[Nogwater]

> I think we'd all agree that increasing employment is a good goal

I don't agree, and I'm not sure why people would see employment for its own sake would be a good thing. I want to increase some of the things that employments brings (purchasing power, a sense of purpose, etc...) and not others (loss of time, feeling trapped, etc...).

[BurningFrog]

In the minimum wage context, the advantages are pretty clear.

Mostly bringing people outside of productive society inside it. Homeless, unemployed, addicts etc.

This is not about making middle class college graduate parents work more.

[firethief]

As GP was saying, employment doesn't help with homelessness or addiction; income and sense of purpose do. Employment does help with unemployment, but that's kind of begging the question.

[BurningFrog]

I completely disagree.

Going daily to a workplace, helping out as part of a team and being useful are essential to becoming a productive member of society.

This is hard for us college educated middle class people to grasp, but many people have grown up without knowing anyone with a regular job and need to get eased into the basics.

[ap22213]

Agreed. I read threads like this one, and all I wonder why all of these amazingly smart, creative, and talented people aren't banding together to put an end to this thing called work.

[fizzbatter]

Agreed - furthermore, low cost employment is hard to get behind on its own for me. If we reduce minimum wage, and some unskilled worker is able to work where s/he otherwise wouldn't, is it really helping them? What good does $2/hr do if they ultimately can't provide for themselves or their families.

I feel[1] like lowering minimum wage below livable levels would require some type of basic income anyway. Am i wrong?

[1] I say feel, because i'm uneducated in these areas

[dandermotj]

I suppose from an individual standpoint examples like yours are very relevant - a big fear for myself is working a job we're I am unfulfilled - but from a broad view we must agree increasing employment is a good goal. The more people working, the greater the output and the cheaper it costs, from which everyone benefits whether we are employed ourselves or not. A highly employed nation is a bountiful one.

[cortesoft]

Shouldn't our measure be productivity, then, instead of employment? At least as far as what a society should care about?

In terms of social benefits, not all employment is equal. We could hire all un-employed people to move rocks back and forth, but that won't contribute to society anything that simply giving those people cash for nothing wouldn't solve just as well.

There are two separate goals we are trying to accomplish, and traditionally they have both been solved through employment - the need for productivity and the need for resource allocation. If you want to keep trying to meet both goals through employment (instead of meeting the second one through something like basic income), then we need to make sure we continue to address both needs.

[dandermotj]

You're right, that's why we use Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as our primary measure of an economy's performance; which employment is the fundamental driver of. I wasn't arguing against basic income, I was just contending that individual circumstance of employment like unhappiness are not good reasons for disregarding the benefits of increasing employment.

I absolutely want to see basic income tried and tested in all its various forms and iterations. I think it could be the solution to the convoluted social benefit policies which are too complicated to be navigated and too specific to generalise well.

And of course I agree that unproductive employment is worthless to society in the long.

[Absentinsomniac]

Unless you're just hiring people for the sake of employment to do things that don't need done. I've read China's housing market is in a bit of a pickle due to this. Course they also apparently have really clean streets.