Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

timjrobinson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 1001 posts

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#381

Post by thephyber »

prostoalex wrote: post #344
treyfitty wrote: post #272

There are a lot of people here dissenting on the idea of UBI on the premise that they find meaning in work, and to take the incentive to work away will lead others (themselves included) not to have meaning in life. I’ve taken a year off of work to start a business that failed and spent the past few months hanging out with my kids. At first, my stress levels were high because daycares were shut down and I was panickin…

> At first, my stress levels were high because daycares were shut down and I was panicking about my business. When I accepted the fate of my business, I chilled out and just hung out with my kids. You might be in the minority of people with mature enough emotional response and ability to deal with stress. What would happen if you had an existing alcohol/opiate/etc addiction? It seems that UBI provides few precautions…

> You might be in the minority

> What would happen if you had an existing alcohol/opiate/etc addiction?

IIRC studies have shown that about 9-11% of Americans have/had an addiction. I think you should consider trying to find out if your assumption that the majority of people have addictions is substantiated.

This article[1] claims 21 million Americans (out of 330+ million) have addictions, although it only includes drugs and alcohol.

[1] https://www.addictioncenter.com/addiction/addiction-statisti...

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#383

Post by gzu »

treyfitty wrote: post #272

There are a lot of people here dissenting on the idea of UBI on the premise that they find meaning in work, and to take the incentive to work away will lead others (themselves included) not to have meaning in life. I’ve taken a year off of work to start a business that failed and spent the past few months hanging out with my kids. At first, my stress levels were high because daycares were shut down and I was panickin…

The lack of real world experience on a HackerNews UBI discussion is infuriating. Western society's white collar elite are completely unaware of truly how many "sucky" jobs there are in the world that all enable our (currently) superior standard of living. Your entire existence relies on a globalist system of slave level labor producing products from all corners of the world. Automation of every industry is impossible unless we have true human replacement robots (many decades out). UBI will over time simply raise costs of all goods/services to subwelfare level that people "can't live on".

Whos going to: - clean your hotel/office/home - cook your food - serve your food - fix your household - grab your garbage - build new houses - build/maintain roads - build/maintain water, sewers - deliver your packages/mail - Drive trucks around - pack/unpack trucks - produce meat products (have you seen a meatpacking plant?) - maintain farms/livestock - provide difficult medical services - be a nurse aide (clean poo?)

I have not even started to list all the jobs required in order to "magically" produce our cheap goods from overseas including clothing and electronics. These are farrrr from completely automated.

Lazy Americans don't need to work right? Discussion about UBI is an expression of guilt over how well our standard of living (general hacker news crowd) compared to the vast majority of the world.

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#384

Post by prostoalex »

d3nj4l wrote: post #369
prostoalex wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At first, my stress levels were high because daycares were shut down and I was panicking about my business. When I accepted the fate of my business, I chilled out and just hung out with my kids. You might be in the minority of people with mature enough emotional response and ability to deal with stress. What would happen if you had an existing alcohol/opiate/etc addiction? It seems that UBI provides few precautions…

You can read about the results of UBI experiments in Finland and Canada: Finland: https://www.kela.fi/web/en/news-archive/-/asset_publisher/lN... Canada: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200624-canadas-forgot... This sentence in the BBC article above is great: > In particular, Forget was struck by the improvements in health outcomes over the four years. There was an 8.5% decline in hospitalisations – primarily…

That is promising, but US examples are less auspicious.

Two large unconditional programs that come to mind are the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend to state residents and tribal distributions to Native Americans.

Alaska tends to lead various reports on drug/alcohol abuse per capita and "Although they only make up 1.7% of the U.S. population, Native Americans experience substance abuse and addiction at much higher rates than other ethnic groups."

https://americanaddictioncenters.org/alcoholism-treatment/na...

