Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income • Hacker News Board

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#491

Post by antitrust » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 9:04 PM UTC

Jd wrote: post #330

tomjen3 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often find that when somebody claims "you can't do x" that we learn a lot by asking, why exactly is that. In your case I am wondering why exactly is that we can't turn people away - in aggregate it is likely to save more lives since seeing people dying would be an excellent motivating factor for others to make sure they pay their health care insurance -- and since they would therefore have it and would be able to g…

Frankly, reports from doctor-friends who work in ERs indicates that a large part of costs are treating people who are dealing with preventable often drug-related problems that create emergencies because the people involved are basically incapable of prevention. Seeing other people on the street homeless is apparently not enough incentive to keep people from becoming homeless themselves. I have no idea why seeing othe…

Natural selection?

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#492

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 9:07 PM UTC

bsbechtel wrote: post #209

Arguments like this are completely selling ourselves short on our ability as a species/society to innovate and come up with new ideas that improve our life for everyone. I'm sorry, but it drives me absolutely nuts! Come on guys, are we really saying that we aren't capable of continuing to come up with new ideas and grow them into sustainable businesses that lift a majority of Americans out of poverty?? What a positiv…

> Come on guys, are we really saying that we aren't capable of continuing to come up with new ideas and grow them into sustainable businesses that lift a majority of Americans out of poverty?

Of course we are. The best of those ideas involve robots and weak AIs systematically replacing humans in everything they do.

What the author says is that the way to innovate ourselves out of this situation and end up well is not by doing more of the same. Capitalism is going to die as energy abundance and automation will make manufacturing essencially free, and smarter software will do the same to most service and knowledge jobs.

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#493

Post by ahoy » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 9:09 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #471

mncolinlee wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of us have a representative system of government, not a purely democratic system. The problem with your thesis is that reality has not presented many examples where deep cuts have not been enacted. Austerity and Social Security cuts are common from elected politicians. The parent idea reminds me of a certain system advocated by Thomas Paine, the famous American revolutionary who came up with a more liberal ideal…

"Austerity and Social Security cuts are common from elected politicians." Because a non-trivial percentage of the population wants them, whether or not you agree with them. Who's going to vote to receive less money?

Plenty of people, if it also means their tax rate becomes lower. Or anyone who makes enough money that their tax burden is greater than the UBI.

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#494

Post by wutbrodo » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 9:13 PM UTC

hackinthebochs wrote: post #306

wutbrodo wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What people seem to be missing in this thread is the fact that the concept of the basic income is that it's _basic_. Construction already (surprisingly) pays pretty well, so does plumbing, etc etc. More tedious jobs will either be automated (which is far more efficient) or if they absolutely require a human brain, there will be a rise in the cost of that labor until the work is worth the money for enough people. Mone…

You're right about your point in the short term. My comment was considering the extreme (though inevitable future) where the majority of labor is obsoleted by automation. Usually discussions about basic income have a component about the increasing obsolescence of unskilled and even skilled labor and the necessary changes to society to accommodate such a future.

We went from putting every ounce of labor into hunting/gathering/building shelter for oneself and one's family to early civilization where the surplus of resources generated by agriculture (i.e. technology) caused a labor surplus that allowed for new kinds of jobs to arise. More recently, the US went from 80% farmers at the time of the Revolution to 2% now. Along the way the definition of "low-level labor" and "skilled labor" changed; you'd be hard-pressed to get a job even at McDonald's or in a factory, if you're completely illiterate in modern America. It's hard to argue that these changes weren't for the better, for _everybody_, including those at the bottom of the new order. The bottom of society today is orders of magnitude better off than the middle of society in 1790, and we owe that pretty much entirely to technological advance. There are of course speed bumps along the way, and a generation of workers that are not skilled enough for the new order will have a hard time, but in a healthy economy, it's the role of the state to smooth that path using the resources that the economy at large gains from the advances in efficiency and wealth.

I'm a little skeptical of the idea that this wave of technology must be different from all the ones in the past (which isn't to say it's impossible) and obsolete jobs completely. Programming literacy may simply become the new literacy; Education may very well have to become a longer stage of life, but given lengthening lifespans, it won't necessarily be a drastically higher proportion of one's life than it has been in the past.

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#495

Post by talmand » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 9:15 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #447

ctdonath wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leftist Platform: "I'm taking yours, f* you." Yeah, this line of discussion is going to get us far.

Let me be more specific: Who is blocking comprehensive reform of the banking sector (which arguably drove not only the US into a recession, but the world as a whole)? Republicans Draconian anti-abortion laws? Republics Raising student loan interest rates while keeping lending rates to banks near zero? Republicans Supporting egregious amounts of defense department spending (The US spends more on defense then the next…

Maybe the reason they are blocking reform on the banking sector is because they feel it wouldn't be necessary if only the Executive branch would actually enforce the laws already on the books that apply?

Maybe the reason they oppose abortion laws is because they feel they are saving human lives who have no say in the matter?

Maybe the reason they support such amounts of military spending is because they feel it is the nation's responsibility to do its best to provide for a safe and secure world, including using the military for life-saving operations?

Maybe the reason they are blocking current immigration reform is because they disagree with the methodology being proposed that is possibly unfair to current citizens including the ones who immigrated here legally and followed the law to become citizens?

Maybe the reason they are trying to prevent implementation of universal healthcare is because they feel the current law is ripe with corruption, waste, fraud, eventual failure, and will in the end actually make things worse?

You are again one of these people going with the notion that since you disagree with the other people's ideas you get to assume that the ideas are somehow bad. Notice that in no way did you explain why these ideas are inherently bad, you simply disagree with them. You are perpetuating the fallacy that they are bad simply because you say they are while ignoring the possibilities that they have good reasons to think that way. Next thing on your agenda will be to ridicule them in some way to show your superiority over such backward-thinking people in a feeble attempt to convince us you are right without actually having to prove anything nor support your accusations.

