Over in the comments at Steve Waldman’s, Morgan Warstler has an interesting proposal for a replacement for the minimum wage and unemployment insurance:
Using a clone of Paypal and Ebay platforms, the US govt. should establish a Guaranteed Wage of $240 per week. Anyone who wants to work registers, receives a Debit Card,and each Friday has their GI deposited.
All recipients have their labor weeks auctioned online. Bidding begins at $40 per week ($1 per hour). Bid increases by .50 cents per hour ($20 increments).
Recipients keep 50% of the top bid, if they take it. If they opt for a lesser bid outside certain boundaries there are penalties (fraud measure).
Recipients cannot be made to work outside a radius of a couple miles.
Bidders must deposit money into system before they bid. They must accurately describe the job. Feedback will be given both ways. If you are familiar with Ebay, you understand what this accomplishes.
There are no taxes paid, there are basic workplace protection requirments. Umbrella insurance is sold on site for folks bringing labor into their home.
Expect 30M to register so approx $345B is our cost assuming 30M are auctioned at $1 (The govt. is picking up $5.50 and bidders are in for $1)
At an avg. bid of $4 per hour, avg. worker is making $8, and the govt. is spending $250B a year.
There is no more UI. There is no more minimum wage. That’s why there are 30M in program.
It is an intriguing proposal, and I see something like this as more likely if the fears of robot labor market dominance come true and many workers end up zero marginal product. But here are some problems I see with this program:
1. If weekly online ebay-like employment markets like this are efficient, then why don’t they exist yet? Is the extra $5.50 in marginal product really all that is stopping them? Here is one similar market for what are mostly errands. Perhaps we are already on a path towards the obsolescence of this complaint. Although maybe labor market regulations make this impossible to do on a significant scale.
2. Are workers required to put themselves up for auction or can they just receive the minimum guaranteed income and say “no thanks” to auctioning their labor? If it is the latter, then I think we will see many workers choose the $5.50 and do nothing. If you can receive $5.5 an hour from the government for doing nothing, or $6 for working 40 hours a week, then you’re exchanging 40 hours for an extra $20 a week. Not a very good deal.
On the other end of the low-paid spectrum, workers who are worth $10 an hour will receive $10.50 ($5.50 + 50% x $10), which means they can get $220 a week for doing nothing or $420 for working 40 hours. Some will probably choose to work, and some will choose not to. But I think many would find $220 plus some extra pay from black market labor (likely at more than a marginal $5.50 an hour) to be a pretty good deal. Those that don’t will be receiving a very small subsidy of $0.50 an hour.
Thus workers with labor worth $10 or more will have only a small subsidy from this, and those with labor worth less will find it pretty tempting to not work. Under either scenario I don’t see much work flowing through this market.
If the point is that everyone will be required to put themselves on auction and surely everyone will be bought at a minimum cost of $40, then I think this logic is incorrect. A review system will be in place, and any worker who does not wish to be hired again will find ways to make sure that doesn’t happen very quickly.
3. Do workers and laborers have the incentives to provide accurate rankings? If an employer finds a good worker and they elect to give them an accurate rating then they will have to pay more for them the next week. If they rank them poorly, perhaps accusing them of being negligent or criminal, then they should get them cheaper. The reverse is true for a worker who finds a good employer.
4. How much does employee choice matter in this framework? The setup of employers purchasing employees at an auction ignores worker preferences over what work they do. Morgan says if job seekers “opt for a lesser bid outside certain boundaries there are penalties”, and it’s unclear to me how you do this without meaningfully ignoring job seeker preferences. This also provides a potential explanation for question #1: the predominant labor market arrangement for cheap labor is for employers to post a wage, job seekers to apply, and employers to choose among them. Aren’t there reasons we’ve evolved to this equilibrium?
Overall Morgan says with this program we can get rid of unemployment insurance and the minimum wage, but I see this more as lifetime unemployment insurance combined with a government funded minimum wage. Still, with the threat of hordes of ZMP workers looming in the future, things like this are worth thinking about and we need more ideas like Morgan’s.
H/T Pascal Gobry
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Friday ~ April 20th, 2012 at 11:27 am
Morgan Warstler
1. They exist everywhere from odesk to fiverr from Angieslist to Yelp http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/3212.html#comment-24431
2. They are immediately up for auction when they sign up. I’m very big on rewards for proving others are committing fraud. It should be a small business.
3. Employers and workers with positive feedback have more weight in scoring others. Criminal accusations = you don’t work there again.
