Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Moving Forward on Basic Income

blog.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

901–910 of 1001 posts

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#901

Post by krashnburn200 »

dilemma wrote: post #887
InclinedPlane wrote: post #807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basic income has a whole host of pretty interesting self-reinforcing feedback loops that seemingly would improve things overall. For example, people would be more likely to leave jobs that were unsafe, treated people poorly, etc. Including situations where employers weren't following labor laws and regulations (which is a huge problem today). Meaning that maybe it'd be more likely that the fire code, sanitary regulat…

Scenario: You're married with 2 kids and live in San Francisco. Is an $8,000/year UBI going to enable you to quit your $100,000/year job without another lined up?

Obviously it would. You are trying to conflate having a family with living in an over priced high demand location. Try again.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#902

Post by alanwatts »

skeeper wrote: post #889
grecy wrote: post #888

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The right to turn down a job is essential for a well functioning labor market, and for a civilized society. I agree 100%, and I must say having immigrated from Australia, it's probably the worst thing about America. It feels like Employers have all the power in America, and therefore all the Employees are basically slaves, and are treated as such. I think it's important for a functioning society to value it's workf…

"I think it's important for a functioning society to value it's workforce over the profits of businesses" I agree. Corporate greed. That's exactly the issue being addressed in this article: https://medium.com/@LevelWorkingField/do-you-like-new-pricin...

This was the biggest move which Dr. King was calling for in his fight for civil rights, a year before he was assassinated.

>We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see than an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. [applause]

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#903

Post by drumdance »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #881
adrianN wrote: post #876

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also increases the salary for other professions. Who wants to clean toilets for minimum wage if basic income is an alternative.

Great, so we will see highly trained people cleaning toilets, because they happen to need some money and cleaning toilets pays better than the jobs that they were trained to do.

I don't see how this is different from the rest of society. "Cleaning toilets" sounds like it lacks dignity, but to an art history major "social media marketing" or "event planning" might feel like cleaning toilets.

We all make compromises.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#904

Post by jeffdavis »

drabiega wrote: post #891
jeffdavis wrote: post #847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say you have a person living in a remote area and they don't interact much with other people and they don't have a basic income. Are they free? Let's say someone lives in the city without BI, is it fair to say that moving into the wilderness is an option for them, and therefore they are free? Does it change if they started in the wilderness?

I've stated elsewhere, I don't think it is fair to say that moving into the wilderness is an option. As cheap as land is in some remote areas, it's still beyond the resources of the people for whom it would be an improvement from their current situation.

That doesn't really answer the question though: if you could live in the wilderness, is that freedom?

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#905

Post by alanwatts »

brbsix wrote: post #801
alanwatts wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about a BI based on resources rather than the dollar? There already exists a renewable surplus of food, water, and shelter. There are around 4-6 empty houses in the US for every homeless person and around 40% of food goes to waste. So providing for the most basic physiological needs of the ~45 million impoverished people in the US is not a problem of production, it's a problem of distribution and waste managemen…

See the economic calculation problem as outlined by Mises. There's no way to efficiently allocate resources absent a price mechanism. Also, how are you supposed to acquire all these resources in the first place? It's kind of an important detail.

>There's no way to efficiently allocate resources absent a price mechanism

Obviously math and science would be involved. However, the dollar is not created based on a mathematical or scientific standard, it is created by a handful of oligarchs based on closed source subjective speculation and confidence, "voodoo economics", and the broken window fallacy.

>how are you supposed to acquire all these resources in the first place?

The resources don't need to be acquired, they're already sitting there. They just need to be shared. So empathy for humanity is where the real deficit lies, and one of the main reasons for this is the fallacy of Malthusian-Darwinian economic ideology.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#906

Post by nathan_f77 »

xienze wrote: post #60

So, a question for the BI fans: I've seen it said repeatedly that BI will save us money (or at least, not be so outrageously expensive) in part because we can eliminate existing welfare programs. "Just cut a single check, no more overhead from several agencies", they say. But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all th…

Not an answer to your question, but I think it's ironic that some people are proposing basic income as a solution to reduce overhead. After all, if we only need basic income because technology is taking people's jobs, then surely technology can also be used to minimize almost all the overhead in government departments.

So I think we just need far better social welfare programs, and far better government software.

I'm imagining a new kind of welfare that provides good quality housing, healthy meals, sports and other kinds of activities, counseling and mental health service. All free, and available at any point during your life. We already have the foundations for something like this in countries like New Zealand.

