Slashdot Mirror

https://www.nature.com/article...
https://sevenpillarsinstitute....
https://basicincome.org/news/2...

Libertarians are by no means universally hostile to a Universal Basic Income. Cato had a wide-ranging set of essays and discussions around the UBI - the lead essay was pro while other essays ranged from lukewarm support to implementation concerns. No one was really adamantly opposed.

Since that series of essays, the current Libertarian Presidential candidate, Gary Johnson, has said he's open to a UBI (and, until forced to walk it back, even open to using a carbon tax to fund it).

On the conservative side, F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Richard Nixon (!), Charles Murray, Marco Rubio and others have all supported some form of UBI. The Earned Income Tax Credit is a form of UBI and one of the most politically popular features of the tax code.

The devil is in the details, but some form of UBI is coming - we're running out of work.

It is well known that the majority voice - both in staff and readers - at slashdot has leaned conservative for over a decade now.

It's not a conservative or liberal issue, it's a fringe issue. Gary Johnson is open to the idea, and Milton Friedman supported something similar (he called it negative income tax). Bernie Sanders is ambivalent in his support for it.

In a world where we are deciding an election based on whether to invade Russia, whether reality TV qualifies you for the presidency or not, whether it's worse to grope a woman or defend a groper.........and in a world where people decide the answers to those questions based on whether it matches their 'team' or not......the words 'liberal' and 'conservative' mean nothing.

Politics is a team based sport, and people vote that way. The issues are less important than the team winning. And frankly, if you investigate your opinions and find that they match more than 80% with either party's platform, then you are playing the team game. Stop and think.

Sweden is starting to take it seriously as a political issue. linky

Very few in Sweden take the Green party seriously so I would ignore that "blog"/"article"/whatever it is.
Finland however take UBI seriously. Enough to want to try it out.

I'll just leave my usual links here. You've probably seen most of them before

In Praise of Idleness, essay
A town in Canada tried it.
Humans Need Not Apply
Ooh, a new one. Canada is going large-scale now? linky
Sweden is starting to take it seriously as a political issue. linky

Here's the actual sitiuation.

On the one hand, cost of employing people in jobs that can be automated is rising. Picture this as a graphed ramp up on a plot.

On the other hand, cost of ever-higher quality automation is dropping rapidly. Picture this as a graphed ramp down on the same plot.

When those two lines cross each other, businesses will automate as soon as possible. Not may; will. Any of them that might be inclined not to, for whatever reason, will be out-competed in very short order and subsequently fail.

This can't be fixed by raising the minimum wage; it can only be accelerated, because it doesn't change the rate of the dropping automation line, but it only steepens the rate of the rising employment costs line.

So the solution cannot lie in "just raise minimum wages" approach. There has to be some way to either add costs to automation (most typically taxation is the cost suggested... which businesses generally arrange to be taken from the income of the remaining workers) or change the entire economic model to something along the lines of Basic Income. Something along the lines of that is inevitable due to inevitable technological change, but there's a lot of pain and screaming that will be done between where we are and that point. The former is right where we are already:

Walmart, for instance, is one example of severely low wage workers that are subsidized by the social safety net, which in turn is paid for by the middle class. This is what enables Walmart to keep prices low; they only pay part of the worker's survival needs. Same thing for waitresses, burger flippers and so on. Your hamburger isn't cheap if you're middle class; it's just that you pay for part of it at McDonald's, and then you pay for the rest when you pay your taxes. Very handy for McDonalds. They get to maintain the illusion that they sell cheap(er) food. Most taxpayers fail to make the connection, and continue to support McDonalds' business model by buying those burgers.

The question is how long that will be sustainable in the face of a mandated wage increase -- will people still buy a burger if, instead of $1.00 at the window and $x at tax time, it's $1.++ at the window? And what, do you imagine, will McDonald's do about it if they see this as less likely?

Pretty obviously, they will automate. People will lose their jobs. But now instead of paying for part of the burger flipper's wages at tax time, the ex-flippers are unemployed, so the social safety net must cover their entire cost of living using the income of those who remain employed. Business will continue to see to it via legislative control that they are not the ones who do the paying.

Isn't it clear that severe pain is on the way no matter what under the current economic model? I can't see a way out of it. At all.

This is why I support a change to a formal basic income. Looking at the stats and polls, though, I don't think it's likely in the near term.

Arguing for it is a different matter. As I understand it, it has a threshold built into it so that there is a minimum living allowance below which there is no consumption tax (I think they arrange that by providing X$ to the individual which makes up for Y$ of consumption) and that way it's not regressive.

But it's been a while since I looked at it; it never got any traction (no surprise there either way... things are just how the rich like them, and they're not going to change), so I never really managed to gen all that much interest.

Currently, a fan of basic income, but again, I don't think that's going anywhere yet. Not until automation makes significantly more inroads and there simply isn't any other viable option.

Do you have any ideas how we can fix it?

I do. Among other things, I am associated with the publishing industry and have put quite a bit of thought into the matter from that perspective.

In this kind of case, which is publishing and dissemination of the results of scientific research, if that dissemination is intended to be done without charge, then the answer is trivial: Put it on a website and let the world see it. Put your credentials on the website and let fly.

  If it isn't intended to be free of charge, then pay what is asked or move on without the work product, whatever it is. Of course, if the research was paid for by the public -- IOW taxes -- then as far as I'm concerned, the public already owns it. That's pretty straightforward no matter how you look at it. For where would the authority over such research product come from? From the public. Because that's what (in the US, can't speak for other countries) government is supposed to be: an arm of the public.

In the case of art and software, I would like to see a public funding mechanism that incorporates the idea of basic income for everyone, and rewards proportionate to readership / userbase / other appropriate measure of valued incorporation into the social matrix. I think we're going to hit something along the lines of basic income sooner than most think (due to actual independent artificial intelligence, along with not intelligent, but rather very clever software agents working on our behalf), and then we'll be in the interesting position of being able to make a different decision with regard to what to do about/with creatives, because no one will be starving -- that simply won't fly as an argument. You want to make PD or some other form of freeware your whole life, hair on you, you can -- and I am sure some people will.

Right now, inasmuch as we're not there yet, things are not only commercial, they are very commercial, and there seem to be two significant problems, one at each end of the issue. At the top, there is congress, which is pretty much in the pocket of anyone who has money in that pocket and is willing to spread it around. This has led to what I consider absurd copyright lengths, no protection whatsoever from predation at the agent / publisher level for artists without great power and at least a modicum of foresight, and draconian penalties for tiny violations of the Mandates From Above.

At the bottom, there is this ridiculous "information wants to be free" meme, which I see as the product of too much pressure on the buyer, price-wise, and not enough education as to the fact that artists and other IP creators actually have to, you know, eat and stuff. And for those that don't earn squat during the creative process, those earnings may actually have to come from the dissemination of the IP itself when / if it reaches a marketable state. That "information wants to be free" meme needs to be countered wherever it raises its disingenuous little head. Not only because it is stupidly wrong, but because it is actually toxic to a significant portion of the creative process. While that is being done, we need to push congress to nudge this situation back into reasonable boundaries.

And therein lies the real problem, as I see it. We've lost control of congress. So that means, I think, that we're going to have to wait for social change that inevitably goes around congress itself. I don't want that to come at the expense of a bunch of creatives getting shafted (certainly not any more than they already are, either.) But AI and clever software... I honestly think that's going to do what the voters refuse to do, and that is put congress into a position where they have absolutely no choice in the matter.

