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Comment by holograham | Hacker News Reader

simple sure but let's talk about what it would take to give a meaningful dividend to all americans

If we used a conservative 3.5% average return to give $1,000 USD for each American (~325M) you need nearly 10 Trillion dollars in this fund or over half of our yearly GDP.

Now keeping in mind this would need to be generated from a tax on some good/service/capital which obviously has a cost component at it's base. Just getting the initial 10Trillion in a fund would be ridiculously hard. Now add to that the fact that 1k is a pittance and figuring out a true basic income -- this is wayyyy more complex.

I'd like to point out a HUGE fallacy in this "simple" plan -- it only works in low population high natural capital resource areas. Alaska and Norway happen to be relatively remote/cold places with an abundance natural gas/oil. Norway's 1T dollar fund would be comical at US scale.

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If the United States wanted a fund the same size proportional to population of Norway's it would need 65 trillion dollars, which is about the same size as the total value of the top 60 stock exchanges in the world.

The NYT article made me think it was a good idea, but this comment inspired me to run the numbers myself. It's impossible to run a UBI with this type of system in the United States without total state ownership. Why would they publish something like this?

>Why would they publish something like this?

It's as if people in the world have agendas that allow them to handwave away things like facts.

In all seriousness, it's an op-ed, so the NYT hasn't subjected it to their standards of journalistic rigour, and it's written by a lawyer/blogger who works for a think tank called Demos. Maybe I'm biased from living in DC/the Beltway for so long, but in my head whenever I read 'works for a think tank,' I substitute 'professional liar'. The author is the very definition of someone pushing an agenda.

> The author is the very definition of someone pushing an agenda.

I understand people have reasons for writing appealing lies. I understand part of the job of a think tank is to write and publish their ideas.

I do not understand why The New York Times would publish a policy idea that is impossible. A critical thinking person can conclude that the investment fund model cannot be applied to The United States in a meaningful way. The New York Times is one of the most respected news papers in the world. In my mind, publishing this article has the effect of decreasing the paper's reputation among people that critical analyzed this policy proposal. This is damaging the The New York Times' greatest asset, the reputation of their brand.

I do not know a lot about newspapers generally, or The New York Times specifically. What I do know is this discourages me from investing more of my attention into The New York Times.

>I'd like to point out a HUGE fallacy in this "simple" plan -- it only works in low population high natural capital resource areas. Alaska and Norway happen to be relatively remote/cold places with an abundance natural gas/oil. Norway's 1T dollar fund would be comical at US scale.

What makes natural resources different from capital such that these wealth funds work with natural resources but not capital?

Probably something to do with the rent seeking problem. It’s wealth tied mostly to possessing rights to exploit valuable land, not to the labor or ingenuity of people.

this ^

Value is value -- for sure

but Value derived from luck of the draw (e.g. Norway's current citizens banking on their ancestors settling in a land rich in oil).

Frame it this way -- would Saudi Arabia be as wealthy as it is today without Oil? Do you think their social and political structure would have produced equivalent wealth as their oil companies?

I have to believe that the original author was astute enough to understand these numbers and the inadequate nature of the dividends, so I'm forced to think his 'solution' to inequality is solely about taking capital from the wealthy. This is just a convoluted way of doing that...

It could be generated by the swipe of a pen, simply "nationalize" 30% of all registered companies.

Sure, at the price of violating the 5th Amendment (eminent domain clause). Also probably at the price of the future productivity of those 30% of companies (government owners usually turn out to not be very efficient managers).

Who said anything about managing? Govt should merely own shares (30%, or more, of each company, not 30% of companies), and let existing capitalist/free-market incentives continue to do what they're good at, driving innovation and efficiency. While replacing, at least partly, what they're not good at, which is distributing the profits fairly to all contributors, and supporting the wider society that enables them to operate at all.

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