Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Born Poor? Santa Fe economist Samuel Bowles says you better get used to it

sfreporter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 53 posts

Re: Born Poor? Santa Fe economist Samuel Bowles says you better get used to it

#11

Post by chipsy »

"Basic income" has been pilot-studied in Africa to great success.

The reasoning is very simple: If you are living hand-to-mouth with unreliable income - so unreliable that you can essentially expect "the end of the world" to come at any time - then you cannot make any future plans around earning and saving; consuming as much as possible immediately holds more value.

But if you have a government-guaranteed income, you can build plans around that - you can pursue the risky project, you can start the startup, you can go to school, etc. One anecdote I read(this was years ago) involved a woman who built up a flock of chickens from basic income. This lifted her out of poverty, since the chickens can pay for themselves with eggs in just a few months.

Re: Born Poor? Santa Fe economist Samuel Bowles says you better get used to it

#12

Post by ibsulon »

apsec112 wrote: post #8

Where is his proof ? He has this whole elaborate theory of economics and inequality worked out, and not once does he present any proof .

I'd start at http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/ and his actual papers, not what a reporter writes. :)

Re: Born Poor? Santa Fe economist Samuel Bowles says you better get used to it

#13

Post by viggity »

I love how he tells his staffer to buy the printed book and not the version on the kindle. The author goes on to say that the printed book is marx, the kindle book is rand. History makes it pretty clear how your economy will wind up using marx's theories.

Capitalism is the worst kind of economic structure out there, until you look at all the alternatives.

Re: Born Poor? Santa Fe economist Samuel Bowles says you better get used to it

#14

Post by eru »

nazgulnarsil wrote: post #10
isleyaardvark wrote: post #6

The article makes some interesting points but there seems to be a flawed use of statistics. Particularly the part about "the percentage likelihood that a bottom 10 percenter will ever make it to the top 10 percent. For 99 out of 100 people, rags never lead to riches." Well, what would you expect? There's going to be a pure mathematical limit to that sort of movement, nevermind issues of income mobility. To take an ab…

trying to paint those statistics as negative is hilarious on the articles part. we have insane mobility compared to any other society at any time in human history.

While our situation is quite good (and in absolute term probably the best ever), I doubt that we (=US 2010?) have "insane mobility" --- measured in actual turnover between quantiles of wealth from one generation to the next.

Does anybody have some sources? (I'd guess it would be interesting to look at societies in great turmoil (e.g. England after 1066, French Revolution, Communist revolution in China) or societies with more equality of wealth than the US (e.g. Scandinavian countries). They may well have more mobility (at least in a purely technical sense).)

Re: Born Poor? Santa Fe economist Samuel Bowles says you better get used to it

#15

Post by emilind »

Don't everybody gonna get hung up on the $250,000 demogrant. Bowles is a super interesting thinker (same for his frequent co-author, Herb Gintis). Bowles (and Gintis) are trying to synthesize agent-based modeling, evolutionary game theory, behavioral economics, mainstream economics together with the other social sciences. It's an ambitious project and absolutely necessary.

Come to think of it, ff there's one economist who would appeal to functional programming eccentrics and polymaths it'd be Bowles. His papers are pretty readable for non-economists so if you're curious check out his homepage.

Re: Born Poor? Santa Fe economist Samuel Bowles says you better get used to it

#16

Post by emilind »

mtalantikite wrote: post #2

He's an interesting guy, he used to teach econ over at UMass Amherst when I was studying it there. One of his colleagues/research partners has a good evolutionary game theory book available for free on his website for anyone interested: http://people.umass.edu/gintis/ It's called "Game Theory Evolving"

It's a great book, and of all the game theory books I've seen it's the easiest and most enjoyable to read (not that it's easy).

Re: Born Poor? Santa Fe economist Samuel Bowles says you better get used to it

#18

Post by guelo »

eru wrote: post #14
nazgulnarsil wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

trying to paint those statistics as negative is hilarious on the articles part. we have insane mobility compared to any other society at any time in human history.

While our situation is quite good (and in absolute term probably the best ever), I doubt that we (=US 2010?) have "insane mobility" --- measured in actual turnover between quantiles of wealth from one generation to the next. Does anybody have some sources? (I'd guess it would be interesting to look at societies in great turmoil (e.g. England after 1066, French Revolution, Communist revolution in China) or societies w…

You are right, mobility in the US is not what conservatives think it is.

Sources: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/b1579981.html "By international standards, the United States has an unusually low level of intergenerational mobility: our parents’ income is highly predictive of our incomes as adults. Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States.

From The Economist, http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2005/01/the_economist_o.ht... "would-be Horatio Algers are finding it no easier to climb from rags to riches, while the children of the privileged have a greater chance of staying at the top of the social heap."

Re: Born Poor? Santa Fe economist Samuel Bowles says you better get used to it

#19

Post by pln »

nazgulnarsil wrote: post #10
isleyaardvark wrote: post #6

The article makes some interesting points but there seems to be a flawed use of statistics. Particularly the part about "the percentage likelihood that a bottom 10 percenter will ever make it to the top 10 percent. For 99 out of 100 people, rags never lead to riches." Well, what would you expect? There's going to be a pure mathematical limit to that sort of movement, nevermind issues of income mobility. To take an ab…

trying to paint those statistics as negative is hilarious on the articles part. we have insane mobility compared to any other society at any time in human history.

Untrue, compared to both previous decades in the US, and other nations today.

Re: Born Poor? Santa Fe economist Samuel Bowles says you better get used to it

#20

Post by teej »

chipsy wrote: post #11

"Basic income" has been pilot-studied in Africa to great success. The reasoning is very simple: If you are living hand-to-mouth with unreliable income - so unreliable that you can essentially expect "the end of the world" to come at any time - then you cannot make any future plans around earning and saving; consuming as much as possible immediately holds more value. But if you have a government-guaranteed income, you…

For those more interested on the results of the pilot program in Nambia, you can read more about it in their report here: http://www.bignam.org/Publications/BIG_Assessment_report_08a...

I read through it and was pretty surprised at the findings. The increases in education and health are particularly staggering.

Post reply on HN