511–520 of 809 posts
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==Child rearing seems like a waste of talent.== Based on what metric?
Using identical twins, they find outcomes are basically identical. And really this only applies to 0-5. After that, kids go to school.
Kids go to school around age 5, but I'm not sure that is the end of child rearing.
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And this is a very misleading summary of the results. Here are some actual quote from the study: > Ten respondents moved from unemployment to employment while 32 moved from employment to unemployment. Of the participants who moved from employment to unemployment, 13 (40.6%) enrolled in full-time education during the pilot with the intention of re-entering the labour market later as more qualified workers. Almost half…
Sounds like the participants knew the study was temporary and invested the money in a job they knew they’d need after the study.
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People aren't so stupid that they'd do something that completely against their best interests. If you're a subsidence farmer and get sick, you have no means of making enough money to see a doctor. Historically, people didn't care about leisure until they accomplished stability.
>People aren't so stupid that they'd do something that completely against their best interests. The world is actually full of such examples. There's quite a bit of work done in psychology and sociology as to why this happens. Often, the move from, for example substinence farming to other jobs is a kind of throffer - and so it was, historically documented, in the 16th and 17th centuries in England, too with the move f…
The industrial revolution started in the late 18th century. Keep in mind that the population was booming then, so there wasn't enough space on the cottage to support the same standard of living.
I feel like the concept of a idyllic peasant is the modern iteration of the "noble savage." For complex decisions, you indeed run into the paradox of choice and other strange psychological phenomena. However, choice between sacrificing time in order to accumulate capital is an easy one, as this has been done billions of times. You need extraordinary evidence to prove otherwise.
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Yes, having a software engineer cleaning dishes for a restaurant is a waste of talent. Maybe if overtime was flexible, you could suggest hiring unskilled workers to do those tasks at home. I love my kid, but it's not like he's learning cutting edge stuff that requires an engineer to teach them. And there's many hours in the evenings and weekends we spend together where he learns how his dad behaves.
A huge part of growing up is developing bonds, understanding relationships and getting your kid on a firm footing so they can deal with what the world throws at them. A lot of that develop happens when they are not learning, or at least you don’t think they are.
The bond is there.
If you really want to turn this around, imagine how dependent a child would be on a parent if they never used a babysitter.
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I agree. Letting workers leave abusive employment situations is a benefit of UBI. UBI might even totally reorient the idea of work in that now an employer has the incentive to keep workers happy that must be balanced with the profit incentive.
UBI would reorient the idea of work in the sense that new generations won't think about work the way we do, for them it will be something that you can do, not something you have to do. Similarly how sport is today, you can do sports but you don't have to. Also with UBI you are guaranteed a certain amount of income for the duration of your life. You can go to a bank and take a loan against your UBI. A big portion of t…
Trying to figure out how this would work. Presumably a bank would only lend a portion of the UBI to you
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"There is a limited amount of capital in the world." You've already lost me. This is provably false, as any programmer should know: if you sit down and code something useful today, you've just increased the amount of capital in the world. Out of thin air. A carpenter who buys a bunch of lumber and turns it into a thousand-dollar piece of furniture does the same. The more people can learn to add value to the world, an…
I mean that there isn't enough capital to distribute to everyone in the world, not that it's fixed forever. You can grow it. That's my point. It's better to increase capital than redistribute it. > Investment distributes wealth primarily from the elite to the slightly-less elite. If you've seen how China changed in the last couple decades, you'd see how this obviously isn't true. Basically all electronics are manufac…
Consider the notion of leverage where both A and B can increase their capital more in absolute value if some part of A's significant capital is redistributed to poorer B. UBI just takes risk out of this equation so A does not have to lend to B in order for this to happen. Though yeah, this makes A poorer in absolute value than they would have been without this sneaky taxation (= involuntary expropriation of money).
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I'd be willing to bet in most workplaces, about 20% of the workforce is dead weight - especially those in the management chain.
Very few workplaces have 20% management. A few businesses have experimented with radically flattening the organization and cutting out management layers; this has generally not improved productivity or financial results.
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Might it be worth considering that choosing to not work and choosing to contribute to society in other ways could, for some people and in some circumstances, be slightly different decisions?
There are absolutely people who would contribute to society in other ways but there are also people who would not work, not contribute and, sit in their rooms all day not having the will to do anything but debate with strangers on internet forums(lol). In my opinion the problem with UBI is that it would take away the necessity for people to do something to survive and it would make a significant minority of the popul…
Why do you think this is not a meaningful contribution to society? In order for sitting-in-the-room people to debate on the forums, someone else – a part of society! – has to spend their time on said forums, creating demand for discussion. Otherwise the forums would have no posts at all. One person sitting in the room could effectively “free up” time of dozens others that they could spend otherwise.
From my personal point of view, basic income SHOULD disincentivise work; it's a boost for society, health, well-being, children, etc. Because in the current economy, a lot of people have to work unreasonable hours, multiple jobs, and have all people in a family work to make ends meet, at the cost of personal health and well-being, personal time, having children at all or having more children, getting married and buyi…
Ok, but work (productivity) is how you actually pay for UBI. So by giving UBI, you are decreasing the resources that pay for it.
For example - currently a trucker driver will pay state tax, federal tax, pay taxes on the things they eat/buy. When a self driving truck comes...all of that above won't occur anymore. And the company saves money.
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> Tax-funded UBI is theft, slavery, and extortion. Our law creates both property rights and taxes. Taxes aren't theft because, by law, that money is actually the government's property. If you want individualistically overrule our law to make taxes theft, I might as well do the same to make your property mine.
The notion of property rights is not created by the law, but a law of nature, a concept intuitively understood by human beings. The same goes for theft. The law only adopted these concepts, but it created taxes. It is not intuitively obvious that some entity is entitled to a percentage of the money you're earning. You can change the law any way you want, but you're not changing the underlying laws of nature, and they…
Nope, sorry. You might be on to something if you limited yourself to the "foreign relations" of a community, but we're talking about intracommunity relations here. If you're looking for laws of nature, socially obligatory sharing is far more fundamental and important than any primal notions of exclusivist private property and theft.
Concepts like private property, theft, and taxation do have primitive antecedents, but you're guilty of anachronism if you think those antecedents make some modern ideological notion a kind of fundamental law.