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

Why we should all have a basic income

weforum.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 492 posts

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#451

Post by whytaka »

dzink wrote: post #192

During Brexit, people in job-starved areas of UK were reported as resentful for receiving handouts. They wanted gainful employment and their dignity back. You could have corporations foot the bill for basic income and people with certain values would still not want it. The image of being a breadwinner is so deeply instilled in some people that for them not being that, triggers mid-life-crisis: a depression, sense of…

Which is great for UBI as the social contract makes explicit that everyone is a beneficiary of it. The people who need it then will have both their dignity and the will to make more of themselves.

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#452

Post by crdoconnor »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #437
crdoconnor wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be happy enough if there were no apple. Overpriced crap, reality distortion field and an egomaniac running a wage fixing cartel operating the whole thing. No thanks. I'll take some high speed rail though, please. Perhaps 100,000 new affordable apartments in New York and San Francisco too. Unless you think that there's no need and people wouldn't want them?

Is there a reason we can't have both? It's not actually possible to solve it the other way anyway. It's not 1929 anymore. Modern construction jobs require trained workers with trade licenses who demand middle class salaries and benefits. That is a lot more expensive per-person than a UBI. So if you have a legitimate project like that, go hire some of those people and do the work. But what about everybody else?

>Is there a reason we can't have both?

If you mean UBI and a job guarantee, I suppose not, however it's going to cause inflation to spike pretty high.

>It's not 1929 anymore

It actually kind of is. Wages have stagnated, the wealth of the 1% has ballooned, infrastructure is crumbling and the far right is on the rise.

>Modern construction jobs require trained workers with trade licenses who demand middle class salaries and benefits. That is a lot more expensive per-person than a UBI.

Just guaranteeing paid work to the ~30% unemployed is far cheaper than giving a stipend to every person in the United States.

Even if you include the cost of materials it's not going to come close.

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#453

Post by wolfgke »

smallnamespace wrote: post #390
wolfgke wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For one thing, it reduces the incentives for someone to work hard. If you work harder, you will still have more money - that's what % is about. > Some people (maybe justifiably) feel very uncomfortable with the idea of selling their own future equity. If they have a problem with that, then they should negate something like "40% for every gross dollar over 1000 per month". You are > Also it felt really unfair to hig…

It's a matter of trust. People in other societies do this all the time -- entire families in China, for example, will pay in invest in others' education or pay for them to emigrate to the US, with the understanding that if the person succeeds they will bring over other family members or send back money. But do coworkers really know and trust each other so well to do this without enforcement mechanisms? Lawyers are ex…

> People in other societies do this all the time -- entire families in China, for example, will pay in invest in others' education or pay for them to emigrate to the US, with the understanding that if the person succeeds they will bring over other family members or send back money.

Indeed I had this in the back of my mind when I suggested my idea.

> enforcing 'percentage of paycheck' contracts is difficult. Just see how much trouble people have enforcing alimony or child support payments, even when the case is 100% legally clear.

Alimony and child support payments are forced upon them from above - this is nothing that anybody would willingly agree to if he/she could choose freely. On the other hand: Getting financed to learn something new is something people would willingly agree to. And if after that they earn more than before even after "donating" the 40%, they are still better off than before.

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#454

Post by wolfgke »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #395
wolfgke wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Street promoters make me sad. If they can find no job they better stay at home and learn something new, but they have no time for it, so they are stuck doing useless, maybe even harmful, work. If these people really have such a large earning potential if they were just learning something new, why not let coworkers get together and finance a fund: The worker (let's call him John Doe) will get his existing income for…

How is this different to a student loan, in any meaningful sense.

> How is this different to a student loan

* Student loan is "poor student vs. large bank". My suggestion is "peers finance peer".

* Student loan have to be paid back completely (with interest, of course). In my suggestion you pay back a defined percentage of the gross income for a defined number of years. So the risk that the person will only get a badly paying job is not on the person that is financed, but on the financers. This in particular means that the person taking the "loan" will avoids the risk that he will need many more years than originally anticipated to pay back the "loan".

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#456

Post by simonh »

braveo wrote: post #423
simonh wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a persistent and pernicious misconception. UBI is intended to increase people's autonomy, but manly by eliminating the poverty trap. Too many people live off benefits they would lose if they took a low paying no job, so are better off or only marginally worse off not working. UBI takes that problem away to that everyone would always be substantially better off working. It would act as a major subsidy for low…

> UBI is intended to increase people's autonomy https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/autonomy 1. the quality or state of being self-governing; 2. self-directing freedom and especially moral independence exactly. The point is that they can do what they want.

This was in the context of talking about people playing WoW all day every day. That's not the sort of lifestyle UBI is intended to enable or encourage.

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#457

Post by dTal »

lemmsjid wrote: post #134
funkyy wrote: post #94

Automation will not reduce overall jobs same way industrialization did not do that. Automation will create more jobs in services instead. Basic income is crazy socialist dream that was tested in communism already and it failed.

Basic income is very different than traditional communism in that it keeps with the basic capitalist infrastructure. In fact, basic income is much more capitalistic than existing social safety net systems because it maintains the assumption that if disadvantaged people are actors in the market, that the overall system will be more efficient than specific government-specified handouts. Really the question underlying b…

>Really the question underlying basic income and safety nets in general is to what extent every citizen in a modern society should have access to goods, regardless of their contribution

Absolutely this. And if we're honest with ourselves - if someone will die for want of something relatively cheap that the state can easily provide (like food, water, shelter, or antibiotics), can you really justify condemning them to death because they can't afford it? Sure, you want to encourage people to contribute to society, but do you really want that encouragement to be the threat of annihilation?

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#458

Post by perilunar »

jondubois wrote: post #342

I'm a big fan of Thomas Piketty's idea of a progressive global tax on wealth. I think that the root cause of a lot of the financial stress that many people are feeling right now is the result of having too many people leeching off of passive income from their investments/wealth (derived from work they did 30 years ago) and not actually contributing anything new to society. These wealthy people have become parasites.…

What you've described is close to Georgism, which holds that people should only be able to own wealth they produce themselves by their own labor, and that wealth from 'rent seeking' (land rents, natural resources, natural monopolies) should belong to everyone.

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

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#459

Post by sauronlord »

dzink wrote: post #192

During Brexit, people in job-starved areas of UK were reported as resentful for receiving handouts. They wanted gainful employment and their dignity back. You could have corporations foot the bill for basic income and people with certain values would still not want it. The image of being a breadwinner is so deeply instilled in some people that for them not being that, triggers mid-life-crisis: a depression, sense of…

So "handing out jobs" would not breed resentment? It would for me (no one owes me anything).

No one is stopping someone from providing services or goods to others

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#460

Post by JoeAltmaier »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #450
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Straw man. No data to support that; just a scare story. How about: cost of goods continues to drop as automation continues to expand explosively (as it has in the last 10 years). Standard of living rises steadily as the workforce decreases. What's the difference in the two scenarios? Data. Which we don't have. So certainly a UBI should be carefully introduced to keep the economy stable.

There's not any data to support it because there's no data around a nationwide, long-term UBI, period. All we have are little experiments where people know it could end at any time.

Qualify that enough, you can make the point. But UBI has been around long enough to collect data (pensions, Alaska, experiments). What people 'know' has no place in economics. We can measure - did prices rise in those places? No? Yes? How much?
Post reply on HN