The Future of Not Working
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
You just cannot expect everyone to "earn" money while expecting technological progress to continue unabated.
Don't want so many people? Mandate reversible sterilization at birth.
Don't want so many disgruntled and unemployed people? Endorse some form of guaranteed income, or incorporate basic housing, meals, healthcare and internet into the list of undeniable human rights.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamplighter
Yes. The aptitude of higher abstract thinking varies greatly among different people and groups.
If you are really curious, check out the IQ test about pulling info from a sports column.
After that, your question becomes similar to asking why every short person can't be taught/trained to do well on a professional basketball team.
The number of active NBA players is in the hundreds and their careers are short. Education is a very effective weapon against multi generational poverty and the focus of international aid organizations for a reason. Someone from an impoverished background is much more likely to live a better life with more education than someone without.
This feels like a pretty strong over-application of the computational metaphor, my friend.
If we extend the metaphor, there are 4004s and there are i7s. You need a lot of 4004s to equal the output of one i7. That many 4004s use a lot more watts than the one i7, and at some point the value isn't there.
Is this a joke? It sounds like something so detached from the reality of humanity that it's something only an engineer or computer scientist would say. An unemployed human isn't a 'waste' of anything; the fact that the human does not need to be employed but is still suffering at the hands of capitalism is horrible.
IQ (g) is normally distributed.
The only hope here is that there is some extrinsic element, similar to nutrition, but as yet undiscovered, that will improve human IQ for those on the left-hand side of the curve in a real way. Otherwise, no, not everyone can contribute in the same way.
So... they tried a little something like that back in the 30s and a lot of people didn't like it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility
Seems a lot more humane than sterile-by-default until magical government bot decides it's ok for you to continue your genetic lineage.
But we're technologists right? We don't care about that fluffy duffy humanity thing. Politics is not worth our time.
Sign here to add yourself to the baby waitlist. Party members get priority, of course.
This sounds like an absolutely atrocious idea ripe for corruption. It would be only a matter of time before those programs target the poor, those who whose political views, religious views, or ethnic origins are unwanted or inconvenient.
Then again, the intentions ultimately don't matter if you're on the receiving end of it.
Jesus. It's like some of you sit there and say "the status quo is horrific; let's just add a pinch more horror and everything will be swell."
I don't know if this statement is true, but a lot more jobs could be created in the area of teaching, caring for elderly and ill people, etc.
Jobs as care worker won't be enough and not everyone is good/motivated in them and I don't think you don't realize how bad it is for the cared to have a spiteful worker
There's a huge issue looming as the current mainstream libertarian model is ill suited for a post scarcity society plus there's gonna be a huge problem with migrations ready to compound with internal strifes.
Nothing impossible to solve with preparation but seems we gonna reach that point fastly and badly.
Humans are amazing creatures. Moreover there is no limit to the work that can be done, there is always something else that can or should be done should the labor become available. I can assure you, people will not run out of valuable, substantive work to do.
People got much more efficient at farming (by orders of magnitude), that didn't lead to people stopping working it led to people finding other things to do such as crafts, art, and later manufacturing. Now that the save thing has happened with manufacturing people are again finding other things to do.
Health insurance is actually a very good example if you want to find meaningless drone work, because of the rent seeking you describe and because of other perverse things that come about due to government intervention in that market. That's work that nobody would do if there wasn't a government regulating that industry. You could make an argument that all of that work is meaningless and human beings should be freed from doing it.
Of course, you could also argue that work is no less necessary simply because the government exists and intervenes in healthcare, because the government exists and is going to intervene in healthcare whether we like it or not. Thus, having drones at the office to lobby governments is valuable to Aetna. And I'm sure someone from Aetna would claim that they have to spend that $20 million or else they'd be unable to provide health insurance at all. Which is also a ludicrous claim, but a lot of companies seem to be getting out of health insurance lately...
The problem is not no jobs, the problem is political will and priorities. Right now most of the wealth created by all humans goes to a tiny minority that has different priorities than the rest of humanity.
Maybe. The existence of so many businesses with vast stores of cash in the bank makes me wonder, though. This is capacity to pay for valuable, substantive work, but it sits.
Even if people look back on this era in 100 years and note that everyone had something else to do by 2060, the sudden change seems likely to cause more traumatic social upheaval, so a peaceful transition to a post-whatever-this-is economy seems unlikely without trying something very different.
I'm quite libertarian, and I think a basic income is not fundamentally incompatible with that, if implemented correctly. It seems to me that GiveDirectly's voluntary approach is a step in the right direction.
Jesus fucking Christ, let's just round up all that don't have jobs and kill them all it'll go faster.
Making decisions about how to share limited resources in a post-work world is one of the most difficult problem we are going to face, and yet it isn't discussed. Instead, we'd rather claim that Basic Income pixie dust is going to solve all problems.
Overpopulation is not the problem in itself, the problem is that people do not have enough to survive, all when we as humans are producing more wealth per capita than any other time in history.
Because we can't afford a spare bedroom to put them in.
Turns out kids are just a pain in the ass not worth having if you don't need 'em to fund your retirement. I'll tell my wife; thanks.
We'd still need pretty much the same kind of society. We'd need pretty much the same kind of infrastructure. Given that wealth in the typical industrialised, Western country isn't generated by natural resources, it wouldn't be the case that suddenly there's simply more stuff to go around. Why would halving the population of the place improve quality of life?
People think overpopulation is a problem when you reach a certain cap, but I don't think there is a cap. I think it's progressive.
Plus with our current population size, we are bound to certain kind of systems and can't try alternatives. We have to normalize, we have to batch, we have to have pyramids, a chain of command to manage things.
This is great to produce and consume a great quantity of goods, but not so much for education, progress as a society, as a specie and even for something simpler such as producing goods of great quality.
But even if you disagree with any of that, and my whole population size theory, great birth control would solve one current major problem: unwanted pregnancy by men.
I'd say about half of my male friends became parents unwillingly for a lot of different reasons and scenarios. It does not make them great fathers because they didn't want to be one at this time of their life in the first place.
I think a global solution for a safe, non invasive and permanent procedure to keep one sterile at will would improve immensely the quality of life, eduction, and growth of children. Because the ones being here would be the ones wanted.
Which means basically shaping a better future.
Halving the population wouldn't stop this happening. There would be a rush to the cities, a rush to create density of population and all the opportunity people want from it. What you're complaining about would happen again; particularly since people know what's possible with density of population, and they choose it over the alternative.
I suppose you might be able to get the effect you want if you really, REALLY reduced the population. By an order of magnitude or more.
We have to normalize, we have to batch, we have to have pyramids, a chain of command to manage things.
Which allows us to have a society in which people are hundreds and hundreds of times richer than they were even a couple of centuries ago. The wealth of humanity under this is astonishing. We are all so much better off. And again, to reach the point where this efficiency became uneconomic and your alternative options would become optimal would require a population drop of far more than half.
- I believe lowering the population density will not annihilate those benefits. Paris was still Paris with the half of its population, but you could find a pre-school much more easily 50 years ago.
- the benefits of the current density can be achieved with a lower one given our current knowledge and technology
- accumulating wealth is probably not as much as linked to population density (in our modern countries) as that we have added science (machines and software) to our optimized slavery and theft.
- With a smaller population, we may be able on concentrate on quality of life. And education, which could lead to limit our current huge amount of wastes and appetite for superficial things. This could balance what we loose for a higher density population.
