It’s not that I couldn’t have (although that may be true). It’s that I have no desire to. Those inventions are going to do society more good in the hands of someone who might do something with them instead of sitting in my “shit I’m bored with” folder on my hard drive.
You’re still professing an either/or choice in what seems to me to be a whole spectrum of options.
But so it goes. You’re far from alone in thinking that your choices are to be an unemployed bum or ride someone else’s wage train.
What are the other options you’re thinking of, and why do you think those would be more beneficial to me than what I’m doing now?
I don’t understand what this means. Where do we get the money except from taxes? If the idea is that we won’t spend any more than we do now on means-tested programs, I don’t see how that is achievable.
I also don’t understand this. You are certainly correct that much of the populace consumes more than they produce. It seems inescapable that this proportion would rise with a GBI. What problems does it solve when we no longer expect and encourage/coerce people to support themselves?
As with most economic phenomena, this would be most noticeable at the margins. If we institute some kind of GBI, some number of people who now work because they have to, would stop working and become artists or surf the 'Net for porn or something. Thus the economy loses out on whatever they produce, and therefore has to get the income to pay the GBI from somewhere else. Maybe that’s more dignified than scratching away every day at a job you hate. But it doesn’t benefit anybody but yourself.
Thus the economy takes a double hit - it loses out on whatever you produced at the job you hate, so the total amount of useful production goes down, and the total amount someone else has to produce to support you goes up.
It’s not like someone retired and living off investments, because you didn’t take any productive risk and didn’t delay present gratification for a higher reward later. It’s more like Peter Pan, who never grows up. I don’t see how it is pouring money down a rathole to say "okay sonny - now it’s time for you to earn your own living, so find someone who wants what you can produce enough to pay you for it.
And there is a club for people who aren’t deeply fulfilled by their jobs. It’s called Everybody, and it meets at the bar every Friday." IYSWIM.
Regards,
Shodan
Psst. We meet more than Fridays.
Sorry, I can’t make it - gotta work.
Regards,
Shodan
Basic Income is not something that can be implemented in our current system, so trying to discuss it with the same limited set of tools and perceptions is an exercise in pointlessness. You have good questions, but they all apply to a fundamentally broken economic system and are phrased as if we have to accommodate all those broken pieces, and something like Basic Income/GBI/whatever as well. Asking what part of the 2015 Federal Tax Code I’d change to accommodate it is pretty irrelevant.
Basic Income would be a vast improvement on the other systems used to accommodate a large non-working class (from starvation and abandonment, to something like slavery, to a massive welfare structure, to endless and costly attempts to “create jobs”). Since that class isn’t going anywhere and gets larger every year, from forces and changes that neither can nor really should be reversed… I consider Basic Income to be a worthwhile goal to be aimed for after other socioeconomic changes, and the proper solution to ever-shrinking labor needs. But it won’t stand in a vacuum and can’t be implemented as a simple replacement for “welfare” (both individual and corporate).
I don’t have any better answers that will address your here-and-now-and-this-game questions. It’s as secondary a concern to me as climate change or the US educational system - things that need to be addressed, but cannot be ‘fixed’ using any of today’s broken tools and self-referential thinking.
If discussing your reasoning behind this assertion is an exercise in pointlessness, I’d say it’s a pointless assertion.
No, I can do that. If we have a large class in our population - let’s call them Morlocks - who are more or less perpetually unemployed or underemployed (cannot make a living wage on their own)… well, no ‘if,’ because we do and have had such a class for a long time.
It’s a class that’s growing every year, because the artificial boom of the postwar era still has everyone fooled into thinking that there are 40-hour, family-supporting jobs for “everyone who wants one.” Clearly, there are not. Maybe slightly less clearly but pretty hard to argue, there never will be again, not with automation and production efficiency reducing and reducing the needs for skilled labor and many categories of employment that will pay those kind of wages.
We’ve sopped up the difference with a vast explosion in “service” jobs, but we have pretty much as many people selling us hamburgers and massages and life coaching as we have room for… and we still have a hell of a lot of Morlocks. Our solutions to date consist of “temporary” social support, which consists of inefficient and phenomenally costly programs and efforts, while trying to “retrain” these people for jobs that don’t exist - at best, they don’t exist anywhere near where the person lives, and employment bubbles tend to skitter around in time and location ahead of any attempts to relocate potential workers for them. Situations like the South Dakota oil boom are flukes, for the same class of people who are willing to give up everything else in their lives to go grab high wages for backbreaking work with no future.
So we can keep supporting the Morlocks on welfare, and keep bribing companies to employ more than they need and less skilled than they’d like with corporate welfare (industry and local subsidies and tax breaks), or we can let the lazy bastards starve, or we can put them into some kind of indentured servitude/slavery… or we can pay them to stay out of the job market and accomplish the benefits of “welfare” and “job building” and meet social obligations to our citizens and preserve an effective employment structure… and probably for less, net, than the ineffectual welter of “fix ups” and “temporary support” programs we run now.
Can we do this with a few patches to the IRS code and renaming three federal agencies? No. Can we do this while the idea remains ingrained that those 40-hour, high-wage, unionized, guaranteed, raise-a-family-and-retire comfortably jobs for “everyone” are just one tax rise, tax cut, jobs program or HHS subprogram away? No.
First, we face reality. (The 1950s model is gone, dead, and buried.)
Then, we change expectations. (Which are mostly driven by marketing.)
Then we reshape the whole notion of “employment” to mean that those who have something to contribute can and do; those who don’t are excused to idle their lives away or find ways to contribute not measured by a paycheck.
