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Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

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

#331

Post by tjr »

mynewwork wrote: post #235
hackinthebochs wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absurd. People will work, they just won't "work for the man" if they don't want to. They will do things they enjoy. They will be creative. They will play sports. They will volunteer, etc etc. Ask yourself: what would you do with your life if you had nothing to compel you into the daily grind for survival? If your basic needs were guaranteed to be met, what would you want to accomplish? Imagine a world where t…

Being a waiter, cook, barista, janitor, retail floor worker, or cashier are all 'working for the man' that few people really enjoy. So restaurants, coffee shops and basically all stores disappear in your proposed only "do things they enjoy" world. Which is good, because no one would work construction, or do plumbing, or review building permits for safety in a basement office in city hall for fun either, so there woul…

I would be a lot more inclined to find value and even enjoyment in being a waiter or cook if my desire (quite plausible to imagine) was to own and operate a restaurant. Likewise, I wouldn't mind so much doing janitorial work or running the cash register in my own shop.

Maybe what would disappear is the huge retail / food service chains, in favor of passionately-run local businesses?

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

#332

Post by dragontamer »

daraul wrote: post #269
streptomycin wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A certain percentage of the population would stop working entirely since they no longer need to. True. The problem is, as things are now, a certain percentage of the population will be forced to stop working as they are made obsolete by increasingly efficient globalization and automation. As that percentage increases, eventually either society will collapse or something fundamental will have to change (such as implem…

This is a powerful point to ignore. The Great Recession has shown this trend might be establishing itself already; the percentage of people not participating in the workforce in any fashion spiked, hasn't recovered, and isn't showing promising signs of ever recovering. What a basic income will tend to do however is reduce the need for a minimum wage. Currently the minimum wage exists to solve a problem: People need t…

On the contrary, I see a falling dollar in the world market which is reinvigorating the US Manufacturing industry. As China's middle class grows, they become impatient with China's loose policy of eradicating their own currency to promote local jobs. The Chinese middle class has begun to rise, and with it, the cost of production in China.

In the US, the weaker economy has hurt the US Dollar, making manufacturing cheaper again in the US. So for the first time in over a decade, Apple Computers is building a US Factory.

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

#333

Post by absherwin »

dragonwriter wrote: post #307
absherwin wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that the vast majority of wealth in this country in held in liquid assets or in real estate which is already taxed based on value, why do you suppose that a scheme to tax it would be more complex than the corporate tax system which employs on the order of ten thousand people and generates returns that are often thousands or even tens of thousands of pages and has been shown to be amenable to a wide variety of g…

> Given that the vast majority of wealth in this country in held in liquid assets or in real estate Source? > There will be some complicated edge cases but there will be relatively few and the ability to game them is less because wealth is a simpler concept than income. How is wealth a "simpler concept" than income. AFAICT, income is far simpler (and, in fact, involves a strict subset of the assessments necessary in…

Non-financial non-real estate assets account for 5.8% of the total according to the Fed's flow of funds report (Z.1) table B.100: http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/Current/z1r-5.pdf. Note this also includes non-profits but that's a relatively small distortion.

Wealth is the value of everything you have less what you owe. Every item can be valued by seeing what people would pay for it, which is usually just its current market price. How do you determine income objectively? You could merely take wealth at two points in time but our society has declined to define it that way because much of the money coming in might go to some sort of expense which ought to be excluded, which is neither objective or simple, and because some changes (such as fluctuations in asset prices) are assumed to be transitory and therefore impractical to tax. The latter is actually the source of most of the perfectly legal tax evasion in this country: Hold stocks, generate value, pay nothing until you sell which needn't be ever.

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

#335

Post by sukuriant »

Vivtek wrote: post #236
twoodfin wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but unfortunately I don't think "basic income and no other welfare programs" is a politically stable policy. No sooner will it have been introduced than politicians will be tempted to screw with it to help a favored constituency. Go to work as an inner city teacher? Here's an extra 20% in your BI. Live in an area damaged by a hurricane? We'll bump your BI for a year or two. I don't think a "simpler" tax code…

Go to work as an inner city teacher? Here's an extra 20% in your BI. So ... politicians would suddenly start to pay people to teach in the inner city? Those scoundrels! I can see why you're opposed to this concept.