No, Switzerland does NOT have a basic income. They have decided to hold a referendum on the issue... in 2016. For information, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_referendums,_2016 or http://www.basicincome.org/news/2014/08/switerland-government-reacts-negatively-to-ubi-proposal/

I don't know how you got modded +5 informative for a three line comment that was false, would be known to be false to anyone who keeps up with news on the basic income proposals, or could easily be proven false by a quick scan of this year's headlines on the topic, but it demonstrates the inability of Slashdot to process political material.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

Also, tell that to senior citizens in the USA who almost all get a what is essentially a basic income from Social Security. Most seniors have *not* paid full value into that relative to what they expect to get out of it, so it is not like a retirement investment plan (even if people pay a tax that goes towards it when they work for wages). Social Security in the USA is essentially an income redistribution system, originally based on ten young workers to one elderly person (original recipients had not paid into the system) and now at about three young workers per elderly person. Personally, I feel it is unfair that the elderly in the USA get Medicare and Social Security when everyone else does not and these days reflects age discrimination backed by the political power of the elderly in the USA. Many young parents, for example, have a very hard lot, often caught between caring for their young children and their own elderly parents, while also needing to hold down a full-time job with increasingly worse benefits. A basic income would make it possible for more young parents to spend more time with their own young children while also caring for their own parents. I feel the resolution to the age discrimination issue there is to make the two programs of Medicare and Social Security available to every US citizen without discrimination based on age. We can then talk about eventually expanding those programs to all residents, legal or not, and then looking at doing it globally.

Arguments for a basic income include that, because governments have privatized almost all land, citizens have some right to the fruits of the land. Also, citizens have a claim to some of the fruits of the common inheritance of ideas and so on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...
http://www.usbig.net/
http://www.livableincome.org/

See also my essay: http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...
"One may ask, why should millionaires support a basic income as depicted in Marshall Brain's Australia Project fictional example in "Manna", but, say, right now in the USA, of US$2000 a month per person (with some deducted for universal health insurance), or $24K per year? With about 300 million residents in the USA, this would require about seven trillion US dollars a year, or half the current US GDP. Surely such a proposal would be a disaster for millionaires in terms of crushing taxes? Or would it? ..."

Anyway, even while I'm not especially a fan of crypto currencies (good currencies need to be backed by a social constitution controlling their production IMHO), I applaud the experiment in this direction.

Correlation does not prove causation, but interesting paper none-the-less reading the summary: "Copyright and Creativity -- Evidence from Italian Operas"
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...

But even if it was true, should most of humanity be denied access to most of human knowledge via the internet that could otherwise be available right now (like via Google Books) so we might get a few more operas and other such thing?

Beside, current research (even by the US Federal Reserve) shows reward is not motivator for creative works (or sometimes even has a negative correlation of causing artists to just rehash more of the same old thing). Lot of studies are cited in these works by Alfie Kohn and Dan Pink to support my point:
"Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes"
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books...
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Also: "Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator: Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain"
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...

A better answer to the issue of people having enough time to do quality work (including learning to do it) is to have a "basic income" for everyone (so, for example, monthly Social Security payments in the USA from birth, not just for those 65 and older).
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...

There are plenty of reasons copyrights stifle creativity these days, because artists can't easily remix.
https://gigaom.com/2011/12/12/...

Most, as in 99%+ (my guess), of artistic people are only held back by copyright, because very, very few people can make a living at licensing creative works as authors or composers or whatever, but they instead generally have to pay for access to contemporary novels and music and such. Some of that is discussed here:
http://www.thepublicdomain.org...

"After all, that's what happened to virtually everybody else on Earth. Do you ever wonder why you have to work five days a week, until you're 67, and then you die within a few years of retirement? Who claims to own all the land in your country? When somebody sells a piece of land, how did they claim to own it in the first place? The people of the rainforest are being forced off their OWN land, where they have lived for tens of thousands of years, to be turned into wage slaves, working in factories. Wake up."

Insightful. It has been suggested the "Garden of Eden" story is really about the painful transition from hunting/gathering by tribes to agriculture managed by militaristic bureaucracies. Several groups of people have similar stories, some fairly recently as they were forced to convert to agriculture by being pushed off their native lands. This happened also in England with the "Enclosure acts".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

Various pushed to "privatization" in the USA are the same old thing... And it is expanding to water rights, spectrum rights, endless copyrights, overly broad patents, and so on...

Related:
http://conceptualguerilla.com/...
http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
http://www.primitivism.com/ori...
http://www.amazon.com/Pandoras...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...

And the amazing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sle...
"A riveting account of the astonishing experiences and discoveries made by linguist Daniel Everett while he lived with the Piraha, a small tribe of Amazonian Indians in central Brazil. Daniel Everett arrived among the Piraha with his wife and three young children hoping to convert the tribe to Christianity. Everett quickly became obsessed with their language and its cultural and linguistic implications. The Piraha have no counting system, no fixed terms for color, no concept of war, and no personal property. Everett was so impressed with their peaceful way of life that he eventually lost faith in the God he'd hoped to introduce to them, and instead devoted his life to the science of linguistics. Part passionate memoir, part scientific exploration, Everett's life-changing tale is riveting look into the nature of language, thought, and life itself."

Howard Zinn wrote about what parts of America were like before Columbus began the conquest (backed by profiteering organizations run for "the love of money"):
http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
"The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone...." He concluded his report by asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage "as much gold as they need ... and as many slaves as they ask." He was full of religious talk: "Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent impossibilities." Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim

Caltech Vice-Provost on pyramid scheme: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...

From 2004, and it has only gotten worse: http://www.villagevoice.com/20...

Still, also problems in science for anyone: http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...

More by me from 2009:
"[p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")"
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
"[p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

We can and should do better than this as a society.

My proposed solution: a "basic income" (as well as an expanded gift economy and better subsistence via 3D printing and cheap solar panels and cheap agricultural robots). Then anyone can live like a graduate and think and talk and publish all they want on whatever topic they like. Of course, if people want to afford lab space or equipment, that is more of a challenge, and they might have to do paying work. But so much can be done with cheap computers and cheap equipment now, that a lot of good tabletop research can still be done on a shoestring.
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...

One example (not saying it will work, but is it tabletop physics/chemistry on the cheap):
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...

Even most millionaires would be better off with a basic income IMHO:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...

Now if only the legions of unemployed humanities PhDs (and some unemployed law school graduates too) would just collectively take up this cause for a basic income and expanded gift economy etc. and write stories about it, write persuasive essays about it, write funny viral videos about it, lobby for incremental laws about it (Social Security for All from Birth), and so on. Then we might see some accelerating movement on it... My own attempts in that direction, which I'm sure those legions could vastly improve on:
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Nothing short of a big social shift like that is going to solve the fix academia is in, between the student load debt bubble about to burst and the collapsing pyramid scheme of the value of a PhD to train other PhDs. Instead we are seeing play out the ultimate folly of expanding cradle-to-grave schooling as a sort of arms race where parents invest vast amounts of money in hopes their offspring will have secure more credentials than someone else whose parents have less money and so get some coveted job in academia or elsewhere. All the while, AI and robotics are taking on more and more jobs -- even grading student essays and doing it so cheaply that, as in the parable above, humans need not apply.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

http://www.basicincome.org/bie...

Not because my kid is a dummy (far from it), but because I know becoming and staying an "owner" in the 1% is like winning the lottery. And societies with big rich/poor divides are less happy to live in -- even for the 1%.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08...
"Stiglitz and his allies argue that a free and competitive market is highly beneficial to society at large, but that it needs government regulation and oversight to remain functional. Without constraint, dominant interests use their leverage to make gains at the expense of the majority. Concentration of power in private hands, Stiglitz believes, can be just as damaging to the functioning of markets as excessive regulation and political control. "

See also on how aspiring millionaires are used to keep everyone down:
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://conceptualguerilla.com/...
"But here's something I'll bet the dittoheads haven't thought of. Maybe they're the chumps. Maybe they've been sold a bogus "American dream" that never existed. Maybe "the rules" they play by were written by the people who have "made it" -- not by the people who haven't. And maybe -- just maybe-- the people who have "made it" wrote those rules to keep the wannabes chasing a dream that's a mirage."

I wrote an essay on why even rich people should support a basic income:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...

The fact is, most paid jobs are going away as robots and AIs become cheaper to employ than humans for more and more jobs -- even "creative" ones, like I discuss here
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyo...

