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What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

theguardian.com

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Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#411

Post by undersuit »

kdamken wrote: post #370

Let's do some basic math - she makes $400,000 a year, on 131 units. 400,000 / 131 / 12 = $254 a month per unit. That's really not a ton of money for each one. $254 for your own place to live isn't a bad deal. Additionally, when they say she makes $400k a year - is this her take home, or her business's gross profit? Are they considering the money she has to spend on mortgages, insurance, repairs, business administrati…

I like how you first do the math to show how cheap these units are. "It's a bargain!"

Then you wonder it the $400k is gross profit or revenue. Wouldn't it be useful to know if the units were being rented for $254 a month or if the owner was renting them at rates that would generate in excess of $254 a month in revenue?

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#412

Post by undersuit »

CydeWeys wrote: post #377
tamana wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Land-Value Tax. Landlord makes money by improving the land and providing services to residents, not by merely owning land in perpetuity. Land is common wealth.

So I'll admit that personally I'm intrigued by land-value tax, but it's not an answer to the other guy's question. He was precluding all public and private land ownership. There can't be taxes on land of any kind if no one owns anything and no ownership is enforced.

Why can't there be taxes on land and no ownership? You can't tax land use? Are all the shelters floating above the land? No records?

What's the problem that makes taxing land with no ownership untenable?

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#413

Post by undersuit »

kefka wrote: post #366
rogual wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not saying it's free money, he's saying it's easy to have an account.

Well, for starters, you need a computer that can create the public/private key pair for a BTC transaction. That's nowhere near free... Whereas most banks allow creation of an account for $50 BTC highly fluctuates, making storing money in this currency highly unstable. It's good to pay someone across the world, where US banking regs get in the way. Getting into the BTC ecosystem is hard, unless you have hard currency…

>Well, for starters, you need a computer that can create the public/private key pair for a BTC transaction. That's nowhere near free... Whereas most banks allow creation of an account for $50

Cellphones can do that, so while not everyone has a cellphone, anyone that does could create a bitcoin wallet to doesn't charge you an additional fine when your newly opened checking account drops below $50.

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#414

Post by Snargorf »

coliveira wrote: post #125
Snargorf wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure they would. People will do almost any job, if they're paid enough. This is why military contractors in war zones, Arctic crab fishermen, and prostitutes make a lot of money. This is econ 101; supply and demand. You know it too. You're (presumably) not impoverished, but you'd work in diamond extraction or a clothing sweatshop, if you were paid enough.

What you forget is that some jobs just cannot pay enough to make it worth for non-impoverished people. A very clear example is farm jobs in the US. If farmers had to pay real salaries, production costs would go dramatically up. So they depend on undocumented workers. This is similar for the fast food industry and so many other industries that are now operating in third world countries. For these industries, poverty i…

>What you forget is that some jobs just cannot pay enough to make it worth for non-impoverished people.

Of course they can pay enough. Just not when there is competition from other farms using illegal immigrant labor.

You know as well as I that if all illegal immigrant labor simply disappeared, the American farming industry would not just shut down and leave everyone to starve. They'd pay as much as they needed to hire Americans, and consumers would pay as much as needed to sustain that.

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#415

Post by Snargorf »

xerophyte12932 wrote: post #265
Snargorf wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure they would. People will do almost any job, if they're paid enough. This is why military contractors in war zones, Arctic crab fishermen, and prostitutes make a lot of money. This is econ 101; supply and demand. You know it too. You're (presumably) not impoverished, but you'd work in diamond extraction or a clothing sweatshop, if you were paid enough.

Minor nitpick: Prostitutes make a lot? I guess depends on which part of the world we are talking about. I hear you can get them in South Asia for as low as $5. Probably lower.

Compared to what they could make in another job, they make a lot wherever they are.

e.g. here it's hundreds per hour for a girl who would barely beat minimum wage otherwise.

$5 in South Asia is mostly mythical, but even where it would be true, that's a large multiple over what they could make otherwise.

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#416

Post by Snargorf »

FussyZeus wrote: post #16
Snargorf wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure they would. People will do almost any job, if they're paid enough. This is why military contractors in war zones, Arctic crab fishermen, and prostitutes make a lot of money. This is econ 101; supply and demand. You know it too. You're (presumably) not impoverished, but you'd work in diamond extraction or a clothing sweatshop, if you were paid enough.

The thing is though people are willing to pay a lot of money for crabs. No one is willing to spend crab money on, say, sweatshop clothing. Going fishing on one of those boats is on my bucket list, once I'm not so flabby. I think it would be a hell of an experience.

If there was no other source of clothing, you'd be willing to spend crab money.

In fact, this was the case during the industrial revolution. A pair of pants would cost a full week's wages. This is why people back then owned like 2 to 4 outfits.

