Equality, freedom and wage labor

I haven’t been active in the debate between Crooked Timber members and various others (Bleeding Heart Libertarians, Matt Yglesias, Tyler Cowen) so far. Broadly speaking the claim on the BHL side has been that if only some minimal conditions (existence of a universal basic income, for example) were met, all employment contracts could be assumed mutually beneficial and there would be no need for governments to regulate their terms, for example to prevent sexual exploitation.

Most  at CT have been dismissive of these claims, but I’d like to explore the question a bit further. Is the objection that the necessary conditions aren’t likely to be met in practice, or that the employment relationship is inherently unbalanced, simply by virtue of the fact that one party gets to boss the other around.

Suppose that the following conditions were met

* Full employment, so that the cost to a worker of finding a new job is no greater than the cost to an employer of hiring a replacement

* A minimum wage adequate to allow a decent living standard without requiring acceptance of degrading working conditions

* A universal basic income sufficient to ensure that, even without working no-one need be poor

* A default employment contract, incorporating prohibitions on sexual harassment, rights to regular breaks and so on, unless these are explicitly contracted out

Would we then feel that legislative restrictions on employment contracts were needed, and, if so, which and why? Or, is the question badly posed in some way

I can think of two ways to argue that the question might be badly posed.

The first is that capitalism could not sustain such conditions, and so the question could never arise in practice.  For example, it might be argued that the tax rates required to finance a UBI would not be consistent with a high (post-tax) minimum wage, assuming that capitalists still had to earn a positive rate of return.  I’m not convinced of this, especially since developed countries seemed fairly close to meeting these conditions towards the end of the postwar boom. But, arguably, that’s why the boom ended.

A second response, which I find more appealing, is that such conditions would give workers sufficient bargaining power to demand union representation, and that union contracts would embody the standard protections.

But I’m also attracted to a third view, one which would give a little more ground to the BHL position, though at quite a high price. That is the view that, if only we had the substantial measure of economic equality described in the conditions above, we could indeed dispense with a lot of government intervention, and thereby enjoy more freedom in matters such as contracting over working conditions (or, as discussed in another thread, selling kidneys).

I’m not convinced that this is right, but I think a lot of the heat in the debate reflects the extreme inequality of current conditions, particularly in the US. The BHL side of the debate wants to believe that a modest tweak to current conditions would provide sufficient independence to make free contracting on equal terms a meaningful concept. The CT side mostly takes it for granted that the required degree of equality can’t be achieved in practice, and that it’s therefore silly to concede anything to demands for freedom of contract.

Obviously, I think CT has had the better of the debate. Still I’m attracted to the idea that a more equal society would also be one in which there was less need for detailed and prescriptive government interventions. Against this, I share the intuition that bosses will always be bossy and (at least some) will always try to abuse their position.

So, I’ll leave it there, and request civil discussion,

Posted via email from John’s posterous

148 thoughts on “Equality, freedom and wage labor

  1. I think that what is wrong with our system is that it is insufficiently situationally flexible.

    An alternative structure would be to have an “employment bill of rights” which set out the national employment culture. Then to establish fairness, rather than apply a minimum wage, apply a minimum standard of living. The advantage of this is that it is regionally flexible and automatically adjusts for cost disparities such as housing, food, transport, education, health care access and child minding. Individual and/or collective contracts would then cater for skill and performance factors.

  2. It strikes me that the first point is that not all people are equal. There are considerable different levels of knowledge and intelligence–not to mention inclination to chicanery, etc or just in knowledge of where the marketplace is going. Heck ,for that matter, a large number of people are illiterate, innumerate or otherwise challenged to conclude a contract.

    I would suggest that this is more common among prospective employees but I am sure we have some outstanding incompetent employers as well. Setting a binding contract on someone who does not understand the implications of a contract is a bit worrying.[1]

    Of course, this approach would be a boon to the law profession. Any time I went to hire someone or to apply for a job I would need the contract vetted very carefully by a lawyer since if there was no government regulation of the labour marketplace I would have to suppose that there is no common consensus for basic things like a lunch break or time to go to the washroom. If the employer is offering a pension then do I need my own actuarial study to decide if it is safe to go with the pension or opt out?

    Actually I once saw an example of this at a slightly higher level. I was on vacation with some relatives, one of whom, an American, was thinking of taking a new job in the USA. It appeared to me that much of his job negations had nothing to do with work conditions or salary, most of it, at least that I heard, was a negotiation about health benefits, something that is usually of vary minor importance, if of any in Canada. Multiply this by each employee having to hammer out vacation times, pension rights if any, and so on and we have a complete muddle.

    I would also question the concept
    Full employment, so that the cost to a worker of finding a new job is no greater than the cost to an employer of hiring a replacement

    On a slightly more practical idea, it is not at all clear to me that a UBI would be that onerous in the long run. At least in my country,Canada, we spend inordinate amounts of money “delivering” various kinds of social assistance. Some “social” programs are so designed as to impede or frustrate anyone trying to get off the program. One simple UBI program with a suitable tax-back rate for those with higher incomes might save money in the long run since the most vulnerable portions of society might not have to resort to criminal or quasi-criminal activities to stay alive and various stigmae resulting from “being on Welfare” etc might be reduced allowing better access to jobs and so on.

    Against this, I share the intuition that bosses will always be bossy and (at least some) will always try to abuse their position.

    Check your history for the rise of trade unions. My take on unions is that if a company has one it usually earned it: Twelve or sixteen hour days, abysmal safety records, no tenure, arbitrary hiring and firing , gross discrimination and a few other things were major causes for unionization.

    Arguably, a major reason for lower union participation in Canada, and probably in other parts of the OECD, is government regulation has reduced the need for really active unions. A relaxation of labour laws is very likely to cause more unionization

    There quite often is a real disconnect between senior management and owners and front-line employees. I once heard the head of a one of the big five Canadian banks suggesting that any university student applying for a student loan should just go and negotiate the interest rate with the local bank manager. He really did seem to think that a student negotiating a CDN$ 5K loan was in a good position to dicker.

    Arguably, a major reason for lower union participation in Canada, and probably in other parts of the OECD, is government regulation has reduced the need for really active unions.

    No bosses cannot always be expected to be sweet and kindly.

    [1] The US sub-prime fiasco is a good example of this. Obviously many people did not understand the contracts.

  3. The unions argument, that workers aren’t skilled negotiators, is a reasonable one. However I would argue that only the worker knows what would makes them happy. A few times I have negotiated employee deals and most often they are to the employees financial detriment – but they felt they had a victory and were pleased!

  4. * A universal basic income sufficient to ensure that, even without working no-one need be poor

    In practice this seems quite unachievable. If you can avoid both work and being poor then there will be a lot of people not working. Which will increase the cost of the associated basic income through the weight of numbers and the burden on those saps that do work.

    A basic income is still a good idea as a replacement for the likes of the minimum wage and other price regulations in the labour market. However it can’t be so lucrative that many could or would adopt it as a lifestyle alternative to working for income. It has to be a modest thing that acts as a safety net and a wage supplement not as a lifestyle alternative to working for income.