Preparing your kid to win the 20th century economic rat race leaves him or her a rat on a sinking economic ship in a 21st century economy...

That said, independence when needed, cooperation when needed, hard work, prudence, saving, frugality, investing in the future -- in broad sense, these are all good things to learn however a kid applies them later in life.

On code, the free code and content I write now and in the past like our free garden simulator and other tools has helped (a teeny tiny bit, I hope) to help bring about a 21st century transformation to a bigger gift economy, to better planning, to a more informed and enlightened and empowered citizenry. For example, this freely usable software someone else lets me reformat my slashdot posts to remove smart quotes from quotations in the above that display wrong:
http://dan.hersam.com/tools/sm...

So, free code and free content can make a difference in the world by making the world a better place in various ways. And then, such a society can hopefully do a better job of taking care of old farts like I will be soon enough -- if I am not already. :-) As well as doing a better job of taking care of the next generation which is much more important than taking care of the previous generation -- although you would not know that looking at who gets "Social Security" and Medicare in the USA -- the old, not the young). As Daniel Moynihan said, "the young don't vote, and it shows".

Kids grow so fast. Enjoy them while you can! See also:
http://www.katsandogz.com/onch...
----
On Children
Kahlil Gibran

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

without a work requirement: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ma...
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...

Yes, it is true -- we thought computers, AI, and robots would liberate us, but instead they are being used to spy on us, to micromanage us, and to force us to work like robots or else.

On depression and such, look into vitamin D deficiency, eating more fruits & vegetables, and getting more Omega 3s. Also, look into a treadmill workstation or a standing desk to help with ergonomics and joint pain.

Good luck! Hope you can find some way to make your work more meaningful -- even if just by practicing skills you can use on other projects in your spare time, like perhaps to make free software the world really needs?

Maybe contact this Dutch guy (in Toronto at the moment though) for some good ideas of stuff that really needs doing, including with Squeak:
http://nl.linkedin.com/in/cdeg...

"What sucks is we're so much more productive, you'd think we'd be working less. But why the hell would we give anything to anyone if they didn't 'work' for it?"

If inheriting property is a legitimate idea, what about all of humanity inheriting our collective know how and so being entitled to some of the fruits of our global productivity?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he saw the "cultural inheritance of society" as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, technique and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization. ..."

One way to implement that:
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...

http://www.basicincome.org/bie...

The problem with the current approach to US government transfers is it is mostly "needs based" (inviting fraud and shame) and is also skewed by narrow politics (like farm subsidies to huge farms not to grow stuff or to grow unhealthy stuff). A basic income for all (social security from birth) would democratize our distribution system, leading to all kinds of innovation in services. It would also respond to increasing unemployment as AI and robotics can do more and more jobs and most human labor becomes increasingly devalued in the exchange economy. We need to accept that there are two broad economic spheres -- an open ended one of real goods for living (food, education, personal housing, infrastructure) and a mostly zero-sum casino economy tied mostly to banking, stocks, derivatives, other finance, insurance, and real estate speculation. The reason the USA is still in the midst of a Great Depression (whatever mainstream economists claim) is because vast amounts of cash are in the FIRE sector and there is a drought of cash for the living sector. That is why economic models about money supply and inflation are flawed -- they don't differentiate enough between these two spheres. A basic income funded by tax (income or wealth) as well as possibly inflation and also royalties on use of government assets like fishing rights or spectrum use (like the Alaska Permanent fund) is a way of moving money out of the zero-sum FIRE sector into the hands of people who would spend it on having a healthier human life.

From 1964, a bit ahead of its time but playing out now given essentially zero net new jobs for a decade even as the population grows:
http://educationanddemocracy.o...
"Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S."

Most wealth comes from a combination of natural resources and what our ancestors learned by trial an error, and is our common global inheritance, as explained by C. H. Douglas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"Social credit is an interdisciplinary distributive philosophy developed by C. H. Douglas (1879-1952), a British engineer, who wrote a book by that name in 1924. It encompasses the fields of economics, political science, history, accounting, and physics. Its policies are designed, according to Douglas, to disperse economic and political power to individuals. Douglas wrote, "Systems were made for men, and not men for systems, and the interest of man which is self-development, is above all systems, whether theological, political or economic."[1] ... According to Douglas, the true purpose of production is consumption, and production must serve the genuine, freely expressed interests of consumers. In order to accomplish this objective, he believed that each citizen should have a beneficial, not direct, inheritance in the communal capital conferred by complete access to consumer goods assured by the National Dividend and Compensated Price.[6] Douglas thought that consumers, fully provided with adequate purchasing power, will establish the

What or who should you revere? That is a good question you may spend a lifetime answering... From Albert Einstein:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly."

On broader change to make economics work for more people, see stuff like:
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/

On the pitfalls of academia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds

There are many spheres of life. Or as another analogy, life is like a city with lots of different districts and back alleys and night clubs and homes. Even if conventional academia is not your forte, you might find others where you can build a meaningful life that is a healthy success (parenting, being a good friend or neighbor, etc.). Many inventors did not "fit in", so you might fund some other creative niche outside of the formal academic related career path.

For many people, the promise of academics has become a scam. However, diplomas are still used as gatekeepers to many jobs. For a deeper view of the scam in progress, see thsibook (free online) by John Taylor Gatto:
"Underground History of American Education"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/

And this:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

Anyway, I sympathize with your feeling and frustrations. Even with a dipl

Wow, looking that up, on Applebees and Chili's: http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-waiters-and-waitresses/
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/12/02/applebees-tablets-table-top-devices-restaurant-technology/3698561/

I think people overestimate the "human touch" need in service (like mentioned as a reason everything won't be automated in other posts). While it is true humans need other humans to be human, and physical human touch is important, interactions with "strangers" can be stressful for many, and they also expose people to a risk of disease. And example if banking, where many people now prefer using an ATM machine to talking to a bank teller. Same with many automated phone systems for routine transactions. It may depend in part on a person's personality of course. At some point thought, "more sanitary" and "more personalized and interactive" may become arguments for more automation. For example, who likes to wait around for the wait staff to bring you a bill when you are ready to go at the end of a dinner out?

One can hope though that as we see more abundance from more automation, people may have more time to cook at home and entertain at home. That may be the bigger long term change here. Why go to a restaurant at all, where you have little control over the ingredients, the people around you, and so on? Or, alternatively, when a robot can fetch your meal for you, as in this video of a PR2 robot going to Subway to fetch a sandwich:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIYRQC2iBp

Marshall Brain's "Manna" explores two possible answers to your last question.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Regarding "socialism", here is a great graph on US perceptions, preferences, and reality regarding wealth distribution:http://danariely.com/2010/09/30/wealth-inequality/
"As you can see from the figure, participants rather badly estimated the current state of wealth disparity! Furthermore, they offered an ideal wealth distribution (under a "veil of ignorance") that was even more different (and more equal) relative to the current state of affairs.
What this tells me is that Americans don't understand the extent of disparity in the US, and that they (we) desire a more equitable society. It is also interesting to note that the differences between people who make more money and less money, republicans and democrats, men and women -- were relatively small in magnitude, and that in general people who fall into these different categories seem to agree about the ideal wealth distribution under the veil of ignorance.
Maybe this suggests that when there are no labels, and we think about the core of our morality in abstract terms (and under the veil of ignorance), we are actually very similar?"

Graph picture there seems broken; see it here:
http://ecologicalsociology.blogspot.com/2012/06/us-income-inequality-real-perceived.html

Still, you are right about the "allergy", and that is why planning through the market in the USA along with a basic income may be the easiest way forward:
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_market.html
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/establish-basic-income-guarantee-all-americans-similar-what-being-proposed-switzerland/jF

Montly "Social Security" payments from birth: http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Also, to echo your point on "family", raising children well can easily take as much effort as most adults can put into it... And the solar system could support quadrillions of humans in high-tech style in space habitats.

