Well actually, on the “people multiplying” … no. Most developed countries are either stable in population or have declining populations. It’s a problem in some European countries but most noticeable in Japan. People in less developed countries typically have hordes of children because adult children who will help support them in their old age are their only social safety net, and the more the better. Basic Income negates that.
Just sucks if either you’re disabled and unable to work or, as has been the case these last few years, there are not enough jobs to go around.
This will become more of a problem in the future, the lack of jobs rather than the lack of skills.
High density poverty, however, is associated with crime which is why so many US cities have dismantled their [del]warehouses for the poor[/del] high rise subsidized housing. I have my theories on why this is the case, that wealthy people can live in dense urban buildings without problems but the poor can’t, but it would be a tangent.
Actually, under the current system healthy childless adult receive ONLY food stamps - there is no other welfare for them. Wonderful, you can eat but otherwise have zero income. That’s why we have healthy, able-bodied unemployed people who are homeless. They tend to be invisible due to couch-surfing and the like, but they do exist.
Apparently we have determined that able-bodied adults only require food - they don’t require housing, transportation, clothing, reliable access to showers, or things like deodorant. Try applying for a job unbathed sans deodorant and wearing whatever crap clothing donated to the local food pantry.
At a certain point, even if you are able-bodied and adult you need help and not just a bowl of soup. More and more people are falling down to that level yet no one seems to care.
Except NONE of the proposals in the OP set the basic income at $20k! Where are people getting that notion? One was $1,600-something and the other 3k - not even enough to actually live on. I’ve yet to hear a basic-income proposal set as high as you suggest.
The purpose of BI is NOT to make for a comfortable, lower middle class lifestyle, it’s to help ensure the rock-bottom basics. Very few people will be content with that, so the incentive to work and earn more still remains, but no one will go completely without the essentials of life.
And THAT is a fundamental problem with our current level of technology - the ditch diggers have been replaced with backhoes. We no longer have need for people to fill those menial jobs, yet we still have people who are suited for nothing other than that.
We can’t all be doctors, lawyers, and accountants, yet that seems to be the answer trotted out - make everyone highly educated and skilled! We live in a time when more people have college degrees than ever before, but society can’t seem to grasp that when many of those folks are driving taxis (another job soon to be automated away) or pouring coffee at Starbucks it’s a waste of either talent or educational resources or both.
It sounds to me like your brother may have impaired executive function. Phrases like “12 year old in an adult body” and “no judgement” describe these folks quite well. It’s hard to get people to accept that such individuals really are impaired because they look so damn healthy and able-bodied, but if that part of the brain machinery is damaged in a sense they never achieve complete mental adulthood and we have no way of fixing that. They are not capable of being as responsible as the rest of us.
I have a nephew who wound up like that due to a traumatic brain injury. He actually IS still quite intelligent… he just is incapable of using that intelligence in a useful way. In his case the damage dates to a specific day and event, but despite the physical scars of his accident, never mind the invisible damage, people STILL berate him for being lazy, not having a job, no ambition…
It’s a stickier situation for folks who didn’t have an obviously precipitating event, or one in the very distant past when extremely young, that might have lead to that capacity never developing. It’s hard even to diagnose the problem in such situations, especially if the person is otherwise intelligent. You can be smart in the IQ sense and stupid when it comes to “sense” and planning and foresight.
I’m not saying that is your brother’s problem - he might, in fact, be a slacker. I don’t know, but the way you talk about him and describe him he sounds like a less extreme version of my nephew.
IF that is the situation with your brother that actually IS a mental illness and there might be a case to get him on disability or open up social service opportunities for him. Of course, he also might resist such a diagnosis. In any case, what it might make available to him would probably be minimal, but think about it.
The gain is taking away the incentive of the desperately poor to riot and commit crime by making them less desperate. It’s the same reasoning that leads to universal public education.
What the hell do you think poor people do with their money? Stuff mattresses? No, they BUY STUFF. Which is what makes the economy go round. The rich person invests in a store, but unless people buy stuff from the store no one makes any money. If poor people have the means to buy stuff they benefit by having that stuff and the store owner benefits by selling that stuff.
I don’t get this assumption that the money of poor people doesn’t do anything - it does. Ray Kroc didn’t become a billionaire selling burgers to just the rich, he got wealthy by selling them to everyone, and most of the people buying were NOT in the 1%.
Give a rich person money to invest and they may or may not see a return on that investment (sometimes >gasp!< they LOSE money!), or they might just put into some sort of savings, but in any case it doesn’t DO anything for some period of time, weeks/months/days… even years. Give a poor person money, though, they usually go out and spend it immediately, putting it back into circulation. Both contribute to the economy in different ways, but why do we only see to value the contribution of the rich and ignore that of the poor?
