The Swiss are smart folks. BUT
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/swiss-voters-decide-guaranteed-monthly-income-plan-103534182--business.html
In the years ahead, WTF do ya think will happen?
I think they voted badly and in time more and more nations will implement this kind of thing for all.
As ROBOTS take more jobs from "the working man" and the undereducated people what else should be done?
Learn OR die
We already have this in the UK almost, a minimum guaranteed monthly income.
Maybe it needs to be higher, I'm OK with that. Easiest way to do that would be just to pay everybody the same, cut out all the costs of distributing it.
However I don't think a guaranteed monthly income is compatible with progressive taxation. Choose wisely.
QuoteMaybe it needs to be higher, I'm OK with that.
I go for that idea. But tie payment into something socially beneficial. not thought it beyond that, and clearly not everyone can.
But visiting the old, anywhere human interaction is good. Caring. Robots can do so much, but the human touch is still going to be good for a while yet :)
>tie payment into something socially beneficial
Yeah. A job.
"Yeah. A job."
As a conservative MF, I'd agree but going forward ROBOTS will be taking so many jobs that a different solution is needed because the education system in the USA has FAILED
So we have to redefine "Job" to be something that adds self worth.
The big obvious one is Caring... loads of old people. lonely.... need help. In the west we do not look after people the way we did 2 generations ago.
Well in the UK we don't. The state has taken that role. Hence a huge NHS bill, disability costs through the roof etc.
As Mr Mackin says... we have to start thinking about a world when there are a lot more people than there are jobs.
http://th3core.com/talk/water-coolerextra/terminator-scenario/255
So much of our moral universe is tied up with "hard work" and "keeping your nose to the grindstone." Do people become unchained when it is not just unnecessary to have job, but for most people impossible?
I think guaranteed income will be necessary, but so will a whole rethinking of our moral universe.
I had forgotten, but years ago I had a conversation with a friend about welfare and some years later he reminded me that I had changed his thinking on the subject. I didn't remember at all. He said that he has always seen welfare in moral terms until I told him, "It's not a question of morality. It's a matter of asking a simple question: what is the cheapest way to keep desperate people with nothing to lose out of my living room?"
As jobs contract (which may or may not happen), we are going to have to rethink the morality of work.
Something else we're going to have to rethink is the assumption that "value" has to be defined by "cash flow".
Many things that a "job" enables us to do, we could do directly for ourselves.
Why does it count in the GDP when I get a job, earn money, and, say, buy an expensive stereo and lots of CDs, but no value is assigned when I practice my instrument to create my own music?
The same question applies to a wide range of activities, from making soup, mending a garment, growing vegetables, even the simple act of walking.
We've organized our lives to depend on cash flow but that's not necessary to the degree that we think.
No doubt this idea will take time to become acceptable, it is probably premature at this point anyway.
As a father of four I think about this topic a lot. I'm pretty firm on the idea that many jobs will evaporate in the next 20 years. Too much idleness isn't good for a society, I grew up surrounded by the classic welfare families where a bunch of adults pulled their government checks together and lived off the system without working. On the other hand my mother was part of a program that got her off of welfare and into a profession that eventually allowed her to have two kids graduate from a university and pay plenty in taxes -- I point this out as an example of a social-welfare program that worked.
I really do not see an alternative to basic income if the predictions of mass-automation are coming, otherwise we are probably heading to a world depicted in the film Elysium. Yet, I think we will have to be very careful in the way it is implemented -- incentives need to push people to strive, not stagnate.
If we do nothing, then we will most likely have massive crime and it costs an average of $31k/year to incarcerate someone in the US, £40k/year in the UK.
> Easiest way to do that would be just to pay everybody the same, cut out all the costs of distributing it.
Agreed.
In practical terms it will be equivalent for a tax cut to many, but guarantee a minimum standard of life for those at the bottom. The bureaucratic cost of means assessment is a waste and in my (simplistic) view, this is the best way to ensure no one is missed and no one is without...