I've been meaning to put up the comments I had on Ray Dalio's principles somewhere for a long time. I finally just put them up here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sent-to-Bridgewater-on-Ray-Dalio-Principles.html

As I note there, obviously, writing stuff like that must not be the way to get a high paying (>$200K annual) job programming in the financial industry. :-) But this may be of interest to others looking at Ray Dalio's "Principles" or in Bridgewater Associates (the world's biggest hedge fund in 2011) as a place of employment. Or perhaps it may be of interest in trying to understand, from a psychological perspective, some of the potential limits of Bridgewater's financial models if they reflect only that version of "Principles"?

From what I sent:
----
I guess one might say that from the outside, with this cover letter I'm trying to upgrade Bridgewater in my own way, even as Bridgewater would probably upgrade me in some sense if I worked there. :-) I'm supplying some of the results of my having read widely for many years on a variety of topics related to evolution, technology, psychology, and social change. Maybe someone at Bridgewater will read this, maybe not, but it was also interesting to write it and try to get a message through the filters all organizations have. It's a first draft, and it could be a lot better, a lot shorter, and so on were I to spend a lot more time on it, or were I to have better tools with which to communicate it (which I can aspire to create someday, like supplying a semantic web to your inbox).

The key points here are that:
* "Evolution" does not mean "progress" as humans normally think of it (this from someone who was in a PhD program in Ecology and Evolution for a time),
* All reasoning depends on emotions (which give us reason to reason),
* Bridgewater has reached the size where it has a significant effect on the exchange economy that supports it and needs to consider the broader issues in its modeling and responsibilities to stakeholders;
* There can be many overlapping senses of "self" (body, family, philosophy, company, state, etc.) and models (including financial models) may need to take that in account, but that is not reflected in "Principles";
* There is a pressing need for sensemaking tools and I feel I can help create them (and have helped create some in the past);
* such tools might, through the FOSS gift economy, even be a way to take aspects of Bridgewater's self-improvement culture (like through structured arguments) and make that available to the general public, as if things like openness and rationality are true for Bridgewater, they must be true for the rest of the world, and maybe Bridgewater try to help the rest of the world achieve those things too (while also increasing its potential employee pool of people learning such tools);
* Bridgewater can probably better promote health among its community in terms of vitamin D, eating more vegetables, understanding the "Pleasure Trap", and having treadmill workstations; ...

---

Realistically, I'd have probably been a better match for the Dalio Family Foundation perhaps, directing time and money to open source sensemaking software efforts? :-)

Anyway, thankfully I found some other way to earn ration units (fiat dollars) that I can exchange for food and shelter, in the absence of a "basic income" and given pretty much all the land is enclosed and privatized, and even if it was not, it takes a village and lots of specific skills to live well in the wilderness...
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

You're welcome. On a basic income, one reason for a basic income versus increasing the minimum wage is that it ensures purchasing power is distributed somewhat evenly across a society. The market only hears the needs of people with money. But the value of most human labor is declining relative to capital used for automation (especially AI and robotics), as has been long predicted (like in "The Triple Revolution" memorandum from 1964).

It's true that an increased minimum wage (similar to say Denmark) would help ensure more of productivity gains go to workers -- except that it also increases the financial pressure to automate to get rid of workers. So, higher wages becomes an economic death spiral for most workers when robotics is rapidly improving. As work that can't be easily automated becomes more abstract, more precise, or more demanding, fewer people have the skills and talent to do it well, contributing to a growing rich/poor divide.

Automation also does no have to completely replace workers to have this effect -- if automation enables one person do the work of two, then there is one worker who can be fired. There will only be a job for that fired worker if the economy expands -- but expanding the economy has probably (in the USA) long passed the point of diminishing returns, as people sicken from supersized meals, lose human community by spending time interacting with more stuff, and so on. And in any case, the exponential potential of automation seems to be increasing faster than economic growth, so even as the economy expands, it is not clear humans are needed to do much more work. The US GDP has grown by about 33% over the past decade while the work force has stayed essentially the same,

Supporting evidence for all that here:
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

Also, a basic income, which goes to every citizen without conditions, is somewhat different from a guaranteed minimum income which is an income supplement to ensure someone has a certain amount of income as a minimum. With a basic income, there is no disincentive to work, contrasted with the way there is a disincentive with a guaranteed minimum income (where you lose some of the subsidy for every dollar you earn). With a basic income, there is no need to monitor how money much everyone makes in order to decide how to supplement -- so there is less bureaucracy and no possibility for cheating by hiding income since income does not matter in deciding who gets it, A basic income acknowledges that as "property" rights enclose the land, the average citizen should still get some right to the fruits of the land even if they don't own it, because the original conversion of land to individual ownership is in some sense a theft from the commons.

A basic income (as a "social credit") also acknowledges that most of what makes possible some people to be so productive is the ideas in the common cultural heritage of all humans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit

More on a basic income:
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

But these issues all are interlinked. If people had better representation in Congress, as basic income would be more likely to get passed (contrast with Germany which is moving more towards one). Something like it (more like a guaranteed minimum income) did pass the House under President Nixon, but did not pass the Senate. If people had better communications systems, then maybe they would be able to work out the details of the transition better. If people had a basic income, they would have more time for lobbying Congress (whether about human rights at home or preventing US foolishness abroad) and writing free communications software.

For example, my own effort towards a FOSS social semantic desktop and public intelligence tools has mostly stalled with the

http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

From what I wrote in 2008 before I'd heard about "basic income", with a a typo and a rotted link fixed: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/openmanufacturing/a4Fw5A15GUE/wQbnjYso09sJ
----
Something I wrote in another list, but I am posting a variant here in public in part as a contribution towards [Nathan Craven's] work on an open enterprise, moving towards an open society. This is to support a transition to a post-scarcity future.

It seems that, sadly, we can expect zero privacy in our personal affairs in the USA between warrantless wiretapping and banks and ISPs rolling over for any governmental request for any reason. The US government is now underwriting all the major banks and the three major US car companies to the sum of approaching about a year's GDP. And the Fed is now doing "quantitative easing" which is Fed speak for printing money. This is all very *radical* (and hypocritical) compared to the ideology espoused by most political and economic leaders in the USA historically. We are now in uncharted territory.

So, since privacy is history, and banks are now socialized enterprises, and the main engines of US manufacturing (the car companies) are now run as welfare organizations for all those US Americans who otherwise would lose their jobs, and I could say more on what's going wrong but won't here, how can we get something good out of this spirit of radical innovation by our leadership by looking on the bright side? :-)

My suggestion:

* Close all the banks and have the US Social Security administration run a single debit checking account with a card based on the person's SSN (plus an additional PIN or other security measure like a physical token or biometric or some combination of all three the user might choose). We have no financial privacy anyway anymore, sadly, so the cost savings would outweigh making it easy for the government to spy on anyone. Maybe make all transfers part of the public record (especially that of public officials), or maybe not. Make part of the public record who has looked at whose account information. Maybe involve the US post office for PIN number resets where ID is presented in person. The transparency of funds transfers may deter some fraud and identity theft.

* All account holders have US$1500 a month deposited in that account. This replaces all forms of government welfare. There is no needs test, so everyone gets it, and this reduces overhead. This also replaces all forms of public education (since a kid's money can be used for schooling if the parents want it to). This also replaces social security for the elderly. If people need more than this, tough -- charity can handle that. :-) It would be illegal to borrow against future earnings there or to enforce any such deal. This monthly amount would vary depending on Congress and price fluctuations. Services might spring up to supply a good life on just the basic stipend for intellectual types. Industrial productivity would go up as no one who did not want to work would apply for a job. It is possible one could phase in the amount in this account over a few years to give the economy time to adjust. But maybe it would be best to just do it all at once.

* Medicare/Medicaid for all. Congress sets the limits similar to other countries health care systems. People want more, they buy private supplementary insurance. Nursing homes are available for all, but they require handing over most of the monthly stipend. There might be government plans for in home round the clock nursing care too (again, costing about a monthly stipend); if you want something better, you buy private long-term care insurance.

