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Universal Basic Income is 'best way to distribute equity stake in productivity’

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Re: Universal Basic Income is 'best way to distribute equity stake in productivity’

#81

Post by gremlinsinc »

tomschlick wrote: post #14
undersuit wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens now? What about the people right now that cannot afford to eat? And I'm not talking about the panhandler on the street. There are families right now who cannot afford to feed themselves, even with federal assistance.

How so? The average family of 4 on Snap benefits receives $465/mo for food. If you can't buy groceries on that then you're doing something wrong.

Have you priced baby formula lately? $40 bucks a can, our baby goes through like $200 a month. We have a 2 year old and a 5 month old. $265 for 3 square meals for 1 child and 2 adults is rough. I think we spend close to 700 on food. I don't even want to think about when the kids get older, two teenage boys could easily bankrupt a family on snap.

We struggle some months because I freelance and am not the best marketer of my dev services, and the hurt is real. I have a valuable service I can provide and usually we eek through the hard times. But most others are not so fortunate, WE were not so fortunate before I self-taught myself to code 8-10 years ago. We had a stint of homelessness for about 2-3 weeks. Not by choice. We had no drug or addiction issues we (were) Mormon at the time and abstaining from coffee, tea, tobacco, alcohol, drugs -- wife still is (Mormon).

Anyone can fall on hard times, it's not just junkies and shitty people. And yes, not everybody is going to be great at managing their money, but if they at least had more of it, then they'd have less stress and worry. Less stress would lead to less anger and domestic violence, or robberies, and other crimes making society overall safer.

Less crimes = less inmates in prison = less money from taxes going to that. Less inmates = more potential workers adding value to the economy, or at the very least helping raise their kids to be better adults because they can afford to give them quality time because they don't need to hold down two jobs.

There've been studies done that show when certain occupations have feast/famine episodes, i.e. you get large amount of cash at a specific time of year, and have to make it last the rest of the year -- when you get toward the end of the year and begin struggling your actual IQ can go down by as much as 40 points. Stress from poverty actually causes IQ to drop.

If we can end poverty we make society's aggregated IQ rise, making us experience more progress. It benefits everybody not just a few as the current system is rigged to do.

Re: Universal Basic Income is 'best way to distribute equity stake in productivity’

#82

Post by peterangular »

maxxxxx wrote: post #80
insickness wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. You have no response to my arguments.

You have stated no arguments.

That's the point - they won't respond to the "Western society" common sense because they'll just ignore facts and move the goalpost. Which is pretty convenient when you want to win an argument!

In their eyes, they've won because I won't engage them further when in all reality no one wins because no one is willing to give up their stance.

You can't nail these folks down on anything - they argue in almost pure logical fallacy, and the last thing they want is to concede to how the world _actually_ works... That's why the "fake news" thing was so incredibly damaging - if anything it signal virtues to everyone to just make up their own narrative =(

Re: Universal Basic Income is 'best way to distribute equity stake in productivity’

#83

Post by zackmorris »

thatswrong0 wrote: post #46
zackmorris wrote: post #21

I'm against the agism in the article but the rest of it is sound. Right now we means test shareholders on the basis of whether they have capital to invest in a company, which is discriminatory in a society like ours where wealth inequality is the highest it's been in the history of the world. If half the country has no upward mobility and an impoverished quality of life that takes everything they got just to survive,…

> I think it's time to question the rationality of people who are against UBI This sounds like a thinly veiled ad hominem against skeptics.

Ya thanks for pointing that out. I probably should have phrased it "I think it's time to question the rationale of arguments against UBI" because personally I think most of them are straw men masking cognitive dissonant or undignified positions.

In other words - at their root are things like classism/racism, fear of socialistic solutions to fundamental problems with capitalism, or flat out greed and the "I've got mine" mentality that's so prevalent in the US.

That fear/uncertainty is a distraction from what we are capable of today with automation. It's a 20th century zero sum worldview where giving to someone requires taking from someone else. I don't subscribe to that, because we could largely automate basic sustenance production (food, water, energy, shelter, transportation, etc), charge very little for it, require substantially less human labor, and turn any profits from that into a stipend that we all get for being US citizens. I think that's more in line with a 21st century or Star Trek future.

