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Request For Research: Basic Income

blog.ycombinator.com

611–620 of 1001 posts

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#611
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes--driving down the cost of housing is one of the things I think about the most. It seems so critical to the whole equation.

I wonder if we are thinking about the housing cost problem properly. I live in NYC and there are a lot of affordable options. That's certainly not the case about the most desirable locations. But ipso facto those locations will continue going up in price. Perhaps the problem is not so much about housing cost but transportation and access to services (eg uber, doordash), which seem to be advancing and making a lot of…

Who pays for the transportation and services? The people via taxes. Who reaps the benefit? The land owner.

Tax land. Tax capital gains on land. Untax labour.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#612

"What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?" I think cheap quality housing is a huge area that would help everyone. Taxes and housing together eat up the vast majority of the earnings most people make. What could make a difference? - applying technology to building denser housing. for example, imagine cheap robotic excavation, so every house and building could bury all their parking lots and long term…

Georgism is another option to tackle the housing issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

Spot on. This is the solution.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#613
Throwaway for this--I'll get back to lurking (I'm not sure what password I used). I read it. I agree. The way there will be difficult. I've been on unemployment and noticed how pointless the weekly reports were. This will get rid of a lot of systems that need to be removed. I make good money and stand to inherit great money, but I do hope for all sentient life on Earth.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#614
Not a single comment so far has mentioned Karl Marx. This "research" proposal is merely a technocratic rehash of Marxism: the inexorable forces of materialism and technological improvements entail endless progress driven by a Hegelian spirit. This will free humans from labor and eliminate the power of capital. Thus, somehow, unlimited production will enable people to live according to the motto "from each according to his ability to each according to his needs", and people will enjoy egalitarian heaven on Earth.

Marxism has been tried, and has failed, in so many places with such bloody results. Instead of wishing that somehow advanced technology will solve the inherent problems of Marxism, maybe we could all learn from the failures of that ideology, and revive an understanding of the world inspired by the words of Locke, Jefferson, and Smith, among others.

I despair. Are we going to keep repeating the mistakes driven by the ideologies of Marx, Hegel, Kant, and Plato? For examples of the atrocious consequences of "basic income" divorced from free markets, see the Soviet Union, East Germany, Red China, Cuba, Cambodia, and more recently Venezuela.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#615
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not going to be an answer, of course. I think a good source of data could be the population of retired people. I'm pretty sure if I could afford to be retired, I could easily keep busy the rest of my life.

People who retire earlier die sooner; for each year earlier that one retires, life expectancy is shortened by two months (and the results are robust against different assumptions).[1] This would lead one to believe that working is good for your health. [1] http://freakonomics.com/2012/05/17/retirement-kills-a-new-ma...

Two months per year? To me that's worth it. I want to live as long as possible, but that is strongly based on how much I enjoy life. If the things people enjoy happen to be a little unhealthy, it may be worth it.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#616
post #355

In my opinion, "we tried this before" and it didn't work. We didn't call it Basic Income, but we have some historcal examples of large scale attempts to guarantee everyone gets a share. Famous failures include communism. I do not care how you arrange this research, it will not tell you what will happen under real world conditions. There is plenty of instructive data from the real world that you can look at. For examp…

It seems like you're assuming that in our future there will be plenty of jobs for average people to earn a 'living wage' (i.e. enough to pay for basic shelter, food, clothing, education, medical treatment, etc.). What makes you confident in that given that forecasts of economic growth show significant stagnation and trends show increased automation of jobs?

There will be jobs, they just will require more education and/or skill than jobs currently require. This is always true any time civilization advances. The entry level jobs we have currently take more education and skill than jobs took 100 or 200 years ago.

My father, who died a couple of years or so ago in his late 80s, was a high school drop out. This was not a big deal in his day. It was not a mark of shame or a barrier to getting a job. When Lincoln was president, the average education level of your typical American woman was 2nd to 4th grade (IIRC).