4. The whole point is this WEEKLY choice. We WANT the unemployed to be figuring out that the more they are in demand, the more choice they have. The feedback loop is infinite 52x a year. What can I do that pays me most that I am willing to do? A single giant clearinghouse.
The reason we have evolved to this equilibrium is that GOVT programs have not been attacked by Internet guys.
If Friedman were alive, this would be his PREFERRED approach to a negative income tax.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 6:14 am
david
2. It’s not fraud to be a bad worker, and it’s nigh-impossible to prove that you’re just not doing as well as you would for a private employer paying $1+$6 rather than just $1. Notice that the private employer has no incentive to complain, either. Both are benefiting from $6 of state largesse per hour, divided however.
It’s a massive subsidy on whoever can most plausibly claim to be employing workers to do $7-an-hour jobs, even if the “job” is “go out there and sell these trinkets by the street” and all the employees mysteriously return with $2-an-hour cash within five minutes and the nearby dustbins keep overflowing with trinkets.
3. That just makes the problem Ozimek pointed out worse. Good workers or employers who are rated falsely badly have less power to retaliate.
4. Jobs can be legal whilst still being humiliating, at a level where we normally hesitate to oblige people to work there. Simple example: bar entertainers and Hooters waitresses. It’s not technically illegal to require staff to wear revealing clothing, of course. Would you favor your daughter to be auctioned? Notice also that you are proposing to punish people who refuse to accept the high bid, whatever it is.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 6:45 am
Morgan Warstler
The private employer WHO HAS THE GOAL OF GETTING REAL WORK DONE has every reason to complain. More importantly they do not hire the bad worker again.
So on one side are the folks we’ll call normal people and then on the other side are the fraudsters you are “worried” about.
Let me show you the error of your ways:
“It’s a massive subsidy on whoever can most plausibly claim to be employing workers to do $7-an-hour jobs”
Yes like the 50M normal people on my side of the fence.
“even if the “job” is “go out there and sell these trinkets by the street” and all the employees mysteriously return with $2-an-hour cash within five minutes and the nearby dustbins keep overflowing with trinkets.”
And your fraudster side is bidding against mine.
So the good workers trend to the top, all shit workers are stuck down at $1.
So we know where to look for fraudsters – finding them is now very easy.
Note: I’m claiming segmenting out the freeloaders as an plan advantage.
If you get caught for fraud as employer you face criminal penalties, you won’t be bidding again.
If you are a lazy ass who participated in fraud, you are going to be suspended from GI.
Remember part of the 52x a year feedback loop is to change people, we want a constant reward / punishment in place to rewire the lazy, to make their lives as lazy so publicly uncomfortable, and to quickly reward any effort on their part, that they follow the true path of least resistance.
Orimek hasn’t really thought through the 52x feedbackloop and really gamed out the paradigm shift I’m talking about.
The fact is Ebay quickly overcame all of your objections and they did it without having everyone’s social security number picture, home address, main source of income, AID, food stamps, all wrapped up.
The page of yours, that sells your labor, if filled with a living breathing timeline of pictures, audio, video, notes, feedback – bidders can SEE you clearly improve, switch jobs, try something, switch back – this is a TON of data to molest and extract value from.
Last note on fraud, I’m a big fan of rewards that pay for proving fraud. We want SMB fraud detectives to make a good living providing visual proof.
No system is foolproof, but my plan CRUSHES the status quo – it employs everyone virtually overnight, and carries advantages a mile long.
It will happen.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 7:09 am
david
Why would a “fraudster” worry that all the “shit workers” are stuck down at $1? The scheme to split the state subsidy works just as well with slackers.
It’s not illegal to employ someone to sell trinkets. Nothing illegal is being done here. The employee might really be selling those trinkets on his own time. But if the employee turns out to be slacking off, well, it’s not like you knew, right? It’s the fault of the government sending you all these lousy workers. You’re just an honest small businessman wholesaling trinkets to street salespeople. Wink-wink, nudge-nudge.
Problems #3 and #4 still remain, by the way.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 7:55 am
Morgan Warstler
3. employer can only rate you badly if they don’t bid to hire you back. Let me say it again 52x a year. 520x over 10 years. The reputation system works. Think of it like Yelp where the businesses get to record the bad reviewers, and the reviewers KNOW their name and face, their REAL LIFE reputation in their local community is tied to honesty of the review.
4. you aren’t required to take a job. [ ] will not work around adult entertainment.
If you have multiple bids for $3 and you are taking a $1 job, a SMB detective will likely be checking to see if you are really working – they eanr rewards for catching fraudsters.
If you have offers at $5, and you still take $1 the state may cut back their subsidy. We’d have to see the incidence and how the populace felt about it.
