The world needs more jobs.

Someone could say the world needs more of a lot of things. It needs more faster-than-light spaceships; it needs more fish in the ocean; it needs more fossil fuels. Unlike many things, jobs are an achievable goal with no drawbacks. For there to be more fish, we need to fish less. More fossil fuels would also mean more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and more global warming.

We worry when we can't do things that we think we should be able to, because it means something about the way we thought was wrong.

The way we talk about job creation is pretty simple. When we say that a specific number of jobs were created in a certain location, it's usually a factory. A politician convinced a company to open the factory here instead of somewhere else. We win, the other place loses.

This is not how to create jobs on a global scale. A job is when someone does work in exchange for value. There is plenty of value in the world; the problem is that the people without jobs are not able to do the right kind of work. (Some jobs are best done in certain locations, like next to a hydroelectric plant that provides cheap power, but people in bad locations can still do useful work, especially with the Internet.)

People without jobs have fewer skills. For them to have jobs, people need to buy things that require less skill to make. This can be hard: in many cultures, a "cheap" gift is seen as an insult. But this kind of thinking is only a sort of shortcut. A chef who works at a restaurant that charges $5000 per meal, more than the monthly salary of a typical worker, is certainly more skilled than the chef working at a restaurant that charges $5 per meal. These skills might be how to cook food, or how to arrange food in a colorful way, or what type of plate to put certain foods on, or how to speak to guests in a manner that conveys the chef's experience and skill without any food being tasted at all. But not everyone values these skills when deciding which restaurant to go to, and not everyone should.

The technical reason why buying from unskilled people increases the total number of jobs — instead of just putting skilled people out of work — is that unskilled people are more likely to have low incomes, and people with low incomes are more likely to spend money as they earn it. Money flows through an economy instead of stagnating.

Plenty of people would buy the $5000 meal if only they could afford it. There has to be a reward for acting in a way that's best for the world. Otherwise, like with recycling, a lot of people won't do it. It might seem like the reward for not buying the $5000 meal is that you still have $5000, but that isn't really it. Just like a person has no need for money when they're dead, they've no real need for money if they're always working. The reward that many people need to convince them to buy from less skilled people is time.

Humans are natural optimizers. We cut across the grass when the sidewalk doesn't go the right direction. We spend more time working now, based on the understanding that this money will earn interest and save us from working more time later. We don't sweep the floor every time a few crumbs fall on it, because we know that we will sweep it tomorrow, or perhaps just before someone comes over. If the reward structure from work made it easier to accomplish goals if less time was spent working each week, or each month, or each year, some people would not work as much.

This is like a reverse overtime. You could call it various names, like "the accelerated work week", but the name doesn't matter. With overtime, pay is reduced before a certain point and increased after that point. With this system, pay is increased before a certain point and reduced after that point. Just like with overtime, the influence this has on how much people work is a sort of trick. For supervisory jobs that don't benefit from overtime, the unpaid work is accounted for in the salary for the job. For industries like construction where overtime is common, the base wage is lower to compensate. If someone provides more value through their work than would be expected based on their pay, their pay will eventually increase. If they provide less value, their pay will decrease.

What this system does is provide fairer compensation for a worker than they would get if their pay was directly proportional to the number of hours they worked. Highly-paid jobs usually require thinking. We can perform aerobic activities for a long time without getting tired, as opposed to anaerobic activities — like sprinting — that require more cellular respiration than our lungs can provide oxygen. Our hearts are continually active until we die. But our minds need sleep. Efficiency of thinking drops over time. There are also jobs where the demand for work is uneven, like a paid firefighting job.

Fair compensation when working less is important to convincing people in leadership positions, which require thinking, to do so. Having bosses work less is important for getting everyone else to do so.

There is no need for everyone to work less, or restrict people to a certain number of hours of work. But it helps if most people have the option of working less. People will often do something difficult in a sign of solidarity with others for whom this difficult action is not a choice.

The lack of jobs in the world, and the competition for what jobs do exist, is a problem that can be fixed. Other problems can be fixed as well. With each problem that is fixed, we can focus more attention on other problems that have not been solved. Among them are how to deal with depletion of resources such as minerals and sources of energy.

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If you read all that, it was probably shared by someone you know. Now comes an important question: why should you share this? The answer depends on you who are.

If you're a politician, you should share this, and propose laws that remove any legal obstacles to this system being used, because people who are not politicians are probably not going to share or discuss it.

If you work for a politician, you should share it because politicians depend on other people to filter information for them.

If you work in the news industry, you should share it because it would improve the world and you have an audience, but I know you won't unless a lot of other people are already talking about it.

If you're a normal person who has never been the subject of a news story or elected to public office, you should share it because politicians will not. If we fix a problem like unemployment, we can also fix problems like global warming or, more broadly, situations where there are no consequences for doing things that hurt the world, like dumping plastic trash into the ocean. Lots of people say that climate change is a problem, but no one expects Random Politician From A Town You've Never Heard Of to offer a solution. Politicians think that the big problems aren't their responsibility; all they have to worry about is whether people are violating the law by having a barbecue at a local park.

If you're someone who spends all their free time playing video games, you should share it because in 30 years you might want to go see a rhinoceros, and you wouldn't want them to be extinct by then.

If you're someone who's debating whether to jump off a cliff, you should share it because what do you have to lose, eh? There was a comic about this.

If you're five years old, you should share it because you're quite smart.

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The proposal summarized: we can create enough jobs for everyone by paying people a higher rate when they work less time. For example, 1.2x their normal pay rate for the first 24 hours of work each week, and 0.7x their normal pay rate for all hours after that, including hours beyond 40. People would work less and buy from less skilled people, instead of working longer so they can afford to buy from more skilled people.