The Swiss debate was only every going to go one way. This came about because of a system where 100k online votes automatically trigger a debate. Apparently it was backed by no politicians and there was nothing in the proposal to deal with minor details like who pays for it, how much it would be or how to stop all the hardworking tax payers from saying "well, screw this, I'll get paid to watch home under the hammer" (of whatever the Swiss equivalent is).
I keep hearing about guaranteed basic income, but mostly from stoners on reddit who expect to get paid to spend their days arguing online and posting memes between frequent wank breaks. I'm not sure I'm hearing the best arguments for it. The points above are the best I've heard so far (Sorry for lowering the tone!)
Coincidentally this thread surfaced in reddit today. Pretty sensible discussion and interesting
https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/4mt6xu/universal_basic_income_in_the_uk_discussion/
"incentives need to push people to strive, not stagnate."
I'm still going with Gordon...
This just popped up in my feed. Haven't read it yet, but it's on topic
http://fusion.net/story/288907/why-free-money-beats-bullshit-jobs/
Good READ
"numerous people are forced to spend their entire working lives doing jobs they consider to be pointless. Jobs like telemarketer, HR manager, social media strategist, PR advisor
Could basic income kill the welfare state?
"The third reason we need a basic income is that it would pull the plug on a welfare system that has devolved into a perverse behemoth of control and humiliation."
READ ON
http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/pros-cons-guaranteed-national-income
I understand the key reason the Swiss rejected it was because they cannot control their boarders.
If that is true, the USA may NEVER have it >>> unless
Quote from: Mackin USA on June 08, 2016, 11:17:01 AM
"numerous people are forced to spend their entire working lives doing jobs they consider to be pointless. Jobs like telemarketer, HR manager, social media strategist, PR advisor
When I did get around to reading it, I read that one aloud to my wife.
>>http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/pros-cons-guaranteed-national-income
Good read. And this is a real problem:
QuoteThe 2013 Cato Institute study, "The Work versus Welfare Trade-Off," found that a mother with two children participating in seven common welfare programs—Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), food stamps (SNAP), Medicaid, housing assistance, WIC, energy assistance (LIHEAP), and free commodities—could take home income higher than what she would earn from a minimum wage job in 35 states, even after accounting for the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit. In fact, in Hawaii, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., welfare pays more than a $20-an-hour job, and in five additional states it yields more than a $15-per-hour job.
The question is whether or not that problem goes away as fewer and fewer jobs are needed.
In any case, in the US, I think the main thing is first to provide an infrastructure that allows people to work as long as there is a need to have actual people working.
An example: a friend has two rental properties. The woman who was cleaning for him had no health insurance, is living in a homeless camp and does not have reliable transportation. She was doing great and for two years never missed a cleaning (and had an apartment and a car). But living on the margin, a couple of setbacks meant that she lost the apartment and the car and has no health insurance, all of which mean that she can no longer work.
So in the US, we first need universal health coverage. The lack of it is a huge disincentive to small-scale entrepeneurship like this woman's cleaning business.
Then we do need a way to make sure that someone like this cleaner, who is a hard worker and wants to work, gets paid enough - whether through wages or negative income tax or UBI - that she can support the personal infrastructure that working requires.
I see a level of UBI that lets people sit around doing nothing as being 50 or 100 years down the road as the impacts of automation become so preponderant that few jobs are left. I don't think we're there, but universal health care and a basic UBI would, I believe, let more people work with dignity, not fewer and would remove the absurd and crushing requirement on companies to provide for the health care of their employees. What other country in the world requires this of private companies? If I were trying to invent the dumbest possible way to dole out health care, that would be it.
This is a good read.
Why Do the Poor Make Such Poor Decisions?
https://medium.com/utopia-for-realists/why-do-the-poor-make-such-poor-decisions-f05d84c44f1a#.m2ek4hvwy
I realized after reading it, it's by the same guy who wrote the other one I posted, but it's a better article. Much more thought-provoking to me at least.
