How come "make-work" is bad but "creating jobs" is good?
@peterdrake I never think of creating jobs as good, since a job is a cost of production.
Also, usually the people who talk about job creation are talking about creating them in a specific place, which I don’t care about.
Though in reality a useful job is much better than make work, since make work is paying the cost without producing anything.
@pganssle @lucifargundam Related question: Why do we always complain about technology “destroying jobs”? Wasn’t the point of creating all this technology to reduce the amount of work we have to do?
@peterdrake @lucifargundam To be clear I do not think it’s a bad thing when technology “destroys jobs”. People think it’s a bad thing because, IMO, they confuse costs for benefits (since practically speaking you need a job to get an income, people think they want a job rather than an income).
@peterdrake @lucifargundam There are some people who argue that an income without a job would lead to despair or a lack of meaning in life, but I think if it were common to have a reasonable income without a job, we would learn to cope…
>> @peterdrake @lucifargundam There are some people who argue that an income without a job would lead to despair or a lack of meaning in life, but I think if it were common to have a reasonable income without a job, we would learn to cope…
<< You're addressing the taboo in laborless income. The problem most people have with that is that laborless income is funded from the taxes of those who work comparatively harder. And those latter individuals are significantly more concerned about someone who's abusing access that tax fund(which is assumed exponentially more than non-abusers) than someone who genuinely needs it.