Like the brilliant social engineer Jacque Fresco said, we should just give everyone what they need to live for free in what he called a Resource Based Economy. That is even better than giving them money. I highly recommend his book "The best that money can't buy".
People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report
451–460 of 809 posts
Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you need somebody to take away the garbage, pick the fruits and unclog the toilets So your plan is to make sure some people will die of starvation unless they accept to do these jobs? If no one is willing to do these critical jobs voluntarily, perhaps we should either pay them large amounts of money to convince someone to do them, or spread the work between more people - perhaps on a rotational basis.
If jobs are critical and unappealing, then we should pay large amounts of money for them to be done... Right now those critical and unappealing jobs are quite undervalued.
The examples specifically used above (garbage removal, plumbing) pay very well. I'd say they're valued appropriately for how little training they require.
Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report
#453If you raise the bar by $x across the board then doesn't $x gradually becomes the new bottom? If we give everyone $50k / year tax-free, would that just make $50k the new $0 relative to cost of living? The effect being the same as a progressive tax (those who make far more are far less impacted). If it is basically the same as a progressive tax, then it does strike me as a much simpler way to implement it (instead of…
The Harvard economist Greg Mankiew has a talk where he shows how a UBI + flat tax could behave the same as a progressive tax + phased out UBI: https://taxfoundation.org/universal-basic-income-ubi-means-t...
Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trying to distill 'child rearing' to $15k/year and calling it a 'waste of talent' is absurd. Not everything can (and should) be broken down into a monetary amount and optimized for. You can classify anything as a 'waste of talent' when looking through this lens. Are you a software engineer? If so, then doing literally anything apart from developing software is a 'waste of talent'. Cleaning dishes? Gardening? Exercisi…
Yes, having a software engineer cleaning dishes for a restaurant is a waste of talent. Maybe if overtime was flexible, you could suggest hiring unskilled workers to do those tasks at home. I love my kid, but it's not like he's learning cutting edge stuff that requires an engineer to teach them. And there's many hours in the evenings and weekends we spend together where he learns how his dad behaves.
A huge part of growing up is developing bonds, understanding relationships and getting your kid on a firm footing so they can deal with what the world throws at them.
A lot of that develop happens when they are not learning, or at least you don’t think they are.
Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're assuming the additional 10-20 hours is a meaningful competitive advantage. That's not a given.
Anecdote incoming. I work double full time and have done so for approaching a decade. It's definitely proven to be a significant competitive advantage in my case. I don't know too many folks who could have comfortably retired in their 20s (that didn't grow up with generational wealth). Still, I've seen many folks in esports do crazy workloads and get nowhere fast. So there's more to the formula than just pouring in m…
I mean, congrats, but if you retired comfortably in your 20s you got crazy lucky - that kind of rapid wealth acquisition isn't skill based. I used to work in the game industry getting peanuts for the same hours, we made amazing things in crunch that I am proud of, but when we started to scale back hours our product got even better because we lowered the stress and increased the healthiness of our workplace.
Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding of UBI was it’s a replacement for many existing social programs.
Where did you get that? UBI won't help people that get free housing in NYC UBI doesn't work with HCOL areas.
Many UBI proposals have suggested eliminating or reducing other programs in conjunction with their implementation.
Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For which the market should correct by increasing their compensation, thus incentivising people to return to working, no? Which drives up the cost of goods, resulting in an inflation that counteracts the UBI and gets us right back where we started.
Competition still exerts a downward force on prices, and as the cost of labor increases the cost of developing automation will become more and more attractive to replace it.
You don't need UBI then, prices will just go down towards 0 because of competition, resulting in free food / housing / clothing / mobile phones for everyone.
Only being half-sarcastic here.
Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your link leaves out the study of the Alaska Permanent Fund https://www.nber.org/papers/w24312 I believe it's left out because it contradicts the premise - it found more people actually looked for work because prior to the Alaska payment they were too poor to venture far from home.
Similar findings are repeated all across the social safety net. For example, the Scandinavian countries with their robust social programs routinely top lists for ease of entrepreneurship. [0] (e.g. Losing health insurance is big disincentive to starting a new company.) There are also have been repeated studies that found that financial stress causes people to perform worse on cognitive tasks, and removing that stress…
Ease of entrepreneurship might be high, but actual entrepreneurship lags the US where a much weaker social safety net exists.
Ow do you explain that?
Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report
#459I'm not optimistic about basic income for the average person. That said, I know that if I had basic income, I would spend my time building things for the world. There are lots of side projects that I have worked on or want to work on, but simply haven't been able to get them off the ground because I don't have the time to dedicate enough mental energy. There's too much at stake for me to compromise my current job to…
I would think that thousands of people like you trying to build something innovative and new would be well worth the investment in those who try and fail or those who are content to "waste it away" (spending their UBI and doing nothing else is still creating economic activity).
Re: People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Would fewer people in the workforce really be so bad? Yes. Someone needs to work to produce the goods and services they use, as well as fund their UBI. The more people who opt out of working, the harder everyone else must work to compensate. > What’s the carbon and water footprint of all of these goods we really don’t need but we bust our humps for anyway? People dropping out of the workforce doesn't reduce the dem…
> Yes. Someone needs to work to produce the goods and services they use, as well as fund their UBI. The more people who opt out of working, the harder everyone else must work to compensate. Workers are more productive now than they ever have been.[0] Productivity was up 253% since 1948 seven years ago. For decades they’ve been promising us the 20 hour work week, and it’s here. In fact it’s only 15 hours comparatively…
> The point is: you don’t need everyone to work full time everyday for a society to maintain a healthy standard of living.
Maintaining isn't what people are aiming for though, they want improvement. People are not satisfied by objectively living much better lives than some king or pope 500 years ago.