How basic income could fail in America
businessinsider.com
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That's why I'm really in favor of a scheme like this. Ensure that people supported by the community at least give something back. Go a step further and increase funding for the arts so we can create jobs there too.
The problems faced by small post-industrial towns are many, varied, and way outside the grasp of probably anyone on HN, but I'd be willing to bet that "underemployed", "rust-belt", and "small town" has a lot more to do with a person's lifestyle than the amount of free time they have.
One of the closest examples of an actual Job Guarantee was the "jefes y jefas de hogar" program in Argentina after the crisis (Google it). It worked pretty well for what it intended; perhaps too well, to the point where it became politically unpopular due to traditional views on gender roles, and was eliminated because of that.
This training could be offered on a voluntary basis at community colleges and broaden the positions available and offer more stimulating options then simply manual labour or service industry jobs.
Why do you assume that people with their time taken by (almost certainly physically exhausting) make work jobs will have an easy time looking for other employment?
People underestimate how important this is. When you are out of work people have a tendency to adopt sporadic sleep habits and lifestyle. It can be a big shock just trying to get up at a set time each day and getting to specific place with the expectation that you have 8 hours of work to do.
TLDR: A regular schedule is just drilled into your mind. It is much more important how much you work (if there are not very good reasons for the schedule).
You are projecting your very unique and overachieving situation onto a world which is in quite the opposite position. The vast majority of the people that will end up in work programs have at best a high school degree. Many of them not even that and possibly some criminal or drug history. Or bad employment history.
~80% of the employment in the US is in the service industry. That is where most people are going to find employment.
These programs are not designed for PhD students they are designed for people who have had a hard time getting the basics straight like holding a job. Staying on the right side of the law. And making the right choices which You and I take for granted.
I know some people who are unemployed for a long time and/or have trouble getting a job or not getting fired soon after they get a job. I respect their problems. What I will never accept is why they aren't using the lot of free time that they have for example to learn a foreign language, learn computer programming or something similar. It's not that money is the problem: For language learning there is Duolingo or Memrise, for web programming there exists freeCodeCamp, etc. It's also not that there is a lack of people that they could ask for help if they really needed it: For programming or mathematics they could ask me if they really have trouble understanding, for language learning I would be willing to help them finding people they could ask etc.
I can accept that people have bad luck and end up in a shitty situation. But as I see it, many unemployed people are simply lazy.
Willpower is a very hard thing to master. Procrastination is a part of everyones life. Distractions are everywhere. People get sucked into watching TV. Playing sports. Video games, gambling etc, etc.
Also depression can be a big part of it. People get depressed and that can be very debilitating. Many people do not want to admit that they are depressed and would rather just shut themselves off from the world.
Some very smart and wealthy people end up dropping out of university or loosing all of there money and sleeping in the streets.
For some people that might end up in a work program simply having the responsibility of getting to work on time and having some obligations gives them a sense of order and purpose that can turn around there whole perspective and set them back onto a productive path.
More than 1/3rd of US adults are obese.
I agree that for some people routine would be helpful.
How did people survive before 9-5 jobs, then? Or, more drastically, before the beginning of agriculture? (Honest question.)
There is a reason why capitalism, competition, and corporations have managed to pull more people out of poverty than any other scheme. Of course a set of regulatory policies, socialist schemes, and worker protection laws are required to make sure that the focus is on the people.
Science isn't generated in a vacuum, and in any case, science alone doesn't generate goods/services. I strongly recommend you look at the evidence presented on the causes of global poverty reduction:
https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill...
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-glo...
Did you read the articles I linked? What was your takaway from them?
Obviously after implementing BI the economy may not adhere to previous economic models since youre changing part of it.
What scientific studies would you reccomend? I dont consider ted talks to be a rigorous science community and I dont think its conjecture that products are designed for the people who will ultimately pay for them.
>Economists have looked at this and concluded that the spread of market institutions like private property rights has accelerated poverty reduction, because of the effect it has on capital allocation and incentives.
This isn't specifically about BI. My point is that you're wrong to claim economic systems don't matter. You're applying very little critical thinking and intellectual integrity to this debate. What do you think you'll accomplish by lying to others and yourself?
