w.r.t. physician shortage, I keep repeating myself but US needs to follow the MBBS model that many countries follow. There's absolutely no reason why the rest of the world allows students to get into med school right after high school and finish in 5 years vs the US system of 4 years of undergrad/pre-med + 4 years of med school. It severely limits the pool of students who want to become a doctor when you can join a FAANG company right after undergrad (or in some cases, after high school). 3 - 4 years of extra school is a big deal and it's not like American doctors are better than doctors elsewhere.
Having gotten bounced out of the pipeline after pre-med myself, I've always had a radical take on what should be done:
1. Merge the nursing and medicine professions. "Enlisted and commissioned" works for the military, but makes no sense in medicine.
2. Create a program of study with 2-year increments. Each increment is paired as (roughly) one year of classroom work plus one year of clinical.
3. Each increment qualifies you for a specific scope of practice. The first gets you to a basic nurse/med-tech level, the next gets you to a PA/MSN level, and the third gets you to MD/DNP level. After that, you go into specialties. [ed: The specialties can have varying lengths and clinical requirements, but they also help get rid of the absurdity of the matching system and return it to a more market-based mechanism: You specialize in whatever 4th-increment program you can get into, nothing more, nothing less.]
[Also Ed: 4. Each increment serves as its own on/off ramp: There are entrance exams to get in, and qualification exams to get out. You're immediately qualified for jobs all across the system, no need for residencies or fellowships/internships/whatever. Your resume simply speaks for itself.]
PS: The benefit of this system is that it vastly expands the workforce while making sure that they're qualified for whatever level they're working at.
It does this by INTEGRATING the entire workforce, so they're all speaking the same language and performing similar kinds of care that builds into a hierarchy of experience and capability. So, you don't have to call a nurse to do this but a doctor for that, you just have people performing and supervising the work at different levels.
And it also does it by getting people into and out of the pipeline quickly, with well-defined but flexible scopes of practice. You waste fewer resources having people take decades of training just to find out that they're crap at something; instead, you get them into appropriate scopes of care and see how they do at the early levels.
I think these are great ideas. Hopefully, policy wonks who focus on healthcare and college education start advocating changes based on these ideas. I'm not very optimistic that med schools, AMA, etc. will make these changes because they benefit from the status quo and are not known to act in the best interests of patients/consumers so only external pressure from politicians and voters will force them to change.
I have the opposite framing of the basic income study. People were given an income equal to that of a full time minimum wage job, and 98 per cent of them kept working.
The minimum wage in Illinois is $14/hour; if a full-time job is 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, then that comes out to $28k/year. This study gave participants only $12k/year.
(Admittedly, the minimum wage in Texas is only $7.25/hour, i.e. $14.5k/year, which is much closer to the UBI amount. But even then, that means that UBI *plus* minimum wage is more than double UBI alone. I'd expect it to be worth it for almost everyone.)
1. What percentage of the American workforce is considered overworked?
IE, working 2 to 3 jobs, and they are destroying their will to live. They have no vacation, zero time with their family or friends, and generally life sucks because they are working 10 to 14 hour days.
2. Why is a 2% point drop in people working "large negative effect"? That seems very small. Plus, what is the nuance there... did they start secondary education? Are they looking for another job? Do they need a break because their mind/body is destroyed by overwork?
I don't like the idea of basic income, but your response to it feels very reflective and not like your normal posts. A 2% drop seems like nothing, plus I want to know the specifics. Is that two people in the study? 4? Tell me why it is significant.
If we are going to "harvest" the workforce for the best possible outcome it seems like we need to educate more people. And to do that we need them to have some stability so they can feel they can go back to school, to be able to have the mind-cycles to actually think about their future and what they want. Or we can work them to death in a low paid job that robots can do.
The more engineers and thinkers we can produce, the better that is. It is one reason I am so frustrated over minimum wage. If we paid an adequate minimum wage and had federally mandated vacation I think people could more easily get out of the poverty trap and actually move up the economic ladder.
I don't think "more work" is automatically better for human progress. Smarter work by a well educated workforce seems a lot better. And having enough income to feel able to have babies also seems to be key at this day in age.
IE, if two people earning minimum wage get married, but got a basic income which helps them secure housing and stability, and then they have 2 to 3 kids, and those kids are not broken/stressed like a lot of lower income families. They get an education and become engineers to a greater degree.
I don't like a basic income, I'd prefer we have a real minimum wage that allows people to live decently (and actual vacation time). I think that not only helps the birth rate stabilize but results in people who can actually think about what they are doing in life past trying not to drown.
Were any of the 2% mothers who decided that they could finally stay home to care for young children? Or care for someone else (elderly parent, infirm, &c.)?
Listening to another report on the study today they claimed that a lot of the decrease in hours worked was single mothers spending more time with their kids. Noah seems a bit overly dismissive here.
Yes. Given the statistics regarding children of single mothers (higher crime rates, lower grades, higher likelihood of neither working nor being in school, etc. and generally less success in life) anything that helps single moms helps society.
~Single parents: Recipients who were single parents at the time of enrollment were about 3.9 percentage points less likely to be employed and worked an average of 2.8 hours less per week than single parent control participants~
Interesting that this was in the same article as the story about higher wages leading to more automation and, I assume, lower employment. Ideally increased productivity leads to the option to work less, if some of the profits go to supporting a basic income, which leads to more leisure.
John Maynard Keynes predicted that his grandchildren would work only 15 hours a week, since the nation was becoming so wealthy. It's my theory that drastically increased income inequality and status competition has prevented the decrease in work, something many people would welcome it seems.
5.2% of Americans hold multiple jobs. But that alone doesn't tell us they are "overworked" per se, since I imagine a fair number of them are working two part time jobs instead of a single full time job.
Thanks! Ya, is there no good econ stat trying to nail this down? Weirdly I saw Monster.com's econ team say it was 37% of the US population lol.
I'd be curious how Noah views overwork for salary employees. IE, I had family stuck working every Sunday for 4 hours for x+ years in a salary job. It really hurt his will to leave and life enjoyment. That environment rolls downhill to family/kids/social institions.
Is the point of the economic system to pull every last drop of your will to live? Or some type of balance for life?
But I just want to know how we get to STNG economics. Capitalism + full use of everyone's capabilities.
When I was running a medium sized company, one thing that really shook my world view was that I kept promoting people into new positions and they grew and handled it. Sometimes I didn't think they were ready, but with some support they almost all did a great job. We def had a few ethical problems we had to sort out quick... but it has made me consider that anyone can do almost anything. Which also makes me super worried, how many amazing human beings do we have managing cash registers, being depressed and stuck in video games, etc, all they need is some type of challenge / interesting oppurtunity. It is depressing to think about how much human potentional we are wasting.
