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> Are you sure it's a good idea to systematically reward a lack of ambition? > You proposed design will become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Putting people on a permanent wage because they will "probably never work again" will signal to those people that society considers them worthless. You will never produce anything of sufficient value for anyone to consider it worthwhile to feed you for the effort.

You provide question and the answer. The idea of universal income (which this proposed wage is a limited application of) is that you give everyone a bare minimum stipend, while encouraging people to go out and earn more if they want more.

It wouldn't be event that expensive, considering what a modern social state already spends on its citizenry.

In a sense, modern government is partially already a mechanism of universal income (many government employees are unfit for being productive in private sector).

So here's where I'm coming from: Putting food on the table as a result of your work is satisfying and a source of pride. Not being able to do it is shameful. This is a fundamental dynamic.

While it's good that there's a safety net so slip-ups and bad luck won't put you in the street and kill your children, institutionalising that dynamic (effectively removing it) will have catastrophic effects on the values of society.

These concerns are not crack-pot libertarian wet dreams, they were raised even by social democrats when the Nordic social democratic welfare states were designed. Britain has talked about anti-social behaviour and broken society for years (it's not just something David Cameron invented with his good-on-paper/WTF-IRL-"Big Society") - don't have that kind of language for it in Denmark, but the same dynamics are present.

I guess to me that's not an interesting dynamic for a society that's advanced past subsistence farming. In subsistence farming, yes, you work to feed yourself. If you have modern 21st-century farming technology though, producing enough food to feed everyone takes only a few percent of GDP, not 100% of everyone's time. Why not just give it to everyone, since its cost is basically noise on modern economic scales anyway?

Then find some more advanced goals for people to work at. If they really, truly, want nothing but a bare subsistence existence, and nothing else that modern society has to offer, then fine, let them sit around eating 2000 calories/day for free; maybe in the future robots will do all the work anyway, and lazy humans can just live off the munificence of their robot benefactors (we're halfway there). But an "advanced" society in 2011 where the reason people work is because they'll starve otherwise, despite the utter un-scarcity of food, now that seems like a pretty shameful dynamic. I'd be more interested in asking, rather than setting up artificial scarcity so that people have to work for the old scarce things (e.g. food) even though they aren't scarce anymore (there's only a distribution problem, not a scarcity problem), whether we can have a society where people work for something else. Maybe the answer's no, but to me that'd be a pretty sad answer.

Putting food on the table is a metaphor that goes beyond food. Here are some statistics on Americans counted as poor: http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/09/understandi...

We have moved beyond subsistence farming and free food - "food on the table" means a lot more, including many scarce goods.

Indeed, we should make a point of not wiping anybody's fanny. What I had in mind is a type of existence where one has bare minimum provided (shelter, food, clothing, access to information), but that also as a feature provides a social stigma. This institution should be viewed by society as a temporary stop or a final refuge a safety net if you will.

You want tobacco? Go and work for it. You want booze? Go and work for it. You want PS3? Go and work for it.

You want tobacco? Go and work for it. You want booze? Go and work for it. You want PS3? Go and work for it.

Isn't this how food stamps are currently supposed to work? They only cover staples, and users aren't allowed to pay for tobacco, etc. The thing is, in the real world, food stamp recipients frequently barter their vouchers for these luxury items.

When considering such measures, we need to stop imagining what an optimal government might be able to do. Instead, look at the history of such efforts, and the incentive structures (consider Public Choice economics) to understand what is likely to transpire.

I don't think we disagree much, then. But the origin of this thread was the assertion that 50% of the population would be permanently unemployable by next decade.

>So here's where I'm coming from: Putting food on the table as a result of your work is satisfying and a source of pride. Not being able to do it is shameful. This is a fundamental dynamic.

You act like this is a fundamental feature of humanity; it's not. Its a learned response to thousands of years of scarcity. There were plenty of societies where food was plentiful and thus they never developed this sort of social conditioning.

In a world where food, shelter, necessities are plentiful people will be freed up to gain social standing through creative endeavors. Or perhaps we'll do away with our need to rank each other based on arbitrary metrics. I welcome this future.

I think this is one of the most important ideas being explored right now and could not only save families but also become a giant incubator for new research. (It may also require moving to a new form of government, such as a Direct Democracy, to implement.)

It's an idea whose time has come.

