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Guaranteed Minimum What?

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Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#141

Post by PeterisP »

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.

Housing is one of things that can be solved by UBI - currently in many regions housing is scarce in places "where all the jobs are" and plentiful, cheap, and even empty and abandoned in places with few jobs. This imbalance happens in 'competition' between different centers, and also in the process of urbanization. We have people leaving their granparent's houses, and leaving them empty, just to go to the big city where they can actually earn a living.

UBI can change that by making it feasible for underemployed people to live in those cheaper areas. If there's no economic reason (good for society) to have them work at all, then there's no economic reason for them to live in the scarce housing in the economically most active areas - and they will revitalize the cheaper areas by bringing their spending there.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#142

Post by aeorgnoieang »

massysett wrote: post #84

I have no idea why this is getting upvoted. A blog post that simply observes a bunch of self-serve kiosk machines, has a bait title, and is used on HN for an uninformative rehash of a UBI discussion that has taken place here over and over. I was hoping at least for a piece that made an argument or said something informative, not for some photos of a movie theater lobby and a restaurant.

The 'argument', and the admittedly more informative content, is distributed over many posts on that blog (which I like and follow).

This was a relatively sparse post compared to others from the same blog and is, in my opinion, mostly a 'look, more examples' kind of thing for the blog's regular audience. In this case, literally 'look, more examples of low-status work being squeezed out of the world'.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#143

Post by pyoung »

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.

Traditional education is supply limited. But the internet is rapidly changing things. As an example, Udacity and Coursera are both offering various forms of certificates.

I could see a future where people use UBI to bootstrap an education. Move to a low cost of living area, take some online courses and work on some projects. Once they have built up a small portfolio, attempt to re-enter the workforce etc...

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#144

Post by marcosdumay »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #46
habitue wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a counterbalancing force, which is hard to see going away, which is that larger companies have a harder time seeing which way the wind is blowing and getting ahead of the curve. They make decisions slowly, and tend to be wary about investing in risky things that might pull resources away from their existing profit centers. They have something to defend, so they're anchored to past decisions in a way smaller…

My critical contention is that those counterbalancing forces are going away because Large companies have the following vectors: 1. Invest in small companies broadly enough so they get key insight so they can acquire before they become a threat. See GV, Intel Ventures etc... 2. Overwhelm small companies through brute force if they can't acquire. See: Facebook vs Snap 3. Invest in internal moonshots that startups can't…

Companies have been doing those 3 forever. It works most of the time, it fails once in a while.

All established companies sooner or later face the choice between destroying a huge revenue stream to get a chance on the new thing, or keep the current revenue and limit its lifetime. Nearly all of them choose the second, and the ones that choose the first do not always make it either.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#145

Post by rhino369 »

zimzam wrote: post #116
mamon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Founders might looking for a good living and glory, but VC's for example are looking to really capitalize on 100X growth.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#146

Post by AnimalMuppet »

DonbunEf7 wrote: post #58
atemerev wrote: post #5

Guaranteed minimum income is: sustainable, sufficient for basic life necessities, can be implemented for the current population levels. Choose two. It is as inevitable as CAP theorem.

No, by counterexample of USA. The 2015 average income per capita was $57,540 [0]. The 2015 poverty guideline for a family of five was $28,410 [1]. Clearly there is more income per capita than required to keep everybody out of poverty. A second source, the Census, is pretty reputable too: "Median household income in the United States was $56,516 in 2015." [2] Edit : This statement isn't helpful since it is a median, n…

But it would not be sustainable. If you take everyone's income away, how many people are going to bother to continue to work? Far less than "all of them". So what happens to national income? It falls dramatically. So now you have much less income to distribute.

Peoples' behavior is not a constant. When you change the incentives, the behavior changes. This is one aspect of the "Law of Unintended Consequences" that has wrecked so many fine-sounding ideas.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#147

Post by worldsayshi »

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…

> you undermine riches' motivation

To tax the rich is not the same as disincentivizing investment! Investment matters to the economy, not capital.

Yes you need capital in order to invest. You need the right amount of capital in the right places! Rich hoarders are not the best investors.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#148

Post by marcosdumay »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #6

That is a pretty well presented argument for mass unemployment. But it suffers from all such arguments in that is extrapolates "today" into "tomorrow" without acknowledging that there are literally billions of variables at work. A simple example of the challenges this sort of reasoning present; assume you're a being that perceives time very slowly, perhaps your lifetime is a mere 100 milliseconds rather than 100 year…

> Technology shifts however have not resulted in a 'net loss' of employment opportunities when looked at in the full view, ever.

So, how long is the full view? For how long are poor people expected to just starve off and die before the magic hand of Capitalism restores the labor vs. capital valuation into something reasonable?

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#149

Post by BeetleB »

redleggedfrog wrote: post #63

I hate to say this, and this is in no way a troll, but I believe the solution for this will eventually be to kill the poor. Not directly, at least I don't think, but through lack of health care, lack of shelter, lack of education, poor diet, use in waging war, incarceration, and probably once they get desperate and try and get theirs, being labelled terrorists. People who have money, and therefore power, in the Unite…

>I hate to say this, and this is in no way a troll, but I believe the solution for this will eventually be to kill the poor.

Only works if they die before reproducing...

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#150

Post by lovich »

FussyZeus wrote: post #115
CuriousSkeptic wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Part of the benefit of UBI is removing a large amount of overhead that comes with current welfare systems. This is done by writing a check to every citizen in the system with overhead only to confirm that one citizen gets one check. When you add in other checks you increase how much money needs to be spent on just running the system
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