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Basic income doesn't emphasize divisions between poor and working people

basicincomecanada.org

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Re: Basic income doesn't emphasize divisions between poor and working people

#121

Post by Applejinx »

derekp7 wrote: post #62
erpellan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic productivity in all industries could be improved by introducing flogging / periodic executions of lowest performing staff. What's more likely: someone takes a risk knowing that if they fail their kids won't be homeless, or knowing that if they fail, they will be?

Some companies do this to a lesser degree -- every year they fire the bottom 10% of performers -- also known as stacked ranking.

Good for making people re-read their Rand, but pretty terrible for maintaining stable systems. What if you fired the bottom 10% of law-abiding citizens, as in 'if you speed and get parking tickets and DUIs and beat your husband or wife, you get fired'? To what extent is 'made more money immediately for the company' a useful societal metric? Why do we benefit just because THAT company happened to make money? And yet that's the metric… better we should ask 'what did they do'. Money is essentially a meaningless metric.

If enough people decided 'the best people are those who bite other peoples' fingers off and keep them in a jar', that would be where the money was, and you'd be firing people who don't have human blood on their lips. There's no correlation between 'earning more money' and anything useful, societally or personally.

Re: Basic income doesn't emphasize divisions between poor and working people

#122

Post by troncheadle »

psycr wrote: post #10
troncheadle wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright John Gault. If we're talking nation level, your startup is not a 'tentpole.' How does your market cap compare to GE, Google, Amazon, Lockheed? Those are redwoods, and there are plenty of those. You're a maple sapling, there are plenty of those too. You're doing that thing where the middle class rebels against their own interests by positioning said interests as the interests of the working class, because they…

Opportunity is not evenly distributed, yes. But neither is skill. > Basic income doesn't come off the backs of small business, and that is a silly reason to be so afraid of it. What's the name of your business?

That's just willfully ignorant. For majority of people, differences in opportunity are SO much more influential in their lives than differences in skill or intelligence.

Consider three kids -- one is rich, suburban white, IQ is 170. The other is rich, suburban white, IQ is 75. The third is poor, inner city black, IQ 170.

In this situation, which lives do you think look most similar to one another? If you answered 'obviously the white kids', then great! You get it. If you answered 'the two kids with an IQ of 170' then you need to spend some time in the real world.

Let's add kid #4 -- poor, black, inner city, IQ 75. If we want to compare across QoL, opportunity, really almost any metric, we're going to group across socio-economic lines, not IQ.

If you find yourself thinking 'Well what if that young black kid catches a lucky break and gets out of poverty' you're almost there -- the need to catch a lucky break to escape is a defining aspect of poverty and it works against even the most naturally skilled people. The amount of skill needed to overcome that lack in opportunity makes it silly to bring skill into the equation when talking about opportunity.

Really, come on. That kind of 'they can just pull themselves up by the bootstraps' is ignorant enough to sound like dog whistling.

Re: Basic income doesn't emphasize divisions between poor and working people

#123

Post by bvinc »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #27

It's extremely counterproductive to, as the article puts it, "take the question of the moral quality of the poor off the table." The fact is that a large amount of poverty is directly correlated with "moral quality". Most poor people in the US (maybe Canada is different?) have low "moral quality", which I define as engaging in behaviors that are likely to keep a person poor. These behaviors include not seeking work […

I think this is a super simplistic view. You're basically saying: Bad decisions leads to being poor. Not a single person is under the impression that all poor people made good decisions. Of course there is a causal relationship! But it's much more complicated than that. Some people are poor because they were born physically disabled, or mentally disabled. Some people got sick and lost their job and savings. Some people are poor because they're taking care of loved ones. Not all women choose to be single mothers. And many people living in poverty have jobs.

The causal arrow also goes in both directions. Does a poor man on the street, with no shower, no transportation, no cell phone, and barely enough money in his pocket to eat, really have the ability to seek work? Does a poor man on the street have any reason to worry about the problems of substance abuse? Does a poor man on the street worry about going to jail for a while?

I'm not even sure what you're suggesting though. It sounds like you're suggesting that we should continue shaming poor people as an effective means to prevent poverty. You don't think absolute desperation and lack of safety, security, health, and food, is enough of a motivation? You think shaming works? I don't get it.

