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The Future of Not Working

nytimes.com

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Re: The Future of Not Working

#201

Post by tim333 »

nowarninglabel wrote: post #20
rubicon33 wrote: post #13

> "The research wing of Sam Altman’s start-up incubator, Y Combinator, is planning to pass out money to 1,000 families in California and another yet-to-be-determined state." Oh, really? Where do we sign up? I'd love to be able to build my business(es) without taking investor funds.

I believe it's happening in Oakland for the California one at least. Your remark about building your business without taking investor funds may have been made in jest, but most people build their small businesses through debt rather than investor equity. For those interested in loans for building a small business, Kiva (who I work for) offers interest-free loans here in the U.S. to those without access to traditional…

I note in the article many recipients of the cash used it to start businesses. Maybe it's a common response.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#202

Post by tim333 »

Dagwoodie wrote: post #4

Here's how I think the only possible way this will ever be realized: A non-profit organization will have one of the highest (top 10 to pick an arbitrary number) net-worths of any company on earth.

The article states that the $66bn "it would take to get everyone above the poverty line" is "about half of what the world spends on foreign aid." Maybe they could just reallocate a bit.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#203

Post by snarf21 »

anovikov wrote: post #188

This looks so shiny only because the experiment is low-scale. In a country with an acute shortage of access to capital, small money explainably gives huge returns. If it was done to every, or even every poor, household in Kenya, it won't have resulted in anything but inflation and probably riots/genocide/burning of Give Directly workers for witchcraft. If everyone could buy that fishnet, fish in Lake Victoria will ru…

This is the thing that irritates me soo much. People come up with an idea that doing X will solve problem Y but they ignore the fact you can't just change one simple thing in a complex system and not expect other variations. Giving everyone in the country X dollars will just result in inflation like you said. Plus, it will take wealth away from those people who had wealth currently make up to a small multiple of this new income.

Adding access to clean water, plumbing and electricity is enabling and the kind of investment that will have the most return. Returns can also be had by starting to give access to credit/loans to enterprising people. I liken this issue to Democracy. You can't give a country Democracy but you can help create conditions for its citizens to build it themselves. But there is also a chance that they don't want it.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#204

Post by Amezarak »

sametmax wrote: post #191
kayoone wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Birth rate in western countries is hardly the problem.

I disagree. I think our quality of life would improve if we could half our population, once passed the painful periode where society adjusts.

The TFR of non-immigrant populations in most postindustrial countries is already below replacement rate. You don't have to do anything.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#205

Post by linkregister »

zouhair wrote: post #166
Razengan wrote: post #135

With almost 8 BILLION people on this planet soon, not everyone can meaningfully contribute to something that can't be done more efficiently by automation (which is also cheaper for everyone and easier on the environment) or done away with entirely. See [1], [2], [3] for examples from our not-so-distant past. You just cannot expect everyone to "earn" money while expecting technological progress to continue unabated. D…

> Don't want so many people? Mandate reversible sterilization at birth. Jesus fucking Christ, let's just round up all that don't have jobs and kill them all it'll go faster.

It's amazing how nobody has understood that your comment was out of exasperation and you were disgusted with the parent post.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#206

Post by flocial »

powertower wrote: post #186
cannonpr wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you honestly suggesting there is anything other than education preventing them from it ? That asides, research mathematics is only a small subset of mental tasks available to humans. There are a lot of areas that could benefit from "computation" Laws, philosophy, literature, sociology, psychology. We seem to have forgotten how much of our society is based on how our thought is applied to knowledge. Thought rather…

> Are you honestly suggesting there is anything other than education preventing them from it? Yes. The aptitude of higher abstract thinking varies greatly among different people and groups. If you are really curious, check out the IQ test about pulling info from a sports column. After that, your question becomes similar to asking why every short person can't be taught/trained to do well on a professional basketball t…

Elevating educational standards of society as a whole, especially the poor, has nothing to do with whether all disenfranchised groups have the native intelligence to become academics or well paid knowledge workers.

The number of active NBA players is in the hundreds and their careers are short. Education is a very effective weapon against multi generational poverty and the focus of international aid organizations for a reason. Someone from an impoverished background is much more likely to live a better life with more education than someone without.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#207

Post by marmot777 »

NumberCruncher wrote: post #189
marmot777 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's the point. This program's testing the basic income and I think the idea is there will be a number of tests under different conditions. If this concept proves viable, then that could serve as a model to scale it up. The problem this is trying to solve isn't that of just the developing world, the developed world is sliding toward a catastrophic failure of the system that depends on there being a jo…

>> This program's testing the basic income and I think the idea is there will be a number of tests under different conditions. IMHO there have been enough test for basic income where the basic income was decoupled from the free job market. It is called socialism / communism. All of these tests failed badly and ruined whole generations. No sane person have lived behind the iron curtain would consider it as a sustainab…

No, you've got this wrong. First off, let's distinguish our terms to prevent completely muddled thinking. There are different flavors of socialism: national socialism, communist flavor socialism, democratic socialism. You seem to lump democratic (aka European style socialism) with the heavy handed-killed-20-million-of-his-own-people Stalin-style central planning socialism. You can be opposed to democratic socialism just fine without, perhaps unintentionally, confused thinking. If you would take the time to define your terms you can avoid crying wolf.

