenges of achieving “good work”, in part, by introducing a ‘basic job’ which in my parlance means by introducing a Job Guarantee. They are motivated by a deep vein of social science and medical research that extols the virtues of work beyond its obvious income generation qualities. Pushing a UBI in the light of that research is just a pitiful bailout...

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
UBI – the hopeful not the surrender
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Peter Cooper — Fairness and a ‘Job or Income Guarantee’

Of the various criticisms leveled at a combined ‘job or income guarantee‘, ones appealing to fairness usually go along the lines that it would be unfair for healthy individuals outside the workforce to receive an income while others are occupied in jobs. In considering this objection, a number of points come to mind:

heteconomist
Fairness and a ‘Job or Income Guarantee’
Peter Cooper

Peter Radford — The future of work is now

Forget anticipating the consequences of AI. Obsession with increasing shareholder value, returns, profit rate, and profit share is already transformed the traditional role of workers and the concept of work.

Real-World Economics Review Blog
The future of work is now
Peter Radford

David F. Ruccio — Technology, employment, and distribution

I can make the case that things would be much better if the adoption of new technologies did in fact displace a large number of labor hours. Then, the decreasing amount of labor that needed to be performed could be spread among all workers, thus lessening the need for everyone to work as many hours as they do today.

But that would require a radically different set of economic institutions, one in which people were not forced to have the freedom to sell their ability to work to someone else. However, that’s not a world Autor and Salomons—or mainstream economists generally—can ever imagine let alone work to create.

Technological innovation increases the potential to substitute leisure for work, but that is ruled out institutionally and operationally in a capitalist system operated on wage labor. Rather than increasing leisure the gain from increased productivity goes to owners of technology and technology workers. This puts downward pressure on other workers and increases unemployment in less desirable work. The result is increasing inequality and social dysfunction.

Occasional Links & Commentary
Technology, employment, and distribution
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

Allison J. Pugh — What Happens at Home When People Can’t Depend on Stable Work

My research, involving men and women who experience varying levels of job insecurity, suggests that the dampening expectations they have for employer commitment requires them to moderate the kinds of feelings they allow themselves to have in the event of a layoff. This is especially true for less-educated workers, who are most likely to say they could lose their jobs in the next year.…

So when we talk about work today, we have to talk about it in the context of an unrequited contract, our collective acquiescence to the notion that work can no longer be counted on....

Wake-up from a sociologist. The psychological impact of job insecurity can be devastating, as is shown in health and suicide statistics such as cited by Anne Case and Angus Deaton.

JG to the rescue.

Harvard Business Review
What Happens at Home When People Can’t Depend on Stable Work

Allison J. Pugh is a sociologist at the University of Virginia and a 2016-17 Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, as well as a 2016-17 American Council of Learned Societies Fellow

Neil Wilson — What is Work?

Some philosophy of economics and sociology, where "work" is a foundational term.

Work is another of those Humpty Dumpty words. So let’s clarify what work is and what it should be.

Modern Money Matters
What is Work?
Neil Wilson

Johan Aurik — Work in an Automated Future

The Fourth Industrial Revolution will disrupt employment, just as the previous three did. But before we assume the worst, we should recall that technological change has more often affected the nature of work, rather than the opportunity to participate in work itself.…

The big takeaway is that work has become much less physically demanding owning to technology and distributed leisure has increased significantly, permitting the wider and deeper distribution of education. The wider deeper distribution of education has generated increasing technological innovation that has multiplied the process. There is no reason to suspect that this the end point of the process is approaching of that the process has an end point at all if an essential aspect of human nature is creativity and industry.

So don't freak out over "disruptive technology."

Worth reading the whole post. It is short and on point.

Project Syndicate
Work in an Automated Future

Johan Aurik | Managing Partner and Chairman, Global, at A.T. Kearney

Scott Ferguson — re: f@ck work (arcade)

James Livingston has responded to my critique of his Aeon essay, “Fuck Work.” His response was published in the Spanish magazine Contexto y Accion. One can find an English translation here.