Well-said. But I actually would argue that a UBI, if high enough, is better than a hard minimum wage. It gives the working class more bargaining power for higher wages, minus the deadweight losses from rigidities of a hard minimum wage, covers more people, and like it or not, it is the way of the future thanks to the coming Robot Apocalypse.
“States are starting to see the value of letting internationally licensed physicians help fill their doctor shortages.”
At the end of the Vietnam War, Nebraska recruited Vietnamese physicians who were refugees. They were sent to UNO Medical Center for a short period to assess and/or improve their medical knowledge. These physicians signed contracts, agreeing to be sent to isolated, underserved counties for a period of years. Some never left those communities. They not only were respected, they were revered. Some of these physicians complained that small-town stores didn’t cash their checks. Nebraska is a Red State.
“But if you’re a poor country, you can A) absorb a lot of foreign technology without having to invent it yourself . . .”
And like Poland, you can absorb two million of Russia’s young, educated, and tech-savvy refugees who fled from Putin and his Ukrainian War. Quite the generational gift.
Re "It’s probably the phones", a couple thoughts on the Unintended Consequences of The Enlightenment—
(1) There is quite a bit of research/analyses from psychology researcher Peter Gray and statistician Aaron Brown raising significant questions about the soundness of the research conducted by Zach Rausch (and Jon Haidt). Brown argues, for instance, that the majority of the 301 papers cited in Rausch's research document "are garbage" and Peter Gray expresses similar concerns and also argues that the rises in adolescent anxiety and depression predate the advent of smartphones.
(2) It’s probably contraception, not the phones. The premise of banning phones (and the consequent elimination of access to social media) for children, the centerpiece of the growing crusade among governors and school superintendents across the country prompted by NYU Professor Haidt's bestseller The Anxious Generation, is that children will be able to return to a healthy, idyllic childhood centered on free-play once freed of screen addiction. Jon Haidt agrees with Peter Gray's assessment that the abundance of free-play engaged in by children up to around 1990 was foundational to the personal and inter-personal skills and characteristics necessary for positive mental health in adolescents and adults. Haidt and Rausch, however, seem to ignore the concerning fact that the requisite playmates for such an environment no longer exist — the decline in fertility rate since the '60s and '70s that provided not just a household full of siblings (as a Boomer, I had four during that time), but whole neighborhoods of such homes, has created the current ubiquity of single- and two-children families. These, combined with the growing dominance of school-oriented, adult-supervised activities, have eliminated free-play from our world. What happens to kids when we take their phones away? (Rausch and Haidt do not seem willing to discuss this — I wish I had discussed this with Robin Hanson when I had kabob with him a couple years ago)
I worry that Rausch and Haidt are causing attention and resources to be diverted to solving the wrong problem and that the real problem is much larger than phones (What if the successes of the Enlightenment and Classical Liberalism have brought us to this point?)
> The premise of banning phones [...] for children [...] is that children will be able to return to a healthy, idyllic childhood centered on free-play once freed of screen addiction."
This is such a bad faith reading Haidt that it makes it hard to take your comment seriously and makes me hesitate to bother even clicking your links.
Considering Haidt has written “If parents don’t replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity, then banning devices will feel like deprivation, not the opening up of a world of opportunities.”
And has a post on his substack literally titled "Why The Play-Based Childhood Requires More Than Just Putting Down the Phone".
I think you reinforce Jim's point. If that's the extent of Haidt's response he's glossing over the problem, or ignoring it, or punting on it. It's hardly a "bad faith" reading of anything.
Neither your quote nor the essay you cite address Jim's point about birth rates. I scan read "Why The Play-Based Childhood Requires More Than Just Putting Down the Phone" and it doesn't mention number of children or birth rates anywhere. It argues that the biggest problem with getting children to play outside is the safetyism culture of calling the police when children are seen unsupervised.
Where has Haidt addressed the socialization difficulties caused by there not being as many children as there used to be?
Tran, I regret that I might have created the impression that I'm intentionally misreading Jon — please chalk it up to not doing the best job of communicating. I note that Jon agrees with Peter Gray re the need for "real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity" — after all, he is co-founder of Let Grow with Peter and Lenore Skenazy.
My point is that Jon and Lenore, while very correctly valuing such a childhood of in-person interaction and engagement, are not acknowledging what is to me a very obvious challenge: there are no playmates!
My classrooms are full of Only-Children and students with only one sibling. Multiply this dearth of built-in playmates by every household in the neighborhood and you end up with no one to play pick-up basketball or baseball or soccer or kick-the-can or four-square, no "real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity".
They also agree with Peter (and me) that the Cult of Smart (as Freddie deBoer terms it) has created a very harmful obsession with all-things-academic. This has contributed to a huge decrease in unsupervised play time and an increase in activities closely supervised by adults for the relatively few kids who do exist.
Jon, Zach, and Lenore have not addressed this. That could mean I am just off-base and that the continuous decline in the fertility rate and family size — combined with a hyper-focus on School — do not present the situation I fear.
I live in Vietnam which has low fertility and far more obsession with all things academic than America. Kids go out in the street and play with other kids unsupervised by adults every single day of the week here.
It isn't clear to my why the argument seems to be that they need to have lots of siblings to play.
Don't get me wrong, I am sympathetic to where you are coming from. Play requires a critical mass of kids. I just don't think the factors you mention are any more important than, say, the increase in US house sizes since 1950 or the widespread adoption of air conditioning.
Why do kids here in Vietnam play in the street? Because houses are small and crappy. There is no space to play in the house. There is no air conditioning, so even though it is hot outside it isn't really any better inside. They share a bedroom (often with their parents), no kid gets their own bedroom. There are no fancy amenities like a backyard or pool. The refrigerator & pantry isn't full of snacks and drinks.
So they go outside.
My relatives in the US have kids who never leave the house because the house is huge, has full climate control, the kids all have their own rooms, there's a pool in the backyard, etc.
Tran, thank you for clarifying your position. If I understand you accurately, while you agree with me that a critical mass of children is a prerequisite for productive play, it's unclear from your statements whether you think free-play is important to good mental health — I believe it is (as do Jon Haidt, Zach Rausch, Lenore Skenazy, and Peter Gray).
You do raise a good point relative to my assessment that the number of siblings we have, relatives or not, plays as significant of a role in the prevalence of free-play in contemporary American culture as I believe it does. Perhaps there are other elements of growing affluence that are just as or more important, ones that are offsetting the effects of significantly declining fertility, increased schooling, and decreased family size.
