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VC, Entrepreneur Says Basic Income Would Work Even If 90% People 'Smoked Pot' and Didn't Work (techinsider.io)
An anonymous reader cites a story on TI: The chief complaint people lodge at universal basic income -- a form of income distribution that gives people money to cover basic needs regardless of whether they work or not -- is that it'll make them lazy. Sam Altman doesn't buy it. In a recent episode of the Freakonomics podcast, entitled "Is the World Ready for a Guaranteed Basic Income?" Altman argued basic income could support huge amounts of productivity loss and still carry the economy on its shoulders. "Maybe 90% of people will go smoke pot and play video games, but if 10% of the people go create incredible new products and services and new wealth, that's still a huge net-win," Altman says. "And the American puritanical ideal that hard work for its own sake is valuable -- period -- and that you can't question that, I think that's just wrong." [...] The complaint Altman addressed on the Freakonomics podcast is a common one. Study after study, however, has shown that giving people extra money makes them feel financially secure. That security ends up leading to empowerment, not de-motivation.
Simply doesn't work at the moment http://www.economist.com/news/...
The entire American capitalist system is predicated on the idea that workers don't have the freedom to just leave their jobs, no matter how bad the conditions. This is maintained by a careful system of salary collusion, artificial means of keeping wages stagnant and low (using H1B's and outsourcing, among other methods), and union busting.
A guaranteed income is a guarantee that your workers will no longer have to take whatever shit you sling at them.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Except you are confusing this and welfare. It is not the same thing. It is also not "free" it is basic. Everyone gets it, even those who work. There is a lot of overhead that could be saved in managing welfare systems by doing something like this.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Under guaranteed income, I would still work. I wouldn't be happy with the minimum. I'd be fine knowing a person that could make do with the minimum didn't really have to work.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Right now, when the government wants to expand the money supply, the Federal Reserve just sort of dumps money on the biggest financial institutions. Then it pays them a small interest fee for their service of having use of the money (0.25% according to this Investopedia article).
If the government really must inflate the money supply, then it seems to me that the best way to do it would be to spread the new money evenly among the citizens. It's just part of reality that when you have lots of money, it's easier to get more money, so almost all the time when we are talking about the economy, everything benefits the rich more than the poor. Here would be a direct payment that would definitely benefit the poor more than the rich.
Inflation effectively steals part of the value of the money. This is hardest on the poor, and people trying to live on a fixed income. Directly paying the inflation to the people would offset the harm, at least partially.
P.S. I'm a minarchist libertarian, so I don't really like seeing the government messing with the money supply at all. I'd rather just see prices deflate, so that maybe a hamburger would go back to costing a dime, and even a small income would be enough to live on. However, I'm not a trained economist, and apparently Milton Friedman believed we need to inflate the money supply as the economy expands. If you have to bet on whether Milton Friedman was right or I am right, you should bet on Milton Friedman. And if we accept that we need to inflate the money supply, I'd just as soon do it by paying the new money out to all the citizens.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Robots. Every time raising the minimum wage comes up, people are quick to claim such a raise in labor costs will just accelerate adoption of automation. But if we had basic income in lieu of a minimum wage, then such automation would be unequivocally positive.
Exactly. I'm very surprised we haven't used statistical information to cut down on rent seeking behavior. Useless middlemen must wield far more power than those that desire an efficient, equitable market.
It's not just elimination of the people maintaining the system, it's eliminating the need for the system at all.
When they ran the experiments in Canada in the 70s, only TWO groups of people worked less:
1) Mothers
2) Teenaged boys.
The mothers stayed home with their kids, freed from the burden of trying to take care of children and provide for them at the same time. That's bound to have good outcomes.
Teenaged boys stayed in school. Instead of abandoning their education to get a farm or industrial job at 16, they finished high school. The correlation between education level and productivity is fairly well established.
Additionally, visits to hospitals decreased and the number of mental health cases significantly decreased--huge savings in a system that is already government funded. (An 8.5% drop in hospital visits gives an outsized return; hospital visits are far more expensive than normal trips to the doctor.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
But neither do they want the plebs to revolt.