Arcade has now published my reply.

the unheard of center — critique after modern monetary theory

re: f@ck work (arcade)
Scott Ferguson | Assistant Professor of Film & Media Studies, Department of Humanities & Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida, and a Research Scholar at the Binzagr Institute for Sustainable Prosperity

Scott Ferguson — f@ck work: a rejoinder

Looks like a blog debate in the works about work.

The following is a brief rejoinder to James Livingston’s “Fuck Work,” an essay based on his book, No More Work: Why Full Employment is a Bad Idea (2016). Specifically, it answers Aeon Magazine’s tagline for Livingston’s piece, “What if jobs are not the solution, but the problem?”

What if we stopped believing that capitalists and automation are responsible for determining how and when we labor together? What if we quit imagining that so-called “leisure” spontaneously organizes itself like the laissez-faire markets we elsewhere decry?

This is of the essence of it. Humans construct social worlds largely based on language in ways that no other animal species area remotely capable of doing. Not only is language use  the chief tool in social construction but it also solidifies that construction and transmits it across generations relatively intact owing to culture and institutions.

But language does change over time and adapts to human response to changing conditions. In this way, language use continues to be emergent.

Terms like "work" and "leisure" are embedded in social contexts that give them meaning in specific situations. As context changes, terms adapt to the shifts, sometime subtly in a nuanced way, while at other times drastically, as it the coining of new terms to handle fresh context.

In addition, the human historical dialectal itself also impacts word use as people realize that they are being influenced by particular contextual usage that could be improved upon, for example, by shifting the norms associated with the context.

What if we predicated social critique on terms that are not defined by the neoliberal ideology that we wish to circumvent?

What if we made a federal Job Guarantee the basis for a renewed leftist imaginary?

the unheard-of center — critique after modern monetary theory
f@ck work: a rejoinder

Scott Ferguson

James Livingston — Fuck Work

Revisiting our attitude toward work and our dependence on it. What happens when it goes away?

Aeon
Fuck Work
James Livingston | Professor of History at Rutgers University in New York

Sandwichman — Post Post Work Post

What Karl Marx really meant. And therefore why most of what goes by the name "economics" is a crock. It's actually a story gussied up in math that is used to dupe the rubes.

EconoSpeak

Post Post Work Post
Sandwichman

Branko Milanovic — 99 percent Utopia and money

My good friend and co-author Leif Wenar, in his first tweet, asked this question: “Friends, a utopia query. Keep human nature fixed. Imagine the best possible world. Does money exist?” I could not sleep last night so I decided to give it a thought.…

Presently scarce resources are allocated by markets based on money. It's a distribution issue. Is a superior distributional system possible? Marx, of course, thought so.

Global Inequality
99 percent Utopia and money
Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Sandwichman — More or Less? Fourth Grade Arithmetic for Economists

In plain language, what these charts reveal is the inordinate emphasis in the U.S. on GDP. In fourth-grade arithmetic terms, the index called "productivity" is a fraction. It has both a numerator and a denominator. The numerator is GDP. The denominator is hours of work. The result of this operation of division is called the quotient. Productivity is a quotient. A quotient is increased by either increasing the numerator or decreasing the denominator (or both).

There is an extensive literature on the systematic errors made by children learning rational number concepts. Those errors result from attempts to apply rules that have been previously learned about whole numbers to new situations where those rules are not relevant. Mistaking a quotient (productivity) for a numerator (output) would be an example of this kind of systematic error. Would it be asking too much for economists to set aside their indulgence in arcane mathiness and attend instead to the pervasive ignorance of fourth-grade rational number concepts that underlies the single-minded obsession with "economic growth"?

Econospeak
More or Less? Fourth Grade Arithmetic for Economists

Sandwichman

Bill Mitchell — The rise of non-standard work undermines growth and increases inequality

One of the on-going themes that emerges from the neo-liberal commentariat is that fiscal deficits undermine the future of our children and their children because of the alleged higher implied tax burdens. The theme is without foundation given that each generation can choose its own tax structure, deficits are never paid back, and public spending can build essential long-lived infrastructure, which provides benefits that span many generations. The provision of a first-class public education system feeding into stable, skilled job structures is the best thing that a government can do for the future generations. Sadly, government policy is undermining the future generations but not in the way the neo-liberals would have us believe. One of my on-going themes is the the impact of entrenched youth unemployment, precarious work and degraded public infrastructure on the well-being and future prospects of society as neo-liberal austerity becomes the norm. This theme was reflected (if unintentionally) in a new report, release last week by the OECD – In It Together: Why Less Inequality Benefits All. The Report brings together a number of research findings and empirical facts that we all knew about but are stark when presented in one document.