—-
Splitting the state subsidy doesn’t work out very well. Not with reward paid for people to catch fraudsters.
You don’t want to work, I fake a job for you.
You get $240, I’m out $40 to win bid. You give me $140 and you get $100. So far so good. Except I’m really able to earn $300, and I’m living on $100 a week. These are real numbers.
Someone bids $2, another bids $2.50 and then $3 on me, and I don’t take the Day Care job ??? (I’m a 21 year old girl), flags go up, someone is going to be watching to see what I’m doing.
Where is the job located? Am I there all day? Someone’s watching.
The job is from my house?
Work from home companies must show logs. Go check out LiveOps to see what I mean.
There are no trinkets get dumped and I go to beach or shoot hoops jobs. You can’t spawn them from a Central TRANSPARENT system. Everyone knows the address of your employer. Poeple get paid to bust you. And you are suspended from the dole when you are busted.
—–
Look man, we got 15M unemployed, you need to ask yourself WHY you don’t really like what I’m saying here.
There are either millions of good people who just want a chance or there are not.
If there are, you have no business poo-pooing my plan – you don’t like what I’m going to make people do – I’m going to make them work. It annoys you.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 8:05 am
david
You want to pay people to inform on each other? You think this will be politically popular? Where are you getting these funds to pay for all these informants, anyway?
The split-subsidy scheme works regardless how much the bid is. I bid $20 an hour, outbid everyone else, hand you a pile of trinkets that I say is worth $21 for you to sell, and if you don’t manage to give me $21 by the end of an hour, I’ll report you for slacking. What can your system do?
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 8:43 am
Morgan Warstler
“You want to pay people to inform on each other? You think this will be politically popular? Where are you getting these funds to pay for all these informants, anyway?”
yes. you don’t read well. my program pays folks for catching fraud. Not informing… employers are KNOWN ENTITIES. Get this through your head. When you work, you either work from home (see LiveOps.com Mechanical Turk), or
“The split-subsidy scheme works regardless how much the bid is. I bid $20 an hour, outbid everyone else, hand you a pile of trinkets that I say is worth $21 for you to sell, and if you don’t manage to give me $21 by the end of an hour, I’ll report you for slacking. What can your system do?”
That’s it I’m done with you.
You lose the $1000K you already deposited to buy my week. I get paid it for showing up to try and sell your trinkets. And next week I got back to making $3 a hour where they were sad to lose me.
You carry NO weight in the reputation system because you don’t have strong history of satisfied workers.
I can do this all day, but if you are going to respond, you need to GAME IT OUT.
Again dude, don’t be upset that I just solved unemployment – just cheer.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 8:48 am
david
I can get paid for “trying”? This is great stuff. I’m just going to “try” for every single one of these jobs and pick up my $240 at the end of the week, mkay?
Friday ~ April 20th, 2012 at 12:02 pm
jbprobert
This will be entirely implausible until some tipping point where enough (good) employers are involved that everyone switches over. The awkward current method of emailing resumes to employers or headhunters emailing people whose resumes they find on LinkedIn seems extremely inefficient.
The auction process may start in the other direction. Similar to a sophisticated Amazon Mechanical Turk (for, you know, things other than data entry) employers would post a job description for a window and potential employees would attempt to underbid each other for that position. Obviously, the auction wouldn’t just go to the low bidder, because they would want to look very much at the individual’s ranking.
Perhaps integrated into these systems would be automated assesment tests for different skills which would be embedded into a profile.
Friday ~ April 20th, 2012 at 12:05 pm
jbprobert
http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/296126/conditional-reciprocity-reihan-salam#comment-547982
Oh, hey look, someone said the same thing like three days before. I’m sure you just stole their idea.
😛
Friday ~ April 20th, 2012 at 1:07 pm
Curt Doolittle
I responded as well.
However, people are not commodities. They must be *hired* in person. Their efforts cannot be *purchased*. The fact that economists equate hiring and purchasing is a mental contrivance that allows us to aggregate transactions, but which in turn, obscures and launders the information that transpires in the hiring process, and the extraordinary complexity involved in each human interaction.
Having built many of these types of systems, I’ve seen how frequently they fail. The world has few eBays for a reason. It’s an outlier. Almost everyone else who tried went out of business.
I just don’t see the difference between this solution and green-screen unemployment registries of the 1970’s.
But it’s a great effort.
Friday ~ April 20th, 2012 at 1:29 pm
Morgan Warstler
Curt, you are wrong. I say that as a sophisticated start up technologist. Ebay is Ebay because there can be only one. Whether Facebook or Amazon, etc. Where network effects are true there can be only one.