None of these ideas even matter though. With basic income, what matters is the end result for a society. Maybe life isn't just better for the poor people, but maybe it's better for you too. Maybe more poor people end up being functional members of society. Maybe you end up safer, healthier and happier in a society with basic income. Maybe people still want to work. Maybe there are more entrepreneurs. Maybe a basic income system is necessary for our society to function in the future. There are a lot of indications that this is the case. This is why we need to do basic income studies.

Re: Basic income doesn't emphasize divisions between poor and working people

#124

Post by emodendroket »

icebraining wrote: post #88
bsbechtel wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A basic right is something you inherently have, and cannot be taken away. It's not something to be provided by the government. I wish more people had a better understanding of this.

There is no such accepted definition of "basic right".

Early modern British/early American discourse makes a lot of the idea of "natural rights," which were held to be rights men had that weren't necessarily enumerated in the law. Perhaps that's what the OP means to get at (although the idea that "nobody can take it away from you" is just a definition of the concept of a right, not some innate difference between positive and negative liberties).

Re: Basic income doesn't emphasize divisions between poor and working people

#125

Post by dragonwriter »

err4nt wrote: post #77
ep103 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the reports I've seen have stated that actually, it works the other way around. That the vast majority of people who go into entrepreneurship only do so if they have money to fall back on, one way or another, should their business fail. So by that logic, basic income should actually significantly increase the likelihood of entrepreneurship, because while mincome will still be low enough that people will want…

Maybe on paper, or in theory. In my life I'm not ashamed to say it was the hunger of having nothing, no safety net, and having no job that STILL drives me today. That fire that got started when I had bills and no money is still burning strong today. But I worry if theres too mucb cushion perhaps I would have not hurt as bad, and ever achieved what Ive accomplished since then.

> In my life I'm not ashamed to say it was the hunger of having nothing, no safety net, and having no job that STILL drives me today.

Canada is a first-world country, and like all first-world safety nets, hasn't had "no safety net" for quite a long time (even the US, which has a fairly weak safety net for a first world country, especially given its relative per capita wealth and income, has had significant social safety nets for a long time.)

Re: Basic income doesn't emphasize divisions between poor and working people

#126

Post by Applejinx »

err4nt wrote: post #87
troncheadle wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright John Gault. If we're talking nation level, your startup is not a 'tentpole.' How does your market cap compare to GE, Google, Amazon, Lockheed? Those are redwoods, and there are plenty of those. You're a maple sapling, there are plenty of those too. You're doing that thing where the middle class rebels against their own interests by positioning said interests as the interests of the working class, because they…

The resources that I built my business on: - a chair - a table - electricity - any computer - internet - coffee (for food) - bathroom If you can bring your own laptop to a starbucks, they have plenty of the rest of those. A laptop can cost as little as 230$ USD, so thats really the only barrier and I beleive its an attainable goal for anybody in North America. If your life depending on having a laptop, thats somethin…

Where are they gonna go, Greece? Apple is already in Ireland.

You're assuming giant consumer countries are obligated to just passively let equally giant multinational corporations just do whatever they want. If Apple wants to live in Ireland, let 'em sell exclusively to Irish people. If they'd like to move to Greece, let 'em build an infrastructure there since the Greek government plainly can't.

It's a symbiotic relationship and entities like Apple and Google know that far better than you do. They'd like to get absolutely as much as they can so long as they're not on crumbling sand foundations, and the less headstrong corporations don't even care about that; they'll just lobby for zero or negative taxes for themselves, even if it wrecks the markets they're in.

Business will not leave. There's literally nowhere for them to go: they're already everywhere.

Re: Basic income doesn't emphasize divisions between poor and working people

#127

Post by yummyfajitas »

clavalle wrote: post #94
yummyfajitas wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. In the past I argued that the poor are completely rational and simply choose to exploit the safety net. It's a hypothesis I can't rule out. https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/why_the_poor_dont_wo... But that doesn't explain many of their other bad behaviors, e.g. wife beating.