>You linked christian science monitor and an economist fluff peice fta: "take a bow capitalism," yea - quality, unbiased, non-ideological sources here. /s
Both are considered highly credible media sources. Do you think they are lying when they state that the spread of market institutions is responsible for the largest reduction in poverty in world history?
As for the TED talk, are you aware of who Paul Romer is? Do you know why he is considered credible? Did you watch the talk he gave, and the explanations he provided for why poverty has declined in various countries?
I didn't and won't watch your video source. I dont think cs and economist are lying just that one has christian in the name which says somthing about their preexisting political bias and I'm not lying to anyone, the economist article was definitely a fluff peice which even the most highly credible media institutions can produce.
Putting your head in the sand and being optimistic is not going to make the potential problems of forcible redistribution go away.
When the evidence suggests that a particular idea is a bad one, even if that idea seemed wonderful at first, a d even if that idea is wildly popular, it has to be discarded, for the sake of society.
The only people who advance this peculiar definition are members of the American left, presumably as a way to define themselves out of being "socialist"!
French Wikipedia has a better definition: the elimination of inequality and social classes.
> The word "socialism" covers a very diverse set of currents of thought and political movements, whose common purpose is to seek social and economic justice. The original goal of socialism is to achieve the social equality, or at least a reduction of inequalities and, particularly for Marxists, to establish a society without social classes.
I guess you could say "socialism" is a label and not a description.
"...said Marx, what we observe historically is that only one class of persons has always owned or monopolized the means of production throughout history. This condition of ownership over the means of production is the single most fundamental fact of the materialistic theory of history since it is this that leads to the division of society into economic classes." [Morrison, Marx, Durkheim, Weber: Formations of Modern Social Thought, p. 44, paraphrasing Marx, The Germany Ideology, pp. 8-13.]
"...it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these social classes warring with each other are always the products of the relations of production and exchange -- in a word, of the economic relations of their epoch; that therefore the economic structure of society always forms the real basis, from which, in the last analysis, the whole superstructure of legal and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period is to be explained." [Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, p. 72.]
"The proletariat seizes state power and to begin with transforms the means of production into state property. But it thus puts an end to itself as proletariat, it thus puts an end to all class differences and class antagonisms and thus also to the state as state." [Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, p. 93.]
tl;dr--In the analysis of Marx and Engels, ownership of the means of production is what divides economic classes; economic relations are the basis upon which are founded all social and political relations in society; in the struggle between those who own the means of production and those who do not, it is by the proletariat seizing the means of production that class differences are eliminated in society.
So "ownership of means of production" is simply the next step, an answer to an inevitable question that would arise from French Wikipedia's definition.
Sounds like a good thing in my book if the alternative would be higher unemployment and having no road at all.
And yes, in many cases, that would be the alternative. Even the US lacks infrastructure spending despite being one of the richest countries in the world.
Of course, in an ideal world, you'd build a proper solid road once, and afterwards pay people to do other kinds of work that are higher on the hierarchy of needs. But you can't just blindly criticize something for looking inefficient without properly considering the alternatives.
That's a major motivation for this program from the POV of politicians. It drives down the unemployment stats which is considered very important by public opinion.
I think it might be interesting to operate a live backup economy, a low-tech labor intensive one that could produce minimally adequate calories for the whole population for an extended period of time without electronics. This live backup economy would effectively set the minimum wage and be an employer of last resort, though it might be some people's first preference.
In the past it took a big investment to do something like workfare (like building the Hoover Dam), but now just about anyone could do work by sitting at a computer. It could be anything from project management (there would be a lot of that, with the system itself), accounting, "customer" support, or even helping supervised learning for AI research (by identifying cats).
And you could even allow people to identify the work they want to do, if the have something worthwhile they want to do.
Fortunately these days the market has people doing "real, dignified work" like sitting in call centers harassing people to repay loans while that infrastructure ages and crumbles.
Exactly why did you immediately jump to the presumption that agencies like the PWA that guaranteed jobs for all Americans would result in work that benefited no one?
Further, the major difference between a "guarantee" and not comes when we've run out of useful things to hire for.
