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eBay Founder Pledges $500,000 To Test Universal Basic Income Program In Kenya (mashable.com)
"Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar is the latest tech bigwig to get behind the concept [of universal basic income]," reports Mashable. "His philanthropic investment firm, the Omidyar Network, announced Wednesday that it will give nearly half a million dollars to a group testing the policy in Kenya." The money will come from the Omidyar Network and be doled out to people living in Kenya through a program called GiveDirectly. Mashable reports: Universal basic income is the notion that a government should guarantee every citizen a yearly sum of money, no strings attached. The thinking is that such a program would relieve economic stress as automation technology severely reduces the demand for labor. Theories along these lines have existed for centuries, but their proponents have never had much luck convincing governments to give them a shot. Thus, the only data on real-world effects come from a few scattered experiments throughout the years. GiveDirectly is looking to add to that knowledge with one of the biggest trials of a basic income system in history. The group recently launched a 12-year pilot program in which it plans to give 6,000 Kenyans regular stipends for the entire duration. Around 20,000 more will receive at least some form of cash transfer. The Omidyar Network is hoping the study will help advance the debate around basic income from broad theoretical terms to more practical considerations. "While the discussion has generated a lot of heat, it hasn't produced very much light," wrote the Omidyar Network's Mike Kubzansky and Tracy Williams in a blog post announcing the pledge. "There is very little research and empirical evidence on how and when UBI could best be used."
never allow this to happen since they want to make us work.
This idiot should be funding birth control in Kenya
cut full time down and have an X2 OT at 60-80 hours a week well salary as well
Reducing full time will help the underemployed at the expense of only the middle class, rather than the expense of the capitalist class who really need to shoulder the burden. That in turn only further widens the gap between rich and poor, makes it harder and harder for someone to escape from dependency on the capitalists.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Is it to allow people to not work at all, or is it to provide an income floor to allow them to bootstrap their way out of poverty into a truly productive, sustainable lifestyle?
No, if there is more money the money loses it's value.
If it's merely distributed differently, it retains the same value.
If you printed new money to fund the basic income, that would cause rampant inflation.
If you take the money from the rich to give it to the poor, all you do is boost economic activity (as the poor immediately spend all that money).
Oh and you know, also decrease human suffering. That too.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Because automation is a real threat to the economy in Africa...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
This. They want to force us to accept a lessor amount in UBI than we would get from working. After being a member of the IEEE for over thirty years, I question their motives on this.
This makes no sense. A universal basic income is probably going to happen at some point in the distant, but foreseeable future. Automation will get to a point where very few people are required to work. This will happen in the most technologically advanced first-world countries first. Not Kenya.
Obviously we won't all have more money.
Someone will have have less.
Namely, the rich will have less money.
This, and that is slavery.
Whats the matter? Afraid that your food stamps, free needles and methadone gravy train is coming to an end?
I enjoyed watching Hans Rosling's TED talk and visiting his dollar street web application. It's so hard to get a feel for what it is like to live in another country, so I can't judge how much difference $40 per month per couple would make. But I believe people, goods and services are generally free to move around Kenya, so it will be interesting to see what effect this has on the economy outside of the target villages and how the demographics of each village changes during the experiment.
Nullius in verba
How's those rose-colored glasses working out for you???
yeah, universal
Nope. You have to feed and shelter slaves. Try that on a single low-level income in the US.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They want to force us to accept a lessor amount in UBI than we would get from working.
I'm not clear what exactly you mean by this. Under any sane UBI, you always get more from working than you do from not working. Whether the UBI is a too-little-to-live-on $500/mo or a luxurious $2000/mo, taking that plus even a half-time minimum wage job is still better than taking just the UBI. (The $500/mo would require a tax of about 12% to fund, so that half-time minimum-wage job would still give you an additional $552/mo atop the UBI after that tax; the $2000/mo scenario would require about a 48% tax, so that half-time minimum-wage job would still give you an additional $326/mo atop the UBI after that tax).
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
What is this heresy you talk about! Don't make me bring in the Texan Inquisition!
Rich having less money, isn't that outlawed yet?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/extraordinary-pierre-omidyar/
"In short, Omidyar Network's philanthropy reveals Omidyar as a free-market zealot with an almost mystical faith in the power of "markets" to transform the world, end poverty, and improve lives—one micro-individual at a time. "
I'm glad for the experiment. However, I cannot see how Universal Basic Income would not simply lower the nominal value of money. Once everyone has X, that X is no longer worth anything. If you get $2,000 per month for nothing, and you rent an apartment from me, guess how much I'm going to charge you for it? More than $2,000.
You could make an interesting argument for a UBI policy where you pay people to only have at most one child. Over time it would reduce the population and would probably be cheaper to pay people not to have children than the expenses incurred by society should that person have been born. It also allows more resources to be directed at an individual child ensuring better outcomes. Having a guaranteed income and support would remove that natural human incentive to have more children when poor in order to ensure that some of them will be able to care for their parents in old age.
That only works in a world where everything is abundant, the reality is many items and resources have scarcity and individuals having more money on average actually drives up inflation as the rarer items that many could not afford prior to that income now have to go up in price. It is a never ending cycle that really doesn't end as long as resource limitations remain.
pay people to only have at most one child
If my one child dies in a suspicious accident, will you pay me to have another child? What if my one child runs away and is presumed dead? How many fungible replacement children are you bankrolling here?
The government creates no money. None. What happens when they run out? Who will pay the taxes? What happens when the govt needs more money than the amount they have to pay more citizens? What is going to stop more citizens from working, paying taxes, and just taking money?
This is nothing but a step to communism.
This. The IEEE is now fighting for its own annihilation.
