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

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#431

Post by morgante » Tue, May 03, 2016, 2:14 PM UTC

Unklejoe wrote: post #427

morgante wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's offensive. I am 23 and have lived away from home since I was 17. I've been financially independent since I turned 18. Don't stereotype.

That's quite the accomplishment, and is by far not the norm. I am 25 and have only been financially independent since 23, and even I am the anomaly amongst my peers. I don't see what's wrong with my stereotype in this case. Most people under 25 are not financially independent, and it's mainly due to the society we live in, not the children themselves. When my Dad was growing up, people had full time jobs at 16 years…

Stop calling us "children." It's offense and rude. How very convenient that the cutoff of adulthood is your own age—if you're going to insult vast numbers of functional adults, at least insult yourself in the process. Silly child.

First of all, you are in fact wrong. The majority of young adults do in fact live independently. [0]

Second of all, if you think that adulthood isn't reached until 25, why would you be advocating for reinforcing this supposed infantilization?

[0] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/07/29/more-snake people-living-with-family-despite-improved-job-market/

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#432

Post by Retric » Tue, May 03, 2016, 2:16 PM UTC

random_upvoter wrote: post #379

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.

That is mainly because "these days" 18 year olds are no longer empowered to make any relevant decisions. You propose to keep treating them like children for seven more years. The day they become 25 you'll say "My gosh, they're 25 now but they're STILL like children!". It is my opinion that this huge collective distrust towards youth is one of the biggest hidden problems of today's society. If it was up to me, kids wo…

There are plenty of biological changes from ~18-25 which impact reasoning. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1411647...

In the end all society's have a baby-elder process with many stages. We let 15 year old's risk their and others lives driving multi thousand pound vehicles at 70+MPH. We keep prescription medication behind many additional hoops even for well educated 60 year old's.

IMO, the real difference is how much education people need. A 15 year old can dig a ditch just fine, but cancer research takes quite a bit more. In the end society simply values 15 year old's time less.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#433

Post by takno » Tue, May 03, 2016, 2:19 PM UTC

rhino369 wrote: post #421

takno wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring the government's costs, people on welfare in the UK can easily end up spending 20 hours a week on claiming that welfare, spread between having to transport themselves to attend a weekly signing on session, making a set number of job applications that meet the criteria (at the same time as conducting a real job search), attending worthless courses and filling out the paperwork. If you remove the moral judgeme…

That's not really a cost to society. It's a cost of time from those who have plenty of time to spend.

They are, last I checked, members of society. It's also unhelpful to assume they have the time to spend on this - low income already means that basic things like shopping and getting around take a lot longer since they can't pay for convenience, and they could be spending the time they have on education or even hunting for actual jobs rather than going through a meaningless tick-box approach.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#434

Post by legutierr » Tue, May 03, 2016, 2:19 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #385

legutierr wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the middle class in India can afford help, but those servants live in conditions that in the US would be considered scandalous. India is not a good example at all to support your position, for this and a whole host of other reasons. > We simply don't have the problem of not enough jobs. I would argue that the proof of the emergence of structural unemployment is not in the current rate of unemployment, but in how…

Yes, India is a poor nation. Virtually everyone there - including the software engineers - is poorer than a burger flipper in the US. I would argue that the proof of the emergence of structural unemployment is not in the current rate of unemployment, but in how long it took for us to return to this level after the housing crisis. So your claim isn't that jobs don't exist, but merely that it takes people time to find…

> So your claim isn't that jobs don't exist, but merely that it takes people time to find them.

No, my claim is that it will take more and more time for new jobs to be created, and for laid-off workers to retrain for them. At the beginning of a recession, the jobs don't exist because they have been destroyed, and they are only re-created because the persistence of demand for goods and services--driven primarily by consumer demand--compels it.

I believe that at a certain point, in some future recession, that process will take so long, and will be so expensive, that supporting the levels of consumer demand necessary for economic recovery will be infeasible without government intervention at a scale even larger than what is envisioned with regards to basic income itself. That is, unless basic income is instituted first.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#435

Post by morgante » Tue, May 03, 2016, 2:21 PM UTC

panic wrote: post #148

weddpros wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I don't see any moral justification for a software engineer earning more than someone collecting waste" That's because moral justification isn't at the center of our society. The market is. Many attempts have been made to switch from the market to something else, not many were brilliant. The "lucky historical accident" you cite isn't one... It's just the way our society was built. Also you could argue on many differ…

That's because moral justification isn't at the center of our society. The market is. So how much do you pay your friends to hang out with you? I've been going with $20 a visit, but I've heard that might be a little on the low side these days.

The market rate is closer to $100, at least in luxury cities like New York.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#436

Post by Unklejoe » Tue, May 03, 2016, 2:22 PM UTC

random_upvoter wrote: post #379

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.