I don’t mean there can be only one social network or only one bank, I mean that in solving for a specific thing (twitter, yelp, angieslist, craiglist, etc), you can’t have a split where two thing do the same thing.
To jbprobert’s point,
I encourage folks to actually game it out in you head. In the early days, moms and dads are amazed they are paying $40 for a babysitter.
“Sarah wasn’t that great lets try Sally next week.
Sally’s great, let’s hope no on bids… SHIT! no I don’t want to pay $80, there are tons, let’s try Suzy. (three weeks later) HONEY, I don’t care SUZY was totally worth $100, before this program we’d have given her $200 – we could afford $5.
This conversation is happening 50M+ times a week. Multiple times people are sitting around and sifting through 30M worker profiles.
Software is watching all potential babysitters with 5 miles of your home, assigning value based on who’s getting retained and who isn’t. The market is clearing.
Meanwhile shitty ugly nasty bidders are being exposed and forced to bid more or change their behavior.
Take the reputation system of EBAY
The Real Name and Face identity of Facebook
The local trust value of Yelp
The free usage of Craigslist
And the FORCE Guaranteed Income recipients into the system
In two years time the 5M despicable bottom feeders out of 30M have been FOUND.
There they are!
“Look at this guy, look what a shitty job he did. Listen tyo him sitting at home getting paid and not even answering his phone like he is being paid to”
There will be no remorse for him. He will face some very very rough thing he has to change in his life.
First fine is one months off the dole. And who will hire him? No one.
“SEE! look at my before and after pictures! on this yard clean-up! I’m improving! Listen to me selling on the phone!”
Game it out. It works.
Friday ~ April 20th, 2012 at 3:05 pm
TradersCrucible (@traderscrucible)
Morgan!
Great idea!
I don’t know if I am actually a total fan of it, but I find this awesome:
“And the FORCE Guaranteed Income recipients into the system
In two years time the 5M despicable bottom feeders out of 30M have been FOUND.
There they are!”
This is one of the problems with any JG program – bottom feeders. I think they have serious mental health issues, and I’d imagine a vast majority of people who are making minimum wage have some decent amount of problems which prevent them from being useful to the world.
I blog over at monetaryrealism.com. I know you’re not a fan of MMT – at least if I can take your comments at Scott S’s place and Interfluidity as indication of your leanings. We’re some mutant variation of MMT which is more private sector oriented.
beowulf flagged your eBay JG idea in some conversations we had a few months back, and we’re 50% fans of it.
Why 50%? 1. It’s hard to take seriously coming from someone sooo…vocal on their beliefs. But heck- being abrasive on the internets isn’t a federal crime. 2. It’s slightly crazy, even if it would work. 3. When does workfare turn into indentured servitude? When it’s an eBay JG.
But it’s not a bad idea either. If we’re serious about putting people to work, this guaranteed income + way to match people with productive work is fantastic.
I’d bid on someone to come over and clean up my yard, yeah $50 ought to do it for a day. That’s what it’s worth. And the eBay JG would give them the opportunity to make money and me the opportunity for a nice yard!
Come on over and check us out. I think you’ll find something there you might like.
Friday ~ April 20th, 2012 at 3:38 pm
Morgan Warstler
I’m an optimist, because I’m a realist. People can be made to change. And I’ve spent lots of time studying influence and how a struggling brain rewires itself to modify a person’s behavior. Which is really what happens.
That first month with no money off the dole, that might not do it, but on a three month suspension every Friday everybody else you know they have money on their debit card.
You, your name and face, have a string of people showing pictures, audio, video of how you cleaned their garage, painted their fence, answered the phone. And it all looks like shit.
BUT!
Turning the corner is EASY. Do the first job offered. See there is proof! They hired me back! See there is proof.
The feedback loop is sooooo constant, 52x a year. Good Job! Good Job! Bad Job. Good Job!
This is far more than EITC or workfare etc. This is about SIGNALING, most people don’t get immediate knowable reward for doing better or punishment for doing worse.
You can say that only a certain kind of guy can only live on commissions, but I know you force people to live on commissions and lot of people become that kind of guy.
And competition drives performance.
Now the babysitter,who started off doing night babysitting so she could have it easy, SEES that the ones that also clean up around the house – they get paid more. She is told, “hey I’m probably going to hire someone else to do light cleaning, or replace you entirely (since it is super easy) are you sure you don’t want to clean up? I’ll bid more next week.”
