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An Engineering Argument for Basic Income

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Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income

#71

Post by leetcrew »

clairity wrote: post #67
leetcrew wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it can absolutely make sense to finance a depreciating asset. example one: I have just been offered a good job that requires a car for commuting. I have no car and negligible other assets. it is rational to take out a loan for a reasonably priced car as long as I can comfortably make the payments on my new wages. if I later lose my job but am not upside-down on the loan, I am still better off than I started. example…

no, you're not considering opportunity costs or lower cost alternatives.

care to explain further, perhaps in regards to the two examples I gave? it seems to me that your original comment was not considering all the opportunity costs (in example 1, forgoing a higher income; in example 2, forgoing future appreciation and paying unnecessary tax).

Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income

#72

Post by tharga8616 »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #7

This is a naive engineering argument in that it assumes a simple closed system when in reality it is an open system that does not even usefully approximate as a closed system. There are material tradeoffs being made that are not even acknowledged as a consequence. Several failure modes have simply been placed outside the system by definition to make the problem seem easier. I am sympathetic to the idea of UBI but the…

It's the same principle as in a buckle belt, everyone has one in case is needed, because accidents occur.

Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income

#73

Post by tharga8616 »

nrclark wrote: post #28

Site is hugged for me, so I can't check to see if the author addresses this. I've been wondering - wouldn't UBI tend towards an inflationary spiral? I'm sympathetic to the goals of UBI. But without price controls, what would prevent rent/mortage/food/entertainment prices from just rising to absorb everybody's newfound income? College tuition has been going up exponentially since the introduction of federal student ai…

Competition. What would then impede people migrating to rural areas, where life is less expensive, to live better? Prices in the city will go down if there is not enough demand.

Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income

#74

Post by tharga8616 »

fiftyfifty wrote: post #34
nyghtly wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Social Security Administration sends out checks each month to 64 million people, mostly the elderly and disabled. Unemployment Insurance programs send out checks each month to 2.1 million people. In other countries, the government, in addition to paying these kinds of old-age, disability, and unemployment benefits, also pays out a monthly benefit to every child. In the US that would mean checks going out to the…

There are roughly 209 million adults in the US. Providing a $1,000/month UBI (which seems to be what's commonly proposed) will cost us $2.5 Trillion every year. That is a lot of tax to collect. If we are not careful it will be become a debt burden and it will cause inflation. I'm not saying that it can't be done but I think we would all like to see a very careful plan on where exactly that much money is going to come…

Why nobody ask where is the money going to come from when is for military spending? They always find the money, or just they print it, lol. Because yes, money can be printed. It's a mere abstraction, a measure tool.

Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income

#75

Post by rubycon22 »

My philosophy is that basic income will be ultimately a good in the long run, even if there are some amount of people who take advantage of it and ultimately do nothing productive for the rest of their lives. Because I don't want people like that in the workforce anyway. I believe only people who are actually motivated to work, and enjoy their jobs or duties should be there. I really do not want some sadsack of a person who hates their job serving me at a restaurant, who will mess with my food if he feels slighted by me. He should go rot away in a small apartment and leave that position for someone who actually cares. Society should gladly pay these people to keep them away. It's sad that someone who is happy to work, must compete with hundreds of people who dont give a shit, for the same job. I hope that basic income would get rid of much of the competition for jobs like this, which would also mean business owners can no longer take advantage of a big labor pool to pay poor wages.

Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income

#76

Post by Geminidog »

tharga8616 wrote: post #69
Geminidog wrote: post #18

The 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 test…

And economics nowadays have nothing to do with mathematics, because, where is the rational use of resources to provide for everyone's basic needs? So, UBI is just a fist step outside of this wasteful system to acknowledge that economy should serve and preserve the whole human species, and not the other way around.

You can't rationally predict the outcome of complex systems anymore than you can rationally predict the weather or the stock market.

In general you need to run something called "tests" to verify certain hypothesis. And even then you may not get a definitive answer given the complexity of the situation.

This is not "math" this is the scientific method.

>So, UBI is just a fist step outside of this wasteful system to acknowledge that economy should serve and preserve the whole human species, and not the other way around.

