I'm just off to shake hands with the unemployed
Prompted by this rather good piece in Jacobin magazine (which in turn, unusually, I found because Chris Bertram forwarded it to me on Twitter, rather than through my constant and fevered vanity searches), I've been thinking a bit more about unemployment, and its productivity. By the way, Jacobin is a really great blog.
It's been on my mind a bit because I have been enjoying a short period of unemployment myself. Of the very nicest kind, I hasten to add - did you know that unemployment comes in varieties? The nice kind has the characteristics a) I chose it, rather than it being suddenly imposed on me by someone else, b) it doesn't have negative financial implications for me, and c) it has a set date when it's going to end. It's called "gardening leave", and econometricians among my readers will immediately realise that it is a "natural experiment", whereby I am able to find out whether "worklessness" really does have all the debilitating effects on moral fibre and so on which are claimed for it, when one cancels out the typically highly correlated phenomena of poverty, loss of social status, uncertainty about the future, etc.
And the results are ... maybe a little more mixed than I'd thought. It's lovely to have the summer back, see the kids, make a start on writing my terrible novel, etc etc etc. From previous episodes, I've remembered that without the discipline of having to get up in the morning, it's often quite easy to start drinking more booze than is good for you, and tried to keep an eye out for that one with reasonable success. But ... you do get antsy - this is perhaps more than normally the case for me as my job is amazingly interesting right now, and I'm cut off from the information firehose I'd been accustomed to drinking from. I'm sneaking away to read the Financial Times more than I'd care to admit. And one does miss the old "sense of achievement" thing, which can contribute to an air of listlessness and moping round the house (dealing with this gardening-leave phenomenon is basically the purpose of the terrible novel project). So I would say, within the general fact that I am fucking loving it, and that these disbenefits are very heavily outweighed by the simple joy of leisure, that it's not all bollocks, that there is something special about being employed that is good to have and bad to not have and that I'd be interested in further theories about what it is.
But the point I was meaning to make before I started rambling was that if I had, say, spent the last month updating Wikipedia and working in a community garden, rather than going on holiday and putting silly jokes on Twitter (plus writing a quarter of a ghastly novel), would this have belied my earlier assertion that unemployment is an incredibly low-productivity industry?
Yes and no. Thinking back to that joke post, I missed a trick, because of course the unemployed don't exactly produce nothing - they produce unemployment. Sitting at home and not working doesn't make you unemployed per se, any more than sitting at home and not fighting makes you part of the Territorial Army. In order to be considered "unemployed" by the relevant statistical organisations, and perhaps more importantly for the purposes of unemployment benefit you have to be actively seeking work and demonstrating willingness to accept jobs. All of which is, apparently and according to people who have experienced it, a gigantic pain in the arse.
But, sadly, it's in many ways a necessary pain in the arse. Quite surprisingly, not only is the role of the unemployed in the economy one of the very small number of things that nearly all economists agree about, it's part of the small subset of that set which is actually right. From Karl Marx to Alan Greenspan, the output of the unemployment industry is "downward pressure on wages". And from this point of view, the invention of Wikipedia, or anything else that makes unemployment less unpleasant or which encourages people into non-market productivity and out of the labour force is a productivity reducing innovation. Things that might increase the productivity of unemployment would be annoying and inconvenient job training programmes.
Arguably on this basis, I'm wrong - as Brad DeLong has repeatedly catalogued, the measured unemployment rate is massively understating true unemployment as measured by the employment-population ratio. But pressure on wages is still as great as if we had twice the number of unemployed - productivity increase!
I think that's pretty much a statistical artefact, though, quite apart from the fact that the US economy can't really go on on the basis of the Great Discouragement being permanent. The discouraged workers aren't necessarily hustling for every job out there, but they are serving as the proverbial Terrible Example.
And I think that having more non-market productivity for the unemployed, while certainly worth trying, doesn't really make things all that much better, absent massive other changes in society. The really bad thing about unemployment is uncertainty about when it's going to end; without telling tales out of school, I have mates who have tried different versions of the "natural experiment" of gardening leave, and reported that even if you've got plenty of spare cash and things to be getting on with, uncertainty about the future is a big source of stress. Or more specifically, lack of control over your own outcomes, which, as those who peeked at the last chapters of Michael Marmot's "The Status Syndrome" will know, is probably the big killer about being at the bottom end of whatever Pareto curve you happen to be on.