This is a completely different dynamic than we have right now. My point is, the fact that it is SOOOO hard to find a good babysitter today who will do both for $10, that sucks for me, but it actually sucks for all the folks at the bottom where scarcity and mental pressure are not pointed the same way. They don’t feel pressured to perform.
There is a chance that the 50% the govt. gets is in jeopardy – you could within reason game the system to pay the guy an extra $1 under the table not to take the job offering $1.50 more. But that’s fraud between a satisfied bidder and employee, and I’m not much concerned about it.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 6:22 am
david
I suggest you “game out” how a group of hostile attackers would try to exploit the system you’re proposing.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 7:15 am
Morgan Warstler
go nuts, give it your best shot. Consider the gauntlet thrown down.
REMEMBER names and faces (Facebook), full identity, plus all the same stuff Ebay / Paypal brings to the table.
And loss of all AID all GI during suspensions. We’re talking digital scarlet letter here.
Really think it through, show me how you game the system.
Friday ~ April 20th, 2012 at 4:15 pm
Feed Purge
[…] a Guaranteed Minimum Income […]
Friday ~ April 20th, 2012 at 5:17 pm
mic43ll3
It’s the technopolic version of the Speenhamland system!
Only we should probably tie the supplemental wages to the price of gasoline, rather than bread.
Friday ~ April 20th, 2012 at 6:26 pm
fmb
Search costs need to earn quasi-rents: most jobs require a certain amount of up-front vetting (interviews or reference checks), on-the-job learning (i.e. low start up productivity) that needs to be earned back by the employer. Even in an employee-at-will situation, there is some expectation of a sufficient tenure where things have worked out and there’s plenty of surplus (for both) in the continuing relationship. Hiring a near-anonymous unemployed person to babysit will seem pretty scary to some.
In a period of high unemployment, there may be plenty of gems available, but those are also going to be the most temporary.
But, perhaps there are plenty of people out there willing to do sifting and essentially provide the positive externality of evaluating the unemployed for misc small jobs. Morgan’s internet examples are suggestive.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 7:26 am
Morgan Warstler
I think what happens is anyone worth $10 a hour or less is now part of this system.
Part of what happens in a near friction-less environment, is that companies that want to KEEP workers have to pay for that stability longevity or they instead remake their business towards more temporary workers.
Right now companies get that stability because they don’t have their best workers being approached for poaching on a near weekly basis.
Firms will be forced to become far more honest about who is worth what – this is a fairer system from all involved.
But to your point, there will be 10M out of 30M “gems” that gain more than they normally do for giving it the Harvard try. The performance output shifts to the right. Under my system there are MORE gems.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 12:52 am
Eric Morey
Why not just give everyone $240 a week, subject to a phase out over some income level? No government run auction market necessary. No need to force people to work (if they really are ZMP wokers, why do we care what they do with their time?). No need to subsidize employers’ payrolls unless the employees voluntarily enter contract for employment for pay less than the 100% phase out level.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 7:19 am
Morgan Warstler
Because, my plan forces and then teaches people to work. It changes them from the inside.
That’s why my plan will get full support from conservatives.
See my notes above.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 7:29 am
david
You may find the political fate of Workfare programs across the world worth studying.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 8:01 am
david
To be concrete, workfare programs tend to lose support from conservatives and business groups once they realize that they still have to pay taxes to fund the -fare, but it’s really difficult to get the work- out of reluctant employees. Yet the political difficulty of sustaining the system still means that the -fare has to be quite high to survive.
Keep in mind that your plan is tantamount to offering the entire non-labor-force adult population $240 a week for accepting some probability of being drafted, upon which the penalty for draft-dodging is simply revoking the $240 a week. What stops people who have no intention of ever working from signing up? Whose taxes are you going to raise to pay the $240 a week to these people?
Worse yet, your system has no defense against the probability of the ‘draft’ merely being lowered via political action, like left-wing protest groups showing up at the doors of any business that dares to hire from the auction, until disruption to business outweighs any possible gain from slightly cheaper unskilled labor. See: Tesco, Workfare, UK.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 8:30 am
Morgan Warstler
“To be concrete, workfare programs tend to lose support from conservatives and business groups once they realize that they still have to pay taxes to fund the -fare, but it’s really difficult to get the work- out of reluctant employees.”
Food Stamps. Housing and Energy Assistance, all of it now hinges on you working.
You don’t get that this means there are people without ANYTHING or they work. This is work or go penniless. And since there is no longer a mass of folks and we can’t tell who is who, this is no longer a plight of the poor thing. This is plight of the lazy. 80% of poor are working and trucking along. 20% of poor are going through a whole new kind of life experience.
