Terrible essay.
please elaborate
Well, while I’m not ideologically inclined to agree with Voxette, I still think it’s misguided. The economies with more restricted worker hours below 40 seem to be underperforming and have lower employment, basic income plus fewer work hours simultaneously will cause a bigger hit on the economy, basic income (or other alternatives) already creates more worker leverage to negotiate for fewer hours and safer conditions, and slashing everyone’s Mondays across the board will hit a lot harder than alternatives, because not every worker’s time is equally valuable. Also, I don’t think it will sell well politically - and business will fight like dogs to prevent it from happening.
Which, is odd enough for me to say, seeing as with executive functioning stuff a 4-day workweek (perhaps leaving out Wednesday instead) would fit me well.
Additionally, just on shear economic cost vs efficiency, I can’t see a reason to prefer a combination of 4-day workweek + basic income in the short-medium term, given that the level of automation in the future is uncertain, over a low minimum wage plus direct-to-employee declining hourly livable wage subsidies.
Wage subsidies + low minimum wage would create lots of new jobs, which is a good sell politically, while also taking a lot of pressure off the poor and lower classes and giving them a lot more leverage. Businesses won’t fight it as hard, even though it will need a tax increase, since they’ll benefit from lower labor costs at the low end. It multiplies government spending with private spending for a larger potential effect. It can also be rolled out incrementally in different amounts to test out just how much economic efficiency is lost.
There are other potential advantages, I really should write a post on it specifically, but it doesn’t seem to be getting much coverage vs UBI. I think the Republicans might support it as their alternative to UBI come 2024/2028.
There’s a few points I could make, but one of the great things about giving people time off is that it doesn’t affect the value of time off, and it’s not something that can just cause a decrease in employer contribution leaving people no better off. Giving money, that’s not as straightforward.
Considering it hasn’t seemed to perform well in other countries, I’d rather make simpler overtime rules, then crack down hard on those that don’t follow them.
Anyhow, as part of how I’d sell this, I’d set the starting wage with subsidies higher than the current minimum wage, and since it would make labor relatively cheaper, there’s not much reason to expect a decrease in hours at the low end.
In addition to the risks involved with yanking 20% of the work hours out of the economy, killing Monday also incentivizes workers to work under the table in violation of the employment law in order to get enough money, since the employers can actually cut their salaries to compensate, either directly or through attrition.
With state-backed wage subsidies, there’s no incentive to work under the table, because if the income isn’t reported, you don’t get the subsidy. Though, it is key for this plan that subsidies taper off more slowly than employer wages increase, but that’s how it should be to prevent a new Welfare Trap.
Terrible essay.
please elaborate
Well, while I’m not ideologically inclined to agree with Voxette, I still think it’s misguided. The economies with more restricted worker hours below 40 seem to be underperforming and have lower employment, basic income plus fewer work hours simultaneously will cause a bigger hit on the economy, basic income (or other alternatives) already creates more worker leverage to negotiate for fewer hours and safer conditions, and slashing everyone’s Mondays across the board will hit a lot harder than alternatives, because not every worker’s time is equally valuable. Also, I don’t think it will sell well politically - and business will fight like dogs to prevent it from happening.
Which, is odd enough for me to say, seeing as with executive functioning stuff a 4-day workweek (perhaps leaving out Wednesday instead) would fit me well.
Additionally, just on shear economic cost vs efficiency, I can’t see a reason to prefer a combination of 4-day workweek + basic income in the short-medium term, given that the level of automation in the future is uncertain, over a low minimum wage plus direct-to-employee declining hourly livable wage subsidies.
Wage subsidies + low minimum wage would create lots of new jobs, which is a good sell politically, while also taking a lot of pressure off the poor and lower classes and giving them a lot more leverage. Businesses won’t fight it as hard, even though it will need a tax increase, since they’ll benefit from lower labor costs at the low end. It multiplies government spending with private spending for a larger potential effect. It can also be rolled out incrementally in different amounts to test out just how much economic efficiency is lost.
There are other potential advantages, I really should write a post on it specifically, but it doesn’t seem to be getting much coverage vs UBI. I think the Republicans might support it as their alternative to UBI come 2024/2028.