That is mainly because "these days" 18 year olds are no longer empowered to make any relevant decisions. You propose to keep treating them like children for seven more years. The day they become 25 you'll say "My gosh, they're 25 now but they're STILL like children!". It is my opinion that this huge collective distrust towards youth is one of the biggest hidden problems of today's society. If it was up to me, kids wo…

I think it's mainly because these days, it's much harder for an 18 year old to make an indipendent living than it was back in the day. Today, most people don't even begin their careers until after college, which is usually around 23 at the earliest. When my Dad was growing up, it was not unusual for 16 year olds to begin working full time to support themselves. By 25, most people were already well on their way to marriage. This is not the case today. Today, people who are 18 are usually still dependent on their parents.

It's not the children's fault, either. It's just a fact of the times. More schooling is required than before, and continuous schooling shelters people from having to make many real world decisions. It's easy to live a "don't care" lifestyle during college, only to be hit with reality hard once you graduate. I've personally experienced this.

There is a major difference in meltalities of someone who's been in school their entire life and someone who's been in the "real world" for a few years.

I'm not sure of your age, nor am I suggesting that it would have any negative impact on your perception here, but we seem to have different perceptions of the youth of today. I am 25 years old and I can only speak on my experiences.

And my experience shows that there's not much of a difference in maturity between an 18 year old senior in High School and a 22 year old Junior in college.

However, there's a huge difference between a 22 year old Junior in college and a 24 year old who's been working for a year.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#437

Post by DanielBMarkham » Tue, May 03, 2016, 2:23 PM UTC

ChrisLomont wrote: post #387

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #25

The reason UBI has such broad appeal is that, well, people are able to do basic math. Take for instance the amount spent on the bank bailouts, which were supposedly done to help stimulate the economy. If you'd just let the banks fail, you could have spent the same money giving everybody a check for somewhere around 20K (the number is debatable). Hate poverty? The U.S. has spent more than 5 Trillion on it over the las…

>If you'd just let the banks fail, you could have spent the same money giving everybody The bailouts were asset swaps, repaid with a gain for the taxpayer [1]. They were not cash giveaways. Comparing this to simply giving cash to people is ludicrous. The most at risk was about 2T, with only 650B actually out at any time, which at your claim of 20K per person, only pays for 32 million people. You're off by an order of…

You seem to be in search of an argument. I will not provide you with one.

Yes, the math is plain wrong. No, it does not change the point. I am not writing an essay or presenting a white paper on UBI. Heck, I'm not even supporting UBI except in terms of "let's experiment"

So that was a wonderful tear down of my math, which I expected, but it doesn't change my thesis any: whatever amount of money you would like to provide for good causes, a good case can be made to eliminate the middleman and provide that money directly to everybody -- no qualifying, no overhead, no gaming the system, no complex system of administration.

I'm not in favor of massive tax hikes. I'm also not in favor of bandying around the slogan "UBI". As I said, until there's some real policy there, it looks attractive on the surface. I outlined the reasons why it looks attractive. That's about all we can say about it right now.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#438

Post by TheCoelacanth » Tue, May 03, 2016, 2:23 PM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #170

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…

That's already happening. I pay the guy mowing my lawn as much as the 40th percentile IT or programmer working at my company.

Do you give him the salary and benefits of a 40th percentile programmer and pay all of his expenses in addition to that? Do you pay him as much as the billable rate of a 40th percentile programmer?

I doubt either one. To compare a full-time employee's hourly wage to an hourly billable rate you will generally want to multiply the hourly wage by about 2.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#439

Post by yummyfajitas » Tue, May 03, 2016, 2:23 PM UTC

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #423

yummyfajitas wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would it spur innovation? After enacting a BI, we've just reduced the labor supply and funneled resources toward consumption (since rich people invest, poor people consume, and we've shifted resources from rich to poor). Labor supply = Labor servicing consumption + labor servicing investment Rearranging this implies: Labor providing investment = labor supplied - labor providing consumption Simple arithmetic shows…

More money for consumers -> more money that can be earned by businesses -> more incentive to come up with innovative things for people to spend money on

Forget about money - that's a red herring which is confusing you.

Humans are needed to actually invent those innovative things. But in the BI world, we have fewer humans actually devoting their time to this. (See simple arithmetic above.)

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#440

Post by morgante » Tue, May 03, 2016, 2:24 PM UTC

redsummer wrote: post #184

arximboldi wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if that would actually be the case, but if it were, the question would be: is it actually a bad thing? I don't see any moral justification for a software engineer earning more than someone collecting waste [1]. In fact, it is normal that as our society gets more educated and the supply of unskilled workers goes down, a lot of hard manual labor will become expensive. This is already the case with mining,…

"I don't see any moral justification for a software engineer earning more than someone collecting waste" Garbage Disposal people earn over $100k. Software engineers earn about $80k. A job that can be outsourced or automated is not valuable. http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/24/news/economy/trash-workers-h...

> A job that can be outsourced or automated is not valuable.

Garbage disposal is at this point a lot closer to automation than software development.