They are now surrounded by WORKING people. Amongst their own community, their own friends and neighbors who are now working, these few lazy are the ones who can’t get Food Stamps, need a place to sleep, have nothing, need everything – they are now surrounded by people telling them to go to work.
GAME IT OUT.
“Keep in mind that your plan is tantamount to offering the entire non-labor-force adult population $240 a week for accepting some probability of being drafted, upon which the penalty for draft-dodging is simply revoking the $240 a week.”
I’m fine with that. The Wild West tames itself 80% with very little gvt. (see Internet). Ebay was a mess. Craig-list has scammers. But over time, with a simple reward system in place and people’s real names and reputations on the line, things will calm down, and the system will iterate and iterate.
“Worse yet, your system has no defense against the probability of the ‘draft’ merely being lowered via political action, like left-wing protest groups showing up at the doors of any business that dares to hire from the auction, until disruption to business outweighs any possible gain from slightly cheaper unskilled labor. See: Tesco, Workfare, UK.”
We’re not the UK. Unions here mean nothing. Public employees are being eviscerated here.
Again, my plan is to carry conservatives 40%, blue collars Dems, and liberal technocrats.
The unemployed are not a voting block.
And as I mentioned before, jobs like Wal-Mart are suddenly going to have to pay more, if they value worker stability. If not, they are free to take part in the system, and Wal-Mart certainly doesn’t worry about protests.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 8:35 am
david
Are you aware that it is already the case, in most states, that able-bodied adults must already meet work requirements to be eligible for food/etc. benefits?
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 11:12 am
mic43ll3
If it’s simply a morality play, why not house them in dormitories and have them work for food, shelter, and clothing? Certainly that would change them from the inside as well, plus you’d have the added advantage of keeping better track of them in case you need them to work on short notice.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 12:23 pm
Eric Morey
“Because, my plan forces and then teaches people to work. ”
Why do you care if ZMP workers are doing work? If the problem is that you don’t think people know how to work why not just pay for vocational or technical training or higher education?
“It changes them from the inside.”
The change that these workers would experience is not necessarily positive. You are simply assuming that the change would be positive enough to fund a new government agency to built and run auction, payment and enforcement systems and force people to do whatever can make a profit for someone else without regard to the opportunity cost those workers face. The change may be negative. And you’ll have added a new federal bureaucracy, for what?
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 1:01 pm
Morgan Warstler
Eric trust me here I am not starting a new govt. agency.
I’m replacing 4-5M public sector union workers with 15M in low cost labor run by SMB guys who hire from this plan and make a profit…. yes Govt. does more and does it for less.
This plan basically guts local and many state employees. But the parks are clean, the subways are clean, someone staffing the cafeteria.
Think through what an entrepreneur can provide by paying $5 per hour and staffing 100 people to run low level public goods.
But the online platform runs with a couple thousand private sector employees contracted to run the program. When you want to sign up, the girl answering the phone is making $2 a hour.
I’m not sure it isn’t Paypal and Ebay running it.
The damn thing is NEVER going to be a govt. agency. UI is done. and this platform is greedy to oversee Foodstamps, housing and energy assistance. It soon making sure the elderly take their medicine, and get to doctors. and providing levels of public service that you can ONLY provide when you use non-unionized labor.
The way workers get training is to work cheap until they are competent. A 3D laser printing shop can hire guys at $7 per hour, and train then until they are afraid to lose them.
Training = boss is afraid to lose me
Knowing how to do that requires you learning on the job when you are only worth a couple bucks and hour.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 1:48 am
Eric Morey
“not starting a new govt. agency. ”
I think you are fooling yourself there. But even if you could have the whole thing contracted out, you are adding unnecessary complexity for no good reason. More strikingly, you haven’t been able to answer the question of what is the point of making ZMP workers work. (think about what ZMP means).
Further, what is the point of paying independent contractors to hire employees to do government work. Why wouldn’t the government just hire the employees? Your plan adds unnecessary subsidies to employers. If you want to subsidize vocational or technical training or education just do that. No need to waste money on the employer subsidy part of it. But it seems that all you really want is to subsidize employers.
Just pay ZMP workers money. If you want strings attached, stipulate basic health checkups and care to be met for their families and provide educational incentives. No need for the auction mess.
Even though this is tangential to the ZMP worker problem it would benefit a super set of the population:
Legalize (and regulate) drugs to reduce the drug market and violence and incarceration cycle. Separate facilities for nonviolent criminals from violent criminals. And punish prison rape and murder and possibly other crime with death to the offenders.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 9:16 am
Morgan Warstler
Eric, no we will not just pay “ZMP” workers money. I’ll tell you what, you people toss words around without really thinking.