We have something similar in Germany: "one-euro jobs". A long-term unemployed person (who usually collects 404€ of welfare, plus subsidies for the rent) can work in such a job for slightly over 1€ per hour. It's meant for people who need the routine of going to work everyday in order to have a realistic chance of re-entering the proper workforce.
I've only met few people who did one-euro jobs, but from what I've heard, it's never a nice experience. If all you have is a "make work" job, it doesn't make you feel much better than not having a job at all.
Then again, a lot of people seem to be content exercising a bullshit job [1] (like shuffling around memos in an office).
[1] The term "bullshit job" for a job that's obviously useless has been popularized by David Graeber, who claims (IIRC) at least 30% of employees exercise a bullshit job. I cannot find the original article at the moment, esp. because my Google stubbornly refuses to show me English results.
I disagree with Graeber. Most "memo-shuffling" jobs serve a purpose -- organising thousands of people takes a lot of administration and management. Of course many of the administrators and managers could be removed, but figuring how to do so takes expert senior managers or management consultants (jobs Graeber decries as BS).
Graeber's basic fallacy is comparing capitalism to his ideal planned economy. In an ideal planned economy, there would be no need for sales and marketing, ergo sales and marketing add no value (he reasons). But planned economies don't work in practice, and most of these "B.S. jobs" exist to help coordinate an economy of independently acting, self-interested agents.
His theory is that we could all work part-time but instead we have created a self-justifying system of unnecessary jobs so we can afford unnecessary products. The glaring flaw in this argument is that people can take part-time jobs if they're happy with a lower standard of living. Many do, most don't.
If you are actually interested in what Graeber has to say instead of making up strawman arguments, you can read "Utopia of Rules".
There's a school of economists that proposes a Job Guarantee (called an Employer of Last Resort in their earlier writing, in analogy with the Lender of Last Resort). An absolutely crucial aspect of their proposal is that the jobs would be administratively treated like any other job at the minimum wage. That is, employees earn the minimum wage, and they pay their income taxes / receive tax credits / pay social and health insurance contributions like anybody else who earns the same wage. (The details of that obviously depend on the country.) Furthermore, the jobs are long-term by design.
The proposal makes a lot of sense in my book. At the very least, we have to get away from the ridiculous and cruel status quo where one part of public policy explicitly aims to generate unemployment[1] while another part of public policy is built on the assumption that unemployment is a failure of the individual.
[1] The intended transmission mechanism of the monetary policy rule of raising interest rate to prevent high inflation is that the raise in interest rate slows the economy and generates unemployment to avoid a wage-price spiral.
The jobs have to be something that can't be automated yet still meaningful. My suggestion is make new jobs in politics. More robots means more political arguments over how to govern them.
They should create extra political positions whenever there is an unemployment problem. It would be just like work but you don't have to produce anything. You just argue amongst yourselves. Make new laws. Repeal old laws. It's very social too.
Unfortunately it also comes with a substantial loss of rights, which will probably become a feature of universal basic income programs anyway...
That's something that a lot of people miss, that a universal basic income in a developed country (US, Western Europe) corresponds to a lifestyle of the lap of luxury in most other parts of the world.
The people in charge of this go to extreme lengths to prevent anyone finding out the details, which is strong circumstantial evidence that they're doing something very wrong, and that they know it.
Of course if there are more people beneath the tax threshold you have to pay out more, but that might well be offset by their added contributions to the economy. I'm not saying it definitely will be, but it's not obvious that it won't.
The bottom line is that we have our current mess of welfare systems because social, moral, and political forces have made it that way. Those forces will warp basic income into something resembling the system we have today by adding all kinds of exceptions and supplementary programs to it -- most of which will be politically popular and morally justifiable to most people. Think of it as Mostly Universal Complicated Income.
Apart from the clunky title, the bottom line is this: Most people don't want to be taken advantage of, but they also don't want to feel like they are taking advantage of others. This is a useful heuristic for living in small social groups. But most of the value that is being produced today is not really down to individual contributions, but results from our collective inheritance of technology and productive networks in society. This completely messes up the built-in heuristics of humans.
It's basically a different angle from which to view what you wrote and sama is stated as saying in the article.
The places that can make realistic attempts to implement it now are those with large cradle-to-grave welfare systems and and an economic outlook that requires stimulus, which is why Finland is such an interesting example.
