Anonymous asked:
slatestarscratchpad answered:
The real answer is “respect”, but I’m not sure how to operationalize this.
I’ve never been good at treating “the dignity of all human life” and “respect for everyone just because they are human” as anything other than slogans. Nobody deserves to suffer, and nobody deserves to have their rights taken away, but I think of “respect” and “dignity” as different than that, as necessarily involving desert. To respect someone in a nontrivial way is to assess them as valuable and full of good qualities. If you “respect” everyone no matter their qualities, then “respect” is meaningless, like giving a gold medal to everyone regardless of performance.
The white working class certainly has some good qualities - some of the auto workers I meet are among the hardest-working and most dependable people I know - but again, I feel like sticking my thumb on the balance makes respect false and meaningless. If I think hard enough, I can respect some qualities in almost everyone - but it’s hard for me to deny that there are a lot of things about the white working class I don’t respect, and if I gave them special treatment in the Respect Sweepstakes just because they have a lot of votes, I would think that’s pretty dishonest too.
I think this ties into the question of “does the white working class want special treatment”? That is, if all they want is to be respected the same amount as every other group, then fine, tell the #KillAllWhites people to tone it down and then everyone will be happy. If they want to be respected more than other groups, obviously that’s a problem and the source of this whole “the white working class is trying to defend their privilege” sort of thing.
I think there’s kind of a middle ground, which is that most white areas in the US until recently had very low black populations and practically zero populations most other minority groups. The white working class was alone, they could do whatever they wanted, they could practice their own shared culture in institutions geared completely to them, and they were pretty happy with it.
Then immigrants came in and they faced demands - both literal demands from elites and figurative demands from the exigencies of society - to deal with it in ways that they didn’t like. And I don’t think what they want here is a world where they rule everything and everything happens their way and there are lots of immigrants but the immigrants are second-class citizens. I think their demand is “Look, we were very happy here with no immigrants, we’re less happy with more immigrants, there’s no reason why we should have to take immigrants, why are you insisting that we do?”
As far as I know, nobody has really addressed this except the open borders people, who say “taking immigrants is a moral obligation”. Anyone short of open borders people has no answer to this except to confuse it with the sort of racism where they want a society with lots of races and themselves on the top, which most white people reject and understandably get angry when they’re accused of.
On the other hand, most Trump voters are in areas without many immigrants (and for that matter, without many blacks), making racism and principled-immigration-opposition equally surprising. I don’t know if the immigration aspect is completely metaphorical (the invasion of incomprehensible foreign forces into a world they once understood), if it’s demographic/political (Republicans would have won the last umpteen elections if Hispanics didn’t vote, and a country ruled entirely by Republicans would look very different), if they’re happy with their own hometowns but angry about what they view as the state of the wider country, or if they’re just very confused.
But I think what they want is respect along the lines of “Yes, you were here first, except for the Indians who don’t count, and that gives you the right to determine who you invite or don’t invite into your country. We won’t let new people in unless you like and approve of them and think they’re a good fit for your community.”
Since that’s never gonna happen, maybe we can just give them a basic income instead.
No no no no no.
Basic income is ABSOLUTELY NOT a substitute for respect. Shoving blue collar Whites off into the same category as ghetto Blacks and refugees and the non-working class is absolutely not a solution.
When someone says, “I want jobs, I want to support my family, I want to stand on my own two feet and be respected” the answer is not to sign a small government check just barely big enough to survive on and hand it out to everyone, because doing that is an extremely sincere statement that 1. You cannot, will not, do not have the slightest interest in addressing their desires/needs. 2. You think they are identical to the welfare dependents they aim to not be like.
The works progress administration is a LOT closer to something that would actually satisfy the needs, if you’re barking up the “throw vast stacks of government money at the problem” tree.
Okay but at some point we’re going to have to own up to the fact that we have to choose between a mostly efficient free market and a less efficient, less free market in which we create a bunch of arcane laws to give people busywork, right? Being mad at democrats for taking away the jobs implies that there would be jobs if the democrats hadn’t interfered, or that they’re blocking some measure that would help rebuild rural economies. As far as I can tell, neither of those things are true. In fact, I haven’t heard a single policy suggestion for how we are supposed to “address the needs” of Trump voters other than by giving them welfare. This is just the same “job creation :D” rhetoric we’ve been hearing for years, and it’s just as vague and counterproductive and full of false promises.
I don’t disagree that it’s not obvious how to actually “create jobs” or that most political promises to do so don’t create results.
But… You’re all smart people. You’re a bunch of entrepreneur/philanthropist wannabes. So look at it that way; how can you monetize the mass of mechanically skilled workers in rural America? Build a business model that uses that.
Or figure out a revitalization plan on philanthropy model.
Or, hell, figure out how to eliminate the small towns. Set up a refugee program. Heck, again, there’s precedent for that in the Great Depression too.
The point I want to make is that it might turn out that all possible fixes do more harm than good, and that if there is a way to monetize the mass of mechanically skilled workers I have a hard time imagining that the market won’t uncover it for anything other than, like, public infrastructure projects that can’t necessarily be relied upon as a source of employment long term. And if it turns out that there aren’t any good policies to put into place, we need to be honest about that and not enact bad ones as a form of appeasement.
You guys are Rationalists! You are the people who want to build god and conquer death and Save The World™! You are the people of self-improvement and “growth mindset” and a thousand crazy ideas to solve the world’s problems!
That you run the white flag up at this problem so fast you break the sound barrier does not give lie to the suspicion that you are at heart just a Silicon Valley cargo cult incapable of even contemplating any problem that can’t be mapped onto a White Savior complex.
