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

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

#541

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 9:59 PM UTC

waps wrote: post #32

nawitus wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It misses the fact that work is fulfilling for (most) people. Basic income is not against working, it's point is to let people work in all kinds of situations. Old-fashion social security usually makes the tax rate for certain part-time / freelancing work 100% (e.g. $100 increase in pay can reduce benefits $100, therefore the actual marginal tax rate is 100% and most people won't do that work). > But just paying peo…

1) Work is not nearly as fulfilling as doing nothing for most people. I have no trouble admitting this to myself. And while I'd probably still do something, I'd no longer see any need to make any compromises to work together with anybody else. That would be satisfying. It would also be an economically negative proposition, but I'd learn a lot. Or at least, I'd feel I do. 2) About the "Nordic countries". WTF ? Have yo…

> And while I'd probably still do something, I'd no longer see any need to make any compromises to work together with anybody else.

How is this a problem, when all the essencial work is done by machines and people who do like to do those particular types of work?

"Work is fulfilling" is one of many illusions the society created to shield itself from the fact that we are still, as we have been for the entire history, slaves who can only either work or starve. We are used to this state of the world so much that we've invented many cultural memes so that we can feel good about it.

It is very similar to how people invent 1001 reasons why death is good and gives meaning for life. It doesn't. It's just we can't bear the sadness of our situation, so we invent excuses and stockholm-syndrome ourselves to avoid the pain.

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

#542

Post by speeder » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 10:00 PM UTC

comrade_ogilvy wrote: post #509

sliverstorm wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, you could read Stephen Jay Gould's The Mis-measure of Man. Or you could read The Bell Curve. It is positing a small difference between "races", a difference so small that it is very minor compared to the expected range of deviation for a populace. The idea that there is a scientifically definable thing called "race" lacks data. That is your row to hoe if you believe other. Skeptics are not required to disprove…

I wonder then, what about the Melanesians that have 6% of DNA of a unique population?

Or that asians and whites have wildly different reactions to milk.

Or that some diseases only affect blacks, or whites, or whatever?

This is not data? People use freely the same techniques to categorize humans, to categorize other animals with significant variations in their species, why only humans you must not use the word "race" and use other words to describe the same thing?

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

#543

Post by unclebucknasty » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 10:01 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #263

unclebucknasty wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "corporate taxes are ultimately passed onto people" I don't really get this argument. It's always made as if the taxes are applied in a vacuum where market forces no longer exist. If corporations are operating in a competitive market, they will seek cost advantages and continue to compete for market share. Raised taxes represent an additional expense (for the purposes of this discussion), much like raised energy pr…

> Raised taxes represent an additional expense (for the purposes of this discussion) Raised income taxes aren't really an additional expense, because they are taken out of after-tax net income, not gross income. That complicates the analysis substantially.

I am aware of how the accounting works, technically, which is why I added the parentheses.

Perhaps you can provide more detail as to how you think it changes the analysis in the context of this discussion.

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

#544

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 10:03 PM UTC

prostoalex wrote: post #531

TeMPOraL wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, that's kind of my point, isn't it? Except the meaning of "long-term" changes fast as the progress of technology accelerates.

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

#545

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 10:14 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #222

aneth4 wrote: post #203

I agree that a basic income may be the best solution to the decline in demand for labor. And I consider myself economically conservative. There is still much to be learned about the societal effect. Its something we need to consider as an alternative to social upheaval. However other parts of this article concern me, in particular: "Employment law is liberalised, as workers no longer need to fear dismissal." Employme…

I don't think you understand what "liberalised" employment law means, since it means movement in the direction (if not necessarily to the exact point) you are arguing for in arguing against it.

[deleted]

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

#546

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 10:17 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #222

aneth4 wrote: post #203

I agree that a basic income may be the best solution to the decline in demand for labor. And I consider myself economically conservative. There is still much to be learned about the societal effect. Its something we need to consider as an alternative to social upheaval. However other parts of this article concern me, in particular: "Employment law is liberalised, as workers no longer need to fear dismissal." Employme…

I don't think you understand what "liberalised" employment law means, since it means movement in the direction (if not necessarily to the exact point) you are arguing for in arguing against it.

