The indignity of no work • Hacker News Board

Re: The indignity of no work

#91

Post by smsm42 » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 1:31 PM UTC

chiph wrote: post #79

kevingadd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What numbers, specifically? You didn't cite any and there haven't been many real-world studies or experiments to produce data on the costs/results of a basic income program. Something this complicated isn't going to be accurately modeled by a couple economists purely using estimates...

Caveat: Not a professional analysis, and not the OP. There's 248 million people ages 16 and older in the US, of which 63% are in the labor force[1]. So 156 million people are available for work (not all of whom are employed). Total population is about 330 million. If each of them were to get a basic monthly stipend (this is everyone, including infants) of $1200, that's $396 billion per month in payments. Per working…

Note also if you living on the dole, you get free housing, free healthcare, free phone, free childcare services, free education, etc. etc. All of which you'd have to pay for if you were stupid enough to work. So actual initiatives are even worse. Even now, welfare already pays more, if benefits are counted, than a minimum-wage job:

Welfare currently pays more than a minimum-wage job in 35 states, even after accounting for the Earned Income Tax Credit, and in 13 states it pays more than $15 per hour.[1]

In fact, in 33 states and the District of Columbia, welfare pays more than an $8-an-hour job. In 12 states, including California, as well as the District of Columbia, the welfare package is more generous than a $15-an-hour job. In Hawaii, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington, D.C., welfare pays more than a $20-an-hour job, or more than 2.75 times the minimum wage.[2]

[1] http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/work-versus-wel...

[2] http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/why-get-welfare

Of course, there are incentives to work still, but $1200/month and accompanying tax raise may kill them for many more people than now.

Re: The indignity of no work

#92

Post by atmosx » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 1:37 PM UTC

jlangenauer wrote: post #21

Whenever I hear the phrase "the dignity of work", I'm reminded of Jeffrey Bernard's quote: "As if there was something romantic and glamorous about hard work ... if there was something romantic about it, the Duke of Westminster would be digging his own fucking garden, wouldn't he?" http://www.rense.com/general56/thevirtueofidleness.htm

Quoting Aristotle:

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

Anything more than 3 hours of work per day, equates slavery.

I don't think the above quotes are absolute, but are hard to argue against. However, I wouldn't expect any other approach from The Economist which content's quality has been growing logarithmically lately.

Re: The indignity of no work

#93

Post by yummyfajitas » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 1:41 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #65

dantheman wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of a basic income is still sci-fi. There just isn't that much money. Freeing people to work on things they desire will mean no one will ever wash dishes at a restaurant, no one will pick up trash, no one will spend time wiring your house for internet, or fix your computer, or do a large swath of jobs. The argument that with UBI people will still do that only for more money is crazy, since the taxes would hav…

> The argument that with UBI people will still do that only for more money is crazy, since the taxes would have to be so high to support UBI that the costs would dwarf what people could afford. Actually you could support UBI by just taxing 1-2 people in the whole US.

Could you crunch the numbers and explain how? A back of the envelope calculation will suffice.

Re: The indignity of no work

#94

Post by atmosx » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 1:44 PM UTC

unicornporn wrote: post #33

Since 1930 productivity in my home country Sweden has increased fivefold, mainly due to technical achievements. Does that mean that we work 20% of the time we did then? No it does not. Wealth has increased of course since the 1930s, and perhaps we want a higher material standard. But also consider than since the 1970s productivity in Sweden has doubled. Does that mean we work 4 hour days instead of 8 hour days now? N…

Following a political conversation about 2 years ago, a very insightful left-wing commenter pointed out this:

"One of the biggest failures of Europe's socialism was the lack of any requirement to half the weekly working hours in 70s and 80s."

I wish this idea was more widely discussed, but still the mainstream idea is that more working, produce more value as if 'free time' does not hold any value.

It some scenarios is ridiculous. In Greece for example, the government trying to boost spending, opted for a law that allows commercial stores to open on Sunday. Before that it was illegal, you had to have a special permission to do that.

Of course, the problem is NOT the working hours. The problem is that people don't have money. Apparently the government thins that Greeks are waiting for Sunday to go buy sugar, milk and cigarettes. Says a lot about the level of contact that our (Greek here) politicians have with reality.

Re: The indignity of no work

#95

Post by scotty79 » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 1:54 PM UTC

dctoedt wrote: post #82

scotty79 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Washing dishes is so incredibly dumb. What should have been done long ago is standardising plates, cups and cutlery and creating integrated dish cabinet/washer that can wash those standardised items and store them. The fact that in 2014 we still rely on manual work to wash the dishes is a disgrace perpetrated by oversupply of cheap human work.

> Washing dishes is so incredibly dumb. What should have been done long ago is standardising plates, cups and cutlery and creating integrated dish cabinet/washer that can wash those standardised items and store them. The fact that in 2014 we still rely on manual work to wash the dishes is a disgrace perpetrated by oversupply of cheap human work. And what, exactly, do you propose that we do about this "oversupply of c…

> were suddenly to find themselves both (1) out of a job, and (2) as a result, unable to earn enough money to feed themselves and their familie.

That's only true if you give things to people only on condition that they do something, anything, useful, harmful, obsolete, whatever you can call a job.

Food is cheap, housing can be cheap if it gets detangled from financial speculation and protected against rent seeking behavior. That's not excessive burden to keep all the people fed, clothed and housed and even entertained at minimum standard without making them do stuff.

Only obstacle is the mental one. Hate towards freeloaders, that makes people pretend they do useful things and makes other people create schemes that help to pretend.

People hate the idea that young father could get food or other things for free. He should be given at least a pretend job where he can simulate doing useful stuff away from his growing up kids.