The only criteria a government needs to check is whether the couple has lived together for a certain amount of time (say 1 year) without an incident of domestic abuse etc. or a past criminal record involving child abuse.
No. Forced sterilization is eugenics, and we've seen what happens with that [1]. Eugenics is unconscionable for moral, ethical, legal and humanitarian reasons. When you give government or the private sector or any human being the ability to control other humans' reproduction, that power is ripe for horrific abuse. We know this because that's exactly what happened last time [2].
Not to go full Godwin on you, but eugenics is literally the philosophy behind the Nazis (see [1]).
Overpopulation will be an issue eventually. Better to solve it through more creative means, like becoming a 2+-planet species.
[1]: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1796
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States#...
plus adding planets inside the solar system only gives you 2 real targets (mars and venus) mining asteroids to build spinning habitats is a much more viable colonization target.
You cannot have UBI due to lack of jobs but then also have the US' current family-based immigration system. It would be a different situation if we were specifically targeting skilled robotics engineers and AI coders from around the world, but we put those people through the ringer to favor an unskilled third world immigrant because his brother is a US citizen.
The solution to fewer people needing to work is reversible sterilization at birth? Not bringing down the system that puts people in destitution, poverty and at risk of death beacuse they cannot find a job?
Capitalism is the cause of the inequality, not overpopulation. There are more than enough resources.
People keep saying this, but why is it true? Why can't you just have 4 billion people making boutique food for the other 4 billion who are making boutique clothing in return?
Why can't you have 8 billion people making TV shows for each other while robot housekeepers keep them alive?
Mental health care alone would seem to me to be an almost infinite market in need of labor.
Is there some economic law that defines an upper limit on how much work there is to be done? I see seemingly infinite undone tasks around me.
We often do not realize how many layers of wealth we had to stand on to possess our current wealth.
This is essentially describing charity to poor communities. That's not new. The article's connection between it and "basic income" is tenuous. To be fair, that's not the fault of the article as much as the program itself.
How is charity to poor rural communities with collectivist leanings a test of the vague notion of basic income? Or what will this program tell us about basic income in the US with 300 million people and a much higher standard of living?
Admirable social program, yes. A test of the viability of basic income worldwide? Not so much.
This program will tell us what the next test should look like.
With this initiative, GiveDirectly — with an office in New York and funded in no small part by Silicon Valley — is starting the world’s first true test of a universal basic income.
As you stated, there have been other attempts, so I don't know what the definition of "first true test" is.
A universal basic income has thus far lacked what tech folks might call a proof of concept. There have been a handful of experiments, including ones in Canada, India and Namibia. Finland is sending money to unemployed people, and the Dutch city Utrecht is doing a trial run, too. But no experiment has been truly complete, studying what happens when you give a whole community money for an extended period of time — when nobody has to worry where his or her next meal is coming from or fear the loss of a job or the birth of a child.
The Mincome experiment was 5-years. Why was it not "truly complete"?
http://www.marketplace.org/2016/12/20/world/dauphin
Back to the article:
That, surprisingly, worked well enough to give them the confidence to start a threadbare randomized control trial the year they graduated. It found that the recipients, who received an average of $500, saw excellent outcomes: Their children were 42 percent less likely to go a whole day without eating. Domestic-violence rates dropped, and mental health improved.
Not trying to be argumentative, just not sure what this is testing. What is it controlling for? What is it doing different from previous experiments? What does giving money to every person in a poor community tell you that giving money to poor people in a wealthy community doesn't?
These are very rural and impoverished communities by developed standards. Giving money to the poorest of the poor seems like an obvious improvement for them. What it doesn't say is how you can do it anywhere else.
GiveDirectly gives everyone in the community who registers $22 month. The amount doesn't go down if the person starts to independently generate income. It will be universal, not means-tested.
This isn't necessarily a better experiment, but it is a different one.
What does giving money to every person in a poor community tell you that giving money to poor people in a wealthy community doesn't?
Well, we don't know. Hence this experiment. Mincome, however successful, was basically a deluxe "welfare" program with all the negative baggage that comes with it. If we're giving a supplement to the poor, and taking away that supplement if they become wealthy, some argue it functions as a 100% tax on work, hence functioning as a disincentive. (That's in addition to the "disincentive" of not forcing poor people to work to meet their basic needs.) If you're in Mincome, why take an $8,000 yr. side job? It would be like working for free. But a person on GiveDirectly, if they get a $10/month side job, their total income will be $32. Side work will continue to be a financially productive investment. It's a different type of experiment.
There's no universal definition of basic income and it certainly won't be so straightforward once it goes through the meat-grinder of legislation.
It's cash on the barrelhead to the poorest of the poor from outside organizations. That's charity.
I understand your concern about messy legislation but is that an argument against it? I see your point, though. I'm guessing, possibly wrong, that the people involved in this have considered or at least will consider how this will be implemented and will fund lobbying to try to get this done as cleanly as possible. I realize I'm making some assumptions here but people aren't going to invest boatloads of money in testing a concept than just let it fail during deployment.
There's the classic problem of the leaky bucket, meaning that overhead drains some resources before they reach the problem itself. Cash is about as efficient as it gets.
Average incomes in the US are much greater, for sure. But there are places in the US where average income is just as small, relative to the national average. And what will happen when trucking is fully automated? What would prevent parts of the US from becoming as impoverished as this area in Kenya?
Edit: typo
Editors don't just change headlines. In technical stuff I've written using feminine pronouns I've had editors change to masculine.
Editors will do anything they think makes a piece more ready for contemporary mass consumption.
Speaking as someone who has had to write headlines, there can be very strict guidelines we have to adhere to. Masculine is still the default neutral in professional English, in a number of places I've worked at.
I wish there were a simple way to participate as an individual. You don't have to be rich to cover one (or more) people's basic living expenses at this rate.
Edit: Here's the link to donate: https://www.givedirectly.org/give-now
You can even send money via Venmo to avoid the credit card processing fee.
There is? You give money to GiveDirectly. They even take Bitcoin (I've done it).
I've donated, thank you! Seems like a great charity.
While the lifestyles of people in those countries probably are unfathomable to wealthy westerners, don't forget the cost of living is way lower too. Comparing the converted to dollars incomes is not enough to give one the right perspective on how much they can buy. On 264/year in the US one might literally starve to death; clearly the millions of citizens of those countries are not all starving to death. The cost of food, shelter, etc. are all lower in dollar terms in those countries. They are still impoverished in terms of material quality of life though, of course.
That is, at least partially, because it can't cover someone's basic living expenses for a year. According to the World Bank, the global poverty line was US$1.90/day in 2015, after adjusting for purchasing power.[0] This amounts to $694/year or roughly $57/month. Of course, while it is possible that, after adjusting for purchasing power, those 2280 shillings amount to $60 or more of purchasing power.
I think most Western grocery bills amount to more than $60/person/month; never mind shelter and clothing. And yet, for all of our society's wealth, I wouldn't be surprised if the average Kenyan had a greater net worth than the average American. Without much wealth to speak of, access to debt is likely to be greatly limited.
[0] http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2015/10/04/wo...
> The nonprofit is in the process of registering roughly 40 more villages with a total of 6,000 adult residents, giving those people a guaranteed, 12-year-long, poverty-ending income. An additional 80 villages, with 11,500 residents all together, will receive a two-year basic income. With this initiative, GiveDirectly — with an office in New York and funded in no small part by Silicon Valley — is starting the world’s first true test of a universal basic income.