Wrong. Taking money from the rich reduces their incentive to produce. The more you take, the more effort they'll put into protecting themselves from governmental theft, leaving less effort available for producing.
Poverty doesn't just pop up like mushrooms; people are poor because they're doing something wrong. Give them money, and they'll have no reason to do anything different. So while they may spend all the money they get immediately, a large part of that money will go to booze, cigarettes, drugs, lottery tickets, junk food, widescreen TV, fancy phone, etc.. Not education. Not shoes to walk to an interview with a potential employer.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
You described my mother, not me. I haven't been able to find a job on my field in over fifteen years so those republicans should be paying me.
My Asian coworkers get two or more weeks contiguous off while whites aren't allowed a single day off so we need UBI to cover the unfairness.
A friend that worked at Microsoft that wasn't allowed a single vacation in over twenty years of working there used the term "vacation inequality" to describe that. His Asian coworkers always got two or more weeks off contiguous, but the white people were never allowed a single day off.
This is akin to socialism, which works very well... when everyone is from the same Tribe and are related going back 15 generations.
But it all falls apart when the neighbors are the wrong color, or religion, or accent, or we don't have the same great-great-great-great-great grandfather.
In summary: people in aggregate, suck.
Is it to allow people to not work at all, or is it to provide an income floor to allow them to bootstrap their way out of poverty into a truly productive, sustainable lifestyle?
A good overview of the concepts is in Manna, a short story by Marshall Brain. It's a quick read and gives an easy description of the economic problems we're in the midst of.
In broad terms, we can imagine an automated factory which is capable of producing all the goods needed by everyone in the country.
Such a factory could get its energy from solar cells, and in addition to making everyone's goods it could make enough solar cells to replenish the ones it has when they go bad, and it could have enough energy to recycle all the waste products from goods that people throw away.
That's a the metaphor of course, but it largely sums up where the labor pool is headed in the next 50 years or so: consumption has an upper bound, automation is making huge sections of the labor force unnecessary, and increases in productivity make the labor we have more effective.
As a data point, note that companies are road testing automated trucks *right now*, companies are testing automated last-mile delivery via drones and rolling robots *right now*, and automated farming is coming on line *right now*.
The trucking thing alone will directly eliminate somewhere between 3 and 5 million jobs, and millions more in support structure: restaurants and hotels on the highway, for instance.
We're at the point *right now* where we have too many capable workers and not enough jobs, and improvements in technology will bring us closer and closer to the "completely automated" factory metaphor used above. The actual factory will be a host of factories distributed around the country, "automated" will still require 100K workers for maintenance and upgrades, and energy will be rooftop solar
The regular rules of economics are about to break down. It's currently a sort of cycle, where money flows to the people (through salary), the people purchase things from companies, and the cycle repeats.
With no one working, no one has money to purchase anything so the cycle stops. People starve and the economy halts.
UBI is an attempt at a new economic model. People are given money to spend to keep the economy going, and as a side-benefit people don't starve or commit crimes to survive. Society benefits by having reduced crime and an active economy, and people have more leisure time to do things such as raising children or getting educated.
UBI is one of about 5 proposed solutions for the economic transition we're facing.
It's had a couple of small trials to great success, so it seems like it might be a viable option.
I think parent means reduce the hours worked but keep take-home the same:
Used to work 40 hrs at $65 per hour
Now work 20 hrs at $130 per hour
See? Now we're all happy.
Kenya doesn't need any help in literally fucking itself to death. The population has quintupled since 1960.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Flying home to India is expensive and takes a lot of time. I understand why they get a lot of time off, but it sucks being white and not allowed to even take a single long weekend off.
ChrisMaple <-- moron (too dumb to be an oxymoron)
Only I can judge you.
As if you didn't know that before you took your job. Microsoft is upfront about the fact that Americans aren't allowed vacation time. They told me that in my interview.
Wrong. There is almost no evidence that people change their labor market supply in response to taxes. They will move money around if you change the tax system (e.g. owners will pay themselves more this year if taxes go up next year) but they don't change their actual work.
Admittedly, at 100% taxes you have problems. But when taxes were 92% prior to Kennedy the ultra rich were asked if they would work more or less if taxes were increased (yes, increased from 92%) and they answered more. So, we've got some headroom.
That would be fine, except that it's much harder (if possible at all) to mandate a one-time but permanent doubling of all wages, than it is to mandate fewer hours punishable by higher pay requirements at longer hours.
E.g. if you drop full time from 40 to 20 hours, and demand that everyone already working be paid twice as much, then the employers are going to replace everyone already working with two new hires getting paid "half as much" (i.e. what the old pay used to be) as quickly as possible.
About the only people you could save from this without the government suddenly dictating exactly what every single worker in the country must be paid are minimum-wage employees (i.e. you could double the minimum wage), which takes us back to the problem of helping the poor only at the expense of the middle class.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Vacation inequality is a problem at every startup I've worked at. I hate the fact I don't get to see my family.
And, I said in my interview that I'm from Iowa and must take time off for Christmas. My flight home from Seattle has a layover plus a six hour drive after renting a car. They've only allowed me to return home once for Christmas over the past thirteen years. I hate them for that, and I know a lot of other employees that have it even worse. If you feel that Microsoft hates you, you're probably right. I know I hate the fact that I've only seen my two nieces twice their entire lives. I hate Microsoft, but I haven't been able to find a local job that pays as much.
As in mine, bit I didn't take them seriously until I worked for five years without a single day off. Microsoft sucks.
So we have no one doing any work? Robots perform all jobs from the menial to the complex? Everything is free? I suppose we're going to outlaw private ownership of land too? All those copper mines and gravel pits are now belong to the State? This sounds like a good thing to you?
