A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing • Hacker News Board

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#361

Post by PietdeVries » Tue, May 03, 2016, 1:13 PM UTC

cujo wrote: post #348

Unklejoe wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool idea. I'd advocate for an age of 25 though. An 18 year old these days is still a child. Give them a couple years into the drinking age to get their bad decisions out of the way.

Sounds like you should advocated for a drinking age of 25 instead. Or move all those other things you get to do at 18 to 25 also.

Let me know when you have this thing in place: I will start a "Spring Break Holiday Park" somewhere in the south where beer is $20 and a Rum&Coke goes for $40. Only people from 25 are allowed in.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#362

Post by eru » Tue, May 03, 2016, 1:13 PM UTC

Unklejoe wrote: post #307

pluma wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Germany at least, public retirement funds are "pay-as-you-go", i.e. you don't pay in to save up money for yourself, you pay in to finance the current payouts to other people who previously paid into the system (and so on). Of course nobody treats it that way -- you'll hear a lot of "my pension" talk especially from people close to retirement and those who are unaware of how low their pensions will be a the current…

Social security works basically the same way in the USA. Once a system like that is in place, it's very hard to stop the pipeline. I honestly don't see the purpose of that type of system either. Why create this pipeline of money anyway? Why not just take the contributions that everyone makes and put them into individual retirement accounts? Assuming the system is stable (which it's probably not), it seems there would…

Those systems were put in place when the population was robustly growing.

Also, the pay-as-you-go systems allows the politician to hand out money straight away. Making the programs instantly popular and entrenched.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#363

Post by fucking_tragedy » Tue, May 03, 2016, 1:14 PM UTC

robk wrote: post #235

blfr wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have been arguing against basic income for years now, and with some really good points[1], but I think you consistently miss the main attraction of the idea to the HN crowd. Many here believe that if people weren't forced to work for income, they would be doing things that are more valuable but also more difficult to monetize (at least initially but perhaps generally), like open source development. There is an un…

Why would anyone clean toilets when they could write/paint/sleep all day?

Because doing those activities in what is still poverty isn't fun or fulfilling.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#364

Post by pbhjpbhj » Tue, May 03, 2016, 1:16 PM UTC

MicroBerto wrote: post #226

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do mice have a concept of leisure? Exploration for its own sake? Cultural enrichment? Scientific endeavour? Also, in that experiment isn't there a complete excess of resources? We certainly don't have that, opulence would still be expensive and out of reach of a BI.

> a complete excess of resources? We certainly don't have that You seen the obesity rates in America? The people who truly enjoy "Exploration", "Cultural enrichment", and "Scientific endeavor" are not those that I'm worried about in this world. Most of the world does not operate like that, nor do they use (or even understand!) such phrases.

Yes. Obesity is far more complex than that, I'm also looking at the global perspective.

Obesity to me is about lack of resources for better nutrition (though companies push junk pretty hard), lack of education, and lack of will power.

FWIW I'm substantially overweight despite being poor enough to need to miss meals in the past couple of years.

So give people BI and they'll just get blazed/drunk all the time, and make other mischief, is that your assessment?

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#365

Post by eru » Tue, May 03, 2016, 1:16 PM UTC

PietdeVries wrote: post #357

goda90 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about children are included, then provide X% to parents for child care expenses, and X% to a fund that the child can't access until 18. That way we don't have to do free higher education. Public universities can expect each student to have close to XXXXX dollars saved away and set tuition accordingly.

Hmm... So with everyone getting free money, including the children, there is no need for a father to take care of the family when he decides to diforce, right? Afterall, the family gets a good deal of income even when daddy is gone. So marriage will no longer be a bond forever, it will be a bond until something nicer comes along since there is no financial penalty anymore: no pressure to stay together for the kids. M…

Equally snarky:

Is a family that's only together for the money worth keeping around?

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#366

Post by lmm » Tue, May 03, 2016, 1:18 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #331

lmm wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-empirically-validated numbers obscure a lot more than they clarify. The scarmig comment you link to shows that almost all of the effects you included were irrelevant and this whole exercise was worse than useless. Using this much precision at this level of accuracy can only ever mislead.