Re: Universal Basic Income is 'best way to distribute equity stake in productivity’

#84

Post by zackmorris »

ap3 wrote: post #75
zackmorris wrote: post #21

I'm against the agism in the article but the rest of it is sound. Right now we means test shareholders on the basis of whether they have capital to invest in a company, which is discriminatory in a society like ours where wealth inequality is the highest it's been in the history of the world. If half the country has no upward mobility and an impoverished quality of life that takes everything they got just to survive,…

>If half the country has no upward mobility and an impoverished quality of life that takes everything they got just to survive, then wealth is an inherited trait just like cultural identity. I question whether half the country has no upward mobility and an impoverished way of life. Furthermore wealth is inherited, and we have an inheritance tax for it. Still don’t get how UBI creates wealth

It's not a question. We passed the point where children have less than a 50% chance of being wealthier than their parents sometime around 1980:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/aparnamathur/2018/07/16/the-u-s...

Countless studies show it's basically impossible to live on minimum wage jobs anywhere in the US now. I'm more than 50% confident that a quick internet search will show them so I won't bother listing them here.

The inheritance tax is low and in constant danger of being eliminated by the Republican party. All income should be taxed the same way (meaning we should eliminate capital gains tax and other unearned income taxes) and income brackets need to be shifted to account for inflation. Payments shouldn't begin until around the $30k/yr threshold, the average career job at $60-80k should pay about 25% tax, and the top income tax should be near 50% above about $125k. The social security tax cap at $132,900 should be eliminated. This is my mathematical optimum, you might have your own, but a fact of life today is that current tax policy is anything but fair or ideal. It's been coopted by lobbyists and special interests and only works for millionaires.

UBI creates wealth because currently we have no "human potential" gross national product (GNP) metric. The majority of jobs today are a waste of human resources. For example, is a human life worth more than its potential to flip burgers? The answer is self-evidently yes, so that means that the fast food industry subsidizes its profits by under-employing its workers and depending on government handouts in the form of food stamps and welfare. We can repeat that analysis for pretty much every industry and see that underemployment is one of the great problems of our time.

Even if we use the conservative measure of part time workers who want full time work, it tends to hover between 12 and 18% in the US:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/205240/us-underemploymen...

But I'd argue that it's really much higher than than. Is anyone really more than 6 hours productive in an 8 hour workday? That puts underemployment at more like 25%. If we count all the people with degrees working at non-career jobs, or hackers/makers/inventors valued only for their ability to make money for their employers, then I think it's around 50%.

UBI gives workers a lifeline out of underemployment. Then they can start their own businesses, which leads to more employment and productivity. If our GNP is $20 trillion, then I would expect UBI to gradually raise that to perhaps $40 trillion (in today's dollars) and beyond over a decade or two if underemployment is 50%.

I tried to keep this brief but truthfully I could go on indefinitely. My personal underemployment hovers near 100% because I've never gotten ahead of the curve enough to make any of the inventions I'd like to. I spent many years of my life thinking about how to automate the jobs like painting houses and moving furniture I held that paid above minimum wage but had no upward mobility.

Re: Universal Basic Income is 'best way to distribute equity stake in productivity’

#85

Post by zackmorris »

maxxxxx wrote: post #3

I like the idea but I doubt this will be sustainable long-term. There is already a lot of pressure to reduce the social safety net and to have more tax cuts for the "job creators". Why would this be any different with UBI? The people who work full-time jobs will complain about the slackers who do nothing. Maybe once almost everything is automated there is a better chance to do this. Personally I think it would be bet…

You bring up a very good point about the time value of money and how that could be manifested by reducing working hours.

When we say that we want to provide a UBI to all citizens, that could be looked at as an equivalent number of hours. Giving someone making $10/hr a $10,000 UBI would be the equivalent of 1000 hours freed of a 2000 hour work year. It would increase their quality of life by 50%. A $50/hr worker would get a 10% quality of life increase on a $10,000 UBI.

