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

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

#531

Post by prostoalex » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 9:47 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #465

jsnk wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically speaking, automation in various fields greatly increased number of jobs, productivity and quality of life.

But it also systematically replaces low-skilled jobs with high-skilled ones. You can't expect a low-wage factory worker to change into control engineer overnight, nor a clerk will be able to program automated checkout machines. Nowdays new jobs are simply not accessible to the people who get replaced. I think what people don't get when discussing it is that historical (XIX century) examples don't apply because our co…

I think the discussion is more about long-term change than short-term.

I'm sure operators of horse feeding stations had similar arguments when Model T came around, but you don't find many people in that occupation nowadays.

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

#532

Post by cheald » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 9:47 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #456

cheald wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automation reduces costs and prices, creates new job fields, and permits for specialization. It's been happening since the cotton gin, and is a basic staple of an advancing society. We're able to sit on our butts in our chairs and make our livings punching keys on a little rectangle while staring at another little glowing rectangle because our societies are highly specialized and highly automated, making it economica…

> Automation reduces costs and prices, creates new job fields, and permits for specialization. Currently automation has reached the point in which it replaces lower-skilled jobs by higher-skilled jobs. Many people who worked in the former will not be able to work in the latter (mostly because it takes years to specialize), so for them, those jobs are as good as gone.

Do you have any particular examples we could analyze? Yes, you're right, the jobs that robots can do better are gone, but any improvement in efficiency in an industry generally results in lower prices and an increase in job creation around that industry. Again, in the case of the cotton gin, while the gin itself reduced the need for manual labor to pick seeds from cotton, it blew the demand for labor to plant and harvest cotton through the roof, and the improved output of these larger plantations resulted in the creation of shipping ports and explosive growth in the textile industry. In fact, this is widely considered to be a socially negative effect of the cotton gin, since it dramatically increased the demand for labor, which was then filled by slavery. That was obviously not desirable, but the core point I'm trying to make there is that eliminating all those slaves' jobs resulted in a dramatically larger demand for labor in the supply chain.

Just because the old job is gone doesn't mean there isn't a new one to be done, and improvements in efficiency and costs of production result in economic growth that have positive impacts all over related markets.

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

#533

Post by MartinCron » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 9:48 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #522

MartinCron wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to couple one controversial idea (basic income) with another controversial idea (global climate change)? Yikes!

Climate change is not a controversial idea. It is widely accepted idea.

Climate Change is not a controversial idea in the scientific community, but it is still a controversial idea in mainstream politics. Sadly.

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

#534

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 9:50 PM UTC

axuaq wrote: post #56

Can we come up with a solution that doesn't strong-arm workers into keeping society's dead weight around? Why make sure that every non-worker in society has enough money to eat McDonalds and watch cable TV at the cost of the freedom of everyone to make and spend money as they please?

> Why make sure that every non-worker in society has enough money to eat McDonalds and watch cable TV at the cost of the freedom of everyone to make and spend money as they please?

To turn this question around, why do we want only slaves to live comfortably, while denying this right to people who are free?

Yes, slaves. Our culture, out of necessity, managed to successfully hide this fact from most of the people, that we are all slaves. We need to work, or else we starve. Some of us are lucky and do the things they would have done anyway living free, but for most of us, it's just global slavery we're in denial with.

Automation may finally free us all, and this is the point most people (suprisingly, even here on HN) seem to fail to understand.

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

#535

Post by dkrich » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 9:53 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #455

guard-of-terra wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which basically means things that do not scale will skyrocket in price. You already see this as prices of education and housing grow decade to decade. Essentials are: bad food that doesn't taste well, bad housing, bad medical care, bad transportation and bad service. That's what Soviet Union consistently delivered to every citizen and while there were vitrually no hungry, unemployed or homeless people, nobody felt ha…

Also, we're talking about world where robots produce those cheap essentials out of soil and solar/nuclear power, leaving many more unemployed competing for ever shrinking pool of jobs that are not done by robots out of free solar/nuclear power. Basically it's not any kind of a solution, it's exactly where we are headed now.