I don't follow the logic of following your statement "Play requires a critical mass of kids" with disagreement that a low number of siblings in general negatively affects attainment of that critical mass. It seems to me that fewer siblings in general = fewer children in general = fewer playmates in general.
Your observations about larger house size and more AC and growing affluence in general prompt me to consider those as additional factors, but I still believe that smaller family size has a much greater, negative influence on the availability of contemporary free-play opportunities.
I'd like to see more on the role of organized "travel sports." These take up as much as 20 hours a week and involve much adult supervision and a decrease in independent and creative play. But it seems like all the parents are doing it, leaving little time for just hanging out and trying to deal with boredom like we did in the good old days.
There are many other problems beyond the low quality of their research. Most obviously, enforcement. Governments can't even keep phones out of prisons, how are they planning to stop kids using them? The only possible way to enforce it would be an enormous surveillance and identity checking infrastructure that would be absurdly expensive, have many totalitarian consequences, would be very inconvenient and would in the end not work anyway because you're going to get lots of parents who don't even agree with it. If you want the war on drugs times ten, that's a good way to get it. It's entirely typical of left-wing academics to think all of these problems are out of scope.
And in the end even in the success case it probably won't work. The study Noah cites continues the tradition of low quality studies. It was only for two weeks and the way they decided if any real problems had been solved was to do a questionnaire. This is a heavily self-selected group and for all we know any improvement (if real) might just be because the parents were suddenly focused on their kids for a change.
I agree with Alistair's point about enforcement. I spent 20 years in high school classrooms and have seen my employer attempt to limit and ban phones. I've also researched whether school bans have worked over the past decade and can find no studies to support success.
We should also ask at what point does increasing the role of the Nanny State in children's lives outweigh the purported benefits of the actions?
Already, students do not enjoy the constitutional protections of basic human rights when they step on campuses — no freedom of expression, no protection from unreasonable search and seizure, limited self-protection, no due process — and now we take away wholesale the personal and community relationships they enjoy via their phones.
Add into the mix the K-12 Surveillance/Therapeutic State (see Abigail Shrier's work), and we end up raising risk averse humans with few, if any, personal and interpersonal skills that are necessary to the positive mental health outcomes Jon rightly pursues.
More than 50 million children give up so much at the hands of the state daily — at what point do measures like state-enforced bans on phones and social media aid and abet the existing factors that already do not support good mental health?
Unfortunately the US Baby Boom cannot be used as an example for today's societies, as it was predicated on the almost paradisiacal economic conditions that were the result of the US being the "last man standing" in World War II.
An absence of foreign competition (either still not developed or in ruins from the war) combined with the recent proliferation of car ownership (which had opened up vast quantities of cheap land for housing construction) meant that even low-IQ men could earn a wage sufficient to support an entire family.
And even with those optimal economic conditions the Baby Boom still had its downside: with even the worst-quality men able to breed the '50s was notorious for its "juvenile delinquents", and the crime wave of the '60s resulted when those delinquents came of age and became adults.
And surely the "growing dominance of school-oriented, adult-supervised activities" is down to two consequences of relative economic decline:
1) Rocketing housing costs made two incomes essential and thus mean mothers have far less time to engage in activities with their children themselves, and
2) Many of these activities are ones that parents encourage their children to take part in to ultimately help them in a labour market that globalization and automation have made far more competitive than in the past.
I am familiar with that argument. Unfortunately, there is really no hard empirical evidence conclusively answering that question. I would hazard a guess that the causal arrow is at least somewhat bidirectional though. Particularly under neoliberalism and its massively increasing inequality since the 1970s by design, which is the real culprit IMHO.
If you look at graphs of women's workforce participation: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1qy4e vs a graph of median house price: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1qy4V, you see that women started entering the labor force in large numbers well before the start of the run up in housing prices. Not conclusive, I'd agree, but certainly suggestive.
Hmmm. Looks like women's labor force participation peaked around 2000 and declined slightly since then, yet housing costs have still continued to skyrocket since then unabated.
Exactly. Peaked around 2000 and leveled off just below that peak, which means that a large percent of households have 2 earners who can bid the price of supply constrained housing well past where 1 earner households can. Since they can and need a home, they do.
The culture of safetyism is indeed the real problem, but it is a bit reaching to blame that on contraception, much less the Enlightenment and Classic Liberalism. There is no law of nature that says that having fewer kids must necessarily lead to a culture of safetyism. Going back to the bad old days when women were brood mares (and men were work horses, by the way), is not a solution.
Right. But I am not proposing anything. I am simply pointing out that the availability of safe contraception beginning in the late '60s and early '70s has permitted women (and their families) to opt for fewer children. Which they did. Unsurprisingly.
The Enlightenment successfully promoted values centered around individual liberty, which could be argued to have led to the feminist movement of the '60s, which has led to women being able to pursue personal choices in education and careers. Which they have. All over the world.
Not to be overly simplistic, but there are theories that the increase in safetyism regarding parenting could be that individual children are valued more than they used to be when 5+ child families were more common (Offspring Deflation?). Add into the mix Doomerism, parental narcissism, the rise of CNN and 24/7 TV (remember Adam Walsh?), and many other factors associated with growing wealth, discretionary time, educational attainment, and an increased focus on the value of the individual, we end up with risk-averse children who are constantly surveilled by their parents with Life360 and their school counseling offices with software like Lightspeed and Gaggle.
Should we be surprised that this results in increasing anxiety and depression in adolescents as they realize they might have to move out of the safe places their homes have become?
I'm not proposing a solution to that because I don't have one. I'm simply pointing out that Jon Haidt doesn't have one either and his School Phone Ban Crusade is likely missing the point and diverting attention and resources away from solving the real problems.
Unionisation will also make it harder to hire and fire workers which makes it harder to change how the firm is run. This probably explains why there is slower adoption of technology in Europe relative to America. If you want to artificially increase wages to boost automation, welfare will probably be better than labour market regulations.
I don't think there is much evidence of this in economics literature. Are you making an assumption or do you actually have data? Not even sure that there is good data showing slower adoption of technology in Europe - are you talking about software, specific manufacturing? What kind of technology.
Just feels like a sweeping statement - be curious to see any actual studies/data.
IMO the UBI study perhaps indicates that we should instead think more in terms of early-life UBI.
IE, if a UBI can help level the playing field for teenagers and young adults to get the education they need, then great! We phase it out in their early 20s, and then they have to wait until retirement for the free money spigot to come back on again.