I think this might be a part of what Juliet Schor's Plenitude (which I have not read, or really heard of outside the Jacobin summary) is on about, in as much as it represents an attempt to declare independence from the market economy. I'm rather pessimistic though. All these schemes seem to me to still be basically not quite self-sufficient, in that they still depend on either on state benefits or on substantial free-lance income. Although these schemes are all very worth doing for some people, for some time, and certainly look better than just being miserable, the very lack of longevity makes me suspicious. So I'm still with Keynes on this one; for the time being, we are not in a future of plenty, and for the time being, despite everything, the best way to provide income security and a basis for long-term planning for nearly everyone is the full-time wage contract, and so the goal f policy should be getting one for as many people as can handle it. I'm worried that a lot of localist and/or environmental schemes are terribly susceptible to being suborned by "Big Society" types (who have already got their hands on "happiness economics", note), who see them as displacement activity for the "discouraged workers" - the reserve army for the reserve army of labour. We could be building the foundations of a movement that will help to sweep away globalised neoliberal financial capitalism, and replace it with something nastier.
Edit Synchronicity, I see - Alex is on the trail of a company that sounds as if it might be "helping people find jobs. But of course, what it's doing is forcing unemployed people into more-or-less pointless (because unemployment is a macroeconomic problem, and a quick look at the unemployment/vacancy ratio tells you there's no current micro solution) "job-related activity". This has the effect of making unemployment more unpleasant to those who have it, while constantly sticking it under the noses of employers, and contributing to a general air of uncertainty and fear. In other words, raising the productivity of unemployment, at the expense of increasing the (psychological) environmental pollution of the unemployment industry. Lovely people I'm sure.
Double edit I've just been made aware, by comments, that Jacobin is not actually just a blog but an actual magazine! I have accordingly subscribed (to the pdf edition, in the vague hope of a Kindle version to come) and encourage my readers to do so as well. Also, Left Business Observer, another ace newsletter!
Christine Lagarde has figured out that high unemployment can undermine the credibility of commitments to cut spending. And we can't have that, can we? Once that sinks in, Very Serious People will be all for doing something about it.
ReplyDeleteNot just a blog, they produce a great magazine as well.
ReplyDeleteYou have a job you like. If the only choice was meatpacking, or unemployment (at the same wage), how would you feel then? Most people have jobs that really, really, suck. Its easy to forget sometimes.
I also know a number of people who've basically drifted through life, picking up a job only when the money ran out. Not what I'd want to do with my life, and certainly not possible with kids, but they seemed happy enough.
That reminds me of Orwell's distinction between "work" and "not work" in The Road to Wigan Pier:
ReplyDeleteThe function of the machine is to save work. In a fully mechanized world all the dull drudgery will be done by machinery, leaving us free for more interesting pursuits. So expressed, this sounds splendid. It makes one sick to see half a dozen men sweating their guts out to dig a trench for a water-pipe, when some easily devised machine would scoop the earth out in a couple of minutes. Why not let the machine do the work and the men go and do something else. But presently the question arises, what else are they to do? Supposedly they are set free from "work" in order that they may do something which is not "work." But what is work and what is not work? Is it work to dig, to carpenter, to plant trees, to fell trees, to ride, to fish, to hunt, to feed chickens, to play the piano, to take photographs, to build a house, to cook, to sew, to trim hats, to mend motor bicycles? All of these things are work to somebody, and all of them are play to somebody. There are in fact very few activities which cannot be classed either as work or play according as you choose to regard them. The labourer set free from digging may want to spend his [sic, recurs] leisure, or part of it, in playing the piano, while the professional pianist may be only too glad to get out and dig at the potato patch. Hence the antithesis between work, as something intolerably tedious, and not-work, as something desirable, is false. The truth is that when a human being is not eating, drinking, sleeping, making love, talking, playing games, or merely lounging about—and these things will not fill up a lifetime—he needs work and usually looks for it, though he may not call it work. Above the level of a third- or fourth-grade moron, life has got to be lived largely in terms of effort. For man is not, as the vulgarer hedonists seem to suppose, a kind of walking stomach; he has also got a hand, an eye, and a brain. Cease to use your hands, and you have lopped off a huge chunk of your consciousness.
I figure Daniel has the decency to not reveal his novel to the world, so it's left to his readers to speculate about its plot, characters, and themes:
ReplyDeletesecret societies
capital controversies
depreciation
American beer
terrible music
Yes
ReplyDeleteyes
sort of
no
No
Its just occurred to me that we have a long and rich dataset on what people do with themselves when relieved of the need to work.
ReplyDeleteLady's and Gentlemen I present to you the British Aristocracy.
Lady's and Gentlemen I present to you the British Aristocracy.
ReplyDeleteThere was a lot written about the appropriate use of one's time and wealth in the eighteenth century, often with a nod to a Roman or two. But that was before the mass de-casualisation of work.