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#385

Post by EGreg »

Aerroon wrote: post #166
alex_young wrote: post #114

A UBI paid for with a carbon tax would both save us from the worst consequences of global warming and stimulate the economy. It's hard to find a rational excuse for not doing it. Planet Money did a great episode on this idea over 7 years ago: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/07/12/201502003/epis... They did a followup 5 years later: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/18/630267782/epis... It seems like…

I don't see how this would really work. A carbon tax in an ideal situation is just a consumption tax. This means that it's the consumer that pays it. Rich people don't eat more food nor do they drive dozens of cars at once. If we want this carbon tax to offset our greenhouse emissions then that means it will necessarily disproportionately impact poor people. And then you want to turn around and pay that money back to…

No. A UBI paid for by pigovian taxes would be redistributed right back to the people, counteracting the problem you mentioned that led to the Yellow Vest protests. It would align the public’s incentives with increasing the tax, thereby increasing the cost of the negative externalities!

UBI is a very powerful tool for aligning the public’s incentives with collective action that may otherwise be intractable.

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#386

Post by EGreg »

alex_young wrote: post #114

A UBI paid for with a carbon tax would both save us from the worst consequences of global warming and stimulate the economy. It's hard to find a rational excuse for not doing it. Planet Money did a great episode on this idea over 7 years ago: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/07/12/201502003/epis... They did a followup 5 years later: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/18/630267782/epis... It seems like…

Tell your reps to vote for it

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#387

Post by birksherty »

treyfitty wrote: post #272

There are a lot of people here dissenting on the idea of UBI on the premise that they find meaning in work, and to take the incentive to work away will lead others (themselves included) not to have meaning in life. I’ve taken a year off of work to start a business that failed and spent the past few months hanging out with my kids. At first, my stress levels were high because daycares were shut down and I was panickin…

People who complain are the ones who already already have good stable income, privileged. They don't have issue when someone owns billions.

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#388

Post by NAHWheatCracker »

mc32 wrote: post #54
bilal4hmed wrote: post #15

most of the middle eastern countries have UBI. Hasnt really done anything for them

I wonder why people tend to ignore de facto near UBI in those places (for citizens). And since no one (citizens who get de facto UBI) wants to work, they have to import labor.

The Wikipedia article says that the Iranian plan pays $40 per month, which seems very low for consideration as a UBI compared to numbers like $1000-2000 per month that people throw around for the United States. I don't know much about Iran, so I'm not sure if it's 25-50x less expensive to live there.

The only numbers I found on the Saudi plan is $533 million per month paid to 10.6 million people [0]. This works out to about the same individual payment.

I think investigating the effects of these plans in those nations is worthwhile. Separating the effects of the plans from the specific situation in the Middle East would be challenging.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-allowances/saudi-ar...

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#389

Post by elvinn »

john_moscow wrote: post #333
alex_young wrote: post #114

A UBI paid for with a carbon tax would both save us from the worst consequences of global warming and stimulate the economy. It's hard to find a rational excuse for not doing it. Planet Money did a great episode on this idea over 7 years ago: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/07/12/201502003/epis... They did a followup 5 years later: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/18/630267782/epis... It seems like…

You tax something you want to reduce. Since carbon emissions are associated with most travel and great-tasting food, it sounds like paying people to sit at home, watch TV and drink themselves into depression.

and + not to breathe lol

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#390

Post by monadic2 »

alex_young wrote: post #114

A UBI paid for with a carbon tax would both save us from the worst consequences of global warming and stimulate the economy. It's hard to find a rational excuse for not doing it. Planet Money did a great episode on this idea over 7 years ago: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/07/12/201502003/epis... They did a followup 5 years later: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/18/630267782/epis... It seems like…

The only way a UBI makes sense in terms of increasing equity in society is either a) printing the money to intentionally induce inflation, which american economic common sense seems allergic to, or b) reclaiming the wealth from the wealthy directly, which seems unlikely to be effective in the near future.

I certainly don’t want to put the idea of carbon neutrality and solving wealth inequality at odds, that doesn’t make any sense.

Post reply on HN