From: Max More (max@maxmore.com)
Date: Sat Aug 31 2002 - 23:32:07 MDT
Reason -- of course I am highly sympathetic to your perspective on
retraining. I really do doubt that a government program could be structured
so as to do more good than harm over the long run, for all the usual
reasons. However, I wouldn't rule it out completely.
At 05:13 PM 8/31/2002 -0700, Reason wrote:
>So let me see now: you'd go for enforcing an unaccountable monopoly on
>assisting workers to retrain,
No. Where did I say anything about enforcing a monopoly? I specifically
said a "limited" and "temporary" program. As for "unaccountable" I said
"carefully tracked". I suspect that you are expressing the equivalent of a
patellar reflex. :-)
I would also want such a program to require repayment by the retrained
person over some reasonable period of time. This would not only keep the
cost down, it would give them an incentive to avoid the government program
and instead find a company willing to do the training. In most cases that
is how it should be. I'm only thinking of cases where ex-workers are
effectively stuck without access to such retraining. In other words, cases
where there are no obvious incentives for companies to provide training. (A
situation you seem to rule out in principle.) Of course, a sound first step
would be for the government to supplement private services that connect
available workers to companies who need skilled workers and are willing to
do the training.
> managed by people who have no direct incentive
>to make it work?
That is always a problem with government. And it's one of my reasons to
doubt that my tentative proposal would actually work as intended.
> Why oh why wouldn't this training be done far better in a
>market environment by companies who provide services in new industries and
>have an economic incentive to retrain people? Or by the invisible hand
>notifying universities and educational establishments that money can be made
>by retraining people? Or by free market, competing training institutions
>that make their profit from future wages of the people they retrain?
It is done better. However, I am not at all sure that it works well for
everyone. How many of these "competing training institutions that make
their profit from future wages of the people they retrain" can you point
to? Perhaps you know of many that I don't. By the way, rather than the
government directly doing the training, it would be better to contract out
this work to private companies. This could be set up precisely to include a
component of revenue to these companies that depends on the results.
>Gah. Speaking as someone who has retrained and is constantly working to stay
>up to speed, anyone who claims they can't retrain under their own steam or
>can't break into a new labor-short industry just doesn't want to do it badly
>enough.
That is the standard libertarian response. I agree there is a lot of truth
to it. But it seems just a bit too easy a response. People unemployed in
Pittsburgh, living there with all their family and social connections, who
received a lousy government education, might find it overwhelmingly
difficult to zip over to L.A. to train as postproduction workers, or to
Silicon Valley to train as programmers (while paying housing costs about
four times what they are used to) or to learn bioinformatics in San Diego
or Massachusetts.
It makes good sense to have a *very* strong presumption against government
programs given a government structure anything like we've seen
historically. I'm not quite willing to write off all government programs --
if a real need exists that the market does not handle well due to
externalities, and if there may be a way to shape incentives to prevent
expansion of the program and to keep costs minimal by running it more like
a business. (Every government agency should be such that if the bureaucrats
figure out how to put themselves out of business by turning things over to
the market, they should receive a large reward.)
Onward!
Max
_______________________________________________________
Max More, Ph.D.
max@maxmore.com or more@extropy.org
http://www.maxmore.com
Strategic Philosopher
President, Extropy Institute. http://www.extropy.org <more@extropy.org>
_______________________________________________________
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