Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Why should the .gov chose a winner as in "used to finance housing or education for those children"?

Why not demand a savings account for iphones to make apple rich? The fundamental problem is housing and (excessive) education is a non-productive activity.

I don't see any benefit for society as a whole, in a supply/demand situation, to make relators and school administrators wealthy, while making it financially much more difficult / impossible for kids from small families to compete. What philosophical reasoning behind a kid with only one bro/sis has to live in the poor ghetto or be unable to afford college, in comparison a kid with ten bro/sis will have far more money in his account and be better off for his/her entire life merely because his parents were more fertile? There's an obvious financial reason under this system for college admins and housing builders to encourage huge families, because they'll be able to suck more money out of them.

Another interesting effect of inflating higher ed prices would be the elimination via unaffordability for adult education. No more going back to school to learn X if the tuition for X has been exploded such that only children with 18 years of savings and 10 siblings can afford it. I'm not sure as a cultural trend that using the hammer of .gov policy to discourage lifetime learning (insert cliche about the economy being faster than ever, blah blah) is a wise social goal.

Whoa whoa okay, let's put it in some savings account that is divided to all children equally once they're 18. They are then free to spend it as they want.

This is to avoid inheritance problem: One- or two-kids families usually can conjure more help for grown-up children than big families, while big families receive more financial help but tend to eat thru it saving nothing. We need to defer some of that financial help till children grow up.

Why exactly does an 18-year old with a guaranteed income need 18 years' worth of savings invested for them? I don't think you really understand the concept of a guaranteed minimum income.

The idea is that you can live and eat without the rigamarole of food stamps/qualifying for a benefit program etc. Introducing complexity such as investment programs and sliding scales for families is not productive and, in my view, counter to the underlying principle.

It wouldn't be 18 years' worth of savings, more like 5 years of savings. That would let the child buy some home or attend so college.

That's a bonus. the main thing that we get by this is discourage child farms by withholding some of BIG. And we can't just take some part of BIG because that would be, like, human rights violation.

I have a better way to discourage child farms: only pay BIG to adults.

You'll have no children then. Having children is a crushing expense, magnified by the fact that most benefits will be scraped in the favour of BI. So, nobody have children and they accept a consumerist lifestyle and then bitch about their misspent life when it's too late, and birth rate plummets, and then your economy tanks.

Take a look at world demographics for a second. The top 10 countries by birthrate are poor-as-dirt African nations. Surprise, they didn't sit down and say "I'm not having any more children until the government guarantees me $10,000/year for each baby".

Yes, maybe you won't have children born purely as a cynical money-grabbing exercise. But people who actually want children (aka the people you want having children) will have them regardless.

They may have to budget for them or, I don't know, get a job.

Why do you assume people want children so much that they will sink into poverty just to have them while working their ass off thus never getting to actually see these children?

What if only 10% of people actually want children in post-job society? What if birth rate plummets to .5? What's your plan?

I politely bring your africa argument down because neither of us live there and you don't want me raising martian examples.

First, note that the world population is still exploding, and the us still has a 2.2 birthrate.

If basic income only for adults did drive people not to have kids (where you don't get as much welfare as a child costs now, so it is still a net negative today, yet parents have kids anyway) then you would have to then conflate with cultrual and societal rejection of those who don't procreate.

Even if you got into a situation where you had a sub 2 natural birthrate and were concerned about your long term population sustainability, you are looking post 2050 at the earliest. Why not just use genetic engineering to create human templates and just grow generations in labs, a la Brave New World? Why not raise them in some collectively researched and agreed upon environment to try to grow them into creatively thinking intellectual socially capable human beings? Do you really need to organize your social reproductive structure around random pair bonding that gets funky and creates amalgams of the parents, who said parents then raise, with 13 years of state funded daycare in a factory environment?

It is worth noting, though, that African birth rates are still high for a competitive advantage reason - without state elderly welfare programs, you heavily depend on having children that reach adulthood with enough productivity to care for you when you can no longer work fields. It is really modern where some countries don't have children as their retirement account.

It is also worth noting that female empowerment and education more directly correlate with lower birthrates than any amount of fiscal policy. US birthrates haven't changed much between 80s monthly check per baby welfare and modern unemployment programs, but European birthrates tanked when women were getting state guaranteed higher education.

All the time I wasn't talking about USA specifically.

And, as far as I understand, birth rates of the "people who you want to have kids" - people with education living near a large city - have already plummeted. Which is compensated by people who don't quite fit the society but instead reproduce to get something from the society.

Why will there be a cultural and societal rejection? A lot of people don't have babies already (or defer it until it's too late) and it's okay for everyone. Anyway, when you've got a nuclear family or a single person, it's not easy to reject or influence them - they'll give you a finger and start a new WoW gaming session.

And when you've got a society where childless family is the norm, it won't be easy to reverse until it's too late.

If you're ready to breeding humans in labs like cattle, why would you object to wiping out human populations we don't like? Surely, humans have rights, but only the wild ones. Humans grown in labs are property. Random pair bonding is what gives you a society. Anything else gives you androids that usually malfunct.

And the only reason we're talking about BI is because we think that people have rights and we have to cope with those.

What we're not in Africa is a fact. Female empowerment and education is also a fact. Let's think what are our next steps? Hint: it doesn't involve trying to make a few steps back.

Cultural. Where I live, parents and grandparents ostricize their grandchildren without a family by 30.

And even if you didn't have a cultural reason, incentivizing reproduction is extremely short sighted in an overpopulated world. Uplift Africa rather than reproduce here. The transition to a sustainable population is another topic, but it is an inveitable problem that must be solved, and we are no where near capable of having 8 billion US (or even the less egregous European nations) level of consumption and pollution without running out of resources, livable space, and breathable air well below that threshold.

Cultural things change rapidly once cultural meets financial.

Do those parents and grandparents really support their grandchildren or they only want them happen and then do nothing about it?

Anyway, children living near a large city are more capable than ever of giving them the finger, and that's what they going to do. See in the concurrent thread, "If they decide to have children" - meaning your default is to not have children.

World may be overpopulated, but is North America overpopulated? I guess it actually isn't. Most of places outside South Asia aren't overpopulated. Having some population growth and economy growth and no fears that social security would implode is better than having decline and being in panic like Japan does.

"is North America overpopulated?"

There's an abstract sense of overpopulated (sometimes described as turn all of texas into Manhattan and abandon the rest of the planet and texas would still only be half full)

And then there's carrying capacity sense of overpopulated. Both food, and west of the Mississippi, water, is actually the limiting reagent (Los Vegas will be simply out of water in a generation or so...). There's already a cultural impedance bump when westerners talk to easterners WRT water "waste".

Mexico is tremendously overpopulated from a carrying capacity standpoint. Canada is in pretty good shape. USA in between.

In poor countries, children are an economic win because they can be made to work for their parents. In rich countries, children are an economic loss because they can't be (both by law and because child labor is not in demand).

But then those adults will have children and complain that the state is anti-child. I know this because people already do that, on less evidence.

WRT the Whoa Whoa thing, the biggest problem with social engineering is most people think we're at a space age era of it, whereas its virtually impossible to evaluate fully but we're probably closer at social engineering tasks to the invention of the wheel than the invention of the starship.

A reasonable conclusion is making things as simple as humanly possible seems to be reasonable. The longer and more complicated the regs, the more likely to be gamed and screwed up and unintended consequences.

Given that, I'd stick with "Were you breathing this month? Yes, you say? OK here's your basic income... good luck see ya next time". More or less. There are still ways to game it, just much harder.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com