The only way that UBI could ever work is if the Government owned everything. The Government is never a producer, they are a consumer with the power to redistribute wealth. We have seen this happen repeatedly in history, and the result is never good for the populace. Look at Stalin and Lenin's Russia after the Communist Revolution. The Government took control of all food and distribution channels because "for the people". The Proletariat is a fiction, because there always has to be control, storage, and distribution sites. That bureaucratic layer is either Government or Privately controlled. In Russia the takeover led to a massive amount of corrupt government and death to tens of millions of Russians.
People are attempting to stage use cases where it's possible to demonstrate even a tiny victory, but even if they find one it won't work at scale. Be mindful of what comes from those tests and remember the old saying. "Nothing comes for Free", so you either give up all liberty for free stuff or keep liberty and earn what you work for.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Republicans support slavery. I know in the past 11 years I worked for Microsoft I wasn't allowed a single vacation day off unlike my Asian coworkers that got two or more weeks off contiguous.
My last flight home was $3,200 so why shouldn't I get preference?
Except people don't have more money "on average", for the usual sense of average (mean). Same amount of money, same number of people, same amount of money per person on average.
Doing an UBI the sane way (give everyone some x% of the GDP per capita, fund it by a flat x% income tax) doesn't even move where (i.e. what percentile) that mean income falls. Right now the mean income is about the 75th percentile. Do a basic income the aforementioned way and the mean income will still/em? be the 75th percentile, and people making that much money won't even see a different in their income after UBI and taxes (they'll exactly cancel out at that point). Just the numeric income values (post UBI and tax) at all other percentiles will be closer to what that average (mean) income is.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
You are correct. Republicans will support UBI since it is slavery.
When it comes to that point, what they really want is for all the useless have-nots to just die and stop nagging them for things. "You didn't work hard enough" becomes just the excuse for why their easily-prevented deaths are justified.
I emboldened one of your words to draw attention to it.
Curiously, as a group Republicans give more to charity than Democrats. Apparently Republicans are more caring and giving than Democrats in general on that score, so long as the giving is voluntary and not mandated.
Also curiously, the party with "free speech" as one of its core values has no problem smashing the venues of a controversial speaker.
This is my way of saying that there's evil on both sides of the aisle. Saying it's one side or the other is a misnomer, we need to identify the stupid bits on both sides and excise them like a cancer.
Come out against the stupidity instead of against the side. There are good Republicans and there are bad Democrats.
We need to stop turning everything into a tribal conflict.
On that point, instead of telling us what "they" actually want, tell us where we should be going.
People would actually support a good plan, if someone should propose it.
That thinking is why Microsoft gives Asians time off but not whites.
Does Kenya have Radio Shacks?
Why should you get day off when our days cost us two days in traveling plus thousand of dollars?
as the poor immediately spend all that money
What happens to the spent money? Does it end up in some garbage dump? Some sort of used money disposal facility?
Remember this: Every dollar spent/wasted/squandered by someone is a dollar earned by someone else. Where would the poor people spend their money? On food? We, the rich, own the grocery stores and the agri business.
Would they squander it in beer and cigarettes? We, the rich, own brewing companies, distribution networks, and tobacco companies
Would they smoke themselves to emphazema and end up in hospitals? We, the rich, own pharma companies and hospitals and healthcare
There is nothing the government can do without profiting us. We, the rich, and even the middle class hoi polli investing in stock funds and 401K will get the money eventually.
This is the key. People sold their labor to earn money to spend it. The labor is getting lower and lower valuations and the poor are not able to earn enough to keep spending. This will shut off our profit stream. It is imperative for the government to fund the poor to keep the consumption up.
So where is the government going to get the money? Partly by taxation. We, the rich, should pay the tax because existence of government protects our property and our interests. Partly by Quantitative easing or printing money. It does not matter, the money taxed from us will come back to us.
It does not matter how wasteful the government spending is. All that waste is earning for Americans. Cut the government and send the profits to private companies, they will invest in Bangalore, Bangkok and Bermuda.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Because I didn't decide to get a job half way around the world. Microsoft doesn't allow me more than one day off in a row bit allows you to take two weeks off. That is unfair.
If a town of 10,000 has about 300 people willing to buy pizza on any given night, that is the job creator right there. If one rich guy does not want to "create the job" by our rules, move along buddy, there are other rich people who would. The world is sloshing with 2 trillion dollars of money looking for a place to invest. There are no good investment opportunities anymore, I did not say it, CNBC is blaring it almost every quarter.
There is only one way to deal with the rich people. Call their bluff. They would do every trick in the book to scare us. They got rich by playing hardball. Being rational and reasonable with them is insane. They will play chicken and will win because, rational people always lose the game of chicken. The only sane, rational thing to do is to appear to be even more insane than they are. Scare them with communism, nationalization, eminent domain, till we instill a panic and fear in them. Then they will play by the rules.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
So take money from Musk so he can't build cars, and rockets and give it to a million people so they can upgrade their cable TV package... Maybe debt should be redistributed from government to poor people, so instead of government pretending to do something people can actually do something since they have to pay it back
And John Galt who was the greatest entrepreneur in the whole damned world got stumped because some rail road would not run a line to Galt's Gulch. So he took his marbles and went home. That was the story in a nut shell by Ayn Rand. Insane story written by a deranged social security collecting leech.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Flights back to India are expensive and take a lot of time. It isn't inequality to deny you vacation and allow us vacation time considering how expensive it is for us to take vacation time.