    One alternate way to lower the effective minimum wage to zero from a market price perspective without reducing income is to provide an offsetting tax rebate to employers based on the product of the minimum wage and the number of full time equivalent workers on the books. However this is a little messy and overly compensates for the minimum wage. The over compensation could be reduced by tweaking the system based on the unemployment rate. It could even be made specific to the unemployment rate for a given region.

  5. “But I’m also attracted to a third view, one which would give a little more ground to the BHL position, though at quite a high price. That is the view that, if only we had the substantial measure of economic equality described in the conditions above, we could indeed dispense with a lot of government intervention, and thereby enjoy more freedom in matters such as contracting over working conditions (or, as discussed in another thread, selling kidneys).”

    translated: if we were all rich enough we’d need fewer laws

    yes, i agree – very profound

    pop

  6. Blogger “jrkrideau” makes some good points. A proliferation of contracts and contract negotiations (with each individual worker negotiating a contract with an employer) will be highly inefficient and time wasting. The contractural overheads versus benefit to employer, employee and general economic efficiency would rapidly reach a point of negative returns.

    So what would happen in practice? In practice employers will begin to offer basic take-it-or-leave-it contracts (with very few rights and conditions plus the lowest possible pay scales) to all prospective employees except those relatively few with high skills that are highly differentiated from those of the general workforce. Thus we would exchange social democratic government regulations (legislation) for full capitalist regulation or rule of society. You simply hand the running of society entirely over to the owners of capital.

    The real problem, that too few want to explore anymore, is capitalism itself.

  7. TerjeP says; “If you can avoid both work and being poor then there will be a lot of people not working.”

    Yes, that is absolutely right.They are currently the owners of capital, the rentiers and the managerial class who do their bidding. None of these people do real work. They are the parasites.

  8. @rog
    “A few times I have negotiated employee deals and most often they are to the employees financial detriment – but they felt they had a victory and were pleased!

    But why not? They made have made trades for quality-of-life issues that were not reflected in money terms. I have known more than one person to turn down increased monetary reward because the job would negatively impact Quality of Life.

  9. Surely the problem lies in the concept of ‘a universal basic income sufficient to ensure that, even without working no-one need be poor’.

    Poverty has come to be a relative rather than an absolute condition in post-industrialised countries. It would therefore seem logically impossible to fix a UBI that lifted the whole population out of poverty. It would simply have the effect of raising the poverty line.

    Quite apart from that, the bipartisan notion of mutual obligation and the strong cultural attitudes deploring welfare bludging mean a UBI will not be introduced in Australia within any timeframe useful for public policy planning. The speculative discussion on CT has all been very interesting I suppose as an abstract exercise; the danger is that conservatives will distort the bits they like and apply them to the actually existing socio-political situation. For example “Even the hard left like Quiggin supports deregulation of the labour market if there is a proper safety net. Australia has a proper safety net. Therefore the left is hypocritical in opposing individual employment contracts! (laughter and cries of ‘Hear Hear’)”

  10. TerjeP says; “If you can avoid both work and being poor then there will be a lot of people not working.”

    Iconoclast sees that things are more complex and says “Yes, that is absolutely right.They are currently the owners of capital, the rentiers and the managerial class who do their bidding. None of these people do real work. They are the parasites.”

    Totally agree with Iconoclast, and I think we’d all be better off if some of those libertarian capitalists, those ‘jahb creators’, stopped ‘working’ and did a degree in psychology. They might then understand that the jahb’s they create, like in call-centres and payday lenders, are meaningless, soul destroying work that actually create stupid lazy, work-averse and even dishonest people.

    In my experience there are very few people who don’t want to work. The people in my small rural community who don’t have a job – they are either retired or a disability pension – do lots of work. They do voluntary work that pays nothing and in fact often costs them in petrol money and other incidental expenses. The work they do is helping other people in nursing homes and hospitals, they go to the local school and participate in the lives of the children in our community. In other words they are building community. How much will that be worth in the uncertain future we are facing?

    Some unhappy unhealthy people do sit home, idle and feeling bad. Some of the young ones who can’t get a job even pretend that they like being idle but this is a ‘defence mechanism’ they use to protect themselves from the cruel and ignorant accusations from the ‘capitalists and their ‘running dogs’ who see ‘bad people’ everywhere, except of course inside their own self-satisfied, self-congratulatory selves.

    What I see as the fundamental problem with our society is the current narrative about human nature which allows people to believe that there are good people; the capitalists or those capable of becoming capitalists and then there are ‘the others’.

    That was the bit that libertarians liked best about Rand and Hayek; both these faux-philosophers made this division between people explicit in their faux-philosophy and it must be so hard to give up the joy and self-satisfaction they feel when casting aspersions on the moochers.

  11. I am going to have to support TerjeP a little bit in his argument.

    Given the situation of “guaranteed” security a large percentage of the population will settle into a level of situational security and minimum effort. People are perfectly able to fill their time with other exploits if work is not necessary.

    It is essential to say here that there should not be a compulsion that people should “work” in our societial sense. If people can achieve a (self fulfilling) worthwhile existence disconnected from the economic millwheel, then this an entirely fair and natural method of existence. (there is another word for this but cannot recall it). The only proviso is that such people are taking a free ride on education, health, and possibly access to infrastructure. To this I would argue that such an imposition should be tolerated as an expression of the full spread of human (positive) possibilities.

    In Christchurc NZ where I lived for nearly 2 decades there were a number of people who had obtained real estate to freehold level in the Muldoon era when such property was very cheap and organised their affairs such that they were able to live permanently on the dole. They were fairly obvious as they lived a meagre life style, and fairly hollow by my observations, from the male side, and from the female side where such was achieved as a solo parent (more common) more fulfilling but again fairly shallow engagement with the rest of society.

    Maori people who engaged in this fringe existence had a more solid claim to such and were more creative with it, more success, and had a more fulfilling life, largely due to their extended family structure and their connection with the sea and its bounty.

    It is all part of the legitimate spread of human outcomes.

    Having said all of that, humans need to be energetic and active. Without that we really do lose validity. But Active can have many meanings.

  12. Yes. Clearly, if you make it too easy to be poor everyone will choose to be poor. Poverty as a lifestyle choice has always been society’s most pressing problem.

  13. Freelander,

    When, in the 70’s I moved from my Elizabeth Bay flat to move into a 2 metre square trailer beside the 44 foot ferro cement boat that I was building in Glebe Point my fellow departing flat mate, Fiona Bryce (who was an advertising script writer at the time) gave me a little graphic to affix to the canvas wall of my tiny enclosure, a graphic wisdom which stated that

    Rich is a State of Mind.

    There is no greater truth than that.

    I was rich with no income and the smallest accommodation in that huge City. I was rich because I had purpose, self fulfilment, a future that I believed in, and I was extremely busy.
    Those were some of the best years of my life. In amoungst this I managed to fit in an appearence on the ABC Inventors show, while I was completing the yacht that subsequently became my home.

    Rich IS a state of mind.

  14. But how can we have continuous productivity improvements if avoiding gainful employment is an all too easy lifestyle option?

  15. JQ, it seems to me you got yourself entangled with verbal theoreticians. Perhaps there is a benefit flowing from getting a bit of insight as to what these people want.

