A Millennial/Boomer Dialectic: Part 3 - Jobs & The Economy
What follows is an imagined conversation between two imaginary people. Alex is a Leftist Millennial and Blake is a Conservative Baby Boomer.
Alex: Why should everyone work?
Blake: Because work is a moral good, work creates value for the economy, and work isn't just sitting around leeching off the system.
Alex: I'm going to ignore the "moral good" part because that's a personal thing, not a justification for policy.
Blake: Fine, address the other two then.
Alex: Please describe to me how the advertising industry adds value to the economy.
Blake: Advertising increases consumer awareness of new products. It helps consumers find and direct their dollars based on new innovations, moral causes, and personal aesthetic choices.
Alex: So, a company can pay money into a system that claims to be able to shift the spending habits of other people, but doesn't create any value in itself. It pays artists to create hollow, disposable art that will be forgotten within seconds of seeing it. That sounds like it subtracts value from the economy.
Blake: Ha, okay, yes. Some industries are more about rent-seeking than adding value.
Alex: Why are those jobs better than sitting around and doing nothing at all, then?
Blake: It gets people out of the house and participating in the economy.
Alex: So, contrast an artist who works in advertising with a single mother of two who lives with her aging father and works two jobs to cover the necessities for her family. She is adding value to the economy in the traditional sense, but her spending is only on the bare essentials. Food, utilities, rent. By contrast, the artist adds nothing to the economy, but participates by buying a modest amount of luxury items: some consumer electronics, nicer food, entertainment, etc. According to the traditional logic, the mother is the more ideal case, but in our modern economy, the artist's economic activity is what's actually valuable. So, why don't we let them both quit and just GIVE them money to spend? The mother can enjoy her life more and be around her kids more. The artist can create actual art that has meaning in itself, while maintaining the same lifestyle?
Blake: I see where you're going with this, but for one, we could never afford to do that, and two, that sounds like Communism to me.
Alex: It's actually not communism! Universal Basic Income allows us to keep our Capitalist system while removing the "work or die" threat at the bottom of the income ladder. This will have the effect of allowing compensation to match the desirability of the job, which will make the labor market more fair. It will encourage more economic activity across the majority of households. It will only require higher taxes on voluntary incomes.
Blake: That still sounds like communism to me. Besides, what does this have to do with racism?
Alex: Almost every system and institution in this country has been, over the course of the last few decades, changed to entrench and codify class and stall class mobility, which predominantly affects Black people and People of Color.
Continued in Part 4...