Earlier quoted context omitted.
State-enforced debt jubilees.
Does this not discourage lending? Who would issue a loan the year before a debt jubilee?
> Does this not discourage lending
Yes. The goal is to reduce debt.
An Engineering Argument for Basic Income
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Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income
#12People who have unemployment don't want to work because they'll loose unemployment :/ UBI seems like a good motivation and a fun experiment, looking forward to hopefully AY launching it in NYC.
> People who have unemployment don't want to work because they'll loose unemployment :/
Do you have any evidence for this? This is not claimed in the article as far as I can tell. I don't understand how anyone might make that calculation. I don't believe any state pays your full salary while you were on unemployment. And it's time limited.
Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does this not discourage lending? Who would issue a loan the year before a debt jubilee?
> Does this not discourage lending Yes. The goal is to reduce debt.
Why? Buying a house or car through debt is not a bad way to match your payment stream to the usable lifetime of the asset.
Even if you can pay cash, unless you have a huge cushion this could make a lot of sense (taking your savings to 0 is worse than taking your savings to n months of cost of living, including the loan payments).
I am lucky enough to be a cash buyer but I can still see the logic of using debt in this way.
Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income
#14It feels like the combination of Yang's presidential run and covid has broken the seal on the idea of UBI in the US. After having the experience of the government sending everyone direct payments, I think it's all but inevitable that we'll arrive at some level of formal UBI in the future.
Given its sky high bipartisan popularity, it's hard to imagine how any non-UBI supporting politician will be able to compete with a UBI supporting politician going forward. I'd speculate that this was the deciding factor in the Democrats' recent Georgia runoff victory. Nothing motivates voters like the prospect of money placed directly in their pockets.
While I'm strongly in favor of UBI and think we are basically doomed without it, there are a couple things in particular that I worry about:
1 - As the Frédéric Bastiat quote goes: "the state is the great myth that everyone can live at the expense of everyone else". Once people get a taste of UBI, how do we prevent voters and politicians from pushing it to unsustainable levels? It seems like the incentive on both sides will be to always push it higher and higher.
2 - Motivation and purpose. Imagining a world with UBI, widespread automation, and general or close-to-general AI, what percent of humanity will be able to meaningfully contribute? If the number is, say, 50% or less, how do we maintain any semblance of purpose and opportunity under these circumstances?
Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income
#15Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income
#16Sam Little has 30 women in his home at $2,000 a month each. That's $60,000 a month funding the worst human behavior imaginable. You will gift the world to bullies and murderers.
Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income
#17I think a good place to start would be to not have the average American be 6 figures in debt.
this is true, but kinda misleading. a very large portion of that 6 figure debt is going to be a mortgage on a home. as long as you're not upside-down and you can afford the monthly payments, it's not bad to have a mortgage. you have to go down to the tenth percentile of american households to find negative net worths. of course, net worth doesn't tell the whole story either, but it's a lot better than presenting debt…
I don't think its really all that misleading. The article is talking about basic income being needed as a safety-net for events like losing your job so that you can continue to feed your family. I suspect that absent a car, mortgage and credit card payment coming due every month most people would actually be able to weather this sort of event. The reality of these monthly liabilities doesn't change all that much regardless of your equity situation.
Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income
#18The author misunderstands science, math and engineering. He says "Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong," then uses this argument to cite the need to use UBI as "fault tolerance" and cites examples of planes and safety systems.
The irony here is that his statement of whatever "will go wrong" applies to fault tolerant systems as well. You can't deploy redundant safety features without testing that it works.
Is UBI tested to a degree of verifiability that it will always work? No.
Also "testing" and "making arguments" is not strictly the case of engineering. These two things are the domain of science and while engineering can in many cases use "science" this is not what's going on in this article.
Engineering is mostly about using what we already know about in science and mathematics to solve problems.
This article neither uses Engineering, math or science to say anything. It's just a qualitative argument demonstrating an arbitrary point using a bunch of analogies to cast an illusion that this is an "engineering argument."
You need to run a scientific experiment with a control group or observe real world examples to make this argument at all "scientific" or "engineering" related. Until then it's just an opinion.
Whatever your political stance on this policy is... nothing substantial was said here. Just a regurgitation of things we all already know that may or may not be true.
Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income
#19People who have unemployment don't want to work because they'll loose unemployment :/ UBI seems like a good motivation and a fun experiment, looking forward to hopefully AY launching it in NYC.
> People who have unemployment don't want to work because they'll loose unemployment :/ Do you have any evidence for this? This is not claimed in the article as far as I can tell. I don't understand how anyone might make that calculation. I don't believe any state pays your full salary while you were on unemployment. And it's time limited.
I know quite a few people who have either not looked for jobs because it would have meant less income overall, or refused promotions / higher salary for the same reasons.
This is a well known phenomenon known as the welfare trap [0].
This may not be the case if you have the opportunity to go from unemployed directly to a higher salary but most unemployed people have minimal wage as a best prospect, many times not even that.
UBI evens it out in that if you do get a job you'll make more money instead of downright trading your free time for busy time with no financial gain.
Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that would be nice. What policy would you suggest to get there?
State-enforced debt jubilees.
This would have tons of negative consequences even if you believe that we'd be better off with debt and loans generally, e.g. essentially acting as a huge windfall (i.e. a free house) toward people who currently have mortgages while doing nothing for renters.