A Digital WPA

Earlier I suggested that that we offer unemployed people jobs that could be done from home:

A 21st century jobs program would pay people to stay home and isolate, support people without work, and produce some useful output all at the same time.

Instead of paying people to dig and then fill ditches we could pay people to help train machine-learning apps, enter data, subtitle videos. take surveys, maybe even fold proteins to disrupt viruses.

Writing at Brookings, Apurva Sanghi and Michal Lokshin provide some more ideas:

Another high-potential area is document digitization: Only 10 percent of the world’s books are digitized. Even with the current level of optical character recognition (OCR) technology, for a book to be digitized, an independent person needs to check it for errors, problems with tables and images, tagging, and oversee the look of the resulting text. Handwritten documents, images, and tables, even in printed books, require manual processing, proofreading, careful checking, and quality control. A person would receive scanned images of, let’s say, old letters to decipher and type into the electronic document. Comparing the results of several independent people working on the same document would assure the quality of transcription.

I want to add one more item to the list: contact tracing. In addition to tracing apps, we are going to need hundreds of thousands of people doing contact tracing and most of it can be done with email and phone from home. Two birds, one stone.