I'd be interested to read more about the effect of the Industrial Revolution on the aristocracy -- not just the rapid emergence of the bourgeois new aristocracy, the mercantile and manufacturing wealth that becomes the staple of Victorian novels, but on what happens to the relatively idle rich when large chunks of the workforce start putting in twelve-hour days at t' mill.
But you are still for shorter hours, yes?
ReplyDelete-------
Reminded of something Isaiah Berlin said:
If men never disagreed about the ends of life, if our ancestors had remained undisturbed in the Garden of Eden, the studies to which the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory is dedicated could scarcely have been conceived. For these studies spring from, and thrive on, discord. Someone may question this on the ground that even in a society of saintly anarchists, where no conflicts about ultimate purposes can take place, political problems, for example constitutional or legislative issues, might still arise. But this objection rests on a mistake. Where ends are agreed, the
only questions left are those of means, and these are not political but technical, that is to say, capable of being settled by experts or machines, like arguments between engineers or doctors. That is why those who put their faith in some immense, world-transforming phenomenon, like the final triumph of reason or the proletarian revolution, must believe that all political and moral problems can thereby be turned into technological ones. That is the meaning of Engels' famous phrase (paraphrasing Saint-Simon) about 'replacing the government of persons by the administration of things',2 and the Marxist prophecies about the withering away of the State and the beginning of the true history of humanity. This outlook is called Utopian by those for whom speculation about this condition of perfect social harmony is the play of idle fancy. Nevertheless, a visitor from Mars to any British - or American -university today might perhaps be forgiven if he sustained the impression that its members lived in something very like this innocent and idyllic state, for all the serious attention that is paid to fundamental problems of politics by professional philosophers.
Any thoughts on the productive output of, say, All Souls College?
(It strikes me that Berlin seems to be saying that if we agree on ends, then "the ends justify the means", which seems an odd thing for him to say)
By the way, Jacobin magazine doesn't actually have a Kindle subscription and I have apparently bought the paper version. Sorry to any readers who were confused.
ReplyDeleteI think that what Emma Harrison has invented is something that closely mimicks the unpleasant aspects of work without actually constituting a job. You are required to turn up and be present during hours set by management and carry out various tasks in front of a slightly obsolete PC in an office building while behaving in an specified manner, but they don't actually pay you.
ReplyDeleteSo you get the loss of leisure, submission to discipline, boredom, uncongenial working environment, etc without the income, satisfaction of a job well done (because after all, you're still only producing unemployment), solidarity among colleagues, feeling of taking part in a useful enterprise etc.
Obviously, if you consider the unemployment industry to be in the business of producing Terrible Examples, this is quite possibly a major improvement in productivity, and would explain the supernormal returns the inventor of this technology, the James Watt of idleness, is apparently able to extract.
I don't think Peter Frase's article is a 'rather good piece' at all. It's very unclear: it's possible that he is advocating one of three things, one of which is okay but a bit platitudinous, one of which is positively contemptible, and one of which is at root a dumb acquiescence in the reactionary policies of the British, American and Eurozone governments.
ReplyDeletePlatitudinous interpretation: 'While people are unemployed, they should receive transfer payments so they don't starve, and as well as looking for work, they can do things like work in gardens and update Wikipedia, which can be fun.' Gee, thanks, Peter.
There are a lot of people out there making anti-welfare-state arguments (many of them, like Emma Harrison, simultaneously making millions from the welfare state). The anti-welfare Right, and their associated profiteers, are dangerous, but if we want to knock their ideas down we'll have to make tougher, clearer, more detailed arguments than the one above.
But possibly Frase is arguing this: 'It's okay for people to choose not to seek work but rather update Wikipedia and make YouTube clips. As a matter of policy, such people should receive transfer payments indefinitely, including pensions in due course, because paid work is not a solution to all life's problems'.
If he means the latter, he needs stomping on. Rhetoric like that lends credibility to the 'benefit claimants are scroungers' Right, and to the likes of Emma Harrison.
More fundamentally, it's morally wrong. The lifestyle of anybody who chooses to hang around putting things on YouTube is not going to be funded by a tax paid exclusively by the super-rich.
It will be paid for by general taxation, which includes revenue taken from the woman who gets up at five am to go to her shift at the old people's home, the guy who spends eight hours a day cleaning the streets, my sister who teaches in an inner-city state school, the paramedic who is threatened with assault when she tries to treat a stab victim, etc. I suspect they'd all have some problems in seeing why they should subsidise the production of YouTube clips.
We should all be in favour of a strong welfare state, including transfer payments to those unable to find or perform work.
