Should the Government Subsidize Online Jobs and Classes -- and Streaming Services? (brookings.edu) 106
Two lead economists for the World Bank called for an updated online version of a legendary government program from America's Great Depression during the 1930s -- public works programs -- as a companion to widespread calls for quarantining:
What is missing in such mandatory "stick" approaches is the more active use of "carrot" incentives that could both encourage self-isolation and help prepare a workforce to bounce back in the recovery phase.... [W]e propose that governments subsidize a set of activities that could be done from home. This would further induce self-isolation, reduce the need for quarantine enforcement, and encourage some to learn new skills that could be useful after the pandemic is over.
It could also provide effective, self-targeted social assistance to young people who have lost their jobs due to quarantines and lockdowns. Several categories of activities satisfy these criteria: data labeling, document digitization, and virtual services.
Long-time Slashdot reader sixoh1 quips it could be a kind of "Mechanical Turk for all," but adds, "One idea that struck me was converting documents to display online."
The two World Bank economists also suggest that governments subsidize online courses -- and maybe even streaming services. In these times of social distancing, "There is actually a public-good component in these privately-provided services..."
It could also provide effective, self-targeted social assistance to young people who have lost their jobs due to quarantines and lockdowns. Several categories of activities satisfy these criteria: data labeling, document digitization, and virtual services.
Long-time Slashdot reader sixoh1 quips it could be a kind of "Mechanical Turk for all," but adds, "One idea that struck me was converting documents to display online."
The two World Bank economists also suggest that governments subsidize online courses -- and maybe even streaming services. In these times of social distancing, "There is actually a public-good component in these privately-provided services..."
The Libertarian answer (Score:3, Insightful)
No. Hell no...
Thank you.
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Is this like coding bootcamps that produce really incompetent expert beginners?
Re: The Libertarian answer (Score:1, Funny)
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Should people and businesses be taxed to clean up 100% of the pollution they expel into the atmosphere?
The real Libertarian answer is yes. Fake Libertarians disagree.
Contemporary Libertarianism is just unfettered capitalism and it's exceptionally toxic.
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Taxed? No. Hell no. Sued — maybe.
Libertarianism is more than Capitalism, and there is nothing "toxic" about it — indeed, it is the only free (as in "liberty") way to live.
Re:The Libertarian answer (Score:4, Insightful)
Eh, the Trump incarnation of libertarianism is much like an annoying HOA, justifying everything from rigidly closed borders to military intervention. It is essentially nationalism (quite peculiar to libertarian thought) with cherry-picked externalities justifying nearly any action in the name of liberty for me but not for thee.
Just in comparison to the insanity coming from other sides; it is marginally more tolerable, but even that is wearing thin.
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What are you talking about?! Trump simply seeks to enforce the immigration laws — which is why we hired him.
What "military intervention"? The Iran and the North Korea, as the opposition was goading him?
Nationalism is completely orthogonal to Libertarianism...
No idea, what you're talking about.
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Then obviously you don't read much on traditional libertarian websites (especially comments) like Reason.
Nor did I mention any specific actions by Trump, merely the kind of libertarians that unironically support both that are in vogue now.
Instead of broadly question them, as justifying spending a ton on a Berlin-esque wall even though most illegal immigration comes from... Canada.
We can start with libertarian arguments for pre-emptive strikes after 9/
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Country of origin doesn't equate to point of origin.
To wit, Since 2007 Visa Overstays have Outnumbered Undocumented Border Crossers by a Half Million [cmsny.org].
And the country with the most overstays?
Canada [ctvnews.ca].
Try reading what was actually written.
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Overstays are a completely orthogonal problem to that of illegal crossings, and both need to be attacked.
That said, overstays are less of a problem too because we have, at least, vetted those people once — and know their names, photographs and fingerprints, as well as are reasonably sure, they had no dangerous diseases before coming over.
None of this can be said about folks crossing in illegally, which is why they should be top priority as far as immigration goe
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You can point at particular cases of where my statements contradict the Libertarian doctrine, but the broad "you don't read much" is not an argument.
