Average Is Over • Hacker News Board

Re: Average Is Over

#211

Post by yesbabyyes » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 7:18 PM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #39

exit wrote: post #3

did you mean to link to the comment field in particular, or the entire article? in any case, it reminded me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee

I tend to agree with that solution, though I think there are more and less sustainable vs. conflict-inducing ways of structuring it. The simplest way is just to pay out cash collected from taxes, but that's always subject to conflict around "my tax money going to support lazy bums" type stuff, and easy to cut (or fiddle with in various ways to meet other budgetary goals). More sustainable basic incomes tend to be str…

Georgism is interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

My issue with that is that it would drive us to extract the maximum value from the land, which could worsen the environment even more. I would like to hear more about what people think about this.

Re: Average Is Over

#212

Post by smattiso » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 7:21 PM UTC

There is no "solution" per se.

As I see it it's like this.

Most people are paid with how much labor they provide. $X amount of hours worked equals $Y amount of money. Call these people Group A. Some are paid using a different scale in line with the value of their creations. E.g. inventing a better battery, opening a well positioned McDonalds, etc. Call these people Group B.

Technology is reducing the amount of hours of labor from Group A the world actually can use. Similarly most of Group A won't be able to create something that actually adds value to the economy and transition into Group B.

So what are we going to do with all these people from Group A that are not adding "value" to the economy? The only reasonable solution is to subsidize these people in a way we deem socially acceptable.

Social Darwinism isn't acceptable, so the trick is finding a way to do this without causing side effects and hopefully that adds benefit to society. Note these people won't generate benefit to the economy in any meaningful way.

Re: Average Is Over

#213

Post by goatslacker » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 7:35 PM UTC

Jach wrote: post #100

goatslacker wrote: post #20

Post high school education is overrated. In fact the American school system won't really prepare you to face the reality. Yes it seems like the need for these "average" jobs are decreasing but in the end it will all balance itself out and there will be new areas that would need to be filled.

What's overrated is the "pick a degree, any degree, you get to call yourself 'educated' in four years!" mantra. The difference between the US and (what I hear of (so probably stereotypical)) Germany is that in the US you're told from a very young age to go to college to "get an education". In Germany you're told to go to college to "become a competent engineer". I really disagree with you that it will balance out, th…

I believe new opportunities will open up. Change will come. There are plenty of needs that will surface somewhere and it's up to the "average" to adapt to fill those needs.

Those that don't adapt or resist the change will be the ones that suffer the most. This is a pattern with many things in life.

Re: Average Is Over

#214

Post by droz » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 7:39 PM UTC

rsheridan6 wrote: post #166

barefoot wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, I think replacing waitresses with touchscreens removes an important part of the whole dining out experience. A touchscreen waiter seems very cold and utilitarian. It reminds me of the cheap LCD displays that have replaced gas station attendants. Almost all of the gas stations that I've used recently have them, and they all have very poorly worded prompts that show no regard for the time that I spend interacti…

If people really wanted gas station attendants, they would go to gas stations that had them instead of LCD displays, and you would see more of them. In reality, you can hardly find a gas station that has an attendant outside of states that don't let you pump your own gas, because the demand isn't there.

Same goes with the the self-checkout lanes at grocery stories.

Re: Average Is Over

#215

Post by mahyarm » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 7:41 PM UTC

giardini wrote: post #172

gyardley wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a completely wingnut idea. I first bumped into it in Hayek, who was in favor of it and not much of a socialist. The rationale works like this - given that some less-fortunate members of society will need assistance at some point in their life, and given that 'conservative' != 'asshole' and we don't want to just let them die in the street, we have to provide some form of limited welfare state. Since we have t…

"... or we could simply periodically cut everyone a small check." And what do you do when they drink the check and once again lie dying in the street? I really do agree with you - society can pay up to some point and no more. But at some point people must be allowed to die. For example, today I would not be opposed, in the case of cancer, to society providing payment for all necessary pain medications and hospice car…

Make the 'cash' only spendable on a specific category of necessities. Such as rent, food, transportation, etc. But your creating bureaucracy to manage that, and people will find ways to get around it.