But those arguments will get a lot harder to make if we have putatively 'Left' writers saying 'let's give cash to anybody who wants to sit around the house, and tough luck on any tax-paying suckers who have to do jobs they don't like'. More of that, and we will make the case of the anti-welfare Right a lot easier. Fortunately that view is very much a minority one at the moment.
Or maybe he's making another argument: 'Look, we're getting all steamed up about unemployment. Instead of seeing the downside of people not having paid jobs, let's look at the upside! They can work in gardens and make YouTube clips, and argue with Neil Clark on Wikipedia update pages! Policy should look at providing more of these fun things for people to do, so that their unemployment won't be so bad after all. Sure, they'll get jobs eventually- you know, in the long run.'
Certainly it's good if unemployed people find things to do that give them some enjoyment. But this argument is at best quietism and at worst 'the Treasury view': things will get better sooner or later, and people will have jobs, so don't sweat it. And we should be fucking sweating it: unemployment is at the level it is, in the UK and the US and the Eurozone, because of decisions made by politicians and central bankers, decisions made by rich people for ideological reasons. We should be challenging the blindness and groupthink of the powerful, not saying 'the recession won't be quite so bad if the unemployed can update Wikipedia'.
Its just occurred to me that we have a long and rich dataset on what people do with themselves when relieved of the need to work.
ReplyDeleteLadies and Gentlemen I present to you the British Aristocracy.
Sort of... "being a large landlord" is itself work, as is "running a large household", witness the rental property and hotel management industries respectively. And for much of history, the British aristocracy was also fully employed in local and national government ("being the Duke of Norfolk" in 1500 was a full-time and rather dangerous job) and in the military.
Sitting there and letting the money roll in from your investments is a rather more modern thing, and not confined to the aristocracy.
Btw, I should really have written 'anyone who works in an inner-city state school', since my argument is not strengthened by what my relatives do or don't do. (If, on the other hand, I say 'I know schoolteachers/paramedics/the idle rich, and what they tell me is...' that's rather different, since one is actually citing some evidence in support of an argument.)
ReplyDeleteShorter DH: Paid work may not be the solution to all life's problems, but that isn't an argument for just going on the dole. Neither is it an argument for Hooverist economic policies that force people onto the dole. Further, both Emma Harrison and Neil Clark are a waste of oxygen.
ReplyDeleteFair enough, I think.
I have no idea if Neil Clark is still thieving oxygen, btw, and I do not intend to find out.
ReplyDeleteHaving just finished my own lengthy paid holiday ('post operational tour leave'), I'm rather alarmed at how much chaos you've all created while I've been away.
My definition of "a rather good piece" is objective and apolitical and based on "cites me approvingly". I think it was JK Galbraith who claimed to be able to tell more or less instantly the quality of any work of economics by a glance at the G section of the index.
ReplyDeleteI think we're violating one of the laws of the internet, unless Sandwichman is on holiday, or something.
ReplyDeleteI think the creation of YouTube videos is a damn site more useful than half the white collar jobs out there. The Douglas Adams joke about telephone santisers has a certain logic about it. Cleaners we need. Care home workers we need. Marketeers and financial con^H^H^H advisers not so much. Corporate trainers? Strategists? Advisors, consultants, etc, etc. Of course they're generally paid far better than cleaners.
Ajay - 2-300 years is a pretty big dataset. Mostly they had estate managers. The lot of an estate owner was as onerous as they wanted it to be.
"This has the effect of making unemployment more unpleasant to those who have it, while constantly sticking it under the noses of employers"
ReplyDeleteEmployees?
I see tomorrow's papers have Blunkett's latest wheeze: "voluntary work" in exchange for college vouchers. Perhaps if they allowed people to go on vocational training without cutting all their benefits, or indeed structured the Employment Service so that it helped to address skill shortages, rather than just trying to make the unemployed better competitors in the job market with each other, that might make for a better society all round. The trend at the moment seems to be more towards an overt attempt to bully people off the register.
Smoking dope all day is probably less injurious to your health than constant drinking, and easier to discontinue.
Its just occurred to me that we have a long and rich dataset on what people do with themselves when relieved of the need to work.
ReplyDeleteLady's and Gentlemen I present to you the British Aristocracy.
Teaching ravens to fly underwater
BTW, what's the dsquared twitter? As your sidebar notes, there are a lot of Daniel Davises in the world...