[deleted]

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

#547

Post by ppereira » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 10:17 PM UTC

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.…

It would not be regressive overall. The corporate tax and basic income need to be considered together. You are combining a corporate tax that might be regressive or flat, with a lump sum payment of equal magnitude. The net effect is most certainly progressive.

Taxing corporations may not produce magic money, but it is certainly more efficient than taxing individuals. Look, for example, at the Canadian tax system which offers near full integration for corporate taxes. Corporate taxes be a way of capturing money up front and limiting tax avoidance.

If we had a flat tax with basic income, one could scrap taxes on employment and just tax corporations by denying salary as a deduction. This would be equivalent to the standard approach of writing-off salary expenses and taxing individuals.

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

#548

Post by aneth4 » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 10:17 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #222

aneth4 wrote: post #203

I agree that a basic income may be the best solution to the decline in demand for labor. And I consider myself economically conservative. There is still much to be learned about the societal effect. Its something we need to consider as an alternative to social upheaval. However other parts of this article concern me, in particular: "Employment law is liberalised, as workers no longer need to fear dismissal." Employme…

I don't think you understand what "liberalised" employment law means, since it means movement in the direction (if not necessarily to the exact point) you are arguing for in arguing against it.

Well, "liberalised" as a general term doesn't mean anything, so I wouldn't say I "don't understand" it. The language is ambiguous, but you may be correct on second thought.

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

#549

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 10:22 PM UTC

cheald wrote: post #532

TeMPOraL wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 har…

> Do you have any particular examples we could analyze?

I'd look at every job that is being replaced by a robot or a computer system. I can't give you a particular example in form of "job A replaced by robots, workers can't move anywhere else", because so far we've been very efficient at reallocating labor. Throughout last 200 years, people out-automated in agriculture moved to manufacturing; optimized out from there they are moving to services, but the computer technology makes this sector fair game, and there doesn't seem to be anywhere else to go.

More machines are creating more opportunities for building them, but the manufacturing is already heavily automated, so this is the case of robots building robots. As a human, you can't compete there much.

Just imagine self-driving cars really taking off in few years and replacing most jobs in transportation industry. Where will those people go? What kind of jobs we can imagine they could have without years-long retraining that robots arleady can't do better?

> Just because the old job is gone doesn't mean there isn't a new one to be done

Yes, but my point is that jobs are not made equal, and just because you could do the old one doesn't mean you will be able to do the new one. It is increasingly not the case.

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

#550

Post by JonFish85 » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 10:23 PM UTC

unclebucknasty wrote: post #518

JonFish85 wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it an easy solution though? Based on what you've said, companies have likely already done what they can to reduce expenses to what they consider an optimal place. I'll try an example, although that might not be totally valid (I'm not really up on current tax laws). These are all made-up numbers and rates: Say you sell a widget for $100, and it costs you $70 to make. Your profit on that is $30, of which let's sa…

I see the rationale in that argument, but I think one of the things you're missing is that companies won't just automatically raise their prices in unison. Smart companies may hold their prices constant and take a per unit profit hit to capture more share, allowing them to maintain or even increase overall profit. They may introduce higher margin products and/or develop entirely new strategies or lines of business. A…

If the market has reached the pre-tax equilibrium, would an added evenly-applied tax change competitiveness at all? I guess I don't see how that would change anything at all. If you and I are competitors, and we both pay the same tax rate, that's already factored into our businesses in some way. Sliding it up or down an equal amount on both of us won't change the me vs. you competitiveness right?

I get what you're saying regarding only pricing what the market will bear, but on the flip side of all this, consumers suddenly have more money, so I could make the argument that the consumers are willing to pay more because they suddenly have more in their pockets, and around the mulberry bush we go...