Basic income does not presume any of the flavors of socialism, though if your particular ideology is libertarianism or conservativism then you've likely been taught to throw any sort of government program into the same category in order to attempt to discredit it.

This is basic income with no strings attached. You can take that money to buy ramen so that you can be a half starving artist or you can take a chance on that job or start the business that you've been hesitant to take a chance on because you estimated the odds of falling hard and broke were too high.

If you retire and didn't save enough in your 401k and Roth IRA's to make it to the finish line without working when you're old and tired then this might make the difference. If you fall on hard times as many human beings do at some point in their lives sooner or later, the UI would be the floor with a little padding.

There's not a single thing about this that has anything to do with the "iron curtain." Nobody thinking this through themselves using reason would arrive at your conclusions and you're probably pretty damn smart. So I suspect the problem that it is not your thinking, you are instead parroting some quasi-talking-points from some ideology or other that you subscribe to.

Please try to get beyond seeing everything that you encounter through the lens of your ideology or any ideology at all for that matter, but if you need your ideology for whatever reason, at least review and define your terms again to make sure you at least have that part right or what follows doesn't have a prayer of coming together as a cogent argument.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#208

Post by randallsquared »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #158
Razengan wrote: post #135

With almost 8 BILLION people on this planet soon, not everyone can meaningfully contribute to something that can't be done more efficiently by automation (which is also cheaper for everyone and easier on the environment) or done away with entirely. See [1], [2], [3] for examples from our not-so-distant past. You just cannot expect everyone to "earn" money while expecting technological progress to continue unabated. D…

That's a very classist attitude founded on a view of economic activity that pertained to human history only over a short period of tube and otherwise is a completely unrealistic view of the human condition. Humans are amazing creatures. Moreover there is no limit to the work that can be done, there is always something else that can or should be done should the labor become available. I can assure you, people will not…

> Moreover there is no limit to the work that can be done, there is always something else that can or should be done should the labor become available. I can assure you, people will not run out of valuable, substantive work to do.

Maybe. The existence of so many businesses with vast stores of cash in the bank makes me wonder, though. This is capacity to pay for valuable, substantive work, but it sits.

Even if people look back on this era in 100 years and note that everyone had something else to do by 2060, the sudden change seems likely to cause more traumatic social upheaval, so a peaceful transition to a post-whatever-this-is economy seems unlikely without trying something very different.

I'm quite libertarian, and I think a basic income is not fundamentally incompatible with that, if implemented correctly. It seems to me that GiveDirectly's voluntary approach is a step in the right direction.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#209

Post by NumberCruncher »

marmot777 wrote: post #207
NumberCruncher wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> This program's testing the basic income and I think the idea is there will be a number of tests under different conditions. IMHO there have been enough test for basic income where the basic income was decoupled from the free job market. It is called socialism / communism. All of these tests failed badly and ruined whole generations. No sane person have lived behind the iron curtain would consider it as a sustainab…

No, you've got this wrong. First off, let's distinguish our terms to prevent completely muddled thinking. There are different flavors of socialism: national socialism, communist flavor socialism, democratic socialism. You seem to lump democratic (aka European style socialism) with the heavy handed-killed-20-million-of-his-own-people Stalin-style central planning socialism. You can be opposed to democratic socialism j…

How long have you been living in a country where everything is basic? Your job, your income, your home, your education, your healthcare? What do you know about how humans living under sutch conditions act and how sutch systems end up? You call it ideology, I call it experience.

[Edit:] I appreciate your intent to build up a working socialism and not to fvck it up this time. But some systems simply does not work with humans, only with ants and robots.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#210

Post by Fraterkes »

malandrew wrote: post #116
paulpauper wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marx predicted that...hundred forty years ago. Hasn't happened. History suggests revolts occur when basic needs are unmet, usually after a nation falls into debt and ruin as a consequence of war

What amazes me is that people keeping keep increasing the definition of basic needs and we wonder why things become unstable. Universal healthcare is now considered a basic need. We're not even talking about basic healthcare either. I see people arguing all the time that everyone is entitled to a level of care that is for all intents and purposes a premium product that commands a premium price. If you were to tally u…

You could argue that "premium" universal healthcare can't be a basic need because it isn't sustainable, but the alternative, deciding who deserves it based on who can afford it, seems even worse. This growing sense of entitlement that many people complain about is mostly just normal people wanting all the same perks that modernity brought the wealthy, and I don't think thats unreasonable.

(As a thought experiment, imagine that premium health care was extremely cheap. It would be completely intuitive that everyone deserved it, since we are basically talking about ensuring that people stay alive/in good health.)

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