I think the confusion here stems from the differing interpretations of what 'productivity' means. On the one hand you and the other economists are using the term in an economics textbook sense. However others interpret it more widely to mean 'activity which is useful'. Consider the use of the term in the following phrases:
ReplyDelete"I had a really productive day today, I cleaned my house, did some work in the garden and then spent the evening doing voluntary work in the local homeless shelter"
"I was unproductive today, I slept in until mid-day, then spent the afternoon watching crap on the TV whilst snacking left-over takeaways"
The above are basically how the term 'productivity' is used in the english language. But both examples above are largely irrelevant to the economist because he or she uses the term to mean something else. So when you write things along the lines of "unemployed people are not productive" you are using the term in a manner that isn't widely understood.
It is possible for an unemployed person to either spend their day sleeping and being lazy, or doing unpaid but useful activity such as childcare, voluntary work etc. Hence sticking to the strict textbook view of what productivity is doesn't distinguish between how people who are unemployed use that time, and inadvertently contributes to the anti-welfare discourse that sees unemployed people as a drain on society.
(also I would have thought helping keep wages down would be considered an economically useful function by some groups of people)
Gardening leave has long been an ambition of mine but - given that I work in the public sector - probably an unrealistic one. I do have personal experience of sustained unemployment, however, having foolishly gained a humanities PhD in my youth.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that a major part of the unpleasantness of unemployment relates to the pressure it places on self-identity and social identity given that most of us these days define our role in society by the wage labour we undertake rather than (say) who our ancestors were or whom we have married. Motherhood can have some of the same effects, although it certainly isn't associated with idleness or meaningless makework.
So I would defend Peter Frase against Dan Hardie. It seems to me there would be real benefits for many if wage labour played a smaller role in establishing our contemporary sense of self.
Arguing against Andrew Fisher's concluding sentence would be rather like nailing smoke to the wall. I agree that wage labour should not play the main or only role in establishing one's 'sense of self'. In related news, I am in favour of motherhood and apple pie. Bad things? I'm against them. Good things, however, I like.
ReplyDeleteStepping aside from platitude, if Frase is saying that long-term voluntary unemployment should be subsidised by taxpayers (which includes the working poor) then he's a damn fool.
If he's saying that long-term unemployment is a problem to be addressed by finding nice activities for the workless to do, rather than by creating paid jobs for them, then he's a damn fool who is making reactionary arguments right at the time when powerful men like George Osborne and Tim Geithner are increasing human suffering by imposing unnecessary unemployment on British and American workers.
Just adding a point to my last paragraph: at a time when Osborne and Geithner, and the Eurozone governments, are imposing unnecessary *and unwanted* unemployment on workers. The people who have lost paid don't want, in the overwhelmning majority of cases, to be on the dole, even if that does free up time for Wikipedia updating and community gardening.
ReplyDeleteWhy don't they want to be unemployed? Try reading Dsquared's post for some reasons. (Essentially my comments are just a rather blunt 'hear, hear' to what Dan originally said.) In part, as Dan says, it's because they don't like the uncertainty and powerlessness that comes from not knowing when you'll stop being unemployed.
And those feelings of powerlessness won't disappear if we all clap hands and say 'well, we can stop that feeling of powerlessness if we just all jolly well agree that paid income shouldn't define sense of self, and tell the unemployed that they're really useful too because they can update Wikipedia'. If we do that, and even if we scrap the state-organised bullying of the unemployed that Alex Harrowell's post refers to, most unemployed people are *still* going to want to find paid income and *still* going to feel powerless due to their lack of ability to bring that about.
Why? Income. Even if we somehow raise the social status of unemployment, people without paid jobs are still going to be dependent on transfer payments funded from tax revenues. And with the most generous scheme in the world, transfer payments are still going to be a lot less valuable than most people's wages. Which is not a problem you can solve with a further round of flannel about getting beyond materialistic values, etc. ('Listen, poor people, money's over-rated.')
Even if we somehow raise the social status of unemployment, people without paid jobs are still going to be dependent on transfer payments funded from tax revenues. And with the most generous scheme in the world, transfer payments are still going to be a lot less valuable than most people's wages.
ReplyDeleteOffer universal public services for instead of transfer payments wherever possible. Less inequality; fewer status distinctions.
if Frase is saying that long-term voluntary unemployment should be subsidised by taxpayers (which includes the working poor) then he's a damn fool
ReplyDeleteThing is, if you set the universal income above the poverty level, then what exactly would define working poor? And if people weren't forced into horrible jobs by the need to put food on the table, then perhaps the quality of the jobs would increase, or even the pay.
Most low paid jobs are service sector, which have very little affect on our "competitiveness", so the price of labour is largely a distributive factor.
people without paid jobs are still going to be dependent on transfer payments funded from tax revenues.
As opposed to people employed by the state who are dependent upon transfer payments funded from tax revenues, you mean?
I've noticed that while people who acquire a private income of some kind, often go out looking for something to do with their time, they tend not to be so desperate for some way to fill their time that they clean toilets.