From what I've seen, the evidence linking smartphones to a rise in depression is underwhelming. I'm not saying smartphones are good for teen health or for anybody's health, but neither are television, cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, teen magazines, college admissions, and so on. It's just one other bad thing among a sea of bad things. To prove otherwise, you have to present actual causal evidence, and nobody has managed to do this so far. This actually seems pretty telling to me. Socal media as a source of great eveil isn't a new narrative and it's not like we're starved for data now like we were in the fifties when television was taking off. If smartphones are really are so bad, it should be very easy to find a large effect. So why haven't we yet? It's not like people aren't trying.
For the other studies on universal income, I’m not sure whether they found no effect or whether they merely didn’t find an effect. I haven’t had a chance to read your link on X. If they studies had a too-small sample, had insufficiently intense data collection, were poorly designed or just got unlucky, they might fail to detect an effect on labor participation by universal income. Also, I’m not sure how someone would design a study to affirmatively prove that universal income has no effect on labor participation. Seems hard to prove a negative.
I wonder how many basic income supporters are workaholics like me. I didn’t teach summer school this year and I have felt like I was bored to death since around July 4 and am excited to have a purpose in my day again.
It seems like a good insurance against the pretty low possibility that work won’t support me. But like a lot of normal people hate working.
The studies on the basic income confirm my view that a Job Guarantee program would be far better because the latter would induce structural changes in the labour market by helping to sustain higher employment, thereby strengthening the workers' position.
By contrast, UBI can, in some ways, be seen as welfare for capitalists. Now, more people can drive for Uber and work for TaskRabbit – at even lower wages! – because UBI subsidizes the meager paychecks earned by hustling for the sharing economy. The tech companies take home the profit and face even less pressure to pay a living wage to their non-employee employees. That is why you find so many Silicon Valley advocates for the basic income.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell would argue the opposite, namely, that JG is logistically unworkable in practice, and that UBI is far better, all things considered. As for the "Uber-ization of everything" or "gig economy", that genie is long since out of the bottle regardless, for better or worse, and actually makes UBI that much MORE necessary these days.
I just don't see it. UBI becomes a consolation prize for those whose lives are disrupted. Benefits still accrue to the designers and owners of the technologies, but now with less guilt and pushback about the collateral damage. The JG represents a chance to offset the collateral damage
I am not against a JG per se, *in addition* to UBI. But unless we want to create lots and lots of useless make-work, because reasons, we need to recognize that JG really has its limits.
I think there are loads of socially useful jobs that could be filled via a JG program. The public jobs bank could include a list of monitoring programs, rehabilitation programs, and public investment programs. The jobs will tackle: soil erosion, flood control, environmental surveys, species monitoring, park maintenance and renewal, removal of invasive species, sustainable agriculture problems in the United States, support for local fisheries, community supported agriculture (CSA) farms, community and rooftop gardens, tree planting, fire and other disaster prevention measures, weatherization of homes, and composting. Jobs can include: cleanup of vacant properties, reclamation of materials, restoration of public spaces, and other small infrastructure investments; establishment of school gardens, urban farms, co-working spaces, solar arrays, tool lending libraries, classes and programs, and community theaters; construction of playgrounds; restoration of historical sites; organization of carpooling programs, as well as recycling, reuse, and water-collection initiatives, food waste programs, and oral histories projects.
The JG can also support individuals and families, filling the particular need gaps they may be facing, notably elderly care; afterschool programs; and special programs for children, new mothers, at-risk youth, veterans, former inmates, and people with disabilities. Those are just a few crucial areas. I would hardly describe these as "make work" jobs.
Fair enough. That makes sense. But in practice it would still be hard to truly "guarantee" everyone such meaningful jobs to literally everyone who wants one. So why not simply both, JG and UBI? Then we won't need to worry about creating work for the sake of work.
My view is, let's get rid of all of the involuntary employment first, and then we can determine whether a UBI is required as well. I think there are a lot of negative externalities associated with a UBI, a lit of which I pointed our above
The point about hugher wages spurring additionsl investments in technology was a key insight of Seymour Melman, who argued that an economic ‘virtuous cycle’ emerges if you pay workers more, because competent managers will compensate for higher wages by using more and better machinery, and by improving the way work is organized, which will then lead to higher profits, which can lead to higher wages, leading to better machinery/organization of work, and so on. Indeed, Melman even argued that if you have strong unions, management will be forced to figure out more clever ways of organizing work than just trying to decrease wages.
“Second, the pandemic-instigated shift to work from home (WFH) raised the amenity value of employment in many jobs and for many workers.”
We’ll, a lot of workers were burning less gasoline via eliminating commutes. And at a time when the U.S. was producing record amounts oil and natural gas. Also, the time savings and mental fatigue may have made workers happier and more productive.
The UBI post is very interesting. Wage growth for lower income workers is often cited as a reason for bringing low skilled jobs back to the US. But I've always felt we should focus instead on helping low skilled people get training for the, call it, moderate skilled jobs that are in high demand, like CAD techs and welders. Have always wondered why they wouldn't take out a loan for a few grand, do a 6 month cert, and then use the presumably significantly higher earnings to pay off the relatively low amount those trainings cost. The counter-argument is that they are just more price sensitive and are reluctant to take that time off or roll the dice with a few grand in debt. But the fact that people would respond to getting relatively large cash infusions not by spending it to upskill but to work less and spend more time on leisure suggests that money and time are not why they don't upskill. Of course, this rests upon the assumption that the people in this study were more of the lower skilled segment of the population.
"The fact that the U.S. got away with bringing down inflation without hurting the economy implies that either A) there was a big shift in inflation expectations that became a self-fulfilling prophecy, or B) there was some sort of positive supply shock going on."
When all the models say something is going to happen, and it doesn't, you have to consider that
C) The conventional model is wrong about the relationship between interest rates, unemployment, and inflation.
w.r.t. physician shortage, I keep repeating myself but US needs to follow the MBBS model that many countries follow. There's absolutely no reason why the rest of the world allows students to get into med school right after high school and finish in 5 years vs the US system of 4 years of undergrad/pre-med + 4 years of med school. It severely limits the pool of students who want to become a doctor when you can join a FAANG company right after undergrad (or in some cases, after high school). 3 - 4 years of extra school is a big deal and it's not like American doctors are better than doctors elsewhere.
Having gotten bounced out of the pipeline after pre-med myself, I've always had a radical take on what should be done:
1. Merge the nursing and medicine professions. "Enlisted and commissioned" works for the military, but makes no sense in medicine.
2. Create a program of study with 2-year increments. Each increment is paired as (roughly) one year of classroom work plus one year of clinical.
