Guranteed annual income--conservative option

In My Humble Opinion
161

Not following you. We can’t implement a GBI now, because it will cost too much (correct me if you don’t think this). But if the economy shrinks and there are fewer jobs and more adults dependent, then we will be able to afford it because nobody will expect more than a bare existence. Is that it?

I think the history of immigrants to the US, and of blacks from the South to the North, is a counter-example to the notion that people can be convinced to accept a reduced standard of living so long as they have the minimal means of survival.

Regards,
Shodan

162

Nothing of the kind. I said this was too much at odds with the thread topic, and I’m not sure I can answer your questions very well while remaining attached to Basic Income as the topic anchor. Once again, mit der feeling, I see Basic Income as a very good, very viable option for a changed socioeconomic picture. It is not (in my view) the goal towards which everything else is bent.

In an economy not bent to fostering, supporting and being supported by maximized consumption, a number of options present themselves. One of them is sufficient collective capital to “buy out” unneeded workers.

For the record, I reject most standard economic concepts as self-serving drivel; economics is a science only in the way that logic is, and in both it’s possible to construct absolutely “logical” entities that have nothing to do with reality. Economics, as it’s currently used and understood, is the language and rationalization for a system built on maximized consumption. If you throw out that baby, the bathwater has to go with it.

So: I can’t really address your statement in very clear terms, as the idea of “reduced standard of living” is pegged tightly to the idea that only upward economic spiral is desirable, healthy or “natural.”

I see a future in which far more people than now live very rich, very satisfying lives… but not because they can all consume like Kardashians.

163

People have that option now. They choose to maximize their consumption because they’re human, and humans generally tend to want more stuff. You say modern economics doesn’t reflect reality while pushing for a system that requires humans to behave in a way counter to how they have for all of recorded history.

164

Both questions suggest confusion. I’ll assume the 1st was an attempt at irony, and address the 2nd.

Consumer demand is set by market forces. In the form I and others have outlined, where the “income guarantee” largely takes the form of free housing, food, childcare and health care there would at most a tiny cash stipend. People would be motivated to work to get better clothing and housing, personal appliances, etc. Wage levels might fall, as Taber speculates.

Conservatives who post vehemently about Adam Smith’s principles are often the first to be confused by the simple fact that such forces still work when a government is also playing. Government policies (e.g. taxing to avoid inflation) come into play, and we wouldn’t want them to be sabotaged – but that’s a topic for another thread.

I think what Shodan is asking is: Will the economy support such a welfare state or will prosperity collapse? We don’t need to speculate; the experiment is being played out in Europe, where many countries offer cheap low-cost housing, and free healthcare and childcare. To some extent, demand for consumer goods may be replaced with increased leisure time. Often immigrants rush in, to take jobs if wages fall, or to take advantage of the welfare state; this is especially a problem if there is xenophobia against some of the immigrants. This is a real concern that need to be debated without hyperbole.

On balance, France, Germany and Denmark are examples of countries with much larger welfare states than the U.S., but which enjoy high quality of life.

165

Which is pretty much the set of comforting lies we tell each other to justify our ever-accelerating consumption. Gosh; it’s just human nature; whaddya gonna do about it, Morty?

It’s even half true. But you’re leaving out a good half of the picture. Change that half, and change of the whole is within reach.

166

Can you describe how that half exists now, and what exactly needs to change within that half to make the whole within reach?

People wanting stuff is not a lie. It’s one of the major contributors to humanity’s development.

167

No offense, man, but you don’t get to throw out a branch of science just because it doesn’t fit well with how you want the world to work. If you’d have replaced “economic” with “climate change” or “evolution”, you’d be eaten alive right now.

168

Are we done with Basic Income? Because nothing further I have to say has much of anything to do with it. Just so we’re clear.