If you want to play this game, I didn't mention Trump at all, you dragged him in...
It is not for the Executive to question the laws — he is only supposed to faithfully execute them.
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Trump isn't a libertarian. There is no "Trump incarnation" of libertarians.
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Bullshit. Libertarians don't support Trump. They might support some Democrat less, but that's meaningless.
That is not a fallacy. That is a fact.
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You're saying that it takes a village [wikipedia.org] to make your life successful, happy, and fulfilled, and when you achieve these things, you owe it all to your government. Not hard work and self-reliance. Government.
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What's the difference?
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So you pledge your loyalty to your unique set of geographic coordinates? And I'm the retarded one? Really?
But I suppose that's a little better than worshipping a decorated piece of cloth that people attach to the tops of poles! How crazy is that!
I've forgotten why I ever thought "America the Beautiful" was a patriotic song. If the entire country burned down and were no longer beautiful, I would feel no less patriotic. Would you? If not,
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Should people and businesses be taxed to clean up
Taxed? No. Hell no.
You've just proven my point. You want all the freedom and none of the responsibility. 100% toxic.
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Not at all. I disagree with a lot of things from many political philosophies but contemporary Libertarianism is one that is toxic because it encourages making private gains even if it hurts the public. This is the very definition of antisocial behavior and is highly destructive to societies.
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Suing isn't very libertarian because when an individual wants a few thousand bucks to clean up the mess made by a hundred billion dollar international mega corp the chances of them being able to afford justice and actually winning and collecting the money within a decade are close to zero.
Re: The Libertarian answer (Score:1)
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Our government, should provide free education on all subjects of worth, to all citizens, as long as they pass the testing mechanisms in place to ensure they are not wasting time or having their time wasted. Citizens should be as educated as possible. I mean to say, stop and think about, ignorance of the law is no excuse by that very statement, government is liable to provide a full education in law, ignorance is a legal excuses where knowledge of the law is denied you by price barriers, this would legally
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People are upset that their jobs are going away but also don't want the government to do anything to actually help them like providing education. Well, they want them to somehow bring back uneconomical jobs like coal mining, good luck with that.
The working class never stops falling for this. Always tricked into voting against the own interests, going back to the American Civil War.
Here's how you help people bounce back (Score:1)
Take the boot off the head, let people live lives as they choose.
Don't speculate they might fare better if you use a better polish or buy neon laces.
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While one would expect the reduction in red-tape to unleash the "animal forces" inherent in market economics, the point of WPA in the depression was that market economics were broken. If that was true during the 1930s due to deflation, it's much more true today since the current economic issues are only half the death and illnesses occurring, at least half the effect is due to the lockdowns. Assuming you don't think the entire pandemic is fake, we're stuck with some kind of social distancing and public hea
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true during the 1930s due to deflation
In the 1930s the government was trying to expand the economy with fiscal spending while simultaneously choking it with excessively high interest rates.
During the 2008 financial crisis, we did a much better job by firing with both barrels: Fiscal stimulus plus rock bottom interest rates.
In hindsight, the monetary stimulus (QE) helped a lot more than the fiscal stimulus. Monetary stimulus works much faster and is much easier to throttle when it is no longer needed. Fiscal subsidies have a long lag and tend
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QE helped the people who got the money directly or received investment. The program did not function as originally-advertised, and it's still questionable as to whether or not it did more harm than good.
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QE helped the people who got the money directly or received investment.
Millions of people refinanced their homes or bought new houses.
Millions more got jobs working for the companies which got low interest loans to expand.
it's still questionable as to whether or not it did more harm than good.
The only "harm" was in the theoretical inflation that utterly failed to materialize. Without QE, we would have likely fallen into a deflationary spiral.
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QE didn't go straight into their pockets. It went to banks, and much of it was invested directly in the stock market. Pardon me if I'm skeptical of any program where banks get free money in the hopes that maybe they'll loan it out to people (much of it did NOT go to loans).
As for "theoretical inflation", we were still stuck at 2-3% right up until Covid-19 upended prices. Essentials such as food, housing, and medical care kept outpacing the base inflation rate.
