Slashdot Mirror
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.
I strongly suspect that my level of "basic needs" I'm willing to "give" to someone who smokes pot and plays video games all day is much lower than they will demand.
The Capitalist system has created more jobs, more wealth, more prosperity, and higher income mobility than any other system in the history of mankind.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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.
Ask the people in East Germany before they were set free from your idea of utopia if they think their lifestyles - as empowered by mandatory collectivist wonderfulness - was more or less corrupt, or polluted, or impoverished than was the lifestyle in West Germany.
You're deliberately pretending that history didn't happen so you can insist that having other people provide for you is somehow not only fair to them, but preferable. No. We don't want to be your slaves, slacker-boy. Trying to re-tell the history of prosperity so you can avoid looking at reality is just your juvenile way of wishing you could slack your way through life while other people work and create and make the things you want to be handed simply because you're breathing.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
Corruption exists in all economic systems.
More pollution and more trash are by products of people using more resources. Not all choices will be good choices
Capitalism is basically resource allocation based not on need but ability to cover the expenses of gathering those resources. It is flexible by letting people set their own lower bounds. Socialism tries to make it capitalism more efficient which It can do in limited grouping but not on the whole system. Some systems especially those dealing with people will always been horribly inefficient. That won't ever change. So the most flexible system will grow the most and that is capitalism.
Where capitalism fails is in providing minimum base level. If you want people to have healthcare capitalism will always fail at that. If you want everyone to get a minimum amount of food daily. Capitalism fails. Otherwise you get homeless hungry people dying on your streets.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
You people categorically against this do realize we are rapidly approaching a point where large parts of the population don't really have to work to support our basic societal infrastructure? So what happens then? Do we actually reevaluate our economic system or just proceed as we've been going with increasing economic inequality and subsequent societal unrest? Are you people so selfish that you would deny basic support for all if our society could afford it? There will always be an incentive for work because you'll be able to make more money and have more things.
And if that is the way modern capitalism worked, you might have a point. But when you consider the amount of corporate welfare in most industrialized countries, and couple that with the fact that, as the Panama Papers show, the very wealthy are so powerful that they can actually manipulate, if not outright force the political system to make sure not only profits are guaranteed, but large amounts of cash is protected in tax shelters. There's nothing wrong with being wealthy, but when being wealthy effectively creates a whole new political class, capable of overawing politicians to guarantee compliance and leniency, then i'd say we've left behind the idealized capitalism and are well on the way to kleptocracy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Oh for fucks sakes, anytime anyone offers anything, there are strings attached. The difference between government and private concerns is that governments are at least hypothetically responsive to the voter. But really, this is total paranoia. All housing, even privately owned housing, has rules attached to it. I can't dig a big ass mote around my property, nor can I build a five hundred foot tower. I still have to get permits, and if the plan violates local or state building codes, then that's that. If I play loud music at 1am, the fact that I own my house doesn't mean I can't be fined under nuisance bylaws, and potentially even end up in court.
This Libertarian fantasy of yours simply does not exist. We all have obligations, whether we're owners or renters, and whether, as renters we live in privately-owned housing or public housing.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The difference between government and private concerns is that governments are at least hypothetically responsive to the voter.
Another difference is that private parties are responsive to their own welfare, and not just hypothetically because they must play well with others in order to have continued success.
So this debate boils down to which has more power to push common good: the set of voters or market forces? My thought is "both", and I think it's foolish to play the game of attacking one side just to promote the other.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I have a suggestion, rather than everyone sitting around drawing conclusions out of their asses, lets see what actually happens when someone tries it. Let them prove or disprove it and then we will have some results to examine and criticize.
Been done, forty years ago. And the results (WARN: PDF) seem fairly positive. Now, one test is never good enough but it didn't reduce the town to a smoking ruin. So why shouldn't we throw some more at the wall and see what sticks?
I htink we were collectively distracted by the poor term "the 1%". The actual 1%, the moderately wealthy, the successful doctors and dentists and lawyers and small business owners, they aren't the issue here. The 1% aren't the people in the Panama Papers.
We should instead be upset at "the richest 100 families", who IMO have been causing so many problems. In some ways, the difference between "ideal capitalism" and "capitalism as practiced in the US" is the difference between the 1% and the richest 100 families.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Oh please, this isn't that hard. The Basic Income is simple: everyone gets the same amount, period. (As I understand it; if I'm wrong, someone please correct me, but I don't think I am.) You don't get more money for living in NYC than in Bumfuck, Idaho. So if that basic monthly paycheck (which isn't going to be a whole lot by NYC standards) isn't enough for you, then you need to pack up and move somewhere cheaper. But guess what? Now that you have a guaranteed basic monthly income, you have money to move, and you don't have to worry about losing your job and not having a source of income, so you can afford to abandon the high-price city and move someplace cheaper and see if it works out for you. If it doesn't work out and there's no jobs there or you just plain hate it, no problem, you still have that basic income, so you can pack up and move again. Moving isn't that expensive when you don't have a lot of stuff anyway, the problem is the danger of losing your job and that paycheck, and not finding a new one in the new location. BI solves that.
Now, with that out of the way, real estate prices are pretty simple: leave them to market forces (to an extent). If a city makes itself so expensive that all the janitors and cooks and meter maids can't afford to live and work there, oh well! They'll have to figure out a solution on their own, such as building some lower-income housing, or they can just suffer the consequences.
In fact, this will probably be a really GOOD thing for getting rents lower: with the lowest-income people no longer required to work for a living, and only working because they want more money so they can buy iPhones or whatever (BI isn't going to provide them enough money for any luxury, just the basics), they're not going to put up with shitty jobs in high-rent cities any more, a bunch of them are going to move out to cheaper places. It'll be better for them to move to the middle of nowhere, collect their BI check, and smoke pot or watch TV or maybe start a small business than to hang around some ultra-high-rent city like NYC working their ass off just to pay the rent (or commuting for hours every day to live someplace more affordable) because the BI isn't close to sufficient to pay the rent there. This will force rents to come down in those cities, one way or another.
So, for your SanFran example, the city will basically implode, which is a good thing. Usually, things need to completely fall apart before people will fix them.
I think the VC's claim is a little strange also:
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,
Yes, people will continue to invent, they will create new products and services, music, art, etc. But who is going to decide that instead of sitting home and watching TV, they're going to wait tables, or flip burgers, or enforce laws, or collect trash, or be a retail cashier?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
This sounds nice on paper, except you still haven't dealt with the problem of those who feel they have the "right" to live there.
Sure I have: they don't have any such right. They have a guaranteed monthly income, and they can spend it how they like. If they can't afford the rent in Manhattan on that, then they'll have to move.
Remember also that New York was one of those states that wanted to justify having unemployment for longer than 99 weeks.
You don't need unemployment with BI, just like you don't need "disability", SNAP, etc. All these social programs are band-aid attempts to fix the problems caused by poverty. Eliminate poverty with a basic income and you don't need them any more.