Poverty Is a System Problem- a UBI Is the System Solution | Hacker News Reader

Poverty Is a System Problem- a UBI Is the System Solution

michael-haines.medium.com

2 pointsGigamouse6 comments

>As unemployment rises, the UBI can be raised. As it increases, some people will choose to cut back their hours, or drop out of paid work altogether, leaving room for those who want/need the extra money that paid work provides. At some point, the market will be brought back into balance

I couldn't make it more than a dozen sentences in before running into the illogical and unsupported claims. If unemployment is high, why would we want to drive more workers out of the labor market? How would this create "balance". Ubi would be highest with 100% unemployment.

I assume this comes back to the false idea that printing currency can be treated like real economic growth. You can print all the money you want, but at the end of the day someone has to grow the food and build the widgets.

Anything that proposes solving complex problems with a single, simple solution is pretty much guaranteed to have a fatal flaw.

In this case: If you give everybody a baseline amount of income, then prices will invariably rise to absorb it all, returning everyone to their previous positions (and problems).

If you actually want to tackle the problem of poverty, you need to first solve the problem of monetary inequality, which invariably involves taking it from the rich (who have lots of resources to fight against such measures).

Your last statement seems like it's circular.

I think it better framing is that to solve poverty you need to reduce the difference in value creation, which is no easy task. Governments and societies have been trying to maximize value creation for centuries, so there are no easy fixes and deeply entrenched institutions.

Social engineers have tried many options to increase the value creation by the forest members of society, but most of them have very little impact and questionable Roi.

Marx proposed reducing the differences in individual value creation bye prohibiting individuals from participating in capital investment. This came with a large reduction and overall productivity and other unintended consequences.

Personally, I think that any effective measures will have to Target education and employability for people with lowest economic standing. However, I don't think our current educational institutions and systems are up for the task. I think something along the lines of rigorous boarding schools or occupational programs could have a big impact, but I don't think the political support for such programs currently exists.

The main issue imo is that the larger the spread between rich and poor gets in a society, the worse these kinds of issues become. I've lived in a great many countries in my life, and although they all have their idiosyncrasies, one thing that's always stood out in comparison to average quality of life (poverty, crime, security) has been the rich-poor spread. The worse it gets, the worse everything else gets.

You don't have to "make everything equal" like so many idealists (Socrates, Marx, Keynes) tried. There has to be a certain amount of inequality, just like there has to be a certain amount of corruption and a certain amount of general dissatisfaction with how things are. But at the opposite end, allowing these things to grow unchecked is madness. I now live in a society where you lose 70% of anything you inherit from your parents, and that seems to be about right for draining money out of the rich and putting it back into circulation. You still get a boost from having rich parents, but not so much that nobody else could ever compete with your luck of birth - and it gets a lot harder to form black holes of wealth. The society works well, poverty is minimal, competition is good.

I personally dont think the important factor is the spread, but the visible spread. If some king you have never seen lives in splendor somewhere you have never been, people dont care much as long as their basic needs are met. Alternatively, if you see major inequality all day long, just to go home and be bombarded by even more extravagant displays of lives you can never have on facebook, people will naturally be outraged. For better or worse, that particular cat is out of the bag, and I dont think anyone can put back in.

For the most part, people have no measure for the material quality of their lives besides comparing it to others in they see. It doesnt matter if you have wealth and comforts beyond your grandparents wildest dreams, if it seems like you are worse off than 90% of the people on the street.

In the 1930s, Keynes imagined that humans would live lives of leisure as productivity doubled every 20 years. However, the human hunger for material comforts is bottomless, largely because it is not the absolute quantity, but relative amount that matters.

Where do you live that inheritance tax is so high? It looks like there aren't many[1]. I dont think that would help too much in general. Most of the most publicly outrageous fortunes in the US are first generation wealth. There is much more anger directed at the Gates, Bezos, and Musks of the world than their various elite children.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inheritan...

A UBI partially offset (only because the per taxpayer limit is equal to the UBI) offset by a high, immediate new “UBI tax” (1/3 of earned income) is basically standard rapid-clawback means-tested welfare program of the type UBI is usually contrasted with.

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