@akhilrao "active labor market policy" is a terrible name for the great idea that people should be actively thinking about valuable stuff that could be done, and encouraging people without wonderfully rewarding uses of their time to explore those. we should do a lot more of that! but that's largely independent of questions of remuneration. sometimes it may be directly remunerative, sometimes not. 1/

@akhilrao prosperity, though, can be shared quite directly. "obsolescence rents" can only be extracted by people with bargaining power because forseeable obsolescence makes new entrants scarce, and that's fine as far as it goes. but there should be other measures of social value than bargaining power in private labor markets, and we should use the state to pay socially productive people whose productivity lacks a business model or scarce factor to deploy for bargaining. 2/

@akhilrao (i'm not sure this is quite responsive? basically, it's good to pay people, it makes their life better, and it's good for people to do work that makes other people's lives better. market valuation and remuneration of labor is one way to get those things, and it's great, but not sufficient or perfect. we should use other tools, funded by the public purse, rather than hope that quirks of bargaining power and cost diseases can somehow smudge away the flaws of private labor markets.) /fin