Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

It's not about the minimum wage it's about what's considered poverty. If you make below $41866/year here you are living in poverty.

> heavy and intrusive labor regulations

I'm curious as to what you consider heavy and intrusive labour regulations? All of the regulations in the industry I work in are focused on worker health and safety. Without those regulations I would be working in dangerous hell hole breathing in toxic dust constantly, where I wouldn't be paid overtime wages, be legally eligible for breaks and my shifts could be whatever the fuck my boss wanted.

>but that's not the point. It's a supplement to your existing income.

Several other posts in this comment thread alone seem to disagree and believe it's a reasonable amount of money to live on.

>will provide minimum means not to fall into abject poverty

>actually do see it as solely sustainable, in the scenario I outlined.

There's also comments on here from people talking about how it will give them time for this that or the other.

Lets see, for me at least I would need to get $1200 every month just to cover rent and i've lived in the same place for 8 years now. Rent in that time has doubled around me to the point where a one bedroom apartment is $2400/month. My internet bill is just under $100/ month, phone bill is about half that, travelling to and from work is about $200 a month, groceries and expenses and such another $200 or so if not more. Leaving whatever I have left for saving and fun.

I'm just really trying to imagine what kind ubi could be given to anyone that would really make a difference.

I understand why people want this and I understand the wanting to believe people will take this money and be alright and use the extra time they will suddenly have to better their skills still feel ok when low skilled work becomes unavailable.

The reality will be something more along the lines of an underclass living in ghettos being unable to move up. As it is even the most unskilled work around requires expensive tickets and certifications. Hell apparently even burlesque dancers here can't get work without a ticket saying they went to burlesque school.

This is going to keep happening and the barrier of entry to things will keep being raised to the point where these people won't be able to enter the workforce even if they tried. Even i'm not doing what I went to school for because I can't afford the $15,000/year fee to register as a professional. So despite my education,degrees and my work experience, I don't get hired because I can't pay to have that little R.P. appended to my name.

Having extra time and a little bit of extra money means nothing when the fees for entry are beyond what you can put together without already working.

And i'm not even going to bother going on about the reality of what happens when you give poor unmotivated people free money...but maybe look into council estates and what happens there in the UK.

Where did you get the land to grow your seed? Where did you buy the bricks to build your house? And the fence to keep the deer away? What of the police and army to keep people from killing you and taking your seedling? The water to nourish it?

You described one of the only scenarios in which wealth is "created" and the only reason it's created is because it derives "free" energy from the sun. But that is just one of the economic inputs of the seed, and there are many more (the labor to water it, the water to grow it, the land on which it grows).

The sun's energy in this case is a small portion of the actual economic inputs the seed requires. And those economic inputs are diverted from somewhere else. They do not appear out of thin air.

So yes, I agree, we should harness the sun's energy, or other "free" energy sources, as economic inputs.

That doesn't change the fact that the overwhelming majority of wealth already exists and is not created out of thin air, but diverted.

In my experience, in Britain middle class means driving an Audi and eating hummus (eg a lifestyle), nothing to do with owning a business

Fair points in regards to my response. However, I believe part of your argument is still predicated on endless resources. Agreed, there are vast many (ever-shrinking) resources we can use while the population is growing, however at some point we will reach an equilibrium where there is no more vacant land and the creation of new wealth (barring space exploration, at least for this argument) will cease.

In regards to your watchmaker: a pile of gears might be marginally useful to a few, but a working watch will be valuable to many. Has the watch created wealth? No, because the people who were not buying watches are now not buying something else in order to buy the watch. The creation of the watch did not add the dollar-value of exactly one watch to everyone's wealth, allowing them to spend money on the watch. The wealth was diverted! The creation and selling of the watch certainly did create societal value but it did not create wealth, it merely diverted wealth from some other purchase each watch-buying customer would have made and sent it to the watchmaker.

My point is that the overwhelming majority of transactions are diversions, not creations, of wealth.

To your very original point: "You seem to believe there's a fixed pile of money in the world that every human competes for"

I suppose my argument should be changed to: Perhaps amount of wealth is not currently fixed (as defined by the shrinking number of resources one could use to create wealth), but those who create wealth (and not just merely divert it) are generally already very wealthy and are generally the only ones who have the means to create this wealth due to extremely high barriers to entry.

So, I would say theoretically, you're correct: there is a growing pool of wealth. But practically, any normal, everyday person cannot go around creating new wealth...they can only hope it is diverted to them by someone who already has wealth.

That's probably not the (only) way to do it. There are two interrelated but distinct types of breakthroughs that happen in research: the kind that occurs well within expectation, the next step in a well-understood plan; and the kind that is serendipitous, usually by way of uncommon or novel interpersonal or intellectual communication. For the latter, you need... diversity. Expertise, too, of course, and some amount of common ground. However, the most interesting and creativity-enabling interactions require people who aren't all aiming at the same thing before they initially interact.

On top of that, it can be difficult to separate the people who are actually intellectual elites and the people who are good self-marketers.

I kind of think we should just be committing a lot more funding to those interested, who meet some reasonable, objective level of expertise.