UBI is not the first time someone has proposed that a central authority should determine the income of the general population. It doesn't take much research into Russia to recognize this as 'serfdom'.
original source of this example: https://ploum.net/largent-doit-il-etre-notre-seul-objectif/ (in french, but interesting essay)
The original argument was that GDP would decrease if we had less people producing, the counter argument seems "we could make GDP artificially increase" presumably as a way to suggest that GDP isn't meaningful. That's not a very good argument because artificial GDP inflation is a temporary solution that has devastating results down the line
>Increasing the GDP is easy. First, pay me 50$ to dig a hole. Then I pay you 50$ to fill the very same hole. We created nothing but the GDP increased by 100$ (well, tax aside).
there's nothing about individual income there.
Briefly, the only possible reason why there would be inflation is that the people given money for digging and filling holes now have more income that they can spend, so they increase demand for products. If this raises the price of products (and yes, that's an if), it will also mean that companies will have more money and an incentive to hire new people so that they can meet the increased demand. Some of those people will come from the digging-and-filling-holes program. It's a self-stabilizing feedback loop.
Obviously there are more subtleties, e.g. when a lot of domestic consumption is from imports. But even then, you wouldn't get runaway inflation. In the extreme case, currency markets would adjust up to the point where it becomes profitable to increase domestic production, and you'd get self-stabilization in that way. And increased domestic production in itself would be seen as a good thing by many people.
As for the whole Keynes being wrong thing, you didn't actually address what I wrote about inflation and how giving people a fixed amount of money for work (even if it's "make work") is self-stabilizing.
Also, to your "more money in the system than the system is producing": Keep in mind that the amount that the system is producing is not a fixed quantity. It's variable and part of the whole dynamics.
Do we just end up recreating the current welfare state on top of UBI? Perhaps a better way to ask that is, what would stop us from recreating the current welfare state on top of UBI?
The same thing that stops us from recreating the current welfare state on top of the current welfare state to protect people who barter away all their food stamps for drugs.
In a democracy? Nothing can prevent that. Even if we wrote UBI into the constitution, it could always be amended. There are always going to be proposals to give some people different amounts of money than others under basic income, and some of those proposals will gain enough voter support to pass.
You may be interested in Tyler Cowen's post on this subject, which I posted about elsewhere in this thread: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/wha...
They have no income whatsoever. If you waste 1 months income of UBI and end up on the street, you will have learned a very harsh lesson, but there will always be the next payment coming. Hence if you're not a total imbecile, you presumably will make better use of money in the future.
This "thing" is not addressed because it really isn't an issue for UBI. What happens to a teenager who wastes say a $1000 present for his 18th birthday? Presumably they become better at managing money.
That's, uhh, a bold assumption.
They have no income whatsoever.
I am currently homeless and I previously had a class on homelessness. Not all people on the street "have no income whatsoever." Not having enough income to afford a middle class lifestyle and no income whatsoever are not the same thing.
Just to be clear: I am not for basic income and I blog about that and I intend to blog more about it -- when I have the time. At the moment, I am busy trying to do more paid work so I can try to get myself off the street in the near-ish future, now that some of the underlying problems that caused my homelessness are nearly resolved.
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.
This statement unnecessarily weakens your comment as it comes across as an attack and uncivil, regardless of the context. Your comment is very strong—and makes this very point—without it.
Thanks again for sharing your personal experience here. I trust you'll continue to do so!
For me the goal is reaching greater understanding. If someone were to tell me "You have no idea what you're talking about" I know my knee-jerk reaction would be to get defensive, and that wouldn't put me in a good place for continuing the discussion constructively. Granted, it's not a perfect reaction, but it's a very human one.
In any discussion I choose to participate in, I've tried my best to determine if I'm adding something purely factual/informational or trying to reach understanding of where the other person is coming from (not necessarily agreement), or sharing my own understanding. That sharing word is important to me right now. Some might choose teach or show or correct (which is where I hear "You have no idea where you're talking about" coming from), but I think words like these put up a barrier (or at least a speed bump) to understanding.
Like I said, that's where I'm at right now. Still trying to figure this stuff out.
It can be hard to see the beam in our own eye while we nitpick the mote in another's.