* Either one or both of a flat transaction tax (3%?) or a wealth tax (0.25% monthly on balances and real property of any US account holder) to pay for

http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
"A basic income is an income unconditionally granted to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement. It is a form of minimum income guarantee that differs from those that now exist in various European countries in three important ways:
        * it is being paid to individuals rather than households;
        * it is paid irrespective of any income from other sources;
        * it is paid without requiring the performance of any work or the willingness to accept a job if offered.
Liberty and equality, efficiency and community, common ownership of the Earth and equal sharing in the benefits of technical progress, the flexibility of the labour market and the dignity of the poor, the fight against inhumane working conditions, against the desertification of the countryside and against interregional inequalities, the viability of cooperatives and the promotion of adult education, autonomy from bosses, husbands and bureaucrats, have all been invoked in its favour.
But it is the inability to tackle unemployment with conventional means that has led in the last decade or so to the idea being taken seriously throughout Europe by a growing number of scholars and organizations. Social policy and economic policy can no longer be conceived separately, and basic income is increasingly viewed as the only viable way of reconciling two of their respective central objectives: poverty relief and full employment.
There is a wide variety of proposals around. They differ according to the amounts involved, the source of funding, the nature and size of the reductions in other transfers, and along many other dimensions. As far as short-term proposals are concerned, however, the current discussion is focusing increasingly on so-called partial basic income schemes which would not be full substitutes for present guaranteed income schemes but would provide a low - and slowly increasing - basis to which other incomes, including the remaining social security benefits and means-tested guaranteed income supplements, could be added.
Many prominent European social scientists have now come out in favour of basic income - among them two Nobel laureates in economics. In a few countries some major politicians, including from parties in government, are also beginning to stick their necks out in support of it. At the same time, the relevant literature - on the economic, ethical, political and legal aspects - is gradually expanding and those promoting the idea, or just interested in it, in various European countries and across the world have started organizing into an active network. "

See also:
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/11/16/can-unions-and-strikes-still-make-a-difference/index.html
"What good is it to get more money and more benefits for fewer and fewer remaining workers while they wait for their own jobs to be lost to automation and improved design? Yet, this has been the strategy of most unions for many years. The failure of the US American automakers in Detroit shows how, in the long run, unions creating private welfare states within individual corporations does not work well anymore for union members or anyone else in society these days. The companies become less competitive relative to other companies that pay less and embrace automation and better design, and so they fail, taking all the union jobs with them.
    We are possibly past the point where union actions related to single companies make much sense. If unions are to have any major role in the future, it may likely be as part of larger efforts to rethink the underlying basis of our economy and society, like by somehow being part of a national effort for a basic income, or comprehensive single-payer health care reform, or reforming education, or things like that."

http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm "With most of the rank and file employees replaced by robots and eliminated from the payroll, all of the money flowing into a large corporation has only one place to go -- upward toward the executives and shareholders. The concentration of wealth will be dramatic when robots arrive."

Some solutions I've cataloged: http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
The most obvious is a "basic income" like they have some of in Alaska with the Alaskan Permanet Fund: http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

It's kind of surprising how much politicians think they can get away with now in the USA. There is still massive unemployment and they think they can push through legislation like this. Why not instead, say, just mandate that all US companies be willing to pay for two months of employee training a year, to level the economic playing field and promote the growth of the US workforce? And also mandate vacation time as well?
http://www.salon.com/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010/
""Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?": America's misguided culture of overwork ... Germany's workers have higher productivity, shorter hours and greater quality of life. How did we get it so wrong?"

Personally though, I'm all for throwing open the borders. The issue is making H1Bs second-class citizens. If you want to import workers, make them citizens when they step off the boat. And give everyone a basic income. It's an experiment, but its hard to imagine doing much worse than what we have.

What ever happend to "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"? Why not ake the USA into the "Australia Project" Marshall Brain wrote about in Manna?
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

In the book "The China Price", a factory worker is discussed who had his hand mangled in an injection molder. He was left to fend for himself with a tiny bit of "compensation" from the factory. No wonder smart people in China want to avoid factory jobs -- they are not like factory jobs in the USA. See:
"The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage" by Alexandra Harney
http://www.amazon.com/The-China-Price-Competitive-Advantage/dp/0143114867
"In this landmark work of investigative reporting, former Financial Times correspondent Alexandra Harney uncovers a story of immense significance to us all: how China's factory economy gains a competitive edge by selling out its workers, environment, and future. Harney's firsthand reporting brings us face-to-face with a world in which intense pricing pressure from Western companies combines with ubiquitous corruption and a lack of transparency to exact a staggering toll in human misery and environmental damage. This eye-opening expose offers, for the first time, an intimate look at the defining business story of our time."

China is already moving to increase automation. From a couple years ago:
http://ww5.plasticsnews.com/china/english/headlines2.html?id=1278958338
"In the wake of labor unrest, Chinese factories are adding automation to control rising labor costs. It was bound to happen."

The same issues will play out as in the USA with a declining need for most human labor in all areas. For ideas on what to do about it:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

I also don't understand why China does not just print money to give out as a "basic income" to Chinese citizens so they can buy Chinese factory products (eventually recycled by taxes when the money supply grows to the right size). While in the past it might have made sense for Chinese factory workers to accept low wages as a sort of "tax" so China could learn how to make things based on Western know-how, it seems that has passed the point of diminishing returns. The big issue is that the Chinese don't have enough cash to buy their own goods, and that should be relatively easy to solve. I guess even the Chinese don't understand modern fiat-dollar economics, let alone the emerging post-scarcity economic model? Of course, I could say much the same about the USA, where there is a shortage of money supply because so much digital cash is either sitting on the sidelines parked in zero interest bank accounts or is in the zero-sum "casino economy" on Wall Street. Related links:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/an-emergency-program-of-monetary-reform-for-the-united-states/5494
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3p48upXJaA&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://www.moneyasdebt.net/

http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
"A basic income is an income unconditionally granted to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement. It is a form of minimum income guarantee that differs from those that now exist in various European countries in three important ways:
* it is being paid to individuals rather than households;
* it is paid irrespective of any income from other sources;
* it is paid without requiring the performance of any work or the willingness to accept a job if offered.
Liberty and equality, efficiency and community, common ownership of the Earth and equal sharing in the benefits of technical progress, the flexibility of the labour market and the dignity of the poor, the fight against inhumane working conditions, against the desertification of the countryside and against interregional inequalities, the viability of cooperatives and the promotion of adult education, autonomy from bosses, husbands and bureaucrats, have all been invoked in its favour.
But it is the inability to tackle unemployment with conventional means that has led in the last decade or so to the idea being taken seriously throughout Europe by a growing number of scholars and organizations. Social policy and economic policy can no longer be conceived separately, and basic income is increasingly viewed as the only viable way of reconciling two of their respective central objectives: poverty relief and full employment.
There is a wide variety of proposals around. They differ according to the amounts involved, the source of funding, the nature and size of the reductions in other transfers, and along many other dimensions. As far as short-term proposals are concerned, however, the current discussion is focusing increasingly on so-called partial basic income schemes which would not be full substitutes for present guaranteed income schemes but would provide a low - and slowly increasing - basis to which other incomes, including the remaining social security benefits and means-tested guaranteed income supplements, could be added.
Many prominent European social scientists have now come out in favour of basic income - among them two Nobel laureates in economics. In a few countries some major politicians, including from parties in government, are also beginning to stick their necks out in support of it. At the same time, the relevant literature - on the economic, ethical, political and legal aspects - is gradually expanding and those promoting the idea, or just interested in it, in various European countries and across the world have started organizing into an active network. "

See also the "Triple Revolution Memorandum" from 1964, which I quote here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures -- unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potent

It's true that people take up space and use up resources. But they also create spaces worth being in and produce resources. Also, the more people we have, the more innovation we have. Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource

Most of the USA's land and about half its water goes to livestock agriculture. The livestock runoff then pollutes most of the other half. See:
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
http://www.ravediet.com/

While a small amount of clean organic naturally-fed unprocessed meat (especially fish before mercury and dioxin polluted them) may be healthy in a diet, the quantities and types of animal product most US Americans are eating are part of why US health is so poor.
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx

On Earth, we could reduce water consumption by growing vegetables indoors. But in any case, we can always condense fresh water out of the air or distill it from the oceans if we have cheap energy, which we will get soon from cheap solar panels (and maybe cheap hot or cold fusion soon). The more people, the sooner we will get those innovation breakthroughs.

