* Equally credible alternatives to university education for professions that don't involve students shouldering $100k-$200k in debt based on decisions they have to make when they're 18 years old.
* Empirical, blinded, skills-assessment based turnkey hiring solutions that outperform interviews for non-technology roles like marketing, purchasing, &c, so that people who avail themselves of alternatives to universities can get good jobs regardless of social signals.
* Tools that make it possible for companies that today exploit the 1099 labor classification to cost-effectively offer benefits and handle taxes, to make on-demand employment legal and fair while remaining competitive.
* Alternatives to patient-present doctor-mediated health care to cover the 80% case in which doctors are expensive overkill; some combination of telemedicine and nurse-practitioners.
* Technology-mediated services that drastically improve outcomes in K12 education.
* Modern logistics-driven solutions for inexpensive high-quality child care.
* Products that offer serious competition for incumbents in the financial sector to bid down the 7-10% of the economy taken by financial services.
* Tools to improve engagement with local elections and make it easier for people to take flyers on standing for election.
* Modernized fee and fine collection for things like traffic and parking tickets, which currently default out to "charging minimum wage workers $2,000 to get the boot off the car on which they happen to owe 3 parking tickets".
* Similarly: a way to do things like enroll a credit card with your local government to automatically pay fines and fees at their reduced early-payment rate --- which is something you might be able to do without getting permission from local governments.
Later: I added some things
Simple change with 100% guaranteed positive outcome.
Whereas a startup that had a really good solution for inculcating the kinds of skills and values white-collar employers are looking for could outcompete universities instead of legislating them out of the picture.
When people discuss the value signaling provided by elite universities, their first example is usually "the diligence and hard work it takes to get into the university". That strikes me as the kind of value you can find ways to signal just effectively without asking for $150k.
Graduation rates at universities for the elite are nearly 100%. Getting into the club is the only hard part and everyone involved knows that.
Empirically, what's required to get into the club is being wealthy enough to afford the private schooling, tutoring, and extra circular activities necessary to help your child game the admissions process.
As long as people value these prestigious brands, the elite will continue to buy them for their children. It's got nothing to do with education itself, which could be obtained any number of ways already.
The student can then turn around to some great companies and say "I got into X university, but am thinking of waiting a semester and want to learn a bit about your business. Would you be open to some sort of internship?"
I don't know if that is the correct solution though. Much of what I learned came from being at school, but not necessarily the classroom. I learned a ton about alcohol and drugs and sex and other things that simply being in an environment with so many of my peers produced. Additionally, I'm a designer. If I weren't an editor for the school paper, I'd never have picked up a copy of creative suite and probably would be working a miserable corporate job somewhere otherwise.
The way to fix this is to sue lots of employers for requiring or discriminating based on college education. Or at least win a few high-profile cases.
Though sometimes we're trying to tech-fix things which are broken on a whole different level. Education is effectively free today. You pay to get the certificate. I think that's a broken system.
So don't ask yourself "What degree does this guy have?", but "How much physics research has this guy done? Can I see his body of work? Is it high-quality stuff?" The latter is performed anytime a competent person performs a hire anyway. It's fine to skip/ignore the education when someone can demonstrate competence. The problem really comes in "soft" degrees like business, marketing, communications, etc., where it's not really possible for a body of work to be presented as evidence that the individual knows what he/she is doing.
I am not sure I understand this. If you are going to a doctor, you would want to make sure she is qualified, isn't it? And the only way (currently at least) to make sure is that degree that proves she knows what she is doing. Of course this doesn't apply to all professions.
It's true if someone can do those 3 things without going to medical school they may be missing a great deal of knowledge passed from medical school that maybe they were not explicitly tested on or experienced in the field. I'm not sure what to do about that. If you could find a solution for that then banning from asking or considering education could actually work, I think...but that's a hard problem to solve.
