[p2p-research] Structural Unemployment... round #3527

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Edward Miller wrote:
> Thank you Paul for all your insightful comments on technological
> unemployment. Being fairly obsessed with this topic, I would like to add a
> few thoughts of my own.

Thanks. In looking through some older posts, I thought this one you wrote 
also connects with these issues: :-)
"[p2p-research] Re: gotta read this"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/004959.html
"""
Perhaps there is some hope in this generation, and the growing alternatives 
to both markets and governments, as embodied by the P2P movement. Perhaps 
the paradigm shift to this will be as bloodless as the overthrow of 
Encyclopedia Britannica by Wikipedia. Not too many molotovs in that 
revolution, from what I hear.
   Yet, it isn't inconceivable that the nation could fracture or collapse, 
but considering the statistics, I can't imagine many geographical borders 
larger than a few square blocks that would contain homogenous 
cultural/political/social views. I really think what we are seeing will be 
unprecedented, and likely very strange.
   If Factor e Farm or something similar takes off, perhaps Panarchy will 
take off, as they seem to be hoping. Though I doubt it could remain an
evolutionarily stable state for long. Natural Selection will continue to 
select for virulent systems and actually think Alexander Wendt's recent work 
arguing that World Government is inevitable makes a strong point... or at 
least elucidates the structural properties which make higher levels of 
organization likely (and even desirable).
"""

Which reminds me of Manuel de Landa's "Meshworks, Hierarchies and 
Interfaces" essay again:
   http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains 
and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly 
turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and 
hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory 
alone but demand concrete experimentation."

> The biggest refutation of the logic of structural unemployment is the fact
> that as production becomes more efficient, prices decrease, and thus the
> cost of living decreases. This means people can afford to work for less
> money.

Well, it would perhaps refute it if the gains in automation were evenly 
distributed. But, at least in the USA, they are not (something the Triple 
Revolution memorandum was talking about back in 1964). So, that means some 
few remaining workers get the benefits, while the rest become unemployed.

In the current situation, economist are talking about how the US work week 
is at its lowest level since 1964 (33.3 hours, up slightly from that in the 
past month),
   "For Workers, The Grim News Just Keeps Coming"
   http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/03/grim_news.html
and the implication is that when (if?) the economy "recovers" in terms of 
demand, existing employees will get a boost in work hours (and even 
overtime) before new people are hired. If the average work week is still 
considered 40 hours, and people ofter readily do overtime, and if the amount 
of benefits paid per employee is fixed, then it makes sense for current 
companies to go so far as to almost double the working hours per employee 
(so, 40 hours straight time and 10 hours overtime, where the cost of 
overtime are matched by the savings of benefits like health care and 
retirement for new employees) before hiring any new employees. If they did 
that, we would see no new jobs even if the US GDP were to *double* because 
there is so much slack there.

The total amount of money paid in wages would go up, but it would all be 
concentrated in current employees. So, people currently unemployed would not 
get any benefit from this. This also assumes demand really could go up in 
such a dysfunction situation, especially with movements like 
environmentalism and voluntary simplicity and improved durability of some 
products (like cars or houses) putting downward pressure on demand.

Thus we have calls for a shorter work week like this:
   "The time for the 32-hour work week is NOW!"
   http://www.opednews.com/populum/diarypage.php?did=12209

But there is the conflict that what seems good for workers overall in the 
long term is bad for specific workers (many people do like to work more 
hours either because they like their work, or they want the money, or they 
want to escape from a bad home life or other problems) and also it raises 
costs for companies to manage more employees and pay more per-employee 
benefits like health care. There may be long term benefits like lower taxes 
(less unemployment, less social stress), or improved worker productivity in 
some cases (from better rested employees if overworked or if their family 
life or community life has fallen apart from not being there to help and 
that has translated into lower work performance from distraction), but those 
are not noticeable in the short term. Also, it is a big intrusion on 
individual workers and business owners to tell people how long they can work 
(like in France) and overall may decrease the output of specific businesses 
if there is some sort of skill shortage in some area in demand. For example, 
right now, there might be a demand for robotics engineers, but should they 
only be allowed to work 32 hours if there are not immediately available 
replacements? This issue also ties in with worker mobility and lack of 
loyalty on both sides of company and worker, so companies have reduced 
investments in workers to upgrade skills. Many people could become robotics 
engineers  (almost any auto mechanic probably has the skills and aptitude 
these days since modern cars are basically robots with many computers and 
servos and sensors and so on) but it might take an investment in retraining. 
And of course, training lots of robotics engineers will only make the 
employment problem worse IMHO. :-)

> Now, when it comes to rapid advancements in AI, etc, this point can become
> moot. However, I am mainly going to talk about the near term.

