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A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory

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Re: A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory

#211

Post by TeMPOraL »

goldfeld wrote: post #193
TeMPOraL wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. After 8h+ of work for little pay, 2h of commute, doing dishes, dinner and cleaning up, you'll have little energy to do anything creative and constructive. Grabbing a beer and turning on TV is a way to relax before turning in and beginning another day of work. I don't know of a person who doesn't have dreams, hobbies, things to do and create. Many just put it off until they can buy a house, until they ca…

I think it's even more than necessarily being tired: people who struggle to get by are in a constant state of alert and stress that precludes developing their creative dreams (they will have them, but can't advance on them). When you're stressed you'll turn to addictions to relieve yourself: chocolate, TV, MJ, and some will even become workaholics through some basal twisted work ethic.

That's true, and I know this from first-hand experience. Having an unstable financial situation, constant worrying about how to support 4 people and pay off debts pretty much shuts down your ability to do anything creative. It didn't stop me from having ideas, it didn't even stop me from starting to work on them - but it always stopped me from advancing on them - either because lack of money for required components, or being too stressed out worrying to focus on doing the theoretical/software work. So in the end I ended up opting for watching stuff and reading books as a way to tune down before another day of struggle.

And yes, I am a programmer. You can end up in shit as one too. I made some bad work choices before and ended up pretty much not being paid for half a year.

Re: A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory

#212

Post by TeMPOraL »

ajuc wrote: post #204
goldfeld wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real reason Communism couldn't succeed (not necessarily the reason it failed) is because none of the countries trying it were or are advanced capitalistic economies before the revolution. Imagine a transition into communism in a less-scarcity scenario, where robots generate so much material wealth as to provide it to everyone, and no one HAS to work, and technology married to political science in turn allows more…

> because none of the countries trying it were or are advanced capitalistic economies before the revolution revolution was the least common way to turn communist. Far more common was "forced by nearby communist country" Also for example Czechoslovakia was advanced capitalist country. It's often overlooked - it was very industrialized country, with long capitalistic traditions, and democracy before WW2. It also went t…

> From the POV of medieval people We're already in a less-scarcity scenario. We just don't like to share, as a species. I highly doubt technology will change that.

It seems to me that technology will force that change on us. In a world when a robot can do every job you can, only faster and better, and doesn't eat, sleep or complain, there's little use for you and me. So either we get rid of the whole concept of jobs or starve (or stop the progress, but good luck with that, the very system that threatens to destroy us is the one that's driving progress).

Re: A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory

#213

Post by ajuc »

rorykoehler wrote: post #207
ajuc wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a government were to do that for everyone Inflation would eat it up.

How? Competition would increase and prices would come down. We are currently fighting to avoid deflation anyways and all indicators point towards this continuing. If anything UBI will stop people hoarding cash as is happening now and re-introduce some cash-flow into the macro economy. A little inflation is healthy.

Why would competition increase?

Re: A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory

#214

Post by just_had_tea »

goldfeld wrote: post #193
TeMPOraL wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. After 8h+ of work for little pay, 2h of commute, doing dishes, dinner and cleaning up, you'll have little energy to do anything creative and constructive. Grabbing a beer and turning on TV is a way to relax before turning in and beginning another day of work. I don't know of a person who doesn't have dreams, hobbies, things to do and create. Many just put it off until they can buy a house, until they ca…

I think it's even more than necessarily being tired: people who struggle to get by are in a constant state of alert and stress that precludes developing their creative dreams (they will have them, but can't advance on them). When you're stressed you'll turn to addictions to relieve yourself: chocolate, TV, MJ, and some will even become workaholics through some basal twisted work ethic.

I wish there was a translation of this article into English: https://decorrespondent.nl/511/waarom-arme-mensen-domme-ding...

Basically, the argument is that "poor people do stupid stuff" because their "intelligence bandwidth" is being sucked up by worry about where to find the next meal/rental payment/etc. leaving no brainpower for what we well-off and spoilt folk would call "constructive pursuits".

Re: A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory

#215

Post by TeMPOraL »

I'm a strong supporter of the concept and motivation behind universal basic income, but I admit I don't understand one part of the calculations - what's the solution for the problem of prices universally rising to the point of cancelling out the UBI? I mean, if everyone suddenly gets additional $500 a month to spend, how do you prevent the market from correcting for that?

Re: A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory

#216

Post by kriro »

anticon wrote: post #52
onion2k wrote: post #33

One of the first pieces of advice I had when my company landed its investment was to pay ourselves a decent (not extravagant) wage so that my time went on worrying about the company rather than how I was going to afford to do things in my personal life. The same is true for employees - if they're paid a good living they will spend more time on thinking about problems in their job instead. If a government were to do t…

People starting companies are driven, determined people who want to create things. The vast majority of people are not. You're vastly over-estimating the general population. The majority are lazy, and if given money, will sit watching reality TV and stuffing their face with ice cream. (Step outside the startup bubble for a while). Most people are also selfish. The idea that they'll all start doing things to benefit o…

I think the basic argument for testing this is that in the future it might very well be the case that only a small portion of society can do "meaningfull work". Think of an AI future or a vastly automated one.

Sure one solution is pushing the wages of say a factory worker up so it's enough to sustain them. In reality we'll probably reach a point where lots of manual labor jobs shouldn't rationally be done by humans. It's a very hard problem to solve imo and naive "comperative advantage though" isn't the answer.

I mean I can see a ton of reasons against base incomes but I also don't see many good answers for a scenario where say half the currently working population could be "optimized away".

Re: A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory

#217

Post by just_had_tea »

mierek4ever wrote: post #137
tormeh wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know one single person like that. Wanting this is very rare and is a symptom of mental illness. Most people want to be proud of something. Granted, MacDonald's will have problems finding workers, but is that so bad? Living in Norway it is perfectly possible to slack off on the taxpayers' bill if you want to, but society doesn't collapse. People would rather avoid the low status associated with living on the dole th…

Norway is extremely different than for example US. With all due respect, I'm sorry, I can't see Norwegians happily supporting social programs if they are mostly designed to help immigrants. US is immigration based. What about Norway consisting in 15-20% of Blacks, than the other 80% coming from all over the world. I believe that about 75% of all Americans are immigrants, their children, or their grandchildren. Would…

...in which we learn the real reason you're against UBI—dirty immigrants.

I really fail to see how this can be anything other than an argument for more fair/equal wealth distribution in the world. If most countries had similar schemes, then why would the "good for nothing immigrants" go to supposedly scrounge in the US?

Re: A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory

#218

Post by just_had_tea »

314 wrote: post #109
anticon wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't mention the fact it's completely unworkable mathematically. In the UK I believe it'd cost £240 billion a year. Where the hell would anyone be able to find that money from? (Tackling tax avoidance from Starbucks isn't a credible answer). Just to put it in context, that's twice the entire NHS's budget, or 5 times our defence spending.

Checking the latest figures for 2016: 155B for pensions and welfare 56B. I assume the point is to replace both of those completely with the basic income so the net cost is not 240B, it is 29B. Not cheap, but not pie in the sky either. Sell a bank or two :)

Cut defense wastage. Uh, sorry, I meant defense spending.

Re: A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory

#219

Post by uhwhat »

Basic income would need to be pegged to the CPI or some standard of living.

I imagine partitioning living NEEDS [housing, food, transportation] as an area of the economy with its own money/token/basic-income-credits system separate from the WANT economy of everything else.

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