In terms of education there are two options. Ban mentioning degrees only credentials, or ban mentioning school names which deflates the ivy name recognition. In both cases schools would need to focus on education not name recognition.
I really, really, really doubt that.
In 2013, Harvard researchers did a study of how financial stress affects decision making. Denise Cummins, Ph.D. explains their findings in Psychology Today:
"When the cost of [a car] repair was increased to $3,000, a very different picture emerged: The cognitive performance of those at the upper end of the income distribution was unaffected by the increase. But those at the lower end suffered a 40% decline! The authors interpreted this to mean that scarcity impaired people’s ability to think clearly. The threat—even an imagined threat—of a large bill made it difficult for poor people to focus on the cognitive tasks at hand."
Financial stress impedes human thinking / problem solving. People get consumed by the short term challenges in front of them, and can’t see the big picture.
Sources: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976 http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/good-thinking/201309/why...
It feels like, rather than a basic income, we need two orthogonal currencies: one for necessities (food, rent, utilities) and one for niceities. Everyone would just have two numbers in their bank account, for each of the country's two official currencies. Basic income would be paid in one, while all income from trade in the economy would be in the other.
Economists liken money to votes for demand in a decentralized allocation scheme. They liken taxes and fines to punishing people by taking away their voting-weight in said scheme, relegating them to suboptimal options that they wouldn't have voted for. (Basically, the equivalent of pairing them up with a non-first-choice partner in the Stable Marriage Problem.)
This works fine at a theoretical level where every agent is participating in economy X without depending on economy X (e.g. an economy consisting wholly of foreign investors), but falls apart when people are expected to also eat and live in some of the things they vote for, because those things have inelastic demand—taxing/fining people doesn't make them consume any less of those things, because they need to consume those things; and frequently inelastic supply—there just aren't options for places to live below a certain cost, because all the suppliers' prices are being "floated up" by said inelastic demand.
If, instead, we said something like:
• A new currency—"necessity dollars"—is allocated to people by the government each month to pay for a basket of goods with inelastic demand. The original currency persists, renamed "nicety-dollars."
• Necessity-dollars can only be used for goods and services with inelastic demand (as found by the BLS during CPI calculation), though they are not restricted to goods with any particular "moral cleanliness" value (so cigarettes are just as applicable as bread†.) This is enforced by only permitting certain sellers to accept necessity-dollars, and only on certain transactions.
• At point-of-first-sale, necessity-dollars are actually sent off to the government and the seller receives nicety-dollars instead. There's probably some exchange-rate involved, that the government can manipulate to some interesting end. Thus, companies never hold necessity-dollars, or pay out in necessity-dollars; they're just a thing individuals have and transparently give back to the government at payment-processing time.
• You can't tax or fine anyone in necessity-dollars. People just receive them, hold them in an account, and spend them voluntarily, and that's it: no other operations are valid. Importantly, banks aren't allowed to impose necessity-dollar fees on necessity-dollar accounts for holding them, and so forth. (They could impose nicety-dollar fees on fancy necessity-dollar accounts, but see the next point:)
• If you get taxed or fined or liened or collected on for anything in nicety-dollars, and you don't have enough nicety-dollars, this doesn't "spill over": you can't pay a nicety-dollar cost in necessity-dollars. You're not allowed. This means that if you run out of nicety-dollars, you're effectively bankrupt (in all the current meanings of that word—all the same machinery kicks in), while still being able to afford necessities. Your niceity-creditors get chased off/annulled by your bankruptcy, without disrupting your ability to afford necessities.
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† Addiction causes need just like hunger does. You can't really economically disincentivize addicts from seeking a fix; that's basically definitional. Addicts under pressure commit crimes to get the money to pay for their fix, rather than going without. Just freakin' build the infrastructure to treat addiction, if you don't want people spending taxpayer money that way.
This issue happens because one has to constantly juggle many priorities in the mind all at one time. This can come down very heavily on a person. To have to make decisions to chose one over the other, a.k.a making sacrifices can be soul depleting if done for a very long time.
