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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."
This idiot should be funding birth control in Kenya
Nobody really wants other people to have to work. What they want is to not have to work themselves. If the most efficient way of getting what they want without having to work for it themselves is making other people work, then that's what they'll want. But if they can more easily have robots provide them with everything, and not have to pay some ugly bags of mostly water to do it instead, all the best from their perspective. The whole point of all technology is to lessen the need for human work, because if you need human work then you need other people and if you need them they've got leverage to demand things from you.
So work as a justification for dessert becomes a convenient narrative, an easy excuse to say why they don't have to give anyone anything: you didn't work hard enough to deserve it. Never mind that as automation displaces human labor there increasingly comes a point where there's no such thing as "hard enough" because humans are simply incapable of providing the same value as robots; work remains the justification for why the haves get to keep having it all and don't have to share at all with the have-nots.
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.
-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."
How did you jump from not wanting to have to work to not deserving to live? I think that is a horrible revelation of your mind and nothing else. (See what I did there?)
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.
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.
Unless done in a pants-on-head retarded way, an UBI always preserves the benefit of working. You always get more from working than you do from not working. The net effect it has is to bring all incomes (after the UBI and the tax that funds it) closer to the mean income. Hardly anyone is going to want to just barely survive for free if they've got the means and opportunity to (much more easily thanks to the UBI head start) live a luxurious life with all their favorite toys and joys in exchange for a little work. It creates a center-ward pressure on incomes, giving people with the lowest incomes a boost up closer to mean income, barely affecting people near that mean income, at the expense of making it harder for people extremely far above the mean income to continue moving even further above it.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Nobody's talking about increasing the money supply, they're talking about shuffling it around. And as the money is representative of material goods, that's equivalent to shuffling the material goods around too, which is the entire point of the exercise.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
This may come as a shock to you, but not everyone wants to live in San Francisco.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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."
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.
Well no, not at least in the models currently being tested/speculated about. It depends on how the BI is arranged. I wrote about the BI experiment going on here in Finland in an earlier story here, quoting the relevant part:
Because in most models of BI the income is essentially created as a negative tax-bracket it means that not everyone will get a blank increase of X dollars which would lower wages. For me example under such a model my tax-rate would go down 5 %. meaning my pay could be cut by that amount without it affecting my level of income at all. Cutting any more than that would start to reduce the net income I get.
No, it wouldn't. If I was offered 200 instead of my current pay, my net income would drop 63 % under this model. People are not going to go "oh cool, you want me to keep doing what I've always been doing and get less than half the money I used to because they tweaked the taxation system slightly, I'm fine with this."
Besides, doing this would destroy the consumer base entirely. If the net incomes of the vast majority of people drop by over half, domestic consumption would come crashing down, in turn causing major issues for companies,
BIs are at their core tax-reforms which are meant to ensure people can accept part time and short-term jobs more flexibly without having to worry about the problems that causes for their benefits and the hassle of re-applying for them and in the process losing any source of income for the time that their application is reprocessed. The current bI models being discussed in western economies are not such that they could be used for massive pay-cuts. The models assume that pays stay the same, as the BI itself requires heavy taxation of income to be funded. Cut pays across the board and the tax-revenue will collapse, making the system immediately unsustainable.
In the long term, if and when automation proceeds to a stage in which nearly everyone is on BI, then the situation is different and the amount of BI will have to be increased to maintain domestic demand, but in that scenario, since nearly no-one will be generating income tax-revenue, the money for the higher BI will need to come from somewhere, which means corporate taxes and capital gains taxes will have to be tweaked to fund the higher BI.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
As someone who's mother is also on welfare, please provide instructions for how she can leverage that into getting a nice car instead of just barely surviving.
There are several ways to do it. A common method is to use a fake address, but actually live in a household with a combined income above the threshold. Then if you want to work, do it under the table for cash, or have the paycheck made out to someone else. Another method, is when granny dies, just bury her out in the backyard, and continue to cash her checks.
Disclaimer: I used to live in Appalachia, so I learned a lot about welfare cheating from my relatives.
I think OP meant "how can my non-criminal mother on welfare get a nice car". Otherwise, you might just as well say "become a crystal meth dealer".
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it