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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

#431

Post by pjungwir »

dragonwriter wrote: post #353
absherwin wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> Every item can be valued by seeing what people would pay for it "What people would pay for it" is a controversial quantity that can only be speculatively and uncertainly answered unless you are actually selling it in an open, unrestricted auction (even actual sale under real-world conditions often doesn't answer this, since its possible that both buyer and seller have non-financial interests which motivate the sale…

> "What people would pay for it" is a controversial quantity

Yep. A friend thinks we should have a "You bought it!" law for insurance companies that assess the value of your belongs to calculate a premium. Basically once they give you their assessment, you have to right to say, "You bought it!" and they have to take it off your hands at that price. Not that such a law could work in the real world, but it is pretty clever. I bet a lot of people wish they could use such a law for property tax assessments.

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

#432

Post by medell »

tokenadult wrote: post #174

I see no one in this active discussion has mentioned yet Charles Murray's book In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State, http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0844742236 in which Murray goes into detail about how much a program of guaranteed income for everyone would cost in the United States, and some probable effects that would have on everyone's everyday behavior. I read the book a year or two after it was publi…

Great links. Curious, how does the book address the issues of cost of living across regions? As $10k in SF is very different than $10k in St. Louis.

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

#433

Post by TeMPOraL »

ahoy wrote: post #360
tomjen3 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, but that is a feature, not a bug.

I don't follow, do you care to elaborate? Are you suggesting that welfare programs are designed to be unpopular/to be stigmatizing?

In current job-valuing society, yes.

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

#434

Post by zxcdw »

Tichy wrote: post #402
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…

The statement "people need to work 40 hours" is already obviously false. There are lots of people who don't need to work, because they already have more money than they could ever spend.

On which fields is it obviously false that the status quo is to work 40'ish hours per week?

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

#436

Post by lifeisstillgood »

medell wrote: post #432
tokenadult wrote: post #174

I see no one in this active discussion has mentioned yet Charles Murray's book In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State, http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0844742236 in which Murray goes into detail about how much a program of guaranteed income for everyone would cost in the United States, and some probable effects that would have on everyone's everyday behavior. I read the book a year or two after it was publi…

Great links. Curious, how does the book address the issues of cost of living across regions? As $10k in SF is very different than $10k in St. Louis.

It won't be so different once everyone in both places is paid 10k pa.

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

#437

Post by rayiner »

talmand wrote: post #376
rndmize wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is precisely the reason I don't understand it when people say the cost of the tax will be passed onto consumers. What cost? The tax is on profits...

You may see it that way, but most businesses do indeed see tax liabilities as a cost of doing business. Just because the profits are taxed doesn't mean it's not a cost of some sort. For instance, you could say today's taxes are the cost of doing business next year or even quarter.

But mathematically taxes don't behave like costs.

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

#438

Post by dllthomas »

absherwin wrote: post #333
dragonwriter wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

If we shift a huge portion of the tax burden to financial and real-estate assets and ignore others, will that remain at 5.8%?

If we don't ignore non-financial, non-real estate assets, then difficulty of estimating their value becomes a significant issue.

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

#439

Post by guard-of-terra »

kokey wrote: post #411
dkrich wrote: post #383

I think the main problem with this argument that software is eating everything and automation is replacing jobs is that it imagines the world as it is today, with the current set of jobs as fixed. Lest we forget a time when all goods were physical and there were no digital goods. The extent of what can be consumed by technology does have limits. But more than that, we as a society become wealthier, not poorer, when t…

That's the thing, instead of giving people a universal basic income and distorting the prices we should really keep on striving to make the essentials that people need as cheap as possible.

Which basically means things that do not scale will skyrocket in price.

You already see this as prices of education and housing grow decade to decade.

Essentials are: bad food that doesn't taste well, bad housing, bad medical care, bad transportation and bad service. That's what Soviet Union consistently delivered to every citizen and while there were vitrually no hungry, unemployed or homeless people, nobody felt happy too, everybody fought to be able to afford a tiny bit of something of quality.

In short, cheap essentials are not so cool.

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

#440

Post by zxcdw »

cheald wrote: post #337
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 economica…

> Automation reduces costs and prices, creates new job fields, and permits for specialization.

Specializing(education) takes time and effort. At what kind of rate can the technology make jobs obsolete that thesociety and workforce can keep up? As far as I am aware, technological progress is exponential, meaning that it accelerates at an accelerating pace. As such, it's inevitable that at some point people and the society as a whole can't keep up anymore.

At the point where it's simply easier to use machines, if not basic income or some other way of more or less equal resource distribution, what do you do?

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