Interestingly people don't mind the freeloading descendants of rich people. They didn't contribute themselves but their ancestors contributed so much. Unlike the ancestors of young poor father. He should be severely scorned for any of his attempts at freeloading.

Re: The indignity of no work

#96

Post by qwerta » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 1:54 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #74

cwaniak wrote: post #9

Everybody in the USSR had job. But these jobs didn't produce any (usually) value to the society. Who wants to have a job like this? You want to do something valuable so you know that what you produce people are willing to pay for (vs. being forced to pay for it). It just seems much more healthy too.

> Everybody in the USSR had job. But these jobs didn't produce any (usually) value to the society. Well, they got a huge backwater, mostly agricultural country, into one of the big powers of the industrial era. And got to feed some hundends of million of people, have space exploration, very good physics and math, music and arts, and a lot more besides. So, it's a myth that these jobs didn't produce any value to the s…

It was criminal offense not to have a job. Regime just used it as a stick on homeless and people outside system. Some actually payd their employer for providing a fake job; for example self-employed plumbers in gray economy.

Re: The indignity of no work

#97

Post by coldtea » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 2:14 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #93

coldtea wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The argument that with UBI people will still do that only for more money is crazy, since the taxes would have to be so high to support UBI that the costs would dwarf what people could afford. Actually you could support UBI by just taxing 1-2 people in the whole US.

Could you crunch the numbers and explain how? A back of the envelope calculation will suffice.

Well, it might be a slight exaggeration to just tax 2 persons. But it's based on the extremely skewed power-law distribution.

The richest 2 people in america have around 120 billion dollars between them. 100B are enough to directly give $5000 to 20M people under coupons and welfare today.

Even $1000 are more than the yearly income for billions of people in places with far less physical resources than the US (and close enough food prices). Heck, 200 million Pakistanis live with a national GPD of around 250 billion dollars for comparison ($1300 per person).

And the richest 400 share around 2 trillion between them. We haven't even touched the trillions they save from off-shore accounts, shady accounting etc. And that's for private citizens, one would also want to extent it to corporations.

Also, you won't be giving a basic income to anyone making above a certain amount (no reason to give it to someone already making several tens of thousands of dollars a year).

Not to mention that these people, unlike Warren Buffet or Trump, cannot hoard the money they get, so those get re-invested in the economy pronto.

Re: The indignity of no work

#98

Post by loup-vaillant » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 2:16 PM UTC

yourapostasy wrote: post #88

mattdw wrote: post #2

> A world in which a healthy adult has the reasonable expectation of earning a decent living while working full-time at a market wage is absolutely a world in which the dignity of work is a useful social value to cultivate. In a world in which that is not a reasonable expectation, the dignity of work can be a harmful concept. Interesting times ahead. It's going to be painful getting there, if we get there at all, but…

We do not yet have the technological foundation to feasibly implement a Banks'ian Culture-type "hard" UBI, and we barely have the beginning glimmers for even "soft" UBI like what many are discussing today. We lack energy production and management, AI, and nanotech for even rudimentary hard UBI, and even soft UBI is infeasible due to knock-on effects whose management is poorly-understood. Example: we already have a di…

France's welfare system is already close to ABI. You have to fight bureaucracy, you're not eligible unless you have no revenue, and it's barely enough to survive, you're supposed to be actively looking for work, but it's there.

We could start by simplifying the system, and replace that welfare system by an equivalent ABI (the salaries of currently working people will probably need some adjustments). It would be insufficient of course, but that would be a start.

Re: The indignity of no work

#99

Post by loup-vaillant » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 2:25 PM UTC

whatevsbro wrote: post #85

atmosx wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? Do the Medicare numbers work for anyone? Health insurance in the USA is the worst in the world and costs more than anyone's else. USA citizens still use it and actively fight any substantial towards a more rational scheme that will offer more and cost less (ultimately). This as the basic income, is not about math - it's about politics. NOTE: I don't mean politics in the negative sense, I mean it in the sense…

> So what? He's pointing out that it's a practical impossibility. The money for UBI has to come from somewhere , and any money a government has at its disposal comes from: 1) extortion (ie. taxation), 2) printing, 3) borrowing. Those are the three options, and none of them are a sustainable way to fund UBI, because the amount of money needed is so massive. You can't get something from nothing, and everyone can't get…

> The money […] has to come from somewhere

Not necessarily. Money can be printed out of thin air. It is printed out of thin air right now, mostly by private banks (I know they're not technically printing money, but Fractional Reserve Banking and other shenanigans have the same practical effects).

Of course, once you're explicit about printing money, you need to be careful about inflation. But we shouldn't fool ourselves: we never ever lacked money. Money isn't scarce. What we may lack however are resources (both renewable and fossil), and labour.

But in this era of massive unemployment, it looks like labour isn't the bottleneck.

Re: The indignity of no work

#100

Post by loup-vaillant » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 2:30 PM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #91

chiph wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caveat: Not a professional analysis, and not the OP. There's 248 million people ages 16 and older in the US, of which 63% are in the labor force[1]. So 156 million people are available for work (not all of whom are employed). Total population is about 330 million. If each of them were to get a basic monthly stipend (this is everyone, including infants) of $1200, that's $396 billion per month in payments. Per working…

Note also if you living on the dole, you get free housing, free healthcare, free phone, free childcare services, free education, etc. etc. All of which you'd have to pay for if you were stupid enough to work. So actual initiatives are even worse. Even now, welfare already pays more, if benefits are counted, than a minimum-wage job: Welfare currently pays more than a minimum-wage job in 35 states, even after accountin…

Of course, a sufficiently high ABI would have welfare gotten rid of: no more free housing, schooling, nothing: just live with your ABI.

To really calculate the cost of ABI, you need to subtract the cost of welfare.