There are often conflicting priorities many demanding attention at the same time. In case of trade off you often stand to lose something for the other.
That's me. I was recently fired for having severe narcolepsy. (Irony: The medication that might help with this condition for the first time in my life arrives tomorrow, a few days before our health insurance runs out.) It's been surreal to be excluded from most life aspirations due to being unable to participate in the 9 to 5 that society expects. Part of why it's hard is that no one can relate to this at all. When you throw your back out and are unable to work, people understand. When you arrive at 1pm because you have no memory of waking up and turning off all three of the alarms you'd set, no one cares why. You're damaged goods.
A basic income would at least assist with searching for my next job. My wife and I are now in a situation where we either start receiving income within three months max, or completely run out of money.
I know intellectually what needs to be done: Port a webapp from an older framework to a next-gen framework, then write a detailed post about how it was done and what the benefits were. That would be enough social standing to at least get some freelancing gigs.
Trouble is, I'm completely frozen. It's not quite fear -- closer to profound loss of hope. When a medical condition excludes you from society, it's easy to let it get the better of you, or feel bitter. Those are precisely the opposite feelings that will result in income.
In that light, it's not strange that a $3,000 bill would reduce someone's performance by 40%. Even if it's not a disaster, you end up wishing that you could take your wife on that honeymoon you've talked about for four years. When it took 6 months to save up $3,000 dispite a decently high salary, you know that your future will never be free from the "money problem," and that it will permeate every aspect of your life.
So what do you do? Try to be intelligent, of course. Try to see your situation as amusing. Amusement, yes; anger, no. It's easier to deconstruct a problem when it feels like a puzzle rather than a prison.
Easy to say that. What do I do? Pull up React docs while trying not to cry.
None of my ambitions matter anymore. Life is a years-long process of trying to recover from a tailspin. I'm 28; blink a few times and I'll be 50.
A basic income might help. When the company fired me without notice, they mentioned that our health and dental insurance will expire at the end of the month. This translates into a few things: (a) an extra $350/mo of bills, which accelerates our impending bankruptcy; (b) choose to remove my wisdom teeth and get a root canal right now, this week, which will knock me out for at least two weeks when I have to perform, and will cost at least 15% of our reserves anyway, so I'm not going to do that. Maybe it will result in messed up teeth for life, but that's an abstract problem that Future Me will deal with later.
On the other hand, maybe a basic income would hurt. I don't want handouts. I want to participate in life and to add value to my pursuits, just like you. It's easy to imagine feeling like maybe this basic income should be my lot in life. At least if I know we'll hit a brick wall in 3 months and that my wife won't be able to graduate, I can sort of force myself to try to use React / etc, and to otherwise hustle.
But I miss being 13, when life was an endless intellectual playground, and that "forcing yourself to have fun learning a programming framework" was an absurd contradiction.
Why post this? I don't know. It's not a sob story, and it's not really a warning. It seems like no one else will learn a thing from any of this. But at least it won't seem so mysterious that a $3,000 bill can subvert you.
I didn't choose to be sick. I don't want handouts either. I am very fortunate. But I do think it's a damn shame that health insurance is so tightly coupled with employment when employers come and go but your health follows you everywhere. I can't imagine that a public option would be worse than this.
I don't see why narcolepsy should be a problem, especially in our area. I mean sure, meetings and stuff like that might be harder to do, but our industry is/should be lenient to things like office hours. There have been tons of times where I go to the office at "late hours" (e.g. 1+ PM), and as long as I turn in my deliverables on time (or let my lead know I won't be able to), there is no issue.
So again, very sorry to hear that.
Also, if I may, I would like to give you the following suggestion.
What about, instead of porting something and then writing about it for the PR, why not take the lowest hanging fruit you can find and do some local web dev/mobile dev, even if you only get a small fraction of the money you need each month.