3. Each increment qualifies you for a specific scope of practice. The first gets you to a basic nurse/med-tech level, the next gets you to a PA/MSN level, and the third gets you to MD/DNP level. After that, you go into specialties. [ed: The specialties can have varying lengths and clinical requirements, but they also help get rid of the absurdity of the matching system and return it to a more market-based mechanism: You specialize in whatever 4th-increment program you can get into, nothing more, nothing less.]
[Also Ed: 4. Each increment serves as its own on/off ramp: There are entrance exams to get in, and qualification exams to get out. You're immediately qualified for jobs all across the system, no need for residencies or fellowships/internships/whatever. Your resume simply speaks for itself.]
PS: The benefit of this system is that it vastly expands the workforce while making sure that they're qualified for whatever level they're working at.
It does this by INTEGRATING the entire workforce, so they're all speaking the same language and performing similar kinds of care that builds into a hierarchy of experience and capability. So, you don't have to call a nurse to do this but a doctor for that, you just have people performing and supervising the work at different levels.
And it also does it by getting people into and out of the pipeline quickly, with well-defined but flexible scopes of practice. You waste fewer resources having people take decades of training just to find out that they're crap at something; instead, you get them into appropriate scopes of care and see how they do at the early levels.
I think these are great ideas. Hopefully, policy wonks who focus on healthcare and college education start advocating changes based on these ideas. I'm not very optimistic that med schools, AMA, etc. will make these changes because they benefit from the status quo and are not known to act in the best interests of patients/consumers so only external pressure from politicians and voters will force them to change.
I have the opposite framing of the basic income study. People were given an income equal to that of a full time minimum wage job, and 98 per cent of them kept working.
The minimum wage in Illinois is $14/hour; if a full-time job is 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, then that comes out to $28k/year. This study gave participants only $12k/year.
(Admittedly, the minimum wage in Texas is only $7.25/hour, i.e. $14.5k/year, which is much closer to the UBI amount. But even then, that means that UBI *plus* minimum wage is more than double UBI alone. I'd expect it to be worth it for almost everyone.)
BINGO. Well-said.
Is the minimum wage being used the de jure or the de facto?
I think the de jure one is being used.
Questions for you on the basic income study.
1. What percentage of the American workforce is considered overworked?
IE, working 2 to 3 jobs, and they are destroying their will to live. They have no vacation, zero time with their family or friends, and generally life sucks because they are working 10 to 14 hour days.
2. Why is a 2% point drop in people working "large negative effect"? That seems very small. Plus, what is the nuance there... did they start secondary education? Are they looking for another job? Do they need a break because their mind/body is destroyed by overwork?
I don't like the idea of basic income, but your response to it feels very reflective and not like your normal posts. A 2% drop seems like nothing, plus I want to know the specifics. Is that two people in the study? 4? Tell me why it is significant.
If we are going to "harvest" the workforce for the best possible outcome it seems like we need to educate more people. And to do that we need them to have some stability so they can feel they can go back to school, to be able to have the mind-cycles to actually think about their future and what they want. Or we can work them to death in a low paid job that robots can do.
The more engineers and thinkers we can produce, the better that is. It is one reason I am so frustrated over minimum wage. If we paid an adequate minimum wage and had federally mandated vacation I think people could more easily get out of the poverty trap and actually move up the economic ladder.
I don't think "more work" is automatically better for human progress. Smarter work by a well educated workforce seems a lot better. And having enough income to feel able to have babies also seems to be key at this day in age.
IE, if two people earning minimum wage get married, but got a basic income which helps them secure housing and stability, and then they have 2 to 3 kids, and those kids are not broken/stressed like a lot of lower income families. They get an education and become engineers to a greater degree.
I don't like a basic income, I'd prefer we have a real minimum wage that allows people to live decently (and actual vacation time). I think that not only helps the birth rate stabilize but results in people who can actually think about what they are doing in life past trying not to drown.
Were any of the 2% mothers who decided that they could finally stay home to care for young children? Or care for someone else (elderly parent, infirm, &c.)?
Listening to another report on the study today they claimed that a lot of the decrease in hours worked was single mothers spending more time with their kids. Noah seems a bit overly dismissive here.
Yes. Given the statistics regarding children of single mothers (higher crime rates, lower grades, higher likelihood of neither working nor being in school, etc. and generally less success in life) anything that helps single moms helps society.
~Single parents: Recipients who were single parents at the time of enrollment were about 3.9 percentage points less likely to be employed and worked an average of 2.8 hours less per week than single parent control participants~
Interesting that this was in the same article as the story about higher wages leading to more automation and, I assume, lower employment. Ideally increased productivity leads to the option to work less, if some of the profits go to supporting a basic income, which leads to more leisure.
John Maynard Keynes predicted that his grandchildren would work only 15 hours a week, since the nation was becoming so wealthy. It's my theory that drastically increased income inequality and status competition has prevented the decrease in work, something many people would welcome it seems.
Well-said
Indeed
BINGO
5.2% of Americans hold multiple jobs. But that alone doesn't tell us they are "overworked" per se, since I imagine a fair number of them are working two part time jobs instead of a single full time job.
Thanks! Ya, is there no good econ stat trying to nail this down? Weirdly I saw Monster.com's econ team say it was 37% of the US population lol.
I'd be curious how Noah views overwork for salary employees. IE, I had family stuck working every Sunday for 4 hours for x+ years in a salary job. It really hurt his will to leave and life enjoyment. That environment rolls downhill to family/kids/social institions.
Is the point of the economic system to pull every last drop of your will to live? Or some type of balance for life?
I'd like to think that balance also improves the overall system. If you treat cows well they produce more milk -> https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-792372
I've rambled a lot Noah :)
But I just want to know how we get to STNG economics. Capitalism + full use of everyone's capabilities.
When I was running a medium sized company, one thing that really shook my world view was that I kept promoting people into new positions and they grew and handled it. Sometimes I didn't think they were ready, but with some support they almost all did a great job. We def had a few ethical problems we had to sort out quick... but it has made me consider that anyone can do almost anything. Which also makes me super worried, how many amazing human beings do we have managing cash registers, being depressed and stuck in video games, etc, all they need is some type of challenge / interesting oppurtunity. It is depressing to think about how much human potentional we are wasting.
Well-said. But I actually would argue that a UBI, if high enough, is better than a hard minimum wage. It gives the working class more bargaining power for higher wages, minus the deadweight losses from rigidities of a hard minimum wage, covers more people, and like it or not, it is the way of the future thanks to the coming Robot Apocalypse.