Misplaced priorities.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
The rise of non-standard work undermines growth and increases inequality
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

William H. David — The Internet Has Been a Colossal Economic Disappointment

This gets it backwards. The purpose of technological innovation is not to create jobs but to increase productivity, which generally means replacing jobs and making space for increased leisure. 

Technological innovation increase makes work obsolete. This has been the historical result of technological innovation. 

If there is a problem, it's with distribution of increasing surplus in order to increase shared prosperity.

Harvard Business Review — HBR Blog Network

The Internet Has Been a Colossal Economic Disappointment
William H. Davidow | Mohr Davidow Ventures

Jerry Toner — Were Roman slave-owners the first management theorists?

Weekend reading. Some interesting parallels.

Aeon Magazine
Were Roman slave-owners the first management theorists?

Jerry Toner

Henry Blodget — The Sum Total Of Human Progress Over The Past 150 Years Is Revealed In These 2 Charts

150 years ago, we spent about 70 of those 112 waking hours working (63%). 

Thanks to the remarkable productivity enhancements we have made over the past 150 years, however, we have reduced the average workweek in most countries by about 30 hours, to 40 hours (34% of waking hours)…. 

This has freed up a lot of extra time. 

So what do we do with all the extra hours our miraculous progress and productivity enhancements have allowed us to create for ourselves? 

We spend them watching television.

The boob tube rules, literally. Now being replaced among digital natives with gadgets.

Business Insider

The Sum Total Of Human Progress Over The Past 150 Years Is Revealed In These 2 Charts

Henry Blodget

Stephen Bevan — Unemployed? You shouldn’t just take any job.

Being in poor-quality work which, perhaps, is boring, routine or represents underemployment or a poor match for the employee’s skills is widely regarded as a good way for the unemployed to remain connected to the labor market – and to keep the work habit. But Butterworth’s data contradict this. The HILDA data show unambiguously that the psychosocial quality of bad jobs is worse than unemployment. Butterworth looked at those moving from unemployment into employment and found that: 

"Those who moved into optimal jobs showed significant improvement in mental health compared to those who remained unemployed. Those respondents who moved into poor-quality jobs showed a significant worsening in their mental health compared to those who remained unemployed."

So now we have a slightly different answer to the question about the unemployed being better off in work. Yes they are, as long as they are in good-quality jobs. If they are in bad jobs, there is a perversely strong chance that they will be worse off – especially in terms of their mental health. 

Again, for those who think that there should be punitive undertones to policies to get unemployed people back to work would do well to question whether the “any job is a good job” maxim is as accurate as they like to think. Moreover, we should probably question whether the revolving-door characteristics of some policies in which many people fall back out of work soon after being found a job might – in part – owe their poor performance to the damaging psychosocial quality of the work itself.

This shouldn’t stop us from straining every sinew to help people find work. But it should make us think a lot more about how the quality of jobs can affect our health and productivity.…

The Washington Post
Unemployed? You shouldn’t just take any job.

Stephen Bevan | Director of the Centre for Workforce Effectiveness at the Work Foundation and an honorary professor at Lancaster University

ht Dan Lynch

Corporatists Divide & Conquer ... By Getting The Plebes Arguing Over Crumbs

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Reich & Hanauer Waste Political Capital Arguing Over Crumbs

They want to restore guaranteed overtime to more salaried workers - often middle "management."

Sadly, Reich & Hanauer are missing the point. Arguing details while missing the pink elephant in the room. Worse, their message is addictive for the Middle Class they say they want to save.