[0] http://www.nation.co.ke/newsplex/counties-purchasing-power/2...
I didn't see the specific region named in the NYT article.
2280 shillings is about 28-38% of the amount needed to get above the (absolute) poverty line, with the true number likely being closer to the middle or lower end of that range. It likely brings the people whom they chose out of poverty and around on-par with their just-above-poverty neighbours but not much more. I'm inclined to believe that they chose a region of Kenya where there was a good mix of people living just below the poverty line and people living just above the poverty line for exactly this reason.
I'm not sure about the distinction between extreme poverty, regular poverty and a national standard poverty line (in Kenya). When so much of your population is in absolute poverty, I don't think that a national standard line makes much sense. It does, of course, make more sense in the developed world where shelter alone will cost more money than the median Kenyan spends in a year; the median Kenyan is not below the global poverty line.
From the NYT article:
Kogelo, where Obama’s father was born, is just 20 miles from the village, which lies close to the banks of Lake Victoria. (This is the first village mentioned)
We took off at dawn from Kisumu, a bustling industrial city on the banks of Lake Victoria, and followed a two-lane highway to Bondo, a small trading city filled with cattle, bicycles and roadside food stands. From there, we turned inland from the lake and drove into a lush agricultural region. (This is the second village mentioned)
All across the villages of western Kenya, it was clear to me just how much aid money was wasted on unnecessary stuff.
Young people and whole villages can use it to bootstrap: things like proper cell service, internet, and healthy food become affordable where before they were not.
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GiveDirectly is my charity of choice right now. I have a $1000 monthly recurring with them.
The difference in cost of living between San Francisco and rural Kenya is vast. The upshot is that an amount that many of us here on HN can handle is life changing for a lot of people on the other end.
I live in a co-op, so I save more than that every month compared to many of my friends in rent alone, and still we all have ridiculously comfortable lives.
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Poverty exists here too, but a lot of it's entrenched and intractable. It has complex causes like bad urban design, bad schools, and political gridlock. It's hard to create improvement with a donation. It requires creative activism.
Rural Kenya and Uganda, on the other hand, have lots of communities full of bright young people where the main thing holding them back really is just an abject lack of resources.
That means there's an opportunity, and I think GiveDirectly is the best organization right now to take it.
- They are effective. They don't do virtue signaling. They don't helicopter in, build a cinderblock schoolhouse, and then pose for photos with smiling kids. They measure outcomes.
- They are efficient. They stick to cash transfers, the most direct way of giving. They track and advertise the fraction of their income that they lose to corruption and overhead. Most charities are worse on those metrics and don't talk about them.
- They are rational. They don't do sob stories. They don't spam. They are run like a startup, by economists.
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Be an activist locally. Be a donor globally. Many of us are extremely lucky and, by global standards, powerful. Wield it well :)
For instance, the people in the village were paying to get iron sheets for roof covers, and if you expense the cost over it's lifetime, it comes out to maybe an extra $1 a month. In the US, you pay $400-2000 a month in rent per person but you get a building that has central air, a solid roof, comes with a kitchen & bathroom with modern plumbing, fulfills building safety codes, and probably a lot more.
The people in the village were also buying access to wealth generation. One person went to invest in a fishing net and hired labor. He went from receiving $20 a month to potentially making $20 dollars a day. It underlines to me that investment is needed to unlock more productivity and better growth. It is sustained periods (decades) of this kind of continual investment that allows leap frogging from one income level to the next that turns a village into a modern city.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g...
The modern anomalous rise in wealth is directly correlated to an increase in the use of fossil fuels since the beginning of the 20th century. So if you want to talk about giants, you should mean to say you're standing on the shoulders of trillions of carbon lifeforms condensed into coal, oil and natural gas over hundreds of hundreds of millions of years.
What people have accumulated in wealth between when life arose and 1850 is entirely insignificant than what was built in the last 167 years (roughly).
In fact, what seems to be a common story in the article is that giving money directly in a way that is sustained over time allows people to plan long-term, stand on their feet and find better work or start businesses, making better long-term financial decisions to reverberate to the whole of the community.
The easy resistance to BI is to say that it will remove incentives to work, and that is what the headline seems to imply. The content of the article seems to suggest the opposite.
Love this.
A vast majority of aid — 94 percent — is noncash. Donor resistance is one reason for this; it is not easy to persuade American oligarchs, British inheritors and Japanese industrialists to fork over their money to the extremely poor to use as they see fit. “There’s the usual worries about welfare dependency, the whole ‘Give a man a fish’ thing,” said Amanda Glassman, a public health and development expert at the Center for Global Development. “It’s so powerful. It’s really a basic psychological feature of the landscape. You’ll start drinking. You’ll start lying around at home because you’re getting paid.”
...
If cash transfers flourished, “the whole aid industry would have to fire itself.”
The number seems low to me.
I wonder if this $66b is for those who are below $1/day. Looking at the plot in [1], we can guess that the number at $1/day is much lower; $66b would give 181 million people a dollar a day.
The OP article noted the amount needed in the village in the beginning was $22/month, so $.75 a day, give or take 10c.
You still have the problem of regional thugs that will come round every "pay day" for their taste. Or beat you up. A pretty simple variation a protection racket, but I'm not sure how to protect against it.
700m × $2 = $1.4b. What am I missing?
For an anecote on PPP vs real dollars, I remember that in the eighties in soviet-ruled Poland, an average monthly salary amounted to about $20. At the same time, the average standard of living was not that bad: most families had flats with central heating (no air-con though), education up to university level and healthcare were free, most families didn't have cars but public transport was cheap.
Can't say that explains it all but presumably there are other things like that.
Most people are poor because of their government. Either through corruption, lack of property rights, or wars both internal and external. We cannot fix poverty in this world until people are guaranteed freedom and safety of person and their property.
I don't know where you live but I'm in the U.S. where it's obvious the number of jobs is going to decline relative to the number of people who need them. Resources won't necessarily decline along with the jobs so I see this as not just applicable to the developing world and not just to solve poverty but to act as a stabilizing force.
On what do you base your claim this is a dumb attempt to guilt people? You're suggestion that's the motivation of those who are backing and implementing this test?
I don't really understand the idea that no action should be taken unless these conditions are met and these conditions are always outside the reach of those who want to act so they shouldn't act because conditions aren't perfect?
I don't think anyone's claiming that testing UI's objective is to see if it will lead to a utopia, otherwise it's a no-go. No, we can't fix poverty if you define fix as a perfect solution that works always and everywhere but if perfect conditions had to be met before anyone acted nobody would do anything productive or useful.
I guess I find your line of argument strange because it does not appear to be founded on anything at all that's coherent, though I'm hoping you can alleviate that problem by explaining it coherently.
Let's work through an example.
North Korea is one of the poorest countries in the world, and many people starve there every year. It's also a ruthlessly oppressive totalitarian state; the government decides who can enter and leave the country. The government also runs the entire economy, and directs most of it toward military spending. This is all because the country is essentially under the total control of a single person whose father and grand father decided they like things this way, and the geopolitical situation happened to work out in their favor from 1950 to the present.
Suppose you've got an infinite pile of money to give to North Koreans to solve their problems with not having enough food to eat. It's illegal for you to enter that country without permission and illegal for the North Koreans to accept money from foreigners. So how do you give them the money?