Have a great evening (or whatever time span it is where you are).
I bet even if basic income was implemented media would soon be full of stories of slackers not doing anything and soon politicians would run on a platform of cutting basic income. So I the end it wouldn't look much different from what we have now.
I think it would be much more important to address income inquality. Maybe the share of national income that people like Altman receive is just too high? How about making sure that someone who is working 40 hours per week can actually live off that income ?
The people who work, who I assume are the intended audience of your argument, will also be aware that their income taxes are going directly into the pockets of the slackers.
The perception that hardworking peoples' income tax goes to people who do not deserve it is at the root of much of the opposition to welfare programs today. It's such a strong sentiment that it makes it difficult to get political support for even the rudimentary safety net we have now -- it would be an even more potent political argument against UBI.
First, "hardworking peoples' income tax" already goes to people who, in their view, don't deserve it. Not just in the form of welfare and social programs that already exist, but also in the form of massive business in the defense industry or in the environmental industry, depending on where your political views lie.
Second, I'm far, far less concerned with who gets my tax money -- or even, to some extent, how much I have to pay for taxes -- than I am with my own financial future. If someone wants to propose a program which would make my taxes go up but also substantially increase my supply of potential customers ... that sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
Telling people that things are already bad is not going to convince them to support policies that will make things even worse.
> Second, I'm far, far less concerned with who gets my tax money -- or even, to some extent, how much I have to pay for taxes -- than I am with my own financial future. If someone wants to propose a program which would make my taxes go up but also substantially increase my supply of potential customers ... that sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
Good for you. If the majority of voters thought that way, we would already have a much better welfare system than we actually do. So, they must not think that way, and there is no reason to believe they will make an exception for basic income.
> Telling people that things are already bad is not going to convince them to support policies that will make things even worse.
Well, that's one way to describe that point, I suppose. About the wrongest way, but one way.
Another way is: "this is a proposal which is not very different from what we already do, but might have a much better outcome."
Unfortunately, that's not a debate we can probably have, since we're having trouble agreeing on the meaning of English words.
> If the majority of voters thought that way, we would already have a much better welfare system than we actually do. So, they must not think that way, and there is no reason to believe they will make an exception for basic income.
Ah, the "ignorance is permanent" position. Sorry, I've got too many years of experience in arguments on the internet to want to spend any time on that.
If it isn't already clear to you that people's minds can be changed for better (or for worse) when presented with either evidence or convincing arguments, then I'm not sure which reality you're living in but it's not the same one I am.
> "People do form bonds with their community and their society through work," he says. "And I think it does contribute to our national cohesion."
I'm biased by my experiences and by the company I keep, but I doubt this is at all a likely outcome, at least for the majority of people.
I know exactly one person that would be content to sit inside a small room all day long, eat just enough to exist, and spend his time playing video games. That's his passion, and as awful a life as it would be for me, I can't really say it's wrong.
Everyone else I know would rather spend their time outdoors or in their community or doing something that doesn't always have to have money attached to it. There are about 120 volunteers in our county's search and rescue organization and we'd be happy to have more [1]. There's another group self-funding an indoor climbing facility. Other groups working on improving the county's economy, attracting more talent, improving the organization of the talent we have. Still another group that runs a maker space.
It could be that this county is an outlier or it could be the people I choose to associate with, but I've yet to see for myself any evidence that basic income would make people socialize less or even be less productive. The opposite, in fact.
[1]: Come to think of it, the overwhelming majority of our search and rescue volunteers are all retired people -- they're the only ones that have the time and residual income to handle the commitment it requires. There are a few professionals with semi-flexible schedules, and fewer still business owners like myself that have managed to eke out some of the benefits of retirement before actually reaching retirement age.
Bandwidth is currently spotty -- your best bet is Comcast in their small and crowded service areas -- but a local ISP has secured funding for a large last-mile fiber deployment and I think they've either just broken ground or are about to.
It's beautiful here, you can get to the store and back in 5 minutes, you can go to Tahoe or to Sacramento for the day, and, seriously, it seems like everyone is always doing at least three cool things.
We're pretty high-tech for a rural county too, and we're actively recruiting tech companies to come up here.