You're going to have to spell out for me how vertically scaling the income distribution curve (which is all an UBI does in effect, move all points on that curve closer to the mean value, squashing it a bit in the y-axis) suddenly means nobody does any work and everything is free, and furthermore why that would entail the end of private property, and where I said anything about that sounding good to me.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Going home is so much more expensive and time consuming for us so relatively speaking you shouldn't get any time off.
In the future of Idiocracy, the government owned all the farms, not because America became communist, but by default, because food still needed to be grown. The government bought from Brawndo and sold to Carl's Jr but the corporations simply didn't want the farms.
It is known that if the income is substantial that it actually saves money foe a governmental system. My only reservation is that Kenya may not have an honest enough government to actually put the money in the hands of the intended recipient. In the US, in many areas, it is assumed that a person in deep poverty will work under the worst conditions or starve to death quietly in a dark corner. That is a fantasy. people in poverty will steal, sell drugs, commit armed robberies or even murder to get by. Things are so twisted that if a person is suffering enough poverty a smart move is to build some sort of history of addiction and by doing so get fed and sheltered in a rehab, hospital; or even a jail. Fort Lauderdale has seen the extreme edge of this with alcoholics who live in the jails. They get arrested quite deliberately. After a few weeks or months they are put out on the street. They will walk about, see the sites, smell the air and then walk into a restaurant, order a large meal and then not pay the bill in order to get a ride back to the jail. A variant is to walk into a liquor store twist open a bottle and chugalug as much as they dare and have the store owner call the PD to drive them back to the jail. Sometimes they even go back to the same cell or cell block and swap stories about what they did this time. Four arrests a year can get them food, shelter, and medical care for that year. It costs the city a fortune to play the game which pleases the drunks to no end. These folks belong in long term care in a hospital like facility where therapies known to achieve good results can be tried and the inmate protected from their own suicidal type of alcohol abuse. It would actually be cheaper than keeping them in jails with multiple trials etc.. When released these folks are often way too burned out to work and would only be able to survive with a realistic income from the state.
Sounds hateful to push your xtianaim. Normal people want you to. Or expand on that. .
This. Microsoft doesn't care about vacation equality.
They have to travel farther and on more expensive flights so that is only fair.
Not sure if you think you're arguing against me, but all of that was exactly my point. Moving the money around into the hands of the poor accelerates the flow of money (and consequently economic activity). Money flows to the rich the way that water flows downhill, but when all the water has flowed down the waterfall stops turning the watermill. Redistributing money back to the poor is like pumping water uphill; it just makes more water flow back down more quickly.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
You are absolutely right!
The high corporate tax rates and high salary expectations from workers (especially incumbent unionized workers) in the US have had absolutely nothing to do with off-shoring of production.
Oh, wait, yes they have... You are talking out your arse. It is a very VERY common effect.
Reducing full time will help the underemployed
Reducing full time employment does NOT help the underemployed. That is the Lump of Labor Fallacy. There is not a fixed amount of labor to be divvied up. Real economies just don't work that way. When someone is employed, they spend their earnings on goods and services, thus creating demand for more labor.
When France reduced standard working hours to 35 hours per week, proponents of the change were sure it would reduce France's persistently high unemployment. That didn't happen. Economists were not surprised.
But $500K doesn't seem to be a lot of money. This eBay billionaire shouldn't get a Slashdot article out of that paltry sum, which many readers on /. could've matched (admittedly not w/o hardship, but let's say they could in their will).
Omidyar is an F. CHEAPSKATE!
Make full time 32 -35 hours a week also put a cap on OT so you don't jay working 80 hours a week to cover for jack and bill.
This is why I often say it would be incredibly useful to have a crazy radical left, as crazy (and thereby wrong) as the radical right we've got. To renormalize where "moderate" really is. Not saying that I want such a radical left to actually win, but to have them there as a threat and a contrast to more moderate left positions, in the way that the Black Panthers, though wrong in their position, were useful in helping Martin Luther King Jr. seem more reasonable to those who might have otherwise considered him radical, if not for the Panthers' contrast.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Microsoft puts their boot heels to the throats of whites.
This. They want to force us to accept a lessor amount in UBI than we would get from working.
The UBI is what you get IN ADDITION to your wages or salary.
The whole point of a UBI is EVERYONE GETS IT and there is no means test.
Why should whites get even a single day off after oppressing us for so long?
Same here in my six years at Microsoft. I haven't been allowed a single day off.
> *right now* and automated farming is coming on line *right now* ...
Farming automation was a long time ago, in the US and other developed countries. Farms today employ 94% fewer people per output than they did in 1945. (USDA)
Factories were automated in the 1960s-1980s, with the process being competed around 2006-2007. They haven't gotten significantly more automated in the last ten years. (Brookings)
A huge portion of middle class jobs in bookkeeping, drafting, printing, writing, and all forms of processing information were replaced by computers in the 1970s and 1980s. I don't have the statistics on that handy, but it was somewhere around half of middle class jobs - what a single computer does today used to take a room full of people.
In the 1970s and 1980s there was a lot of fear and debate about the issues you mentioned. You mentioned the book Manna - another book titled Manna was written in 1984, also a dystopian view of the industrial revolution. Because the change happened in the 1960s-1980s, today we get to actually see what the results were, we don't have to predict. What happened is that as people no longer needed to work on farms, food costs fell and they instead worked making Blu-Ray players and Raspberry Pi and quadcopters, and they spend their money on Blu-Ray players and Raspberry Pi and quadcopters. Most likely, you are employed in a job that didn't exist in 1960, or at least didn't exist in the same form. My job didn't exist in 1960. My grandfather was a bookkeeper - his position has been replaced by a computer. That computer needs to be secured, which created a new position for me making three times as much money as my grandfather made (inflation adjusted).
