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Guaranteed Minimum What?

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Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#111

Post by devrandomguy »

drxzcl wrote: post #83
devrandomguy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The relationship between value produced and resources consumed may not be linear, but that does not mean that it is possible to have infinite production, or to produce a change in value from zero resources. If production is not limited, then we can instantly transform our solar system into a Dyson sphere, right now. What am I not understanding, of this theory?

You'd be right, if all value production was in utilitarian, physical stuff. Increasingly however we're spending a smaller percentage of our income on stuff, and more on services and immaterial goods. To produce a two ton truck, you need to use more than two tons of resource, that much is obvious. But how many resources go into the production of my copy of GTAV? Or my blue-ray of The Lord of the Rings? Or my viewing o…

Even information based value has limits. I feel those limits as heat when I push my hardware to its limits. There is also the space limit of how much information I can store, and the time limit of how much information I can experience or learn through my senses.

Those limits are constantly being pushed outwards, but they are not disappearing. Eventually, we might have cities and data centers covering the entire Earth, à la Coruscant. At that point, we will still be constrained by our ability to cool the system, by our ability to efficiently power it all with minimal waste heat, and by the speed of communications through congested networks.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#112

Post by bryanlarsen »

haltingthoughts wrote: post #57
bryanlarsen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you expect inflation? All sane UBI proposals don't create money, they just move money from rich people to poor people. If you're a Friedman disciple, then "inflation is a monetary phenomenon" and we can stop there. If we're moving money from rich people to poor people, perhaps we'll see the prices of stuff rich people buy go down and the prices of stuff poor people buy go up. The vast majority of stuff poor…

Housing, Education, Healthcare are supply limited and pretty important to the poor and UBI doesn't fix that.

Education & Healthcare are already universally covered in Nordic countries, yet cheaper than in America.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#113

Post by AnimalMuppet »

DougBTX wrote: post #93
CJKinni wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All sane UBI proposals don't create money, they just move money from rich people to poor people I'm not very educated in this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding was that while UBI doesn't create money, but it can move money from people with a lower ratio of money-spent to money-made, to people with a higher ratio. If that's the case, the money that's actively being used should increase.

What do you mean by, "actively being used" though? The rich tend to want a return on their money, "invested" seems like a type of use, even if it is passive. Crazy hypothetically, if it reduced the money available for investment, it might raise the interest rate on loans, reducing the rate of lending, so reducing the total money supply.

I'm not sure that the rich usually invest in terms of making loans available, so I don't think your concern will happen. What might happen is a decrease in investment, which might lead to a decrease in economic growth. (Or, alternately, to a decrease in the rate of installation of automation, which might preserves jobs...)

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#114

Post by DougBTX »

darpa_escapee wrote: post #22
cbanek wrote: post #4

> Humans are agressively being eliminated from as many business models as possible. Well that's true, where they don't add value. What's the difference between the case of getting movie tickets and your waiter at a fancy restaurant? One of them is practically a useless annoyance, and the other one is part of the experience. Someone in a movie box isn't going to tell you about the movie, or have a conversation about i…

> Someone in a movie box isn't going to tell you about the movie, or have a conversation about it with you. They are there to take the most basic info (movie, time) and money, and give you a ticket. It's also always done thru a thick bit of glass that makes communication sometimes difficult if not painful. This has not been my experience at all. People who work at theaters get discounted, if not free, tickets to movi…

> This has not been my experience at all.

FWIW it matches my experience. I can't think of a time I've gone to the cinema not already knowing which film I'm there to see, so it wouldn't cross my mind to ask for recommendations.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#115

Post by FussyZeus »

CuriousSkeptic wrote: post #102
FussyZeus wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My problem with UBI is that all tests to date look great, but have only been done on a micro level. The fundamental issue I would like addressed is the macro scale inflation you would expect when redistributing trillions of dollars without commensurate economic value being created directly. The thing is though, most people who would benefit from UBI are not currently generating enough economic value to live, or bar…

If you don't see a dime I wouldn't call it an UBI. "Unconditional" is supposed to mean that everyone gets the same amount of dime. If you are concerned with progressive income tax as a means of financing it. Consider the possibility to implement UBI based on land rent instead, like the Alaska oil fund but the rent from all kinds of natural resources that really should be shared fairly anyway. Regarding the issue that…

> If you don't see a dime I wouldn't call it an UBI. "Unconditional" is supposed to mean that everyone gets the same amount of dime.