It's amazing how many people just can't comprehend how the world can realign so different things become 'normal'. Like, "nobody would ever pay that for clothes". What, you think they'd go naked if there was no alternative?

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#417

Post by duaneb »

MichaelBurge wrote: post #230
duaneb wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethics is not binary. It is ethical to provide shelter. It is more ethical to provide shelter without profiting. The landlord has expenses, including perhaps a vacation, but they should be minimized. I dont have much beef with the trailer park owner in question, but you are simplifying the variables at play. The net win for everyone would be providing shelter at absolute minimum cost, including for the people maintai…

Similarly, employees should accept the bare minimum salary they need to live on(perhaps with a modest vacation). Anything above this is unethical, since they are now profiting off of their employer. In both cases, you are essentially condemning the person to stay in that position forever with no chance of advancement. It reminds me of the parable of the talents[1]; I tend to agree with its conclusion that the guy who…

Why is advancement desirable? Giving people more responsibility when they prove they can handle it is one thing. It's entirely another to equate advancement with monetary compensation.

In general, I believe people should be incentivized with responsibility, which is in everyone's interest. Cash compensation only benefits one person; doubly so when considering the rate of tax avoidance in the upper echelons of income.

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#418

Post by Fjolsvith »

ubernostrum wrote: post #236
Fjolsvith wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, I don't see that this is perfectly reasonable to expect. TANSTAAFL. Food still has to be produced. Energy still has to be produced. All that stuff has to be paid for somehow or the producers stop producing for the freeloaders. What you think of as a mental hurdle I see as a way of discerning what is mine from what is yours. Show me a developed nation where a person actually doesn't have any personal property…

Food still has to be produced. Energy still has to be produced. All that stuff has to be paid for somehow or the producers stop producing for the freeloaders. The question is: what happens when most or all of the food and energy is being produced not by human labor, but by fully-automated processes? Why would, say, a farming robot care whether someone is "freeloading" off its labor? What you think of as a mental hurd…

"There is no logical reason, if the capability exists to automatically produce sufficient basic necessities for every human being, why every human being should still have to do a make-work job in order to prove they "deserve" those things. And you could still have all the capitalism you like for anything that isn't a basic necessity; the basic life doesn't have to be one of luxury, just one free from worry about things like food and shelter; the currency of such a society would need to be tied to something other than control of basic-necessity resources, but finding alternative bases for currency is something people already do for fun."

Well, let the people who live on welfare invent and create the machines that will give them free food, water, heat and living space. They surely have a lot of time to devote to that, not having to work for a living.

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#419

Post by jpetso »

sokoloff wrote: post #285
jpetso wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the question we should ask ourselves is not how to eliminate inequality, but what baseline level of services and opportunities we want to give people at any stage in their life, regardless of their competitiveness and productivity, including when they're otherwise poor and a net drain on society. In other words, is stable housing a basic right or is it a luxury? If it's a basic right (and/or a net positive if…

If the top end is short of "billionaire", I think you get a world without Tesla, Space-X, Blue Origin, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and several other things that I believe are valuable and worthwhile. You may argue that the cost is too high and that we'd be better off without those things.

I wasn't arguing for lowering the top end, I think it's fine as is.

A broader bottom end may mean that it gets a bit harder to make it to that point, but in practice that's not where most of the resources for providing more/better housing would come from anyway. Ambitious people will find a way to make it to the top, while putting their wealth into self-directed charities and moonshot companies instead of government-controlled tax revenue. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and it can and will continue either way.

In the end it's the decision of the broad public, the "middle class" if you will, to determine how much we want to collectively spend on housing security, and how to create mixed-income communities to facilitate upward mobility and avoid creating poor-people slums or monocultural wealth enclaves. The main ingredient for that is (valuable city) land, so I don't believe technology can do much about improving things too much. Nonetheless we always have the option to contribute to affordable housing, universal basic income, yadda yadda. I don't think that's mutually exclusive with high-profile billionaire projects.

Re: What if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

#420

Post by FussyZeus »

Snargorf wrote: post #416
FussyZeus wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is though people are willing to pay a lot of money for crabs. No one is willing to spend crab money on, say, sweatshop clothing. Going fishing on one of those boats is on my bucket list, once I'm not so flabby. I think it would be a hell of an experience.

If there was no other source of clothing, you'd be willing to spend crab money. In fact, this was the case during the industrial revolution. A pair of pants would cost a full week's wages. This is why people back then owned like 2 to 4 outfits. It's amazing how many people just can't comprehend how the world can realign so different things become 'normal'. Like, "nobody would ever pay that for clothes". What, you thi…

Yeah but you're talking about an entirely different market. Cheap clothes exist because of volume sales, if shirts suddenly costed what they arguably should, the market would shrink a LOT to compensate for the higher cost. If the $5 shirts at Walmart that parents buy their kids because it has a funny design on it suddenly costed $25, a lot of that business would no longer exist.
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