511–520 of 786 posts
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and why do you assume that somehow in this equation there will be enough jobs with a living wage to accomidate the entire population?
because across 250 years of extreme and rapid industrial progress, wages have gone nowhere but up, across all quintiles.
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A lowering of work means a lowering of goods means society, including those not working, get less. Sure, more leisure time is good, but mostly only so if mankind still gets the goods and services they are used to. UBI would not do that. When national productivity drops a few percent, it's a recession, and people notice the lack of goods and services. People can already work less. But people also like goods and servic…
Does your thinking here work if including automation into the equation? Why didn't society then collapse when automation began - like textile/garment/fabric manufacturing, etc? You also seem to be ignoring the other side of productivity - if it drops it's arguably, in part at least, that less people are buying - so there's no funds/fuel for the local system. If UBI had to be spent locally and only on "local" goods -…
Yes, I am more of a technologist than anything. Automation is not free, and if a thing can be efficiently automated it is already or will be as soon as it's efficient.
Automation gains in the past have not freed large swaths of workers, simply because as more goods are available people want higher quality of life, absorbing any gains. If you want to live like someone in 1950 you could on a much lower salary than people get now, but people now want bigger houses, more cars, more goods, more entertainment, more of everything.
If you think automation will free us all, work on figuring out why all the massive automation gains did not already free large amounts of people from work.
>If UBI had to be spent locally and only on "local" goods - within the ststem - then there's no leak
This completely fails. Consider how good your life would be if you could only have goods you made. Not nice. Then make it people within a mile of you. Better, but still crap. Make it a US state. Better again, but not really anywhere near first world standards.
If you want a first world standard of living, you need goods from around the planet and skilled people from around the planet trading and making and innovating. Buy local simply lowers your quality of life (and everyone, since you'll soon lower the # of specialists that can exist by serving large populations).
>This is why major, credible think tanks estimate an immediate 13%+ increase in GDP with implementing a $1,000/month UBI.
And others have reached the opposite conclusion. Most importantly, the evidence from real world trials is consistent with a smaller, not larger, economy.
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To take a market perspective to this: I think there are some costs that people fail to accommodate for when comparing employment vs welfare. We used to consider homemaking an actual profession, because... it really is. Now that we are expecting households to have dual incomes, we are recognizing that income on paper, when in reality it always was there, it just was not formally recognized. With the cost of childcare…
Good point about the child care. But I disagree with your comment on the second point. As I said, I'm all for welfare/assistance given generously to those in need, but that's different from funding non-working lifestyle of those who have good working options and simply don't want to work. Some part of UBI might overlap with the welfare part, but it's going to significantly increase the number of people who don't work…
I guess what I’m getting at is that someone options for employment might not make sense given their life circumstances. A good job for someone is not a good job for everyone because of the opportunity cost.
On one hand, we can make our benefit systems so barebones that any minimum wage job is better, even including opportunity cost, but then the people who actually need those programs are starving.
If we make those benefit programs generous to properly support those who truly need it, then minimum wages are going to have to support more than bare survival to be a better option.
It’s really not an easy dilemma to solve because incentives are working against you.
Really, I think the best way to get people off welfare is not to decrease welfare benefits, but increase the incentives to get a minimum wage job.
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If those people aren't getting paid a very high wage, they can reduce their working hours too. If they are getting paid a very high wage, then they already had the leverage needed to reduce their working hours, and they were choosing not to. They'll still make plenty of money.
That’s the interesting thing. Some people want to be lifetime wage slaves: they will work till they die at a low earnings level. Others would like to make five times as much with five times as much work. Proportionality is what they value. The problem, apparently, is that you want to force the latter into the former lifestyle. To that, I say no. In fact, you’re not going to get that world.
No I don't. If I was in charge then for step one I wouldn't change the amount of money those people make at all, I'd try to claw back any productivity gains from the last few decades that aren't going to workers and see how much UBI that can turn into. If I did want to tax someone with 5x income more, it wouldn't be that much more.
> who saw no indications of such a behavioural effect. One wonders what he was seeing. I used to know a fellow who would get himself laid off as soon as he'd worked long enough to qualify for unemployment. Then he would fail to get a job until the unemployment ran out, then he'd get a job. He lived for many years like this. He had no interest in working. He was quite open about what he was doing.
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currently I'm on welfare. (enough to not have to use money put aside) If I work (even part time, I will loose all welfare). If I find a job I will earn only 400-800E more than I earn with welfare.
E is Euro? 400-800 Euro is a significant amount of money.
But as an average of ~500 euros improvement of my current "salary" and loosing at the same time 40h/week + getting tired and not being able to do intense intellectual things after work I don't know if it's really worth it. And as I said, I "earn" enough money to not have to use my saving.
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> Guaranteed income (GI) would at least buffer some of the anxiety. I could also see businesses knowing it existed would cut worker hours to part-time. But if part-time plus GI was enough then the worker has the power. This is the biggest advantage I see, and shows why you wouldn't even need a living wage. You need a sufficient amount of money so that if a worker is being abused they can say "fuck it, I quit" and be…
I don't get it... why not raise minimum wages to reflect local cost of living? IE, why tax all of us instead of the businesses not paying enough for their employees?
Because it impacts all of us. Imagine the impact on crime and homelessness if there were UBI. Quality of life would improve for everyone. I'm happy to pay my taxes if it goes to that.
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What’s hard to understand is why I should work even harder making money so that you don’t have to.
No one says you have to work even harder. If you reduce your consumption and live according to your most basic needs, you can achieve a level of self-suffiency that allows you to actually support yourself with your hobbies. Live simply, plant a garden, buy your clothes at thrift stores and shop at discount grocery stores. What ever it takes to follow your passion. Live like a starving artist and make something great.…
If I recall correctly, the per-capita share of the US budget individuals are responsible for, if we split it evenly between every US resident of age, is (very) roughly $10k a year.
I currently pay above $100k/year in federal taxes; about 10x my share.
How much does the person “following their passion” pay? Are you really self-sufficient if you rely almost entirely on the largesse of others to fund your society?
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On one hand, you say that fewer people working reduces the pie. On the other hand, you say we should encourage automation. What situation would enable full automation and enable 100% workforce participation?
I'm not a luddite. I think that automation is good, but I don't think that it makes humans permanently redundant. The human skill set is too diverse. Automation should be encouraged, not taxed, because it makes society wealthier and more productive.
I actually agree with you on this if taxation is framed as a way to discourage something. But the goal is to encourage automation but ensure it benefits society, not just a wealthy few, so…
> because it makes society wealthier and more productive.
It does not. It makes some people ridiculously wealthy and makes everyone else poorer.
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> McDonalds by my house is offering $23/hr for entry level work and robots are nowhere to be seen. Who's pouring the drinks at your McDonalds? Over the past five or so years, the robots have taken that over. McDonalds has never been a stranger to labor savings, although I don't think they use burger conveyors like other chains, they do lots of little things. They've also been putting in two lane ordering all over the…
> Who's pouring the drinks at your McDonalds? Generally, prior to COVID-19, the customers themselves.