If someone's seriously interested in relocating, contact me. I'm pretty plugged-in to the folks pulling strings to make it happen.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CANEVA0URN [1] https://www.mynevadacounty.com/nc/hhsa/bh/docs/Alcohol%20and... [2] Nevada County has a much higher rate of alcohol involved motor vehicle accidents than Placer County or the State as a whole
Again, this is tangential to the debate over basic income, and is its own complex issue.
In the BI article, Sam Altman expressed concern that basic income could further isolate people, and I was responding to that specifically.
> I could pretty much guarantee that there will be people everywhere that waste UBI, and do nothing with their time, it's just human nature and the place you live won't change that.
a. You can't guarantee that anymore than I can guarantee with my anecdotes that there won't.
b. Even if it were true, that would mean UBI would be "wasted" as welfare is "wasted" already.
c. There exist right now entire classes of businesses which survive on exploiting poverty, and UBI might make them go extinct, and that would certainly be a net good for society. For one example: http://time.com/3182726/if-you-want-to-see-inequality-in-the...; for another: http://www.npr.org/2014/05/19/312158516/increasing-court-fee... (and before all the supply-side armchair economists appear to tell me that UBI just means that impound costs and court costs will rise to exactly match: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/01/04/econo...)
d. The U.S. has some serious problems with poverty and inequality right now (http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/12/america-is-failing-the-... and http://business.time.com/2010/09/16/why-are-a-record-number-...) and it seems prudent to start exploring multiple solutions to that problem. The people who are steadfastly and ideologically claiming that UBI won't work are presenting no more evidence for that than the people who are steadfastly and ideologically claiming that it will solve all of our ills. In between are the poor schmucks like me saying, "hey, it sounds interesting, my bet is it won't go as badly as some people think it will, let's give it a try."
e. Google is failing me for a citation, again, but the U.S. has (arguably) lost millions of IQ points to poverty in the last decade. On a site like HackerNews, that should give any reader a reason to pause and wonder what else we've lost as a society as a result of that.
f. Further, UBI provides benefits to people not currently on welfare, so even if it were wasted, it might still be a net improvement over our current system.
g. And still further, the overwhelming evidence supports that both addicts and felons are less likely to continue their self-destruction when they have economic opportunity.
h. You look at a few tragic cases and argue that they are just human nature; are my anecdotes somehow less "human nature"? Is it not human nature to make things, to create art, to develop science and technology? If that is your argument, how do you reconcile that with the last 10,000 years of human civilization?
I was just trying to say that no matter what we do, or how carefully we plan, there will always be some exceptional cases that UBI will fail for, and that these failures will generally be the same (very) small percentage pretty much everywhere in the world, people that behave in this way have always existed. The fact that this happens is therefore nothing to do with the community you are in, the government in power, the way the benefit is administered, etc. These outliers will always be available as anecdata, and it is useless to claim that you live in, or will generate, a utopia where they don't.
Ideally, UBI would be guaranteed and never withdrawn, but it would be a pretty good argument for basic income if you can say that people continue to have a better outcome for years after payments stop versus people who never were enrolled in the first place. On the other hand, if most people become dependent on the payments and do worse than the control group when payments stop, that would be a strong argument against UBI.
(I imagine the outcome might also be very different between study participants that know their payments are going to stop at a certain time, participants who have their payments withdrawn suddenly without warning, and participants who are told in advance that their payments might be withdrawn at any time.)
I can't claim to know what BI would look like if widely implemented, but I think it's preferable to mass un/under-employment, which seems like a clear possibility.
Here are a few tiny scraps is akin to a kind of feudalism. How do they assert influence in a such a structure? Is life to become a spectator sport? Do people gain purpose from a collective goal in which each plays a part or one in which they sit on the sidelines? Wouldn't a better option for most then be to echew industrialization and 'progress' and revert to the land and village like communities.
The costs of too many unemployed and underemployed is far too high on multiple levels including to those who are not in either group than any social or welfare net and it's absence leads to higly unstable and fractured societies.
But is basic income really an answer in an inherently calvinist society? Add to that the preponderance of the soulless ideology of Rand among sections of US society and the entire social goal it seems has been effectively reduced to celebrating personal achievement and supermen and superwomen.
