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Request For Research: Basic Income

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#651

Post by TrevorJ »

soperj wrote: post #390
jdmichal wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often have the same inclination of thought with regards to university education and government-guaranteed student loans. If I'm a university executive, and I know that the average student can afford $X, and I know the average student can also receive a guaranteed $Y in student loans... Why would I not set my price at $(X+Y) and take the full rent that I can?

Only works if every university does the same thing.

According to a study be the federal reserve, it actually is happening right now. Education isn't a commodity product so this kind of pricing doesn't require collusion between different schools.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#652

Post by ZenoArrow »

mkempe wrote: post #614

Not a single comment so far has mentioned Karl Marx. This "research" proposal is merely a technocratic rehash of Marxism: the inexorable forces of materialism and technological improvements entail endless progress driven by a Hegelian spirit. This will free humans from labor and eliminate the power of capital. Thus, somehow, unlimited production will enable people to live according to the motto "from each according t…

> "Marxism has been tried, and has failed, in so many places with such bloody results."

This isn't Marxism, that's a lazy comparison. At its core, Marxism is about shared access to the means of production. Basic income has nothing to do with changing who owns the means of production (or at least, it could mean that, but it doesn't have to mean that).

Furthermore, whilst Marx had some interesting ideas, he also had at least one dangerously bad one. I'm referring to the dictatorship of the proletariat...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletaria...

... I'd argue that no attempt to achieve communism at a state level has ever got past that stage, because the path from a society controlled by power to a true communist society is beyond the imagination of many.

That said, forms of socialism that don't rely on a dictatorial intermediary stage do exist, and just because one form of socialism is misguided doesn't mean they are all misguided.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#653

Post by tinym »

JoblessWonder wrote: post #440

> What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone? I think it might be best to create a different thread since this is a separate and important question than the "Basic Income" debate that is also interesting and happening in the same comments. Either way, here are my thoughts: You can take that question a few of different ways. What can all startups do within their current processes/products? What is a star…

>I'm also taking the view that raising the prosperity for the lowest individuals will in turn increase the prosperity for everyone else.

This is an aside, and I don't particularly want to evaluate it as good or bad, but this statement is striking compared to the neoliberal idea of 'a rising tide lifts all boats' - i.e. increasing general prosperty raises prosperity for the lowest individuals.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#654

Post by ccvannorman »

Speaking from personal experience, not having to work 9-5 at a dead end job has astronomically increased my personal well being, productivity, and contribution to society (ed-tech startup). If I had been born in the lower class and never had any capital/runway, I would never have been able to do my startup -- or at least not yet, and not with this much impact.

9-5 service jobs so that people can pay rent needs to become a thing of the past, so many lives and talent gone to waste.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#655

Post by jgord »

> What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?

I agree with the fundamental dogma that startups are the best way we know to create good technology, which in turn benefits everyone. ie. the big wealth creators are discovering new resources and creating better technology. ( The big new resources are in space, or perhaps deep sea, so your back to startups to get there.)

Extrapolating, it seems reasonable that within 15 years the cost of many manufactured items will fall dramatically and quality will go up - when 3D printing can print electronics and plastics intermingled together at good resolution, that will mean all our vacuum cleaners / iphones / laptops / TVs / cars / bikes / shoes are printed whole instead of assembling them from parts.

Aside from consumer goods, we still all need high quality and cheap solutions for : education, energy, transport and housing.

Cheap, high quality [customisable!] housing might actually be solved by 3D printing also [ but maybe you'll just end up paying more for rights to the land plot or sky space to host your dream pad ? ]

Its worth mentioning the obvious, that Startups don't exist in a vacuum, they need the backdrop of founders and staff who are highly educated [ not to mention a functioning economy with capital, infrastructure, internet ]

Personally, if someone gave me a basic income and a project budget, I would spend it on establishing Math Circles for students aged 10 to 15. ( My ideal version of math circles involves some hands-on programming in javascript, coupled with the typical tricky math problems to solve - https://quantblog.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/mathcircle-with-c... ). Id also like to see how we could scale out Math Circles by delivering them online.