    Since around 2003, there is a scheme in Germany, known now as Hartz IV, which provides a minimum cash income per months together with a rent allowance to unemployed people whose unemployment insurance payments have expired and who have used up specified proportion of their private wealth. There has been opposition to this scheme from the beginning and it is ongoing, including high level court cases as to the adequacy of the minimum income. The opposition to this system comes not only from the least skilled (stereotypically thought of as the long term unemployed) but also from non-managerial professional people (engineers, technicians, researchers) who are on incomes between say Euro 80,000 to Euro 200,000 p.a.

    Hartz IV is named after a person who proposed the original version. This person was Peter Hartz, a Human Resource Executive, at Volkswagen, a large German company. He was later accused and then convicted of various wrong-doings in his job. He was fined about half a million Euros and was put on probation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hartz

    The Hartz IV history surely raises a few question: Who is ‘the employer’ in a corporate enterprise and who is ‘the employee’? (Yes, at a price, lawyers do eventually find their way around ‘the [several times restructured] enterprise’ to find a billing address, but the person whom they call ‘the employee’ may come and go without ever having met ‘the employer’. Enterprise Agreements, also promoted by HR ‘experts’ contain the same strange categories.) What can we expect if two employees of ‘an enterprise’ negotiate a contract affecting only one of them? (see Hartz).

    As is indicated in the above link, neither a social democratic party government (Chancellor G. Schroeder)*, nor workers representations on the supervisory board, nor government ownership in Volkswagen prevented having a ‘Human Resource Executive’ to fail in his duties while telling others what to do.

    The story told in the post is an example of interest groups confusing wishful thinking with theoretical knowledge and an attempt to carry on regardless of empirical evidence.

    ——-

    *I understand the Schroeder government survived because it decided against sending troops to Iraqu.

  16. Without agreeing with BilB on every point, I do believe he makes a valid one, namely that the categories of ‘the employer’ and ‘the employee’ are also senseless because they ignore the motivation of people to do particular type of work beyond making a living. There is also a hint of changes in preferences for type of work versus monetary rewards over the life of a person.

    Sure enough, this bings me to my favourite topic of grievance: macro-models with ‘capital and labour’, characterised by the letters K and L (if you are lucky you find, K and L are real valued variables).

  17. I’m a little bemused when people attribute to me a form of bitterness towards poor people that simply does not exist. I feel bitter towards many aspects of our “system” but I’m rarely bitter towards anybody for more than half an hour and even then they have to do something that offends me in some personal way. Also whilst I’m well off I wasn’t always well of and plenty of libertarians I know are low or modest income. If you disagree with libertarians then fine but dressing them up as monsters is such a hollow leftist cliche. Not everybody who disagrees with you is evil.

  18. I totally agree that rich is a state of mind but the problem is that in this society it is so very hard for the poor to ‘feel’ rich when they are regarded as inherently lazy and stupid and will always do the wrong thing; unlilke bankers of course.

    It takes a great deal of learning and/or a damn good upbringing to understand that rich and happy does not come from being selfish and greedy. But where are the narratives in our society that tell us this? What has been driving our values is the idea that greed and selfishness and material success or economic growth is all we need.

    Terje, bemused you say? lol I’m happy that you are just bemused and not calling me names this time. I don’t think you are bitter; you may be showing a tendency to self-pity and to exaggerate the bad things that lefties say about libertarians though. Who would suggest that libertarians are evil; that”s just silly but it may be that there is bad stuff happening because of what they do?

    The way I see it, libertarians are just a certain type of person who like to make pejorative value judgements, but there’s room for all types of people in my human nature narrative; diversity is the key to a decent society and diversity includes lazy and stupid people.

    How about a UBI and free therapy for all libertarians and other poor people?

  19. I really think Australia should pursue the Job Guarantee idea in the form (or close thereto) put forward by Bill Mitchell.

    To my mind, paying unemployment benefit to get no paid economic work out of a person makes less sense than paying a basic wage, getting some productive work and getting some back in taxes anyway. Arguing that worthwhile work cannot be found for most of these people is incorrect IMO. Maintaining an entire society and all its people and infrastructure in good order means there are always things that could be done to improve life, infrastructure and environement.

    The entire welfare and compliance structure could be changed over to be a Job Guarantee structure. The idea I think would be to phase it in over several years, progressively moving people from unemployment to the JG. What would be wrong with letting people elect to work from 20 to 40 hrs per week at their choice on the JG? This would be with the proviso that once they elect hours they must stick with them for 6 months at a time. Pay would be minimum wage adult hourly rates with annual leave loadings. Once the JG was fully available there would still be some other benefits like sickness and invalid benefits but no unemplyment benefit.

    Minimum wage legislation could be removed from all private enterprise work. But if employers try to pay too much less than the JG, people will elect to move to the JG.

  20. if there is a universal basic income sufficient to ensure that even without working no-one need be poor, why have a minimum wage?

    any downsides of a universal basic income is easier to manage that those of a minimum wage?

    a default employment contract unless these is contracting out, is the same as employment at will unless there is contracting in

  21. jrkrideau :
    On a slightly more practical idea, it is not at all clear to me that a UBI would be that onerous in the long run. At least in my country,Canada, we spend inordinate amounts of money “delivering” various kinds of social assistance. Some “social” programs are so designed as to impede or frustrate anyone trying to get off the program. One simple UBI program with a suitable tax-back rate for those with higher incomes might save money in the long run since the most vulnerable portions of society might not have to resort to criminal or quasi-criminal activities to stay alive and various stigmae resulting from “being on Welfare” etc might be reduced allowing better access to jobs and so on.

    The Latin word ‘stigma’ is not a feminine noun of the first declension but a neuter noun of the third declension, and so its plural is ‘stigmata’.

    There’s nothing wrong with treating ‘stigma’ as an English word, with the normal English plural ‘stigmas’. But there’s no justification for ‘stigmae’.

  22. Since you wonder, yes, I have heard of typos.

    I’d be prepared to bet money this wasn’t one, though.

  23. Ikonoclast’s proposal makes sense to me if
    a) there is ” L” (one type of labour only) and
    b) the supply of “L” at price p[L] exceeds the demand for “L”at price p[‘L] permanently and
    c) there is only 1 location in ‘the economy’

    But (a) is definitely false on empirical grounds and therefore (b) and ( c) are not interesting (even for ‘the economy’ Lichtenstein).

  24. @J-D

    J-D :

    jrkrideau :
    On a slightly more practical idea, it is not at all clear to me that a UBI would be that onerous in the long run. At least in my country,Canada, we spend inordinate amounts of money “delivering” various kinds of social assistance. Some “social” programs are so designed as to impede or frustrate anyone trying to get off the program. One simple UBI program with a suitable tax-back rate for those with higher incomes might save money in the long run since the most vulnerable portions of society might not have to resort to criminal or quasi-criminal activities to stay alive and various stigmae resulting from “being on Welfare” etc might be reduced allowing better access to jobs and so on.

    The Latin word ‘stigma’ is not a feminine noun of the first declension but a neuter noun of the third declension, and so its plural is ‘stigmata’.
    There’s nothing wrong with treating ‘stigma’ as an English word, with the normal English plural ‘stigmas’. But there’s no justification for ‘stigmae’.