Let's assume you can give them the money; that you have a big cargo plane you can fly over North Korea and can throw money out the back of and be certain that a deserving poor starving person will receive it. Where is the deserving poor starving person going to go to buy food? There's no private farm to shop at. The government run stores aren't going to take this foreign money. They're stuck with whatever the government dictates will be produced, which is obviously not enough food.
Ignore that problem and assume the shopkeeper or the farmer would take the money. What are they going to do with it? Private property is basically illegal in North Korea, so it's not like the farmer is going to save his money to make a better farm that can feed more people. He can only spend money in state run enterprises, which all feed directly into the government, and the government spends it all on Kalishnakov rifles, nuclear weapons programs, and weird foreign assassinations. These things are not great for solving the problems of starvation and poverty.
North Korea is the most extreme example, but lots of poor countries have problems like this that cannot be solved by simply throwing money out the back of a cargo plane. Poor societies often need to change to become not-poor.
You can't expect a microeconomics proposal to solve an international political crisis.
> someone gave you enough money to eat, that would be a solution regardless of how corrupt your government.
is obviously not a solution. NK is the most extreme example, but there are others which are less extreme and don't rise to the level of "international political crisis."
Looks like they only paid $90 for the assassination (and materials I guess)).
Given that, do you toss the whole idea or do you think it could work in places like Kenya and the United States?
It's too easy for someone to say "Group X needs additional support for Reason Y" and end up with something just as expensive and complex as what we have now. I know, because I've managed to bait people on both the left and the right into doing it for different values of X and Y.
By "correct implementation", I mean one that replaces all welfare, social security, and probably some parts of the tax code. Healthcare maybe you can get away with treating separately.
I don’t know enough about Kenya to say one way or the other.
As you suggest, it's difficult to imagine this shoehorned in with the tangle of programs administered by multiple agencies.
This will go on for a few decades until there is an uprising of sorts, then those with the money will return to giving everyone else crumbs, or just enough to quell the uprisings. This will probably go on perpetually.
Yes, there are huge disparities of wealth but when I look at the world my young son is living in and has to deal with, I don't want instability, revolutions, chaos as know enough history to know the failure rate of all that stuff's very high. If the underlying purpose is to "quell the uprisings" or because of pure motives does not particularly concern me. I'm interested in results.
Universal healthcare is now considered a basic need. We're not even talking about basic healthcare either. I see people arguing all the time that everyone is entitled to a level of care that is for all intents and purposes a premium product that commands a premium price.
If you were to tally up all the entitlements people argue should be basic human rights, you'd have a economically unsustainable system, because you'd eventually take so much from those working that the motive for them to continue participating in the system would disappear. It got so bad in East Germany, that they had to build a wall to keep those that were productive from fleeing.
Shelter - at what size is the minimum? I remember US standards increased the size of the houses two-fold within the past 30 years (I might be mistaken, I can't find the source now).
Health care - does it include complex treatments?
Education - would signing up to Coursera classes be considered minimum, or a drop in the level of education?
Communication - I considered a broadband minimum for reasonable standard of life. Would 10 Mbt/second be guaranteed? I do not think everyone shares this opinion what is minimum standard of life. When working with others, you would see disagreement over all aspects of it - and it will prove hard to come to an agreement how to define the exact minimum. Furthermore, it might become very hard if the resource you are distributing is referred as a 'free' one.
(As a thought experiment, imagine that premium health care was extremely cheap. It would be completely intuitive that everyone deserved it, since we are basically talking about ensuring that people stay alive/in good health.)
deciding who deserves it based on who can afford it, seems even worse.
If premium healthcare were extremely cheap, everyone could afford it.
Marx didn't predict that there would be an endless cycle of appeasement. He predicted that there would become a state of automation so advanced that the capitalist mode of production no longer suits the people under it who are being driven to more and more low-standard jobs. The idea that if something doesn't happen in 140 years then the predciton is false is truly a fallacy.
In principle modern democracy, liberalism and capitalism combined with super-advanced automation could well lead to a communist system as described by Marx without violent revolution. If capital equipment (intelligent computers and automated factories) by themselves create more capital, then why would we need capitalists anymore? Currently productive ventures (companies) require investment and management, but if they become self-generating and self-managing then capitalists themselves become necessary. All we do then is vote in democratic governments that tax and regulate such ventures for the benefit of the majority and we're done.
Marx wasn't really against capitalism as such. He was perfectly well aware that it was massively increasing wealth and productivity. He saw it as an inevitable but temporary phase in world history. In that respect he might have been right but not necessarily for the right reasons and we're still to see whether he was right about what would come afterwards.
For many, money is survival. It's just a convenient instrument to trade. If you are unable to make or have money, you are unable to accomplish anything you can't do by yourself (this includes shelter and sustenance which requires land).
Also, wealth concentration globally is a lot different from wealth concentration nationally. In other words, if we follow globalization as it's been seen in the US recently, the owners can easily sell goods to offshore markets while neglecting the local labor market, allowing them to further diminish. The wealth class can (and do) simply pay the government for protection (police, imprisonment, military, etc).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
Personally, I'm not so sure a living wage is enough to keep the population at bay. People need something to climb up Maslow's triangle that money is only a prerequisite for. People still need a feeling of accomplishment.
Huh? In your worldview is charity just not a thing?
I think a living wage will be required eventually, but you better believe the people who donate largely to campaigns will fight it tooth and nail. Not only that, they will make sure it's just enough to quell uprisings and comes out of debt rather than increased taxes.
And are elites just one monolith? I don't think that's how it is. I think every group in society has its cool people and its narrow-minded, greedy cretins. I doubt that there's a single entity called the elite that acts in concert after the annual meeting.
Therefore, when 90% of the workforce is not needed, people who can afford to lobby congress (wealthy) will assuredly continue to lobby congress to ensure that the laws to deal with that problem don't affect their interests negatively. Paying what is essentially social security for everyone isn't going to be cheap. Paying 150 million people (approx workforce) $1000 a month would cost $1,800,000,000,000 a year, and that probably won't be enough.
This is not limited to the GOP and there is a ton of historical evidence of this. The middle class has been stagnant since Reagan. Globalization, trade agreements, ignoring the minimum wage limits, increasing visa limits, not prosecuting employers who use illegal labor, weakening of unions, not allowing the government to bargain on drugs they purchase through tax dollars, not allowing people to buy drugs from other countries, extending copyright monopoly durations, etc. None of those things help the middle class, they only help the corporations and people who lobbied congress.
Here is a list of the top 20 lobbying groups / people. I cannot see of any (except the AARP) that has citizens interest's in mind when they lobby. I certainly don't see any who would lobby to increase their taxes to support a living wage. These organizations are all controlled by wealthy people.
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s
In short, wealthy people and organizations lobby congress because they are the only ones who can afford to.
These lobbyists you speak of and those who fund them can be dethroned in the next wave of populism to hit. The next wave might come from the left, might come from the right, or might just hit as a nihilistic spasm.
The order that you describe above is there based on an illusion.
I'm not trying to make some mystical claim. Pull a bill from your wallet. Try to eat it. What's it worth? It's worth money because of a tacit agreement on its value. There's no inherent value in that $5.
Go to the campus of a University. Why is that place University and not the park down the block? Because we've agreed and yes made laws to protect that designation and the professors and students show up at one and not the other but it's not objective reality woven into the fabric of the universe.
