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Guaranteed Minimum What?

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Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#211

Post by redahs »

worldsayshi wrote: post #147
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…

> 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.

Taxing capital and labor creates deadweight loss and disincentivizes investment in the production of more goods and services. Capital goods are durable goods which go to wherever they are best treated, including overseas.

If you want to tax the rich without taxing capital or labor, then you want to tax land. Unlike capital, there is only a finite supply of land and it cannot be moved overseas. Wealthy individuals like owning land in areas with high land values in stable countries with high public spending, and with a land value tax they directly pay for it.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#212

Post by brndnmtthws »

Freakonomics had an interesting 2 part podcast series about this very topic. If you haven't heard of it, and these things interest you, I suggest you check it out:

Part 1: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/earth-2-0-economics-edition-...

Part 2: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/earth-2-0-income-inequality/

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#213

Post by antisthenes »

sparkling wrote: post #39

From Henry Hazlitts 1946 classic "Economics in One Lesson": You cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him anything less. You merely deprive him of the right to earn the amount that his abilities and situation would permit him to earn, while you deprive the community even of the moderate services that he is capable of rendering. In brief, for a low wage you substitute unemploy…

Are you citing it as an example of a theory that's been proven wrong or what?

It's hard to tell with many HNs saying incorrect things about economics and then realizing they were serious.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#214

Post by notahacker »

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.

And, as I've pointed out in various other threads, kiosks used in the food industry is more or less the worst possible example of automation making people redundant. I mean, the first example is basically a digital version of leaving a menu with tickboxes and asking people to have change ready so it can be picked up by the food deliverers as they pass your table, which has been a possible way of cutting staff - in the few restaurants that don't think waiters encourage more purchases per customer - since mass literacy. Robotic barista? We've had coffee vending machines since the 1940s (the first vending machine was proposed in 215 b.c). And whilst the arm adds novelty value, it's still less likely to be cute or good at upselling muffins as minimum wage earners.

I wish UBI discussions on here generally revolved around actual predictions and the awkward mathematics of who's paying for it when, but I understand that it's easier to sell dubious ideas with pictures of robots than falsifiable claims

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#215

Post by bitJericho »

lordlimecat wrote: post #191
bitJericho wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubi goes hand in hand with taxing the rich

The US federal budget is 3.8 Trillion. Using parent's numbers, you would need $5.3 Trillion to just cover healthcare + housing, assuming zero inflation. What tax rate are you proposing will genenerate $5.3 Trillion off of taxing the rich?

Trivial. Tax the top 1 percent at least 75 percent for about 2 trillian or more once you close off loopholes, ban insurance companies altogether and make hospitals publish their prices, and require estimates for any work to be done, and you suddenly have a balanced budget.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#216

Post by omginternets »

nateberkopec wrote: post #133
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…

MV = PQ. Money * Velocity = Price level * Quantity of goods and services. Friedman assumes the velocity of money is constant (good assumption), so really the only why you can cause inflation is to increase the supply of money, M. UBI increases the velocity of money by moving money from low-consumption, high-investment rich people to high-consumption, low-investment poor-to-middle-class people. Increase money velocity…

What is meant by "velocity" in this context? I'm unfamiliar with the term.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#217

Post by Eyas »

Taek wrote: post #202
justinator wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You write as though you've never held a minimum wage job. Have some compassion for those people who are working hard for almost nothing. Sometimes, it isn't their first choice, or it's their only choice. I would suggest a better experience is had when you give respect to the (say) service industry worker you engage in a transaction with.

Maybe we should be working on better ways to get the poor educated and integrated with modern society as opposed to making them dependent on jobs which take all of their time, don't pay nearly enough, and block any and all opportunity for a way out because there's no free time or disposable income.

We should also work on better ways to equip society to have skills that are more "valuable" in the modern high-tech world, absolutely.

The incompassioante charge made by the gp is still fair, I think: Saying these workers provide "no value" is too business-focused and incompassioante. Yes, these workers provide little value in terms of profit to the business, but looking at societal value at a larger scales, these jobs do have value (to the workers, to their families, to the local businesses and landlords they can now make business with using their wages, to homelessness, crime, hunger, etc.). Simply replacing these workers with technology is a net negative for society if we don't do what you suggested.

The free market thinking that the poor deserve to be fired because their skills are no longer competitive, can be, I think, a privileged and incompassioante position.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#218

Post by cr0sh »

zanny wrote: post #201
etskinner wrote: post #190

"There will always be a need for someone to wipe down the tables, mop the floors, and take out the trash so a few minimum wage level positions will linger on." Hah, yeah right. Boy is the author gonna be surprised when those jobs get automated too.

Seriously, we already have robots that mop and vacuum. Scrubbing tables and taking out trash are just more expensive - it isn't a technically infeasible thing to do right now, especially if you sacrifice some of the magic by just putting UV strips on the tables to indicate where the robot should scrub, or some such. That eliminates the day labor, you would probably still want a weekly cleaning crew to come around and…

> The problem right now is that buying a robot that can wipe tables

I'm not sure how it would help with the "cleaning" part of things, but what if the tables were robots themselves? Could that help with cleaning?

It could help with a lot of things - for instance, imagine a conference center that could re-arrange itself between groups or conferences, then put itself "away" as needed.

Or imagine a garbage can at some venue that loiters around people with disposable items (and perhaps reminds them about its presence when it senses they need to throw something away - I experience this once at a "human level" at a 5-star hotel, where instead of visible garbage cans, there were people who stood around to take your "garbage").

One could potentially think up many such instances - where everyday items become robots for tasks (which might also help to keep such things clean, as well).

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#219

Post by loup-vaillant »

lordlimecat wrote: post #186
adamsea wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You kinda missed the whole point of the OP, which was, if people don't add value to a business, how will said valueless people put food on the table and participate in society?

The same way we have every time an industry has disappeared in the past: by participating in the newly opened industries. Is it rough when (for example) shipping crates put a bunch of longshoremen out of a job, when they are in their 50s and too old to easily retrain? Sure. But how many people now not only enjoy (as customers) the benefits that Amazon provides, but also enjoy the employment benefits of a massively ex…

You're looking at it with past-tinted glasses. This time is different, and the market won't solve it.

Those newly opened industries have less people in them than the industries they replace. Mostly because our consumption doesn't increase as much as our efficiency does.

Funny you mention Amazon. We enjoy their services, and they enjoy that expanded global market. And they do this by killing local businesses with their ruthless efficiency. (Remember we're supposed to be competitive. There will be winners and there will be losers.) They don't create nearly enough jobs to compensate for the unemployment they cause.

There's also the problem of skill. For instance, in 20 years, truck drivers will be gone. Instead, we'll have an operator managing a fleet of 50 trucks from some control centre. The rest will have to find something else. But what exactly? The low skill jobs will be even scarcer than they are now, and the high skill jobs will be taken up by people who enjoyed a higher education in the first place, as they are now. You could still raise the level of education, but that will be too late for those drivers.

Keep this up to its logical (and absurd) conclusion, and half the population will starve to death in the streets. They're useless, why the market would support them? Of course, we'll have cleaner robots wipe it all away, cleansing the stench of death —those who still have value will be able to enjoy their walk in the park undisturbed.

More realistically though, we'll have a revolution before we get to this point. Or, the rich and powerful will see it coming, and start giving bread and games to the people. Come to think of it, they already do it to some extent.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#220

Post by irrational »

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…

I know what you are saying, but I can't help wondering where teenagers will get their initial job experience if most minimum wage jobs go away.
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