751–760 of 1001 posts
http://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html
The fear drive for basic needs is an innate motivational quality in humans that should not be artificially taken away.
Only upon overcoming the fear of basic needs can a human evolve and pursue more enriching needs.
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…
> "basic income" divorced from free markets, see the Soviet Union, East Germany, Red China, Cuba, Cambodia, and more recently Venezuela. 1. There was no universal basic income in any of these places. 2. The proposal discussed here does not say anything about abolishing free markets. 3. Proof by analogy is fraud.
The notion that one's income ought to be guaranteed regardless of the value of one's work, or even of its existence, has its origins in the Marxist claim that people should get whatever they need regardless of personal, intellectual, or capital differences (couched under a general denunciation of private property and of non-labor theories of value).
European socialists have been advocating for Basic Income --aka "social dividends"-- since the 60s at least.
Things that would help everyone, regardless of income, without depending on a radical restructuring of entitlement spending, that seem like things startups could actually do: * Equally credible alternatives to university education for professions that don't involve students shouldering $100k-$200k in debt based on decisions they have to make when they're 18 years old. * Empirical, blinded, skills-assessment based tur…
> Products that offer serious competition for incumbents in the financial sector to bid down the 7-10% of the economy taken by financial services. The limiting factor here is the regulatory regime, which makes it all but impossible to move money around without using a bank as an intermediary. That gives the banking cartel effective veto power on all new financial services. The key reform here is to separate the movem…
Debit cards?
Abraham Maslow addressed the psychology of basic needs in the 1940's. http://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html The fear drive for basic needs is an innate motivational quality in humans that should not be artificially taken away. Only upon overcoming the fear of basic needs can a human evolve and pursue more enriching needs.
Why not just eliminate that in the first place and proceed directly to the "more enriching needs"?
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…
> "Marxism has been tried, and has failed, in so many places with such bloody results." This isn't Marxism, that's a lazy comparison. At its core, Marxism is about shared access to the means of production. Basic income has nothing to do with changing who owns the means of production (or at least, it could mean that, but it doesn't have to mean that). Furthermore, whilst Marx had some interesting ideas, he also had at…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The money for the basic income comes from taxation. Even though everyone would get it, higher tax rates on people with middle or high incomes would mean they were no better off, or worse off. This isn't supposed to be a way to make everyone $x per month better off, it's a way to change incentives and replace welfare.
What I'm curious about is what's stopping a large portion of the population from simply quitting their jobs to live off basic income, thus decreasing the potential pool from which taxes to pay for basic income can be extracted? If it really worked out like you say it would, where people with middle or high incomes are no better off, I wonder what they would think when suddenly large swathes of the population are able…
Basic income proposals usually work something like this (numbers all made up, but close to those I've seen):
Each person gets something around the poverty level (say $10k -$15k per year). The taxes that are raised to pay for it would increase gradually based on income up so that it would be a wash for someone making $55k a year, and once you start making more than $75k a year, you start paying more.
If you look at those numbers anyone who decides they can live off of the basic income was unlikely to have been making enough to pay any federal income tax at all, much less enough to have been contributing to the extra UBI tax.
> where people with middle or high incomes are no better off, I wonder what they would think when suddenly large swathes of the population are able to live off the dole without busting their humps.
They will be living off the dole at the poverty level, not living middle class lifestyles.
I'm very skeptical of basic income as commonly understood. The typical basic income program I've seen goes something like this: give every person in the country $10k to live on, no strings attached. [a] 1) As defined above, this is horribly inefficient and expensive. I, a software engineer in Silicon Valley, would receive this $10k. How does this benefit society? I already make over $100k; I don't need additional inc…
> 1) As defined above, this is horribly inefficient and expensive. I, a software engineer in Silicon Valley, would receive this $10k. How does this benefit society? I already make over $100k; I don't need additional income support. So give basic income only to people doing less than the basic income, and take it away once you are doing more. That's how it's been implemented in some countries, and I don't see any reas…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, but all of those sound like things that are going to help people who were already going to be successful to be even more successful. College debt, for example, is a problem for those who were successful enough to get into college into the first place, and who, simply by getting into college, are already increasing their lifetime earnings by millions of dollars. Technological services for K-12 ed is pushing a s…
I'm not a big believer in minimizing college debt. I'm a believer in minimizing college . People who grow up in wealthy families naturally find themselves on a college track that seamlessly routes them to elite schools when they're 18 years old. People who grow up in poverty aren't on that track and might not even have much agency (due to their circumstances, requirements to work young, entanglements with the law) un…