I wouldn't see a dime because I make far, far more than the people who need it. I don't need help.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#116

Post by zimzam »

mamon wrote: post #94
bryanlarsen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you expect inflation? All sane UBI proposals don't create money, they just move money from rich people to poor people. If you're a Friedman disciple, then "inflation is a monetary phenomenon" and we can stop there. If we're moving money from rich people to poor people, perhaps we'll see the prices of stuff rich people buy go down and the prices of stuff poor people buy go up. The vast majority of stuff poor…

The problem with taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor is that you undermine riches' motivation. If you limit the prize, then you also limit amount of effort that one is willing to make to get it. Therefore, after UBI is introduced on mass scale we might see a slow but steady decline in economic activity: fewer new companies started, fewer investments made, riches focusing on tax evasion and moving the…

This assumes that the primary reason to start a company is to become fantastically wealthy, which I would contest.

Sure, most founders want to get rich, but I'd assert most would be just as happy to end up in the 8 figure range ($10's of millions) as they would in the 9-10 figure range. (And such a reduction would require taxes on a scale far beyond what UBI would require)

Few people are going to consider starting a company and then sit down, calculate their tax burden as a billionaire and decide that it isn't worth starting Apple, Facebook or Google.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#117

Post by dsacco »

e_d_e_v wrote: post #11
cbanek wrote: post #4

> Humans are agressively being eliminated from as many business models as possible. Well that's true, where they don't add value. What's the difference between the case of getting movie tickets and your waiter at a fancy restaurant? One of them is practically a useless annoyance, and the other one is part of the experience. Someone in a movie box isn't going to tell you about the movie, or have a conversation about i…

When I worked in the movie box, that was not at all true. People would come in and ask about the movie. How long was it, whether it was any good, should they see another one instead? We gave them real answers. Just because you have a minimum wage job doesn't mean you're a bump on a log. If you've lost sight of the value of basic human interaction with anyone not baked into your caste, I pity you, even if you are in t…

There was probably a nicer way to make that point without attacking the parent's awareness of "the value of basic human interaction."

For what it's worth, I didn't infer any value judgement about caste in the comment.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#118

Post by jellicle »

mamon wrote: post #94
bryanlarsen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you expect inflation? All sane UBI proposals don't create money, they just move money from rich people to poor people. If you're a Friedman disciple, then "inflation is a monetary phenomenon" and we can stop there. If we're moving money from rich people to poor people, perhaps we'll see the prices of stuff rich people buy go down and the prices of stuff poor people buy go up. The vast majority of stuff poor…

The problem with taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor is that you undermine riches' motivation. If you limit the prize, then you also limit amount of effort that one is willing to make to get it. Therefore, after UBI is introduced on mass scale we might see a slow but steady decline in economic activity: fewer new companies started, fewer investments made, riches focusing on tax evasion and moving the…

Why is it that giving money to rich people increases their motivation, but giving money to poor people decreases their motivation? This "motivation" thing sure is hard to understand!

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#119

Post by haltingthoughts »

bitJericho wrote: post #99
haltingthoughts wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing, Education, Healthcare are supply limited and pretty important to the poor and UBI doesn't fix that.

Ubi does fix that. If ubi isn't enough to cover those then it's not high enough.

It's basically not possible to do that without making those things cheaper somehow. Convert the entire US federal budget to UBI and it is around 10k per person. Healthcare alone per person is already 9k. Housing is maybe another 5k. And this is before those things get more expensive as people consume more of them.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#120

Post by bluehazed »

mamon wrote: post #94
bryanlarsen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you expect inflation? All sane UBI proposals don't create money, they just move money from rich people to poor people. If you're a Friedman disciple, then "inflation is a monetary phenomenon" and we can stop there. If we're moving money from rich people to poor people, perhaps we'll see the prices of stuff rich people buy go down and the prices of stuff poor people buy go up. The vast majority of stuff poor…

The problem with taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor is that you undermine riches' motivation. If you limit the prize, then you also limit amount of effort that one is willing to make to get it. Therefore, after UBI is introduced on mass scale we might see a slow but steady decline in economic activity: fewer new companies started, fewer investments made, riches focusing on tax evasion and moving the…

Riches' motivation to do what? Continually hoard resources? The problem of hoarding, tax evasion, and generally just theft from society disguised as "innovation tax" is the problem that already exists. You're not reducing economic activity, you're just taking economic output and putting it where it deserves to go.
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