But, if we leave race out of it… the fact that nearly all land has been taken by violence undermines the idea of “well this was violently transferred” in principle, I don’t think it makes the case that the Japanese government cannot opt to restrict immigration, since all land ownership is effectively created by force of arms anyway. Even by the basis of “well some specific Japanese might object,” there is almost never going to be complete unity of opinion in government, so their objection does not necessarily invalidate the entire project, especially if emigration is permitted and there are states to emigrate to.
In fact, there is a thriving market in governance already, with hundreds of options to choose from. As criticisms of “but the market doesn’t have what I want” can be shut down as the market not being obligated to supply it, so too, here.
There is an idea, in some circles, that parents effectively own their children. This risks leading to various abuses, and also doesn’t line up with all moral intuitions. On the other hand, most children do not have the capabilities, including executive function, to adequately evaluate and act on long-term preferences that will become important when they become adults.
I propose a rather simple-but-vague model that has no doubt been proposed before. The child is effectively held in a trust owned by their future self. The duty of the parents, therefore, is to safely deliver a well-developed adult to be inherited at the point of hand-off. They are the trust’s operators, not the trust’s owners, and thus they have a variety of duties, abilities, and limitations.
A parent can have vaccines administered. They can’t remove a significant portion of the child’s body, or demand a tattoo of their choice. They can enact ordinary disciplinary measures, but not abusive ones. They can require that the child attend school and do well at it, but they are not allowed to engage in pure ideological indoctrination. And, if they fail to meet the terms, they can be removed from administration of the metaphorical trust.
The exact details might vary. In many ways this is what people are acting on already - thus why Child Protective Services exists in the first place - but it isn’t explicitly specified. I outline it here mostly so that it can be brought up as a counter-model when people suggest either ownership of children, or treating children as atomistic adults with fully-formed executive functioning and experience.
btw what is the Official Counterpoint to Japan not taking immigrants?
is it that their circumstances are different, or that they’re just super racist and not an example to emulate?
Japan is super racist.
I honestly did not think this point was up to any debate at all.
I deal with this problem by not trying to move to Japan, they can be as racist on their own island as they want.
Yeah, but that hits a wall under the modern moral climate, where it’s implicitly argued that foreigners have a right to immigrate to, essentially, anywhere, but particularly to developed nations. The idea of “the Japanese on their own island” has the audacity to suggest collective ownership of a nation-state for the benefit of an exclusive group - the old Nationalist model.
A model that I actually approve of, minus the racism, but one that now would mark me as right-wing, even though I don’t consider myself right-wing.
Yes, this is my view.
The Japanese don’t have the “right” to “be racist on their own island”, if that means excluding immigrants. All this amounts to is placing the whims of the collective (the alleged ownership of the islands by the Japanese race as a whole) over the rights of the individual: i.e. the right of individual Japanese to invite immigrants to work for them and to sell or rent property to them.
Suppose a group of Japanese racists get together and start a corporation. That corporation buys a small island, and and allows its owners to live on the island, so long as they are Japanese. Land is portioned out based on stake in the corporation.
This is not a covenant, because owners of the corporation can sell to whoever they want. Similarly, the corporation could, by majority vote, sell the island, or allow non-Japanese owners to live there. There is no condition that restricts the use of the land in perpetuity ( @theunitofcaring raised this objection the last time this came up).
However, so long as a majority of the owners of the corporation don’t want non-Japanese living on the island, they can’t. And practically, the rule won’t change unless the owners become less racist over time and generations, or wealthy anti-racist activists buy them out, fairly compensating the racists for being prevented from satisfying their preference. Or somewhat fairly, anyway; I’m not quite sure how only needing a majority stake affect the cost of buying them out. That’s a question for someone in murders and executions.
Do the Japanese racists have the right to do that? If not, why not? And what is the minimum change to the scheme that would make it within their rights, in your opinion?
Conversely, if your do think that would be within their rights, I suppose your objection to the current restriction on immigration to Japan is that it’s not the Japanese’s island?
That would be fine, if they acquired the land voluntarily.
What’s not fine with the Japanese government doing that is that it didn’t acquire the land that way.
And a big difference is that if they are restricted to acquiring the land voluntarily, that would greatly limit the amount of it that they could practically obtain. But supposing hypothetically that this weren’t true and that freedom of contract led to one private “government” owning all the land, then that would be a strong point of having a “public” government to limit their ability to do that.
By that logic nearly all land on Earth in private hands could not be considered “voluntarily acquired”.