Since the Solar System could support quadrillions of people living in style in space habitats, even if one was to argue the Earth was overpopulated, even limited agricultural land is no reason to limit human population growth any time soon, even if one might suggest an aesthetic limit on the Earth perhaps, like putting an occupancy limit on a restaurant in a city.

The repentant anti-GMO activist is wrong on the need for GMOs, because GMOs (even if safe) are solving the wrong problem. To begin with, people starve or are malnourished for economic reasons that could be solved with a global "basic income". The market does not hear the needs of people without money, so the simplest solution to malnutrition is to give people money so the market will listen to their needs. Yes, this requires some level of social consensus leading to enforced redistribution of resources. Frances Moore Lappe and others explains why less people does not mean less starvation.
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/food-theres-lots-it
http://windward.hawaii.edu/facstaff/dagrossa-p/articles/WhyCantPeopleFeedThemselves.pdf
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

Although a semi-rebuttal to Lappe that ignores distribution issues:
http://www.hoodrivernews.com/news/2002/sep/18/lappe-response-think-locally-starve-globally/

Agricultural robotics (including for the home gardener) and solar panels are going to change the face of agriculture over the next twenty years to produce lots of food for all, if we want that future:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

We do not need GMO crops to feed the planet. What we need is to do things like grind up rocks to make cheap organic fertilizer:
http://remineralize.org/

And then we need a space program. And we need to be better stewards of the oceans (rather than overfish because our economic systems are broken in that sense).

The current focus on plant breeding, whether GMO or conventional, has produced monocultures of crops that are dependent on s

http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

With a basic income, much of the argument for copyright fades away (if it ever made sense), because everyone would be able to spend their time creating free software and free content if they so desired. Or people could put their time into other "volunteer" efforts whether with local charities or even just trying to be good parents, good friends, and good neighbors, which could overall make the world a much happier place.

"The three assumptions for home schooling are that it is inherently preferable for a parent to stay home to be there for the kids if they are needed, and that school as it is now is a negative influence the children who parents want to bring them up in a morale world. The third, and more controversial, is that 12 years of schooling is overkill. "

There is a lot more complexity to this than that, although you make some good points.

I'd rather see a "basic income" for all than paying people to be responsible parents, neighbors, or friends.
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

Home-based and community-based education is often about reclaiming family and community from institutionalization.
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."

It certainly is true that unhealthy habits may get passed from kid to kid in schools (they are probably the easiest places to buy addictive drugs, for example). There are other addictive and unhealthy things passed on too at schools, even if they may originate elsewhere:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.chefann.com/
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077

But public school can be seen as inherently immoral in part because it rests on a premise of unneeded violence through coercion.
http://www.educationrevolution.org/blog/educating-children-in-a-violent-world/

Contrast a "public" school with a "public" library, where many peopel throught the ages have learned a lot without someone grading them or monitoring everything they learned or forcing them to read certain books on a certain fixed schedule.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3a.htm
"One way to see the difference between schoolbooks and real books like Moby Dick is to examine different procedures which separate librarians, the custodians of real books, from schoolteachers, the custodians of schoolbooks. To begin with, libraries are usually comfortable, clean, and quiet. They are orderly places where you can actually read instead of just pretending to read.
For some reason libraries are never age-segregated, nor do they presume to segregate readers by questionable tests of ability any more than farms or forests or oceans do. The librarian doesn't tell me what to read, doesn't tell me what sequence of reading I have to follow, doesn't grade my reading. The librarian trusts me to have a worthwhile purpose of my own. I appreciate that and trust the library in return.
Some other significant differences between libraries and schools: the librarian lets me ask my own questions and helps m

Maybe it is more an "anti-violence" push? :-) http://www.educationrevolution.org/blog/educating-children-in-a-violent-world/
"Lest you think I am overreacting when I declare that the means and methods by which nearly all of the children in this country are educated are inherently violent, consider what Webster's lists as its third definition for "violent": "caused by force; not natural, as in a violent death."
    Conventional education is all about force, beginning with each state's compulsory education statute. The failure to cover the state mandated curriculum, or its equivalent, is punishable by law. Even worse, students and teachers trapped inside schools that sort, grade, and rank children like fruits and vegetables face an increasing specter of punishment if the students don't measure up on mandatory -- and soon to be nationwide -- high stakes standardized tests. Students are told that, if they don't pass, then they can't move on to the next level. Teachers are told that, if their students don't pass, then it's time to look for another job. The indelible bottom line: learn or else. (Chris Mercogliano, past co-director of the Albany Free School)"

If the money is allocated to "education" then why do you consider it reasonable to exclude non-classroom (e.g. administrative) overhead? The fact is, divide the number of kids in NY in public schools by the amount spent, and it is about $20K per child per year. Administering a system where the money goes directly to the familes should have very little overhead. Personally, I'd rather see a more general basic income for everyone in the USA though on the order of US$2000 per month (about one half the US GDP), and then families could decide how much of that to allocate to educational expenses.
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://www.usbig.net/index.php

I agree we'll see 60% unemployment or worse (barring radical changes) fairly soon (due to robotics, AI, and free content on computer networks), but I don't think that issue is fixable by reforming public schools. Every country is going to see this, regardless of the school system. Some solutions besides a basic income:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
"Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an [institution]. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production. all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied.
The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."

However this could be fixed in our society with a basic income (and/or other changes):
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

Every age has its challenges. Twenty thousand years ago, there was no malaria (a side-effect of agriculture), no threat of nuclear war or bioterrorism or nanotech or robotics run amok, communities and familes were probably stronger overall than in industrialized countries, people ate more vegetables and so had little cancer, diabetes, gout, or heart disease, people got a lot of sunlight and so autism and allergies were probably very rare, people who "worked" did so directly for themselves and their families and communities without some complex bureaucratic supervision alienating them from what they were doing, education was very hands-on, religion was likely more a direct experience connected with nature and community for most people, the planet seemed like an endless vista for growth with free land everywhere relative to the number of people, addictions as a "pleasure trap" were harder to get stuck in, etc. etc.. Oh, sure, there were bad things about those times too. My point is not that such times were uniformly "better" (where would we be without twenty-thousand years of dog-breeding to create "man's best friend"? :-), just that the issue is more nuanced than you suggest -- some things have improved greatly, but other things have gotten worse in some ways for a large percentage of the population. Increasing addiction rates are just one sign of social stress and a dysfunctional economic system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Consider as an example of a conflict between an old way of living an modern society:
"Christian Missionary Deconverted by Tribe"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr3q6Cid1po

And:
http://www.ishmael.org/origins/Beyond_Civilization/
"Civilization, in effect, represents an attempt to improve upon tribalism by replacing it with hierarchalism. Every civilization brought forth in the course of human history has been an intrinsically hierarchical affair--in every age and locale, East and West, as well as every civilization that grew up independently of ours in the New World. Because it's intrinsically hierarchical, civilization ben

"It's REALLY hard to do! It's basically exhausting."

So true. Something I posted in 2001:
"License management tools: good, bad, or ugly?"
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/gnu.misc.discuss/30tDY9VE92Y
"My question is: should software tools, protocols, and standards play a role in easing this required "due diligence" license management work (at least as far as copyright alone is concerned)?"

