Interesting Links for 05-11-2013

[andrewducker]

• These Are Some of the Most Amazing Views of Earth You'll Ever See
  (tags: earth space photography )
• Tesco petrol stations use face-scan tech to target ads
  (tags: technology faces advertising )
• Joe Cornish is up to direct Star Trek 3
  (tags: StarTrek )
• What happens when you look up Adam West in the phone book?
  (tags: batman )
• Something worth breaking

Comments

[bart_calendar]

Paying companies to pay workers is a better plan.

Simply because people feel psychologically better about themselves when they are being paid for a job. Levels of depression and stress are much, much lower and people have a much higher sense of self esteem.

Buying something, even something as simple as an apple or a beer feels emotionally better if you feel like you've earned it rather than it being given to you.

[naath]

We could legislate to force companies to pay the living wage without giving them money instead no?

[bart_calendar]

I would assume that's possible. I was just addressing Andrew's question.

[andrewducker]

We could do. That would, of course, mean that jobs which were worth less than that much to the company would cease to exist (if a job brings in £6.50/hr worth of value to a company, and they have to pay £8.80/hr in wages then there's no point them having the job).

[andrewducker]

I agree that working is good for people - I'd like to encourage people to work.

What this does, though, is tie people to companies that have signed up for this tax break, while compensating the company for paying a decent wage.

If the government simply handed you the difference then you could work for any company and get this benefit without having to worry about which ones were signed up for complex tax rebate systems.

[bart_calendar]

Well, that's true, but I suspect that this way avoids stigmatizing some people.

I know that for myself I'd feel differently about getting two checks - one from my job and one from the government - than I would about getting the same total amount of money in one check from my job.

I would feel much more like a charity case and probably more prone to depression on the two check system. Because I don't think it would make people feel great to be like "fuck, I work hard at my job every day and still need government assistance." With the one check thing your subconscious would quickly forget that part of your check came from the government.

[andrewducker]

Most people on minimum wage are already in this situation in the UK (through a horribly complex system).

But you can deal with it through negative tax - so you just get a single paycheck, it just shows your tax as being negative when you're earning a very low amount.

[bart_calendar]

Gotcha.

[del_c]

Wait, how does the negative income tax turn your paycheck into extra money from the state, without looking like it's different from the rest of the paycheck, in a way that isn't exactly like the "pay employers to pay their workers" that you originally objected to?

I've no objection to psychological tricks. Recessions are all about psychology, and so are their remedies. QE is totally about psychology, hence the need to instil the belief that the QE isn't going to stop.

I heard that genius Brazilian economists stopped hyperinflation in Brazil in the Nineties by inventing a new currency, but not issuing it. Every night they worked out the inflation, reversed the result out of the imaginary currency, and made traders display the price of everything in the non-existent currency the next day. After a while of showing everyone this currency that didn't inflate, they finally issued new currency. If they'd issued it before, it would have just inflated like the existing currency

[andrewducker]

The difference between "We will reward you for doing something, by handing you a bunch of cash, which you can try and manipulate in all the ways that companies do when it comes to tax" and "We will use you as a conduit for handing money directly to employees" seems pretty large to me.

Of course, it could be simplified by the government just handing out cash directly to people, but I can see why doing it this way might seem simpler (for people that have jobs).