You're predicting the past. Spoiler because I've already seen it - it turns out pretty good.
I'ma tell ya'all a story about a man named jed
a poor mountaineer barely kept his family fed
then one day he heard about a universal basic income program in kenya
and he loaded up the truck and moved to kenya
later folks
- jed
How is this functionally different from unemployment insurance?
Would the stipends continue if the person is employed?
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
I was in Kenya for a long time and the closest thing that I saw to automation were horseless carriages. For the vanishingly small minority that could afford it. I thought this post was a joke when I read it.
Pfhorrest,
I've actually read all of your contributions to this thread. I really appreciate how articulate you've been in trying to explain this concept to people. Its disappointing to me how many "intelligent nerds" simply can't comprehend....
1. redistribution does not lead to inflation.
2. demand is the primary driver of the economy - demand creates jobs, not wealth.
3. it is in everyone's best interests that nobody become desperate. A rising standard of living for everyone should be the ultimate goal as it leads to greater stability and reduced chaos.
You mention a time when the highest tax bracket was 92%. That time wasn't that long ago... America was "great" - we put people on the fucking moon for Christ sake.
What happens to the spent money? Does it end up in some garbage dump? Some sort of used money disposal facility?
Just handing money to people is the best form of charity because they spend it and then some of it winds up in their community, paying wages. And if you have UBI then you not only don't need welfare or food stamps or social security but you also don't need a minimum wage.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Considering all of the vacations you white people had growing up, you don't deserve any more. I'm glad Microsoft has decided to allow me vacation time and refuse it to your kind.
There are the Amish. I'm sure there are more than a few dozen of them. For starters.
So we have no one doing any work? Robots perform all jobs from the menial to the complex? Everything is free? [...] This sounds like a good thing to you?
Does it matter whether it sounds like a good thing to me, or not? That appears to be the direction we are headed in, unless we are going to outlaw the development of robotics and AI. The only question is, what how are we going to adapt? If we do nothing and just retain the current system, then we still end up with robots doing all the jobs, but also with all of the humans starving (or perhaps living on welfare, if it's available).
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
test is flawed. In a real setting the village would have to collect the money in order to give everyone a part. In this test money from outside Kenya is funding it. Spreading money in a city will increase the economy for sure and go back afterward.
Like every Liberal project the positives will be highlighted and the negative effects will be hidden. Like socialism and world, universal basic income is a pipe dream that is not sustainable.
Where have you been, living under a rock for the past four years?
And it will be a success without even hearing any information about it. Typical. Yet, We'll see that the economy will TANK. No one will have to work. No one produces anything. And starvation will be even worse when they pull out.
So sad, and sick.
Gresham's law: good money will displace bad money. Money that is stolen and redistributed to the unproductive is bad money and will become worthless regardless of the amounts
You can't handle the truth.
Lot of armchair pundits predicting it will fail, well that is the point of an experiment- even if it fails you learn something. Whenever an "automation will eliminate all jobs" article hits slashdot the number one solution tendered is...... Universal basic income. The number two solution tendered is ...... Absolutely nothing.
...according to Universal basic income 'useless', says Finland's biggest union
Since January, some unemployed Finns have been receiving a stipend of e560 (L477) per month; amount isn't means-tested and is paid regardless of whether recipient finds a job
Of course there's back and forth -- you didn't test correctly, you're a union and afraid of losing power, your mother wears Army boots. Glad he's trying another test, more data is useful As Long As you write down and publish all of the variables you think you're testing As Well As exactly how you tested and how you derived your results.
"I'm testing to see if pigs can fly -- maybe I just need a lot more thrust."
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
Trying it in kenya seems strange.
But, the idea of universal income is that you can do away with all the other social security mechanisms and give people enough that they can survive. This means that then you CAN take extra jobs for a little less money.
Basically in Finland now you CAN NOT take a job that pays under a certain amount in the month because then you will be out of other benefits and you can't survive! but if you would have universal income then you COULD do another job for even 5 bucks / hour, making a lot more jobs viable.
the thing in finland is that the government is obliged ALREADY to provide basic social security to everyone through one way or another but the burocracy for that is very heavy. If you would roll up all the benefits into one, including housing benefits, and just give that to everyone it would be cheaper, easier and enable you to work at the same time.
also it would put pressure to provide housing in which you could live with that.
it would be feasible to take jobs like mowing your neighbors lawn for couple of bucks - right now it really isn't if you're unemployed as you would get kicked out of unemployment status(potentially, or get a quarantine).
Basically it enables a lot of smaller jobs to be done vs. just putting everyone in the social security/unemployment benefits which deny the possibility to take low paying jobs for couple of days every now and then.
as such it would enable manufacturing and service jobs that are not feasible right now, but more importantly you could just fire most of the burocrats out of a cannon into the moon.
why isn't this already being done fullscale in Finland? well duh the buros don't want to lose their jobs too(also in some cities the waiting time to get a social security hearing is longer than even legally allowed.. ).
it would be rather simple to implement too. just make the progressive taxing that finland has just a little bit more progressive, so that people earning (pre tax) 2700e / month or so would be sitting at the same income level of money to the hand (universal basic income would be given to _everyone_ - even those who have good jobs and don't need it. thats what makes it UNIVERSAL and makes it unnecessary to have the burocracy around it).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Thank you, though actually that 92% tax bracket comment was someone else, not me.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
What, you contend there's an actual radical left that emerged these past four years?
Say, a big block of people who advocate the absolution of all property (even your toothbrush isn't yours), or a total command economy (the state says who you must work for and how much you must accept for it)?
That's a radical left. And they're wrong; I don't want those people to win.