So if I were willing to move to Alaska, what would I do for money and where would I live? They probably don’t want a 53 year old handicapped woman with health issues moving up there even if she comes with a fairly adept husband retired from the Naval machinists mate program. I am not about to move out to the wilderness, I need to be within ambulance call of a first class medical facility.
This totally ignores the marginal case. I am sure there are people in the world who love their jobs so much that they do not care how much they get paid and would do it for free. There are also people who love money so much that all they care about is the acquisition of money and have no desire to spend it. These people are few and far between. Most people, even ones that enjoy their jobs or are highly motivated by money have other things they like. Hobbies, sports, travel, spending time with their families etc. Everyone has a different priority as to how much time to spend on work versus how much time spent on other things. If you make works less renumerative than you automatically make alternatives more attractive and decrease the amount of work. Those who value money over leisure may have a higher point at which they will lessen work but that does not mean that their value of money over leisure is infinite.
Furthermore if you accept your premises that some people are better at creating jobs than others and that jobs are good for society then it follows that we want the people who are creating jobs working the hardest and should steer clear of any policies that could keep them from working as hard as possible.
It also ignores that wealth is not money, money is only the way of keeping track of wealth. If a computer glitch made the amount of dollars double overnight, we would not be twice as wealthy tomorrow. Wealth can only come from production. Production comes from work, so the more people in a society that are working hard then the wealthier society would be. Think of society like a rowboat, in order to go fast you need everyone to row as hard as possible. To do that you need to tie rewards as closely as possible to rowing output. That would not be fair to those who can’t row as fast, but it moves the boat and ultimately everyone in the boat benefits because of the increased speed.
Rewards according to production leads to a rich but unfair society. Rewards according to need leads to a poor but fair society. Rich but unfair is better.
How do the people who get no “rewards” (because they don’t row effectively) benefit from increased speed?
You kind of just lay it out there like it’s a given the increased speed is better, but why would it be? In the economy, it’s basically the speed at which rewards are created. Increased speed is great for someone who gets rewarded, and pretty much irrelevant for someone who doesn’t.
Back to society as a rowboat, if I’m going to be born, live and die on the rowboat, who gives a crap how fast the thing is going? What matters is whether I have a padded seat, good food, entertainment, a comfortable berth, and how much of my day is spent rowing vs. living.
You want the bad rowers to be happy getting no benefits because it (perhaps) helps drive the boat faster, a fact that has no particular impact on their lives at all.
Where your rowboat analogy breaks down is when someone install a motor on that boat, which is what is happening now. Automation has already displaced over 5 million jobs in the last few years, and it’s headed towards displacing even more jobs down the road. The rowers WILL NOT BE NEEDED to make the rowboat go very, very fast indeed. What then?
Then we get the first four chapters of the story of Manna. No word on the last 4 chapters.
I can’t speak about what people feel they deserve, but as far as incentives go, there is a big difference between a lump sum transfer to someone with no wage income, and an income tax that is collected at a marginal rate from someone richer who has high wages.
If leisure is a normal good – and most of the time, it almost certainly is – then a lump sum payment to a person will be a disincentive to work. A group of people who are given the transfer will choose comparatively more leisure and comparatively less work. In econ jargon, this is called a pure “income effect”. Naturally, they will personally be better off. But if the transfer is broad and includes many people, then the disincentive to work will affect the broader productivity of the economy, which in turn will make it more difficult to pay for the transfer.
It is a different thing to tax X% of the wages of richer people. The income effect will still exist, which would encourage more work, but in most cases, the available evidence indicates it will be more than balanced by the “substitution effect”. The trade-off between leisure and work changes as the benefits from working more go down. With a lower rate of income (after taxes), the opportunity cost of an extra hour of leisure goes down. If leisure costs people less in foregone wages, then they will choose relatively more of it. I was working out the math of this, but it quickly gets convoluted and hard to explain, so then I just figured, hell with it, I’ll rely on personal credibility. This is how standard economic models work.
Bottom line: There is no necessary contradiction between a lump sum transfer being a disincentive to work, with an income tax on richer people to pay for the transfer also being a (net) disincentive to work.
From here we can dip into a broader topic of whether standard economics tends to advocate policies that benefit the rich more than the poor. And while I see the source of the criticism, I’m not sure it’s entirely fair. There’s a lot of noise in economic discussions, and for any position that helps the wealthiest, there will be an economist willing to write an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal explaining how that position is the best. Where there is strong demand for hackery, a supply will be readily provided. But at the same time, I’d say the majority of economists use fairly orthodox arguments from theory to advocate for positions which they strongly believe would help the poorest people. It might not always look like that because a lot of the arguments have counterintuitive pieces, but I’d guess that’s the way it normally is.
I can imagine a counterintuitive argument that might fit in this thread, if I keep working on it.
