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The Future of Not Working

nytimes.com

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Re: The Future of Not Working

#51

Post by woodandsteel »

Clubber wrote: post #6

The people with the wealth pay people for one reason and one reason only: they have to. Once they no longer have to, they will lobby the government to continue to lower taxes and squawk about laziness, welfare queens, and all that garbage. This will go on for a few decades until there is an uprising of sorts, then those with the money will return to giving everyone else crumbs, or just enough to quell the uprisings.…

>The people with the wealth pay people for one reason and one reason only: they have to.

No, that is not true. Human beings are complicated, and different people do things for different reasons. There are lots of rich people like Andrew Carnegie and Bill Gates who spend the first part of their lives doing everything they can to get rich, and the second part giving it away for the benefit of mankind.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#53

Post by sdenton4 »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #23
paulpauper wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the subtlety is 'of', not 'is', which changes the meaning. Agree it's kinda a poorly written headline

It's not just the headline. This is essentially describing charity to poor communities. That's not new. The article's connection between it and "basic income" is tenuous. To be fair, that's not the fault of the article as much as the program itself. How is charity to poor rural communities with collectivist leanings a test of the vague notion of basic income? Or what will this program tell us about basic income in th…

A lovely asymmetry: econ research on people living in the west is assumed to be generalizable and applicable to populations worldwide, while research on non-westerners is assumed not to be general in scope...

Re: The Future of Not Working

#54

Post by yummyfajitas »

marmot777 wrote: post #43
rubicon33 wrote: post #13

> "The research wing of Sam Altman’s start-up incubator, Y Combinator, is planning to pass out money to 1,000 families in California and another yet-to-be-determined state." Oh, really? Where do we sign up? I'd love to be able to build my business(es) without taking investor funds.

That's a pretty cynical attitude. It's obvious the intent of this is to test a program that has the potential to keep people from drowning. I doubt you're now gasping for air as you sink below the waves.

I don't think you understand what Basic Income is. Basic income is meant to support people who desperately need it as well as wealthy hipsters who just don't feel like working.

Means-tested welfare is indeed a program with the intent of "keeping people from drowning", but that's explicitly NOT what this is about.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#55

Post by reddytowns »

marmot777 wrote: post #43
rubicon33 wrote: post #13

> "The research wing of Sam Altman’s start-up incubator, Y Combinator, is planning to pass out money to 1,000 families in California and another yet-to-be-determined state." Oh, really? Where do we sign up? I'd love to be able to build my business(es) without taking investor funds.

That's a pretty cynical attitude. It's obvious the intent of this is to test a program that has the potential to keep people from drowning. I doubt you're now gasping for air as you sink below the waves.

That's the exact opposite of a cynical attitude. It's the attitude I hope all the participants will have. If everyone receiving BI are not trying to make something better out of their lives, then UBI is no better at helping the poor then any other charity -- the old give a man a fish thing.

No US citizen in California really has to worry about starving to death. They do have to worry about losing their benefits, and in some cases having to retroactively pay them back.

I have my doubts about UBI, though. I lived in a poor neighborhood in Las Vegas. About a quarter of the residents were drug addicts, and living among them were the drug dealers. They all were on public assistance, and spent most of their time trying to steal anything they could from the people and shops around them.

Ever wonder why so many poor people vote Republican? This is it. People there were afraid to leave their homes at night and the hope was a Republican government would clean up their neighborhood for them. But I digress...

Re: The Future of Not Working

#56

Post by woodandsteel »

It's interesting how this runs counter to the two dominant political ideologies in the US.

Liberals believe that the poor are too dumb and helpless to figure out what they want, so the government should do it, both domestically and in foreign aid.

Conservatives believe that the poor are poor because they are unintelligent and lack good values (or they are acting rationally in response to liberal welfare programs), and domestic and foreign programs should be eliminated in favor of religious missions.

What programs like this are finding is the the poor are intelligent and well-motivated, and they just need an opportunity to get out of the hole they are stuck in.

Let me add that, from what I understand, foreign aid programs can be very helpful in areas like public health.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#59

Post by reddytowns »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #42
jimmywanger wrote: post #36

I think that fundamentally, the thing we're going to run up against is population growth. I think history has proven that we can live in extremely wretched conditions. By giving money to people, are we going to be increasing their living standards or just creating more mouths to feed? Note that the basic income only applies to whoever registers at the beginning of the program. Would that amount of basic income cause…

wealth is strongly inversely coorolated with population growth. Keeping people in poverty means they have more children, not the reverse.

UBI would incentivize people to have more kids. I think that would override the wealth to children correlation.

Also, wealthy people are often busy trying to maintain their own wealth. The excuse about not having kids is often about being more career oriented.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#60

Post by DanBC »

returnbuyer wrote: post #58
ImTalking wrote: post #57

Anything that reduces the oppression of women is a good thing. Freedom is the ability to make choices.

Women are not oppressed in America, they are in Islamic countries though. Somehow the solution to that is to import more Islam. Hm.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.

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