    And there’s no justification for suggesting that “stigma” is a Latin word at all, save as a loanword from the original Greek – from which it gets its plural. There is a place for pedantry in an incidental way, as a concomitant to painstaking precision, but none at all when it fails to deliver that. It’s like claiming that the plural of “ignoramus” is “ignorami”; it only highlights the lack of basis.

  25. Two things:-

    – TerjeP’s original description of how a UBI would have to be set lower than sufficient for survival is quite accurate (we discussed this elsewhere, exploring the Negative Payroll Tax approach that he also mentions; I drew that to his attention, but as I am not alone in advocating it he may have heard of it elsewhere too). However, he hasn’t brought out transitional issues, or emphasised that it would operate as a top up allowing people to price themselves into work at less than a living wage (another top up to the UBI one), giving both higher employment and decent living standards – so it would be futile if there were still a mandated minimum wage. NPT would be faster acting and consistent with previously mandated minimum wage arrangements, and could be switched to a UBI over time – and, in turn, that could be switched to Distributist style private resources yet later (eliminating many bossy boss scenarios and undercutting the rest since self employment would be far more realistic; it would not be a question of a “free” choice between comparable bosses).

    – I came to the NPT idea from considering a labour market imperfection, an externality favouring unemployment driven by the disconnect between the spread costs of unemployment benefits and the employer cost benefits of hiring and firing. There is another material distortion: corporate structures, and the legal assistance they get, favour firm sizes suited to bossy boss scenarios, disfavouring self employment and working for small firms that might be more genuinely paternalistic (in the best sense of that word), and in any case would be more numerous and so would offer more genuine choice of employers (this, too, ties in with the Distributist arrangements mentioned above). Coase put considerable work into looking into optimal firm sizes; his work should be used as a framework for analysing this, but not using the assumption that what is, is the product of properly operating competition; there is a thumb on the scales here too.

  26. @J-D
    Don’t bet, as you realised it was not a type , wrong gender! And only 40+ years since my last Latin class. How quickly we forget.

  27. “To my mind, paying unemployment benefit to get no paid economic work out of a person makes less sense than paying a basic wage, getting some productive work and getting some back in taxes anyway.”

    I also think this is the wrong thing to do also; it is not good for people to get something for nothing. Human nature is such that we need some worthwhile meaningful aim in life and the receipt of taxpayer’s money, ‘should’ imply some sort of obligation on the recipient to repay the taxpayer in any way that they can.

    The problem lies with the lack of understanding on the part of ‘the taxpayer’ about the value of what ‘others’ have for them; for society. If everyone acknowledges that Maggie was wrong and there certainly is society; that society is all there is to being human. We are not a collection of individuals who compete for resources and the ‘best’, the ‘fittest’ survive. This idea is crap, crap and crap again, I say.

    If everyone understood that there is new knowledge about human nature and human culture, that explains all the stupid and laziness we all see around us, but which really upsets some of us, we would be on the fast track to working out a functional efficient and compassionate system, where growth in human ability to create happiness would be valued more than being ‘rich’ and having more stuff than other people…. oh and can I have a pony with that?

    “Arguing that worthwhile work cannot be found for most of these people is incorrect IMO. Maintaining an entire society and all its people and infrastructure in good order means there are always things that could be done to improve life, infrastructure and environment.”

    Absolutely agree Iconoclast. There is such a lack of creative intelligent thinking among those ‘jahb’ creators.

  28. Ernestine Gross :
    Ikonoclast’s proposal makes sense to me if
    a) there is ” L” (one type of labour only) and
    b) the supply of “L” at price p[L] exceeds the demand for “L”at price p[‘L] permanently and
    c) there is only 1 location in ‘the economy’
    But (a) is definitely false on empirical grounds and therefore (b) and ( c) are not interesting (even for ‘the economy’ Lichtenstein).

    Ernestine, reducing the entire social economy to a simple spurious equation or model proves absolutely nothing.

  29. This is van Gogh on laziness; totally off topic but hey freedom, or even better, creativity.

    “the man who is idle despite himself, who is consumed inwardly by a great desire for action, but who does nothing, because it is impossible to do anything, because it is as if he was imprisoned in some way, because he lacks what he needs to be productive, because inevitable circumstances have reduced him to this.

    “Such a man does not always know himself what he could do, but he feels instinctively; I am good at something, I can sense a reason for my existence.”

    This resonates with me because it is what I felt when I was ‘made to feel’ – wrong way of framing the problem but I wasn’t enlightened back then – false shame for being a moocher, for sucking at the taxpayers teat etc. I mistakenly thought I was doing a good job and in return for my single parent benefit I was raising the next generation to be able to do better than I had and to be able to contribute.

    Can I just pat myself on the back here and say that I actually did a bloody good job and have 2 children earning in the 6 figure bracket – I think that is the term. They are paying tax and happy to do so. The youngest is more ‘difficult’ but is on the right pathway now and will be able to pay his hecs back and also pay tax to support others less fortunate than him.

    It hasn’t been easy for him, being so ‘easily led’ and ‘impressionable’. Note that there is no need for an aspie diagnosis. There have always been people with different abilities and problems. I was the same, but back when I wanted lots of stuff I didn’t need, the banks wouldn’t lend me money. My son didn’t benefit from the ‘freedom’ to borrow more than he could afford, that freedom that the banks so conveniently provided. Of course, it was for the well being of the moochers that they did ‘free’ up the requirements. I know that. He also didn’t benefit from the freedom that bad bosses have been given to take advantage of his trusting nature.

    But back to whinging about the appallingly inhuman narrative from the libertarian voices that I and all those on welfare have had to listen to over the past decades. Oh we were useless criminal stealing their dollar, etc etc. Thank god for psychology, cos Im pretty much over that cruelty now. I forgive – lol – and understand that the libertarian narrative was based on prejudice, misunderstanding, ignorance, and distrust; those oh so ‘common’ attributes typical of badly brought up people. They really couldn’t help themselves.

    Terje says, “I’m rarely bitter towards anybody for more than half an hour and even then they have to do something that offends me in some personal way.” Lucky you Terje, do you think you could be that way and not get fired if you had to work for a boss who felt free to dispense her political and economic views to employees?

    I’m using ‘boss’ as meaning an employer or manager, IMW – in my worldview – a boss is anyone with power over me – it is the power that is the problem not the literal ownership of the capital. In none of the casual menial jobs I did, was there the option of being personally offended by the (usually stupid) opinion that the boss offered; it was a matter of ‘tugging the forelock’ and getting on with the job.

    But that’s character building right? So how come bosses don’t need any character building? Ah of course, they are those born with all the ‘character’ they need.

  30. The European Commission does or did advocate flexicurity- easy hire and fire, minimal labour regulation and strong social welfare – as practised in Denmark, *en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity*

    I note this abstract on a paper re flexicurities applicability elsewhere:

    We argue that the efficiency of the Danish flexicurity Model, which combines high unemployment benefits with low job protection and high participation rate, relies on strong public-spiritedness. We also argue that Continental and Mediterranean European countries are unlikely to be able to implement the Danish Model because the lack of public-spiritedness of their citizens raises moral hazard issues which hinder the implementation of efficient public unemployment insurance.