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It went to banks
It went to the banks as loans, which they pay back with interest at a profit to the taxpayers.
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And the banks made a larger profit. Free money for them, even when they subverted the entire program into an investing campaign that bloated P/E ratios.
QE effectively increases money supply. If you aren't the one directly receiving that supply of money (e.g. you are not a bank), you are losing out.
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While one would expect the reduction in red-tape to unleash the "animal forces" inherent in market economics, the point of WPA in the depression was that market economics were broken.
The market isn't broken now - neither are its economics. The market is shut down by Governmental edict. Big difference on the cause of the problem, even though the effects appear the same. Easiest way to solve the problem: get Government's boot off the neck of the economy.
What do you need to subsidize free stuff for? (Score:2)
Re: What do you need to subsidize free stuff for? (Score:1)
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Will throwing money at them change that?
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How many of those YouTube videos are credible?
How many commercial on-line bootcamps are credible?
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Well, for those of us that have been working in online education since the late 90s (I helped get our first 12 classes w/ 200 students online in Fall 1998... Fall of 2018 we had 450 sections and 7k students taking online classes...) I gotta say... government has already been subsidizing online classes. Or do you not know where the difference between "in-state tuition" and "out-of-state" or "non-resident" tuition comes from? Hint - the state education board.... Federally subsidized too, unless you don't c
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Proper education is not "free" - the economists are suggesting subsidizing remote learning, not idly watching YouTube videos. Good remote learning courses require human interaction at some level and results based testing, or you get a very very low return on investment. If passive video watching worked then PBS's NOVA series would have resulted in millions of Physicists and Palentologists.
As for Mechanical Turk - the point is to put MORE money into it so there would not only be a large number of tasks avail
Re:What do you need to subsidize free stuff for? (Score:5, Insightful)
Proper education is not "free"
Bullcrap. I have learned much from free MOOCs. My kids have spent hundreds of hours on Khan Academy.
Plenty of good education is free.
Plenty of bad education is expensive.
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Proper education is not "free"
Bullcrap. I have learned much from free MOOCs. My kids have spent hundreds of hours on Khan Academy.
Plenty of good education is free.
Plenty of bad education is expensive.
pedantically - it was free to you. It costs plenty to produce high quality stuff like Khan.
(Making it free to the user makes it even better value, as more people use it).
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pedantically - it was free to you. It costs plenty to produce high quality stuff like Khan.
Khan Academy received a $10M grant from Bill Gates. That is 3 cents per American citizen.
student loan bankruptcy!! (Score:1)
student loan bankruptcy!!
It already does... (Score:2)
The infrastructure was mostly built on tax dollar. The federal government still provides significant grants for building networking availability to rural areas.
The content of current online classes was largely built by university faculty and non profits which are publicly funded in parts (if not entirely) through federal grants and state university systems.
At my university, we have online programs (mostly graduate) which are taught by regular faculty. And university budgets are about 40% tuition, 40% state
No.. (Score:2)
What government generally does is allow monopoly positions which should never have been allowed in return for claims that rural and poor were being serviced, which had been proven time and again to have been lies.
In other words as usual the people have been screwed by cooperation between corporates and government.
Of course the same will happen with any puget government 'handouts' because that is how the system now works.
The way forward is for people to turn their backs on the corps. Accept that deflation is
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Thank you for pointing out the truth about network rollouts in the US by telco and cable companies. Not sure if I agree with you on deflation since most Americans are cash poor and in debt. Deflation murders you under those circumstances.
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It is horrifying, but if you want to "address the problem", you have to do more than just give people more money or forgive their debt. There's a great need for changes in behavior, which would upend the economy. Much of our economy is driven by consumer debt. Unwinding that little problem would be one hell of an undertaking.
Covid-19 is showing us an extreme example of what would happen if people chose frugal lives. Take away quick, easy consumer debt, and people just stop buying as much stuff. Jobs wo
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Free money = good, but missing the point of online (Score:2)
I am not going to go into the incompetent crap that comes out of some online course providers - that is its own can of crap that we do not need stinking the house with at the moment.