“States are starting to see the value of letting internationally licensed physicians help fill their doctor shortages.”
At the end of the Vietnam War, Nebraska recruited Vietnamese physicians who were refugees. They were sent to UNO Medical Center for a short period to assess and/or improve their medical knowledge. These physicians signed contracts, agreeing to be sent to isolated, underserved counties for a period of years. Some never left those communities. They not only were respected, they were revered. Some of these physicians complained that small-town stores didn’t cash their checks. Nebraska is a Red State.
“But if you’re a poor country, you can A) absorb a lot of foreign technology without having to invent it yourself . . .”
And like Poland, you can absorb two million of Russia’s young, educated, and tech-savvy refugees who fled from Putin and his Ukrainian War. Quite the generational gift.
Re "It’s probably the phones", a couple thoughts on the Unintended Consequences of The Enlightenment—
(1) There is quite a bit of research/analyses from psychology researcher Peter Gray and statistician Aaron Brown raising significant questions about the soundness of the research conducted by Zach Rausch (and Jon Haidt). Brown argues, for instance, that the majority of the 301 papers cited in Rausch's research document "are garbage" and Peter Gray expresses similar concerns and also argues that the rises in adolescent anxiety and depression predate the advent of smartphones.
https://reason.com/video/2024/04/02/the-bad-science-behind-jonathan-haidts-anti-social-media-crusade/
https://petergray.substack.com/p/follow-up-to-letter-45-comments-on/comments
(2) It’s probably contraception, not the phones. The premise of banning phones (and the consequent elimination of access to social media) for children, the centerpiece of the growing crusade among governors and school superintendents across the country prompted by NYU Professor Haidt's bestseller The Anxious Generation, is that children will be able to return to a healthy, idyllic childhood centered on free-play once freed of screen addiction. Jon Haidt agrees with Peter Gray's assessment that the abundance of free-play engaged in by children up to around 1990 was foundational to the personal and inter-personal skills and characteristics necessary for positive mental health in adolescents and adults. Haidt and Rausch, however, seem to ignore the concerning fact that the requisite playmates for such an environment no longer exist — the decline in fertility rate since the '60s and '70s that provided not just a household full of siblings (as a Boomer, I had four during that time), but whole neighborhoods of such homes, has created the current ubiquity of single- and two-children families. These, combined with the growing dominance of school-oriented, adult-supervised activities, have eliminated free-play from our world. What happens to kids when we take their phones away? (Rausch and Haidt do not seem willing to discuss this — I wish I had discussed this with Robin Hanson when I had kabob with him a couple years ago)
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/13-fertility-scenarios
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/humanity-is-going-to-shrink?nthPub=391
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/shrinking-economies-dont-innovate
I worry that Rausch and Haidt are causing attention and resources to be diverted to solving the wrong problem and that the real problem is much larger than phones (What if the successes of the Enlightenment and Classical Liberalism have brought us to this point?)
> The premise of banning phones [...] for children [...] is that children will be able to return to a healthy, idyllic childhood centered on free-play once freed of screen addiction."
This is such a bad faith reading Haidt that it makes it hard to take your comment seriously and makes me hesitate to bother even clicking your links.
Considering Haidt has written “If parents don’t replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity, then banning devices will feel like deprivation, not the opening up of a world of opportunities.”
And has a post on his substack literally titled "Why The Play-Based Childhood Requires More Than Just Putting Down the Phone".
I think you reinforce Jim's point. If that's the extent of Haidt's response he's glossing over the problem, or ignoring it, or punting on it. It's hardly a "bad faith" reading of anything.
Based on my quotes in a Substack you assume that's the limit of his response?
Jim claimed Haidt had refused to engage at all on the subject. I made a brief quote to show that is a flat out lie.
Neither your quote nor the essay you cite address Jim's point about birth rates. I scan read "Why The Play-Based Childhood Requires More Than Just Putting Down the Phone" and it doesn't mention number of children or birth rates anywhere. It argues that the biggest problem with getting children to play outside is the safetyism culture of calling the police when children are seen unsupervised.
Where has Haidt addressed the socialization difficulties caused by there not being as many children as there used to be?
Tran, I regret that I might have created the impression that I'm intentionally misreading Jon — please chalk it up to not doing the best job of communicating. I note that Jon agrees with Peter Gray re the need for "real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity" — after all, he is co-founder of Let Grow with Peter and Lenore Skenazy.
My point is that Jon and Lenore, while very correctly valuing such a childhood of in-person interaction and engagement, are not acknowledging what is to me a very obvious challenge: there are no playmates!
My classrooms are full of Only-Children and students with only one sibling. Multiply this dearth of built-in playmates by every household in the neighborhood and you end up with no one to play pick-up basketball or baseball or soccer or kick-the-can or four-square, no "real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity".
They also agree with Peter (and me) that the Cult of Smart (as Freddie deBoer terms it) has created a very harmful obsession with all-things-academic. This has contributed to a huge decrease in unsupervised play time and an increase in activities closely supervised by adults for the relatively few kids who do exist.
Jon, Zach, and Lenore have not addressed this. That could mean I am just off-base and that the continuous decline in the fertility rate and family size — combined with a hyper-focus on School — do not present the situation I fear.
Tran, what do you think?
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Why+The+Play-Based+Childhood+Requires+More+Than+Just+Putting+Down+the+Phone%22.&rlz=1CATIHM_enUS1092&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/about-those-12-year-old-dropouts?utm_source=publication-search
I live in Vietnam which has low fertility and far more obsession with all things academic than America. Kids go out in the street and play with other kids unsupervised by adults every single day of the week here.
It isn't clear to my why the argument seems to be that they need to have lots of siblings to play.
Don't get me wrong, I am sympathetic to where you are coming from. Play requires a critical mass of kids. I just don't think the factors you mention are any more important than, say, the increase in US house sizes since 1950 or the widespread adoption of air conditioning.
Why do kids here in Vietnam play in the street? Because houses are small and crappy. There is no space to play in the house. There is no air conditioning, so even though it is hot outside it isn't really any better inside. They share a bedroom (often with their parents), no kid gets their own bedroom. There are no fancy amenities like a backyard or pool. The refrigerator & pantry isn't full of snacks and drinks.
So they go outside.
My relatives in the US have kids who never leave the house because the house is huge, has full climate control, the kids all have their own rooms, there's a pool in the backyard, etc.
Tran, thank you for clarifying your position. If I understand you accurately, while you agree with me that a critical mass of children is a prerequisite for productive play, it's unclear from your statements whether you think free-play is important to good mental health — I believe it is (as do Jon Haidt, Zach Rausch, Lenore Skenazy, and Peter Gray).