'Thing is, if you set the universal income above the poverty level...'
ReplyDeleteGreat idea- that would solve everthing! One small question: how do we fund this, while continuing to fund the other necessary functions of Government?
As to the point about (certain) white collar jobs being so useless that they shouldn't be funded by the taxpayer, I entirely agree. It's a good principle, isn't it?
If I ever become Secretary of State for Defence, at least 30% of the officer corps, and the same proportion of MoD civil servants, will be told 'time for you to go and find a real job.'(I mention the MoD simply because it's the area of government of which I have the most recent first-hand experience. No doubt there is middle class welfare to some extent in all areas of government, although I suspect the MoD may be one of the very worst offenders.)
Taxpayers can and should be expected to fund a large number of things vital to a civilised society. I can't see, and nobody has yet told me, why (say) a woman who spends her days looking after incontinent old people should help to pay for an open-ended subsidy to Major Jobsworth at the MoD's Department of Paperclips, or to Mike Giggler so that he can carry on updating Wikipedia.
Solve everything, even.
ReplyDeleteSam Dodsworth: 'Offer universal public services for instead of transfer payments wherever possible. Less inequality; fewer status distinctions.'
ReplyDeleteAgain, great. We have universal - but high quality- public services, alongside either a universal citizen's income or open-ended transfer payments to anyone who asks for them. All problems solved. And we pay for this by...?
Or- given that in the UK we do have the universal provision of health and pre-University education, plus significant state provision of housing (both actual houses, and rental payments) and at least some subsidy for the poor in transport, maybe Sam means something even more ambitious. Perhaps he means 'universal public services' which would replace the market's provision of, say, most consumer goods? Again, problem solved- makes you wonder why no one's ever tried it. Or perhaps someone did, somewhere...
ReplyDeleteI've seen it costed (a universal income is a surprisingly popular idea among certain bits of the thinking libertarian right), and the assumptions didn't seem unreasonable. A lot of its unknowable because so much public (and private in the forms of insurance, security, etc) is dealing with poverty one way, or the other. Be it policing, social work, inefficiently administered transfer payments. So you'd make significant savings there, but its very hard to predict how big they'd be.
ReplyDeleteAn alternative would be to basically offer anyone who wants one a public job at a minimal (but non-poverty) wage as some of the MMT guys suggest. Good in some ways, as the public sector could be usefully expanded at the low end, but administering such a scheme would be a lot more expensive. Its cheaper just to give people money at the low end, than to employ them, if all you want to do is transfer money.
Perhaps he means 'universal public services' which would replace the market's provision of
ReplyDeleteAre you familiar with the concept of arguing in good faith. Clearly he doesn't mean this. Which rather begs the question why you need to imply that secretly he does.
'Are you familiar with the concept of arguing in good faith. Clearly he doesn't mean this. Which rather begs the question why you need to imply that secretly he does.'
ReplyDeleteHere we go, for the umpteenth time: Cian gets childishly unpleasant. The whole 'civilised disagreement' thing lasted perhaps four comments. Next up: Cian responds to continued disagreement with his usual response, which is hysteria. 'Troll! Troll! TROLL!'etc.
It's funny: I'd actually written a comment saying 'I'm not going to address Cian's disagreements because he can't discuss things with me', and then I stopped myself, because I thought he'd actually raised an objection in a calm manner. Should have known.
That's it for you, sonny. You're a sad little man and you have some weird hang-up about me, and I am not wasting any more of my time talking to a fool like you.
Sam D: I am having some trouble in understanding what you're advocating, so I've suggested two interpretations and made it plain that I'm not sure if either is an accurate representation of your views. Sam, if you feel that I am being rude, please tell me and you will have my apology. (Certainly I was being sarcastic, and if that's upset you, I apologise now.) If neither of my suggested interpretations is accurate, please also tell me and I'll do my honest best to respond to what you say.
(Actually, what I'll really do is dishonestly insinuate that you secretly believe something that you don't. There's a guy here who knows more about me than I know about myself, and as he'll tell you, that's what I like to do.)
Dan Hardie: "Taxpayers can and should be expected to fund a large number of things vital to a civilised society. I can't see, and nobody has yet told me, why (say) a woman who spends her days looking after incontinent old people should help to pay for an open-ended subsidy to Major Jobsworth at the MoD's Department of Paperclips, or to Mike Giggler so that he can carry on updating Wikipedia."
ReplyDeleteI don't know how it goes in the UK, but in the USA this argument is used by people who are quite happy to take the employed woman's money, and to spend it on the rich and their cronies. Cutting taxes on the working poor is not going to happen, save in the nominal and fraudulent sense (i.e., Joe Working Poor gets a $20 reduction, raised 'fees', and cuts in benefits and services).