No argument. So is the sexual urge. (That’s not a joke.) The difference is that, barring a certain level of aberration, we haven’t spent the last 60 years or so frantically urging every sentient person to madly fuck whatever they can grab, and that the more they fuck the better the world gets for them and everyone else.

We have spent that 60 years, and more, being behaviorally stimulated and engineered to spend, spend, spend, buy buy buy, acquire acquire acquire, consume consume consume. The best and brightest and most innovated behavioral specialists work in marketing and product development, and have since the amateurs like Don Draper were pushed aside. We have been generationally conditioned to consume until we pass out from exhaustion. That there are innate desires and behavioral triggers for this is someone’s fault - God or Darwin or the Cree, I dunno - but the rat runners who have made a high science of learning to push them ever harder and more selectively have turned a little roll in ze hay into a global PCP-driven fuckfest.

And it’s the core problem, the root of nearly every headline crisis, if you only step back to see it. Blunt the insane rush to consume, and a surprising number of our “insoluble” problems either vanish or become manageable.

In a nutshell, consuming to live is the nature of life. Living to consume is a societal cancer - and we long ago crossed that divide, no matter how many individuals think they are “nonconsumers.”

Climate change is based on science and verifiable fact, not collective opinion. Evolution is the same. So is any science.

Economics is not a science, no matter how much we’ve worshipped business and finance and the tools of wealth analysis over the last few decades. It is a philosophy with a core of mathematics and hardly a single precept that does not require other precepts to function. There are almost no absolutes in economics; there is inference drawn from observation that leads to formulations of rules that work in the presence of other rules, until they fail to work in spectacular and unpredictable ways because they are not laws of nature.

Economics is a descriptive tool with useful predictive value… but the descriptions not only change over time, but can be wholly replaced with other self-consistent descriptions and rules and be equally valuable in predictive terms.

The current state of economics is a highly refined and self-consistent set of descriptions and rules that clearly outline how we are going to sail off a cliff and maintain there is no other option. I reject that, because there are other options and if we don’t choose them, this world as we know it may end before I do… and that’s not a huge span of time.

169

What are the other options?

How will those options save the world? If economics can’t be trusted, by what metrics will we use to measure the fitness of those options?

This is part of the science that is economics. See this description of the subjective theory of value.

170

How long do you have? :slight_smile:

I never said economics can’t be trusted - quite the opposite, I said it was a useful tool. It is not, however, an absolute one and the current modeling is only one way to view things. If the view chosen is faulty, the solutions - immediate, ongoing and long term - can only *not *be faulty by chance.

If we use the tools of economics correctly, and view our social and economic reality without distorting it to fit precepts and assumptions about to rupture because they’ve been stretched so far… we’ll see very different solutions, and ones that make sense in terms far broader than numbers dancing around a spreadsheet.

As I said above, the answer to a sustainable future that resolves many of our current problems and provides what may be the best possible road for, say, the next half millennium, while holding out the possibility of even better lives for a wider spectrum of us - not utopia, by any means, but far better than the dystopia we’re already mired within - is economic de-growth.

Which in itself is not even my goal or target; it’s a useful adjunct much like Basic Income could be.

But all solutions - *all *roads that lead to a sustainable future, other than ones that pick up after some large and sudden population crash - begin with reversing the rise of endless maximized consumption as the basis for our economy, society, politics and lives. Everything follows from that - economics, social change, political adaptation, management of the problems caused by our era of overconsumption, everything.

The step that’s hardest for most people to get over is seeing that such a change does not mean a reduction in real standard of living - that in redefining and leveling such “standards” there is room for a significantly better life for nearly everyone.

Except maybe the Kardashians and a few of the Waltons. :slight_smile:

171

Do you have any evidence to support this assertion? Can you present that evidence to us?

172

No.

I can, however, probably find a report from a NASA research project that establishes the dominant reflective wavelengths of the sky are clustered around 475nm. Will that help?