Also, where I hypothesized millions of US citizens arrested over copyright, same as now for marijuana: http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html

I'm thinking more and more that it is just not possible for anyone to really prove they have a legal right to have proprietary content on some specific device when you look really hard at it. Bills of sale might be forged, to begin with, so what does showing one prove? And if you not going to jail depends on some third party verifying something over and over, good luck. And many proprietary licenses are violated often if you have too many copies (including on backup media), so you really can never 100% prove you have right to the software on a device because there might be copies elsewhere, and how do you prove you don't have extra copies somewhere? A very problematical situation if someone really pushes things...

Also, border searches now occur a hundred miles or so inside the actual US border, so most US Americans (who are mostly bi-coastal) can in theory be searched at any time this way by warrant-less border-related searches.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception

Since, as above, people can't really prove they have legal access to anything they paid for, that makes almost everyone in the USA effectively a felon who can be arrested tomorrow by the border police if someone with some power wants to push the point. So, using only freely-licensed information might just become the safest option, even if that might also not be good enough (how do you known a statement about something being under a free license is really valid?). We'll see how all this "artificial scarcity" plays out...
http://www.artificialscarcity.com/

This book has a section on why goods with low incremental costs for distribution should be free according to the authors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level:_Why_More_Equal_Societies_Almost_Always_Do_Better

A "basic income" could fund creators rather than copyright monopolies...
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
http://www.livableincome.org/amillionairegli.htm

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.02/code_pr.html

As that older article points out, the Bakers also spent some time early on at IBM Research doing speech stuff (and from when I was working at the IBM Speech group myself much later, it did not seem completely clear what way most of the knowledge was flowing). My undergrad adviser at Princeton, George A. Miller, who did a lot in the psychology of natural language and knew the Bakers (I think from when he was at Rockefeller with them), told me about this loss more than a decade ago, as a cautionary tale. More than the money, what really hurt most for the couple was not being able to work on their project anymore. For anyone who really cares about what they are working on, this is a good argument for working in the free and open source software realm rather than trying to finance proprietary software somehow, even when you think you are the "owner" of the software. Imagine if the Bakers had released Dragon as FOSS back then and built a consultancy around it -- at least they would not be alienated from their 20+ year labor of love (or "third child" as they called the software). In general, you also can't expect the same people who put their love into creating great things for the world to be fully prepared to deal with business sharks (even business sharks like GS being supposedly hired to "help" them). I'm glad my wife and I released our own labors of love (like our Garden Simulator and PlantStudio software) as FOSS instead of taking on investors and making it proprietary, since at least we can always still work with the source code. Of course, the flip side of that is often not having the time to do that because of a need to do other things for money. We ideally need a "basic income" and similar social changes to solve that problem and to minimize a software industry based around "artificial scarcity".
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
http://www.artificialscarcity.com/

"... as an Australian taxpayer I also want to see the welfare using our tax dollars on those who are genuinely needy (given than most government benefits in this country are means-tested)."

http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

See also E.F. Schumacher on Buddhist Economics for support for your point.
http://web.archive.org/web/20110425153540/http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html

Also, look at stuff on a "basic income":
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

And stuff by Martin Ford and Marshall Brain.

"Going after these services is treating a symptom, not the root cause."

See: http://www.basicincome.org/bien/

The root cause is lack of a basic income, an expanded gift economy, or improved subsistence technology, and/or better government planning (which could all support artists and other creators).

With a basic income (or those other things), creative people would not have to worry where their next meal is coming from, and would not have to engage in the legal, but increasingly immoral (in the internet age), practice of creating "artificial scarcity" to fund future works or repay investors.

I also mention three other aspects that are important too besides a basic income (a gift economy, improved subsistence, and improved planning). More on all that by me:
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

If you look at the hard data yourself, you will see that US governments (federal, state, local) together spend about US$600 per month per capita on welfare, unemployment, and schooling. If that money was given directly to every citizen, a family of four would be getting US$2400 per month (tax free) which for many would be enough to live on and homeschool in an area of the country with a low cost of housing (especially as both parents could still do additional work or subsistence gardening activities and would have time to be frugal and would have less stress leading to recreational shopping therapy).
http://www.whywork.org/action/lifestyle/jobfree.html

With more involved parenting, and more neighbors with free time for being involved in their communities, most neighborhoods will be much better place to grow up in, and there will be less juvenile delinquency and fewer kids wanting to act out by hurting others. See also:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html

The graph you point to, indicating rising government over the next few decades up to about one-half the GDP, is pretty meaningless in the sense that it must depend on a lot of unstated assumptions all subject to political action. Also, some things like health spending may drop greatly as people understand health better; see the links I assembled here:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

Besides, what is wrong with redistributing one half the GDP as a basic income (and health insurance)? That would amount to about US$2000 per month as a right of citizenship right now (more if the economy grew more), and to make up for the effective enclosure of the land and of the copyright commons and for pollution suffered from industry and so on. I think that could make a lot of sense, and so do many others:
http://www.usbig.net/whatisbig.php
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

The remaining half of the GDP would be about as big as the total US GDP around 1995, which seemed big enough to motivate anyone who needed motivating by money back then. :-)

Alaska has something called a Permanent Fund that is somewhat like that (Sarah Palin helped grow it):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

Also, right now the US governments spend more per capita for medical care than other countries require to give all their citizens generally better health care outcomes than in the USA.

So, the numbers easily work out. It is the ideology that is the problem. See:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"Justifications for elites and social hierarchy goes all the way back to the pharaohs. ..."

The fact is, our current socioeconomic system is falling apart (see other links I've posted in this thread) -- and one consequence of that is increased domestic violence and increased warfare. I have collected more details here:
http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery

So, the status quo is failing, and increasingly at risk from WMDs from alienated people. We ne

"Explain to me how that fosters innovation. "

Because it causes deflation -- everything is cheaper, which makes it easier to live on less and have more free time for innovation.

After hundreds of years of innovation, we've now reached the point where most human labor is spent on "guarding", not "production".
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

See also:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us" by Dan Pink
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

And on how Bill Gates learned to program in part from dumpster diving to read other people's code:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=437640&cid=22255952

People like Eric von Hippel at MIT have written about how about 80% or so of innovation comes from customers, anyway...

What we really need is a "basic income" so anyone who wants to focus on innovating and giving away the results without enforcing "artificial scarcity" can afford to do so.
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/

"Absent the capitalist system of letting the market decide which products are desirable, how do you determine which ebooks deserve to succeed? How do you determine how much to reimburse the author? These are the fatal flaws with hard-core socialism / communism: you have no reliable, accurate way to determine the best way to allocate resources."

J. K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter while she was on the dole.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3666215/From-the-dole-to-Hollywood.html

How do you explain the success of "free software" or the success of the Debian project that is coordinated through emails and chat messages instead of dollars? What often determines what succeeds and is maintained is by what people think is useful (not who has money to pay for it).

Why do people need to be "reimbursed"? People can be motivated by the work itself:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

It turns out creativity often suffers if it is remunerated.
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm

Further, why do we have to keep innovating like crazy if we never get to rest after all that innovation is done? Haven't we made life easy enough that we can get back to spending time with family, friends, hobbies, contemplating nature or the infinite, being a good citizen, and so on?