Overtime is profitable for corporations. It's how they nudge current staff back towards 80 hour workweeks instead of 2x as many people working 40 hours per work. That's bad for the Middle Class, however, since it reduces the number of people working, and also promotes private savings while reducing net consumption.

Instead, why not just lower all taxes on labor, so that the working class can consume more of what they're able to produce?

If citizens don't consume what they produce, someone just uselessly hoards that production .. which doesn't do anyone any good in the long run. 

In a social species, the best form of SAVINGS is full investment in co-citizen capabilities ... since they're the ones who look out for one another.

Increasing an Output Gap benefits even parasites only short term, by making their host transiently vulnerable ... so that the parasites can insert themselves into protected positions. Yet that protection only persists if the host's vulnerability is only transient. A sustained Output Gap guarantees that some other culture will have a higher Adaptive Rate, some culture with immunity to the current form of NeoLiberals.

There's a simple principle at work.

The pricing structure's connected to the monopoly supplier, and the monopoly supplier's behavior is connected to the Cultural Adaptive Rate.

If either connection is broken, the CAR stalls ... and we start to roll backwards.

Instead of more overtime, why not see all the way through, and raise wages, cut FICA/Medicare/labor taxes, mandate a 32 hour work week, and guarantee everyone 1 month of paid vacation per year? We'd have fewer McScrooge billionaires sitting on their hoarded "piles" lobbying for preparation H-bomb subsidies (corporate welfare) ... but we'd have a virtuous cycle of consuming more, thereby providing the incentive to produce ever more.

Reich's getting senile. I'd quit listening to him. And tell Hanauer to raise his aim about 10x higher, or not bother.

There are times when arguing over crumbs makes you miss the train. Then it's too late.

That's what Upper Looting Class parasites think they want, along with their mindlessly narrow NeoLiberal lapdogs. Divide & conquer, by getting the plebes arguing over crumbs. And, hopefully, keep 'em arguing long enough for the gravy train to slip out of the next station. Is it our goal to hunker down at some fixed station in life, or to be onboard the moving train of cultural evolution?

We used to know these things. Why do grandchildren have to re-learn ... the hard way ... things their grandparents knew, yet their parents either forgot, or weren't taught?

Nevertheless, as you can see below, whole citizen armies can be mobilized to argue over crumbs, and the Upper Looting Class never hesitates to spend whatever it takes to mobilize competing Plebe armies to divide and keep busy conquering one another ... FOR the ULC. Yes, division & recombination works, but through coordination ... not factional strife.

And yes, those plebe armies - staging social civil war for the profit of parasites - include occasional VCs, planted or not.

Riddle me this, propaganda man.

If a VC speaks out of paradigm in a plebe army (or sets his sights too low) ... does it matter, in the long term, what he says?

...

From: Robert Reich <info@democracyforamerica.com> 

Dear [Plebe] -- 

In November, President Obama issued an executive order on immigration, protecting millions of families from deportation. There's another action the President can take to help working Americans, without waiting for Congress:
He can direct the Department of Labor to expand the number of workers who can receive overtime pay, putting more money in the pockets of as many as 10 million Americans. 

Seattle-based venture capitalist Nick Hanauer wrote an important piece in Politico calling on President Obama and the Department of Labor to make more workers eligible for overtime. Nick and I have joined forces with Democracy for America to launch a petition to the president asking him to raise wages and create jobs by expanding overtime. Below is the email Nick sent to DFA members. 

I hope you'll sign Nick's petition. President Obama is listening. Let's give him the support he needs to expand eligibility for overtime pay in America. 

- Robert
Robert Reich
Former Secretary of Labor 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nick Hanauer via Democracy for America
Date: Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 10:40 AM
Subject: SIGN MY PETITION: Tell President Obama to restore overtime pay! 

I'm getting rich and you're getting screwed. Sorry. But with a stroke of the pen, President Obama can make sure you get what you earned, without any congressional action at all. 

If it feels like you're struggling harder than your parents did, working longer hours for less money, it's because you are. Meanwhile, a handful of capitalists like me are growing wealthy beyond our parents' wildest dreams.
What's changed? Overtime pay. 

