131–140 of 1001 posts
There's a very relevant section in this book ( The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies - http://amzn.to/1KFJ1Iu ) , that I just read last night: > "His view is strongly supported by the work of economist Andrew Oswald, who found that joblessness lasting six months or longer harms feelings of well-being and other measures of mental health about as much as the death of…
That kind of ongoing feedback would be invaluable to capture the day-to-day experiences of study participants, and I'd be happy to volunteer my time to support the study...
I recommend this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Unexceptionalism_... From wikipedia: "Allister Heath, deputy editor of the The Daily Telegraph, wrote that the book shows how the “remarkable work ethic” of Scandinavians has been eroded by large welfare states over time." (Of course, don't take wikipedia's word for it-- read the book yourself) My take-away: Heavy socialism has absolutely stifled econo…
The key component of it is that it doesn't phase out with higher income, which would otherwise cause a strong disincentive to work. How strong compared to no phase-out is a good question, but that's exactly what research like this is good for.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always wondered if its actually the joblessness that degrades people's self worth or the job search that must not be going to well and thus keeps them jobless. Would a person without a job but with a basic income and thus not feeling pressure to get a job experience the same hit to their self worth?
The reduced sense of self-worth is likely a result of the cultural stigma against joblessness. Hopefully, merely collecting a universal/basic income will not be similarly stigmatized.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Will this be possible to simulate if the participants know they are taking part in a study?
And in particular, if they know they cannot count on the basic income indefinitely? Studies on this in the past have hit that exact problem.
I don't know this would be too unrealistic for the study.
There's a very relevant section in this book ( The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies - http://amzn.to/1KFJ1Iu ) , that I just read last night: > "His view is strongly supported by the work of economist Andrew Oswald, who found that joblessness lasting six months or longer harms feelings of well-being and other measures of mental health about as much as the death of…
Basic income doesn't aim for people to sit idle, and in practice basic income doesn't seem correlated with idleness. Some studies show an increase in work hours [0], and another showed a slight decrease in work hours among new parents and teenagers [1].
Loss of self-worth need not occur when people are given the freedom to say "no" to unfulfilling and unproductive jobs, the freedom to take time off to care for their own or another's health issues, and the ability to pursue their passions -- teaching inmates, launching a startup, or becoming a world-class gamer.
[0] e.g. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2268552
[1] http://public.econ.duke.edu/~erw/197/forget-cea%20(2).pdf
There's a very relevant section in this book ( The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies - http://amzn.to/1KFJ1Iu ) , that I just read last night: > "His view is strongly supported by the work of economist Andrew Oswald, who found that joblessness lasting six months or longer harms feelings of well-being and other measures of mental health about as much as the death of…
Find ways of destroying harmful institutions by replacing them with better ones-- a perfect example to pursue is the institution of health insurance in the USA, which is explicitly harmful to people, inefficient, inhumane, and completely entrenched in multiple other institutions. Find a way to get people cheaper and better care, and they'll flock to you.
There's other ways, of course, but the gist is that rather than focusing on relatively irrelevant problems (getting takeout easier, booking flights easier, etc), startups could choose to tackle actually difficult problems such as political corruption, exploitation of the poor, existential angst, etc. These issues aren't traditionally simple to monetize.
I think we need a way to have a faster iteration cycle for trying sociopolitcal ideas. The problem is, its almost impossible to change the laws necessary at a governmental level in any reasonable time scale. This is exacerbated by the fact that you are inside a "monolithic legacy codebase" in which you can only afford to make minor changes over many years to take you from point A to some goal which is point B, and you still can't verify that point B works in any practical way.
Ideally, you could have at least an entire city (population ca. 50k minimum) where you could just try out all this stuff, and continually carry out sociopolitical experiments. I suppose that's not feasible, but any idea that goes in the direction of increasing iteration times and improving the testability of ideas like this would be a good direction I think.
What do other HNers think about this?