I think solving inequality will not be about reducing access to said safety nets but increasing them for all.
No, they weren't. They were promised a monthly check that, should they become absolutely devoid of marketable skills and liquid assets in their old age, would prevent them from dying in a gutter.
They're nowhere near dying in a gutter.
If you want to solve inequality, stop giving checks to people who spend it on golf trips to retirement villages in Arizona, and give it to people who have 84-month car notes and whose student loans are in forbearance. You only have enough money for one of those two groups, not both, so use utilitarianism to decide who to give it to.
In reality, few are concerned that Alice has a much nicer car than Bob, compared to concerns that Bob will die without insulin. Get Bob his insulin, and he will still be motivated to have a nicer car.
Not at all. It's the primary reason why communes fail.
Something like "arrest the trend towards upward accumulation which also reduces incentives to excel", maybe.
It's not hard to show either. Imagine you're on an island and have been gored in the stomach by a wild animal, and a skilled surgeon can save your life. Most people would instantly agree that continued existence is of immense "value".
However after making that decision, you discover that you're on an island where almost everyone is a surgeon and the going-rate is much lower than you expected. Are we supposed to believe that your new knowledge somehow reaches backwards in time and retroactively changes the "value" of Not Dying? No, that'd be crazy. Valuation is never the same as price-point.
There is no other meaningful definition of the value of an item or service.
> either of those is a far cry from claiming it's "the value they create".
Nobody is going to hire someone who produces less value than their pay.
Everyone who's ever spent 6 months in big tech knows how easily compensation is divorced from value. Plenty of net-negative, work-creating behavior gets rewarded with big raises.
No evidence of that.
> Everyone who's ever spent 6 months in big tech knows how easily compensation is divorced from value.
You could always sell your yourself to a big tech company with your expertise in who are the value ones. A person with that skill would be very valuable to a company.
I do think up until 2020 he was useful, there's a reason nobody else made electric cars or self landing rockets work. But most of his wealth accumulation has been since then.
2. What better way to keep an eye on how things are working on twitter by dogfooding the platform?
3. An effective manager does not micromanage a company. He finds competent people and delegates the authority.
4. Most of his tweets are advocacy of the products of his various companies. A major part of being a CEO is being the top salesman for the company.
5. WaPo is owned by Bezos, who competes directly with SpaceX.
6. His companies seem to be doing quite well. Why mess with success?
And people demand the maximum pay they can get. It's the Law of Supply and Demand.
Consider this. You hire Bob for $10/hr, and he produces $100/hr in value. What's going to happen? Your competitor hires him away from for $20/hr. Then another competitor hires Bob away for $30/hr. This proceeds until Bob gets paid about $85/hr. The ROI of hiring Bob is somewhere around 15%.
There's a good reason why the vast bulk of the American workforce is paid much more than minimum wage.
However, lack of information is called "risk", and risk strongly affects what you will pay for something. A low risk deal will cost you more than a high risk deal.
Risk is part of every transaction in a market economy, and is priced in.
https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/03/when-comparing-wages...
Work or die vs Work to gain additional benefits.
The trouble with that is the same reason communism fails - too many people decide to just live off of the work of others, and play video games all day.
Also, who is going to work as a janitor? Most jobs are not filled with glory. They're tedious - that's why they are called "work".
- Some labor is easy both to offshore and to automate -- e.g. factory work
- Some labor can be offshored a lot more easily than it can be automated -- this causes at least a practical problem for the "nice UBI" countries. I'm struggling to think of particularly good examples...
- Some labor can be automated more easily than it can be offshored, e.g. self-driving
- Some labor is "rare enough" that it can potentially be well-paid -- my intuition says construction and repair, especially with the aid of machines
But janitorial labor is low-status, is required constantly, needs to be done on-site, and is really hard for a robot.
So a particularly good UBI test: how do you hire janitors?
It's not necessarily impossible -- for example, if a few shifts of janitorial labor could double this "decent baseline," would people pick it up? Would this leave it affordable?
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2023-04-13/...
Having been welfare adjacent more than once, getting food stamps is difficult and many legislatures have spent the last few years making it way more difficult, adding job requirements and the like. Ideologically you are probably fine with that, but it has consequences that you seemingly do not perceive.