Well, how near is near? Five years? Ten years? Twenty?

What I see is more that, eventually, as people see what is going to happen 
in two to three decades, with AI, robotics, 3D printing, and better designs 
and better production processes, that any predictions about an abundant 
future will feed back into policy changes in the present day. So, there are 
present day implications of future predictions. For example, why worry about 
running a deficit in the USA for universal health care now (or for vastly 
expanded R&D into robotics, automation, 3D printing, and better open design 
:-) if one is just assuming the current scarcity-based economic system will 
be transcended to a world of abundance in a couple decades?  It makes no 
sense to stick our economics heads in the sand and say we'll change only 
when unemployment reaches 99% or when the economy stops working entirely 
because people are printing all their needs locally.

> In the mean time we have lots of other policies like minimum wage and
> environmental regulations which makes human labor more expensive and
> incentivizes automation. So we may have structural unemployment, but not
> because of market forces. However, the rationale for my support of the Basic
> Income and similar P2P/post-scarcity policies really has little or nothing
> to do with the idea of structural unemployment.

When there is a lot of unemployment, no minimum wage would mean a race to 
the bottom in wages. If you have some savings and credit, or own your house 
or have cheap rent, it makes sense to underbid other employees on wages so 
that you can last as long as possible compared to not having a job. This 
puts massive downward pressure on wages eventually. I saw that happen in 
specific technology areas -- there was a Smalltalk bubble with wages up to 
US$120 an hour and more in the mid 1990s, and then it burst (everyone 
claimed to know Smalltalk, it seemed) and wages were bid back down a lot. 
Similar things have happened with other languages. Programming wages in 
general continue to fall (some rare exceptions excluded perhaps, with an 
intersection of domain knowledge, programming skill, and corporate fit).
"The Sky is Falling, and So Are Tech Wages"
http://www.ere.net/2008/05/27/the-sky-is-falling-and-so-are-tech-wages/

What I see now is people getting nervous. People in the technology field 
know more and more about how easy it is to automate things or outsource 
things. Someone who is a system administrator knows their job can be done 
from India for much less or automated away in various other ways. It is only 
the continued innovation and change that keeps up some demand and desire to 
have some humans present. But there are continuing innovations that also 
reduce jobs. Server virtualization, for example, makes it easier for one 
system administrator to do the work of several.

Already, it only takes about 1% or so of the population in the USA to supply 
everyone with food. It only takes 9% or so of the population (guessing) to 
supply everyone with core material goods. Most of the rest is services or 
non-essential luxury goods or relates, as Bob Black suggested, to "guarding" 
or as Alfie Cohn said, to the inefficiencies created by competition.

Essentially, our social pyramid is already inverted, with only about 10% of 
the population needing to "work" on material things. Almost all the other 
services could be very easily supplied on a voluntary basis or automated. We 
have already long passed the threshold (for decades) where we could have a 
very different society with different economics. Momentum and ideology and 
active resistance and schooling has kept us on this course for as long as it 
has.