There's a lot of assumptions and agreements in almost everything that's part of civilization, including the details of the order that you described above.
That you will always have electricity, water, and enough to eat are also not written in stone either. Nobody who really understood some history, I mean feels it beyond mere abstraction, would say a destabilizing word in public or try to stir anyone else to act against stability. This person would have a broader understanding of their own interests. They would never advocate for authoritarianism as they'd grok Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, etc., etc.
I am not saying that it's even close to guaranteed that civilization will pull off survival nor do I have any clue how fast we are sliding and how much acceleration is to come and when. Nobody does. But I think it would be foolish for smart people to not consider this with an open mind.
To act in time I think will require some persuasion because if this idea is forced to wait until it can sell itself, then conditions will have deteriorated to the point where even those deep in denial will feel it. Reality can hit hard and fast.
I'm not saying you personally think things are just fine as I can't imagine anyone on HN who is not at least aware of the inevitability of a growing gap between those who need to work to survive and the number of jobs.
Further, I'm sure you're aware there are millions who are not going to be even close to ready to survive through their retirements.
If this all comes together with a malevolent or just clueless demagogue then things could get a whole lot worse, a whole lot faster.
I hope people are watching and learning and can put aside whatever ideology they currently cling to because those ideologies are just hindrances to clear thinking.
The Great Depression saw a peak unemployment at around 25%. That took 10+ years, some arguably unconstitutional laws and a massive, global war effort (with destruction of many competing economies) to get out of. That was in a time period when both the political parties actually wanted to solve the problem. In the worst case scenario, with near complete automation and offshore labor, you'll be looking at around 75-90% unemployment in the US in a fairly rapid time period (10-20 years?). We've never seen anything like it; not that quickly.
I'd like to think we would figure out how to adapt, but we've had a serious political discussion about climate change for going on 10 years now, and the US has barely come around to agreeing it exists and is man caused (and I'm being generous) let alone an actionable plan to retard it, let alone reverse it. This denial and inaction is caused by the very same forces that will cause inertia when figuring out how to combat a US economy that can't support a fraction of the workforce.
We recently had the worst financial crisis since the great depression. Who got bailed out and who didn't? I understand why we needed to bail out the banks, but about the only thing the average homeowner got was weak refinancing laws that were abused by the wealthy banks! Furthermore, we haven't taken any serious measures to prevent it from happening again. What measures we did manage to take (Dodd-Frank) are constantly being picked away by those same forces.
We've had middle class wage stagnation for going on 30 years now and the electorate keeps voting for people who do things to perpetuate and accelerate that stagnation (both parties), thanks in part to misinformation and secrecy funded by those same forces.
As far as political shakeups, Occupy Wall Street did nothing. The Tea Party was absorbed then gradually extinguished by the GOP. The most recent political shakeup the US electorate could come up with was electing Trump. I don't have high hopes about him solving our upcoming economic problems either.
What we've been through in the last 10 or so years isn't even the scary part if my dire prediction comes to fruition. I don't think our political system is healthy enough to deal with what might be coming.
PS: This was a lot longer winded than I anticipated, so apologies if it reads all over the place.
If automation takes way more jobs than it creates, possibly a lot more jobs, then nothing will jump start economy into jobs creating machine even if with higher economic growth.
So there's no gaming the business cycle to kick job growth into gear, though.
Without UI or perhaps a better program that works on the same program, you're NOT keeping the dire wolf from showing up at your window to collect his due. The '30s came close to that condition.
So angry tea partiers were not starving, the protesters on the left aren't starving. This Trumpian wave of populism isn't the worst case. The worst case is a Stalin, a Hitler or some of the sort of malevolence we don't have the imagination to understand due to its depravity. Imagine the difference between well-fed activist headed to the pub after a protest vs. millions of displaced with no hope and nothing to lose. I
I look at what I've written and I can tell I'm losing some coherence due to fatigue as the night wears on so hope it still came through what I was trying to say here. Sadly, because I don't stop by HN enough I might have to sign off soon but maybe I'll stay only for while surfing to see what emerges as I've personally found this discussion great. And other than maybe some minor flair ups of which I'm guilty of as much or more than average, I feel this HN community is pretty damn solid. Nobody actively tried to make look stupid or applied ad hominem attacks, it's an earnestness here that I admire Earnest gets worthwhile work done so keep it up.
Yes and no, I mean knowing the outcome certainly makes it seem that way. We certainly didn't have the economic knowledge we do today. 10 years of working at the problem had modest results and then a second recession occurred. The war spending was really what got us out of it. We supplied, at a nice profit, war material to England and France for two years before we got involved.
Back then, they (Hoover admin) believed the economy would take care of itself and did nothing (sound familiar?) Finally, Hoover (who was considered a brilliant businessman at the time) decided to enact a protectionist import tariff on Canada which was met with a retaliatory tariff on our goods and that was akin to throwing gas on the fire. A funny anecdote: Congress didn't do much about the dust bowl in Texas/Oklahoma until a 10,000 foot dust cloud was blown all the way from Texas/Oklahoma region, across half the continent, settling in Washington DC.
http://mallhistory.org/items/show/274
>Imagine the difference between well-fed activist headed to the pub after a protest vs. millions of displaced with no hope and nothing to lose.
Yes, I envision this as well, and on a massive scale. With the current militarization of the police in even the smallest towns, I fear, based on history, the local and state government would crack down hard on the protesting, a la Chicago riots in 1968 or the union busting in the early 1900s. Based on how authoritarian and stubborn the US government has become, it won't be long before they get involved and throw what remaining constitutional protections we have out the window. This could go on for years. Propagandists will continue to pit poor against poor along racial lines as they have been since after Bacon's rebellion and as they do today. Violence will begat violence and it might come closer to a 1930s Soviet landscape than we care to imagine as our government will see the protesters as "threats to democracy," and the "anarchists" moniker of the 1900s will come back and need to "be dealt with harshly." It will look foreign where you have the wealth class, the political / enforcement class, and everyone else. Only the last class will be the vast majority of the population, and as you said, starving. Not only starving, but oppressed, harassed and imprisoned. I don't trust our current government culture to handle this gracefully or intelligently. The biggest difference between now and the 1930s is that in the 1930s, the population trusted the government to act in their (citizen's) best interests, to their best ability. I don't think we're anywhere near that today.
As an aside, the Civil War had the benefit of a country versus a country; blue uniforms vs. grey uniforms. With this, if it comes to that, it would devolve into gurilla uprisings, not unlike the Arab Spring with the outcome of either side winning looking pretty ugly. I saw a photo that hit me like a brick. During the protests in Oakland, I believe, a young protester was wearing an Arab head scarf fashioned into mask like you would see in an ISIS video (Shemagh). I hope that wasn't a foreshadow of things to come.
>Nobody actively tried to make look stupid or applied ad hominem attacks, it's an earnestness here that I admire Earnest gets worthwhile work done so keep it up.
Yes, I really enjoy a good, thoughtful, intellectual discussion on the internet. This was the best discussion I've had in a while. I prefer discussing via typing rather than speaking, because I have time to research my own assertions as well as other's. HN is truly a pearl in a sea of mud.
Is this community kept civil exclusively by users up and down voting posts or are there moderators, too? Regardless, if you value civility you get civility.
I feel gratitude toward those who have built the culture here. Thank you.