    *www.iza.org/en/webcontent/publications/papers/viewAbstract?dp_id=1928&menuTriggered=true&noPageLoaded=true*

    I think flexicurity is worth considering but I’d be worried that it may contribute to the spread of an indolent, dysfunctional and crime ridden underclass such as we see with Aboriginals in many parts of Australia. Flexicurity may also be incompatible with our high immigration levels and increasingly heterogenerous society, as these seem to destroy the public trust and public spiritedness the American Economic Journal abstract cited above considers important.

    I strongly disagree with BilB’s comment ” People are perfectly able to fill their time with other exploits if work is not necessary.” Actually it is extremely difficult for most people to productively use all their waking hours if they aren’t in paid employment. I’m surprised by your apparent ignorance of the copious studies on this issue.

  31. Mel thinks flexicurity is worth considering but says “I’d be worried that it may contribute to the spread of an indolent, dysfunctional and crime ridden underclass such as we see with Aboriginals in many parts of Australia.”

    Oh you troll Mel; you want an argument about whether Aborigines are as intelligent as ‘us’. ROFL, you don’t need to be argued with; the evidence is overwhelming now that your IQ fundamentalism is, wait for it… ignorant and lacking any rational scientific support but I have no interest in doing your research for you.

    “Actually it is extremely difficult for most people to productively use all their waking hours if they aren’t in paid employment. I’m surprised by your apparent ignorance of the copious studies on this issue.”

    Oh yeah where’s your links to this evidence? LOL one of the best comments I read on the BHL site was from someone – I assumed it was a young male just like my youngest son was a few years ago – who said, and he was not joking, “But if people have enough money for food shelter and the internet why would they leave the house?”

    Quite obviously Mel you need to meet up with some more of the younger generation and up-date your prejudices and tired old hobby horses.

  32. Sorry you may have missed the point, I was making that being on the internet can be a full-time occupation and perhaps a useful one in the future?

  33. Following on the comments, it seemed to me a lot of the commentators are commenting when they haven’t followed the debate on Crooked Timber.

    The CT members argued against labour market deregulation on the basis possibility of workplace coercion that arises when lack of regulations and have provided real life cases of of these coercion. The comments here seems to be all about the same old UBI is welfare kind of debate.

    In fact the UBI were suggested by BHLs as a basic need for giving choice to workers to leave employment if they face coercion in workplace. The BHL argues that such will allow worker’s to freely quit when they are forced to do something in workplace without being unable to meet the basic financial obligations such as food and rents, so regulations will not be needed.

    The CT members rebuttals are interesting as well on the basis that one people could of made decisions to take on mortgage or have kids when they took the job or worked in the workplace for a few month before making this decision of whether to do as the boss told or to quit and go on UBI (of course, in my opinion UBI should not be so generous to be able to support mortgage payment with 3 kids to feed, otherwise it will be a very high burden on the state). As well as, they might also be weary that it will be difficult for them to find another job (full employment was assumed by the BHLs), might not want to leave the social circle in the workplace etc.

    I think CT members are on the upper hand because their arguments are much more sensible amd realistic. BHLs assumption and arguments are unrealistic and have conflicted with their belief such as the assumption of full employment and UBI as that will require a sufficient tax rate to fund it (although a UBI of say 40-50% of median income using the poverty line is not too expensive to fund, BHLs will cry the tax is too high regardless).

  34. Julie Thomas:

    “Oh you troll Mel; you want an argument about whether Aborigines are as intelligent as ‘us’. ”

    Don’t be such a rude twit, Julie, I never mentioned IQ. Dysfunctional, indolent, drunk and violent indigenous subcultures are an observably obvious phenomena and the crime stats, mordibity stats, alcohol related disease stats etc are readily available. I’m not sure why you have such a huge bug up your arse but please leave me out of it.

  35. Julie Thomas:

    “Oh yeah where’s your links to this evidence? LOL …”

    You could always use your brain and look for it yourself as there are hundreds of readily available peer reviewed studies that may be accessed (either completely or abstract only) on the web and which pertain to the issue. This one discusses unemployment and ill health and incidentally addresses risk taking behaviours associated with a lack of gainful employment:

    “Research supports a link between individual unemployment and future premature morbidity and mortality. Age adjusted all-cause mortality is substantially higher among individuals with a history of unemployment relative to persons who never have been unemployed (see [1]). For example, among individuals aged 15–47 years who were included in the Swedish twin registry, unemployment in 1973 predicted increased mortality risk 10 and 24 years later relative both to employed persons in the general population and to their employed twin siblings [2, 3]. Associations were independent of age, smoking status, alcohol consumption, and preexisting chronic illness. Much of the longitudinal evidence supporting an association between unemployment and future morbidity has focused on psychological symptoms and self-reported health [4]. In a Swedish study examining long-term effects of unemployment among school leavers, experiencing at least 6 months of unemployment between ages 16 and 21 was associated with more smoking, greater psychological symptoms, and among men, greater physical symptoms at age 30 [5]. Similarly, in a study based on data from the Health and Retirement Survey, U.S. workers aged 50 and older who suffered involuntary job loss reported more depressive symptoms and worse physical functioning up to 2 years later [6]. A subsequent follow-up of this study demonstrated a link between unemployment and verifiable physical disease in that workers with a history of unemployment were at increased risk of experiencing a clinical cardiovascular event up to 10 years later relative to those who remained employed, even after controlling for relevant risk factors [7]. Additional evidence to support unemployment as an antecedent of future morbidity is offered by census studies conducted in Denmark and the United Kingdom that have found unemployment to predict incident of cancer, particularly of the respiratory tract (see [8]). Among two cohorts of Danish persons aged 20–64 in 1970 and 1986, respectively, unemployment predicted an increased risk of cancer morbidity and mortality 5 years later [9]. Examination of smoking trends indicated that the elevated risk was explained only partially by increased smoking rates [9]. ” etc etc etc *http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~scohen/Janicki_2008_AnnBehavMed.pdf*

  36. @Ikonoclast
    I agree with this, but often when people first enter the workforce, there is a temporary period of unemployment. I would like for these people to receive the dole as it is now for a short time (say 6 months) so they can devote all their time to look for work. If they can’t find work in this time, they should be transferred to the JG program.

  37. I’m going to back track and address just JQ’s original questions without much reference to the comments. Warning: long.

    The employment relationship is inherently unbalanced, simply by virtue of the fact that one party gets to boss the other around – when conditions are such that effectively only those employment arrangements are on offer (as now). But when self employment is realistic for many, and even more so when there are many smaller firms that include some that operate more collaboratively, people don’t have to settle for such arrangements and firms have an incentive to offer other arrangements. Aside: during my MBA, many years ago now, the Organisational Methods texts brought out the empirical observation that medium sized firms were more collaborative, possibly because small firms could more easily apply close supervision from the top informally and large firms could more easily afford the overhead of bureaucratic structure to control departments and individuals.