You do raise a good point relative to my assessment that the number of siblings we have, relatives or not, plays as significant of a role in the prevalence of free-play in contemporary American culture as I believe it does. Perhaps there are other elements of growing affluence that are just as or more important, ones that are offsetting the effects of significantly declining fertility, increased schooling, and decreased family size.
I don't follow the logic of following your statement "Play requires a critical mass of kids" with disagreement that a low number of siblings in general negatively affects attainment of that critical mass. It seems to me that fewer siblings in general = fewer children in general = fewer playmates in general.
Your observations about larger house size and more AC and growing affluence in general prompt me to consider those as additional factors, but I still believe that smaller family size has a much greater, negative influence on the availability of contemporary free-play opportunities.
And that Jon and Zach are silent on that.
I'd like to see more on the role of organized "travel sports." These take up as much as 20 hours a week and involve much adult supervision and a decrease in independent and creative play. But it seems like all the parents are doing it, leaving little time for just hanging out and trying to deal with boredom like we did in the good old days.
There are many other problems beyond the low quality of their research. Most obviously, enforcement. Governments can't even keep phones out of prisons, how are they planning to stop kids using them? The only possible way to enforce it would be an enormous surveillance and identity checking infrastructure that would be absurdly expensive, have many totalitarian consequences, would be very inconvenient and would in the end not work anyway because you're going to get lots of parents who don't even agree with it. If you want the war on drugs times ten, that's a good way to get it. It's entirely typical of left-wing academics to think all of these problems are out of scope.
And in the end even in the success case it probably won't work. The study Noah cites continues the tradition of low quality studies. It was only for two weeks and the way they decided if any real problems had been solved was to do a questionnaire. This is a heavily self-selected group and for all we know any improvement (if real) might just be because the parents were suddenly focused on their kids for a change.
I agree with Alistair's point about enforcement. I spent 20 years in high school classrooms and have seen my employer attempt to limit and ban phones. I've also researched whether school bans have worked over the past decade and can find no studies to support success.
We should also ask at what point does increasing the role of the Nanny State in children's lives outweigh the purported benefits of the actions?
Already, students do not enjoy the constitutional protections of basic human rights when they step on campuses — no freedom of expression, no protection from unreasonable search and seizure, limited self-protection, no due process — and now we take away wholesale the personal and community relationships they enjoy via their phones.
Add into the mix the K-12 Surveillance/Therapeutic State (see Abigail Shrier's work), and we end up raising risk averse humans with few, if any, personal and interpersonal skills that are necessary to the positive mental health outcomes Jon rightly pursues.
More than 50 million children give up so much at the hands of the state daily — at what point do measures like state-enforced bans on phones and social media aid and abet the existing factors that already do not support good mental health?
Abigail Shrier: https://www.thetruthfairy.info/p/bad-therapy-first-excerpt-in-the
Unfortunately the US Baby Boom cannot be used as an example for today's societies, as it was predicated on the almost paradisiacal economic conditions that were the result of the US being the "last man standing" in World War II.
An absence of foreign competition (either still not developed or in ruins from the war) combined with the recent proliferation of car ownership (which had opened up vast quantities of cheap land for housing construction) meant that even low-IQ men could earn a wage sufficient to support an entire family.
And even with those optimal economic conditions the Baby Boom still had its downside: with even the worst-quality men able to breed the '50s was notorious for its "juvenile delinquents", and the crime wave of the '60s resulted when those delinquents came of age and became adults.
And surely the "growing dominance of school-oriented, adult-supervised activities" is down to two consequences of relative economic decline:
1) Rocketing housing costs made two incomes essential and thus mean mothers have far less time to engage in activities with their children themselves, and
2) Many of these activities are ones that parents encourage their children to take part in to ultimately help them in a labour market that globalization and automation have made far more competitive than in the past.
"Rocketing housing costs made two incomes essential..."
Are we sure that the causation runs that way? Or is it possible that two income families bid up the prices of existing and new housing?
I am familiar with that argument. Unfortunately, there is really no hard empirical evidence conclusively answering that question. I would hazard a guess that the causal arrow is at least somewhat bidirectional though. Particularly under neoliberalism and its massively increasing inequality since the 1970s by design, which is the real culprit IMHO.
If you look at graphs of women's workforce participation: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1qy4e vs a graph of median house price: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1qy4V, you see that women started entering the labor force in large numbers well before the start of the run up in housing prices. Not conclusive, I'd agree, but certainly suggestive.
Hmmm. Looks like women's labor force participation peaked around 2000 and declined slightly since then, yet housing costs have still continued to skyrocket since then unabated.
Exactly. Peaked around 2000 and leveled off just below that peak, which means that a large percent of households have 2 earners who can bid the price of supply constrained housing well past where 1 earner households can. Since they can and need a home, they do.
The culture of safetyism is indeed the real problem, but it is a bit reaching to blame that on contraception, much less the Enlightenment and Classic Liberalism. There is no law of nature that says that having fewer kids must necessarily lead to a culture of safetyism. Going back to the bad old days when women were brood mares (and men were work horses, by the way), is not a solution.
Right. But I am not proposing anything. I am simply pointing out that the availability of safe contraception beginning in the late '60s and early '70s has permitted women (and their families) to opt for fewer children. Which they did. Unsurprisingly.
The Enlightenment successfully promoted values centered around individual liberty, which could be argued to have led to the feminist movement of the '60s, which has led to women being able to pursue personal choices in education and careers. Which they have. All over the world.
Not to be overly simplistic, but there are theories that the increase in safetyism regarding parenting could be that individual children are valued more than they used to be when 5+ child families were more common (Offspring Deflation?). Add into the mix Doomerism, parental narcissism, the rise of CNN and 24/7 TV (remember Adam Walsh?), and many other factors associated with growing wealth, discretionary time, educational attainment, and an increased focus on the value of the individual, we end up with risk-averse children who are constantly surveilled by their parents with Life360 and their school counseling offices with software like Lightspeed and Gaggle.
Should we be surprised that this results in increasing anxiety and depression in adolescents as they realize they might have to move out of the safe places their homes have become?
I'm not proposing a solution to that because I don't have one. I'm simply pointing out that Jon Haidt doesn't have one either and his School Phone Ban Crusade is likely missing the point and diverting attention and resources away from solving the real problems.
Ok fair enough.
Unionisation will also make it harder to hire and fire workers which makes it harder to change how the firm is run. This probably explains why there is slower adoption of technology in Europe relative to America. If you want to artificially increase wages to boost automation, welfare will probably be better than labour market regulations.
