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

The Future of Not Working

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 279 posts

Re: The Future of Not Working

#111

Post by aianus »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #42
jimmywanger wrote: post #36

I think that fundamentally, the thing we're going to run up against is population growth. I think history has proven that we can live in extremely wretched conditions. By giving money to people, are we going to be increasing their living standards or just creating more mouths to feed? Note that the basic income only applies to whoever registers at the beginning of the program. Would that amount of basic income cause…

wealth is strongly inversely coorolated with population growth. Keeping people in poverty means they have more children, not the reverse.

Only because wealth is positively correlated with education and impulse control.

There's no reason to believe handing a poor, uneducated person with no impulse control a big wad of cash will have the same effect.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#112

Post by tedmiston »

uiri wrote: post #106
tedmiston wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that the article is mistaken for calling this amount a basic income? > The nonprofit is in the process of registering roughly 40 more villages with a total of 6,000 adult residents, giving those people a guaranteed, 12-year-long, poverty-ending income. An additional 80 villages, with 11,500 residents all together, will receive a two-year basic income. With this initiative, GiveDirectly — with an of…

Yes. The region of Kenya described in the article is the Western part of the country near Lake Victoria. The national average monthly consumption per person in Kenya is 9,237 shillings.[0] 42% of the population of Kenya lives below the poverty line.[1] It is not a stretch to say that the poverty line in Kenya is going to be at least 6000 shillings a month, most likely closer to 7-8000 shillings per month. The 2280 sh…

Am I interpreting the data correctly to say this?: The 2280 shillings may provide (or very nearly provide) a poverty-ending income level in one of the poorest regions of Kenya relative to the local standard for poverty, however, this amount would be below the national standard poverty line. Or is that this amount eliminates extreme poverty but not all poverty?

I didn't see the specific region named in the NYT article.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#113

Post by uiri »

tedmiston wrote: post #112
uiri wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The region of Kenya described in the article is the Western part of the country near Lake Victoria. The national average monthly consumption per person in Kenya is 9,237 shillings.[0] 42% of the population of Kenya lives below the poverty line.[1] It is not a stretch to say that the poverty line in Kenya is going to be at least 6000 shillings a month, most likely closer to 7-8000 shillings per month. The 2280 sh…

Am I interpreting the data correctly to say this?: The 2280 shillings may provide (or very nearly provide) a poverty-ending income level in one of the poorest regions of Kenya relative to the local standard for poverty, however, this amount would be below the national standard poverty line. Or is that this amount eliminates extreme poverty but not all poverty ? I didn't see the specific region named in the NYT articl…

The poorest regions of Kenya are the arid northern regions (per the Daily Nation article I linked above). Admittedly, I want to take that article with a grain of salt, but it does make sense to me that the most difficult regions to farm would be the poorest. This region near Lake Victoria probably around the middle of the pack when it comes to ranking regions of Kenya from rich to poor.

2280 shillings is about 28-38% of the amount needed to get above the (absolute) poverty line, with the true number likely being closer to the middle or lower end of that range. It likely brings the people whom they chose out of poverty and around on-par with their just-above-poverty neighbours but not much more. I'm inclined to believe that they chose a region of Kenya where there was a good mix of people living just below the poverty line and people living just above the poverty line for exactly this reason.

I'm not sure about the distinction between extreme poverty, regular poverty and a national standard poverty line (in Kenya). When so much of your population is in absolute poverty, I don't think that a national standard line makes much sense. It does, of course, make more sense in the developed world where shelter alone will cost more money than the median Kenyan spends in a year; the median Kenyan is not below the global poverty line.

From the NYT article:

Kogelo, where Obama’s father was born, is just 20 miles from the village, which lies close to the banks of Lake Victoria. (This is the first village mentioned)

We took off at dawn from Kisumu, a bustling industrial city on the banks of Lake Victoria, and followed a two-lane highway to Bondo, a small trading city filled with cattle, bicycles and roadside food stands. From there, we turned inland from the lake and drove into a lush agricultural region. (This is the second village mentioned)

All across the villages of western Kenya, it was clear to me just how much aid money was wasted on unnecessary stuff.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#114

Post by spyckie2 »

tedmiston wrote: post #65
spyckie2 wrote: post #8

The article's title is misleading - it is not about not working, it's about giving money directly to poor villages for 12 years to provide what is similar to basic income but meeting fundamentally different needs in a very different part of the world. That said, I think it is a fascinating anthropological read. We often do not realize how many layers of wealth we had to stand on to possess our current wealth.

What's most fascinating to me is the dollar amount: $22/month ==> $264/year. It's almost unfathomable from a Western perspective that this could cover someone's basic living expenses for a year. I wish there were a simple way to participate as an individual. You don't have to be rich to cover one (or more) people's basic living expenses at this rate. Edit: Here's the link to donate: https://www.givedirectly.org/give-…

Yes. Recently I've been realizing that humans can live off of very little but we pay for a lot of things that aren't so obvious.

For instance, the people in the village were paying to get iron sheets for roof covers, and if you expense the cost over it's lifetime, it comes out to maybe an extra $1 a month. In the US, you pay $400-2000 a month in rent per person but you get a building that has central air, a solid roof, comes with a kitchen & bathroom with modern plumbing, fulfills building safety codes, and probably a lot more.

