There was an interesting study posted (I believe here) on how a flat 10% re-distribution (10% taxed from everyone, then redistributed evenly across everyone, aka basic income), created a more stable "society" in simulation. It did this by helping support a larger "middle class". Does anyone know the link/can point me to the study? Google is failing me at the moment...
The biggest issue with any sort of basic income is that landlords and grocery store owners will just ever-increase their prices. How do we combat that?
There was an interesting study posted (I believe here) on how a flat 10% re-distribution (10% taxed from everyone, then redistributed evenly across everyone, aka basic income), created a more stable "society" in simulation. It did this by helping support a larger "middle class". Does anyone know the link/can point me to the study? Google is failing me at the moment...
The biggest issue with any sort of basic income is that landlords and grocery store owners will just ever-increase their prices. How do we combat that?
When people have the economic security from a UBI not to have to worry about job security, they can more easily take a stand against bosses/landlords through collective organising efforts. Basically, the UBI can act as a strike fund, giving workers/tenants/etc. more power in the class struggle.
If you offshore your profits and workers, avoid taxes, and the usual bag of tricks? Yes, parasite, and what happens to parasites which are too successful?
Avoiding taxes isn't illegal though. So in a global economy I'm not sure your argument is technically justified and simply the righteous argument most people would accept as true. If my US company shifts labor to India, do we assume it is bad simply because the US doesn't receive those wages to stimulate the US economy? Does this benefit India though? I think your argument depends on perspective, from US point of vie…
Avoiding taxes isn't illegal though.
No one said that it was, and it isn’t illegal to be a parasite. As to the rest, life is a competition.
People who do not contribute to society are what we call parasites. Just because your father or grand-grand-father did something useful to the world doesn't justify that you have to live like a king. Modern society destroyed the old feudal order exactly to avoid this kind of social injustice.
You don't even need to get all this righteous anger involved; the rich benefit more from the stable functioning of society than the poor precisely because they are rich. If the structures that support that wealth were to collapse they'd have a lot more to lose than the guy drowning in debt. It's not only reasonable to expect them to invest more proportionally in the continued functioning of society: it's in their bes…
That's a clearly defective model from a game theoretical point of view. A certain rich person can do very little to preserve the stability of the society, so their actions would be concentrated on things that give them direct benefits, that may or may not help society. It's essentially an externality problem, everybody is marginally hurt by say pollution, but some have local gains that far outweigh the costs, motivating them to pollute, bribe politicians and regulators, skirt taxes and so on, leaving other rich or poor people to support the welfare of the society. When the scales tip in favor of the freeriders, you have a failed state that no rich profiteer could have prevented, working individually.
The issue is simple to understand: as population grows and technology grows even faster, there should be a steady stream of wealth increase. This has been observed as is obvious to everyone. However, if we allow the bulk of this wealth to be controlled by a tiny part of the population, we are creating a huge problem to current and to future generations. A hereditary oligarchy can be terrible to our civilization, and…
Not to say I disagree because I do think the wealthiest should contribute meaningfully to society. But when you say "without visible contributions to society." why should an extremely wealthy person have to contribute to society?
> why should an extremely wealthy person have to contribute to society?
If influence, specifically political influence, and wealth could be perfectly decoupled, no reason. That nexus, however, means an oligarchical class of rich idiots have the capability to project their stupidity onto national policy.
If it is asymmetric, the superficially apparent mutual gain may be illusory, because—while many people think for moral or aesthetic reasons that this should not be the case—there is enormous empirical evidence that the actual experience of utility related to material position is very strongly driven by relative material position, which is often far more significant than absolute material position.
Parent is saying that it's better if everyone gets richer, even if some get more richer than others. So you're saying that it would be better if everyone was poorer individually, as long as they were more equally poor?
>So you're saying that it would be better if everyone was poorer individually, as long as they were more equally poor?
Why are you creating this either/or? Are you proposing that if we don't allow people like Gates and the Kochs to hoard billions of dollars that everyone will be poorer individually?
I completely agree that the richest should contribute to society, especially as someone in the middle class. However, let's pretend I was born into the wealthiest class. If I inherit a business, that business provides jobs (ie. wages) for people, and is a functioning part of the economic system. Does that mean I am not contributing? Regardless of how rich I am, I still need to eat and live and put clothes on my back.…
It's not just contribution, it's about the ratio of what you take and what you contribute. Ideally, one should contribute as much as she/he takes. Of course, that's impossible and impractical. I'd say the higher in the social rank, they ratio of contribution to taking drops exponentially, not linearly. That's the problem.
This article provides paragraph after paragraph of supporting data that the richest have gotten richer, but none that I can see supporting its claim that “billions of poorer people across the world have seen their wealth standstill or decline”.
Wages have stagnated and the poor are not seeing an equivalent increase in their wealth. Moreover, while the jobs numbers are very high 94% of all jobs added in the last decade have been temp/contract work/self-employment. https://hbr.org/2017/10/why-wages-arent-growing-in-america https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/8/16112368/pi... https://qz.com/851066/almost-all-the-10-million-jobs-created...
On the other hand, the wages of 700 million Chinese workers has trebled in the last decade.
The theory is naive, dismissive, and wrong. Stock value increases are coming from optimizations within companies that reduce employee benefits and compensation. On the consumer side of things, profits also come from taking advantage of deregulation, lowering the quality and safety of consumer products and services. Executive leadership and investors are pocketing gains made from making everyone else's lives worse. Ge…
How much of this opinion is coming from being involved in the management of companies vs news articles tuned to generate outrage so that they can generate clicks?
How much of your denial comes from benefiting from the immiseration of the poor?
You don't even need to get all this righteous anger involved; the rich benefit more from the stable functioning of society than the poor precisely because they are rich. If the structures that support that wealth were to collapse they'd have a lot more to lose than the guy drowning in debt. It's not only reasonable to expect them to invest more proportionally in the continued functioning of society: it's in their bes…
That's a clearly defective model from a game theoretical point of view. A certain rich person can do very little to preserve the stability of the society, so their actions would be concentrated on things that give them direct benefits, that may or may not help society. It's essentially an externality problem, everybody is marginally hurt by say pollution, but some have local gains that far outweigh the costs, motivat…
Working individually, yes. But realistically this is more of an iterative prisoner's dilemma than a straight prisoner's dilemma. If the rich don't hold up their part of the social contract, the poor tend to eat them (eventually). So the rich are only incentivized to screw the system if they can get away with it. The problems start happening when we let them get away with it.