Sorry.

fmp

Virtual job simulator ftw.

Cool story Maslow.

Strive means different things to different people

This too.

The most important thing is to have good policies that are fact/principle based alongside an easily digestable narrative containing the political message.

Both the narrative and more detailed stuff will get discussed aplenty. Most won't remember the facts but they will remember the message and some will also remember it was backed up by facts even though they don't remember the details of those facts.

Part of either solution, or both (unspecifically: welfare state handouts or civic service/work programs) is ensuring that we treat everyone with dignity.

I don't mean tone policing to make right-wing morons feel better, not that cheap stuff we debate on the forum.

I mean a conscious cultural shift to celebrate things like civic service. The analogy to the military as modern America's new #1 jobs program is a good one. How many sportball games adulate military members before the game or whatever? We've made military service the culturally and socially acceptable national service while some of us heap disdain and throw shade at civic service, public unions, etc. and work with the political class to dismantle the sector.

Now, you'll rightfully get critics who point out that this culture shaping stuff is for mages and wizards and idealistic and sure, fair enough. But re-shaping the image of military service was in fact actually a consciously undertaken propaganda goal of the American government and the military service after Vietnam. I mean 'propaganda' in a value neutral way, it's not a criticism. Look at military service ads that continue to this day: join the Army, help Haitian kids get food in a crisis, etc. It's been highly effective too. Check out Gallup's historical trends of "which institutions do you trust?" and the military is one of the few American institutions that is ascendant in the public's eyes.

Also most of what we now remember about the WPA and the CCC is the sometimes intriguing art of the propaganda posters and the newsreel footage of the CCC in uniform building bridges over streams or the WPA building golf courses or whatever. Again: propaganda, all of it. To sell the service as desirable, beneficial to the community, to improve morale.

I realize I'm halfway to sounding like a Soviet here but I'm not asking for May Day parades in Red Square, just some reasonable levels of accommodation to the notion that if we're doing make-work programs, it can't be half-assed or haphazard or forget that the whole goal here isn't just to put money in someone's pocket but also to let everyone feel good about it. The cynical me can easily poo-poo this stuff as I'm sure many critics can, and yet how much of the story of Trump: Now President are fairly transparent paeans about the importance of feelings, and dignity, and pride.

I think anyone interested in the project is going to have to start there, to 'invest' capital -- time, energy, clever branding, money whatever -- into reforming and reshaping civil service or public work as desirable, prideful, something worth investing in. Not just for the overseers at the high levels of government, but for the participants.

And I take it on its face this is all much, much harder to do with the traditional welfare state programs that simply guarantee an income and transfer money. I can understand it's just one of those things baked so deeply into out lizard brains that our work and our productive capacities define us that for some, for many -- a handout is a slap in the face.

We're faced with only "non-ideal" options here and so if we're ceding that the global ascendancy of the far right populist movements is subconscious reflexive lashing out due to the global meritocracy programs of the neoliberal elites working too well and enriching too few, we should reconsider things we've tried before during moments of cultural and social despondency that also featured an embrace of more stridently radical political solutions (e.g., the 1930s Depression era that saw both the rise of global considerations of communism AND fascism). One of the areas that my read of history suggests had success was things like work programs and far more robust civic service programs than what we have currently; we're instead now doing just the opposite. The closest modern equivalents are the programs and institutions like public unions we're in the midst of helping America's Scott Walkers tear down year over year.

Also I'll put the internet snark tone back on for a half-serious point but I'm told there's a huge set of Baby Boomers approaching both retirement and facing uncertain future of poor health needing massive amounts of care that might crush public resources and even private health-care industry's ability to effectively react and care for all these olds with diabetes or whatever.

Set about creating a huge public works/service program to get America's unemployed and underemployed working class types to build and staff the world's greatest set of modern nursing homes, ez game. Kill two birds with one stone, keeping the unemployed and restless busy tending to all the dying olds.

You may need to also have a public service army to destroy the health care robots and medical supply delivery drones Bezos and Apple and the Silicon Valley Meritocrats are probably working on to get all that health care money, I haven't mapped this out completely yet.

You deserve your own forum, D

Need to be very careful about reification in spots like this.

Social and cultural attitudes in America dont emerge anymore out of nature than do those of Vikings.