But their existence would highlight how what you're probably thinking of as a "radical" left -- like people who want a higher minimum wage, or subsidized health care, or ordinary things like that that aren't even a question in most modern Western countries -- are really, really moderate, and actually slightly right-wing even without the really radical left to compare them to by the standards of most of the civilized world.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
...and by "absolution" I meant "abolition", of course.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
How can you have dessert if you don't eat your meat?
That is actually the literal opposite of Gresham's law ("bad money drives out good"), and also has nothing to do with redistribution because Gresham's law is about the nominal value of coinage compared to its commodity value, and fiat currency like we have now has zero commodity value (and hey look, fiat money has driven out gold scrip, just like Gresham's law said it would).
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
If you take the money from the rich to give it to the poor, all you do is boost economic activity (as the poor immediately spend all that money).
Oh and you know, also decrease human suffering. That too.
I'm happy to know that if I ever get filthy rich through hard work, some deluded, spoiled communist is going to come around and take my money that I worked all my life to get and give it to lazy poor people that never worked a day of their life so they can get their booze and iPhones and still be lazy.
The only key to boost economy is to LOWER TAXES, not give handouts. High taxes = less money in the hands of people, regardless of who they are, and as a result they buy less goods and do fewer investments. People buying more stuff = more jobs, more goods, happier society.
Taking from the rich and giving to the poor is absolutely useless. In fact, giving anybody money "for free" is useless. All it does is teach the poor that they don't have to do jack shit to get free stuff. They'll blow through all that money in a day, get alcohol poisoning and taxpayers will have to pay for their therapy. That's not the way to go.
Correct. Forcing us to work is slavery but they don't care.
Unless the money for this UBI test is directly coming from the 'local economy', specifically the government in charge of taxation & redistribution than this is no valid test at all...if someone wants to come give me money for doing nothing I'll gladly accept it but its no demonstration of any value to the economy as a whole in doing so...UBI if implemented by a government like any 'welfare' system is a 'redistribution of wealth by force'. If you believe that the basic premise is a societal good then its just a debate over which method provides the greatest overall good to society. Attempting to test this by use charitable donations not obtained by force or from the local economy won't give any valuable information at all.
Huh? Where the F have you been for the last 100 years? It's called communism, its been around as both a 'political premise' AND an actual party & ran whole countries since 1919...guess what, even highly 'socialistic' countries like Canada have entirely rejected this political perspective and yet it still exists.
The basic problem with you not recognizing this is that you set it up in opposition to some 'crazy radical right like we have today'....where is the evidence of this 'crazy radical right' so diametrically opposite to communism? It certainly doesn't exist in any country with any type of going concern for an economy at least not with any greater fervour than communism these days.
Only the poor will notice a net benefit. The rest will have to pay into the scheme.
It does not matter how wasteful the government spending is. All that waste is earning for Americans.
Spoken like there is no trade deficit!
Typically natural resource exploitation is done on government owned land. Mining, logging, and energy companies have limited time exploitation licenses. It's really cronyism though as they can absolve themselves of the mess when they are done and the government has the burden of cleanup. The only resistance to this system is the EPA and their regulations.
Thats not the job creator, thats a market opportunity. If someone comes along and builds a business to serve that market, that might create some jobs. At one point in time, that business might have needed 30 humans to operate. Today it probably needs 12. At some point in the very foreseeable future it will only need 2-3.
The challenge of future then becomes; what to do with all the extra humans?
It will most definitely help spread the work around. That will help some of the underemployed and punish others. If full time is changed from say 35 to say 30, all the people currently getting 34.5 will get 29.5 and those hrs will go to others working less. Probably wont change the total much, those working less hrs are probably a little less productive (thats why they get less hrs) so a a tiny bit more may be needed. People will pay slightly less taxes, assuming they ear enough to pay any at all, so the extra could go to more spending to create more demand. But it would be a minuscule change.
Cutting overtime on the other hand couldn't do anything but give more hours to underemployed workers, assuming the overtime is work that still needs to be done, (seems quite likely since they are paying so much to do it) and that underemployed workers are capable of doing the work. (seems at least possible)
If robots do all the work, everything will still cost money. Robots still require energy, space, and materials, at least.
so you want to pay people to have 'back alley' abortions, to kill their newborns of the 'unpreferred' sex, and to not seek out prenatal medical care as to not be 'on the record' as being pregnant ("just in case")....
you know, kinda like what happened (still happens?) in china after 'one child' became a thing?
i know we have an orange idiot in charge of the free world, and a congress full of 'yes men' to back him up, but i don't think even he and they could fuck shit up that bad.
1. Lowering birth rates doesn't make anyone of those who are already born less poor.
2. Kenya's birthrate is still significantly above average, but steadily decreasing since the nineteen-seventies.
3. Higher civilization standards correlate with lower birth rates. To increase civilization standards is the best way to lower birth rates.
3. Enabling more people to do other things than just struggling to get their food for the day is the best way, in the long run, to help increasing civilization standards, together with education and infrastructure, to which to contribute is one of the things more people will be enabled to through a basic income, too.
"Birth control instead of money" is just racist hogwash. "More money leads to more births, so give them even less money" may seem logical for some, but is a completely unsubstantiated assumption. In the long run, the facts give much reason to assume the exact opposite.
If you take the money from the rich to give it to the poor, all you do is boost economic activity (as the poor immediately spend all that money).
While you are correct that redistribution increases the velocity of money (i.e. greater economic activity due to lower share of money being disposable only optionally), and that has some benefits, the important part is that redistribution increases the size of the pie.
Think of it like this. We have a threshold of wealth & technology at which our shared economy operates. Lets say we all enjoy our iPhones. This adds value to designers, engineers, marketeers, salespeople, the stock market, etc. Now imagine a few people at different points in the inequality curve.