Rather than argue about whether or not we should be able to come up with something, I think the virtuous thing here would be to try and actually come up with something for at least five minutes. (I am proud to call myself a rationalist and have been successfully insultsniped by the implication there is a thing we cannot think about.)
So, I think I can come up with lots of jobs people could be paid to do that wouldn’t be busywork. They wouldn’t be efficient jobs - if it was worth it to pay them to do it, the market would probably already be doing it - but if we have the money to pay them a universal basic income, then we have the money to employ them doing a job which is paid a salary identical to universal basic income. And that might be a legitimately better idea, because it gives them a sense of being Upstanding Hardworking Members Of The Community that is necessary for a lot of people’s self-esteem.
They could work on big public infrastructure projects, they could build monuments, they could build houses, but those things cost money for the bricks involved. Better ideas might be… they could sweep roads and clean public buildings and dig ditches.
But even with that kind of stuff, there’s a limit to how much busywork we can come up with. What I think might work is to give them jobs caring for each other.
My first idea was that caring work is genuinely important work that isn’t busywork, and doesn’t cost money to pay for bricks, and you won’t ever run out of. It doesn’t take a lot of skill to help elderly people get to the shops and back, or help disabled people move around. And if we had a huge army of state-funded carers, we might be able to provide carers not just for elderly or physically disabled people, but for students who want someone to help them get out of bed in the morning, hassled teachers who want a hand carrying piles of books around, dyslexic people who want someone to read aloud to them so they don’t have to read, lonely old people who just want someone to chat to… we might create a society where you request a bit of help, and someone on the work-for-universal-basic-income-program shows up and gives you a bit of help.
But, like, I recognise that not everyone is as Hufflepuff as I am, and some people won’t find carrying an elderly disabled person’s shopping for them meaningful and fulfilling, they’ll find it demeaning.
So then I thought: give them jobs as community-builders. Pay them to run soup kitchens that bring people in their communities together to eat. Pay them to organise quiz nights at the pub and football tournaments on the local green. Pay them to organize town hall meetings. Pay them to run a local chess society. You kill two birds with one stone: you improve their communities, and you give them fulfilling work.
Separately, something else we might consider is a land program.
I have no idea if this has ever been tried, but imagine taking all the rural parts of the country, and also taking all the working class people who want jobs, and dividing up the land among the people. Each of them might get a pretty small plot - like a kilometre squared or something - but it would be theirs. If they want to take pride in something, and do hard work, and feel like they’re contributing something, well, there’s their land. They can build a house on it, they can farm it and sell the goods, they can join together with a bunch of adjacent landowners and try to build a theme park. Most of them will fail, but we don’t care, because the point of the employment wasn’t for them to be successful, it was for them to feel like they do something. Some of them may succeed and be awesome for the economy.
There’s a bunch of obvious issues with this, including the cost of acquiring the land from whoever currently owns it and isn’t using it, and monitoring the environmental impact of whatever they do to the countryside we give them, but you come up with something better.
I think one issue might be that these people don’t just want jobs, they want to feel like the jobs earn them something. They want to feel like because they’re doing a job, they’re better off than a welfare recipient. But while “if we have enough money to pay them universal basic income, we have enough money to pay them a salary equivalent to universal basic income in exchange for busywork employment” is trivially true (since we don’t actually care about whether the job gets done well so we’re not exactly going to pay for much oversight), “if we have enough money to pay them universal basic income, we have enough money to pay the people who do jobs slightly more universal basic income than the people who don’t” might not be. And I’m not OK with forcing all UBI recipients to do the busywork - some of them won’t be capable of doing the busywork. A lot of people who end up unemployed are unemployed because they can’t work, whether because of disability or whatever else.
I don’t know if they would be satisfied with jobs that pay a salary exactly equivalent to what they’d be getting if they were on UBI. I think it might plausibly be worth paying them a little extra to do the job, even though we don’t actually want the job done and this is a giant waste of money, because… it’s not a waste of money to give people a sense that they’re doing something fulfilling, any more than it’s a waste of money to provide them with healthcare or education or the UBI we were planning on offering them anyway. They’re human beings, they have needs.
The community building thing might work, at least for some significant chunk of people. The caretaker wouldn’t; I think it’s not just Hufflepuffiness that makes that appealing, AFAICT most people find it demeaning (also it requires a lot of emotional labor in the older sense of performative emotion, which is draining and which many people are terrible at).
The best idea that came up when my house was discussing this election night was unnecessary infrastructure. Building roads that few people will use, laying down rail, reparing roads etc. It would have a marginally-useful result, if probably not actually worth the cost, and construction is one of the prototypical categories of “good jobs”. (Rebuilding national parks, trail-blazing, and similar things are a related category that we know worked pretty well.)
As to @isaacsapphire‘s claim that this should be easier than things we’ve already set out to do: those are mostly-technical problems, with plausibly technical solutions. This problem is a purely social one - ennui, but with added poverty and more social stigma - and those are much harder. (Well, we can fix the added poverty.)
@plain-dealing-villain @wayward-sidekick I get the sense that people are asking specifically for jobs that will be available long term (as in, like, preferably multiple generations). Merely providing people with an opportunity to perform services for money feels like it misses the point of what people actually want to get out of a labor economy (social status, structure, something they can teach to their kids) besides just being paid. (I could be totally wrong on this.)
You guys missed an option over the medium-term here, which is to cut down the minimum wage to almost zero, then issue a declining, per-hour, direct wage subsidy directly to workers. At $0.50-$2/hr, businesses and communities will *find* something to do with all these people. It also won’t be a total economic loss, and would probably help sort out the inner cities as well, and wage subsidies are favored by economists.
You do have to prohibit it from applying to exported goods/services and government positions, though.