Communism was an alternative solution to UBI. In fact if you squint enough communism is UBI taken to the extreme, where all forms of income become UBI. Communism in theory works, but in practice there is no working example of a communist utopia in existence today.

So you want to turn all of society into some UBI utopia because it fits your political ideology? How about let's not be stupid and run some experiments first.

Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income

#77

Post by AnthonyMouse »

hwbehrens wrote: post #53
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You're forgetting the other side of the coin. The money comes from somewhere. Suppose you can fund a $12,000 UBI with a flat 25% tax rate. So now the breakeven point is at $48,000 in income. If you make more than that…

> you don't want to increase the UBI amount because it'll cost you more than it gets you I think this is an oversimplification, because in practice, there will be a gradient of people around the inflection point who would be willing to take less in order to stop working, and that gradient will vary by the individual and by the job. Additionally, I can also imagine politicians promising increases to the UBI without co…

> I think this is an oversimplification, because in practice, there will be a gradient of people around the inflection point who would be willing to take less in order to stop working, and that gradient will vary by the individual and by the job.

This is less of a problem than you would think, because the people for whom this is the case are the exact people who would already be in the "make it higher" camp.

Suppose you make $20,000/year from your job ($15,000 after tax) and then get a $12,000 UBI, so $27,000 in total. $12,000 is less than $27,000, but maybe if it was $15,000 and then you didn't have to work, you might be willing to take the pay cut. But this is the same person who benefits from raising it to $15,000 even if they continue to work; it doesn't change their vote.

Whereas the person making $52,000/year ($39,000 after tax, $51,000 after the UBI) is not going to be inclined to go from $51,000/year to $15,000/year even if it meant they didn't have to work, so all of those people are going to want to keep it at $12,000, to say nothing of anybody making more than that.

> Additionally, I can also imagine politicians promising increases to the UBI without concomitant tax increases, funded by bonds or other kind of financial mechanisms for monetary injection whose long-term negative externalities would be easy to obfuscate from voters.

But we have this problem already. It's an independent problem.

If you can find a way to stop it, do it. But if they're going to do it anyway then better that the money goes to everybody than that it goes to whichever cronies have the best lobbyists.

Re: An Engineering Argument for Basic Income

#78

Post by AnthonyMouse »

adkadskhj wrote: post #62
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems weird to be criticizing a group for identifying a problem that actually exists (welfare traps / phase out cliffs / perverse incentives) while proposing a solution to it that would actually work better (NIT/UBI). There are proponents of a negative income tax on both sides, e.g. conservative economist Milton Friedman.

I'm definitely not criticizing people for proposing an alternative. However, literally all of the .. group of people i know who might by lumped in that statement offer no alternative. Or rather, the alternative is a complete lack of social safety nets. If you propose an alternative you're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I find a good way to get out of this tribalist mindset is to realize that the stereotypical member of a given party that believes all of the party's official positions is not a real person who actually exists. (Politicians and political operatives sometimes pretend to be but even they're not in reality.)

Some of the people who vote for Republicans oppose taxes. Just the existence of taxes at all. "Taxation is theft." If you want to help people, don't pay taxes to the government, give that money to a charity.

Others think that the US should have the strongest military in the world. An obviously incompatible idea, right? Good luck crowdfunding your fleet of aircraft carriers. But they're in the same party.

It's not an inconsistency because they're not the same people, even if they both vote for Republicans. The Republican party platform itself is incoherent. So is the Democratic party platform. They're not logically consistent sets of policies, they're just coalitions that evolved to gather enough votes to control the government half of the time.

But here's the secret. Nobody cares about things nobody wants. Both parties aren't just automatically the opposite of one another. It isn't that one of them is in opposition to Kill All Humans and the other one is in favor of that. For one of the parties to advance something, it has to be because there are enough people who think we should do that to make it worth a party's time to try to get those votes.

So screw the tribes. Convince the whole public that good ideas are good ideas and bad ideas are bad ideas. When there is consensus in the public there will be consensus in the parties.

If the party who already agrees with a good idea is in control at a given time then you take the win, but if you can't convince most of the country then it just gets reversed in a couple years and we can do better than that.

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