And whenever I start to comment on 'Blood and Treasure' again, or 'The Yorkshire Ranter', I think the same policy has to apply- no more talking to my own little cyber-obsessive.
ReplyDeleteWe've had the test and the results are in: Cian can't keep it together if he's trying to talk to me. I did once get Cian to agree that he'd been possibly wrong about something, but I'd have got the same level of satisfaction with rather less pain and effort if I'd sat there and pulled my own teeth out.
I think I will create a dedicated gmail account ('I_hate_Dan_Hardie@gmail.com' sounds about right) and Cian can send all the hate mail over there. This pathetic feud has been a grotesque waste of time and I am ending it now.
Hi, Barry. (Are you the same Barry who comments over at 'BnT'? If so, hope you enjoyed the Simon Ley book.)
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree on your first point: the American (and British) Right uses the language of compassion for the 'working stiff' but pushes policies that rip them off blind. Certainly we are getting some of that rhetoric from the Coalition here, but the main stated fiscal objective of our Chancellor is to reduce the top level of income tax. Go figure.
But when you say 'Cutting taxes on the working poor is not going to happen'- well, maybe not in the US. (Although Clinton surely did do this, didn't he, to some extent, when he extended the Earned Income Tax Credit? I could be wrong,and I know his fiscal policies benefited the middle class more than those at the bottom.)
But certainly in a UK context, I hope and believe that you are wrong. It's not too much at all to expect that a Labour government (more realistically, alas, a Labour-led coalition) could reduce taxes on the working poor.
We have at least a couple of advantages over you, I think: the centre of British politics is further to the left (or rather, less far to the right) than is the case in the US; and politicians do actually listen to people like the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which has produced a number of useful papers on how the tax burden could be reduced on the poorest. Also, I think the unions here have kept more of their influence over the Labour party than US unions have over the Democrats- this isn't always an unmixed blessing but does mean that low-wage workers have their advocates when we have a Labour government.
Oh Sam D was a commentator on this thread. For some reason I thought it was the author of the original article. Never mind, my mistake. My apologies for fucking up.
ReplyDeleteAgain, great. We have universal - but high quality- public services, alongside either a universal citizen's income or open-ended transfer payments to anyone who asks for them. All problems solved. And we pay for this by...?
ReplyDeleteProgressive income tax, obviously.
Would it help if I said "Scandinavian-style social democracy" or would we just get into a pointlessly specific digression about (say) single parents in Finland?
despite everything, the best way to provide income security and a basis for long-term planning for nearly everyone is the full-time wage contract, and so the goal f policy should be getting one for as many people as can handle it.
ReplyDeleteSchor's argument isn't against this, but rather advocates shifting the definition of "full time" to about 80% of what it is at present, to allow people more time to do the other things in life. Generally she advocates steering increased productivity into shorter hours all round that than into higher consumption of consumer goods.
Thanks for the recommendation!
ReplyDeleteWe have a digital edition, that's just a nice .PDF automatically delivered through Pulley.
At the moment it reflows okay on most ebook readers, but we once we hit a certain number of digital subs we can probably justify making something specifically for a 6 by 10 e-reader format.
Print is the new avante-garde though! Good way to impress strangers on the Metro.
If you use a recent version of Adobe's toolset, then it should automatically produce an epub for you.
ReplyDeleteIt strikes me that if your ambition was "to move beyond paid employment", and you were an egalitarian, it would be pretty curious to start your project of moving away from paid employment by taking it away from some people entirely while increasing it on others.
ReplyDeleteSo I suppose that moves me in the direction of the good old Sandwichman, and in favour of Kurzarbeit policies as an employment-smoothing cyclical measure. While I think it's unfortunate, if inevitable, that we've all concentrated on the YouTube videos in Peter's piece rather than the community gardens, I do think Dan's right that this sort of policy needs to be carefully structured to make sure that everyone has some stake in it. More to come here, perhaps.
Thing is, if you set the universal income above the poverty level, then what exactly would define working poor?
ReplyDeleteIf the poverty line is (as it generally seems to be) 60% of the median household income, then you'll probably still have people below it, even working people, even with a universal income.
An easier thing to sell, would be to provide employment in non-essential, but useful areas. The kind of stuff that relies upon volunteers at present, and which could be scaled back at the top of the cycle. Park keepers rather than community gardeners.
ReplyDeleteDsquared: 'While I think it's unfortunate, if inevitable, that we've all concentrated on the YouTube videos in Peter's piece rather than the community gardens...'