In the super duper long term, there is simply no question that this is correct. In an evolutionary system, animals will (eventually) breed to the limits of their resources.
But we shouldn’t necessarily be planning for the super duper long term when we’re facing short term problems right in our faces. We could suffer a monstrous pandemic of the bird-swine-crocodile flu, or whatever. We could create technology that circumvents evolutionary processes. We could get hit by an asteroid. Stuff can happen in the future, meaning the further away the prediction is, the more likely it is to be circumvented by something weird.
In the time frames that we most care about, people who are richer tend to have fewer children. If you’re worried about sustainable resources, then the best way to reduce world population without mass death, in the short term, would be to make every country as rich as Japan. If I had a magical technology that could give the whole world a basic income of that level, I’d do it in a heartbeat. If we could raise the real income of the poorest from a dollar a day to 80 dollars a day then that is exactly what we should do. Taking care of the most miserable poverty will leave more of us available to think about the harder shit.
In the analogy how fast the rowboat goes is how wealthy our society is.
Less than a hundred years ago the president’s son died because of an infected blister on his foot. Today the son of a ditch digger could go to a doctor and get a prescription for a five dollar antibiotic that would clear the infection up. Anyone with a Netflix account has more access to entertainment choices than John D Rockefeller had. 10% of WW2 draftees had to be rejected because of issues with malnutrition, now the biggest food problem is too much of it. This all happened because society got richer, not from redistributing the existing wealth.
I think you could make a pretty good argument that we in America have a massive source of essentially unearned wealth. Unearned, at least, by those benefiting from it.
I didn’t earn the excellent public education that I received, or being raised by parents who also received an excellent public education and spent so much time with me as a child because they really wanted me. I didn’t earn the genetic jackpot that made me good at the sort of analytic reasoning that means I can write software better that most people can. I didn’t earn being born in a society where those skills are valuable.
Yeah, I worked hard in school and studied so I could learn these skills, and I apply myself to at work. I’m not saying there’s no place for incentives for hard work. But if I’m honest, I didn’t earn most of my success.
The kid who went to failing schools and had neglectful parents and an untreated learning disorder didn’t earn a lot of his hardship, either.
And as technology advances, more and more people are going to find that, regardless of their drive, or their work ethic, or their desire to contribute, there simply isn’t much valuable work for them to do because machines are better at it.
I don’t think we’re there yet. I don’t think we should have a guaranteed income now. But I think the time will come within my lifetime.
I live in Norway, where for the most part people are able to live on welfare if they want to. There is very little real poverty here except for drug addicts etc
People still work. Turns out the motivation is still there. No one I know is satisfied not having a job.
Indeed. I live in Sweden and I’m not sure if I even know anyone that is unemployed.
It is threads like this that remind me that I am way, way left of this board. I honestly don’t care if some people “game the system” because I honestly believe in the long run the benefits far outweigh the detriments.
For a long time, I was puzzled by this seeming contradiction in conservative ideology. If it was truly about rewarding hard work, and discouraging laziness, why aren’t they just as outraged about inherited wealth and capital gains as they are about “welfare queens”?
I think I’ve figured it out. At root, it’s about preserving the social hierarchy, not about work incentives. From the conservative point of view, those at the top deserve to be comfortable. Those at the bottom deserve to be miserable. That is the natural order of things.
Yes, after seeing so many, many instances of Republicans and conservatives rejecting any social measures which might help the poor (other than the pathetic “individual charity” excuse which never works and is often a cover for actual malice (See: Mother Theresa).
nm
At what price do these benefits come? The average swedish-american makes 42% more than the average Swede. That is alot of money and it is the hidden cost of the Swedish system/
And in the American system many Swedes would die of poverty and its associated issues, such as violence. That’s the not-so-hidden cost of the American system.
A price I am willing to pay.
And yes I do pay, without disclosing too much I am in the higher tax bracket where a portion of my wages is taxed at almost 50%. And VAT/Sales Tax is 25% on the majority of items.
Good point. I remember hearing Carl Sagan say that the world doesn’t have a population problem so much as a poverty problem, and he backed it up with good arguments and facts.
There’s no “super duper” about it. Thanks to the magic of exponential growth, populations tend to breed to growth limits remarkably quickly. The only reason this hasn’t happened for humans is the astounding increase in productivity. This increase happens largely as a result of people doing what’s good for themselves. It hasn’t happened in planned economies like USSR or pre-Deng China.
Right: I should have said “unproduced”, not “unearned.”
There are also only 5 million people in Norway.
Do you mean “natural resources”?
Natural resources are really the only “unearned wealth” in that they are just there. But every other step in the process that gets those resources out of the ground (or wherever) and converts them into products people use comes at the expense of someone’s labor.