    JQ asks if a question relating to four points might be badly posed. It is, but through incompleteness rather than inaccuracy. I will fill out the points and the question further, but no doubt that will still not complete them. As to the points:-

    – “Full employment, so that the cost to a worker of finding a new job is no greater than the cost to an employer of hiring a replacement”. For completeness, “a new job” needs to include a self employment option, setting up a partnership, going into a family business, and so on. This need not be an assumption, an exogenous input to these issues that would need separate action to bring about; it is in fact an outworking of some of the recommendations and policies proposed, so it is endogenous to all this and not a separate, free standing thing.

    – “A minimum wage adequate to allow a decent living standard without requiring acceptance of degrading working conditions”. This should not be understood as a mandated minimum wage sufficient to achieve this by itself. It would work if it could be understood as a wage level that, with other personal resources such as private portfolios or a universal basic income, reached that minimum level; or if it could be understood as a wage level that reached that minimum through wage subsidies or similar. However, a mandated version works out as a hidden tax on employment and is generally incompatible with the first point except under unsustainable boom conditions (Australia can be thought of as benefitting in this way from its lower population levels during much of the first two thirds of the 20th century – lower relative to land and capital, that is).

    – “A universal basic income sufficient to ensure that, even without working no-one need be poor”. TerjeP’s comment addresses this, bringing out the fact that this is above optimal and would show as too many simply not working from choice and too much funding being needed, not just for those but for everybody including those in work. However, a universal basic income sufficient for comfort at low wages would work, since people would still have the incentives to work and – in a steady state – funding would be practical unless and until a Malthusian crisis meant that there was not enough to go around anyway (remember, the appearance of lack of constraints might lead to a drift into that). The negative externalities this would fix show that there would be a net gain at these levels, not a cost such as a higher universal basic income would present. Even so, wage stickiness and such might mean that there would be a transitional problem, with not enough funding to cover a stage where not enough were yet working at lower direct wages. This and externality issues lead me to favour a Negative Payroll Tax in the short term, while the funds churning and government control lead me to favour a more Distributist situation using privately held resources in the long term. (That link covers one possible transition.)

    – “A default employment contract, incorporating prohibitions on sexual harassment, rights to regular breaks and so on, unless these are explicitly contracted out”. This would be unnecessary if the problem of inadequate employee bargaining power were fixed, and ineffective if it were not. The only value it could offer is as a Schelling Point and reference.

    I would add another point: large employers receive artificial support through corporate legal frameworks, tax structures like GST with an overhead falling more heavily on small employers and the self employed, and so on. These reduce employee bargaining power further; they should be reformed, though there might be a delay while the culture responded and an unbalanced reform might cause other harm (recall that 19th century Britain revived the corporate form as a general approach so it could catch up with other countries that had already brought that approach in).

    As regards the question itself – “[i]s the objection that the necessary conditions aren’t likely to be met in practice, or that the employment relationship is inherently unbalanced, simply by virtue of the fact that one party gets to boss the other around” – JQ offers three ways it might be badly posed, which I can flesh out thus:-

    – Capitalism definitely could not sustain his four points the way he presented them, but it definitely could sustain the variants I and other commenters have brought out, and there are practical transitions too. Whether they are politically realistic is another question.

    – As, when and if there were little or no support for large, artificial arrangements like corporate empoyers, unions would also be undercut at more than the shop level. So it would not be the case that “such conditions would give workers sufficient bargaining power to demand union representation, and that union contracts would embody the standard protections”, since such conditions would not support those results either.

    – As to “But I’m also attracted to a third view, one which would give a little more ground to the BHL position, though at quite a high price. That is the view that, if only we had the substantial measure of economic equality described in the conditions above, we could indeed dispense with a lot of government intervention, and thereby enjoy more freedom in matters such as contracting over working conditions (or, as discussed in another thread, selling kidneys).”, what high price? Ask the who/whom question. Dispensing with [the need for] a lot of government intervention only incurs a cost to people with vested interests in that. Promoting people out of poverty, engineering out needs – those don’t incur a price in worse working conditions or selling kidneys out of need or whatever, because people wouldn’t be thrust into that under an actually achieved success. (Remember, I’m not suggesting declaring victory politically and eliminating the safeguards on that basis, but rather that as, when and if victory were really achieved they would become unnecessary. “Whither away, state?” or “wither away, state”.)

    The BHL side of the debate wants to believe that a modest tweak to current conditions would provide sufficient independence to make free contracting on equal terms a meaningful concept. The CT side mostly takes it for granted that the required degree of equality can’t be achieved in practice, and that it’s therefore silly to concede anything to demands for freedom of contract.

    A modest tweak to current parameters would be enough, but the result would lead to conditions that were very different, and there are time scale issues and interim safeguards involved too. So whether the BHL side are right depends on just which question you are asking. Me, I think they are right in terms of the way they themselves present matters, but not in terms of the way the CT side presents matters. There is a lot of talking past each other going on.

    If by “in practice” the CT side includes political problems, they may well turn out to be right after the fact, but on the one hand they themselves are part of those obstacles so their objecting is of the nature of a circular argument, and on the other hand the only way to do it is to do it, so in that sense debate is meaningless. They are quite wrong as to whether the fixes would work if they were tried, but considering the political resistance to the proposals of the likes of Professors Kim Swales and Nobel winner Edmund Phelps as well as mine over the last twenty years, they may well be right that it is not practical in that sense. But politicians have a vested interest in maintaining a dependent population on a drip feed of support rather than in fixing their problems, just as a wise rat catcher never catches the last rat but leaves a breeding stock, so there is a real political problem for so long as we continue to operate within a framework of representative democracy – there’s an Agency Costs thing going on. Go Mutualism and the genuinely free market sort of Anarcho-Capitalists! (With a nod to the Distributists.)

  38. Lucky you Terje, do you think you could be that way and not get fired if you had to work for a boss who felt free to dispense her political and economic views to employees?

    Most of my bosses and most of those that have worked for me have at various times shared political and economics view points with me. Quite often there is disagreement. Nobody has ever lost their job over it and it never made me bitter (I don’t think it made them bitter either). One employee I had loved to bait me in political arguments and generally I enjoyed the tussle. I judged him on his capacity to do his job effectively and as such he had nothing to worry about even if he had a touch of Marxism about him. As such I can’t relate in any first hand way to your anecdote although I can easily relate to the notion that some bosses are harder to work for than others. If you’re in a low paid job you are more likely to have a low paid boss and they are more likely to be shitty managers. Skill tends to follow the money.

  39. P.M.Lawrence :
    – I came to the NPT idea from considering a labour market imperfection, an externality favouring unemployment driven by the disconnect between the spread costs of unemployment benefits and the employer cost benefits of hiring and firing.

    PML – I did not find the NPT idea independent of you. Your exploration of the idea was the first I had seen of it. I agree it has a number of advantages in transitional terms. Firstly it is a much simpler political sell as you can introduce it without having to broadly engage in debating the problems of the minimum wage and without having to dismantle the institutionalisal mechanisms supporting the minimum wage. Basically it side steps much of the public debate but still corrects much of the market distortion wrought by the minimum wage and addresses the associated social problem of unemployment. I really do love your idea.

