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Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

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Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

#221

Post by karatestomp »

xwdv wrote: post #166
zelly wrote: post #157

UBI only makes sense in the science fiction world that Andrew Yang and other non-technical journalists think is somehow imminent. We still need people to make things. There are still guys hanging off the side of garbage trucks every day and people still pick fruits by hand. If no one does these things, you will starve and die. We cannot survive forever on financial engineering by bureaucrats and importing all our nec…

This is anecdotal but I haven’t seen guys hanging off garbage trucks in a long time. Around here it’s just one guy with a hydraulic arm on the truck that picks up the cans and dumps out garbage, and he does it very very efficiently. Pretty soon it should be possible to even replace the driver with a self driving truck that goes around pre determined paths in the neighborhood.

Moved to a poor, small (~250k) "metro" area midwestern city around 2008. Robot arm garbage trucks!

Moved back to a much richer one 10x larger a couple years later. No robot arm garbage trucks then, and still none now. Bags on the end of the driveway, guys hanging on trucks.

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

#222

Post by zozbot234 »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #162
Press2forEN wrote: post #110

Years ago, proponents of UBI claimed that it was a replacement for all other forms of social welfare. Now it appears by most proposals to be yet another means-tested add-on. What happened?

People studied the UBI idea and recognized the costs of giving money to everyone are so enormous that it's unworkable. That's there the means testing has come in to try to limit that. Something more like a "guaranteed minimum income" where you can't have less money than what is required to have a good standard of living is a cheaper and more effective idea that accomplishes the same goals of ending poverty.

UBI is indirectly means-tested; if you make too much money, you end up giving back as much or more in taxes and/or partial UBI clawbacks than what you would get via UBI. This actually ends up working better and being cheaper than most alternatives (including the "guaranteed minimum"), because it's comparatively easy to structure a comprehensive tax system so that it minimizes distortions on people's behavior, and hard to design a means-testing policy to the same effect. The latter is especially true given the patchwork of social-insurance programs that currently exists. Giving cash can replace many of these programs, and making the policy a 'universal' one reduces administrative costs.

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

#223

Post by kerkeslager »

zelly wrote: post #157

UBI only makes sense in the science fiction world that Andrew Yang and other non-technical journalists think is somehow imminent. We still need people to make things. There are still guys hanging off the side of garbage trucks every day and people still pick fruits by hand. If no one does these things, you will starve and die. We cannot survive forever on financial engineering by bureaucrats and importing all our nec…

> We still need people to make things. There are still guys hanging off the side of garbage trucks every day and people still pick fruits by hand. If no one does these things, you will starve and die.

Sure.

There are also millions of unemployed and disabled people who don't work, and we haven't suddenly starved and died. On the contrary, we just throw away billions of pounds of food each year[1]. So it seems that the problem isn't a shortage of workers.

Meanwhile, though, people are starving and dying, in the US, at higher levels than any other industrialized nation, because our social safety net is inadequate.

So if you are worried about people starving and dying, maybe look at what actually is causing people to starve and die.

[1] https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

#224

Post by golf1052 »

cheeseomlit wrote: post #136

If the government starts giving me enough money each month to subsist while drastically raising taxes on my earnings from employment then I'll simply stop working. I would imagine most people would do the same.

I doubt people could afford fancy tech gadgets on UBI. As others are saying most people would continue working because they want to achieve more. Do you really think Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates would quit what they're doing because of UBI?

UBI just gives you more options, yes you can stop working and pursue passions which I think would be great if more people did that. You could also maybe get a less demanding job and volunteer more.

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

#225

Post by karatestomp »

lukemichals wrote: post #175
MikeKusold wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also directly listen or subscribe to his podcast here: https://yangspeaks.com/ I refuse to support what Spotify is trying to do to the podcast market.

> I refuse to support what Spotify is trying to do to the podcast market. What are they trying to do?

Replace a standard you can use with any client with... Spotify.

[EDIT] incidentally, I'm about 90% sure they're gonna succeed and open podcasts are doomed to decline, though they'll not go away immediately. Though I do have non-computer-nerd friends who are refusing to follow their podcasts as they move, one by one, to closed platforms, usually Spotify. Still, I don't think it'll be enough to stop it.

