331–340 of 541 posts
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Without incentives, there is no innovation. And if everyone is entitled to the same portion of the pie, what’s the incentive to work harder? Seeing your neighbor put in a third of the effort and produce the same economic result is demoralizing.
Are you suggesting that there is no middle ground between barbaric US-style capitalism and forced redistribution of wealth?
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I work in tech. My wife does not. We came to the EU and I noticed that I make a good deal less, but she makes more. Even more important, though, instead of me getting lots of vacation time and her getting almost nothing, we both get a month off a year, protected by law (no bullshit "unlimited vacation" policy can take it away). We can finally take proper holidays together. Life is better here.
To add alternate experience to the children of this post, I worked for a company w/ unlimited vacation, and while I took very little vacation, there was no pressure from outside to limit it. Other people tended to work less than I did and took vacation more or less in line with what they would have done elsewhere. I wouldn't take unlimited vacation as a sign of anything other than "we expect you to be reasonable and…
It's also yet another way to ensure people who know they can just walk into another job (or that they won't get fired/laid off/never promoted) take loads of vacation, while people who _really_ need to be sure they stay employed or who might be having a harder time at work are always afraid to ask for it.
Buddy of mine worked for a company with unlimited PTO until recently. He would take 2, 3 months off because, as he put it, "I had them over a barrel" (he is extremely good at what he does). His colleagues, for the most part, did not.
I saw this when I arrived in America, and it's the reason I left. I take the bus and seeing literally every day that there were people with families who worried and laughed and were kind who spent 2 hours a day transporting themselves to service or manufacturing industry job when I sat in an air conditioned office making 3x their wages was making me feel terribly guilty. I eventually went back to a country with a soc…
Without incentives, there is no innovation. And if everyone is entitled to the same portion of the pie, what’s the incentive to work harder? Seeing your neighbor put in a third of the effort and produce the same economic result is demoralizing.
As a native to the US, I think we really need to pay more attention to the middle way. We could use a little more social harmony.
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Western European countries hardly take immigrants. When you live in a homogenous, solely middle-class country like Sweden/Denmark/Norway, of course everything seems nice and comfortable. But America accepts some very poor immigrants and allows them to make money and be lifted up. Those are many of the people you saw on the bus.
This is wildly incorrect. Angela Merkel got in trouble precisely because she accepted so many Syrian refugees. Germany absorbed almost a million refugees in one year, which is an incredible number. On a per capital basis, that would be like the USA accepting 4 million refugees in one year, when in fact net immigration to the USA, of all forms, tends to run at about 10% to 15% of that level.
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I agree with you. I think we will see the Universal Basic Income appearing sooner rather than later. The economy needs a recycling mechanism and if it can't be through wages than it must take another form.
We won’t. Even for retirement schemes, there is not enough money; retirement age is rising, the future is bleak. UBI is basically a lifetime retirement scheme; it requires 10x more resources and completely unsustainable.
If more than half of the population makes at least double what they need to keep themselves from starvation, then you could argue there is enough money.
In short, your disagreement with the GP is probably due to a disagreement about the lifestyle that UBI is supposed to afford its recipients.
Those in power might determine that the bare minimum UBI to avoid violent revolution is something like $5000 per year.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work in tech. My wife does not. We came to the EU and I noticed that I make a good deal less, but she makes more. Even more important, though, instead of me getting lots of vacation time and her getting almost nothing, we both get a month off a year, protected by law (no bullshit "unlimited vacation" policy can take it away). We can finally take proper holidays together. Life is better here.
To add alternate experience to the children of this post, I worked for a company w/ unlimited vacation, and while I took very little vacation, there was no pressure from outside to limit it. Other people tended to work less than I did and took vacation more or less in line with what they would have done elsewhere. I wouldn't take unlimited vacation as a sign of anything other than "we expect you to be reasonable and…
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I agree with you. I think we will see the Universal Basic Income appearing sooner rather than later. The economy needs a recycling mechanism and if it can't be through wages than it must take another form.
What I don't honestly understand is source of money for UBI appearing sooner rather than later. I mean, US is projected to have one trillion budget deficit for a second straight year - "US Deficit 2019: Treasury to Borrow $1 Trillion for 2nd Year - Bloomberg". Slap UBI on top of it and this is Greece trajectory.
Neither of these seems pleasant, but if enough people are starving or homeless, it might be inevitable.
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Western European countries hardly take immigrants. When you live in a homogenous, solely middle-class country like Sweden/Denmark/Norway, of course everything seems nice and comfortable. But America accepts some very poor immigrants and allows them to make money and be lifted up. Those are many of the people you saw on the bus.
This is wildly incorrect. Angela Merkel got in trouble precisely because she accepted so many Syrian refugees. Germany absorbed almost a million refugees in one year, which is an incredible number. On a per capital basis, that would be like the USA accepting 4 million refugees in one year, when in fact net immigration to the USA, of all forms, tends to run at about 10% to 15% of that level.
It's no longer the case (I read today that 1 in 4 Swedish schoolchidren wasn't born in Sweden!), and I wonder very much what that will mean for the future of Europe. The mass influx of Germans, Irish, Scandinavians & Italians in the 19th century radically changed what it meant to be an American, and it seems to me that Europe is about to go through an even larger-scale change.
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>Wealth needs to be redistributed I'm still not convinced that it's possible to successfully tax the rich enough to ensure that the poor isn't poor. The redistribution (and taxation) always comes up as "the solution" to inequality. I think that's overestimating how rich the rich are, and underestimating the number of poor people. It's easier to make the rich poorer, and close the wealth cap that way, compared to maki…
Is this backed up by any stats? Last I saw the stats on America showed the top % is unimaginably rich and the inequality is massively worse than other countries like Australia where the average person is much better off.
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Trust me, I don't work 3x harder than most of the people I make 3x of. My wife is a teacher and I am in tech, I make 3x her salary. She works way more and spends more of both her physical and emotional labor on her job. I work hard and I do good work, but what she does is not even in the same stratosphere as what I do. I'm not innovating anything, I'm just writing decent code. She's finding new ways to help kids lear…
It's worth asking why your wife doesn't switch to your job, to make 3x the salary. Either a) she couldn't do it, in which case by extension it boils down to supply and demand, or b) she doesn't want to do it, because she gets a whole bunch of joy from the job which is invisibly priced into compensation (and which indirectly goes back to supply and demand.) I don't see the discrepancy as any kind of market failure.
This is a pretty naive statement.