In a world that does not need workers, how long will the things you describe exist?

People all ready do a lot of defining of themselves via consumption and leisure, would predict this will grow, increase in life long learning we are all ready seeing, many may adopt crafts as a leisure activity that maybe leads to a sub level economy of barter, more musicians etc.

Thats obviously individual motivations, but if robots and AI do everything and government manage much of the surplus thereby, we are at a very collectivised structure, so maybe their will also be an uptick in communal attitude as there is no longer the structural pressure to dissolve people in atomised competing labour monkeys.

Obviously there will be a lag between the fact that structure can change very quickly in the 21st century and legacy attitudes, so yea, propaganda ftw.

You just have to keep focussing on the fact that 1955 was much better than 1935.

I'm with you. I agree that 20th and early 21st century Americans and other Westerners have adapted themselves to become atomized competing labor monkeys through relatively recent conditioning of our current economic environmental context and that it is likely 22nd century people may have adapted to automation such that self-worth is derived from crafts and hobbies and consumption like fantasy football championships and homebrewing beer and whatever else.

But that might be generations away, gotta solve today's problems first.

We can prod things in the rigth direction. That's requires the rigth policies and the right narrative. Reducing the value of income has to be a huge part of it. The usual way is through scocialised services type stuff but maybe we also have to start doing some UBI.

A radical suggestion, ill-thought through -to get the ball rolling. We push for the big trade deals and other wealth generating policies but we also recognise this wealth isn't shared efficiently so allocate a part of the increased wealth as an income for everybody. Pulling a figure out of my arse just to make the point - TPP would come with a monthy income of $50 for everybody.

Realisically there would have to be some assessment of the actual wealth generated but suddenly people would start to be very keen on wealth creating policies and for the right reasons. The income will build at the same sort of rate as wealth is increasing and the need for human labour to generate that wealth is diminishing.

Stoner hippies ahead of their time.

Actual natural environment might even chip in with a whole bunch of hai there, could you consider consuming less, ok thanks bai.

Which would make stoner hippies even moah ahead of their time.

I really want to believe this is the acceptance stage of the MAGAing and not the bargaining stage of the end times.

Considering we're talking about cajoling and tricking people into just taking money and subsequent free time, and using said money and free time to make the world more beautiful in some little way, I'm gonna throw down a little few couple dollars on the latter.

That would be a great way for some to help defer the cost of a college education, similar to the GI bill. If they earned it through a jobs/work program.

Under and not probably.

You could just eliminate both sides of the payroll tax on the first $50k of income and expand the EITC. I guarantee no one will even notice, let alone feel bad about it.

It's not clear to me why a WPA-style program would be a make-work handout needing a PR campaign to be acceptable. The original WPA built tons of roads, hospitals, schools, parks, etc. that are still in use today. The 'digging holes and filling them back up' story is right-wing BS to discredit a social program that did a lot of real good, and our crappy infrastructure could really use that sort of investment right now.

Is everyone certain that automation is going to end employment? Automation has been occurring for a while right? So far the data shows job creation keeps chugging along.



Or are you saying a certain group of people like low-skilled men are having trouble adapting to the new labor market where they might be too abrasive for many service industry jobs and the manufacturing and labor type jobs they used to perform are gone ?

As jobs get automated it creates a lot of wealth and opens up a lot of new possibilities for employment. That's fine in the early stages of automation when it took a lot of time to automate those new jobs but we're entering the age now where we can quickly adapt the machines to do the new jobs as well. As the tech advances the human adapatability advantage is being eroded fast.

Anyone who looks at the past job creation and thinks that's relevant to what's beginning to happen now is in denial.

that's what people say, but it's not reflected in productivity growth. if we really are in a new age of automation then why is nothing happening to productivity?

I find it ironic that given the title of this thread the discussion is some utopian economic fantasy world where we trick people into taking government money, more money magically falls from trade deals into bank accounts, and UBI amazingly appears from some magical bottomless trough with no thought to how wealth is actually created. The Dem Party will surely die if it interprets the message of this election to be a move toward to socialism. Maybe i'm wrong as its possible I guess the democrats can finally figure out a way to do socialism right this time, despite the march of history.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.


(Just my 2c. A debate about socialism is pointless, and I'll be participating in the zero sum game of Texas Hold'em today. Carry on.)