Most work just exists to preserve (through "guarding") the work system itself; see:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://www.whywork.org/

What are you going to propose to do when robots and AIs can do much of the work? How are you going to earn a living?
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/

(Posting AC as I have 15 mod points in the discussion, including modding your post up because it does raise an important point. :-)

Rather than build robots to guard prisons, why not just get the robots to do the boring work outside instead of imprisoning people for not wanting to do the work (and stealing, selling drugs, etc. for money)?
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

We need "A Newer Way Of Thinking":
http://anwot.org/

Where this may all be leading, Marshall Brain's "Manna":
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Why not just have a "basic income" instead, funded by a tax on robotic factories?
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA

Give the money out every month as a "basic income" of $1000 to $2000 a month (Social Security for Medicare for all from birth), and things would settle down soon enough. http://www.basicincome.org/bien/

Much addiction is just a sign of stress: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

And can be overcome: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Good communities help with that: http://www.bluezones.com/

http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still,homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it becomes, because there are more families close by with which to meet during the daytime (especially in rural areas). And sometime just knowing an alternative is possible can give one extra hope. Who would have predicted ten years back that NYS would have a governor who was legally blind and whose parents had been forced to change school districts just to get him the education he needed? So, there is always "the optimism of uncertainty", as historian Howard Zinn says. We don't know for sure what is possible and what is not. "

See also:
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
http://basicincome.iovialis.org/e00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Income_Guarantee
"A basic income guarantee (or basic income) is a proposed system[1] of social security, that regularly provides each citizen with a sum of money. In contrast to income redistribution between nations themselves, the phrase basic income defines payments to individuals rather than households[2], groups, or nations, in order to provide for individual basic human needs. Except for citizenship, a basic income is entirely unconditional. Furthermore, there is no means test; the richest as well as the poorest citizens would receive it. The U.S. Basic Income Network[3] emphasizes this absence of means testing in its precise definition, "The Basic Income Guarantee is an unconditional, government-insured guarantee that all citizens will have enough income to meet their basic needs.""

What good is education as far as economic advancement when the robots and AIs and voluntary social networks are going to do most of the jobs inthe future?
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/

... keeps most people in line. See the new online (free) movie "Human Resources" where that is mentioned in passing. Daniel Quinn has suggested they key factor of "civilization" is that all food is under lock and key.

Sure people can express their opinions, and then they can try to find jobs, which they then maybe won't...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/09/columbia-alum-castigates-_n_794380.html

A basic income might change things for the better:
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
The USA already gives out US$800 a month per person on avergae for social security, schooling, and welfare -- why not just give every citizen a check for that amoutn every month. Seems fairer to me than a "needs" based or "age" based criterion for public assistance.

There is not true freedom without economic security. A lot of farmers had that basic security 200 years ago in the USA. Few people have economic security now in the USA where most people are living paycheck to paycheck, and the young are being imprisoned in school and made to fear stepping out of line or they won't get a "good" job. Other ideas:
http://idlenest.freehostia.com/mirror/www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
It would give people free time again to be good citizens, including time for keeping up with what the government is doing.

Why should everyone not have some claim against the industrial commons, given so much is now privatized through questionable processes?

Alaska has a bit of a basic income through the Alaska Permanent Fund distribution oil wealth periodically to all Alaska residents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

Is Sarah Palin a socialist? :-)

Yes, being able to produce energy at home with reneables like solar panel,s and being able toprint your own stuff in a 3D printer (and even recycle stuff back into raw materials) is a form of capitalims that connects with the locaism solution I mention (among others of a gift economy a basic income, and democratic resource-base plannin).

See writings by Kevin Carson for more ideas on how we might all become capitalists in that sense, even as we move beyond other aspects of capitalism.
    http://mutualist.blogspot.com/

See also:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_S._Albus#Peoples.27_Capitalism

A basic income could also be seen as a claim on our global capital as a right of citizenship:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit
    http://www.basicincome.org/bien/

But it is a different paradigm for the mythology of wealth:
    http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402

Then see if the training budget will cover this: :-)
    http://www.humorproject.com/conference/

See also:
    http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/health/30vitamin.html?permid=196#comment196

By the way, as an alternative to working:
    http://idlenest.freehostia.com/mirror/www.whywork.org/index.html

And, consider:

The US currently spends as much on schooling, social security, and welfare to give every citizen about US$800 a month.
    http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

And it spends enough on Medicare/Medicaid to cover everyone with good health care if it was managed better.
    http://www.singlepayeraction.org/

And the US spends more than twice as much on "defense" in a year than it would take to change the entire country over to using renewable energy and no longer need much of a defense department.
    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan

It's all about the paradigm and a global mindshift beyond narrow vested interests.
    http://www.global-mindshift.org/memes/wombat.swf

At least everyone in Cuba have access to medical care.
    http://www.hr676.org/

On your points:

"Go to work,"
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

"send your kids to school."
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://www.holtgws.com/

"Follow fashion,"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-consumerism
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html

"act normal."
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_war_on_the.html
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

"Walk on the pavements,"
http://www.bluezones.com/makeover-about (shows how unusual that is)

"watch T.V."
http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/
http://www.tvturnoff.org/
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml

"Save for your old age,"
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-practices.html

"obey the law."
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

"Repeat after me: I am free."
http://www.amctv.com/videos/the-prisoner-1960s-video/
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm

Any more? :-)

A basic income would eliminate poverty (and was endorsed by Nobel Prize winners):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://www.usbig.net/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html
The right amount of vitamin D would reduce sick care costs by maybe a third in industrialized countries:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
A good diet, occasional fasting, and moderate exercise would reduce another third or so of sick care expenses by helping people break out of a pleasure trap from supernormal stimuli:
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
Single payer health care in the USA would reduce expenses (for paperwork) by a third as well (these are not all additive, of course):
http://www.pnhp.org/facts/what-is-single-payer
Reinstating regulation on children's TV might help prevent damage to kids:
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077
A more vegetarian diet would also free up three-quarters of agricultural lands in the USA:
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
Renewable energy has been cheaper than fossil fuels and nuclear, when you factor in the externalities, like pollution, defense spending, and risk:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
Switching to electric cars would probably reduce our electricity use, and eliminate the need for much oil (since it takes more electricity to refine the oil into gas than it would to run electric cars the same distance as a gallon of gas in an ICE car):
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
We can develop the technology of being able to produce almost anything from commonly found raw materials:
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
We know how to make healthier communities:
http://www.bluezones.com/makeover-about
http://www.amazon.com/Surviving-Americas-Depression-Epidemic-Community/dp/1933392711
Nuclear weapons and military robots are ironic because the same technology could produce abundanc

Human behavior is a product of many things, genetics, parenting, history, nutrition, community, environment, and others...

As I see it, you are asking, what do we do about psychopaths, and their lesser cousins, bullies?
"[p2p-research] The psychopath as peer?"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005499.html

As Jacque Fresco suggests in the following two videos, you can change the physical and social environment, and that will change a lot of human behavior in a healthier way, which is much better than passing laws:
http://www.youtube.com/user/jacquefresco#p/a/u/2/pbtbGcKiLiM
http://www.youtube.com/user/jacquefresco#p/a/u/1/PSbKfdOTRpY

And as you suggest, today's prisons in the USA create criminals. The USA has many times more people in prison than other industrialized countries,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
in large part because the sentences are way longer (part of that is that the prison industry is profitable to many who lobby for harsher laws or prevent removing harsh laws). For example, in New York State:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/27/AR2009032702834.html
"Then in November, Democrats captured the state Senate for the first time in years. The State Assembly in the past had proposed repealing the drug laws, but the effort was always blocked by Senate Republicans, many of whom represent largely rural, Upstate districts where most of the state's prisons are located."
And consider what was recently discovered in Pennsylvania:
"Pennsylvania rocked by 'jailing kids for cash' scandal"
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/02/23/pennsylvania.corrupt.judges/index.html
Where else in the USA does this happen?

A basic income could remove much petty theft and physical crimes of mugging and armed robbery:
http://www.usbig.net/whatisbig.html
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

Being non-violent does not mean being passive. We can actively work to create a better society that works for most everybody as an active process, especially in a democracy:
"Social Movements and Strategic Nonviolence"
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html

The same as with terrorists, you may not be able to prevent individuals from planning to do harmful things, but what you can do is take away their social support network that enables them and provides cover for them to plan large scale harm. That goes for whether the terrorists are alienated fundamentalist extremists pursuing some radical cause, or ostensibly mainstream elected government officials invading other countries to remain in power and to create business opportunities for their friends.

Again, Voyage from Yesteryear is one picture of such an alternative society (even if it is not the only possible one).
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

Because we live in such a schooled society, where most people have been broken and trained