So, as you mentioned at the post linked at the start:
"""
Of course this is both a natural flaw of human beings and a creation of our 
educational system which, as The Big Crunch article which Paul linked to 
argues, is structured to polish the "gems" and discard the vast majority of 
the "dirt."  It is a good example of one of the many tipping points which 
are happening simultaneously, along with structural unemployment, the 
unenforceability of intellectual property, skyrocketing healthcare costs, 
Open Source, etc etc etc. In systems-theoretic terms, we are at the cusp of 
bifurcation.
"""

But, I'd put it a bit differently. The contradictions have been piling up 
deep for maybe a hundred years (or longer), especially since the burst of 
technology developed around WWII, but in general since industrialization 
began. As a global society (lead by the USA, in turn lead by many with ties 
to Nazi-like financial pyramid scheme ideology), we decided around WWI and 
certainly then around WWII as a globe to compete instead of cooperate. Well, 
technology has gone even further than it was around WWII. The contradictions 
have gotten more and more obvious, until even someone like myself can see 
them. :-) Obviously, many people from Bucky Fuller, to Albert Einstein, to 
the Triple Revolution memorandum signers, to the counter-culture movement of 
the 1960s and 1970s all saw parts of this. Even people like Mother Theresa 
and similar people for many centuries or millennia. They may not have seen 
things in terms of automation, but they could see issues of inequity and yet 
also see the value of increased productivity through cooperation.

> Perhaps a period of structural unemployment may be one of the only ways to
> reorient policies to be more forward-thinking... shorter work week, prizes
> for the technology commons, stronger overtime, Basic Income, etc. Of course
> it would be a very painful process, but I really don't see any other way to
> get there. I actually think we should push for more policies that increase
> the cost of human labor (and hopefully are good in their own right), and
> hopefully create structural unemployment. My working theory right now is
> that this is what has happened in much of Europe.

In Europe, the benefits of increased productivity from whatever sources are 
more evenly distributed. That is the huge benefit of greater "socialism" 
like Western Europe has in the face of automation (even as the USA has some 
redistribution too and fairly high taxes, much of which goes to war or other 
waste). So, structural unemployment is less of a problem in Europe. Europe 
has coped much better with the current recession than the USA, as far as 
most people having an easier time of it. I think, as unemployment benefits 
run out and savings run out and credit runs out, we are just starting to see 
the stress in the USA, and it will likely get much worse over the next year 
or so.

And, as I said elsewhere (though with a typo),
   "[p2p-research] Trust, crypto, and social change (was Re: Google gets 
into the DNS business)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-December/006413.html
perhaps the fact that the population of Western Europe can not easily rely 
on the "ammo box" to solve their problems makes them take the "ballot box" 
more seriously than in the USA?  Sadly, in the USA, it seems almost certain 
that many conservatives will be voted back into office next year during 
midterm elections and maybe as the next president too.

In the USA, many conservative individuals keep saying if things got really 
bad in the USA they would use their guns to solve the problem somehow 
(generally with no clear vision of a better world other than less 
government). But that point never really comes where things are so bad, 
because it all happens so gradually, like it has in other places:
   "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"
   http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
And like in Iraq, it's much easier to take a country "down for maintenance" 
with guns than to boot it back up again some other way.

So, as a community, Western Europe has voted itself more of the fruits of 
automation, and also put in place laws that limit competition or in other 
ways create level playing fields. Western Europe in various ways has limited 
working hours like in France. Western Europe has had taxes to shift private 
consumption to public amenities which may be better because they are often 
more cost effective -- like mass transit, public health care for everyone, 
or good local libraries. I don't think Western European politicians may yet 
get the really big picture about automation, but it will be easier for them 
to accept it than for the US politicians. (Sadly, places like Cuba or Russia 
that one might think would most quickly embrace automation based on 
"communism" have resisted information technologies out of "authoritarianism".)

US Americans can go on all they want about whether Western Europe is as 
"competitive" as US firms, but if the USA devolves into endless civil war 
with burning cities, US productivity is going to be lower overall. Of 
course, the fact that the USA has lots of nuclear weapons means that the 
rest of the world is nervous if the USA continues to descend into madness.

I feel it is clearer and clearer that some form of socialism (which the USA 
already has for the very poor, the schooled, or the very old with welfare, 
public schools, Social Security, and Medicare) is the only salvation 
possible for capitalism as we know it. A basic income could generalize all 
those social supports to one program. However, even then, there is an 
internal tension, because a basic income then enables people to build a gift 
economy (more time for Wikipedia) or improve their local subsistence (they 
can garden more or build 3D printers), so a basic income puts other 
pressures on capitalism. We may well see other solutions (a P2P-ish gift 
economy, a resource-based economy, and/or more stronger local communities 
with local economies) instead of a basic income.