So for example reducing work hours by 1 hour per day on tech workers would be comparable to a $5-10,000 UBI. Which I think is what we're really talking about here. Providing alternative subsistence so that workers can someday get off the workaday world treadmill/rat race and go invent the things that will automate our economy and improve quality of life for everyone, regardless of income. Right now we have a system where some people live extremely comfortably while half the country has no economic stability or quality of life to speak of, and what's worse is, they currently have no hope for improvement no matter how high the gross national product (GNP) grows because politics has been coopted by lobbyists and special interests.

Re: Universal Basic Income is 'best way to distribute equity stake in productivity’

#86

Post by zackmorris »

maxxxxx wrote: post #18
sesteel wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many people view UBI as transformative (as you suggest), though they don't always talk about it in those terms. Increasingly, production and services will be automated leaving fewer and fewer jobs for people. In a far off dystopian future, there will be some Ubercorp that does everything, controls all production and services leaving no paid work for people. UBI is simply a means for smoothing out the transiti…

" Otherwise, the economy will be broken; it already is for some now." If we introduce UBI it would probably be one of the first times in history that society addresses major changes without war, revolution or other upheaval. My prediction is that inequality will grow, a lot of people will lose their jobs, but nothing will change fundamentally without a major conflict. We see that already with climate change. There cl…

You are talking about the tragedy of the commons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Unfortunately, capitalism is one of the primary drivers of this. But it's also correlated to any authoritarian system, as well as deregulated systems that use Social Darwinism.

The heart of the problem is an inability for people to organize and address societal problems in a non-reactionary way by means of central planning. Which means that the solution is inherently leftist politically. We can pretend that there are rightist solutions (the invisible hand of the free market, unfettered capitalism, etc) but there is ample evidence that those don't work in practice and are even accelerating global climate change and the collapse of ecosystems.

War is always about money. If we flatten wealth inequality via UBI, that suggests that the impetus for war may be diminished. So expect backlash from those in power or whose wealth is derived from armed conflict.

Re: Universal Basic Income is 'best way to distribute equity stake in productivity’

#87

Post by akvadrako »

RickJWagner wrote: post #77

Just imagine if Hacker News gave a monthly 'points' stipend to every user. You wouldn't have to earn up-votes or make popular submissions-- the upvote 'points' would be equitably distributed among all readers. What would that do to the discussions? Would it encourage more free dialogue? Would it help promote more civil discourse? Serious question. It seems like a close model to UBI. Is there a point-counting-forum th…

That's almost how slashdot works - a fixed number of upvotes per article. I also can't see the relevance to UBI.

Re: Universal Basic Income is 'best way to distribute equity stake in productivity’

#88

Post by akvadrako »

ap3 wrote: post #61

I don’t get what UBI solves vs the existing social safety net programs >James Felton Keith, tells The Sociable that a Universal Basic Income is the best way to distribute an equity stake in productivity — thus creating an “asset holder class.” US already provides a tremendous amount of value to its residents vs the rest of the world - doesn’t that count as a stake in productivity ?

Current programs discourage working. If you have welfare for $500 a month and start working for $500 a month, you'll lose most of your welfare; so it's pointless - better to just stay at home or do something illegal.

Re: Universal Basic Income is 'best way to distribute equity stake in productivity’

#89

Post by akvadrako »

zackmorris wrote: post #83
thatswrong0 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it's time to question the rationality of people who are against UBI This sounds like a thinly veiled ad hominem against skeptics.

Ya thanks for pointing that out. I probably should have phrased it "I think it's time to question the rationale of arguments against UBI" because personally I think most of them are straw men masking cognitive dissonant or undignified positions. In other words - at their root are things like classism/racism, fear of socialistic solutions to fundamental problems with capitalism, or flat out greed and the "I've got min…

I would weaken the claim a little – UBI is at least interesting enough that we should be doing trials. What the skeptics need to show is that trials are not worth it.
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