ReplyDeleteActually, I just had a glance at my own posts (egomaniacal? me?), and I see that I mocked community gardening and YouTube three times each, while Wikipedia editing got it in the neck six times. My first thought when anyone mentions Wikipedia will, alas, be 'Green Goddess' and 'citylightsgirl' lauding the genius of Neil Clark.
More seriously, why do unemployed people have to work in community gardens (fun though that can certainly be)? Because they can't afford seeds or plant pots or trowels of their own. I've been, like most graduates, 'voluntarily poor' for a bit (swept London streets for a month while I was waiting to go to Paris, earned buttons there as an English teacher, went hungry some days, slept rough for a few days here and there while waiting to move into bedsits- great fun, and anyone just out of university should think of doing the same. And I've also been, like some graduates and a rather larger proportion of non-graduates, involuntarily poor for a while: lost my job, my flat and one of my parents all at roughly the same time and, until I got rid of the resulting depression, spent a while working at or near minimum wage, or not working at all. Yes, this is just one data point, but for what my view is worth- lots of things about poverty are shit, but what's most shit is not having money.
One example: I still remember clumsily breaking my glasses near the end of one month and wondering how I was going to pay for a cheap set of frames for Specsavers and still meet the rent. The answer, of course, was 'walk round for a couple of weeks with no glasses and an increasingly bad headache'. See the post linked to in my name for another example. If anybody tells you that poverty will get better if we all worry less about money, ask them if they're talking from experience.
Hi, Barry. (Are you the same Barry who comments over at 'BnT'? If so, hope you enjoyed the Simon Ley book.)
ReplyDeleteHi Dan and no, that's not me. I'm a very infrequent commenter but fairly constant reader here. I've seen that Barry also over at CT (where I am likewise but always with my same persistent full pseud). I greatly enjoyed the book and read it in one sitting one beautiful sunny Sunday in late May while sitting on a boulder overlooking a picturesque estuary on the north shore of Long Island. [The ending was a bit strange though, was he hallucinating being back on the ship or not?] Thanks again for the recommendation.
Oh good, I'm really glad you liked it. The last scene surprised me, too, but it was very memorable, maybe partly because I didn't quite understand why he thought of that.
ReplyDeleteSince you liked it, I'll recommend two other books which are not all that widely read but should be: 'Hadji Murat' by Tolstoy, and 'Puddn'head Wilson' by Mark Twain. The first is superb, and as with 'The Death of Napoleon' you could probably read it in an afternoon. And I think the second is very good indeed- academics bang on about how the plot is broken-backed but frankly, they overstate things. Very black comedy. Also good is 'Life on the Mississippi', of which the first half is quite superb.
Of course, the real question if we are discussing novels is what Dsquared calls his masterwork. 'Last Exit to Wrexham'?
'Hadji Murat' really is great, and short for Tolstoy (around 100 pages).
ReplyDeleteDan, I'm not sure what 'BnT' is, so I'm probably not.
ReplyDelete"But when you say 'Cutting taxes on the working poor is not going to happen'- well, maybe not in the US. (Although Clinton surely did do this, didn't he, to some extent, when he extended the Earned Income Tax Credit? I could be wrong,and I know his fiscal policies benefited the middle class more than those at the bottom.)
But certainly in a UK context, I hope and believe that you are wrong. It's not too much at all to expect that a Labour government (more realistically, alas, a Labour-led coalition) could reduce taxes on the working poor. "
Question - have the Tories/Lib Dems cut taxes on the working poor? Did Labor in their past term? Did Thatcher?
I'm genuinely interested, because there *are* places where the standard USA right-wing 100% lie isn't actually the norm.
Hi Barry, that would be the fine blog Blood & Treasure.
ReplyDeleteI think I might give "Hadji Murat" a go given my interest in that region and things Islamic in general and Sufi in particular (Imam Shamil figures in it) the next time I get a free day. The Twain I've read though that was a long time ago.
Sorry to go off topic though my situation is too uncomfortably on topic for me. Unemployed and going back to school for a second and more practical Masters degree in the hope there will be something out there when I'm done.
A bit surprised that no one has mentioned the perhaps most important benefit of employment; the work mates. For people with families(*) and/or an extensive social network this might be less important, but there are plenty of people for whom the work place is the primary place of daily socialization. Even a boring job can have great colleagues, and the alternative can be social isolation, which is surely not healthy. So as long as the people you're working with are not total jerks, which is luckily most often the case, the psycho-social benefit of employment shouldn't be discounted.
ReplyDelete(*) Still, there used to be a whole stereotype of the socially isolated housewife back in the decades before women entered the work force in larger numbers.