321–330 of 1001 posts
http://www.basicincome.org/news/2015/10/swiss-parliament-opp...
but is currently slated for a public referendum here in Switzerland in 2016:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_referendums,_2016
I think it is one of really only four possible futures for human society [mincome, totalitarian, oblivion, expansion into the solar system and beyond (which will me effective status quo)].
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The suggestion in the book is a negative income tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
One big difference between basic income and negative income tax is who receives them. Basic income is given to everyone, and negative income tax is only given to those below a threshold amount -- creating two classes of people: givers and receivers, us and them. The negative income tax experiment in New Jersey showed that the negative income tax created a disincentive to work, and increased family breakups. [0] Negat…
"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…
Why not have startups have their employees work from home? Much simpler and easier to implement solution. I don't have the obsession of wanting to live in a city but I'm aware most people I know who don't have that obsession either still have to because their bosses does not let them work from home. If you only have to come in once a month or less you can live in a region where housing is affordable; I could buy a li…
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…
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?
* Standards of living are variable, and especially so between different social classes.
* Debt requires someone to earn more money than they would otherwise need to in order to meet the same standard of living as someone without debt.
* The variety of higher margin products and lower margin counterparts create inefficiency in making consistent spending choices, particularly when it comes to visibility (e.g. marketing).
* Healthcare costs can be extremely variable from person to person.
* A big question is what it takes for a person to feel contentment. E.g. I have multiple family members living hundreds to thousands of miles away from me, from each other even, that I never get to see, and I would be a much happier person today if I was able to spend more time with them. Other factors can include obtaining a sense of achievement in what you do with your time, or a sense of approval from your peers.
* People have a much smaller pool of peers to identify with if they don't go to a regular workplace or gathering of some kind.
* There are regional differences in supply and demand, especially for property, housing, water, and egress. I'd include food, too, if I didn't think you were targeting the US.
I can probably come up with more, but I'll just leave it at that for now.
Things that would help everyone, regardless of income, without depending on a radical restructuring of entitlement spending, that seem like things startups could actually do: * Equally credible alternatives to university education for professions that don't involve students shouldering $100k-$200k in debt based on decisions they have to make when they're 18 years old. * Empirical, blinded, skills-assessment based tur…
This is a great list! I will, selfishly, riff on you 6th point to add: * Modern logistics-driven solutions for inexpensive high-quality elder care. If working this sort of thing sounds interesting to anyone then check out hometeamcare.com and ping me. We're hiring for basically every role in the company. It's a very interesting business!
I'd like to see this sort of research too... I'd also like to see things like the tax system be used to make changes to income inequality - both in terms of like for like pay as well as to some extent evening up the pay professions each sex choose to go into. i.e. if you are a woman you get tax off up to a certain amount because society screws over your pay for getting pregnant. I'd also love to see meat taxed on a t…
That is: In a free market, there are two things, supply and demand, and they communicate via price. In your idea, you fix the amount of supply, for absolutely no reason. All that's left is for the price to move the demand to where it meets (no pun intended) the supply. But you're throwing away half of the ability of the market to respond - the supply side, and you're doing it for absolutely no reason.
Um, unless you're doing it as research. That... might be interesting research, but I suspect that it will show that "supply and demand" makes a more efficient market than "demand alone".
I'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…
> So if you make over $100k a year, you might be taxed $15k more than you were before, but you would also receive $10k.
So basically as a middle class person, I don't benefit at all, I may even lose money, but some kid who has no income and wants to live in his parents basement gets $10k/yr for contributing nothing to society? Am I understanding this correctly?
The upper class won't care - this is pennies to them, but this is going to bite the middle class badly and completely change their incentives to avoiding getting housing and living as cheaply as possible to minimize or eliminate work.
You always have to think very carefully about the incentives you create with something like this. This seems to create very bad incentives to me, incentives which would have caused me to make very, very different decisions in life drawing me away from any sort of productivity in society.
I'm not strictly against this idea, but as you've presented it, I can't see a way this would ever be implemented, how would you sell it to the middle class?