I am saying this not without reason. I have a friend that is doing bad financially, and doing only one gig that got him around 1k USD (different country and situation of course, but at the current exchange rate, it's about that amount) gave him some hope.
And the thing is that he got a big relief when he saw with his own eyes that he could basically turn code into money. Not enough money necessarily, but at least some amount. That in turn lowered his stress and things started to look less bleak.
Just to tell a bit of his situation: he has kids and a wife that for medical reasons as well, can't work, so he is the sole wage earner at home. His job is very likely going to end soon, and has about 1 month runway.
So just in case you check back the comments, and if you are willing to take some random advice from a random guy on the Internets, why not try this? Just take a gig, very very simple one you can find through friends, your local laundromat/liquor store/etc, family, that consists of doing a simple but sleek-looking webpage or something very low hanging-fruity, and after you get your first few bucks, rinse and repeat.
Hopefully the boost in morale will be enough to get you to try maybe a bigger gig, etc, or at least buy you some time while you get to find another job.
Sorry if this is of no use to you, since I know that this route might not afford you the medical care you need and that definitely sucks. But I truly feel you and I was hoping I could chip in at least a very very minor idea in case it's helpful in any way.
Not sure what else to say except to try to keep going as hard as you can, and that I can definitely lend an ear if you are so inclined (let me know and I can send you an email or something). If not, I sincerely hope things get better soon.
Regardless, I hope you are able to recover from this setback and do better than ever. Please don't lose hope - there is always an option.
There is a ton to learn from your story.
Most people think retirement is what you do when you get old. Retirement planning begins on the day you get the first pay check of your life. In fact the whole purpose of working should be to eliminate the need to work.
If you are not doing this already. You are sitting on top of risky avalanche which will go downhill any day.
As some already mentioned, you are likely covered by ADA - if your company is larger than 15 employees.
There are some apps that might help you in this regard that require increasingly complex tasks to disable an alarm. (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kog.alarmc...)
It also has an option to resound the alarm 5min after being disabled.
I have used it and it was effective for me even on 'easy' difficulty challenges, though I don't have a condition like yours, just sort of heavy sleeper. If you haven't, you should definately give it a try.
Why not just free university education for people who have the prerequisite academic qualifications?
How do you really find a good job then? Mostly through family networking. And who has a good family network? The same kids that could afford college regardless. Many college educations are just years wasted, not unlike bad degrees in the US. No matter how many people might think about the wonders of classical educations, and how college taught them to learn, and similar drivel, in practice, those things only matter if you have opportunities handed to you anyway. For people that do not get the opportunities, college is only helpful if it helps them get the opportunities! Whether that's through non-family networking, or because what they studied in college is something in demand in the job market.
When studying the effects of any policy change, we have can't just stop at the first level: We have to see how the rest of the world will react to the primary results to the policy change. It's a bit how student loans didn't really make it that much easier to go to college: What they really did was make all colleges a lot more expensive, making a mistake in major and/or institution that much more dangerous. I think of a friend of mine, Ph.D in Biology with a 6 figure college debt, and no good American jobs that would take her. She's teaching technical english in Japan, because it pays marginally better than her American options! All those years of study, all that money, to go unused, along with being saddled with terrible debt.
So all I am saying is, bad outcomes can happen in a whole lot of cases. Want better outcomes? Create more jobs.
* Simply attending a 4-year university has costs beyond tuition and books; there are plenty of people who don't go to college because they can't afford 4 years out of the workforce.
* The 4-year university system is extremely brittle, in that it creates good outcomes primarily for people who are in the right place (somewhere they can easily attend a good university) at the right time (right after they graduate high school) --- do anything to get off the college track during your high school years and it becomes extremely hard to re-engage with it.
Funny, where I come from, going to a school that takes tuition means you're too dumb to graduate from a "real" university. Most notably, most universities don't accept for-profit faculties. This means that you can at most pay for a "4 year degree", but not for a "university degree".