Domestic abuse is not limited to the poor. But, back to the point, assuming they are not as rational as the rest of us, somehow sub human, is a harmful position to take -- it precludes any positive action to change the incentive structure of the poor -- in your view, no matter what is done, they are still broken creatures beyond help. That you admittedly take that position with other more useful hypothesis still wort…

The poor commit 4x as much domestic abuse as high income people. And I single out domestic abuse because unlike robbery or selling drugs, "stealing a loaf of bread to feed his hungry children" is a nonsensical excuse for beating one's wife (or spending one's money on drugs and tobacco)

But, back to the point, assuming they are not as rational as the rest of us, somehow sub human, is a harmful position to take -- it precludes any positive action to change the incentive structure of the poor -- in your view, no matter what is done, they are still broken creatures beyond help.

It doesn't mean this at all. It just means that we need to create the right incentives, and these incentives need to take into account real life behavior rather than wishful thinking.

For example, giving poor people the option to not work will be exploited. But if we need to prevent them from starving, why not put them to work? Bring back FDR's Civilian Conservation Corp. Then we can also fix our crumbling infrastructure for cheap.

That fixes your incentives - you can either do hard labor for low money, or you can start looking for a better job.

Re: Basic income doesn't emphasize divisions between poor and working people

#128

Post by alanwatts »

radarsat1 wrote: post #104
yummyfajitas wrote: post #27

It's extremely counterproductive to, as the article puts it, "take the question of the moral quality of the poor off the table." The fact is that a large amount of poverty is directly correlated with "moral quality". Most poor people in the US (maybe Canada is different?) have low "moral quality", which I define as engaging in behaviors that are likely to keep a person poor. These behaviors include not seeking work […

Do you not see that poverty can also be the cause of those behaviours, rather than the reverse?

>There are direct causal relationships between all of these behaviors and poverty. Not seeking work will result in not having a job, drug abuse will make you lose your job, and having no job makes you poor. Etc.

Not being able to afford education, or clean clothes, or a permanent residence rules you out of 99% of the job market, which is why so many give up on the job search. As stated by OP (and many parts of society), this is morally wrong, akin to being sub-human, untermensch. Actually believing this sentiment contributes further to this negative feedback cycle and leads to depression which leads to drug abuse.

Re: Basic income doesn't emphasize divisions between poor and working people

#129

Post by mordocai »

err4nt wrote: post #107
mordocai wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$230 extra above living expenses is not attainable without title loans or something similar for many in America. Not to mention that if the laptop breaks you have to know how to fix it yourself or pay $100+ to fix it (or buy another new one for $230). If you don't know enough about computers to transfer data off a "dead" machine then you have to pay $100+ for someone to do that even with the new one.

You must be joking, I know an awful lot of americans with laptops. Its not like mortgaging a house! And Im not talking about 'above living expenses'. When I bought mine I had no money for the electric bill. I leveraged the laptop purchase into paying that bill and many more after it!

You weren't as poor as some people I know then. Many of the people I'm talking about already can't pay their utility bills. Some of them don't have electricity because it was shut off. Just because it works for you doesn't mean it will work for others.

Re: Basic income doesn't emphasize divisions between poor and working people

#130

Post by gremlinsinc »

There's also the fact that growing up in poverty ALMOST ensures that you continue in poverty. Most people who break out of poverty as pop singers, artists, entrepreneurs - their entire family changes, so does future generations from them on..

A recent article exposed how poverty and the stresses from it actually literally affect the brain and cause poor brain development. Essentially this makes Poverty a mental health issue, and should be covered under healthcare.

http://europe.newsweek.com/how-poverty-affects-brains-493239...

If we had a UBI for one generation we would see less crime, we would need less police, less militarized toys for police, and see increase in benefits like 30 hour work weeks, time off for births, etc. When technology displaces 40% of jobs by 2030 - why not make it so everyone can contribute but less time?

When you say how lazy people on welfare are, let me ask you how lazy are rich people too? Especially generational wealth (wealthy brats), how many playboys are out on their private jet, or yacht for 4 months of the year? What makes them matter more than someone who's working at a strip club because it's the only thing she can do to put food on the table.

A good portrayal of this is in Les Miserables where Cosette's mother became a prostitute just so she could send $10 per week to the evil caretakers of her daughter, when she was laid off. There are so many people who are desperate like she was.

There's also this thing where we all want to think we're 'equals' in America, but do you really think your kid is equal to the kid slumming it in the bad sector of town, who might get dinner every other night if he's lucky? Who's parents have completely given up hope so yes, they do drugs - but should he suffer because his parents are fuck ups?

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