There are large questions around human progress, how to define it and the best way to achieve it that need to be revisited. Is a society merely economic interests coexisting or does it mean more than that?
This is what the leftist want you to believe.
It doesn't matter if Bill gates or Queen Elizabeth has billions as long as everyone else is not bad off.
If everyone starts a 100m race and someone wins its fair, but this is a race where the privileged have advantages in too many ways from the time they are born and the unprivileged disadvantaged in too many ways and equality in opportunity in the context becomes nearly impossible beyond posturing and tokenism.
Forced reverse wealth transfer.
Excellent comment.
Some points to consider:
* Poverty is not the problem. Westerners make a big deal out of poverty. They need to believe that poverty is the worst thing in the world and that buying things is the key to happiness. This is obviously not true and a stroll through the many slums of the world will reveal that some of the happiest people in the world are very, very poor. Marx was right about this.
* Unemployment is the problem. Unemployment really is the worst thing in the world. It's something that's difficult to really understand: unemployment is like an invading army of Mongols. Unemployment doesn't just destroy one life -- it destroys families and, on a large enough scale, it can destroy whole cities. It was unemployment that burned Detroit to the ground. It is unemployment that will destroy Baltimore [1]. I say again unemployment is a national security threat far more serious than anything else out there. Marx was right about this too.
* Welfare is the natural state of humanity. Again Western propaganda warps the truth. If you believe the propaganda America is full of self-made men who forged brilliant fortunes despite government interference. This is obviously a lie to even the most casual observers. Westerners benefit tremendously not just from parental welfare (seriously, look at college tuition prices) but they are the beneficiaries of an extraordinary historic investment. (Which, many would say, was itself the result of historic theft and literal slavery.) Marx was right again.
* The key point: feudalism is exactly what we have today. It's difficult to see this because there's so much propaganda in the way but I think people are starting to pick up on it. Certain people enjoy tremendous aid and support and all types of valuable welfare while others are thrown to the wolves. And it's not clear who is doing the choosing or how or even why. The numbers are breaking through though: the falling life expectancy, the total loss of socio-economic mobility [2] and the rapid decline of historical social norms. A historically unprecedented binge of private debt in the early 2000s managed to delay this but now the debt binge is over and what we're seeing is the emergence of an American serf class. (Or rather the normalization of serfdom -- arguably this is nothing new for minorities in many parts of the country.) Eventually the serfs may get angry but what's the worst that could happen? (Marx was probably right here too.)
I'm not a fan of basic income. Basic income can lessen the worst symptoms of the real disease -- mass un-and-under-employment -- but it isn't a cure. And I suspect in the end private producers will capture much of the basic income surplus either in the form of depressed wages or exporting the true costs somewhere else (probably the environment). People don't appreciate (1) the extraordinary lengths private producers will go to in order to avoid taxes and (2) how accommodating politicians are to help private producers and so (3) in the long run, in any conflict between private producers and private labor, private producers always win unless the government steps in to help labor.
(Remember the only reason governments exist at all is to protect against private predation. All of this comes back to the fact that feudalism works! For much of history, for thousands of years, most of the surplus was wholly captured by a few families.)
The right solution is probably something like a Job Guarantee [3]. There's a lot of details that need to be worked out but the basic principles are sound: (1) (involuntary) unemployment must be avoided and causes tremendous harm (2) the government is never going to run out of money and (3) there's always some productive work to be done even if that work is mispriced/underpriced/non-priced by the market. Let the government step in as the employer of last resort and at the least we could slow the bleeding.
It's too bad to see all this work being done on basic income. It's a very seductive idea and it has an element of the underpants gnome logic to it which is very hard to resist. (Step 1: Give people money Step 2: ???? Step 3: Profit!). Giving every citizen a job is a much harder problem and if you buy into the strong AI thesis that problem might not even seem worthwhile.
[1] http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/how-baltimores-young-blac...
[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/social-m...
For example, he wrote:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour...
>But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment – are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly?
and
>To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
Yet by the 1860s, real wages and standard of living had already risen substantially from the level they were at when Marx penned the above.
He was a totally irresponsible and self-absorbed demagogue whose lies wreaked terrible damage upon society.
To see you elevating him in such a manner is disappointing to say the least.