The economic situation of the average person is probably enough to afford one iPhone (in the US anyway). That means that person's work & contribution to society is at least as valuable as that particular item, and she exercises that ability, making money go around for designers, engineers, marketeers, etc., so they can keep contributing too.
Now the rich one is going to earn dozens of times more than the average person, but is going to have a few iPhones maybe, but not dozens. That means whatever the value of their contribution/investments, they are exercising their economic clout at less than full potential. Dollar for dollar, they are less useful. They contribute less efficiently to designers, engineers, marketeers, etc. than the average person, and thus are an overall negative force on economic activity. This essentially diminishes the size of the pie a little bit (when capital accumulation goes beyond 'enough critical mass to promote entrepreneurship' it starts being wasteful).
But the poorest people (those that would benefit from redistribution the most) are the greatest influence. Because the poorest cannot have iPhones. Their contribution & value to society is not going to be enough. This is a large amount of society that adds very little value, and so by definition, barely participates in the economy. This is obvious when you realize that if you give $1 to someone who has $100, that's a 1% improvement, but if you give $1 to someone who has $1, that doubles their participation. Dollar for dollar, empowering the poorest has the biggest effect increasing participation and growing the economy. And thats growing the size of the pie, empowering all the designers, engineers, etc.
So, basically, a tendency towards income equality means greater equality of opportunity. And greater equality of opportunity means that a huge amount of people who are just surviving can actually contribute meaningfully, adding extra value at the threshold. So, no, redistribution is not just increased economic activity. Its empowering those without opportunity to also become designers and engineers and raise living standards for all.
... and voila - free money, housing, clothes, schooling, hospital treatment, food, etc. for life!
All paid for by white people.
Until the system collapses.
So because you were born your entitled to money no matter what? This is the problem with society that never challenges or expects anything out of someone. We have people here in the US who don't bother being any more to society than a person receiving aid. To say that someone automatically owes you a living albeit a minimal state of income is creating a group of people who will never go beyond what the government provides. This is truly sad to think that government wants all these submissive people living within what they give them.
Historical Materialism is right, but Marx was wrong about what came after capitalism. He missed the fact that conservatives themselves often put in the planks of the "Welfare State" themselves to stave off revolutions. The real problem is that money gravitates upwards much faster than downwards in a market economy, so eventually there's a huge money disparity.
While paper money isn't "real wealth" it is a proxy for your share of total production. So while e.g. a baker can still bake just as many loaves of bread if there's more or less financial inequality, the share of that bread that goes to the rich becomes disproportionately larger over time, because money accumulates at the top. It has to come from somewhere, and that is the working and middle classes.
Basically, if you have a system with a finite amount of money and the rich accumulating it constantly, eventually most people are going to run out of money, and sales, prices and wages for the lower classes will all plummet. Basically you'd get runaway deflation in a money-shortage scenario like that, and deflation means anyone who still has money gets proportionally richer. So in that scenario you're in a deflationary spiral in which those with vast money wealth are gaining wealth at an exponential rate - it's basically the reverse of a deflationary spiral. You end up with a third world peasant nation basically, where only a few elites have access to cash. So the Welfare State developed in *every* capitalist nation, because that was actually necessary to stabilize the movement of money.
Universal Basic Income is the next stage of this because it is easier to oversee but solves the same problem with less bureacracy needed.
That's barely a drop in the bucket.
$500,000 over 6000 people over 12 years is almost $7 a year.
Now, assuming the money is allocated to a mutual fund with compounding interest... you can potentially double the payout.
Are they expecting this to fail on purpose?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
The sign at the park reads "Do not feed the wildlife". Ask the park Ranger why. "Because they will grow used to it, and lose the ability to care for themselves". The same government that runs the park is the same government that hands food and shelter to just about anyone with their hand out.
"If you printed new money to fund the basic income, that would cause rampant inflation."
I wish people would stop coming out with shite like this. If you print money, then whether or not it causes inflation, is determined by whether or not spending the newly created money, increases economic activity/GDP.
If newly created money, is used to create more wealth, then no - you don't have to have inflation.
When government spends it, we can make it spend in America. Even if those who take it from US govt imports it from abroad, there is a percentage left in the hands of Americans. If you cut the govt and give all the money as profits to private sector without low or no taxes, they spend ALL of it abroad.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Just handing money to people is the best form of charity. Debatable - at best. However most people who have studied this issue say direct handouts are not the best form of charity.
But it's really not much of a test of UBI is it?
The tricky part about all of these free money schemes isn't giving out the money, it's getting the money. Giving away money is dead simple, no one is doubting that the government can give money away, that's the easy part. The tricky part is making the scheme work in a closed system where the taxes supply all the free money you are giving away. All this is doing is taking outside money and pumping it into a small local economy. So of course it's going to work, its like winning a "cash for life" lottery.
I'll never understand why people keep pushing these useless UBI and mincome "studies". We have a huge source of data from the former communist block. The whole point of communism is "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". All this is doing is removing the first part and giving us "to each according to his needs", but from where does that money come? Who cares, free money! It's just playing the game of "if I won the lottery" at the whole society level.
protecting themselves from governmental theft
If you start off by categorizing all taxation as theft, you can only logically conclude that there should be no taxation at all. Clearly in this libertarian nirvana UBI wouldn't exist, but then neither would civilization in general.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
the important part is that redistribution increases the size of the pie.
False, innovation and invention increases the size of the pie.
So, basically, a tendency towards income equality means greater equality of opportunity. And greater equality of opportunity means that a huge amount of people who are just surviving can actually contribute meaningfully, adding extra value at the threshold. So, no, redistribution is not just increased economic activity. Its empowering those without opportunity to also become designers and engineers and raise living standards for all.
