While this is just a very basic idea I put out, still, corruption is rampant everywhere anyway. I suspect it would be a net positive to have a ton of Brilliant students getting money for their projects even if half of the money are corrupted away.
It does seem like it's getting worse, or maybe media coverage about it is getting better.
Has any country in the world successfully fought corruption in a peaceful way? (ie. no revolutions, no guillotines)
The solution is not throwing more free money in public coffers. It definitively exacerbated corruption in greece for example
Also, how do you measure and compare corruption?
The US has gone to war killing millions of people, including hundreds of thousands of their own, motivated by (oil/industrial-military) money and justified with lies.
The US political system is controlled mostly by corporations and rich people that pay for lobbying.
So are you saying the west is not corrupt because it is more publicly/"legally" corrupt?
Here's a source that estimates total deaths, post-9/11 so far (by November 2018) at hundreds of thousands: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/20...
That doesn't take into account the previous war with Iraq.
By the way, I never said US citizens. Do you think US citizens' lives are somehow more important than people from other parts of the world?
Also, oil/greed seems to be the most apparent motivation (you might want to watch the movie Vice, or just revise non-US media coverage from the time).
It would be great if you could provide a source that has a clear (real) cause/effect of whatever motivated the US to start a war with Iraq and Afghanistan, and please don't say weapons of mass destruction.
No, I don't think US citizen's lives are more important defacto, but I don't see all lives as equal either, for the record.
Oil/greed fit the leftist narrative, but I'm not convinced, and since you made the claim that it's about oil and greed, the onus is on you to prove it! I don't have to provide motivation of my own, though I suspect two planes crashing into a building might have something to do with it.
The first war with Iraq was pre-9/11, so nothing to do with two planes.
Now, about 9/11, what did Iraq or Afghanistan had to do with those planes? If anything, the US should have gone to war with Saudi Arabia, whose citizens piloted those planes.
So how do those planes justify going to war with two totally different countries, that potentially had nothing to do with 9/11? Or how do those planes justify going to war at all?
Has killing thousands more people somehow redeemed or justified the deaths of people during 9/11?
?!
On the off chance of you having some plausible explanation for this outrageous statement I invite you to expand on this.
That's laughable.
What was surprising to me was how uncorrelated other factors of economic health were. We found examples of countries with pretty poor indicators but very low corruption, and they had a lot of opportunity, future, and growth.
I suspect giving people with no life experience, exposure to failure or real life dynamics will end badly. The single digit number of success stories in limited domains aren't representative of any real meaning
If some people can't accumulate something they can't do bigger things as creators or create bigger markets as consumers.
It's just another form of seed funding for ambitious start-ups.
And $30bn/yr is absolutely trivial compared to the opportunity costs of an economy geared more to financialisation and regressive wealth extraction than to productive engineering and invention.
This silly proposal is nothing more than socialized venture capital. We have real venture capital who invest in “far fetched” ideas already — and they have willing participants who know what they are getting into — not people being forced, literally at the point of a gun, through taxes.
Yes you will (according the basic theory of the idea).
Unfortunately, even though you will get a return, when you get it you will believe that you haven't had the return because it will take the form of $100k of life improvements that you will believe you "would have had anyway" without the investment.
You might even get $100k of cash, in the form of your salary increasing by much more than that, and costs of quality of life things increasing by less (enough to make the difference >$20k). But when it happens you will almost certainly attribute it to other causes.
And so, today, you will argue against the investment, it won't happen, and you will end up poorer than you would have been.
While believing you are richer, because $20k cash in the hand today feels more real than $100k quality of life cost differential improvements in future whose attribution is difficult or impossible to verify.
That's the theory anyway.
I think a plausible factor in the failures of trickle down economics to enrich the masses as much as hoped by those who advocate it, is wealthy groups of people acting so as to keep what wealth they have in their own control, away from others. And, over generations, perhaps ceasing to be wealth generators (e.g. inventors and industrialists) and becoming wealth controllers (e.g. "old money" families).
Widespread investing in lots of people isn't subject to the same problem, by definition. (Assuming those people are paid decently, rather than indentured servants to some capital controller).
Maybe trickle down actually works. Maybe we all got a return on it in invisible ways. Maybe things would be a lot worse for the median taxpayer than they are after the policy was enacted. How would we know for sure?
Just like when a VC or government grant agency gives you money, you can't simply invest it and live off the proceeds in those cases either.
With that ruled out, the $1-3MM is not really the recipient's money, and they are not really wealthy in the way you are comparing to other households.
Of course it will. Basic income is so expensive that the wealth don’t have enough to take to fund it. It’s going to require massive taxes in the middle class that result in a quality of life loss.
Any cash given to the poorer classes and taken from the middle classes likely has greater quality of life value to the poorer classes - because it would be used for things that are more essential to life.
This means the quality of life loss to the middle classes is more than offset by quality of life gain to the poorer classes. And the poorer classes have many more people.
By some ethical standards, this makes it unequivocally beneficial to redistribute.
(I don't actually agree with that approach, because money in some hands is more potent for creating benefit to others, than in other hands. But I think the parent's argument, that it's bad because the middle class would suffer, is essentially a "poor people don't matter" argument.)
Many voters in the middle class feel like they've worked (and continue to work) very hard to get where they are and object to the meager spoils of their work being taken for redistribution. Right or wrong, it's a very real feeling. (Obviously, I'm not saying dollars are kidneys, but they will cause a similar reaction in people.)
I think that type of reasoning is fallacious because every policy leaves a subset of people worse off (you can just choose your preferred subset to make the point). Including the status quo.
I like your kidney analogy, and I think it makes a strong counter point that is worth considering when weighing up policy ideas.
Though, the status quo in that analogy looks to me like the majority of people in the world currently are having one kidney removed during childhood, mostly to feed the middle classes and build toys for them. Some unlucky ones have two; they are sick and dying. But we couldn't take a kidney from the healthy middle class folks to give back to those, could we, because voters in the middle class feel like they've worked (and continue to work) very hard to get their kidney from some unspecified source we don't like to think about, and they object to the meager spoils of their hard-earned spare kidney being taken for redistribution back to the people they came from.
Refuting dumb ideas to help the poor doesn’t mean I don’t care about helping them.
By that measure no one could ever become an adult.
Exposure to failure and real life dynamics is exactly what people with no life experience need. At least that's the only way they will gain life experience.
> millennial fantasy
At least millenials are dreaming about a better society and trying to fight for it.
What are you doing besides spitting out unprovoked hate towards a whole generation of people?
> spitting out unprovoked hate towards a whole generation of people?
Care to cite the basis of your assertion?