The existing course/education providers that governments generally have a handle on are the bricks-and-mortar colleges and universities. However, these are not necessarily the best online course providers. Granted, for a complete multi-year college or degree-level education they make a lot more sense than just buying a Pluralsig
Absolutely not (Score:1)
Not Just No, HELL NO! (Score:1)
The "public works projects" or the 30's were the biggest waste of money ever, and had the effect of extending the depression until another bigger and larger (and far more legitimate) public works project came along - WWII. It also burdened the USA with what is now the entrenched civil servant class.
"Federal Employees" should be few and transitory, now we have tens of millions of people who are directly or indirectly working on the federal dole. Recall that government never, ever
Re: Not Just No, HELL NO! (Score:3)
You realize one of the main roles of government is to undertake things that aren't profitable but still necessary for society to function and progress, right? If it was profitable private sector firms would have already done it. Unless you like the idea of having to pay the fire department or the sheriff deputy when they show up on a call before they do anything. Or having to pay a private company to keep the road in front of your house repaired?
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You realize one of the main roles of government is to undertake things that aren't profitable but still necessary for society to function and progress, right?
You realize that the multi-trillion dollar federal budget that we already have, is mostly not necessary, right?
Re: Not Just No, HELL NO! (Score:3)
You're right, we waste a crapload of money on military projects we don't need like F-35s, LCSs, and Space Forces. Cut things like that and the budget really drops.
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You're right, we waste a crapload of money on military projects we don't need like F-35s, LCSs, and Space Forces.
The military budget is smaller than most people think (~3% of GDP) and most of that is personnel costs, not procurement.
Even if we cut the military budget, that doesn't justify spending the savings on subsidies for online training or any other pet project.
Each spending proposal should be judged on its own merits.
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You realize that the multi-trillion dollar federal budget that we already have, is mostly not necessary, right?
Only the military, police, and prison parts of it. Those obviously need to be significantly cut, to near zero. The rest of it needs to significantly increased.
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You realize one of the main roles of government is to undertake things that aren't profitable but still necessary for society to function and progress, right? If it was profitable private sector firms would have already done it. Unless you like the idea of having to pay the fire department or the sheriff deputy when they show up on a call before they do anything. Or having to pay a private company to keep the road in front of your house repaired?
That bullshit gets so old. We had volunteer fire departments before we had government funded stations.
Excerpts from The Development of Municipal Fire Departments in the United States by Annelise Graebner Anderson:
The rivalry among companies, which became extremely strong after 1840 or so, resulted in collisions on the street, false alarms to create contests between the companies and attempts to frame a too-efficient company. To improve its chances of being first to throw a stream of water on the fire, some Pittsburgh companies organized "plug guards"-auxiliary groups to rush to the scene of the fire, place barrels over the fire hydrants and sit on them until the engine arrived.
the volunteer fire departments were traditional organizations. The firemen were far more concerned with preserving their organization than they were with economic efficiency in fire-fighting. The political power they acquired was one reason for this desire, and it also provided the means.
Fourth, the rivalry among the fire-fighting companies, although it had at times improved their performance, was on the whole detrimental to their effectiveness in putting out fires and aroused public opposition to the volunteers. Although rivalry might have made the volunteers an average of just a few percentage points less efficient than they might otherwise have been, a particular property owner or insurance company ran the risk of the full burden of this inefficiency. It was possible for a building to burn to the ground entirely, when destruction might easily have been very limited had the fire-fighters' arrival not been delayed. The outrage at the rivalry that allowed an occasional building to burn to the ground unnecessarily was very great-probably much greater than it would have been had the cost of this rivalry been evenly distributed among the property owners and insurers.
I'd rather have someone respond if my house was on fire that I could trust not to just stop fighting the fire and get in a fistfight with a competing fire company that showed up, thank you very much.
Take your big government bullshit elsewhere. I'd rather pay a private road repair firm to fix stuff that affects me and allow others to pay to fix the things that affect them.