Surely the benefit to high-skilled wages and loss to low-skilled wages is an artifact of the legal regime under which high-skilled workers are the only ones allowed to come in most cases?
Not if Frédéric Docquier, Çağlar Özden, and Giovanni Peri are right:
… emigration, which entails the loss of talent and brains in much larger proportion than the loss of unskilled workers, is the real threat for unskilled workers left behind, even in some OECD countries. Less educated workers in Cyprus, Malta, Ireland, New Zealand, and Portugal all lost between 1 and 6% of their wages because of the flight of highly educated emigrants. While net emigration, especially of college educated individuals, may be a symptom of economic malaise and not its cause, it certainly directly contributes to lower productivity and wages of the remaining workers.
As I understand it, Ireland and Portugal had freedom of movement within the EU, and most of their emigrants went to the EU, so the effect shouldn’t be an artifact of a legally-discriminatory regime.
And the same effect appeared in simulations across 2000 and 2007, across a host of EU countries, including Luxembourg, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, France, and the Netherlands, in addition to the countries of the eastern and southern European periphery.
I think the hypothesized mechanism here is plausible: high-skilled workers have positive externalities, which helps raise the wages of complementary low-skilled workers. If you drain a country of its high-skilled workers, it should hurt the wages of native low-skilled workers.
And because high-skilled workers are inherently more mobile and employable than low-skilled workers, they have a higher propensity to emigrate even when the target country’s legal regime is non-discriminatory.
This table is pre-accession for nearly every country but Ireland, but the table shows the same disparity for Greece, Portugal, and Spain – Greece had a 0.3% emigration rate during the 1990s, but a 4.6% emigration rate for college graduates – and I suspect it would show the same disparity in post-communist Europe post-EU accession.
Interesting.
But there are other legal barriers to the employment of low-skilled workers which would discourage them from moving, even within the EU; e.g. the minimum wage.
Also money, it costs money to move, to temporarily live in new places while finding a job, to find new insurance, to survive while learning new rules or a new language…
There is an awful lot of friction that isn’t just government interference. And of course, there are ways to reconcile lowering the minimum wage with employment of low-skill workers, but not with perfect freedom of movement.
no offense but “family is the people you choose to surround yourself with and love you dearly” will literally ALWAYS be a better theme and a better concept than “love the family you were arbitrarily stuck with because they’re related to you”
because there are some obvious inequalities and injustices in how the traditional family is structured, it’s prone to some well-known abuses, AND even without those, the former model is a lot more appealing in a lot of ways, for the obvious reason that elective affinities are usually going to be a lot more rewarding than accidental, arbitarry ones
BUT
i think a huge amount of the appeal of the latter, and something that would be dangerous to lose, is that it’s a guarantee of warm relations, or at least warm relations of a certain type, that can’t exist in a frame where everything is entirely voluntary.
the idea that EVERYBODY, at least in principle, gets a few people who will be socially pressured to be loyal to them (whether or not they like each other, etc) is an emotional safety net. and, just as there are people who are especially vulnerable to abuses of the family-as-involuntary-loyalty model, there are people who would be especially vulnerable to a world that was more atomistic in terms of emotional and social relations (even assuming there was a decent welfare state, which of course in most historical circumstances there haven’t been.)
as history keeps on going (assuming we don’t kill ourselves) hopefully we’ll develop institutions that balance all these concerns, but i think it’s worth considering what the appeals of all the various models are
Parks & Rec, Pretty Little Liars and the Fast & Furious films all exist in the same universe
And SCANDAL WTF
Oh jeez, SCANDAL….
….and BATTLESHIP too, apparently. It’s a goddamn conspiracy
Oh god. He’s on REVENGE too. How deep does this rabbit-hole go….
Oh my god. DEXTER.
THE ACTUAL NEWS
I read an interview with this guy (who is a real news anchor), and he said he told his acting agent that he is ONLY interested in parts where he plays a new anchor. This is no coincidence. This is by design.
what is his plan
living the dream
Lmaooo
WE’RE IN THE SAME UNIVERSE AS PARKS AND REC!
Oh, this is just beautiful.
Reading various politicians talk about consumer power in healthcare makes me really want to take all of them and make them shadow and then try to do the work of some medical social workers. Like I just feel all these plans really underestimate how little executive function sick people and their families have at the time they need to get health care.
