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The Future of Not Working

nytimes.com

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Re: The Future of Not Working

#61

Post by marmot777 »

jimmywanger wrote: post #47
marmot777 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wealth has the opposite effect as a number of studies have demonstrated. People with a little money in their pocket have fewer kids. I can easily find more citations if you'd like but here's an outline of the concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

"A little money" is relative. They're giving on the order of 250 dollars a year, and the income/fertility chart only really kicks in at about 10k or 20k a year. I don't know the threshold between living in crushing poverty versus simple poverty, but this amount of money wouldn't greatly affect fertility rates based on the chart, but might encourage people to have more children.

Ah, my knowledge of this was not detailed enough to catch that threshold. So in this Kenyan Village it's still $10k to $20k threshold?

Re: The Future of Not Working

#62

Post by M_Grey »

einars wrote: post #7
hackathonguy wrote: post #5

"One estimate, generated by Laurence Chandy and Brina Seidel of the Brookings Institution, recently calculated that the global poverty gap — meaning how much it would take to get everyone above the poverty line — was just $66 billion. That is roughly what Americans spend on lottery tickets every year, and it is about half of what the world spends on foreign aid." Love this.

I also liked this: A vast majority of aid — 94 percent — is noncash. Donor resistance is one reason for this; it is not easy to persuade American oligarchs, British inheritors and Japanese industrialists to fork over their money to the extremely poor to use as they see fit. “There’s the usual worries about welfare dependency, the whole ‘Give a man a fish’ thing,” said Amanda Glassman, a public health and development…

Key words to remember there... "Aid industry".

Re: The Future of Not Working

#63

Post by marmot777 »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #54
marmot777 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I get that is ultimately the idea but I guess I figured that the first stage of rolling something like this out would be to those near the edge and there's no shortage of those.

My assumption is the money would be calibrated to subsistence level so it doesn't concern me that a hipster wants to do art instead of work for money. They'll have to live simply but god bless them if they want to paint in a shared house with other hipsters. Then those who want more money will get jobs. The moral hazard of this doesn't concern me but maybe I'm misguided.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#64

Post by marmot777 »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #54
marmot777 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I apologize for calling your initial post cynical as that's right up there with guessing someone's motives. It's usually a wrong guess and, regardless, not helpful.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#65

Post by tedmiston »

spyckie2 wrote: post #8

The article's title is misleading - it is not about not working, it's about giving money directly to poor villages for 12 years to provide what is similar to basic income but meeting fundamentally different needs in a very different part of the world. That said, I think it is a fascinating anthropological read. We often do not realize how many layers of wealth we had to stand on to possess our current wealth.

What's most fascinating to me is the dollar amount: $22/month ==> $264/year. It's almost unfathomable from a Western perspective that this could cover someone's basic living expenses for a year.

I wish there were a simple way to participate as an individual. You don't have to be rich to cover one (or more) people's basic living expenses at this rate.

Edit: Here's the link to donate: https://www.givedirectly.org/give-now

You can even send money via Venmo to avoid the credit card processing fee.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#66

Post by marmot777 »

reddytowns wrote: post #55
marmot777 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your concern is the moral hazard. What if automation and other changes make impossible to find jobs for everyone, a massive challenge already, maybe already impossible?

And if everyone's included there doesn't need to be resentment as bob down the street isn't getting something you are not getting, right?

Re: The Future of Not Working

#67

Post by jayajay »

If every known resource acquisition task was automated, and the discovery of unknown non-automated tasks could be automated to be automated, we'd be post-scarcity and the concepts of working and income wouldn't be useful metrics anymore.

So, yeah machines are a big black hole and our jobs are doomed asteroids spiraling into the black hole. As they spiral into the singularity, humans will be displaced at an accelerating rate, and it will take more ingenuity and effort for humans to maintain "work". And, for what? In the asymptotic limit, the outcome should be no more jobs and "work" in a the way we currently define them, and humans will be truly free to creative pursuits. Never shall a beautiful human mind be wasted on labor which a machine can do.

At some point, machines will be the dominant species pushing civilization forward, not us.

Until then, we're forced to work, we're forced into employment because our world does not simply give us what we want. Food and spears don't fall out of the sky, so we will waste our time hunting and farming until we figure out how to make those things "fall out of the sky".

Re: The Future of Not Working

#68

Post by cdetrio »

NumberCruncher wrote: post #52

The African people would me much better off if we would stop selling them weapons and would pay a fair price for their work and natural resources. But hey, that wouldn't be a great PR action making headlines!

Of course the best solution is for everybody to just coordinate. But coordination is hard, because there are strong incentives for individuals to defect (see also "Meditations on Moloch").

Making incremental improvements is the next best hope, and this one (giving cash) could turn out to be much more effective than previous state-of-the-art interventions (giving food, medicines, books, etc.). Additionally, enough incremental improvement might reach a tipping point where the poverty/coordination trap can be escaped, and the global equilibrium shifts.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#69

Post by jimmywanger »

marmot777 wrote: post #61
jimmywanger wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A little money" is relative. They're giving on the order of 250 dollars a year, and the income/fertility chart only really kicks in at about 10k or 20k a year. I don't know the threshold between living in crushing poverty versus simple poverty, but this amount of money wouldn't greatly affect fertility rates based on the chart, but might encourage people to have more children.

Ah, my knowledge of this was not detailed enough to catch that threshold. So in this Kenyan Village it's still $10k to $20k threshold?

I don't know if there's a threshold per se, but the X-axis on the graph you cited is demarcated as 10k per line. 250 dollars a year is about 1/40th of each unit on the X-axis.

And that graph seems to apply to people all over the world, I don't see why this Kenyan village would be any different.

The fertility reductions really only seem to matter once you get to 10k or 20k of annual income a year. I agree that if you gave 10k a year strings unattached to every person in that community, fertility might drop.

However, by injecting that much capital into a poverty stricken area, fertility might actually increase, as they would be the most prosperous group by far in the area. Also, there would almost certainly be huge unintended consequences, such as massive inflation and the increase in deprivation of people not receiving the money.

Re: The Future of Not Working

#70

Post by Clubber »

morgante wrote: post #32
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. Huh? In your worldview is charity just not a thing?

Not when it comes to payroll, it isn't. You think companies are gonna start cutting payroll checks for charity's sake? They ship jobs overseas to get cheaper workers and skirt environmental protections, what do you think they are going to do when they don't need 90% of them?
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