Education via this Math Circle format is a very long term technology investment, but has a high bang for buck in terms of upside for the planet and our species. As a parent it seems clear to me, we cant wait around for the government or established institutions to innovate in education - it has to be done in parallel and outside of the constraints of a formal bureaucracy.

Think of each student as a startup you're funding - in that long tail there might be one or two Adas, Edisons, Einsteins or Mirzakhanis wherein almost all future 'value' lies.. but we're also making a wider pyramid of culture, diffusing out into the general milieu of artists, nurses, marketers, designers a slightly higher level of facility and intuition in math and science.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#657

Post by sliverstorm »

branchless wrote: post #601
Tsagadai wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing is almost impossible to fix at this point. Housing is seen more as an asset class than a social requirement (although, not everyone thinks this way there are enough people with money that it doesn't matter what they think, it is an asset class). The majority of the issues you highlight are caused by the amount of capital moving into real estate and the amount of resistance to change is directly proportional t…

If we don't change this you can forget it. Land is the issue, it's been the issue for hundreds of years. The ability to expand into free land was what made the USA different. You could take a job for the man on subsistence wages or set up yourself. That's why you had to have slavery. In the UK with land enclosure the prison is the country. We should tax land and stop the exploitation of workers by rentiers.

How does LVT achieve your goals while property tax, which we already have, does not?

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#658

Post by sevensor »

tptacek wrote: post #259
samstave wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome. A couple points: Alternatives to patient-present doctor-mediated health care to cover the 80% case in which doctors are expensive overkill; some combination of telemedicine and nurse-practitioners. We have police departments and we have fire departments. We should have "nurse departments" that are clinics but much more structured as are fire and PD services for each given area. (I know there is a grey versio…

It was hard for me and Erin to do 7 years ago (our kids are teenagers now), and we're economically very fortunate. I can't imagine how hard it must be for people trying to provide for families on $15/hr to manage child care.

And that's where two parents are involved! Since I became a parent (luckily with a very capable spouse) I've been amazed at the tenacity it takes for the single parents I've met to juggle child care and jobs. Good, inexpensive care would make a huge difference for parents with precarious finances and living situations. The USA's patchwork of county welfare programs is hard to navigate and offers limited alternatives in many regions.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#659

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

ZoF wrote: post #618
nunobrito wrote: post #604

tptacek, please don't apply racist comments on this article. When you don't pay your bills, you simply don't riot on the streets as reaction. Likely not the fault of what you describe as "middle class white" group for enforcing municipal regulation. Likely no innocent parties on either parties involved.

Why was this down-voted? Ask yourself this; If tptacek's comment had the races reversed, would you think it racist? If it's racist to say, 'most crime is committed by African Americans' why isn't it racist to say 'middle class white people are responsible for levying default judgements and financial catastrophes on others?' I'm a middle class white person. I don't wish ill on any black people, or any other people. I…

It's downvoted because the Fergusun protests were not "because people didn't pay their bills", and it's clear the poster simply has no understanding of what life is like when you're forced to chose between paying a bill and feeding your kids.

You feel bad writing what you wrote, because you likely have a bit more awareness of how badly everything is stacked against the poor from the moment they're born, but you prefer to focus on pointless semantic debates along the lines of "color blind" and decrying "political correctness" that are old and tiresome.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#660

Post by ZenoArrow »

Mz wrote: post #646
mkempe wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. I think it is important to understand that the technocratic egalitarianism advocated nowadays in Silicon Valley circles is a poor rehash of Marxist notions. While communism is a political, revolutionary movement, Marxism and Hegelianism were the philosophical underpinnings of that movement.

Not only is it a poor rehash, it is incredibly insulting to the current Have Nots. It is very much a "I got mine, FUCK YOU." position. Perhaps, at best, a means to assuage their guilt for their imagined crime of being wealthy. The system can change. It needs to change. I have no desire to be assigned the role of sheeple, where my only value to society is as a consumer. I cannot imagine a worse quality of life or a mo…

> "It is very much a "I got mine, FUCK YOU." position."

Can you explain what you mean by this?

I think it's worth pointing out that implementing a basic income does not diminish the available work in an economy. If you want to earn more than your basic income, you're still free to do so.

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