Also, what puzzles me about for example those preaching hatred and stirring people up, is what it is that they want? Are they nihilists who just want to see everything in flames even if they burn too? Do they think they're somehow immune? Are they so blinded by ideology they actually think things will go the way their ideology says it will if only x, y, and z?
How could any human being, other than a sociopath or someone completely blinded by their ideology, possibly subscribe to authoritarianism of any kind? We now have access to all the information we need to find out the outcomes. Do they not at least attempt to grok Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot, Mao, Idi Amin, Kim Il Sung, et al? If it's ideology-induced blindness then there's hope.
If it's malevolent nihilism as then there will be no redemption.
To ideologues who want to dismantle the state, are you not familiar with the outcomes when states fail? Or do you think that we can't fail as bad or worse than other failed states such as Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Yemen? Do you think you are immune from violent death, disease, famine?
If the United States fails, we may well eat it more thoroughly in the end as there's no aid from governments or non-governmental organizations to even attempt to buffer us from failure.
We will, whether it's through concerted effort or no effort at all, take everyone down with us who thought their geopolitical position or other interest would benefit from hobbling us.
Do you think that all ideologies are wrong or just all ideologies are wrong except yours? Do you think you or anybody else really has the truth? How did you get your ideology and from whom? Why do you need it?
I feel hope when I talk to people who are free from the grip of ideology, who don't let others manipulate their thoughts and emotions. It's not the only thing that needs to happen but the more people who are free from the bullshit the better.
No, that is not true. Human beings are complicated, and different people do things for different reasons. There are lots of rich people like Andrew Carnegie and Bill Gates who spend the first part of their lives doing everything they can to get rich, and the second part giving it away for the benefit of mankind.
"He believed in the "Gospel of Wealth," which meant that wealthy people were morally obligated to give their money back to others in society."
I'm not sure why Bill Gates does it, but I commend him for it. Also keep in mind, most of his charity goes over seas. Furthermore, Gates is worth around $90 billion. If he gave the entirety of his wealth to all US working people (about 150 million), it would come out to a one time payment of $600.
The US is going to have to start keeping it's natural resources and stop giving it to companies for free or pennies on the dollar. You should see how cheap my state sells water to bottling companies that then sell it for a %1600 markup or something like that.
We can't call him out of retirement now, he's busy, and besides Microsoft isn't as scary as it used to be. Nothing stays the same so learn to appreciate it next time an assholish villain rises up to roll you without the slightest pretense of charm and subtlety.
Thank him for occupying you and your friends' thoughts and prayers for mercy and for endless hours of debate, strife, and paranoia because you won't realize what you've lost until it's gone.
One day you'll wake up and your favorite villain will have become a hippie, smoking hash with bedouins, curing diseases, and exuding something suspiciously close to charisma but it's hard to tell.
Of course the wealthy are going to lobby for lower taxes, only a dumdum in their situation wouldn't. They'll also donate large chunks of their wealth to charity because only the most heartless wouldn't.
Famous billionaires who have spoken in favor of higher taxes include Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.
Heh. Now who's generalizing? (sorry, a little snarky). There's a little over 500 billionaires in the US. Gates and Buffet are on record pledging to do this, as are some of their friends. That's a whole lot shy of "most."
It's not like i don't believe in UBI. There are few other visible solutions to the automation problem (other may be economic incentivizing - like through tax breaks - and cultural promotion of resurrection of personal servants as a mass occupation) - but it can't work as good as this example simply because it doesn't scale so well.
Adding access to clean water, plumbing and electricity is enabling and the kind of investment that will have the most return. Returns can also be had by starting to give access to credit/loans to enterprising people. I liken this issue to Democracy. You can't give a country Democracy but you can help create conditions for its citizens to build it themselves. But there is also a chance that they don't want it.
If anything they need to get to work developing their country; those shacks are not going to be built by robots.
Fully developed countries on the other hand may face the situation where their country is so well run and have such a high level of automation and specialisation that there is too little work left for the population to be fully employed.
And thus they may lower their pension age, experiment with 30 hour work weeks, sabbaticals, maternity leaves, basic income and so on.
The countries that are closest to this are probably the Scandinavian countries. However at the moment they are all moving towards lower social transfers and higher pension age.
Public policy whether implemented by governments or by organizations should test, innovate, change, not just pick an approach and run with it as seems to happen with the largest programs here in the U.S. As far as I can tell there's not been much innovation in the implementation of the safety net since Johnson.
Like anything else humans try to do, there will be bugs, there will be blind alleys, there will be mistakes. Small scale testing is a necessary step so that a working model is ready for larger-scale testing or maybe it'll be found that the implementation will have to have configurations that vary according to local conditions and even just preferences.
I'm a Pacific Northwest guy perhaps out of touch with what Silicon Valley is up to, sometimes I'm critical, but for this initiative, I say thank you. I have no clue how I'd thank anyone for this so just in case anyone involved is reading my comment I would like to express gratitude for doing work that has a high probability of playing a part in making the world a liveable place for my young son and the rest of humanity in the years to come.
By the way, if you've got the chops to beta test UI any chance you could save the Amazon Basin?! Please.
So, yeah machines are a big black hole and our jobs are doomed asteroids spiraling into the black hole. As they spiral into the singularity, humans will be displaced at an accelerating rate, and it will take more ingenuity and effort for humans to maintain "work". And, for what? In the asymptotic limit, the outcome should be no more jobs and "work" in a the way we currently define them, and humans will be truly free to creative pursuits. Never shall a beautiful human mind be wasted on labor which a machine can do.
At some point, machines will be the dominant species pushing civilization forward, not us.
Until then, we're forced to work, we're forced into employment because our world does not simply give us what we want. Food and spears don't fall out of the sky, so we will waste our time hunting and farming until we figure out how to make those things "fall out of the sky".
Making incremental improvements is the next best hope, and this one (giving cash) could turn out to be much more effective than previous state-of-the-art interventions (giving food, medicines, books, etc.). Additionally, enough incremental improvement might reach a tipping point where the poverty/coordination trap can be escaped, and the global equilibrium shifts.
So nobody should do anything unless they can also solve all problems? I actually upvoted your comment because I agree that those things should stop but I don't have the slightest bit of power to stop it and those who are conducting these sort of studies have more power than me but when put up against giant problems, it's at the margins. That is, they can't stop the arms trade either.
And calling it "basic income" is just propaganda.
If this concept proves viable, then that could serve as a model to scale it up. The problem this is trying to solve isn't that of just the developing world, the developed world is sliding toward a catastrophic failure of the system that depends on there being a job (aka a way to make a living) for every adult who wants to work.
I'm not sure but we could be there now. If we aren't there now it won't be long. The trend toward automation and the rise of AI are enough on its own but there are other trends working against the current system. Add to that even for people who have steady work how well has the retirement saving system been going in the U.S.? There are millions of people who will retire completely unprepared to support themselves for even a decade of retirement.
The need will be global. Unless you're wealthy enough to have no worries at all about money, you might someday be grateful for these initial tests that led to the successful deployment of this system for you. I know I worry about how many years I can make it into retirement when that day comes and I really worry about my son who's a small child. The system is failing yet slow enough that perhaps it hasn't hit you yet.
Actually, even if you ARE wealthy, if the system becomes too unstable ultimately we all eat it. Instability is everyone's adversary.