I don't understand why this is a problem. A job is something you have to do to complete a task. Somebody pays you for it because it brings them some value. If they can get that task completed for a lower rate, why is that a bad thing?

Sure, in the short-term you lose the paycheck you received for completing that task, but in the long-term that person who paid you is now wealthier, which enables them to spend money elsewhere. This causes the jobs to migrate to where things need to be done. I assure you we are still a very long way from accomplishing all tasks that need to be done and for which people would be willing to pay. But if we ever did reach that point, nobody would need to work because everything would be free.

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

#536

Post by ppereira » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 9:54 PM UTC

dllthomas wrote: post #474

jerf wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my biggest concern with the idea, which I don't see being addressed (checked the entire conversation on this post to date). I don't think having the vote and having the basic income is compatible with each other. Why aren't people going to vote themselves larger basic incomes every year? How can you both have the (modern conception of the) vote, and a basic income at the same time? Attempts to answer this que…

Put it in a structure where it doesn't take a simple majority vote to raise (real) BI. Let's say the US did it with a constitutional amendment, for instance.

A basic income is much more like a change in tax rates. In fact, the existing Earned Income Tax Credit is already much like a basic income for a certain segment of the population. Requiring a constitutional amendment would create much too high a barrier. One often needs a revolution to make a constitutional amendment. I don't think we want to go there.

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

#537

Post by MartinCron » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 9:55 PM UTC

Friendly reminder: People work for all sorts of reasons, having enough money to not starve is just one of them.

What's the first question people ask you when they meet you? In this country, it's usually "what do you do?"

I'm just as OK with people being motivated to work by status or prestige or ego societal pressure as they are by the threat of financial ruin.

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

#538

Post by thwest » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 9:55 PM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #487

thwest wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an incredibly cheap dismissal that's simply not true. There are plenty of books that look at those issues from a humanist perspective. The Bell Curve is labeled racist because it is myopic about the existence and importance of race. Race is not a valid scientific categorization: it is not based on statistical grouping of DNA, or anything concrete other than "people used to be assholes to foreigners." There is…

That's an incredibly cheap dismissal that's simply not true Examples, please, of books that investigate socioeconomic status & race that have not been called racist? Because I can't think of any. By the way, I'm not talking about literary explorations of race like "Huckleberry Finn". Although that was called racist too. There are orders of magnitude more genetic [...] diversity among each race than there are between…

The distribution of genetic variants within and among human populations are impossible to describe succinctly because of the difficulty of defining a "population," the clinal nature of variation, and heterogeneity across the genome (Long and Kittles 2003). In general, however, an average of 85% of genetic variation exists within local populations, ~7% is between local populations within the same continent, and ~8% of variation occurs between large groups living on different continents,. (Lewontin 1972; Jorde et al. 2000a; Hinds et al. 2005) (Editied my previous post to reflect a single order of magnitude between 8% and 85%).

Thanks Wikipedia. Regarding being labelled racist, fine, everything gets labelled that. Even this post. I took your statement for something bit more meaningful than the cynic's "woe is the opinion of The Populous".

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

#539

Post by chez17 » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 9:56 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?

That's like asking why are taxes above 0%? There are plenty of rational people who understand what it takes to have a successful modern society. Looking at the current US feelings on money and welfare, do you really think that if this was done we would err on the side of too much assistance? I would bet it would be barely livable at first.

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

#540

Post by dredmorbius » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 9:58 PM UTC

abstractbill wrote: post #382

antitrust wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A program that you yourself benefit from tends to be less likely to get eroded by future politicians. This could be bad. Very popular programs never get reconsidered, even if they have bad effects.

Just to help me better understand what you're saying, can you give an example of a program that's very popular, and which has bad effects?

California's Proposition 13 property tax law.

Much of the special exemptions relating to health care and insurance which effectively tie it to employment, while restricting the ability for other groups to form for pooled risk. Addressed somewhat under Obamacare.

Big Ag subsidies.

Patent and copyright laws.