  40. Mel I stand by that statement, though I think that you miss understand the meaning.

    That aside, my policy platform so far would be

    a) a workers bill of rights to outline the work environemnt in the Australian context ie hours, holidays, conditions, respect, etc. In this way there is no longer the requirement for long legal documents for each and every working situation.
    b) a minimum standard of living which is determined for each region to outline the basic income level required for a respectable existence. This is automatically CPI adjusted as its basis is test and adjusted periodically. In this way the “basic wage” is relevent to the area where the work is to be carried out.
    c) individual or collective agreements to cover skill, education and performance factors. This is by nature a short document of simple agreement at the point of retention.
    Now for the unemployed
    a) for the long term unemployed I have long proposed an employment buddy system called the registered shared job. In this 2 people agree to fill one job for a time with each covering the others availability shortcomings. This can also work for students. By this method an employer achieves a full time employee and receives a tax incentive (reduced tax for the employee) for their effort.
    b) I am not averse to the unemployed on benefits being asked to do several days a week of work for a local participating business or entity where available. I can see plenty of fish hooks in this on the one hand, but on the other there are plenty of benefits particularly for the young. Perhaps this could be optional and desireable. I am still thinking about whether there is a meaningful method to create fulfilling work for the unemployed while they wait for their optimal sitiuation to arise.

    c). As for financing the unemployed completely, this can only be done if there is a mechanism in place to ensure that agile government policies work to minimise the list tenancy time for unemployed. In other words the government cannot lamely accept cost of supporting non productive people, it must react to the unemployment level and deliver real policies to eliminate the problem.

  41. Another point is that capitalism has proven itself utterly incapable of providing anything like full employment in any country for any prolonged length of time. Even fast growing countries like India have massive unemployment and underemployment. The situation is even worse in libertarian wet-dream minimal government jurisdictions like Somalia, DRC Congo and South Sudan.

  42. Warning! Long Post follows.

    The first implicit assumption, made by P.M. Lawrence and TerjP, is that progressively lowering the minimum wage will automatically and progressively increase employment offers (reduce unemployment). This fails to recognise a number of practical lower limits on the minimum wage. It also fails to realise the beneficial macro-economic effects of good wages on aggregate demand.

    The second implicit assumption seems to be that if the free market or capitalist system cannot gainfully employ people (market failure) then there is no other way of gainfully employing people. This view suffers from two important oversights. One, it assumes that gainful employment is only that which is economically and monetarily measured. It assumes people are only doing things useful for themselves and/or society if they are earning a wage or other monetary income. Two, it assumes that there is no other way to usefully mobilise people into training, development or paid employment other than by the free market. That is, it assumes that state has no way ways (from conscripted actions to monetarily rewarded actions) to usefully mobilise the unemployed.

    If the above point were true, then all armies of capitalist societies would have to be raised solely by free market actions. That is to say only privatised armies could exist but not conscripted or government-paid armies. The clear ability to mobilise an army from consolidated revenue proves the clear existence of the state’s concomitant capacity to mobilise an Employment Reserve from its unemployed numbers if it has the political imagination and will. There are no real obstacles to this. The obstacles are purely ideological.

    First, let us deal with wage setting. It is clear that a mandated minimum wage of $1,000,000 a day would reduce employment to virtually zero. It is also clear that a minimum wage offer of $00.01c a day would find no takers. Between these extremes there must exist a band where a minimum wage is feasible and practical in that both employers and prospective employees are willing to “strike a bargain”.

    On the employee’s side, if there was no welfare safety net, then a minimum wage must be equal to the reproductive cost of labour or at least the subsistence cost. We can see that a person selling his/her labour must first subsist. Subsistence will comprise food, clothing and accommodation of some basic adequate form. Over and above the subsistence cost, there are costs involved in working; for example fares, work clothes, higher calorific requirements and perhaps some other costs. If this minimum-wage working class is expected to have the capacity, or is to be granted the “right”, to breed the next generation of minimum wage workers then the further costs of rearing, clothing and basic schooling for children must be part of the wage. Replacement birth rate is about 2.2 children per couple on average ignoring migration effects.

    Further to the above reproductive and participation costs of labour are the social costs if certain public health standards are to be met. If the minimum-wage social class is to live in acceptable conditions of personal and public health then their wage (in the absence of welfare and social wage components) must contain a portion sufficient to meet these needs. Ignoring public health costs at this level will impact on the whole community as middle and upper classes can also succumb to epidemic illnesses in the absence of adequate general public health levels. Then there are the humane civilization values to be considered. Society as a whole has to decide what allocation if any to make for these needs. Individual employers (small, medium or large business) may be tempted to not pay for health and human values in a minimum wage but public and democratic pressure from the larger constituency is likely to see pressure for some allocation in wages, or by default, in government welfare.

    Thus the workers’ absolute needs (reproductive cost of labour) and social needs democratically determined (minimum public standards for health, education and basic rights) will set a lower bound on a practicable minimum wage for unskilled labour. The employers’ costs and feasible rates of profit will set an upper bound. It is possible that the employers’ upper bound (the most they can pay for poor to mediocre unskilled labour) will be lower, in at least some conditions, than the worker’s lower bound as determined by the reproductive and reasonable social costs of labour.

    Given this, we then have an area of market failure where the free market cannot gainfully employ all employable and willing persons. The free market result is that these people are unemployable but the societal result is that a substantial number of expensive and complicated “capital equipment” units, namely human beings who cost substantial inputs to raise and educate, are now being wasted. Would any good business waste and leave idle items of expensive capital equipment? No. Thus for the nation state it is not overall “good business” economically or socially to waste these persons and leave them idle. This is even leaving aside humane considerations.

    The unemployment roll should be progressively converted to a Workforce Reserve roll. The notion of involuntary unemployment and underemployment should, could and would cease to exist as a category in a properly run social democratic, mixed economy state. Official unemployment would cease to exist and be replaced by membership of the Workforce Reserve. The Workforce Reserve would be progressively mobilised into training and into useful social, environmental and even cultural work. How could this work within the national budget?

    “Unemployment payments fell from 46 per cent of median household income in 1996 – a little below a conventional relative poverty line – to 36 per cent in 2009-10, a long way below such a poverty line,” University of NSW professor Peter Whiteford wrote in a report to Treasurer Wayne Swan.

    So let us assume that we first slightly more than double unemployment payments to 75% of a median household income or perhaps to 75% of the minimum wage. (These numbers would be a bit different of course.) But let us assume that this measure about doubles the cost of this benefit in the national budget. The 2010-2011 budget outcome for sickness and unemployment benefits (rounded up a little) was $7 billion dollars. Thus to double these benefits to about 75% of the minimum wage would cost an extra $7 billion. This is not a big number in the context of entire budget outlays of $356 billion. In round numbers it is 2% of the budget. If another $3 billion was allowed annually for building and maintaining an administrative department of the Workforce Reserve, the total would be $10 billion annually at current budget levels. This does not count cost savings from winding down and/or transferring aspects of unemployment administration.