Seriously, it’s a good question and I respect it. I cannot, however, answer it - because there is next to no one doing progressive research along this line, because it is career suicide for a economist. (Look up the history of those who championed Wegener before his crazy-ass, obviously-wrong theory was proven indisputably correct - and no, that’s not a “they laughed at Einstein” dismissal of a challenge, because no one laughed at Einstein and very few genuine scientific breakthroughs were really contested for very long. Wegener was right - but dismissed for almost fifty years by geologists because the vast body of geological knowledge was completely against tectonics.) There’s little future in getting an Econ degree and then working to prove the other 99% wrong (especially these days, for reasons collateral to all my contentions, but that’s another story).

My contention is so contrary to standard economic thought that I could only substantiate it by dedicating my efforts to piecing together contrarian threads via negation of vast bodies of standard work. I have no interest in doing so.

So you have a choice: reject everything I’m saying because I can’t cite for it from the existing literature, for reasons that are pretty clear if you aren’t wedded to the notion that all new ideas must be synthesized from the prior work of others - in which case, thanks for the debate and I’ll see you around the ranch.

Or you can grant me some tiny measure of credence for some thought-provoking ideas, ask as many questions as you like, challenge whatever points don’t seem valid to you, and make up your own mind in your own degree of comfort with the validity of the assertions.

I’m not out to convince everyone in one step. (I wasn’t even out to convince anyone at all in this thread; I was just intrigued by the unusual expression of support for Basic Income and got dragged in.) You’re free to think I’m a loon; I’ll even run upstairs and squeeze the stuffed loon we got in Maine, so it makes that haunting loon sound for you.

173

You haven’t made any points for me to question or challenge. Your whole argument is tantamount to “GBI will work when the world changes in a way that both I and economics are unable to describe”. I’m not going to consider your opinion valid simply because you have it.

174

Can I say once again that I don’t really give a shit and a half about GBI? I’ve done everything I can to distance my discussions from that anchor and you keep dragging it back there.

I am done in this thread for that reason. Happy to take up absolutely everything else - including Basic Income as a far-out possibility in a changed economic situation - in a clean topic.

I now return this thread to the exclusive discussion of GBI.

175

If you’d like, make a topic related to exactly what it is you want to discuss. Make the title something relevant to a focal-point of the discussion you wish to have.

176

I’ve considered it (for a couple of years - this is not new territory for me). For the most part, I don’t think it would be a very productive discussion here.

177

Actually, I think there’s an assumption in there that some of those GBI adults actually will be working for supplemental income for a slightly better standard of living. Remember, there’s no means testing for this - some of these folks might work only part time, or at low-skill jobs to leave their mental energy for something more complex/creative during the rest of the day, or to raise funds for a specific goal (maybe buying a car or taking a trip). So they’d be working, just not as much as under some other system.

178

That’s a good point, but OTOH AB seemed to be saying that demand for consumer goods like cars and trips was somehow going to be much lower. I am not sure how that would be brought about, but that would imply that more people would be content with a GBI than would be today.

Regards,
Shodan

179

Well, I think there are lots of other details that would be relevant to whether the plan would or wouldn’t work. But if you don’t think you can speculate on any of those details, then it’ll just have to remain an open question. I certainly don’t think I have a workable plan to propose either.

I do appreciate your direct response to that question, even though you didn’t provide a dollar value.

I think I mostly agree with you that someday something like a GBI will be a useful thing, but I wonder if the issues that make it unworkable today are going to continue to make it unworkable. It seems like they’re mostly cultural rather than economic or political. I don’t see aggregate demand for things going down in the future. We are not likely, as a species, to become significantly more enlightened.

180

You are describing a system where the “government” control every aspect of the citizen’s life. I politely called it “communism”; “fascism” might be more accurate if you object to portraying such a system as “communism”…

This is not how America works. America relies on people making decisions for themselves, and working to support and better themselves. Welfare provides a boost to stave off destitution, but is never meant to replace personal autonomy nor personal responsibility.