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

#226

Post by [deleted] »

hadtodoit wrote: post #112
bt1a wrote: post #89

Trickle up, baby. Man I love Andrew Yang and what his mission is with Humanity Forward. Good move, Jack.

Same here but I really wish he wouldn't kowtow every time some wackjob group is screaming at him. He took a very moderate and reasonable stance on a lot of contentious topics during his campaign then rolled them back within a day of getting lit up by twitter trolls. I think he lost a large section of centrist voters by appearing spineless. He took the best policies from the left and right, but also seemed obligated t…

[deleted]

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

#227

Post by Passthepeas »

Pfhreak wrote: post #32
exabrial wrote: post #8

Which is incredibly charitable! Opponents to UBI only oppose the income source being tax; which is a forced wealth transfer (opposite of my money my choice).

I'm a leftist person who isn't an opponent of ubi, but is an opponent of Yang's ubi. I have no problem with raising taxes, but I do have other concerns. Namely, if everyone got $x,xxx a month, how do we ensure that rents don't just go up by that amount or wages don't go down by that amount? I worry that without a well thought out plan, UBI just ends up funneling money directly back to the wealthy (eg, landlords and b…

so by that logic, if we took money away from people the rent would go down? The answer is yes, it probably would, but not enough to negate the effect of the wealth change. With a UBI of $1,000 I would expect rent might go up in some areas by maybe up to a few hundred but this idea that rent would somehow skyrocket to the point that it would nullify any benefit seems a ridiculous assertion to me.

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

#228

Post by JoshTriplett »

zelly wrote: post #157

UBI only makes sense in the science fiction world that Andrew Yang and other non-technical journalists think is somehow imminent. We still need people to make things. There are still guys hanging off the side of garbage trucks every day and people still pick fruits by hand. If no one does these things, you will starve and die. We cannot survive forever on financial engineering by bureaucrats and importing all our nec…

1) The "U" in "UBI" means that working another job does not stop you from receiving UBI, which means it may still make sense to do so if you want more income. UBI is supposed to be enough to live on, not enough to have everything you might want; there are at least preliminary results that show UBI doesn't stop people from working.

2) UBI will tend to mean less people willing to work low-paying unpleasant jobs, which means employers will have to pay more for those jobs. People who would only take such jobs because they have to, but don't actually want those jobs, will no longer need to take them.

3) Because of (2), more research effort and investment will go into automating and otherwise reducing the number of humans required for unpleasant jobs. And with UBI, that becomes an unmitigated good, with no worry about putting people out of work.

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

#229

Post by golf1052 »

mwfunk wrote: post #197
donw wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens if a large number of people can not afford a meaningfully better lifestyle than what is possible on a UBI because of the tax increases? (Genuine question, no gotchas here)

People get a UBI regardless of whether or not they work, that's the 'U' part. So any money you get from working is additional money on top of the UBI. It would be taxed, but it's still more money. It's not like other benefits where once you start earning your own money, you lose the benefit, and thus have to make a choice between not working to keep the benefit and working 40 hours a week to make similar or marginall…

>Or, maybe you're taking that into account already, and are worried about an uncanny valley in between "not working" and "working" where a significant number of people simply don't work because that first rung in the "working" ladder isn't rewarding enough to start climbing the ladder, so they're incentivized to never work.

This was a concern with the recent economic assistance bill, the additional money from this bill going to unemployment was higher than minimum wage. Should the amount given been lowered so that "it doesn't disincentive work"? Maybe this shows that minimum wage needs to be raised?

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

#230

Post by lancesells »

ck2 wrote: post #122

how about access to health care first no, we can't do both at the same time, we can't even get half the population to wear a simple mask in the middle of a pandemic

This is what has me not liking UBI. It makes zero sense to figure out how to pay a monthly stipend that comes at an astronomical cost but not healthcare.

Free healthcare would make the country smarter, more productive, healthier, better economy, etc.

UBI looks to me like a very bad idea that takes away power from citizens over the long term. I think it would be very ugly 50 years later. Get convicted of a felony? Lose your UBI. Born in an enemy country? Lose your UBI. Late on your credit card payment? We'll just take it out of your UBI.

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