A leverage against slumlords in the same way social media gives leverage to consumers against companies
Request For Research: Basic Income
141–150 of 1001 posts
Re: Request For Research: Basic Income
#142What we need is to study is what changes we need to make to the education system to support societal structures post-employment. Mass unemployment is coming yet we are doing nothing to prepare the population.
We need new "career paths" where people are prepared for a life without work so that things do not devolve into what we have seen in remote communities here in Australia.
Re: Request For Research: Basic Income
#143My personal viewpoint is that you should be guaranteed survival and some opportunity by society, but not guaranteed income. That is, you should get food, shelter, medical care, and education for free (this also implies free child care). But you don't get to buy a cell phone or an XBox or whatever -- you have to work for that. In other words, I think basic income is jumping the gun a bit. Who is going to PAY for this,…
If you try to micromanage peoples' spending, you will spend more and you will hurt them. Believing that poor people will waste their money on cell phones and XBoxes is a common justification for trying to attack them, but this sentiment is evil disguising itself as morality. For example, poor people need cell phones because it's impossible to get a job without a stable phone number.
Re: Request For Research: Basic Income
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah if it's 5 years i would be very worried about finding employment the day after and having a 5-year gap in my resume. Would the hiring manager care that I was working on my art?
Why would there be a gap in your resume? Just because you receive a basic income doesn't mean you won't work. I suppose there will be some who would minimize their lifestyle to live off of the basic income but I suspect many will continue to earn far more.
If it's only 5 years you will feel pressured to find a conventional job that would look good to whoever would be reading your resume if/when you apply for a new job after the experiment is over. If it was guaranteed for life you might do other stuff, not necessarily non-income-producing, but how it would look to HR would be irrelevant.
Re: Request For Research: Basic Income
#145I'm very skeptical of basic income as commonly understood. The typical basic income program I've seen goes something like this: give every person in the country $10k to live on, no strings attached. [a] 1) As defined above, this is horribly inefficient and expensive. I, a software engineer in Silicon Valley, would receive this $10k. How does this benefit society? I already make over $100k; I don't need additional inc…
1) How is this more inefficient than our existing welfare system? Seems a lot more efficient to give everyone money rather than spend $100M on bureaucratic infrastructure for verification and employment tracking.
2) It benefits society because you no longer have to work to live. This affects how you make decisions about your employment. You would be more likely to change jobs when you're unhappy, for example. This is good.
3) Whether you make $40k, $100k, or $500k, the $10k isn't there to prove "additional income support". The system could be set up so that after basic income is implemented, your disposable income is the same as it was before--people making $40k wouldn't have $10k in free money to spend, because their taxes would go up $10k a year, for example. The key here is that if they choose not to work for some period of time, they can. That's not how I think it ought to be implemented, but the principle is true.
4) If government handed out $10k to everyone, they could tax everyone $10k and it would be like nothing happened. The difference in implementation would be that the additional taxes would be progressive, while the benefits are flat. So if you make over $100k a year, you might be taxed $15k more than you were before, but you would also receive $10k. Without a doubt, an effective basic income would require a more progressive tax structure than what we have.
5) "If you do start to add guidelines for poverty, etc.," not familiar with this reference, but presumably a basic income would eliminate extreme poverty. Do you mean like, for example, what would someone who was physically incapable of working receive? Is the basic income enough?
Re: Request For Research: Basic Income
#146There'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…
Related though not necessarily helpful section from Brave New World (1956):
> of course we could give them shorter hours. Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they wouldn't. The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take a holiday from them. The Inventions Office is stuffed with plans for labour-saving processes. Thousands of them." Mustapha Mond made a lavish gesture. "And why don't we put them into execution? For the sake of the labourers; it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with ex- cessive leisure. It's the same with agriculture. We could synthesize every morsel of food, if we wanted to. But we don't. We prefer to keep a third of the population on the land. For their own sakes-because it takes longer to get food out of the land than out of a factory. Besides, we have our stability to think of. We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That's another reason why we're so chary of applying new inventions. Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy. Yes, even science."
Re: Request For Research: Basic Income
#147"What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?" I think cheap quality housing is a huge area that would help everyone. Taxes and housing together eat up the vast majority of the earnings most people make. What could make a difference? - applying technology to building denser housing. for example, imagine cheap robotic excavation, so every house and building could bury all their parking lots and long term…
- applying technology to building denser housing. for example, imagine cheap robotic excavation, so every house and building could bury all their parking lots and long term storage areas below ground instead of occupying valuable real estate.
You need to watch this: Digging down is for the 1% it would seem.
Re: Request For Research: Basic Income
#148>50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people.
Don't know where you live, but here in Pittsburgh anyway the soup kitchens won't turn you away just because you participate in a tech incubator.
Re: Request For Research: Basic Income
#149> What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?
Startups as a whole can do nothing -- it's like asking "what can car companies do to increase prosperity?" except that would be a little more reasonable given the amount of resources and relative free-time those companies have.
In startup land, you typically don't even have a sustainable business let alone vast amount of resources lying around to fix the world's problems. They cannot be concerned with something this vague.
What they can do is work on the correct problems that will put them in a position to make a legitimate societal impact down the road. Even better if they work on problems that is directly correlated to society's well-being.
You mentioned food. If a startup could compete with the likes of Monsanto, but wasn't run by a bunch of scumbags, they might be able to create such a rich company that it starts shipping food crates free of charge to places in need. This depends entirely upon the kind of person running the company.
Since I respect that you have to view startups in the aggregate, I would probably turn around and ask you, what can you do to fund better startups by better people with long-term Do No Harm terms? The terms might even be bullshit like "You will do everything in your power to help the world rather than just helping yourself." It wouldn't be something you hold up in court, but it would be a major internet foul to find out "Super Rich CEO" signed those terms and "Super Rich CEO" was found being immoral. With the leader's reputation at stake, you might have a chance at nurturing Good Guy CEOs.
At any rate, startups have enough to worry about. If you want to help the world, you'll find a way. If you want to make a bunch of money and fuck the world, you'll find a way to do that too. The problem is cultural and resides at the individual level.
Re: Request For Research: Basic Income
#150When I talk with people about basic income, my gut reaction and primary argument is that it contrasts with that fundamental human nature that's been show time and again throughout humanity - given a guaranteed, fixed reward no matter how much or how little you work for it, disincentivizes work. It follows along the same lines as why government instituted communism fails. Or why the first version of the mayflower comp…
>disincentivizes work
Why is this a problem? The market allocates work, the market has decided that a large and growing number of people's work is worth $0, the market is still producing enough to keep everyone happy and fed.
Why should someone be incentivized to work when their work has no value?
Put another way, we have made an amazing collective achievement: 100% effort from 100% of people is no longer necessary or even desirable to maintain/improve standards of living. Life has collectively gotten much easier, and coerced labor (yes, starvation and homelessness due to unemployment are coercion) is no longer necessary.