I don't know if it's like that in all of, or even most, Europe. But it's definitely like that in all the countries I've heard about from friends who live there.
Everyone bemoans the increasing in tuition and increase in admin staff.. these things are intimately tied. The cost of education on a per-student basis hasn't increased very much in the US. Most of the cost burden has just shifted from taxpayers to students (for better or worse). Much of the admin staff is necessary to handle all of the financial aid, grant applications, etc.
Simply providing tuition-free education would eliminate much of the bureaucratic overhead.
We didn't have a problem paying for college in the US until everyone decided that the government should help pay for it. Throwing more money at the problem won't fix it; in fact, it's been a huge part of the problem!
Free? There is no such thing. Someone will always end up paying for it.
You can divert that "free" money and have "free" things for the middle class. That the wealthy would then be "paying" for it is a philosophical perspective that presupposes the status quo for wealth distribution is somehow "correct"
Bad filters look for weaknesses and good filters look for strengths. Anyone who excels in at least one area has potential to do great things.
College debt, for example, is a problem for those who were successful enough to get into college into the first place, and who, simply by getting into college, are already increasing their lifetime earnings by millions of dollars.
Technological services for K-12 ed is pushing a string. The largest predictor of a student's performance is the educational level and socioeconomic status of their parents, not any in-school factor. Classroom technology offers the most benefit to the students best equipped to make use of it, which is again the privileged and better-prepared students.
Increased political engagement helps those who already have enough leisure and status to spend time following and engaging politics.
Poverty is a more basic problem.
People who grow up in wealthy families naturally find themselves on a college track that seamlessly routes them to elite schools when they're 18 years old.
People who grow up in poverty aren't on that track and might not even have much agency (due to their circumstances, requirements to work young, entanglements with the law) until they're in their 20s.
The fastest growing stable white collar jobs all require a 4-year degree. Even if college were free, people of reduced means wouldn't have equal access to it, because taking 4 years off the workforce isn't an option for most people. Meanwhile: a 4-year degree has actually not much value in predicting one's ability to perform as e.g. an HR director.
So what I'm suggesting is the startup that finds a way to turn smart, enterprising 24 year olds working in retail jobs into HR directors, credibly enough that they'll be competitive with Russian Lit majors.
(I'm not picking on Russian Lit; it's just, that's the undergrad degree my sister got at UChicago before becoming a lawyer, so it's the first one that pops into my head).
Please don't discount free education as "not changing much", in the US I would be probably working at Mc Donalds or dealing crack and in jail.
I do agree with you in principle about the HR director thing. College is treated too much like a white collar vocational school.
Why do you equate poverty with inevitable entanglements with the law?
In my experience, those of us who had to work (formally employed) young are less likely to have entanglements with the law, as one natural result of spending time working is having less idle time in which to get into trouble.
But.... It does help a lot of kids who find it hard to afford college/uni while also having other responsibilities.
Those people who sell a pint here and there to afford gas to get to class, etc. It's not an insignificant amount of people.
So chip at this first, then chip away at the abjectly poor or who simply don't think they have a chance at college/uni.
Of course there is always the danger of human nature wanting to claim, I went to uni as told but still can't get a job. That is it's not just a rite of passage, you have to show personal progress.
A couple points:
Alternatives to patient-present doctor-mediated health care to cover the 80% case in which doctors are expensive overkill; some combination of telemedicine and nurse-practitioners.
We have police departments and we have fire departments. We should have "nurse departments" that are clinics but much more structured as are fire and PD services for each given area.
(I know there is a grey version of this with EMT/clinics/hospitals etc... but this is something that could be made better.)
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Modern logistics-driven solutions for inexpensive high-quality child care.
We talk a lot about "getting more women in tech" for example...
Getting more women JUST TO BE ABLE TO WORK involves insuring child care!