It's not about precision, it's about knowing if we are even in the ballpark. And it's an incredibly valuable exercise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem It's also about knowing what facts need to be true for a BI to work. Then we know what facts we need to verify to determine if it's true, in contrast to all the meaningless verbiage in this thread. Also, Scarmig's comment was quite valuable. It showed exact…

> Also, Scarmig's comment was quite valuable. It showed exactly what the driving effect is - that's precisely why you should do a back of the envelope calculation.

And the driving effect turned out to be a disputed premise that we already knew about from our directional, non-quantitative discussions. The quantitative side is just a meaningless overcomplication (the monte carlo part especially), especially when none of the parameters was empirically validated. You wouldn't value a company you were thinking about investing in that way.

A quantitative examination would be valuable if we agreed on the premises, or if we disagreed on conclusions but weren't sure where the disagreement on premises that was driving this was. Neither of these scenarios is the case for basic income. We know what the questions under dispute are; it's time for empirical experiments.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#367

Post by PietdeVries » Tue, May 03, 2016, 1:18 PM UTC

vanviegen wrote: post #28

amelius wrote: post #5

I'm still wondering about one thing: if everybody has a basic income, then who will be doing the dirty jobs like collecting our waste? Will the price for waste collecting go up? And will there then be a kind of economic "inversion", where the intellectual people prefer to work on interesting stuff at the expense of money, while the "non-intellectual" (need a better word here) people will make all the money doing the…

Apart from the extra income, consider that most people don't actually want to be hanging around their houses all day every day. Of course, employers may have to make working conditions more attractive and many people may want to work shorter weeks. Hurray for quality of life, I say!

Sure - or alternatively, employers move to another country where wages are lower and employees complain less. China for instance. Think back: what is still entirely made in the US or the UK? What can we still produce without China? And why with free money down the streets would that all over a sudden change or improve? But it will change in a worse way when employees want better working conditions...

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#368

Post by ComteDeLaFere » Tue, May 03, 2016, 1:19 PM UTC

A basic income fails on the same point as increasing the minimum wage - neither provides much additional opportunity in life, both simply make being poor and disenfranchised more palatable.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#369

Post by yummyfajitas » Tue, May 03, 2016, 1:19 PM UTC

adwf wrote: post #339

yummyfajitas wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Child care is easily available to working mothers? House cleaning services are cheap and readily available to all skilled workers? Professionals sit in the back of their car working on their laptop while a driver watches the road? There are lost of things to do. We have a situation of labor scarcity, not a surplus. Complaining about a labor surplus right now is like a 350lb man eating french fries on the theo…

For the correct pay, yes. Some jobs aren't paid enough for people to do and still afford to live. Basic income actually fixes that by giving people a baseline to live off, upon which their salary can build.

If those jobs "aren't paid enough for people to afford to live" then India should be full of a billion rotting corpses. I was there last week and I feel like I would have noticed the apocalypse.

A much better solution than BI would be a guaranteed job and/or an expanded EITC. These solutions - while not sounding as cool and hipster as BI - have no labor disincentive and cost a lot less.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#370

Post by chongli » Tue, May 03, 2016, 1:19 PM UTC

akshatpradhan wrote: post #167

mcv wrote: post #130

Interesting how this article spins Basic Income as something of particular interest to conservatives while liberals would object to it. I suppose that can help sell the concept to highly partisan anti-liberals, but I know plenty of liberals and progressives who strongly support Basic Income. The idea that the people employed in the bureaucracy managing the current mess of programs losing their job is a silly concern.…

>I suppose that can help sell the concept to highly partisan anti-liberals, but I know plenty of liberals and progressives who strongly support Basic Income. Anecdotal experience. My anecdotal experience is the opposite where the liberals I know believe increasing the minimum wage is that "next big step forward." They won't even give the idea of Basic Income a chance.

Those people are neoliberals, not progressives.