The people in the village were also buying access to wealth generation. One person went to invest in a fishing net and hired labor. He went from receiving $20 a month to potentially making $20 dollars a day. It underlines to me that investment is needed to unlock more productivity and better growth. It is sustained periods (decades) of this kind of continual investment that allows leap frogging from one income level to the next that turns a village into a modern city.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#115

Post by jon_richards »

rubicon33 wrote: post #74
marmot777 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty cynical attitude. It's obvious the intent of this is to test a program that has the potential to keep people from drowning. I doubt you're now gasping for air as you sink below the waves.

What's cynical about it? I guess I must not understand what UBI is all about. I had thought it WASN'T a form of welfare. Rather, it's UNIVERSAL in nature. That would mean theoretically everyone from millionaires, to the poorest, would receive UBI funds. I'd love to be free from having to earn an income, so that I can work on my own projects (businesses). But who wouldn't, right?

One interpretation of UBI is reverse taxation, where you start off with a negative tax obligation instead of 0, and positive tax obligations are added on top of that, usually resulting in a positive balance.

In that situation, is someone with a positive tax obligation really receiving UBI funds? What about if all taxes are raised slightly so that the majority of people's tax obligations remain unchanged? It all gets very pedantic, but it is generally considered both welfare and universal.

It can get even more pedantic in other interpretations, especially when it isn't the government providing the income.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#116

Post by malandrew »

paulpauper wrote: post #15
Clubber wrote: post #6

The people with the wealth pay people for one reason and one reason only: they have to. Once they no longer have to, they will lobby the government to continue to lower taxes and squawk about laziness, welfare queens, and all that garbage. This will go on for a few decades until there is an uprising of sorts, then those with the money will return to giving everyone else crumbs, or just enough to quell the uprisings.…

Marx predicted that...hundred forty years ago. Hasn't happened. History suggests revolts occur when basic needs are unmet, usually after a nation falls into debt and ruin as a consequence of war

What amazes me is that people keeping keep increasing the definition of basic needs and we wonder why things become unstable.

Universal healthcare is now considered a basic need. We're not even talking about basic healthcare either. I see people arguing all the time that everyone is entitled to a level of care that is for all intents and purposes a premium product that commands a premium price.

If you were to tally up all the entitlements people argue should be basic human rights, you'd have a economically unsustainable system, because you'd eventually take so much from those working that the motive for them to continue participating in the system would disappear. It got so bad in East Germany, that they had to build a wall to keep those that were productive from fleeing.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#117

Post by Clubber »

marmot777 wrote: post #100
Clubber wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reason they fight it now, they don't like writing checks.

Who fights what exactly? I'm not disagreeing I'm trying to understand. And are elites just one monolith? I don't think that's how it is. I think every group in society has its cool people and its narrow-minded, greedy cretins. I doubt that there's a single entity called the elite that acts in concert after the annual meeting.

I think you are pretending to be obtuse. Wealthy people can afford to lobby congress, poor people cannot. Congress (has a whole) rarely does squat unless they are paid to do so. Most, if not all lobbying is controlled by wealthy people. Not all wealthy people control lobbying efforts.

Therefore, when 90% of the workforce is not needed, people who can afford to lobby congress (wealthy) will assuredly continue to lobby congress to ensure that the laws to deal with that problem don't affect their interests negatively. Paying what is essentially social security for everyone isn't going to be cheap. Paying 150 million people (approx workforce) $1000 a month would cost $1,800,000,000,000 a year, and that probably won't be enough.

This is not limited to the GOP and there is a ton of historical evidence of this. The middle class has been stagnant since Reagan. Globalization, trade agreements, ignoring the minimum wage limits, increasing visa limits, not prosecuting employers who use illegal labor, weakening of unions, not allowing the government to bargain on drugs they purchase through tax dollars, not allowing people to buy drugs from other countries, extending copyright monopoly durations, etc. None of those things help the middle class, they only help the corporations and people who lobbied congress.

Here is a list of the top 20 lobbying groups / people. I cannot see of any (except the AARP) that has citizens interest's in mind when they lobby. I certainly don't see any who would lobby to increase their taxes to support a living wage. These organizations are all controlled by wealthy people.

https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s

In short, wealthy people and organizations lobby congress because they are the only ones who can afford to.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#118

Post by Clubber »

morgante wrote: post #103
Clubber wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not when it comes to payroll, it isn't. You think companies are gonna start cutting payroll checks for charity's sake? They ship jobs overseas to get cheaper workers and skirt environmental protections, what do you think they are going to do when they don't need 90% of them?

You started by talking about "wealthy people" and then switched to talking about companies and payroll. This is a motte and bailey argument: your reply is perfectly reasonable, while your original statement was definitely not.

Large companies that lobby congress are controlled wealthy people, are they not?

Re: The Future of Not Working

#119

Post by laser »

marmot777 wrote: post #96
Dagwoodie wrote: post #4

Here's how I think the only possible way this will ever be realized: A non-profit organization will have one of the highest (top 10 to pick an arbitrary number) net-worths of any company on earth.

like a government but with a single mission to administer this program. It could be a good idea. I don't know.

Like a department or agency of government? In the US the SSA may be a good contender.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#120

Post by thinkloop »

malandrew wrote: post #116
paulpauper wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marx predicted that...hundred forty years ago. Hasn't happened. History suggests revolts occur when basic needs are unmet, usually after a nation falls into debt and ruin as a consequence of war

What amazes me is that people keeping keep increasing the definition of basic needs and we wonder why things become unstable. Universal healthcare is now considered a basic need. We're not even talking about basic healthcare either. I see people arguing all the time that everyone is entitled to a level of care that is for all intents and purposes a premium product that commands a premium price. If you were to tally u…

The max is generally: food, shelter, health care, education, communication
Post reply on HN