I don't think there is much evidence of this in economics literature. Are you making an assumption or do you actually have data? Not even sure that there is good data showing slower adoption of technology in Europe - are you talking about software, specific manufacturing? What kind of technology.
Just feels like a sweeping statement - be curious to see any actual studies/data.
Mostly software. But yeah fair enough. I don't have the data on me.
IMO the UBI study perhaps indicates that we should instead think more in terms of early-life UBI.
IE, if a UBI can help level the playing field for teenagers and young adults to get the education they need, then great! We phase it out in their early 20s, and then they have to wait until retirement for the free money spigot to come back on again.
From what I've seen, the evidence linking smartphones to a rise in depression is underwhelming. I'm not saying smartphones are good for teen health or for anybody's health, but neither are television, cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, teen magazines, college admissions, and so on. It's just one other bad thing among a sea of bad things. To prove otherwise, you have to present actual causal evidence, and nobody has managed to do this so far. This actually seems pretty telling to me. Socal media as a source of great eveil isn't a new narrative and it's not like we're starved for data now like we were in the fifties when television was taking off. If smartphones are really are so bad, it should be very easy to find a large effect. So why haven't we yet? It's not like people aren't trying.
Indeed, there is really no "smoking gun" in that regard.
For the other studies on universal income, I’m not sure whether they found no effect or whether they merely didn’t find an effect. I haven’t had a chance to read your link on X. If they studies had a too-small sample, had insufficiently intense data collection, were poorly designed or just got unlucky, they might fail to detect an effect on labor participation by universal income. Also, I’m not sure how someone would design a study to affirmatively prove that universal income has no effect on labor participation. Seems hard to prove a negative.
I wonder how many basic income supporters are workaholics like me. I didn’t teach summer school this year and I have felt like I was bored to death since around July 4 and am excited to have a purpose in my day again.
It seems like a good insurance against the pretty low possibility that work won’t support me. But like a lot of normal people hate working.
The studies on the basic income confirm my view that a Job Guarantee program would be far better because the latter would induce structural changes in the labour market by helping to sustain higher employment, thereby strengthening the workers' position.
By contrast, UBI can, in some ways, be seen as welfare for capitalists. Now, more people can drive for Uber and work for TaskRabbit – at even lower wages! – because UBI subsidizes the meager paychecks earned by hustling for the sharing economy. The tech companies take home the profit and face even less pressure to pay a living wage to their non-employee employees. That is why you find so many Silicon Valley advocates for the basic income.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell would argue the opposite, namely, that JG is logistically unworkable in practice, and that UBI is far better, all things considered. As for the "Uber-ization of everything" or "gig economy", that genie is long since out of the bottle regardless, for better or worse, and actually makes UBI that much MORE necessary these days.
I just don't see it. UBI becomes a consolation prize for those whose lives are disrupted. Benefits still accrue to the designers and owners of the technologies, but now with less guilt and pushback about the collateral damage. The JG represents a chance to offset the collateral damage
I am not against a JG per se, *in addition* to UBI. But unless we want to create lots and lots of useless make-work, because reasons, we need to recognize that JG really has its limits.
I think there are loads of socially useful jobs that could be filled via a JG program. The public jobs bank could include a list of monitoring programs, rehabilitation programs, and public investment programs. The jobs will tackle: soil erosion, flood control, environmental surveys, species monitoring, park maintenance and renewal, removal of invasive species, sustainable agriculture problems in the United States, support for local fisheries, community supported agriculture (CSA) farms, community and rooftop gardens, tree planting, fire and other disaster prevention measures, weatherization of homes, and composting. Jobs can include: cleanup of vacant properties, reclamation of materials, restoration of public spaces, and other small infrastructure investments; establishment of school gardens, urban farms, co-working spaces, solar arrays, tool lending libraries, classes and programs, and community theaters; construction of playgrounds; restoration of historical sites; organization of carpooling programs, as well as recycling, reuse, and water-collection initiatives, food waste programs, and oral histories projects.
The JG can also support individuals and families, filling the particular need gaps they may be facing, notably elderly care; afterschool programs; and special programs for children, new mothers, at-risk youth, veterans, former inmates, and people with disabilities. Those are just a few crucial areas. I would hardly describe these as "make work" jobs.
Fair enough. That makes sense. But in practice it would still be hard to truly "guarantee" everyone such meaningful jobs to literally everyone who wants one. So why not simply both, JG and UBI? Then we won't need to worry about creating work for the sake of work.
My view is, let's get rid of all of the involuntary employment first, and then we can determine whether a UBI is required as well. I think there are a lot of negative externalities associated with a UBI, a lit of which I pointed our above
The point about hugher wages spurring additionsl investments in technology was a key insight of Seymour Melman, who argued that an economic ‘virtuous cycle’ emerges if you pay workers more, because competent managers will compensate for higher wages by using more and better machinery, and by improving the way work is organized, which will then lead to higher profits, which can lead to higher wages, leading to better machinery/organization of work, and so on. Indeed, Melman even argued that if you have strong unions, management will be forced to figure out more clever ways of organizing work than just trying to decrease wages.
“Second, the pandemic-instigated shift to work from home (WFH) raised the amenity value of employment in many jobs and for many workers.”
We’ll, a lot of workers were burning less gasoline via eliminating commutes. And at a time when the U.S. was producing record amounts oil and natural gas. Also, the time savings and mental fatigue may have made workers happier and more productive.
The UBI post is very interesting. Wage growth for lower income workers is often cited as a reason for bringing low skilled jobs back to the US. But I've always felt we should focus instead on helping low skilled people get training for the, call it, moderate skilled jobs that are in high demand, like CAD techs and welders. Have always wondered why they wouldn't take out a loan for a few grand, do a 6 month cert, and then use the presumably significantly higher earnings to pay off the relatively low amount those trainings cost. The counter-argument is that they are just more price sensitive and are reluctant to take that time off or roll the dice with a few grand in debt. But the fact that people would respond to getting relatively large cash infusions not by spending it to upskill but to work less and spend more time on leisure suggests that money and time are not why they don't upskill. Of course, this rests upon the assumption that the people in this study were more of the lower skilled segment of the population.
"The fact that the U.S. got away with bringing down inflation without hurting the economy implies that either A) there was a big shift in inflation expectations that became a self-fulfilling prophecy, or B) there was some sort of positive supply shock going on."
When all the models say something is going to happen, and it doesn't, you have to consider that
C) The conventional model is wrong about the relationship between interest rates, unemployment, and inflation.