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Finland’s basic income plan could change everything

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Re: Finland’s basic income plan could change everything

#201

Post by aphelion »

flubert wrote: post #180
aphelion wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always a little mystified by those who believe there is some vast pool of people receiving something called "welfare" that pays them munificent sums to sit around all day not working. There is no "welfare". There's SNAP(food stamps) with a princely average payment of $125, which has time limits on eligibility and mostly goes to working households. There's TANF which only goes to households with children and has b…

>What there absolutely is not is some sort of program where millions of people are paid to sit around https://www.ssa.gov/agency/performance/2016/FINAL_2014_2016_...

Case in point. Social Security is OASDI - old age, survivors, and disability insurance. It's not a guaranteed income for the general population, it's meant to provide support to those incapable of working due to age or disability.

Re: Finland’s basic income plan could change everything

#202

Post by fweespeech »

notahacker wrote: post #191
fweespeech wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm a fan of the theory of basic income but it seems incompatible with an open border/immigration policy. No it isn't. It is very simple to say "Green Card (no basic income) -> Citizenship (basic income) transition depends on N years of taxes paid on time with a dollar value greater than 25 hours/week at minimum wage (or some equivalent proxy value)."

It's very simple and almost certainly a practical necessary to do this, but changing the logic behind the programme to "nobody in this country should have to work" to "only foreign-born people in this country should have to work" rather undermines the idealism of the whole project... Introducing a work requirement - even if only for some people - is of course rather more compatible with the traditional welfare state…

You need some sort of immigration control. No country has the wealth to support 100% of the human population of the world. The work requirement seems the fairest way to handle it to me.

Re: Finland’s basic income plan could change everything

#203

Post by arebop »

1024core wrote: post #195
arebop wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation is generally believed to be caused by an imbalance between the quantity of money and the goods & services in the market. BI per se doesn't change the money supply; it can be done by redistribution of existing money rather than debasing the currency.

I would disagree. If, for example, I take $1B each from every billionaire in the SV (for a total of, say, $20B) and gave each resident of SV (say, 2M residents) an extra $10,000, won't the prices go up? People will go on a spending spree, buying up TVs and cars and games, driving up their prices? There is a reason why gas costs more in SF than in, say, San Mateo.

Then perhaps TV prices will go up, but jet prices will go down. That sort of mixed change in prices is not consistent with the usual definitions of "inflation."

Do you still like your argument when you think about quartiles rather than comparing the top 20 data points against the bottom 2 million? I think it's hard for most people to trust their intuitions about the spending habits of billionaires.

Re: Finland’s basic income plan could change everything

#204

Post by meric »

white-flame wrote: post #196
dibujante wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The counter-argument is that those cheques stop if those people start working. In a worst-case scenario, you can end up with a "dead zone" where you make the same amount of money working 30 hours a week at a poorly-paying job as you get doing absolutely nothing. Why not do absolutely nothing, then? Advocates of UBI stress that the non-means-tested nature of these benefits prevents them from causing that trap. Even if…

Nobody would work those jobs, but on the other hand those jobs exist because companies need that work done. That's what closes the feedback loop and would raise wages to meed their need for basic actual human work. It's an unfamiliar system, but it seems crazy enough to have a chance. At the very least, it's FAR simpler to run than welfare, because it wouldn't need to be qualified and policed. Those issues are involv…

Immigrants who aren't eligible for welfare yet, would.

Re: Finland’s basic income plan could change everything

#205

Post by [deleted] »

gnaritas wrote: post #161
flubert wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't people been saying this since about 1848?

No, they haven't; we're talking about AI here, not industrialization, they were talking about a different problem back then. The two are not comparable, industrialization just pushes humans to do different kinds of labor, AI eliminates human labor, vastly different problem.