IMHO there have been enough test for basic income where the basic income was decoupled from the free job market. It is called socialism / communism. All of these tests failed badly and ruined whole generations. No sane person have lived behind the iron curtain would consider it as a sustainable economic solution.
Basic income does not presume any of the flavors of socialism, though if your particular ideology is libertarianism or conservativism then you've likely been taught to throw any sort of government program into the same category in order to attempt to discredit it.
This is basic income with no strings attached. You can take that money to buy ramen so that you can be a half starving artist or you can take a chance on that job or start the business that you've been hesitant to take a chance on because you estimated the odds of falling hard and broke were too high.
If you retire and didn't save enough in your 401k and Roth IRA's to make it to the finish line without working when you're old and tired then this might make the difference. If you fall on hard times as many human beings do at some point in their lives sooner or later, the UI would be the floor with a little padding.
There's not a single thing about this that has anything to do with the "iron curtain." Nobody thinking this through themselves using reason would arrive at your conclusions and you're probably pretty damn smart. So I suspect the problem that it is not your thinking, you are instead parroting some quasi-talking-points from some ideology or other that you subscribe to.
Please try to get beyond seeing everything that you encounter through the lens of your ideology or any ideology at all for that matter, but if you need your ideology for whatever reason, at least review and define your terms again to make sure you at least have that part right or what follows doesn't have a prayer of coming together as a cogent argument.
[Edit:] I appreciate your intent to build up a working socialism and not to fvck it up this time. But some systems simply does not work with humans, only with ants and robots.
So what are your ideas to mitigate the problem? Or would you rather cling to your ideology rather than think about a problem that's destined to destabilize the system that supports your existence? If the basic assumptions and agreements that make civilization possible go out the window, you go out the window as well.
And I'd appreciate it if you'd go easy on the red herrings. Talking about UI does is not the same as talking about the other things you mentioned.
As far as I know what has never been tried on a large scale is to give everyone a no-strings-attached 'salary' and let them do whatever they want, without consequences for that income.
Communism definitely didn't let you do whatever you want, while still paying you for it. And in all socialist countries I know of unemployment benefits are decreased as soon as you start working, sometimes even at a net-negative rate (yes, I consider that stupid as well).
I don't know what you mean with a basic home. I guess you could call where I live right now 'basic', but only because I don't care enough to spend more for it.
Oh, really? Where do we sign up? I'd love to be able to build my business(es) without taking investor funds.
Your remark about building your business without taking investor funds may have been made in jest, but most people build their small businesses through debt rather than investor equity.
For those interested in loans for building a small business, Kiva (who I work for) offers interest-free loans here in the U.S. to those without access to traditional credit or those building socially impactful businesses.
Means-tested welfare is indeed a program with the intent of "keeping people from drowning", but that's explicitly NOT what this is about.
My assumption is the money would be calibrated to subsistence level so it doesn't concern me that a hipster wants to do art instead of work for money. They'll have to live simply but god bless them if they want to paint in a shared house with other hipsters. Then those who want more money will get jobs. The moral hazard of this doesn't concern me but maybe I'm misguided.
The moral hazard of this doesn't concern me but maybe I'm misguided.
vs
That's a pretty cynical attitude...I doubt you're now gasping for air as you sink below the waves.
I'm confused.
The second statement about sinking beneath the waves was there are people who are starving right as we speak even here in the U.S.
If UBI endangers the motivation of people 'higher in the income ladder', they are likely to become 'people near the edge'. Since UBI hypothesis is testing ideas for the future, it is hard to predict but important that it does not create a demotivated/poorer workforce.
No US citizen in California really has to worry about starving to death. They do have to worry about losing their benefits, and in some cases having to retroactively pay them back.
I have my doubts about UBI, though. I lived in a poor neighborhood in Las Vegas. About a quarter of the residents were drug addicts, and living among them were the drug dealers. They all were on public assistance, and spent most of their time trying to steal anything they could from the people and shops around them.
Ever wonder why so many poor people vote Republican? This is it. People there were afraid to leave their homes at night and the hope was a Republican government would clean up their neighborhood for them. But I digress...
And if everyone's included there doesn't need to be resentment as bob down the street isn't getting something you are not getting, right?
I've probably spent way too much time on this thread today but this is the most hopeful thing I've seen a while. The news every day is relentlessly negative sometimes horrific.
I don't think this idea would turn that neighborhood you lived in into a utopia, either.
I guess I must not understand what UBI is all about. I had thought it WASN'T a form of welfare. Rather, it's UNIVERSAL in nature. That would mean theoretically everyone from millionaires, to the poorest, would receive UBI funds.
I'd love to be free from having to earn an income, so that I can work on my own projects (businesses). But who wouldn't, right?
In that situation, is someone with a positive tax obligation really receiving UBI funds? What about if all taxes are raised slightly so that the majority of people's tax obligations remain unchanged? It all gets very pedantic, but it is generally considered both welfare and universal.
It can get even more pedantic in other interpretations, especially when it isn't the government providing the income.
As far as free from having to earn an income, of course, you realize we're talking about a floor? Someone could correct me on this but my understanding is "basic income" means enough to survive?
Some people would accept living very simply so they could work on their personal projects, build their business, etc., while others would make seeking additional income their highest priority. That's what I like about this concept is that there does not appear to be coercion or social engineering involved.
So you are arguing the rich are rich because they are the smartest? I would tweak your assessment. The rich are rich because wealth perpetuates the capture of wealth at a rate greater than the expansion of the economy.
That was my immediate reaction after reading this. What about after the twelve years, when the donors ride off into the sunset? There are some encouraging stories there of participants using the money wisely, but not all will do so. You could argue that nobody is forcing them to participate, but it does seem at least a little ethically questionable. Particularly given the targeted demographic of a rural Kenyan community with (presumably - I could be wrong) low education levels.
I think history has proven that we can live in extremely wretched conditions. By giving money to people, are we going to be increasing their living standards or just creating more mouths to feed?
Note that the basic income only applies to whoever registers at the beginning of the program. Would that amount of basic income cause the population to explode, so that the per-capita amount of goods/money remains constant?
Also, wealthy people are often busy trying to maintain their own wealth. The excuse about not having kids is often about being more career oriented.
There's no reason to believe handing a poor, uneducated person with no impulse control a big wad of cash will have the same effect.
I don't know the threshold between living in crushing poverty versus simple poverty, but this amount of money wouldn't greatly affect fertility rates based on the chart, but might encourage people to have more children.
And that graph seems to apply to people all over the world, I don't see why this Kenyan village would be any different.
The fertility reductions really only seem to matter once you get to 10k or 20k of annual income a year. I agree that if you gave 10k a year strings unattached to every person in that community, fertility might drop.
However, by injecting that much capital into a poverty stricken area, fertility might actually increase, as they would be the most prosperous group by far in the area. Also, there would almost certainly be huge unintended consequences, such as massive inflation and the increase in deprivation of people not receiving the money.
And what do you think it's viable, what would it take to make it viable. Maybe consider a few scenarios say how it might work (or not work) in different parts of the world, including both developing and developed.
I know that either UBI will have to be so slow that it'll be useless for those in a first world country (like 250 dollars a year) or else we'll have to have far stricter immigration controls than ever - a UBI for first world standards would be unimaginable luxury for those living in third world conditions.
Fundamentally I think it comes down to population control. A geometrically increasing population is simply not sustainable for any long enough period of time. My personal opinion is that if UBI could be linked to contraception (you only receive UBI if you're not allowed to have children while on UBI or take care of children with your UBI funds) then that could work.