"Stuff that affects you" isn't always right in front of you. The food you eat, the house you live in, the clothes you wear, the computer you read this on, you have because roads all across your city,
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All of my first 3 quotes referenced volunteer firefighters, and why they were phased out in preference of government-paid firefighters.
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Not all of them were wasteful. Hoover Dam worked out very well. Too bad so many died building it . . .
textbooks (Score:5, Interesting)
Produce a list of national textbooks that are available inexpensively and cover a range of subjects. You shoudln't need to pay top dollar to learn the basics of anything and for most things the textbooks need not be revised year on year for the introductory stuff - say through first year university math, physics or computing
Put the curricuum online and tell people they will be able to register for testing next year and if they pass they will get a college credit
Tell the colleges they should step up and accept the credits
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Alternately, schools should contract to purchase textbooks by the chapter. Most chapters never need to be changed so you can continue to use them forever. If changes in current events
idiotic Democrat idea (Score:1)
Green New Deal (Score:1)
As an added bonus it'll make us energy independent for real, meaning we'll be able to let the Mid east go do whatever the hell they w
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Are they starting to empty the lunatic wards now, too?
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And additionally - we have been energy-independent for several years now. Guess when it started...
Dear god, please no (Score:2)
If government subsidizes anything, the price simply increases by the amount they subsidize. So it gets more expensive overall, and quality goes down the shitter as well.
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I get the reflexive opposition to government raining cash, but the point is literally to subsidize "stay at home" in some manner that doesn't distort the markets (read the article) - in this case any "job" that can be done from home. Since we dont usually call Mechanical Turk or the related web based piecework "jobs", at least here in the west where you can get a proper salary, we could actually figure out a way to make it into honest remote work for all of the displaced waiters, receptionists, retail store
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I get the reflexive opposition to government raining cash, but the point is literally to subsidize "stay at home" in some manner that doesn't distort the markets (read the article)
The problem is - you cannot do that. The markets NEED people to be out and productive and consuming. When you force the markets to close by removing the drive to be productive and restrict the ability to consume - you kill the markets. You cannot subsidize at all, in any manner and not distort the markets.
No (Score:2)
Should the Government Subsidize ... (Score:1, Troll)
Oh, and you'd have to subsidize internet bandwidth because not everyone has that.
Oh, and you'd have to supply tablets and computers to them as well.
Oh, I'm blind, I need a 120" monitor and 7.1 sound system so I can hear ALL of the details.
Oh, now my 4K video is studdering so crank up that bandwidth.
Oh, and you'd also have to supply power and then UPS power for accidental outages.
Oh, and you'd have to subsidize GrubHub and friends be
Government good. We want more. (Score:1)
Of course they should. Just think how well off we would be if the government ran everything! Everyone would be equal! Life would be like one long Kafkaesque dream of the DMV.
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How about ... (Score:2)
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The idea is "shovel ready jobs" so to speak - something a furloughed waiter could do with a laptop and a BS in Theatre.
There are a lot of "critical" jobs, and a lot of "easy to work from home" jobs, but most of the former are hands-on occupations that dont require a huge amount of skill (not to say there arent some very skilled power-line maintenance folks that are critical), and most of the later require skill or a higher-ed degree or both. What should someone trained in child daycare do (not translatable
Printing presses are cheap (Score:2)
Right - were talking about the country with a current national debt of 25 trillion dollars [usdebtclock.org], something like $200 trillion of "unfunded liabilities", plus similarly massive debt figures for nearly all of the States.
So, of course, the answer to every problem is for the US government to spend more money. After all, printing presses are comparatively cheap.
There's a reason that the government changed its definition of inflation to exclude certain classes of products. They don't want people to realize that the US [shadowstats.com]
Anything starting with "Should the government..." (Score:1)
Anything that starts with "Should the government subsidize..." is almost always a NO. What you are really asking is "Should the working class subsidize...".
I'll compromise. Since I miss out on 99% of all the unnecessarily free government handouts, I'll accept a reduction in taxes to just 10% instead of collecting 25%. So, stop collecting such high taxes, and I'll agree to let the government give away my money for services that offer no benefit to myself or the majority of the working class who are paying t