AEP Invitations

Firstly if you use the Twitter app it just allows you to type DMs of any length

Secondly if people watching that video think there will be no need for human labour within our lifetime they are not very imaginative.

Thirdly the analogy with the horses is stupid because our economy is created by us to serve us. If we find all of a sudden that we don't need to do as much work that means we can spend more time surfing and drinking robot made coffees. This should translate in to reduced working hours. In fact even classical economists assumed that by this stage we would be in a leisure economy spending a few hours a week monitoring the machines that ran everything and then attending operas the rest of the time and figuring out how to be really good at sex and music and poetry and things that humans are really interested in.

Our economy is not created to serve the needs of horses. If horses created an economy the car would have been a welcome change.

The mind boggles at how bad some people are at coming up with analogies. Needless to say I stopped watching the video at that point because I can't imagine it got any less stupid.

So shouldn't we just have a basic income then and be done with it?

Eventually yes but it will be a thousand or more years (in my humble estimate) before we get to that stage.

There is lots of shit that needs doing. We are in a crisis of unemployment this year.

Whether or not you believe basic income is coming in 50 years or a thousand years, it's certainly not appropriate this year, and a job guarantee is.

Interestingly when we chat with people about basic income they almost always have to add conditions that make it not universal or which impose obligations which mean it is nothing more than a modified welfare or job Guaranatee programme.

One of the things Bill Mitchell said when Tim and I went to meet with him the other day was that when you design a job guarantee properly and the spoils of automation are shared equitably it starts to look a lot like what UBI folks envision anyway, it's just a more practical way to transition there.

UBI folks are jumping the gun. The Job Guarantee is the only sane way to deal with the transition away from industrialisation.

Well you don't have to use the word stupid, but you can point out that an economy designed to serve the purpose of horses would have a different view to cars than an economy designed to serve humans viewed from the perspective of horses.

It's the same as saying that old computers would feel bad about replaced by new computers, so humans should feel bad about being replaced by computers.

Bill Mitchell mentioned the other day that "if you design the JG properly then eventually it will start to look like what the BI folks envision".

Now personally I think we are X,000 years from that point but even if it were only 50 years away that's 50 years of involuntary unemployment as you say. The JG is a policy we can implement this year and next in order to resolve the unemployment crisis.

I think that what I see constantly from (U)BI advocates is a very fixed notion of what work is and what it can or can't be.

The most fully formed example of what a JG might look like is my "festival guarantee" idea I posted in Facebook, here's the text:

"What better way for the government to provide jobs counter cyclically in a downturn than to stage festivals? Plenty of employment for artists, musicians, film makers, and plenty of unskilled labour too, in a fun and friendly environment. Glastonbury employes about 5,000 people.

Imagine how much more fun an economic downturn would be if you could take your family to a free local festival? What a great way for the government to pump money into the economy.

What a great way to allow local administration with federal funding.

The festival guarantee!

Just one example of how we can have a counter cyclical job guarantee with work for a wide variety of skill levels that's not "make work" or shitty jobs that no-one enjoys."

Tim doesn't like that as a suggestion because it is reminiscent of the "bread and circuses" of Roman times but if you think about it more like the Melbourne Comedy Festival it kind of makes more sense.