Google stats for "big data jobs". It is expected to produce, directly or indirectly, millions of new jobs in the next few years. Trying to fill big data jobs is currently a challenge because of a skill short fall. It is expected to get worse.

You don't want to get that much education? Then pan for gold. Stuff I have read recently indicates we have only found about 5% of the gold in the earth's crust. We are increasingly using precious metals, such as gold and silver, in the electronics to which we have all become so very attached. Gold currently is selling for around $1100/ounce. From what I gather, about 1/2 cup of gold would weigh as much as a two liter bottle of soda and could be readily sold online for about 80% of the spot price, totaling around $60k in income. It is unlikely we will be able to substitute automation for human labor any time soon for finding gold.

Every single human that exists creates a need for labor. In human history, every time we successfully automate or otherwise dramatically enhance productivity, we raise the standard of living for everyone. When we do it stupidly and badly, we breed a situation that leads to a cycle of booms and busts. See historical civilizations dependent upon distribution of river water via some system in order to grow enough food. They develop a canal system and a complex bureaucracy to run it and every few generations the complex bureaucracy that runs it breaks down, causing the civilization to hit its bust cycle.

Edit: Let me emphasize that: The HUMAN piece of the puzzle breaks down, and the whole system falls apart. You are talking about intentionally trying to create that very situation with Basic Income. Automation cannot keep working without human maintenance.

I have no desire to live in a world where machines run everything and the last man who knows how to write the code that runs them or debug that code or do the repairs dies and the rest of the sheeple sit around waiting for it to fall apart so we can rebuild civilization from the ground up like a bunch of stone age cave dwellers.

We had better find a way to educate people and distribute the work or we are incredibly, amazingly fucked.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#617
post #614

Not a single comment so far has mentioned Karl Marx. This "research" proposal is merely a technocratic rehash of Marxism: the inexorable forces of materialism and technological improvements entail endless progress driven by a Hegelian spirit. This will free humans from labor and eliminate the power of capital. Thus, somehow, unlimited production will enable people to live according to the motto "from each according t…

The Soviet Union did pretty well in its early years, with GDP growth faster than that of the US for a time. Cuba is still doing pretty well compared to similar Latin American countries at the time of the Cuban revolution. Don't know too much about the others.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#618

tptacek, please don't apply racist comments on this article. When you don't pay your bills, you simply don't riot on the streets as reaction. Likely not the fault of what you describe as "middle class white" group for enforcing municipal regulation. Likely no innocent parties on either parties involved.

Why was this down-voted?

Ask yourself this; If tptacek's comment had the races reversed, would you think it racist?

If it's racist to say, 'most crime is committed by African Americans' why isn't it racist to say 'middle class white people are responsible for levying default judgements and financial catastrophes on others?'

I'm a middle class white person. I don't wish ill on any black people, or any other people. I don't wish late fees, high default judgments or financial catastrophe on anyone.

Why do I feel bad for typing this?

Political correctness is ass-backwards.

We want to be nice to each other, we want to live fulfilling, and 'happy' lives. Political correctness as it is actualized today lies in stark contrast to those goals.

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#619
post #614

Not a single comment so far has mentioned Karl Marx. This "research" proposal is merely a technocratic rehash of Marxism: the inexorable forces of materialism and technological improvements entail endless progress driven by a Hegelian spirit. This will free humans from labor and eliminate the power of capital. Thus, somehow, unlimited production will enable people to live according to the motto "from each according t…

Not a single comment so far has mentioned Karl Marx.

I did not mention Karl Marx, but I did, in fact, mention communism. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10983248

/pedant

Re: Request For Research: Basic Income

#620

How about instead of using a "basic income" to enable people to pay for living expenses (food, housing), how about cut out the middleman and just pay for food & housing? This could be a system of college dormitories that people can live in free of rent, and includes cafeterias that serve meals free of cost. Anyone can live there, with some sort of local government oversight. You want to live somewhere nicer? Make mon…

I think you just described homeless shelters.
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