They already do. Working in an inner-city can substantially reduce your college loans as a teacher, especially if you were getting something higher, like an ED.D. (doctorate in education)

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

#336

Post by Futurebot »

Jd wrote: post #320
Futurebot wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should welcome this. For those left in the job market: - remuneration would likely improve - only motivated people would be left, so "pretending" to enjoy a job and all other kinds of fakery diminishes - artificial competition for jobs would decrease drastically - the ability to change jobs becomes extremely fluid on both sides of the table(with liberalized hire/fire policies [employer-side] plus a lack of worry a…

-"remuneration would likely improve" why? -"artificial competition for jobs would decrease drastically" why is artificial competition important? You are saying that it will be easier for qualified people to get jobs because unqualified people won't bother to apply any more?

Rumeneration would improve because of the reduction in the number of people in the "reserved labor" pool, which means lower competition for each position (currently, there are 3 people for each available job opening, as an example), which raises wages. Additionally, the existence of an alternative income stream means that you cannot use the threat of "no income" to hold wages down. Finally, these same forces will mean that "dirty" jobs will no longer be able to bank on the marginal status of potential employees to keep their wages lower - the example of the toilet scrubber (before we get toilet cleaning Roombas, of course) is a useful one. If a potential toilet scrubber can think "do I do this dirty job for only slightly more than the BI, or do I find another one?", then the wage is forced to rise if you want someone scrubbing your toilet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour

Artificial competition going away is important, because it reduces the "fake" demand for positions; those that would rather not be there won't, which takes the pressure off that position (reducing its perceived scarcity/value.) This has both the above-described wage effects, and a cultural effect: you no longer have people pretending that they want a job, lying to get jobs, inflating their resumes, gladhanding, etc. You're only there if you want to be.

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

#337

Post by cheald »

zxcdw wrote: post #313

I don't understand how people oppose unconditional basic income without also opposing the fact that automation decreases the amount of working hours available for a person(or in other words, the amount of jobs ), and thus decreases the amount of income per person, while maintaining productivity stable if not increasing it, thus making all sorts of goods cheaper. Someone enlighten me. These discussions always seem so…

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 economically viable for us to purchase and consume goods produced two thousand miles away, rather than having to spend our time tending our gardens so we can make sure that we have food to eat this week. Bemoaning automation as the death of the common man's ability to feed himself is just as silly as it was in Eli Whitney's time.

People will only need to stop working when automation reaches the point that their needs are met without it imposing a burden of work on anyone else. Of course, this will be the point at which the robot revolution will begin, and humanity is doomed.

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

#338

Post by 127001brewer »

lettergram wrote: post #249

I disagree with this article almost entirely. Yes, labor jobs are on the decline, but service jobs are staying steady if not increasing. The "demand for unconditional basic income" is a joke, yes it's possible to attempt to initiate something where every person receives $10,000 a year, but the money has to come from somewhere. If the money for this basic income comes from taxation, then both the government loses net…

I have disagreements with parts of the article, including the following:

The result is that young people are not being allowed to grow up. In the 1960s the average first-time house buyer was 24 years old, and as late as 2002 it was 28. The average is now 37.

I have disagreement with the above because, generally, "young people" are delaying getting married and having children [1] as well as purchasing housing. And, for some, this is due to greater economic opportunities, especially for women.

Also, there is a type of "basic income" that is surprisingly increasing: disability.[2]

[1] http://nationalmarriageproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/0... [2] http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

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

#339

Post by jlgreco »

antitrust wrote: post #268

The problem with unconditional basic income is that there's no incentive to do anything beyond the minimum. Like most utopian plans, this idea relies on the belief that humans will get up and do things in large numbers. We can't even get them to voluntarily recycle and quit beating their kids.

You've probably got a pretty good job right now, and some decent savings, right?

Why? Surely you could quit your job, find a much simpler one with less responsibilities, and move into a trailer and subside on tubers and rice. Much cheaper, you don't have to work nearly as hard, and less responsibility!

Of course you wouldn't do this because you like the lifestyle that your job allows you to have (and likely like your job as well).

The ability to be poor and not die does not automatically make people satisfied with being poor.

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