Sending a kid to child care full time costs MORE than many women can make per hour! Its ridiculous.
If you have ever tried to look for child care services on Care.com or otherwise, sitters all want ~$25/hour in the bay area.
Of course then they are out of the workforce and 'unhirable' when they try to re-enter it.
Solution: Childcare Visa. Many women in other parts of the world would LOVE to come to America. We need a special visa for them, and perhaps they can take care of your children from 8 to 6PM M-F in exchange for room and board and weekends, or some type of arrangement.
It's not free, but it's significantly less than the aforementioned $25 / hr.
What do you mean by this?
The limiting factor here is the regulatory regime, which makes it all but impossible to move money around without using a bank as an intermediary. That gives the banking cartel effective veto power on all new financial services.
The key reform here is to separate the movement of money from the provision of credit, and to have access to money transfer be classified as a basic human right along with food, water, and internet connectivity.
Good luck with that.
Otherwise it's a terrific list!
And yeah, good luck extracting the banks from the profit-making niches they've carved out in that process. They will fight that to their last breath.
Here in New Zealand, there's pretty much no restriction on getting bank accounts. It's almost unheard of to not have a bank account.
Transaction fees aren't really a thing either. Most people only have to pay to withdraw money from other banks ATMs. There's no fees for bank transfers (regardless of whether it's to the same bank or a different one). Bank transfers are within the hour in the same bank, and either within the day or overnight for between different banks.
One thing that definitely has helped in this situation (somewhat counter intuitively) is that we have an oligopoly of banks, so standardisation and cooperation is simple. That's why we have chip and pin cards as standard here (and contactless cards). It's also meant that almost everywhere accepts EFTPOS.
Hell, I had to cash my first check ever today. I don't even carry cash, unless I have a specific reason to need to carry it.
Something like 'basic citizen right' makes more sense. If you want to opt out of being a citizen, you're still a human.
Debit cards?
You're talking about trade schools? Good. That's a step in the right direction. It doesn't go far enough though. One unfortunate reality of our existence is that people differ markedly in cognitive skill. These differences are innate and immutable. Not everyone can benefit from an education.
If we pitch education as the way to address to inequality, we're not only going to waste a lot of money on useless education, but we're also going to give these negative-marginal-value people false hope of economic success.
We need to figure out an alternate way of living for people who are intellectually incapable of contributing to a modern technologically advanced economy. A basic income is a good start.
I agree on the education front, but disagree that there are significantly many negative-margin-value people. Personally I think a huge amount of that perception comes from the fact that people just don't fucking move to better economic opportunities. That problem may be solvable as things like distributed call centers and other location-independent work becomes more common.
There is another dimension to this problem though; national borders and status.
There are a TON of really smart mexicans and other immigrants of every nation who are stuck into an effective caste system based on their status.
In fact, modern American society would literally fall apart if all the mexican service workers were raptured.
My point is that while we look at those who cannot contribute to a technologically advanced economy, we also are pigeon-holing many many others who are based on the complexities of citizenship status problem.
Leaving the defeatist mentality aside, instead of saying they do not fit our current model, why not work on personalizing education. People go to school and meet a few professors with this attitude and they leave convinced they cannot be made good for anything. Not good.
The solution to the problem isn't hiding in what we already know although many of these things of course would be hugely beneficial to people.
The underlying problem. Technology is still going to be there.
Problem is still there. The rich get richer compared to the poor while everyone is getting richer overall.
Things like child care and finance are not as obvious to me though: these are already competitive industries, with very price-sensitive clients too, and (IMO) mostly sensible regulations, so if something both cheap and competitive was possible, why hasn't it happened yet?