We will create a giant platform that turns most cash transfers into a fully web automated govt shrinker. My system SCALES.
Facebook handles almost 1B profiles and does so with employees measured in thousands.
Having public employees that are upper middle class only works if they deliver 2-5% productivity gains a year, and if they do that the govt. becomes FACEBOOK. Public or private, there’s a ton of money moving around, but it is doing so with far far less friction.
Baumol is a joke.
Let me make factual observations. Progressives are the weaker group, they must win the support of conservatives. If you don’t start here, your grip on reality is tenuous.
My system suddenly allows any kid in the ghetto at age 12 to start working.part time for GI, and systematically impress one bidder after the other, learning on a job day-after-day, earning more, learning what earns even more, so we can stop listening to people argue Affirmative Action. Economic mobility becoms a fact of life.
My system creates far more capitalists and it creates them in poor neighborhoods, if you don’t have enough capitalists, capitalism fails. Please go google “Distributism.”
My system successfully allows American capitalists to pay all US workers WHAT THEY ARE REALLY WORTH in the global market. AND to make use of every single human resource we have.
With that keystone in place, I then say to liberals “since these workers cannot feed themselves on what they are worth” we as society have every responsibility to guarantee that if you are showing up and being directed by someone who is paying your true worth, we will make sure you have the direct cash resources to live here in America.
Look Eric, there may be sticky wages, and economists from the left are free to argue they exist, but ONLY IF they let me get int here decimate all policies that prop up and create sticky wages.
Ask yourself this, while I support NGDPLT, without it in place, how often will there be demand to print money when 100% have a job? Won’t happen.
How much is the GI? Let’s vote. How much must we raise the age of SS retirement? Lets vote. (it is far simpler now, seniors are in GI and not taking any job that requires physical work)
Is there some kind of education that does not occur on the job? (by dramatically dropping the cost of worker training, and increasing the number and types of training that people get early in their life, and by moving education online – LOTS OF SIGNALLING about who you are in society is largely reflected by your performance in this system.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 10:45 am
Eric Morey
So, no answer other than you want old people to do manual labor and embarrass poor people into trying harder, even though there is no societal economic gain from ZMP workers working. You clearly just want to subsidize employers. You don’t even see the problems or loopholes in your auction system (which doesn’t exist but you respond as though you’ve personally already created it).
I can see that there is nothing left to discuss with you about this as you have no answers to my questions, just fantasies and incomprehensible rantings about political games.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 9:11 am
Jonas
First Noahpinion, now Modeled Behavior: The Warstler virus is spreading.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 3:38 pm
Morgan Warstler
I think this does a nice job of framing why my plan is going to happen:
http://www.nationaljournal.com/features/restoration-calls/in-nothing-we-trust-20120419?print=true
Just say thank you.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 8:06 pm
mic43ll3
What? As long as every poor American is an able-bodied 20-30 year old single male with no children, this EBay work plan should go off without a hitch.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 8:43 pm
Morgan Warstler
you got it exactly backwards.
You obviously didn;t go read my plan. because the unemployed are concentrated geographically, the 5 mile rule means that suddenly MOMMIES have access to less $200 a month Daycare.
Entrepreneurial women are hiring unemployed women for $3 per hour in their frigging neighborhood and setting up daycare companies.
What NO ONE seems to get is that LABOR is the real cost to most things here in the states.
TOT wholesales unlimited 3G cell phone plans in Thailand using the same equipment we use here for $6 DOLLARS a month.
The difference in cost is LABOR. Here we pay guy $30 a hour to climb cell cell phone towers.
SO, think! When all the subsidized labor is in poor neighborhoods, the cost of services in those neighborhoods drops dramatically.
That $240 + bid goes a lot farther when mom can go to work earning $1500 a month and only $200 goes to daycare.
Game it out.
I’ll tell you what for a bunch of folks who pay attention to Modeled Behavior you do a shit job of thinking thru the permutations.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 9:10 pm
beowulf
You can’t stop Morgan Monetary Theory, you can only hope to contain it.
:o)
Its a great idea. Liberals don’t get that what Morgan’s suggesting is better than the status quo and, since hope springs eternal, offers a lot of flex points if they want Congress to upgrade it (or otherwise, go to their state legislature to pay for)….
Bump the GI stipend or adjust it by family size, give worker a bigger cut of winning bid, free daycare, etc. You could even integrate the GI into a negative income tax system to reach the working poor, allowing even more govt programs and credits (food stamp, section 8 housing, EITC) to be cashed out.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 10:20 pm
Morgan Warstler
the truly beautiful thing is it correctly orients liberals with the mindset of conservatives.
