I wonder idly if most people who comment on minimum wage have ever worked for minimum wage? (And no, I will not accept any comments along the lines of “when I was your age, the minimum wage was three dollars and you should be grateful to get seven!” As if the cost of living didn’t also rise.)
I think the unfairness of minimum wage also raises the question of How much do we really need? Certainly making $400,000 a year is unnecessary, and probably causes as much indirect harm to society as a poverty does more directly. Better stop here before it gets Marxist. Oh snap! Too late!

Anyway, this machine would be preferable to some minimum wage jobs I (briefly) had. At least you could read a book while you do this. BTW, who refills the reservoir when the pennies run out?

It wouldn’t be a horrible job.

Yes it is. Otherwise their employer wouldn’t *pay* them. Even Marxists get this — “surplus value” and all that. This machine misses the point — it should have some actual outcome to the work — generating electricity or something, which the owner of the machine then makes more money selling then he has spent on labor.

The point here is the very fact the machine has no “actual outcome” (which you seem to define as something you can sell). The lack of outcome is a spiritual one because you have no investment in the work you are doing. You *could* be generating electricity or something, but if you don’t give a crap and you don’t feel it’s electricity that serves a good purpose — what if it’s just surplus electricity that goes to waste? what if nobody actually uses it? what if it goes to an evil purpose? what if somebody is in the next room cranking another handle that cancels out your production? — then it’s essentially all the same to you.

Yeah, I’m working a retail job where I run around and answer customers’ inane questions all day. Someone’s got to run around and answer questions, so I’m paid to do it. But you know what? At the end of the day, for all it does for me, as a person, I might as well be cranking a handle that gives me pennies.

Fact: a lot of work (and jobs) is pointless. I’m not sure how this is “better” or “worse” a lesson to teach people, since it’s just true. Some work is pointless. It doesn’t mean that I think people should loaf around at home and do whatever they want. But I think it’s one way of recognizing a problem with how we’ve structured our economy. One of the questions asked here is: Why do we have jobs or work that are so meaningless or artificial that, ultimately, come to nothing but put some coins in your pocket?

“But just because a job is unfulfilling doesn’t mean that it’s pointless.”

Well, the point here is that the job is also low-paying. Being forced to work an unfulfilling AND low-paying job, I think, is pointless, because you’re giving away yourself — your time, your labour — for little compensation. (Hell, some people even think that they can’t be paid any amount to do jobs they hate, and take up jobs that fulfil but don’t pay.)

Yes, in the end, you are managing to feed yourself (and perhaps others), which is a “point” to all of it, but that doesn’t change the fact that the work you do may not have a “point” personally to you.

You point out a lot of these jobs may be low-paying, but they serve important functions. I agree.

But half of the feeling of “pointlessness” that many such workers feel comes from the fact they are paid so little for their labour. If society knows their work is essential but unattractive, then why aren’t they compensated justly? They have none of that spiritual fodder that softens a hard job, yet also none of the money. The work, though it might be essential, *becomes* pointless that way, because there is no correlation between your sacrifice and your compensation.

This doesn’t mean I look down on minimum wage workers or think all the work they do is useless (although I stand by my feeling that lots of minimum wage jobs also happen to be completely pointless). It just means I don’t think we should be trying to palm them off with the feeling that they’re doing society a service (“our society depends [...]“) when society clearly doesn’t think so.

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I think the key point of all this is the cleverness of this concept lies in how it boils down a lot of jobs into its simplest form.

1. You do something — e.g. turn a crank.
2. As a result of that action, you get coins in your pocket — there is no meaningful or useful product that you make or contribute to, you’re not personally invested in the process, you’re not even sure what the point is … but now you get to put food on the table and that’s really the most important part of the process.

Art takes a little more time to digest, and can lead to interesting insights when approached from several different angles. My first association was with The Crank; operating these machines (without getting the pennies) used to be a punishment in English prisons http://www.uttertrivia.com/prisonofficersscrews.php.

That got me thinking about the many minimum wage jobs I’ve had back in the day, and about how some of them were easily as unsatisfying as simply turning a crank, jobs that a robot would be too bored to do, and a monkey would have too much dignity to do (handing out flyers, charity telemarketing, collecting glasses etc).

It doesn’t matter whether a boss thinks its worth giving you money for a crap job; you can still call it ultimately pointless, because handing out flyers and turning cranks add the same amount to human prosperity. When governments manipulate the economy with stimulus packages and the like, they primarily do it to ensure that jobs are not slashed. Now if the jobs would be slashed without this public action, can you still be so sure that the jobs are needed? And if “earnings” really do correlate with benefits produced, doesn’t that mean that Warren Buffett produces more benefit to society than several milion doctors?

Maybe there are better ways to distribute the surplus in the age of abundance, better methods than simply making joke jobs and handing out derisory welfare cheques. The installation is a genius idea for getting the question raised.

That’s durned near a living wage!