> The idea of the poor having less children and the rich having more is
> something I have thought about before as well. It seems pretty obvious for
> anyone with a utilitarian bent. To narrow the disparity between the
> developed and developing world, actually promoting development is the
> easiest and most effective way, and would require shifting our aid from
> handing out food to providing open technology and other means of production.
> 
> To narrow the fertility disparity within developed nations like the US, then
> you have to talk about changing welfare incentive structures (Basic
> Income!), choice architecture, sex education, etc. Coercion is almost
> totally off the table in my opinion..... though if some fundamentalist
> genetically engineers herself to be able to have dozens of babies who can
> each have dozens more, then maybe some coercion is in order.

To be clear, I think the optimal human population in the local solar system 
is upwards of several quadrillion people. So, I have no concerns about 
overpopulation. I think our solar system is vastly underpopulated, and large 
families should be encouraged on Earth with an eye towards emigration in a 
few decades, especially by people who have focused on non-material values 
and likely are materially poor in our society. :-)

Related by me:
"[p2p-research] Earth's carrying capacity and Catton"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004123.html
"[p2p-research] Peak Population crisis (was Re: Japan's Demographic Crisis)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004174.html

Because kids take a lot of time, and our society has so many other amusing 
things to do
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
and because each person can be a net benefit to society
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource
overpopulation is IMHO the least of our worries. (Not to say there can't be 
local crowding.)

Some people have argue that Western humanity has changed its genetics and 
culture in the past few centuries by the materially rich having more 
children (and the poor dying off). I could believe that, but I don't 
necessarily see that as a plus. It's more like a problem statement IMHO, 
especially as materialism has now become so rampant as to be a threat to 
planetary wellbeing (and even personal wellbeing).

  Likewise, the USA (especially most recently California) has been shaped a 
lot by people who abandoned their homelands for the promise of something 
better. Again, is that a good point or a problem statement?

Anyway, example discussions:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q="rich+having+more+children"
"The Moral Obligation to Have Children?"
http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/05/the_moral_obligation_to_have_c.php

"The Rich Having More Children "
http://park.geocities.jp/jpcdebate/0103/p034.html
"The proverb that the poor have more children is well known among Japanese. 
And until recently I have believed the proverb. However, when I investigated 
the child benefit policy, I found a government statistic which indicates 
that the rich have more children in Japan. "

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/08/greg-clarks-farewell-to-alms.html
"The rich having more children than the poor has been true for most of 
history (exceptions include the modern welfare states), and most of all in 
polygamous societies. Downward mobility has been a fact of life in all 
societies and I doubt it has anything to do with the industrial revolution."

The fact is, raising a child well is more work than just about any job. It 
also produces more important results for a healthy society than most so 
called "work" in a capitalist society, much of which produces junky products 
or unneeded services. So why should parenting not be valued as much or 
higher than a paid 40 hour a week job? It's just a matter of ideology and 
social convention. Just think of the enormous amount of work people are 
doing in materially poorer countries like India or South America raising the 
next generation of humanity. Can't we decide, as a global society, to make 
their "job" as parents easier? The fact is, the future is in the South. With 
birth rates below replacement value, Western society, as a whole, has 
already decided it is non-viable. Granted, those trends may change, 
especially as those from bigger families might in turn decide to have bigger 
families as those around them die off, so in the long term, it is hard to 
say if the West will go extinct just from ideology. But it still does not 
look good. A big empty solar system out there and people not wanting to fill 
it up with joy? Seems very sad to me. It shows all sorts of levels of 
ideological and practical problems in our society that the hope of space 
habitation has been lost. It shows a closing down of our society.

Still, one could have a "sustainable" population only on the Earth. That 
seems to be what many are advocating, and linking population control to 
that. But these people are making plans for billions of other people for 
centuries to come while totally ignoring possible (and *obvious*) 
technological trends, things that eminently physicists like Freeman Dyson 
and Gerard K. O'Neill and many others have said are possible. Why is 
"resource depletion" a real thing (ignoring it is not, given human 
imagination makes resources), when the promise of the oceans or space is 
somehow unreal? It is more real to point to people living in space right now
   "Inside the space station....Awesome !!!!!"
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmC2v4G5zq0
than it is to be sure of any limits to energy production, food production, 
material production, and so on. We're going to kill off literally billions 
and trillions of future humans because we can't look up physically or 
economically? Is there a word for genocide of the unconceived?