I have long said a true progressive who hopes to help the lower class, they have to sacrifice the concept of upper-middle class public employees. It simply has to be IMPOSSIBLE.
Liberals are cozy with Singapore and Hong Kong where this is fact, but here out of politcal gameplay they fight it.
NO County Commissioner, no city manager, no cop, no teacher, no superintendent needs more than $150K a year with no pension. They need to go home to a regular home, public employees MUST live regular lives.
We are fine defining the job as that kind of thing.
Once you give that one thing up…
All focus of progressives goes to what is best for lower classes. They become real Rawlsians.
At that point, I enter the picture.
I know that 50% of conservatives – the middle class religious ones, once you PROVE to them that the needy are GOOD and STRIVING people, they will support a strong social safety net.
If progressives can learn to live with “beggars cannot be choosers”
ad NEVER deviate from the phrase, any policy they create will be acceptable to a large swath of the right.
My plan lets the beggars choose, and it will be OK’d because the middle class conservatives get cheap labor out of it.
It is hard for progressives to frame things int heir mind this way.
You can always tell the real true help-the-bottom liberals because when they’ hear my plan, they have no moral objection to it.
The ones who have a problem are:
1. rent seeking public employees
2. elite liberals who benefit directly from the status quo
3. the lazy who think that society should raise up poets and hate bank managers.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 10:43 am
mic43ll3
Conservatives will never support a strong social safety net if it costs money to support it. That’s the point.
This is nothing more than the Speedhamland system with an electronic component. It’s been done and doesn’t need to be “gamed out”, because the final result following Speedhamland was an angry merchant class who demanded that the lazy poor be punished in workhouses.
Not ideal. Not even close. But you know what they say about those who refuse to learn from history…
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 10:49 am
mic43ll3
And I just realized I typed out “Speedhamland” rather than “Speenhamland”. Apologies for those who wish to look it up.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 11:32 am
Morgan Warstler
Yes yes, nothing new here move along. You ought to confront your real personal issues here. You don’t want to hear that EVERYONE will be made to work, will be publicly watched while they work, and anyone not pulling their weight will suffer consequences.
This is not about slave driving a full boat of people, this is about the poor each having a clear early chance to put together a PROVABLE history of job accomplishment, and the greed of bidders poaching the hard workers 52x a year.
UNTIL you contemplate what this does to personal performance and what it does for increasing trust in a multi-cultural country you aren’t really getting near it.
This is about sorting out who is who in a fair Rawlsian way.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 5:47 pm
mic43ll3
“This is about sorting out who is who in a fair Rawlsian way.”
No, it’s about subsidizing employers and the poor at the taxpayers’ expense. This country’s been there as well, but the social engineering’s different. Here we call it Medicaid (subsidizing Walmart et al) and the EITC (subsidizing the impoverished poor with children) and Pell Grants and farm subsidies, etc, etc, etc.
The EBay thing just looks more directly like Speenhamland. But it is neither new, nor untried, nor even successful, really. I’m sure those who believe that economic status in this country is merit-based will love it, but they’re starting from a false premise anyway.
And when it doesn’t work, we can throw the poor into workhouses under the premise that not only will it force and teach them to work, but that it’s a positive for the country’s distribution model and will bring back manufacturing jobs as well.
Poverty is NOT a moral crisis on behalf of the impoverished, and it won’t be solved by pretending that it is.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 5:50 pm
Morgan Warstler
1. you’re wrong.
2. if you are right, the way to prove it, is to bring conservatives to the table, let them do whatever they want to sort out the goodies from the baddies, what do you care – at least you got everyone a GI.
Right now they got bupkiss.
Monday ~ January 7th, 2013 at 5:44 pm
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Friday ~ October 11th, 2013 at 6:10 am
Janet Yellen is hardly a dove—she knows the US economy needs some unemployment – Quartz
[…] that would make unemployment less attractive and would better track workers reputations: An “eBay job auction and minimum income program for the unemployed.” The program would require those receiving unemployment insurance or other assistance to work in a […]
Sunday ~ October 13th, 2013 at 9:24 am
Janet Yellen, Efficiency Wages and Monetary Policy | Jo W. Weber
[…] Warstler’s Reply: The original link in the column about Morgan Warstler’s plan was to a Modeled Behavior discussion of his plan. Here is a link to Morgan Warstler’s own post about his plan. Morgan’s reply in the comment […]
Thursday ~ September 11th, 2014 at 3:59 pm
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