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Guaranteed Minimum What?

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Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#61

Post by bryanlarsen »

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #44

I really don't understand why ideas like the Negative Income Tax aren't being considered before Universal Basic Income. In that scenario, the government just sets an income floor and pays the difference ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax ). UBI makes little sense whenever someone making 500K a year still gets it unconditionally. The marginal utility of that is nil, but its tax implications are massiv…

Negative income tax is just Friedman's name for UBI. They're functionally identical.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#62

Post by maverick_iceman »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #2

The early adopters will be the largest companies with the most to gain from improvements in efficiency. This pattern is actually the one I'm worried about the most. New tech is giving outsize advantage to the major players across almost every industry, who can afford to invest in creating internal teams for these big new technologies. I see this in every industry I encounter. The middle class worker lost out over the…

Big companies get blindsided by new tech all the time. Think IBM vs Microsoft.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#63

Post by redleggedfrog »

I hate to say this, and this is in no way a troll, but I believe the solution for this will eventually be to kill the poor.

Not directly, at least I don't think, but through lack of health care, lack of shelter, lack of education, poor diet, use in waging war, incarceration, and probably once they get desperate and try and get theirs, being labelled terrorists.

People who have money, and therefore power, in the United States are not going to give it up so someone down the economic scale can have a modicum of comfort and dignity and purpose. They will, carefully and covertly, and maybe even inadvertently, remove them.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#65

Post by SirensOfTitan »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #61
SirensOfTitan wrote: post #44

I really don't understand why ideas like the Negative Income Tax aren't being considered before Universal Basic Income. In that scenario, the government just sets an income floor and pays the difference ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax ). UBI makes little sense whenever someone making 500K a year still gets it unconditionally. The marginal utility of that is nil, but its tax implications are massiv…

Negative income tax is just Friedman's name for UBI. They're functionally identical.

UBI (at least in all the circles I've seen) refers to basic income wherein the government gives an unconditional sum of money to citizens. Negative income tax is not unconditional.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#66

Post by CJKinni »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #50
chris_va wrote: post #33

I realize that UBI is a very popular position on HN, so I am hoping someone here has given this more thought and can comment. My problem with UBI is that all tests to date look great, but have only been done on a micro level. The fundamental issue I would like addressed is the macro scale inflation you would expect when redistributing trillions of dollars without commensurate economic value being created directly. Mo…

Why would you expect inflation? All sane UBI proposals don't create money, they just move money from rich people to poor people. If you're a Friedman disciple, then "inflation is a monetary phenomenon" and we can stop there. If we're moving money from rich people to poor people, perhaps we'll see the prices of stuff rich people buy go down and the prices of stuff poor people buy go up. The vast majority of stuff poor…

> All sane UBI proposals don't create money, they just move money from rich people to poor people

I'm not very educated in this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding was that while UBI doesn't create money, but it can move money from people with a lower ratio of money-spent to money-made, to people with a higher ratio. If that's the case, the money that's actively being used should increase.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#67

Post by the_gastropod »

chris_va wrote: post #33

I realize that UBI is a very popular position on HN, so I am hoping someone here has given this more thought and can comment. My problem with UBI is that all tests to date look great, but have only been done on a micro level. The fundamental issue I would like addressed is the macro scale inflation you would expect when redistributing trillions of dollars without commensurate economic value being created directly. Mo…

The best explanations I've heard effectively make the assertion that a country's land is collectively owned by its citizens. Its citizens can then charge rent (via taxation) to individuals or corporations using the land. UBI is the distribution of that rent.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#68

Post by AndrewKemendo »

maverick_iceman wrote: post #62
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #2

The early adopters will be the largest companies with the most to gain from improvements in efficiency. This pattern is actually the one I'm worried about the most. New tech is giving outsize advantage to the major players across almost every industry, who can afford to invest in creating internal teams for these big new technologies. I see this in every industry I encounter. The middle class worker lost out over the…

Big companies get blindsided by new tech all the time. Think IBM vs Microsoft.

More accurate to say "Big companies have traditionally been blind sided by new tech..."

I'm not aware of any major example of this since the introduction of the iPhone.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#69

Post by nfriedly »

mabbo wrote: post #27
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #2

The early adopters will be the largest companies with the most to gain from improvements in efficiency. This pattern is actually the one I'm worried about the most. New tech is giving outsize advantage to the major players across almost every industry, who can afford to invest in creating internal teams for these big new technologies. I see this in every industry I encounter. The middle class worker lost out over the…

> New tech is giving outsize advantage to the major players across almost every industry, who can afford to invest in creating internal teams for these big new technologies. Oohh, this very much. Inside Amazon warehouses, there are tens of thousands of employees called 'Pickers'. They walk around with these handscanners with 300x300 pixel screens that tell them where to go and what item to get next. For two years, my…

I think the only realistic way for a small player to beat Amazon at selling physical goods is to charge more and convince customers that it's worth it.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#70

Post by wvenable »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #6

That is a pretty well presented argument for mass unemployment. But it suffers from all such arguments in that is extrapolates "today" into "tomorrow" without acknowledging that there are literally billions of variables at work. A simple example of the challenges this sort of reasoning present; assume you're a being that perceives time very slowly, perhaps your lifetime is a mere 100 milliseconds rather than 100 year…

> Technology shifts however have not resulted in a 'net loss' of employment opportunities when looked at in the full view, ever.

This rebuttal suffers from the same problem, it extrapolates "yesterday" into "tomorrow". A computer isn't the same sort of thing as a steam-powered mill or a printing press. A robot isn't a tractor. When we create machines that are simply better at work than humans both physically and mentally -- there isn't anywhere to go from there.

There will always be jobs for people but we're eliminating jobs at a fast pace and there isn't anything replacing it. We aren't doing new things that require new jobs; we're doing the same things more efficiently with less people. This should lead to the future utopia of old science fiction but we will need to re-define what it means to be a functioning member of society.

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