Also, as for "Equally credible alternatives to university education": I'm not sure if I get this one right, wording is a little confusing -- you mean the problem being that people feel forced to spend lots of $$ to study things they won't actually need for their jobs? IMO, to answer that, we also first need to answer why exactly is it the case currently: e.g. no government sponsorship of community colleges is going to help if the reason is that education is primarily used as a signaling device... (Edit: I see your response to another question -- namely a startup offering an independent alternative to screening on education -- and I agree that this can be promising. Not easy, but promising.)
Worse, these are all minimum numbers. You need extra staff to cover someone being sick, or turn people away.
Humans are not a product. They are an end in themselves. It's like trying to automate your friends or your spouse.
* Modern logistics-driven solutions for inexpensive high-quality elder care.
If working this sort of thing sounds interesting to anyone then check out hometeamcare.com and ping me. We're hiring for basically every role in the company. It's a very interesting business!
Serious answer: besides the ongoing need of the 'elite' for childcare, most proponents of basic income argue that people would not just play video games all day. If you think about everything you or other people might want to do in your free time today, even - how many of those would you prefer to do without simultaneously minding children?
When I was a kid, I used to ask why poor people don't just start a business, or go out and get a better job? That was before I understood the way that poverty traps people in a cycle. And the fact that we don't all possess the capacity to become entrepreneurs and creative thinkers.
I think a basic income is most important for the uncreative people. The people who don't really have any talents, and never had any big aspirations. The 50% of all people who have a below-average IQ. Maybe they can't think of something productive to do, but in a post-scarcity economy, why should they need to? When the whole farm-to-table pipeline is completely run by autonomous machinery, then I think there's nothing wrong with just relaxing and enjoying life.
I'm worried that this YC research program might end up making the wrong conclusions, if the results are only analyzed by startup people who are hell-bent on "changing the world" and being ultra-productive all the time. So what if a recipient just chills out all day, goes for walks, swims at the beach, takes some photos, and plays some video games. I hope they wouldn't call that a failed experiment.
Unfortunately this is not the case. What do students who live on student loans and/or parental stipend as a "basic income" do? You can expect more of that when the government becomes the parent doling out the stipend.
Doctor salary only makes up ~8.6% of overall Healthcare spending. Since, right or wrong, people want to see doctors rather than nurses when they bother to go into the hospital in person, I predict this tech will actually increase healthcare spending. The main change will just be that people seek nurse advice from home for minor issues they would have ignored previously. That may more may not be a net benefit.
You're missing the secondary costs. What are the costs of people having to sit at the hospital all day waiting for the doctor to see them. And what are the costs of people putting off seeing a doctor since they can't get an appointment?
Since, right or wrong, people want to see doctors rather than nurses when they bother to go into the hospital in person
Only if the 'costs' are them same. If you just ask people when they come in if they want to see a nurse (short wait and pay $X) or a doctor (long wait and pay $3X), I think you'll find many people opting for the nurse.
Another thing is liability. There are cases where a triage nurse could easily tell a patient "you're fine, go home and rest". But that can't happen right now because everyone's scared petrified about liability issues.
*I'm an 18F employee speaking in a personal capacity.
Sidenote - high-five for the stuff going on at 18F :)
For example: University education changes don't help most people over 30 at the moment. (some indirectly because of children / family) Similar restricted set for child care. (provided someone has a need for childcare because they're employed) Both won't help people who were already affected by current system and are post that phase.
I don't mean these are bad ideas, but it's a list of specific issues in a comment about basic income which actually supposed to help everyone. People had decades to provide solutions to those specific issues - why are they relevant now?
Marketing desperately needs some sort of empirical way of hiring. Unfortunately, I think you'll find that half the people currently in marketing roles though would lose their jobs.
We can simply offer basic income for everyone, then we can get rid of most special rules, such as food stamps, minimum wage, all kinds of deductibles, flexible spending, childcare. We can tax all incomes at fixed rate and be done with it. All these can be trivially tracked by simple computer system, the only thing needed is identify verification once a year or two.
We would have a much greater society and economy, and avoid the need of "job creation like Walmart".