Again, as with economics from decades in the future feeding back to the 
present, if we can have quadrillions of humans living in space over the next 
thousand years, then should that idea not feed back into today's population 
policy, too?
   "High Frontier Screen Savers"
   http://space.mike-combs.com/screensavers.htm

Ignoring the genocide against the Native Americans, and the horror of 
slavery, did not the American frontier have positive effects in some ways? A 
sense of optimism? A sense of possibility? And might that not have had 
benefits even back in Europe?

Of course, one might suggest there will be the horror of robotic slavery or 
AI slavery on the high frontier. Which would be a good thing to think about 
ethically.

> The main point I want to make is that there are actually two conflicting
> things we are pushing. On one end the Open Source stuff and on the other the
> Basic Income stuff... true once they both are implemented they'd feed on
> each other in a virtuous circle, but since a Basic Income seems so unlikely
> to be developed without structural unemployment.... Open Source's
> deflationary effect could actually stave off the structural unemployment
> which I argued we need.

Well, again, only if the increased productivity from open source is shared 
evenly. But if it is not (and it has not), then the rich get richer and the 
poor get poorer. Or, in this case, those with jobs have their money go 
farther, but those without jobs have less prospects of them. So many changes 
seem to be happening that I'm not sure we need to go out of our way to 
increase some of them. A lot of this might just be directing where or how 
the desire for change manifests itself, hopefully diverting it from crazed 
destruction (like the recent shooting on a US Army base) and into more 
positive alternatives (like contributing to Wikipedia or being a better 
neighbor).

I read recently somewhere a devout Muslim saying something like, "We're just 
as angry as the terrorists, we just choose to deal with it differently."

That kind of thing may be more common for the unemployed. Of the 9/11 
hijackers, most were Saudis, and I read in a public profile of them that 
almost all were upset that their chances for advancement in Saudi Arabia had 
been (in their opinions) stifled by the US support for a repressive Saudi 
regime. So, in that sense, 9/11 was about the hijackers feelings about 
unemployment, underemployment, and other related things connected to social 
policy.
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijackers_in_the_September_11_attacks

Already in the US, there are reports of people losing their jobs harming the 
companies they work for in some way -- especially in ways like taking data, 
but sometimes worse in physical ways (the phrase "going postal" connects to 
that in past downturns and layoffs). There are a lot of emotions involved 
for many people, especially when you lose a job when the economy is bad. 
Most people don't do anything problematical, of course. But the tension 
increases and so the probability increases. There was also, for example, the 
recent attack in the Netherlands against the royal family there by a 
security guard who had just lost his job.

So, we may not yet have seen how deep the anger can get about jobs. It would 
be much better for our society if that anger went into positive, socially 
productive directions (including P2P directions) than if it randomly harms 
lots of bystanders. For example, when that army psychiatrist snapped, one 
could see it essentially as over losing his job in the USA and being forced 
against his will to take another one that was worse abroad (even though with 
the same employer), and he then harmed the very people he had been trying so 
hard before to help. Would his core beliefs not have been served so much 
more by some other more positive action? Maybe as some sort of whistleblower 
or something? Of course, when people are pushed to the breaking point, it is 
hard to know how they will break. Most just crumple. Ideally, we don't want 
to find out. But if people do break, it is better if people have positive 
alternatives to turn to.

So in that sense, contributing to open source to create a better world can 
provide one more alternative way to "get even" for those who are mad. :-) 
Negative emotions are not the best way to run your life, but they are part 
of life, and, as Mr. Rogers says, it's OK to be mad, the issue is more "What 
do you do with the mad that you feel?" Well, I'd rather see people 
contributing to Debian GNU/Linux to build a better future, rather than 
shooting up the neighborhood or their old workplace which just makes the 
future worse for everybody.