Yes, it's called the "riot index". A cost/benefit ratio of gains from austerity to the losses from the resulting property damage. It is finely tuned.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Let's clear up a bit of garbage that some idiots don't understand
1) Basic = to what we give them in prison, minus the security. Food, housing, cheap clothing. In fact, it's CHEAPER to give people a Basic Income than it is to put them in prison (guards are not cheap)
2) No one, and I mean NO ONE, that's willing to live at that level of crap (and it is crap) is ever going to amount to much of anything. If you are stupid enough to live like this, you were never smart enough to significantly contribute to society. People that know how to write, dance, invent, discover, repair, etc. should and will continue to work and earn more.
3) The main areas where we would (and currently do) give more money is not for the people on Basic Income, but instead is for their children, which would need education etc. so that they don't get stuck at the Basic Income.
4) We already do this for many people already. It's called Social Security and Disability. Not to mention Prison and Institionalized - though those last two are a lot more expensive, they basically do the same thing.
5) The people we currently provide a basic income for (old, disabled, criminals and insane) are not considered free loading, lazy shmucks because we recognize that for various reasons, they can't meaningfully contribute.
6) All we are really talking about is adding "below average intelligence" to the category of disabled.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Well, to be honest, there is no other human choice.
What is the percentage of people that are useless? 30%, 40%? It has to be higher than the unemployment rate, given the amount of bullshit jobs that exist nowadays. This percentage is increasing thanks to the machine intelligence going on. One guy with modern tools can do the same work as many guys that hadn't those tools back then. Most of the population cannot become PhDs (lack of capabilities, money, lust, whatever), and even if they could, we just don't need 10^9 PhDs. What will be that percentage in 30 years? 80% 90%?
What do we do of these people? Let them starve and have social unrest? Give them what it takes to smoke pot and play video games and have most of the population happy?
We built all our previous civilizations on the value of human work. You have to realize that the value human work is very rapidly plunging towards zero. This is unprecedented in history. Do you really think we can continue business as usual and it will be fine?
Video of some good progressive thrash music
I dont know about the rest of the plebs, but I am sick of being forced to work my ass off to make another man rich.
Basic income will give me the breathing room I need to take my ideas to market, as I cannot afford a single idea that fails to sell.
Today, doing nothing really isn't an option. You *have* to work somehow. By offering a basic income, you are, in effect, creating competition for those jobs. If I have the leverage to say "no", if some people find "nothing" a competitive alternative, then supply-and-demand for workers says that prices (ie, salary) will have to go up to match.
It's a double-whammy against the wealthy, in that they will have to pay a large chunk of *both* the basic income and the delta in salaries. On the other hand, they have benefited the most from income/wealth inequality over the last 3 decades, and increased automation will only make a basic income more necessary.
I'm not sure *anyone* has fully thought through the action-and-reaction of basic income, so I can't honestly say that it's "good", but one way or another its time may be coming.
If UBI feels anything like being on disability, nobody wants it. I am constantly on the brink of insolvency because, although the money will always be there, allowing me to use it on some frivolous bullshit, it stops if I do something sensible, like try to save some of it to get something that might actually improve my life or cushion against setbacks. So too for taking a job, during those periods when I feel I'd be able to handle it. If I went to work for the two or three months at a time I'd be able to manage it, my disability payments wouldn't restart for another six months, assuming that they don't decide I'm ineligible due to having worked. Making the size of "contribution to society" that I know I'm capable of would therefore leave me starving and homeless, rather than just stuck in a terrible house and scrambling to stretch my resources every month. To make matters worse, disability payments aren't enough to cover market rent anywhere at all. You have to get section 8. No problem, right? You automatically qualify if you're disabled. The waiting list is several years long, assuming it's even actually open. Good luck. Also, 100% of new programs are unit-based rather than voucher-based, meaning you basically can't move, ever, like you might want to do if you manage to find some kind of work you're actually capable of. You are tied permanently to the place you already live, just as peasants were in the feudal era. Overall, living off SSI is degrading, frightening, and awful. It is the opposite of what the studies say UBI is like. And I believe the studies. It is clear to me that as more jobs are replaced by automation, the People in Charge want the people "they're" feeding with "their" money to live like I do, rather than feeling secure and empowered. If anything like UBI is instituted in the United States, it will be carefully calibrated to provide as little and have as many rules as will be tolerated. In twenty years, they will literally own you. The only way to stop this is revolution.
