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Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)

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Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)

#101

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

cdoxsey wrote: post #65

Poverty can also be a trap because the simple solution (just giving someone money to alleviate poverty) isn't the same as earned success. When you feel like you've earned money through hard work and you feel like you're a contributor and needed and respected by your peers it brings a significant amount of satisfaction and happiness in life, which in turn drives you to be more productive and alters the way you think a…

This is based on the myth that poor people don't contribute, while rich people contribute more.

Perhaps you don't understand that many people in poverty have jobs. In fact many have multiple jobs, because it's the only way they can stay afloat financially.

Workfare is not a solution. The economy either needs to be reinvented with stable jobs and financial democracy, or essentials - not just cash, but education, health-care, and housing - need to be provided for free, and the cost of economic self-development made so low that anyone with an idea and a hint of a work ethic can try it out without being terrorised by the prospect of absolute economic failure and destruction.

Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)

#102

Post by jimnotgym »

WalterBright wrote: post #67
dd36 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And debt is an intergenerational tax that fully offsets your argument. The young didn’t run deficits.

With a fiat money system, there's no requirement to ever pay it off. It isn't like credit card debt. The central bank just issues more money.

Except in the UK we have a government who think that you need to run the economy like a household budget. They have been trying to cut spending to reduce debt since 2010. This has decimated public services, yet the debt is still there and deepening!

A course on Modern Monetary Theory wouldn't go amiss...

Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)

#103

Post by jimnotgym »

mrob wrote: post #82
mynameishere wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't just call something a nightmare. You have to point out to these blindly privileged rich knuckleheads that the garbage man won't be taking out the garbage if UBI comes to pass. No shit. He won't. Not unless you pay him 300,000/year and that's a whole other kind of economic catastrophe.

It's no economic catastrophe. If the market price for garbage collection by people not threatened with starvation is 300000/collector/year then there is a very strong incentive to automate it.

It also rather depends on the level of UBI. If I can just live frugally on my UBI, but by getting a 20 hour-a-week job collecting rubbish I can afford to eat out and take foreign holidays then I would have a strong incentive to carry on doing it. I might demand that my boss treats me better in general though, which could lead to a labour market where the environment and conditions are as important as the pay

Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)

#104

Post by gaius »

cdoxsey wrote: post #56
dd36 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is more wealthy. Moreover, perhaps Norway is wealthier because of its support systems.

Norway is wealthy because of oil: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_N...

Norway is wealthy because of oil

Right; you wouldn't compare Norway to the entire US, you'd compare it to Alaska.

People forget this about the US. You wouldn't compare "California" to "the EU" because that wouldn't make sense.

Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)

#105

Post by gaius »

oldcynic wrote: post #34
zeth___ wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

325 million people in the US. Give each person $10k so they can feed themselves and live in a tent. That's 3.25 trillion dollars. The total federal budget in 2015 was 3.8 trillion dollars [0]. After we disband the army, navy and air force, liquidate medicare, medicade and social security where do you think we should get the missing 1 trillion or so from? [0] https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bu…

How many under 18s in that 325m? UBI would be for those of working age would it not? I've seen arguments UBI should include pensioners, but never for it to include minors.

I've seen arguments UBI should include pensioners, but never for it to include minors

It has to include pensioners. To make it work you need to take the cost of the bureaucracy out of the system, which means UBI supersedes all other welfare. There will be no pensions, no unemployment, no child benefits (children also get UBI, paid to their parents until they come of age), no means testing - everyone gets UBI, full stop. That's what the U is for!

Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)

#106

Post by jimnotgym »

annabellish wrote: post #86
zeth___ wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

325 million people in the US. Give each person $10k so they can feed themselves and live in a tent. That's 3.25 trillion dollars. The total federal budget in 2015 was 3.8 trillion dollars [0]. After we disband the army, navy and air force, liquidate medicare, medicade and social security where do you think we should get the missing 1 trillion or so from? [0] https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bu…

The best serious proposals I've seen tend to treat UBI as a form of "negative income tax". Say everyone gets $10k or $20k or whatever, enough to _live_, and then for every two dollars they earn they drop a dollar of "UBI". If you get $10k guaranteed, then somebody earning $20k exactly thus has an effective income tax rate of 0%, neither recieving nor paying income tax to the government. Anything earned over that star…

Indeed, in the UK we have a personal allowance of around £10k of income which is not taxed. If you either remove that allowance or add the UBI to your earned income (same answer), you collect a lot more tax and the budget is now higher.