I predict a huge upsurge in angry people in the USA over the next two years 
as the limited social safety net designed only for temporary support gives 
way on top of other problems. Still, anger often does not last, and in 
finding people who do help them, angry people may be able to reconnect to 
their communities. From:
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950124/
"""
Evolutionary psychologists have suggested, furthermore, that wealthy 
communities can, paradoxically, be among those most likely to engender 
feelings of friendlessness and isolation in their inhabitants. As Tooby and 
Cosmides (1996) argued, the most reliable evidence of genuine friendship is 
that of help offered during times of dire need: People tend never to forget 
the sacrifices of those who provide help during their darkest hours. Modern 
living conditions, however, present relatively few threats to physical 
well-being. Medical science has reduced several sources of disease, many 
hostile forces of nature have been controlled, and laws and police forces 
deter assault and murder. Ironically, therefore, the greater the 
availability of amenities of modern living in a community, the fewer are the 
occurrences of critical events that indicate to people which of their 
friends are truly engaged in their welfare and which are only fair-weather 
companions. This lack of critical assessment events, in turn, engenders 
lingering mistrustfulness despite the presence of apparently warm 
interactions (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996).
"""

Still, that also connects with your idea of structural unemployment (or some 
other crisis) leading to improvements.

Of course, that assumes the USA is still functional enough to have enough 
community. It's hard to say. I can be hopeful and optimistic anyway. :-)

> Other tech and causes which most of us may or may not be on board with will
> have similar effects. Buying organic food might be propping up some obsolete
> occupations. In Vitro Meat is possibly one of the juiciest utilitarian
> technologies to ever be proposed and the potential utility gains are
> enormous... it will be a boon to animals, humans, and the environment. Yet,
> about 75 percent of arable land is dedicated to raising and feeding
> "livestock." In Vitro Meat would cause land prices to plummet, food prices
> to plummet, and thus human labor costs to plummet.

Yes, that all sounds possible.

On organic agriculture though, I'm not sure I'd agree with "obsolete". 
Organic agriculture tends to be more knowledge intensive than conventional 
agriculture. If anything, it is conventional agriculture that I'd suggest is 
obsolete. :-) I also see organic farming robots as a next big thing. :-) 
Although that may decrease employment yet again.

By the way, on your point:
"Meat grown in laboratory in world first: Scientists have managed to grow a 
form of meat in a laboratory for the first time, according to reports."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/6680989/Meat-grown-in-laboratory-in-world-first.html

And, to also support it:
"The Truth About Land Use in the United States"
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
"About 349 million acres in the U.S. are planted for crops. This is the 
equivalent of about four states the size of Montana. Four crops -- feeder 
corn (80 million acres), soybeans (75 million acres), alfalfa hay (61 
million acres) and wheat (62 million acres) -- make up 80 percent of total 
crop acreage. All but wheat are primarily used to feed livestock. The amount 
of land used to produce all vegetables in the U.S. is less than 3 million 
acres."

So, it's an interesting point. Still, because agriculture work is such a 
small percent of workforce (around 1%), would it mean that much to 
unemployment rates if it vanished entirely? I can see the land valuation 
issues having a big effect though. On the other hand, a basic income might 
increase the value of rural land not otherwise near jobs. In general, rural 
land has also held its value better in the recession (people looking for 
places they can grow more of their own food).

> I'm not saying we should oppose any of this stuff... I'm just saying we need
> to fight on both ends. Perhaps the easiest and most politically acceptable
> thing to do is raise the minimum wage. The minimum wage is retarded from
> every angle except promoting automation and disincentivizing labor, but for
> some reason mainstream people like it.

Moving beyond the "fight" metaphor might help too. Struggle? Transcend? 
Cooperate? :-) "I'm just saying we need to cooperate on both ends." :-)

A minimum wage also prevents a race to the bottom in some wages. But I'd 
rather see a basic income and no minimum wage. That makes more sense to me 
-- because the minimum wage would no longer be needed if people were 
guaranteed subsistence in other ways.

> I am just as uncomfortable promoting a brief but intense period of suffering
> as anyone, so if anyone has better ideas I'm all ears. If there are no other
> ways, and one disagrees with this approach, then I'd need to see some
> rigorous utilitarian justification for why we should forgo the Basic Income
> side of things.

Some more ideas here:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/