[deleted]

Re: Finland’s basic income plan could change everything

#206

Post by Grishnakh »

gnaritas wrote: post #165
Grishnakh wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is extremely optimistic. We don't have AI that advanced, or evidence that AI will get that advanced any time soon. People joke all the time about the crazy stuff that Siri comes up with. What IS coming soon is automation of mindless, lower-level jobs. Waiting tables is a good example here: humans do a terrible job of it, and add 10-20% to your food bill in exchange for screwing up your order. Having a tablet com…

> This is extremely optimistic. It's inevitable. > We don't have AI that advanced Correct. > or evidence that AI will get that advanced any time soon. That's incorrect. The trend is obvious, watson can already out diagnose a doctor. AI doesn't have to work like a human to out do a human just as planes don't have to flap their wings. > What IS coming soon is automation of mindless, lower-level jobs. That is coming, bu…

I have to disagree about AI and doctors, until at least you can get much better sensing technologies. Computers are only as good as the data you feed them, and someone saying they have a pain in some vague region really isn't enough to diagnose anything accurately. It's why doctors tell people to not use the internet to self-diagnose: they quickly determine they're dying of some rare syndrome when really they just have heartburn. A human doctor can interact with human patients (most of whom are not very logically-minded) and figure this stuff out; a computer can't. Remember, a lot of diagnosing depends on the symptoms a patient self-reports, which is bound to be extremely error-prone. Now, if we get to the point where we have Star Trek-style medical scanners, then things will of course be different, but that's a long ways off.

However, I totally agree about the labor-based economy crumbing well before unemployment reaches 50%. If 30% of the workforce is displaced by automation, our economy won't work any more the way it's set up now. It's why we really need a Basic Income.

Re: Finland’s basic income plan could change everything

#207

Post by nradov »

gnaritas wrote: post #165
Grishnakh wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is extremely optimistic. We don't have AI that advanced, or evidence that AI will get that advanced any time soon. People joke all the time about the crazy stuff that Siri comes up with. What IS coming soon is automation of mindless, lower-level jobs. Waiting tables is a good example here: humans do a terrible job of it, and add 10-20% to your food bill in exchange for screwing up your order. Having a tablet com…

> This is extremely optimistic. It's inevitable. > We don't have AI that advanced Correct. > or evidence that AI will get that advanced any time soon. That's incorrect. The trend is obvious, watson can already out diagnose a doctor. AI doesn't have to work like a human to out do a human just as planes don't have to flap their wings. > What IS coming soon is automation of mindless, lower-level jobs. That is coming, bu…

Religious fanatics believe that coming off the messiah is inevitable. You don't have any more evidence than they do. This belief that general AI will show up soon and change the world is nothing more than a secular religion.

Re: Finland’s basic income plan could change everything

#208

Post by dllthomas »

SixSigma wrote: post #197
dllthomas wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't seem an alternative, so much as it seems one potential (particularly smooth) approach.

I meant instead of $1 in $1 off - too much work.

lftl said, "All it would take is requiring graduated income checks so for every $1 you make more in wages you lose less than $1 of benefits."

A progressive income tax (or even a flat tax, really) is a special case of that, with income checks maximally graduated and always stripping your benefits of less than a dollar for every dollar.

Re: Finland’s basic income plan could change everything

#209

Post by manicdee »

Alupis wrote: post #131
DanBC wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone on benefits who spends all their money on alcohol will find themselves grinding their way through civil debt recovery - their landlord will sue for loss of rent and will evict them from the home; utility companies will sue to recover the debt and will cut off the utilities. and whether that's BI or benefit makes little difference to that. You get the money and it's up to you what you spend it on, once you've…

> Someone on benefits who spends all their money on alcohol will find themselves grinding their way through civil debt recovery I think the point being made was, do we continue to provide other welfare services to an individual like this, or do we just cut them loose and let them fail? Many people would argue we would still have to provide assistance to this individual... so then it begs the question, how is a BI any…

Your straw man certainly draws a long bow :D

Here are the types of "welfare" that habitual failures might have access to under BI:

- Budgeting advice - Free housing for the homeless - Free psychological consultations - In extreme cases, a controlled spending card (i.e.: an EFTPOS card that can't be used for drugs and gambling)

But we wouldn't give them more money, because they've made a habit of using it badly.

Re: Finland’s basic income plan could change everything

#210

Post by JDiculous »

rbrogan wrote: post #36

Would anyone, personally, take something like this as an opportunity to do open source work and/or research projects? Or do you feel like you want/need money as a motivator to be your most productive and a way to keep score in the game?

Most definitely. I feel that there are much more important and interesting problems that I'd rather be tackling than my day to day work, but most of them pay significantly less (eg. policy issues, cancer, curing aging, poverty, etc). Not to mention I love art and creativity.

I don't care about money. To me, time is the most valuable thing that money buys (aside from food/shelter). I make money so that I can retire and have the freedom to work on what I want rather than what an employer or boss orders me to. Basic income would give me complete freedom of time, thus allowing me to retire right now and do 100% what I want to do.

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