    About 625,000 people are unemployed currently in Australia. For an extra $10 billion annually we could motivate, train and employ (say on about a 25 hour to 30 hour week at minimum wage rates) all of these people. The uptake would be progressive of course. We could initially fund this by raising taxes to raise 25% or $2.5 billion of this, by finding savings of $2.5 billion from corporate, middle class and fossil fuel subsidy type welfare and by increasing the budget deficit by $5 billion.

    The NATSEM Income and Wealth Report shows it costs about $450,000 in today’s dollars for the average family to raise two children from birth to age 20. Let us assume the state has contributed only another $50,000 (a very modest assumption). Thus it costs Australian society $500,000 per two children or $250,000 per child. Let us assume the previous cost of raising all unemployed people to 20 is the only cost we count. Let us assume a bench line of 600,000 unemployed. If we multiply 600,000 by $250,000 we get $150,000,000,000 or $150 billion. We have $150 billion of idle human capital. If someone had $150 billion of idle, unsaleable but potentially productive capital equipment costing $7 billion a year to mothball and which could be put to full productive use for a total of $17 billion a year (an additional $10 billion) then I suspect they would look seriously at business cases to see how they could do it.

    Measures that required an extra $5 billion in deficit and another $5 billion in raised taxes and removal of distorting subsidies (as detailed above) would be considered unexceptional in any other kind of national emergency (war, major natural disasters, major pandemics etc.) Why should the national emergency of mass unemployment be any different?

    The work that these people could do is grist for another post. IMO, it would not be difficult in the long term, to gainfully utilise all these people for socially useful work.

  43. Ikonoclast :
    Warning! Long Post follows.
    The first implicit assumption, made by P.M. Lawrence and TerjP, is that progressively lowering the minimum wage will automatically and progressively increase employment offers (reduce unemployment).

    No. Read it again. Not only is there no such assumption, implicit or otherwise, there are explicit statements that minimum wage mandates need not fall under a Negative Payroll Tax.

    What is asserted is that a Negative Payroll Tax would automatically and progressively increase employment – not just offers, as that wouldn’t help if job losses grew more – but that is not an assumption either, it is a conclusion drawn from modelling (you can find that by following the link I gave, particularly to Professor Kim Swales’s material if you want formal modelling). In fact, in my last comment I went to some trouble to point out that the full employment issue would not be an assumption but a result.

    This fails to recognise a number of practical lower limits on the minimum wage. It also fails to realise the beneficial macro-economic effects of good wages on aggregate demand.

    Again, no. This is not only incorrect, it is irrelevant since that is not the operative mechanism. If you had followed the link I gave you would have read the following on this subject:-

    … This boosts employment, but not through a mechanism that uses aggregate stimulus of the economy; some critics have objected that this approach does not create jobs by stimulating the economy, but they are building in the assumption that employment levels are only connected to the levels of economic activity, and so they are leaving out the mechanism involved. (This mechanism actually does end up stimulating the economy, too [emphasis added], but in a secondary way.)

    So who’s making unstated assumptions?

    The second implicit assumption seems to be that if the free market or capitalist system cannot gainfully employ people (market failure) then there is no other way of gainfully employing people.

    Yet again, no. Think through the implications of my remarks about all this including making more self employment possible.

    This view suffers from two important oversights. One, it assumes that gainful employment is only that which is economically and monetarily measured. It assumes people are only doing things useful for themselves and/or society if they are earning a wage or other monetary income. Two, it assumes that there is no other way to usefully mobilise people into training, development or paid employment other than by the free market. That is, it assumes that state has no way ways (from conscripted actions to monetarily rewarded actions) to usefully mobilise the unemployed.

    Yes, it does assume all that. Don’t make that assumption and wish it on me.

    If the above point were true, then all armies of capitalist societies would have to be raised solely by free market actions. That is to say only privatised armies could exist but not conscripted or government-paid armies. The clear ability to mobilise an army from consolidated revenue proves the clear existence of the state’s concomitant capacity to mobilise an Employment Reserve from its unemployed numbers if it has the political imagination and will. There are no real obstacles to this. The obstacles are purely ideological.
    First, let us deal with wage setting. It is clear that a mandated minimum wage of $1,000,000 a day would reduce employment to virtually zero. It is also clear that a minimum wage offer of $00.01c a day would find no takers. Between these extremes there must exist a band where a minimum wage is feasible and practical in that both employers and prospective employees are willing to “strike a bargain”.

    There is no “must” about it; it all depends. The whole problem of using mandates is that today’s developed economies don’t have any such sweet spot. Wage levels low enough for everybody to price themselves into work – labour market clearing wages – can easily be too low for everybody to live on. This is clearly visible as far back as the economic history of early 16th century England, when bands of sturdy beggars who couldn’t find work roamed the land.

    I will neither quote nor reply to the rest of that, as it does not pertain to misunderstandings of what I presented earlier.

  44. @Ikonoclast

    Sorry to say, Ikonoclast @33, it is not me who is “reducing the entire social economy to a simple spurious equation or model”. I am saying your proposal corresponds to such a simple model and one needs only, say 2 people with different trades to have sufficient empirical data to refute the empirical validity of the model.

    PS: P.M. Lawrence is right regarding what are assumptions and what are results (conclusions).

    P.M.L’s negative payroll tax argument by itself is not an argument against government involvement in the economy or in favour of ‘small’ government per se. It is an argument about a mechanism which provides an incentive for businesses (capitalist or otherwise) to substitute work done by people for work done by machines (in the limit). Alternatively put, it is a mechanism to change relative prices within the local economy, taking prices for traded goods and the exchange rate as given. Depending on the implementation, this mechanism may be operating sometimes for short periods of time and sometimes for longer periods.

    I don’t know the details, but potentially this mechanism could be used to counteract what is currently discussed under the heading ‘two-speed’ economy. I don’t know P.M.L’s position on this, but potentially it could provide one leg of a program to redistribute profits from, say the mining sector to keep manufacturing going while the A$ is high (the other leg would be the mining super profit tax or whatever it is called now). It is better than tax reductions for small business because tax reductions are neutral regarding machines versus people or imports vs local production, while a negative payroll tax is dependent on employment. Moreover, it trumps the Bill Mitchell (MMT) idea for the obvious reason that it assists people to continue to work in areas where they are skilled and which they presumably like to work in. Mitchell’s idea is wonderful if you want to have a mechanism for a more or less permanent underclass. Again, I don’t know P.M.L.’s position on this, but I can’t see why a selective (industry specific) negative payroll tax cannot be used to complement state owned enterprises which deal with work in relatively new areas such as the environment. It all depends.

    It is not possible to theorise backward, from the macro-level to the real life economy without ending up with potentially m- arguments, where m is the number of people in the economy. The best example in support of what I say is the macro-economic dynamic general equilibrium model. It contains 1 (one) individual (or n identical individuals, ie “L”!) Why this model is called a general equilibrium model I do not know. Just as financial accounts of a business can’t be used to ‘innovate’ (excluding creative accounting), so macro-economic data, such as GDP cannot be used to find a mechanism to generate a happy and productive workforce; these accounts are monitoring devices for monetary transactions. Full stop. Why some macro-economists associate ‘output’ with GDP is a mystery to me (Keynes talked about effective demand vs Walrasian demand; this I understand.)

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