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#496

Post by jvm » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 9:18 PM UTC

medell wrote: post #432

tokenadult wrote: post #174

I see no one in this active discussion has mentioned yet Charles Murray's book In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State, http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0844742236 in which Murray goes into detail about how much a program of guaranteed income for everyone would cost in the United States, and some probable effects that would have on everyone's everyday behavior. I read the book a year or two after it was publi…

Great links. Curious, how does the book address the issues of cost of living across regions? As $10k in SF is very different than $10k in St. Louis.

If you freely choose where to live, that means you get (at least) $3000 of value renting a $3000/month apartment no matter where you rent it. If it's more expensive for the same size of unit in one place or another, that means you're paying for amenities, or a short commute, or access to a particular job market. So giving people more money to live in SF would be subsidizing the consumption of the amenities that SF provides, or to put it less delicately, you're rewarding San Francisco residents just for living there. One could potentially argue that the subsidy is warranted, but generally I am skeptical that such a subsidy would be welfare enhancing. My suspicion is it would just cause people to overconsume San Francisco real estate relative to their latent preferences.

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#497

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 9:19 PM UTC

dgallagher wrote: post #150

Every single adult member receives a weekly payment from the state, which is enough to live comfortably on. The only condition is citizenship and/or residency. Sweet! None of us have to work anymore! Party at my place every night for life! You get the basic income whether or not you’re employed, any wages you earn are additional. Few, that's a relief. It'll be nice to close all of the school's down and tell kids they…

> Sweet! None of us have to work anymore! Party at my place every night for life!

As Nursie said as well, that's the whole fucking point. The fact we don't live like this today is an atrocity.

It seems that you don't understand the kind of world we're headed to. Energy abundance + automation = dirt cheap manufacturing. At first mostly by economies of scale, later literally dirt-cheap, as pretty much everything you could imagine can be made from dirt, power and a bit of advanced manufacturing tech we don't yet have but we know how it will work [0]. Energy abundance + automation + ever better software = most service jobs gone, most knowledge jobs disappearning, and people getting quickly optimized out of economy.

There is a potential for everything to be free because it doesn't have to cost anything. The only reason we would like that not to happen is some kind of weird stockholm-syndromish love for slavery (i.e. work).

Maybe we should stop working on life extension as well because we were meant to work hard and then die.

[0] - actually, we have it, but it's not ours and we can't control it yet. But it works. You and I are examples of it. Biology is nothing but an highly advanced tech we haven't master so far.

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#498

Post by CountSessine » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 9:20 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #93

crazygringo wrote: post #73

> "How would we pay for it? We could start by getting corporations to pay their taxes." I don't know why people keep harping on corporate taxes. If anything, taxing corporations is regressive -- the taxes ultimately get passed on to consumers through higher product prices, regardless of their income levels. Taxing corporations doesn't produce magic money -- it's still taxing people in the end, but it's the consumers.…

> If anything, taxing corporations is regressive No, its not. > the taxes ultimately get passed on to consumers through higher product prices, regardless of their income levels. It increases producer prices which shifts the supply curve to the right, but its pretty self-evident that the effect on actual prices is dependent on price elasticity of demand in the markets for particular products, and that price elasticity…

It increases producer prices which shifts the supply curve to the right, but its pretty self-evident...

If you're taxing corporate income, it's pretty clear that Apple's and Google's supply curve will shift to the right. Not so much Samsung's or Nokia's. Taxing corporate income harms exports. Trying to tax only the corporate income from products and services sold in the US is in essence a VAT and then we're not talking about corporate income tax.

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#499

Post by iopq » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 9:21 PM UTC

oijaf888 wrote: post #282

throwit1979 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No more than taxing labor income (which the US does disproportionately) If you have a point to make, please try doing it without blatantly lying. It's common knowledge that the US has substantially higher corporate tax rates than almost anywhere else: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/feb/21/corporat...

Seriously? What tax rate do you pay on your regular 40h a weke job? What tax rate do you pay on investments? Most people are taxed roughly 36% (28% income tax, 2% medicare, 6% social security) on their labor, however investments are only taxed at a flat 15%. Hence, the US disproportionately taxes labor over investments. Do you have other evidence that shows that investment income is in-fact taxed higher than labor in…

Except capital gains taxes don't include inflation in the calculations.

So let's say your stocks in aggregate rose 4% that year, and the inflation was 3%. You made 1% profit (in purchasing power). You pay 4% * 0.15 = 0.6% which is 60% of your profits and only 38% of your income.

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#500

Post by prostoalex » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 9:21 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #258

crazygringo wrote: post #73

> "How would we pay for it? We could start by getting corporations to pay their taxes." I don't know why people keep harping on corporate taxes. If anything, taxing corporations is regressive -- the taxes ultimately get passed on to consumers through higher product prices, regardless of their income levels. Taxing corporations doesn't produce magic money -- it's still taxing people in the end, but it's the consumers.…

I'm not in favor of corporate taxes for practical reasons--I think they're too hard to make work in an international setting. That said, it is not necessarily the case that taxes on corporate profits are passed on to consumers through higher product prices. At always comes back to prices being the equilibrium of supply and demand. Taxes on corporate profits obviously have no impact on demand, so we must look at suppl…

Profits are also a cushion for the future years when the sales are not that great, and the company has to dip into its savings account or force layoffs and trim product offerings.

While high corporate taxation environment is great for boom years (unless your corporate constituents relocate), it necessitates bailouts during the bad years. Good example would be some European socialist economies overly reliant on state enterprises.