Easy-peasy, right?
None of what you said addresses any of our concerns, though. You just pointed out the problems our current system has. But this one point is what sticks with me:
Having something to contribute to society isn’t just some sort of magical skill someone is born with. The current system incentivizes people to acquire those skills, then put them to use to accomplish a task in a way that someone wants enough to buy it from them. The system you’re describing, as Shodan has mentioned, will both remove the incentive for people without in-demand skills to acquire those skills and remove incentive for people with those skills to apply them in a useful way.
And as far as the “poor people have difficult lives” argument…well, there’s always going to be a bottom 10%, no matter what system you have.
This is a good post, I believe there is a solution on the horizon to this issue but I doubt it will take hold until the problem has reached a critical mass and the system comes close to imploding.
I believe that technology has finally reached a point where humans can start spending more time in a creative mode. Not unlike they did durring the hunter gatherer periods but on a higher level. Industries dedicated to providing resources dedicated to supporting creativity and providing exposure to a wider variety of creative mediums will start to blossom. Humans again will have better opportunities to define themselves based on their creative natures. This would make for a very healthy society capable of sustaining itself for a long long time. It would also offer opportunities for a good share of the masses that are now left out.
Until all the houses, highways, and data infrastructures fall apart, unless you can convince people that the only true path to happiness is laying cable.
In reverse order: No, I didn’t; sorry to disappoint you.
The current system incentivizes people to buy into its self-serving goals at the cost of their own - it’s a one-factory town factory owner graciously training the workers’ children to replace them while giving them lavish credit at the company store.
Except that the “Morlocks” are nearly 50%, and the figure rises steadily. Ya think there might be something wrong with “incentivizing” people to play the game the way those who benefit from it allow?
Cite?
And the solution to that is to give moderate credit at the company store for doing nothing? How is the company store going to be stocked?
Is the company in your example “society”? Because people are free to buck the system and start subsistence farming if they dislike it (for the most part).
He may be referring to the U.S. Payroll to Population Rate which is around 44%.
If you are writing patentable software for your company, then you have skills to take advantage of quite a number of options. With a GBI, rather than showing up at work everyday to pound out code for a wage, you can sit at home and write the code that interests you. You can put it out under GNU, or sell it and make extra spending money for yourself.
The only reason to work for someone else when you have those skills is because you are afraid that if what you write doesn’t sell, then you could go hungry or homeless. Having a GBI would actually incentivize you to take a risk, and keep the profits of your labor to yourself, rather than giving them up to your employers in exchange for a bit more financial security.
As to “comfortable subsistence” I would argue that a 8’x4’ room with internet access (along with access to all educational materials available to public schools and colleges), a kitchenette and RV style bathroom, along with up to 3000 calories a day worth of vitamin fortified algae and cricket bread, and access to healthcare should be what is considered the “bare minimum.” You have no need of worrying about starving or living on the streets, but the “comfort” would be just enough to prevent unhealthy living conditions. I couldn’t tell you the exact costs, but you could probably do it for only a few thousand a year per person. It would not be means tested, in that anyone, even a millionaire, can take advantage of the free food and housing, but anyone with means would almost certainly look for better accommodations.
I recently started my own business, and for the first year, it took quite some doing to keep up payments on my house, and there were many days when I just skipped eating because I had more important things to pay for. Had such a safety net been in place, I would have had less stress worrying about my own financial problems, and allowed me to take on more stress at work. I would have had no problem living in a tiny space and eating bland bread for the first year or two, now that things are much more profitable, I could start taking more of that income for myself again. Having to pay myself enough to live on during that period definitely stifled my growth.
BTW another argument I would give for implementing a GBI would be that there would no longer be a reason for minimum wage laws. I believe that minimum wage is important, and that it should be higher, because the culture is that you must work to make your living, and if you cannot make a living by working, then that culture is broken. (I say this as a business owner who pays significantly higher than minimum wage.) If there is a strong safety net, and the employer no longer has the power to impoverish their employee, then I would say that minimum wage no longer has a purpose.
I have no interest in putting my work out under GNU. Packaging my software in a manner that can be sold/supported isn’t something I enjoy, so I really don’t picture myself doing that. Again, the stuff I work on in my spare time is of interest to me – whether or not someone wants to pay me for it is of no concern.
“A bit more financial security”? I thought I was going to be financially secure with the GBI?
I see an endless array of jobs that humans can do, and will continue to do until a computer can actually compete with a human brain. (I don’t believe that this will be possible without essentially replicating the human brain, but then you just have a disembodied person, not a computer. Machines of silicon and electrons will never actually be nearly as capable.) Not just creative work, but useful utility work as well. You have protein folding games now, not exactly fun to me, but there is a community of people who enjoy simulating protein folding enough that they do it for free, imagine if you could get paid for it. Other problems I can see humans solving through essentially crowd sourcing human brain power would be: Integrated circuit design, traffic light control, traffic routing, surveillance monitoring, agricultural monitoring, and distribution optimization (Hamiltonian routes). And those are just the ones I have thought quite a bit about. Really, anything that requires judgement and/or logistical coordination would benefit greatly through a crowd sourced human brain supercomputer.
That is of course, not counting the opportunities for raw creativity, but not everyone can contribute meaningfully to the whole of our culture and knowledge, but nearly everyone should be able to help put a couple pieces in place.
I don’t think a GBI will ever be implemented in a way that requires thousands of government tenements to be built.