The worst-case scenario I fear is that UBI given without also providing outlets for activities that actually get used will result in an adult version of problem of otherwise well-off of suburban youth.
Forget about "fake news", the New York Times is literally evil news. It is literally promoting views that proliferate evil. Injecting this level of disorder into an economy and lying about it is a level of deception that goes into moral perversion.
Let me make this clear: I am directly accusing Annie Lowrey of promoting excessively morally corrupt views. She is responsible for promoting evil. This is a person who wakes up in the morning and works hard to promote evil.
Think about that.
Edit: I was down-voted without explanation or rebuttal. If you disagree with what I have written, don't attack my anonymously. I want my karma to be a healthy score, and I don't appreciate people (or bots) decreasing my karma score, and I consider it a personal attack against my reputation.
- HN isn't primarily for political or ideological debate. Creating a new account and starting with a contentious comment probably looked like someone creating an account purely for ideological battle, which is an abuse of HN.
- The HN community strongly values civil discourse, which usually requires keeping strong, passionate, strident language at a lower level, particularly on contentious issues. Phrases like "literally evil news", "literally promoting views that proliferate evil", and "moral perversion" don't meet the expectation of civil discourse, regardless of how strongly you believe them to be true. (Yes, this is "it's not what you say, it's how you say it".)
- You've made a direct, harsh attack on someone without providing any support.
- After receiving downvotes, you complained about it. This is explicitly against HN guidelines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As I stated from the outset, this is speculation. For what people would consider obvious disregard for community standards, they may downvote and not think it's necessary to comment why.
As you express concern about your karma, as you're new to commenting on HN, I suggest refraining from commenting on contentious topics for a while until you become more accustomed to the HN community. There are plenty of other interesting submissions that you may find to contribute to and not find yourself as open to downvotes. I'm sorry you've found your first brush with the HN community to be negative. I hope you find what I've written useful and that you have a more positive experience in the future!
Liberals believe that the poor are too dumb and helpless to figure out what they want, so the government should do it, both domestically and in foreign aid.
Conservatives believe that the poor are poor because they are unintelligent and lack good values (or they are acting rationally in response to liberal welfare programs), and domestic and foreign programs should be eliminated in favor of religious missions.
What programs like this are finding is the the poor are intelligent and well-motivated, and they just need an opportunity to get out of the hole they are stuck in.
Let me add that, from what I understand, foreign aid programs can be very helpful in areas like public health.
It does not matter to me as none of these is likely to hurt others. Where someone is using this money to hurt others we have laws as imperfect as they are. Humans will always be imperfect and society will always be imperfect as an understatement.
There are other places in the world where the limiting factor is that if you give people money, some warlord will come in with guns and take it away. There are other places where if you give money, the local villagers will drink it away. There are still other places where you can give money and people will use it productively to grow more crops, and then the crops will rot in the fields because the transportation infrastructure to transport them to where they're needed doesn't exist.
In places like Kenya or Bangladesh where there is relatively peace, a relatively industrious culture, and the know-how to profitably invest capital, giving money helps. In other places - DRC for example, or rural Peru - the money just gets redistributed to people who will use it to keep the locals down.
I suppose that from 1992 until (but not including) 2016, looking from the outside only at major party Presidential nominees, it would be easy to miss the substantial dissent from the neoliberal consensus in the US (even within both major parties, and even in the segment of those parties in government.)
OTOH, since we elected an authoritarian populist whose economic approach blends mercantilist protectionism with corporatism, the idea that the only economic philosophy with any currency in US politics is neoliberalism isn't even something that relatively disengaged foreign observers can be excused.for.buying into.
This is not the situation I think of when I hear "basic income." Why Kenya?
> GiveDirectly wants to show the world that a basic income is a cheap, scalable way to aid the poorest people on the planet.
Oh.
I was under the belief that only the middle class protested for basic income. It would have been more interesting if the "beta test" was done on educated/ first world persons, so we can finally get progress (or a full stop) on this debate.
I believe this idea wasn't thought out past the "we want to put on airs" phase. Is injecting capital into a system that relies on crime to keep afloat, really the best idea GiveDirectly could have come up with?
This is similar to the Toms fiasco where they would donate a pair of shoes to Africa for every pair bought -- it crippled the local fabrics businesses.
Perhaps if one wanted to fix the African economy, one would invest into economic think-tanks and their executionary tandems, instead of over glorified tax shelters.
It looks like Finland is doing the first experiment, even if it's only on the unemployed[0].
[0]http://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/finland-begins-...
The middle class protests for UBI because the middle class is the one with enough education and free time to think about these problems, and push for solutions, and that also cares about such things (the rich generally don't). The middle class also is closer to the poor side, and both sees what the welfare state is really like and how much of a mess it is and why UBI would be so much simpler and easier to administer, and the middle class also has to worry more about backsliding into the lower classes and so realizes how good it'd be to have that safety net in place.
You're absolutely right, it would be better to "beta test" in industrialized nations, esp. the USA with its very large amount of spending for social services (SNAP, TANF, etc.) and also its large and growing divide between rich and poor and the falling of many poorer people into poverty as their jobs are automated away. Places like Kenya don't really have this issue; they were never highly industrialized. However, doing a "beta test" in the US would be very expensive and it is flatly impossible, politically, at this point in time. The best we can hope for is to try it out in someplace like Finland. So until then, I guess the idea is to try it out in places like Kenya, where it can be done extremely cheaply because the local cost-of-living is so ridiculously low and the standard of living is low too. (Give $10 a week to a Kenyan living in a hut and it'll have a big effect on their lifestyle; give $10 a week to an American, anywhere in the US, and it won't make any difference at all. Maybe they can buy lunch 1 or 2 days with it, and that's about it. It certainly won't pay the rent.)
>This is similar to the Toms fiasco where they would donate a pair of shoes to Africa for every pair bought -- it crippled the local fabrics businesses.
That's something people are going to have to deal with in a globalized world; local businesses have to compete, to some extent, with businesses across the planet. But this is not similar to what you describe. This is giving cash directly to people, to spend how they will; it doesn't favor or disfavor any local business, it just injects more money into the local economy, mainly at the lowest levels, where it'll be spent quickly. If anything, it should be a boon for local fabrics businesses, as the locals will now have more disposable income to spend on things like that. Of course, they might also spend it on manufactured goods shipped from China, but that's not such a bad thing: it'll raise their standard of living regardless.
I think that in addition to the money they should help with the following:
1)Education and the ability to get it at will. Financial education should be a priority. 2)Entrepreneurship, make sure anyone that wants to start a business knows what to do. 3)Security and the enforcement of the law thru a judicial system, both criminal and civil. 4)A working financial system. Make sure businesses and people can borrow money. 5)A way to go bankrupt that will let people start over. It should not be too painful for both creditors and borrowers. 6)A political system that works for the majority. 7) Community leadership that works towards the betterment of the town. 8)A tax system that will let the town provide items that no single person can provide on their own. It's a reality as painful as they are taxes and their prudent use help improve the community's standard of living. 9) Secure property rights. If someone owns something they should do with it what they want without infringing on the community's well being and no one should be able to take it away from them by force.
What gets me railed up is the inability to use the town's human capital. Giving free money will not help forever. If you could get people to work together they would eventually get out of poverty. Maybe the current generation might not but eventually they would be able to do it.