I'm getting rid of my moderations to reply to this, but I think I need to...
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the government would just 'give' money to anyone. It doesn't. Food Stamps and medical care in my state requires that your either: a woman, pregnant, or have kids. Or... You work a job with no less than 15 hours a week, but make less than a certain amount (I don't recall the cutoff right now). Welfare actually has higher requirements. So if your a man who didn't sleep around? Not getting money. A woman with a partner? Not getting money. A single woman with no children? Not getting as much money. Want money? Sleep around and have lots of unprotected sex and keep at least some portion of those kids.
Also this wouldn't create money, it would remove programs like welfare and the hassles that go with it to simply distribute funds evenly across the population. It might need a slight increase in taxes, or we could just stop pissing away money on being the world's police and use that money to help our own people. That's not to mention carious other 'half-baked' programs we have that have requirements we could do away with. Telecom taxes just recently came up because the FTC wanted to use it to support low income broadband. If anyone could afford broadband their is no 'low income' to worry about.
I've always found it funny how the world sees us as so rich, yet I can drive into almost every city in this country and find homeless people in conditions as bad as any third world country. I mean we have people who live in service tunnels, under bridges, and in sewer outlets because we just don't give a shit for our own people. If we could just get money to where it needs to go maybe we could stop being a first world country built on top of a third world one. I'm all for basic income. Welfare and other support systems are rife with abuse because we pick and chose who we help and who are 'garbage' to be thrown away by society.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
It's a trap and even worse can be a weapon used against people in need. Husband lose his job and you were a single income family? Kick him out and we'll give you money! Stay with him and we'll make sure you burn together. What the fuck sort of message is that?
It may not be only single mothers caught in the trap. After all I've not only seen, but I've known men who are effectively 'playboys' who simply knock up women and then say they care for these children to 'earn a living'. My ex-fiancee had two children before I dated her. One from her boyfriend in high school and another from one of those 'playboys' who knocked her up to have another kid he could mooch off of. My Ex is a nurse and as is typical the caring type of person, though not always the smartest. Even so she never intended to have a second child, the guy went to quite some lengths to get another kid he could claim is his. One of our constant issues while we were together was that she'd lose part of her government provided income if I ever married her. She could qualify for welfare while working full time because of the kids and got free medical coverage and 'food stamps' to go with it.
When I lost my job and my unemployment expired? "You don't meet our standards of need or protected status for any type of support." Ironically if we would have gotten married and I lost my job I bet I'd have qualified then because I would have been 'supporting two kids'... The whole system is shit and couldn't see need if it bite it in the ass. It's rife for abuse because we decide some people deserve help and others don't. Making it universal would finally be a means of destroying the traps and weapons and creating a balanced environment without bias.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
This socialist experiment on a level of a country has been tried before, USSR pretty much had it, we had 'the right to work' and thus the 'right to basic income'.
The country does not exist anymore, I don't need even to get into the details of why this is a stupid (but also very importantly immoral) idea from the very beginning. If you think American system will handle it better than the Soviet system, go ahead, run your experiment. I will get a bucket of popcorn and a comfy chair, I want to see this mess happen IRL.
You can't handle the truth.
So BMI is going to be less than they're making today and they won't be able to afford it tomorrow, either.
They'll be able to afford it tomorrow because they don't have to worry about losing their fucking paycheck!! Holy shit, are you really this stupid?
The VC analysis uses the number "10%" doing this. There aren't 10% doing it today, and there won't be 10% tomorrow, especially when it's only 10% who are working at all.
There's only 10% creating real wealth. Most people's "work" is just make-work, or will be automated away shortly.
And you pro-BMI people are insulting and rely on ad hominem too much.
Well maybe if you didn't spout such stupidity, I wouldn't have to point out what morons you people are.
You can live pretty well on $3k/month when everyone else is at $1k.
Not if you want to drive a Ferrari or live in an exclusive place like next to Central Park or in Hawaii. What makes you think rich people are going to give up on wanting those things and be happy with a measly $3k/month?