It definitely addresses a lot of the ideas that have been floating around this thread. Of course, he's a huge proponent and gets kind of hand wavy where the Cato Institute article points out the messiness of implementation. But gives a lot to consider in terms of how people are motivated and what keeps poor people from getting educated, working full-time and making good financial decisions.
Good article.
As someone who has known a lot of poor people I could tell you that they often do not seek their own self-interest. Most of the time it is not ignorance or stupidity, or even bad judgement that causes this. It is more complicated than that, many have a drive toward self-destruction, others just don't think they should be (for some reason) anything more than what they currently are. I could share many stories on the topic. I do think that it is a learned behavior, most of the time its past on from parent to child.
I am not saying that everyone in poverty is this way, but most of the multi-generation, native born poor I have known are. That's the rub with Basic Income, it will not fix these guys. Maybe the best that can be done is to control the spillover?
How does this translates into the future with rising unemployment? I have no idea.
>>it will not fix these guys
This podcast speaks to that question.
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/would-a-big-bucket-of-cash-really-change-your-life-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/
I don't do podcasts or videos, so my apologies for not delving into that one, EG.
I once read an editorial that I'll have to paraphrase; "If 100% of the assets in the US were redistributed equally to every person in the country with the proverbial 'push of the button,' they would again become massively unequal overnight."
My apologies to ergophobe... I skim read unless I have the phone set to auto download podcasts :)
I get it. I don't do video and I never did podcasts until a year ago when I "acquired" a daily commute with poor radio reception.
I would have summarized, but I only remembered the topic, not the findings. I *think* the findings were that after the great land gift of 1832, within two generations, most people had failed to hold onto the acquired wealth, while a minority had.
There was another recent article (Economist?) about how recent research showed that the wealthiest families in Florence from the tax roles of the thirteenth century still are among the wealthiest Florentines.
I actually like audio and video lectures quite a bit. They let me somewhat passively learn when I am doing other tasks. I can't read when I code or do math, but I can listen while doing either.
>Florence
I saw so many headlines on that but never read any of the articles. Smells a little of bullshit to me.
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/05/19/the-wealthy-in-florence-today-are-the-same-families-as-600-years-ago/
<added>
What I've witnessed is more along the "Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in 3 generations" line.
>>Florence
Like any research, there is a loss of nuance as you go from research to mass media article to mass media headline
The article keeps saying that Italy is special because names are highly regional so they can say that someone in Florence today with a certain last name is very likely to be the descendant of the person who lived in Florence in the 13th century and had the same last name. I'm not an Italian demographer, so I have no idea whether that is BS or not.
Quote from: littleman on June 17, 2016, 06:31:37 PM
I actually like audio and video lectures quite a bit.
Maybe you'll support this effort then....
http://th3core.com/talk/water-coolerextra/books-and-podcasts-that-hit-home/
>>>Florence
This just in my feed. I'm not sure how authoritative it is, but it seems more in line with what I've observed and the proverbial quip "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in 3 generations"
70% of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation, and a stunning 90% by the third, according to the Williams Group wealth consultancy.
Love this:
"It takes the average recipient of an inheritance 19 days until they buy a new car." (Related: In our wholesale business, I had a "new chrome" red flag when on the lookout for trouble accounts.)
http://time.com/money/3925308/rich-families-lose-wealth/
Well, I think both can be true.
The study from Florence is asking "What percentage of rich people in Florence today are descended from families that were already rich hundreds of years ago?" That number is going to be really high.
The Time article is asking the reverse: "What percentage of people descended from families that were rich hundreds of years ago are still rich today." That number is going to be really low.
I was just talking to a friend last night about someone who is from a wealthy family, but is so incapable of making or managing money, that even in her 30s she essentially has to go to her dad to dribble in money. She actually couldn't really even manage an annual allowance. That family money will be gone by the second generation unless her father lives long enough to keep her rich enough to pass money on to her son.