Re: Average Is Over

#216

Post by cchurch » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 7:46 PM UTC

hackinthebochs wrote: post #194

billybob wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming that the laws are uniformly applied (which may not be true), they are irrelevant to the differences between people's incomes. If Person A invents hoverboards and everyone buys them, creating billions in economic value, and Person B works at a gas station and creates a few thousand in economic value, they both reap proportional rewards. No, Person A couldn't have succeeded without laws protecting him/her from…

The point is that, the particular rules of the system that reward person A with wealth is arbitrary. They essentially reward the genetic lottery and luck. Person A was able to invent hoverboards because of a million things in his lifetime lined up exactly right for him to be in the right place for his invention, most notably accident of birth and genetic lottery (genius, work ethic). In a different time the rules wou…

You've essentially modernized the old debate between free will and predestination.

Re: Average Is Over

#217

Post by rdouble » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 7:48 PM UTC

More bachelor's degrees won't increase the number of exceptional people, it will just mean more average people with bachelor's degrees. A side effect of this will be that the number of jobs for average people with bachelor's degrees will increase. Some of the most stable and best paying jobs are in education, law enforcement, state and local government, school and health care administration and so forth. Basically anything that is full or partially funded by tax dollars.

In many places there is already an attitude of why would you be so dumb to subject yourself to the logan's run of working in private enterprise when you can get an easy job with a pension by simply working directly or indirectly for the state.

Re: Average Is Over

#218

Post by rayiner » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 7:52 PM UTC

astine wrote: post #202

rayiner wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Billionaires don't exist without a state. Nobody toils for years in grad school and invests time and money in a new enterprise without the panoply of legal protections created by the state. Moreover, since the system of property rights enforced by the state is, like any other system of law, completely arbitrary, the specific people that get rich under a certain system owe their wealth to that arbitrary choice. So the…

That's like arguing we shouldn't oppose Internet censorship because censorship is just a kind of regulation and other regulations make the Internet possible. Besides it's totally possible for billionaires to exist without a state or regulations. It's just that they would look more like feudal lords than the relatively benign fellows we have today. So it is a matter of limitations in the legal framework. It's just an…

Feudal lords were the state. They created and enforced laws, in a form that is quite recognizable to us today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta (this is an 800 year old document created in feudal England). Our system of property law can be recognizably traced back to laws of feudal England more than a thousand years old.

What you're thinking of is more along the lines of a warlord in a stateless place. Such a warlord would have a lot of relative wealth, but because such a society would produce very little wealth, would not be wealthy in absolute terms.

People who have a billion dollars wealth of wealth, in absolute terms, only exist in this country because you have 300 million people working in a highly organized system of divided labor. Without a state you'd have a society of peasant farmers and hunter-gatherers that had a fraction of the population (how many hunter-gatherers can you support in a territory of a size a single warlord can reasonably defend?) and produced a minuscule fraction of the wealth. The state enables, in a very fundamental way, the social concert of action that creates the wealth that billionaires reap.

Re: Average Is Over

#219

Post by dripton » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 8:03 PM UTC

giardini wrote: post #172

gyardley wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a completely wingnut idea. I first bumped into it in Hayek, who was in favor of it and not much of a socialist. The rationale works like this - given that some less-fortunate members of society will need assistance at some point in their life, and given that 'conservative' != 'asshole' and we don't want to just let them die in the street, we have to provide some form of limited welfare state. Since we have t…

"... or we could simply periodically cut everyone a small check." And what do you do when they drink the check and once again lie dying in the street? I really do agree with you - society can pay up to some point and no more. But at some point people must be allowed to die. For example, today I would not be opposed, in the case of cancer, to society providing payment for all necessary pain medications and hospice car…

My grandfather had stomach cancer in the 1960s, when he was in his 40s. He was very fortunate that it was detected quickly and removed successfully. He ended up dying of a heart attack in his 70s.

Nobody lives forever, but some people do survive cancer.

Re: Average Is Over

#220

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 8:06 PM UTC

giardini wrote: post #172

gyardley wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a completely wingnut idea. I first bumped into it in Hayek, who was in favor of it and not much of a socialist. The rationale works like this - given that some less-fortunate members of society will need assistance at some point in their life, and given that 'conservative' != 'asshole' and we don't want to just let them die in the street, we have to provide some form of limited welfare state. Since we have t…

"... or we could simply periodically cut everyone a small check." And what do you do when they drink the check and once again lie dying in the street? I really do agree with you - society can pay up to some point and no more. But at some point people must be allowed to die. For example, today I would not be opposed, in the case of cancer, to society providing payment for all necessary pain medications and hospice car…

[deleted]