The big idea that could make democratic socialism a reality - "An ambitious proposal to create an Alaska-style social wealth fund that could transform the global economy." (previously)
"OK let's do this again. Sovereign wealth fund debate. It's important stuff for the future."
"Despite the criticisms, I really like the idea of a Social Wealth Fund. Unlike corporate taxes, co-determination, etc., it aligns the interests of the rich and the poor. It also provides insurance against the 'rise of the robots' scenario. I'm fine with mechanisms to rebalance corporate power toward labor and away from capital, but they do tend to lead to eternal, bruising, complex battles. A SWF, in contrast, seems like it would be politically durable."
"A great proposal by @MattBruenig for chartering a social wealth fund to finance a universal basic dividend. Perhaps the most politically gentle path towards meaningful reductions of inequality and an increase of social insurance. Neoliberal socialism."
"Roger Farmer and Miles Kimball on the Value of Sovereign Wealth Funds for Economic Stabilization"
also btw!
"'We commend @SenSchumer & @MartinHeinrich for introducing this legislation. This is an important first step toward understanding how today's economy is or is not working for most U.S. families'. My full statement on the new bill to measure inequality."
"discussion of BEA publishing income distribution along with GDP ... reminds me of upcoming ASSA 2019 session on 'Distributional Diversity in the National Accounts'"
oh and :P
Inadequate Equilibria vs. Governance of the Commons - "A review of Elinor Ostrom's book Governing the Commons, about how societies solve coordination problems in real life."
The Cost of not Redistributing Money Part 1 - "no_bear_so_low on how to quantify the economic costs of not redistributing money."
Abba Lerner’s concept of distributive efficiency seems like a reasonable continuation. Personally I’m more of a believer in re-engineering the whole system than redistribution within the existing system — nonetheless it’s an interesting exercise to map how much the United States loses -from a utilitarian point of view- from not redistributing.
The cost of not redistributing money- an interlude on interpersonal welfare comparisons - "I'm eventually going to release a second part to my essay on the costs of not redistributing money, considering the extra costs caused by relative income effects. However I wanted to take some space here to respond to a family of objections to any project of measuring the welfare costs of inequality- objections to the comparison of utility between persons."
Link Round Up: Matt Bruenig on why Scandinavian countries aren’t secretly super-capitalist - "I adore Matt Bruenig's work, but he tends to scatter little nuggets of insight in different places, so I thought I'd do a link roundup of his work on why, contra many contrarians, Scandinavia isn't actually a super-secret capitalist paradise."
I Do Not Understand Why the Left Should Want a Sovereign Wealth Fund
Interesting, but what we really need is some way to provide every person the dignity of a job that pays a living wage.
In something of a response to that idea: Universal Basic Income and the Future of Pointless Work, or Money for Nothing* -- Many jobs are pointless. Others are being automated away. In the future, who will still work for a paycheck? (Atossa Araxia Abrahamian for New Republic, August 29, 2018)
Some years ago, I had a colleague who would frequently complain that he didn’t have enough to do. He’d mention how much free time he had to our team, ask for more tasks from our boss, and bring it up at after-work drinks. He was right, of course, about the situation: Although we were hardly idle, even the most productive among us couldn’t claim to be toiling for eight (or even five, sometimes three) full hours a day. My colleague, who’d come out of a difficult bout of unemployment, simply could not believe that this justified his salary. It took him a long time to start playing along: checking Twitter, posting on Facebook, reading the paper, and texting friends while fulfilling his professional obligations to the fullest of his abilities.
The idea of being paid to do nothing is difficult to adjust to in a society that places a high value on work. Yet this idea has lately gained serious attention amid projections that the progress of globalization and technology will lead to a “jobless” future. The underlying worry goes something like this: If machines do the work for us, wage labor will disappear, so workers won’t have money to buy things. If people can’t or don’t buy things, no one will be able to sell things, either, which means less commerce, a withering private sector, and even fewer jobs. Our value system based on the sanctity of toil will be exposed as hollow; we won’t be able to speak about workers as a class at all, let alone discuss “the labor market” as we now know it. This will require not just economic adjustments but moral and political ones, too.
One obvious solution would be to separate income from labor altogether, a possibility that two recent books tackle from radically different angles. Give People Money, by journalist Annie Lowrey, offers a measured, centrist endorsement of Universal Basic Income—the idea that governments should give everyone a certain amount of cash each month, no questions asked. The anthropologist David Graeber posits that the link between salaried positions and real work has long been tenuous in any case, since many highly paid jobs serve little purpose at all. In Bullshit Jobs, he tries to make sense of the peculiar yet all-too-common situations in which people are hired, after much fanfare, to do a job, then find themselves not doing much—or worse, performing a task so utterly pointless that they might as well not be doing it.
In the absence of a truly useful job, most people, Graeber considers, would be better off living on “free” money. Lowrey views UBI less as a way to eliminate useless work than a way to compensate invisible forms of labor, such as caring for a relative or doing housework, or to bolster underpaid workers. Cash transfers, she proposes, could also stimulate entrepreneurship and creativity. Either way, the idea of paying people just for being alive is now one that both a radical scholar and a reasonable Beltway journalist can take seriously—though neither author fully reckons with the social reordering that would arise from a world organized around love and leisure, not labor.
Emphasis mine, to highlight the response to your comment. Underlined by me, also, because this is a beautiful idea.*
Some jobs are meaningful and can keep you busy all of the time. Some are meaningful and can fill some of your typical 40-hour work week. And some are straight-up bullshit, busy work to keep people busy, which somehow factors into a corporate hierarchy, or public agency structure. (And then some people make busywork for themselves to look busy and appear and/or feel important, making a quick job take much longer to justify their position, but we won't delve into this one).
* Worse, some of the really hard, critical jobs are done by people who are paid miserable wages, from construction workers and laborers who literally build and maintain much of the physical world around us, to teachers, nurses and other social/healthcare providers, who generally get into those fields because they love the work, not because it's an easy life with reliable hours and good pay.
Then drastically on the other end of the spectrum are bankers and investment folks, who can make obscene amounts of money, yet can add no real value to the world. You're not going to say "where are the bankers?" when a natural disaster hits, or communities need to come back from a catastrophe, unless you're looking to get a loan (which will be paid back, with interest, naturally.)
what if the government paid you to write music?
let's not pretend there's not a lot of work out there that needs to be done. there's all kinds of work if we want to make this a more habitable, pleasant, sustainable, equitable, and just world
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