I think the US has a long way to go, and there are a lot of old mindsets to change. I feel that basic income would be a short-term solution to a much more complex problem. I don't think it can be properly tested in the US until the general population views socialism more favourably.

And I don't think we even need it in New Zealand.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#907

Post by krashnburn200 »

colinplamondon wrote: post #67
xienze wrote: post #60

So, a question for the BI fans: I've seen it said repeatedly that BI will save us money (or at least, not be so outrageously expensive) in part because we can eliminate existing welfare programs. "Just cut a single check, no more overhead from several agencies", they say. But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all th…

Personally, I'd hope the system would absolutely tell them "tough shit". There's got to be a line where the safety net gives out, because someone is too expensive to help. That's where family and charity hopefully take over. At the same time, I think your instinct is right, and it's something I've never heard mentioned before. It's almost inevitably that there'll then be the "food security" fund, and the "housing gua…

It's not actually that hard. People who prove they cannot manage their BI are required to participate in a managed BI program. The individual can chose from any/all licenced managers (or an individual/family member willing to accept the responsibility) who provide varying levels of service for a specified Percentage of your BI.

Maybe an efficiency apartment with groceries delivered for 80%. Maybe a bunk in a dorm and a meal ticket for 50%.

Even an individual who can't manage their own money can still chose a service based on their needs.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#908

Post by alanwatts »

brbsix wrote: post #801
alanwatts wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about a BI based on resources rather than the dollar? There already exists a renewable surplus of food, water, and shelter. There are around 4-6 empty houses in the US for every homeless person and around 40% of food goes to waste. So providing for the most basic physiological needs of the ~45 million impoverished people in the US is not a problem of production, it's a problem of distribution and waste managemen…

See the economic calculation problem as outlined by Mises. There's no way to efficiently allocate resources absent a price mechanism. Also, how are you supposed to acquire all these resources in the first place? It's kind of an important detail.

I read the first bit of Mises theory, which is full of fallacy from the start:

>The problem referred to is that of how to distribute resources rationally in an economy. The free market solution is the price mechanism, wherein people individually have the ability to decide how a good or service should be distributed based on their willingness to give money for it.

This is a catch-22. Normal people are given a highly limited amount of money, the supply of which is arbitrarily dictated by a handful of bankers. So the ultimate power of setting prices lies with them. This is explicitly outlined as one of the three main objectives of the Federal Reserve: maintaining stable prices.

>The price conveys embedded information about the abundance of resources as well as their desirability which in turn allows, on the basis of individual consensual decisions, corrections that prevent shortages and surpluses;

If this were true, there wouldn't be 4-6 empty houses for every homeless person, or starving people when vast surpluses of food exist around the corner. There is no such thing as a "free market" and yet the ideology of one persists as a way to prevent any such innovation.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#909

Post by autokad »

grecy wrote: post #888
lewisl9029 wrote: post #804

The most compelling case I've seen made recently for basic income is from Yanis Varoufakis (the infamous Greek finance minister who resigned after refusing to agree to the terms of the bailout that the Greek people voted against in a referendum): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvgdtF3y0Ss There were many gems in that talk, but this one stood out to me in particular: "The right to turn down a job is essential for a w…

> The right to turn down a job is essential for a well functioning labor market, and for a civilized society. I agree 100%, and I must say having immigrated from Australia, it's probably the worst thing about America. It feels like Employers have all the power in America, and therefore all the Employees are basically slaves, and are treated as such. I think it's important for a functioning society to value it's workf…

if you loved austrailia so much, move back. you have to take the 'bad' with the good. we built a system that enables people with ideas to chase their dreams and succeed. that means companies have the ability to pay people with low skills and experience less than those with.

honestly, if you are being treated like a slave, move to another company. if you cant, you don't have skills employers want. get them.

during the recession, many companies used their position of power to their advantage. the smarter companies (and now more successful) used the recession as an opportunity to get the best workers.

the ironic thing is, to try and force employers to treat everyone like stellar employees would probably result in treating everyone poorly.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#910

Post by biafra »

misja111 wrote: post #317

What amazes me in this discussion about BI is that most people don't seem to realize that systems similar to BI have already been tried in Europe, and that they didn't work. I come from the Netherlands, which has always had unemployment benefits. Nowadays you get those only if you meet a bunch of strict conditions but it hasn't always been so tough. In the early eighties, there were almost no checks whatsoever. The r…

There is not enough paid work for everyone. Automation will kill more and more jobs. I see BI as the only humane solution to keep automating stuff.
Post reply on HN