Your parents got a lot of it, and you don't. In 1975, more than 65 percent of salaried workers earned overtime pay -- today, just 11 percent do. That's because the federal government has allowed the overtime threshold to erode to less than the poverty line for a family four. Earn more than $23,660 a year, and business owners like me can make you work unlimited overtime hours for no additional pay at all. 

But to get the country back to the same equitable standards we had in 1975, the Department of Labor would simply have to raise the overtime threshold to $69,000. In other words, if you earn $69,000 or less, the law would require that you be paid time-and-a-half for every hour worked over 40 hours a week.
That would mean 10.4 million middle-class Americans with more money in your pockets or more time to spend with friends and family. And if corporate America didn't want to pay you time and a half, it would need to hire hundreds of thousands of additional workers to pick up the slack -- slashing the unemployment rate and forcing up wages. 

President Obama could also expand the ranks of workers eligible for overtime pay by ending the exemption that denies overtime to teachers, doctors, computer professionals, and many others. And he can do all this simply by instructing the Department of Labor to change the rules -- immediately putting money into the pockets of millions of American workers. 

That's why I'm joining Democracy for America and Robert Reich in calling on President Obama to do exactly that. Sign our petition to the president: Raise the overtime threshold to give more Americans the overtime pay they've earned! 

Many of my fellow capitalists will warn you that a higher overtime threshold would be a job killer, but the truth is, we already have more capital than we know what to do with. Corporate profits have doubled over the past 40 years to more than 12 percent of GDP; that’s about a $1 trillion a year in extra profits.
But rather than invest in creating jobs or raising wages, executives like me are mostly spending our windfall profits manipulating the price of our own shares through stock buybacks. In fact, over the past decade, public U.S. corporations have spent an astounding $6.9 trillion buying back shares, reducing the total outstanding, and increasing the value of the remaining shares owned by capitalists like me. 

We get richer. You get nothing. Again, sorry. But we're only playing by the rules -- rules that President Obama has the power to change. 

President Obama is showing that he isn't shy about using his executive powers to do good things for the American people. But the White House needs a strong public push -- the president needs to hear from as many of you as possible that overtime pay is to the middle class what the minimum wage is to the working poor, and that a stronger middle class is good for business and good for America. 

Join me, Robert Reich and Democracy for America in telling President Obama to instruct the Labor Department to expand overtime eligibility. Let's raise the wage and put more Americans back to work. 

Thank you for standing up for the middle class. 

- Nick

[Roger: Nick's heart may be in the right place, and he may be trying to do what he thinks is right, yet to me he's no Saint Nick. We have a class war to win, not just a Pyrrhic Victory to get sidetracked to. You don't win wars by orienting strategy to local tactics. Keep the end prize in mind ... or don't bother.]

Same Reason Our Schools Are Failing Our Students? Mismanaging Planet Kindergarten.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Eventually, knowing"WHY" to work/fight/learn ... (motivation) ... always trumps "HOW" to work/fight/learn.

Since motivation drives continued innovation.

The law of multi-level selection? Those who know why they work/fight/learn will always run circles around those who only know how?

If there is no consensus Desired Outcome, then aggregates display lagging orientation to why or how to accomplish ... what? The awesome return on net coordination is possible only when aggregates are working towards a consensus Desired Outcome.

Meanwhile, past history repeatedly shows that all individuals learn best & fastest via unbiased exposure to emerging context. So success tracks instilling optimal learning habits as a prerequisite, BEFORE setting off to master endless strings of emerging tasks.

That's why Froebel invented Kindergarten.

A similar lesson applies (on a different scale) for individual aggregates, not just the individual components of given aggregates.

Surely that reminds you of biology (including, eventually, the human species), which was left - initially unbiased - in a (relatively) safe environment (planet earth), where it could learn all on it's own - without outside bias or micromanagement?

Which sadsack ever said there was any conflict between religion & the scientific method?

For gods so loved the world ... that they didn't try to micromanage it's development? Hopefully.

Yes, everything we ever needed to know we're learning here, from one another. Only one question. Will humans ever stop fighting, and graduate from planet Kindergarten?