I think we have to be clear though, we are expecting to have to increase taxation to pay for UBI. If the need for UBI is driven by automation removing jobs, then the extra wealth that the automation creates is going to have to be re-distributed. It is also time to revisit the special treatment that capital (especially land) gets in the tax system. Land Value Tax is perhaps a much more socially aware approach.

Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)

#107

Post by jimnotgym »

hueving wrote: post #44
oldcynic wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many under 18s in that 325m? UBI would be for those of working age would it not? I've seen arguments UBI should include pensioners, but never for it to include minors.

About 24% under 18. Dropping them doesn't even begin to address the massive shortfall.

Surely it addresses 24% of the shortfall? That is nearly a quarter in one answer. You are making it look much more achievable.

Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)

#108

Post by dghughes »

At the moment there is post at #1 about people's notions of an ideal life. It seems to contrast with this article. People want a simple life with good health not to acumulate stuff.

But really you have to think what is poverty? It's such a vague word as is the word poor.

There are people who live a subsistence lifestyle and they're happy. But there are people with mobile phones, big screen TV, computers, in an apartment who are poor.

From my perspective we in a western society require more things to live too many things. For example Internet access for basic government services, by your employer and schools.

Wages haven't kept pace with life. Costs seems to be rising faster than the lowest pay can cope with.

My father is from a generation where you work long hours to make more money, simple as that. But these days the wage from any paying job may not be enough even working overtime.

Even 20 years ago most people didn't have a cell phone, Internet was not widespread, you weren't paying for Netflix or a dozen other things eating away at your paycheque.

To me it seems technology plus stagnant low skill job wages have amplified poverty.

Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)

#109

Post by vidarh »

xstartup wrote: post #93
vidarh wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone else pointed out: The US is wealthier. If it was down to wealth alone, we'd expect the US to have far fewer problems.

Wealth, relatively small population and homogeneity (cultural/religious/economic) does make a lot of difference, See: Qatar. US might be wealthier (I've not vetted this statement) but it still doesn't have many of the above.

Well, yes, because you've just included a significant part of the solution (economic homogeneity) as one of the criteria. When you look back at Norwegian history over the last century, a lot of the shift happened in line with the rise of the labour movement and the rise of the welfare system, and a lot of the beneficial outcomes were visible before the oil revenue even started.

Norway as a result got one of the flattest income distributions in the world, and has relatively high degrees of social mobility, and a culture where the labour movement combined with religious groups (in what some might call a rather unholy alliance) promoted the ideal of modesty. E.g. in Norway sending your schools to private schools long held a significant stigma.

At the same time the US started moving in the exact opposite direction: Executive salaries as a multiple of workers salaries started skyrocketing etc..

Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)

#110

Post by jimnotgym »

gaius wrote: post #105
oldcynic wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many under 18s in that 325m? UBI would be for those of working age would it not? I've seen arguments UBI should include pensioners, but never for it to include minors.

I've seen arguments UBI should include pensioners, but never for it to include minors It has to include pensioners. To make it work you need to take the cost of the bureaucracy out of the system, which means UBI supersedes all other welfare. There will be no pensions, no unemployment, no child benefits (children also get UBI, paid to their parents until they come of age), no means testing - everyone gets UBI, full st…

It has been suggested that minors could get a reduced level of UBI to recognise that they are have less basic need. However it should certainly be high enough to get rid of child benefits.

Interestingly until recently Children in the UK got UBI in the form of family allowance (paid to the parents). x for first born, y for subsequent or something. The sweeping government cuts lead to it becoming means-tested and complicated.

One Conservative (sorry cannot find the quote) remarked that they spent theirs on Champangne, which caused horror in the press, but is money flowing into the economy at least...unlike tax benefits to land-owners

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