The proportion of Danish citizens on some kind of transfer income: 60% (includes student stipends all the way to pensions)

The value of new research undertaken by people on transfer income: very small, if any at all.

The reason the idea requiring direct democracy is that it involves two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.

The second part doesn't seem correct; a huge amount of new development in Denmark is done by people on transfer income. For example, a number of research results that later were commercialized have come out of Masters theses (there's even a whole arrangement where you can do a thesis in collaboration with a company), and a number of companies were funded initially by some kind of government benefits, sometimes officially and sometimes unofficially (since you lose benefits once you're officially "working for a startup"). Even when the money doesn't go directly to the startup, it provides a backstop so people feel more free to take risks starting a company.

I guess it'd be interesting to read a study quantifying it, but I'd be surprised if it were really true that not much research comes out of people on transfer incomes, especially if you include the people who used transfer incomes to bootstrap the early stages of a startup.

So, student subsidies are the odd one out here, because they're not money you're given to survive, they're given in exchange for a specific activity. They do, however, count as transfer income, and the source I have for 60% didn't break it down.

Yes, unemployment benefits can provide a backstop that enables entrepreneurship, but Denmark has more generous benefits than most other countries, yet the levels of entrepreneurship don't follow.

Any other direct subsidy towards entrepreneurship (although often misguided) aren't transfer income in the sense being suggested by the GP.

The people who can just sit around and come up with exciting new research or who can become successful entrepreneurs are generally also the kind of people who can get a job if they want or need one.

The reason the idea requiring direct democracy is that it involves two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.

Make that one wolf and 99 pissed-off sheep.

The thing is, it's not up to us to decide if it's a good idea: it's up to the people who would benefit -- which is the vast majority.

You can have concentrated wealth or you can have democratic principles, but you can't long maintain both.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm familiar with the idea that minimum wage laws and student loan programs increase the cost of goods and tuition as the various institutions realize that there is more money available and adjust their prices accordingly.

No, I am not advocating a cash wage, what is needed is a wage that enables the holder to claim a fixed list of goods (e.g. food stamps allow the holder to buy food, not XBOX games). Likewise, I'm sure that the statistics show that giving money to the homeless to buy food is unlikely to produce positive outcomes, but giving them food or shelter directly is a more responsible option.

I believe that a broad application of this same idea -- to provide a wage for displaced workers in the form of rights to claim an enumerated set of goods rather than indirectly via a cash stipend preserves the incentive structures present in the other areas of our economy while taking care of those left behind yet not undermining ourselves in the process.

A final thought -- consider that an educated, well-fed population with a low infant mortality rate has fewer children. Therefore, a morally acceptable form of population control is available to us: feed and educate the populace. If we can do that, then we should be able to sustain 50% unemployment.

>Are you sure it's a good idea to systematically reward a lack of ambition?

Why the assumption that if you pay someone a living wage when their services are no longer needed, they won't continue to seek meaningful work, re-educate themselves or provide valuable services to the community? I come from a working class family, all of whom have the option to not work yet choose to do one or all three of the above out of a basic need to participate in their community and be valued.

I was quoting the GP:

People who will probably never work again, due to lack of education or ambition.

There exist plenty of large areas dominated by people who are, let's call it "empowered to provide meaningful services to the community". Yet, these areas are more often examples of urban decay than they are of thriving communities.

Really? Have you ever been involved with a school or pre-school for example? All my friends who are parents give hours a week to their children's upbringing in a communal manner, as just one example. I wonder if we aren't being brainwashed by a media that chooses to label us as a lazy species who are only good for watching television - because in the wider world as I've seen it this isn't the case at all.

Our instincts for fairness and obligations in the social contract evolved when we were organized into tribes. Thus, when we see members of our own tribe (i.e., those whose children are educated with our own) we instinctively feel drawn to contribute to their well-being.

The same thing doesn't work for people outside our tribe. Evolutionarily speaking, these were rivals for our food or mates or whatever. So we don't feel the same compulsion to help outsiders.

Here's a counter-example for you: I know several people (and I'm guessing that most of us do) that have exaggerated disability claims, so they're now "retired" and living off social security, when their disability isn't great enough to, e.g., run the machinery to dig a new septic tank.

How many people do not try to minimize their tax burden? Isn't that another example demonstrating that people don't naturally contribute to the well-being of those outside their tribes?