Equal opportunity does not mean equal outcomes. UBI is an attempt to force equal outcomes which causes innovation and invention dry up. This has been proven over and over again. Venezuela, Russia, China, Cuba, and on, and on, and on.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Where "the poor" is about 75% of the American populace (below the mean income) and "the rest" is only 25%, and most of "the rest" are still not very far above the mean income and so pay for a very small part of it, most of the burden falling on those at the very top earning ridiculously, exponentially more than even "the rest", never mind "the poor".
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
This isn't a new idea.
"The initial results are striking: the vast majority of Mincome participants kept working."
http://www.marketplace.org/201...
>If you have an UBI of 800 bucks and you now earn 1000, having a wage of 200 bucks would mean that you get equal pay.
>low paying jobs would get a LOT cheaper for employers. Paying 200 instead of 1000 is cutting the price tag of that employee to a fifth
You're ignoring one important factor for low paying jobs - maintaining equal pay isn't why people work, they work because it's the most cost-effective use of their time (in terms of return on hours spent).
If you were making 200 from your job, and 800 from UBI, then you're basically spending almost half your waking life in exchange for a 25% increase in income. It's a good bet that you could instead quit your job and spend that other half of your waking life finding ways to spend the 800 more effectively, and live a considerably richer and more pleasant life.
Basically, a UBI reduces the incremental benefit of having a low-paying job. A low-paying job that you hate is still attractive if the alternative is living on the street. But if you can survive comfortably enough without a job then the job (pay, satisfaction, etc) has to be a more valuable use of your time than the alternatives.
And of course, there's the fact that you can leave your job tomorrow, and still be making 800. That reduces the employer's leverage considerably, and will leave abusive employers in a world of hurt.
Taken alone, this half of the equation would tend to drive the wages of low-paying jobs *up*, because they're no longer a necessity, and are thus in direct competition not only with alternative low-paying jobs, but also all the more rewarding ways to spend your time.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
They'll never learn it. It's been proven over and over again. On the search of the perfect socially just world... more government interference - more mess up...
In that case
- short term it first increases dependency on government give outs and along with that the decline in self responsibility
- long term it devalues the exact same amount of money everyone gets as a handout because its free and therefore has no value
Trump should really look into what being taught at schools these days.
This has never been tried anywhere, I am sure good things will result.
You're not increasing demand but merely moving demand from durable goods (office buildings, tractors, servers, office equipment, etc) to disposable goods. (alcohol, cigarettes, TVs, food, etc).
Gresham's law can be read both ways, bad money drives good money *out of circulation* because people collect good money and let go of bad, but my point is that good money drives out bad money *out of real trade*, which means that in trade people will not want to take bad money and will expect good money. Also while Gresham's law deals with the most obvious cases of counterfeiting my point is that collectivist theft and redistribution is also counterfeiting because the people who have the money redistributed to them have not done anything productive and thus cannot actually give anything back for the cash that can be presented to them. They can only consume, they are unproductive, they cannot produce, they have nothing to trade, nothing to pay for the money that can be presented to them. The money will lose its value because theft and redistribution is counterfeiting, it counterfeits the value of the currency.
You can't handle the truth.
Anyone who believes that so-called 'UBI' will work in a country of 300,000,000 people is ignoring the math or is just plain bad at math to start with, and that's all I have to say on the subject.
The article is about a first world entity giving handouts to some 3rd world town which proves exactly nothing.
You mean like the antivaxxers?
It am de way ob dey kind. It how dey be.
The biggest beef against UBI is that people who have opportunities to succeed are passing (laziness), meaning UBI is a waste for those individuals. In Kenya, the vast number of people over there likely have far less opportunities to succeed. The needy-to-wasteful quotient is WAY higher there. You need a first-world country for a reasonable test.
They want to force us to accept a lessor amount in UBI than we would get from working.
So get a fucking job. Nothing about UBI says you cannot work.
I was taking about personal tax rates. I am an economist so i'd prefer to have zero corporate tax and simply increase personal tax rates to compensate. The people I would like to increase it on is the rich--because that is where the money is.
Want to see what UBI looks like, take the examples of the UAE and US Indian reservations. In one case, it builds dependency on oil wealth, in the other just dependency of the government. In neither case is it something humans were built for - we evolved as wild predators, not as crops.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... will oppose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Casteism
The only key to boost economy is to LOWER TAXES, not give handouts.
Lowering taxes has never boosted the economy by a measurable amount.
High taxes = less money in the hands of people, regardless of who they are, and as a result they buy less goods and do fewer investments.
Actually, that's wrong. What do think happens to money collected as taxes? The government spends it on people. They either give it to people or pay other people to do things for the government. So, usually high taxes (assuming a graduated system) means more money in the hands of a lot of people and less money in the hands of a few people. Generally, this results in a net gain for the economy because people with less wealth almost always spend more of their income than people with more wealth.
People buying more stuff = more jobs, more goods, happier society.
Generally true, but the approach you want to take is counter productive and results in fewer people buying stuff, fewer jobs, fewer goods, and an unhappy society.
Taking from the rich and giving to the poor is absolutely useless.
Actually, it's sound fiscally policy which is why every developed country in the world does it.
hey'll blow through all that money in a day, get alcohol poisoning and taxpayers will have to pay for their therapy.
If that were true, that money is then going to the liquor store clerk or bartenders, the brewers, the delivery truck driver, the hospital, the janitors, the doctors and the nurses. Plus lots of other people in a web of economic activity so vast I can't list all of the beneficiaries.
Fanatically anti-fanatical