A guy with a million in the bank can go 41 YEARS without working another day on that "income",
So what's stopping that guy from doing that *right now*?
Also, if the government gives me $30,000/year but I have to work at some boring, back breaking job 40 hours/week to make $32,000/year then why the hell shouldn't I just sit home and play video games?
You've just hit on another interesting side effect of a basic income. All of those crappy "backbreaking" jobs that they can get away paying peanuts for today because the only people that will do them are desperate? Guess what, those desperate people can give them the finger, and they'll actually have to pay enough to make people *want* to do it.
The people damaged by the release of the Panama Papers aren't Americans.
Conspiracists say that's because a pro-American entity engineered their release. But could it be that capitalism is practiced a little more ideally in the U.S.? (After all, isn't it incongruous that 68 billionaires live in Moscow, while Russia's per-capita GDP is only $14,600?)
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
It gets worse. The problem with all the basic income, living minimum wage, and most welfare proposals I've seen is that the person who thought it up doesn't understand why a dollar is worth a dollar. They assume a dollar's value will remain the same after their proposal is implemented.
U.S. GDP is about $17 trillion. Total tax revenue is about 33% of that, or just under $5.6 trillion. So far so good.
What is GDP? It's gross domestic productivity. In order to generate GDP, people have to do productive things. If you implement a basic income and 90% of people decide to become pot heads and video game bums, well now your GDP is about 10% what it originally was. So your $17 trillion GDP has shrunk to $1.7 trillion. And it is impossible to reach the $5.6 trillion tax revenue needed to cover basic income even at a 100% tax rate.
See, the value of money comes from productivity. When people stop being productive, money becomes worth less. Prices rise to balance out this drop in productivity, and now your basic income isn't enough to live on anymore. If you panic and try to freeze prices because you believe the price increases are due to sellers gouging instead of your own bumbling economic policies, you're effectively forcing sellers to sell their goods at a loss, and you break the economy. The sellers end up selling their goods on the black market instead, and now not only have you broken your economy, you've broken your currency as well.
Money is just a representation of productivity so its value is not fixed, and it's folly to make economic policies under the assumption that $3 will continue to buy a gallon of milk (with a small constant allowance for inflation). The true fundamental currency is productivity. The average standard of living of a country = sum(every person's productivity) / (number of people). If people stop doing productive work, the numerator in that equation starts to decrease, and the average standard of living drops. And (assuming people's income and the money supply stays the same) the amount of milk (productivity) you can buy for $3 decreases.
For example: Imagine a vastly simplified economy of 100 people where the only good produced and consumed is milk. Average income is $30k/yr and each person on average produces 10,000 gallons of milk. Total productivity for this country is thus 1 million gallons of milk/yr, and total income is $3 million/yr.. The price of milk is thus $3/gal. And each person buys (consumes) 10,000 gallons of milk/yr.
You decide each person needs a minimum 5,000 gallons/yr of milk to live, so you implement a basic income of $15k/yr. 90 of the people become bums. Total income drops to 90*$15k + 10*$30k = $1.65 million/yr. Total milk production drops to 100,000 gallons/yr. The price of milk is now $16.50/gal - enough for your basic income to buy only 909 gallons/yr of milk.
If you resist the urge to break the economy by implementing price controls, milk producing companies are now making more money per gallon sold. Consequently they can pay their employees more (each employee is still producing 10,000 gallons/yr). The wage of a worker thus increases from $30k/yr to $165k/yr. Total income is now 90*$15k + 10*$165k = $3 million/yr, while milk production says at 100,000 gallons/yr. The price of milk is now $30/gal, reducing the purchasing power of your basic income to 500 gallons/yr of milk
And so on. By the 10th iteration a working person's income is $975k and the basic income buys only 65 gallons/yr. By the 100th iteration a working person's income is $13.1 million, and the basic income only buys 11 gallons/yr. The series tries to equalize at a point where each person's income matches their productivity. In other words a basic income doesn't work - the value of the basic income tends towards the productivity of the people receiving it. If their average productivity is zero, the value of the basic income trends towards zero (the series is divergent). If their average productivity is 10% that of a worker, the value of the basic income tends towards 10% that of the worker. The value of a basic income (or minimum wage) doesn't stay at the value you originally assigned it.