Basic income

If people didn't need to compete for the most terrible jobs possible, employers would have to actually offer something, not just offer not-nothing.

yup

did someone summon me?

imo, which probably comes with its own package of biases, one of the problems with income disparity is career mobility. like flopson said, a number of jobs that existed in the middle class have been pulled upward by a tier of corporate management positions and the like, but few industries that have factory workers are promoting from within. some unions, especially in construction and mechanical trades, are good at ongoing training and determining career path, but there's a ceiling hit when all management is from the upper middle class and is hired directly into that level -- they were never union, they're making a parallel move from a college engineering degree into management

I also kind of wonder if there's some strong self-interest going on with techbros when it comes to basic income. There'd likely have to be an adjustment to the income based on geographic location, so an itinerant programmer settling in, say, the bay area would have to receive a larger basic income to make ends meet than someone in the midwest.

What happens to entry level wages or internships when there's a basic income? Would employers be able to actually cut the wages for the lowest-tier employees since the cost of living in some areas is consuming the majority of their salaries? like if I'm paying my new hires $100k (when they'd make half that in other parts of the country) only because rent is catastrophically high, would I be able to pay them $50k if there was a basic income if I screw around with the numbers?

who knows man wld be interesting to see and ultimately maybe no one wld care cause they know they cld always just go live in a yurt and play video games

this is a long time coming. thomas paine: "A one-time stipend of 15 pounds sterling would be paid to each citizen upon attaining age 21, to give them a start in life."

nixon talked abt doing basic income

tbh i'd probably go back to being a musician, something i enjoy but have never been able to balance against a full-time day job. i could live in a yurt too if that becomes compulsory

i love the tent life

i would probably have a long list of fun, ambitious projects that i would like to do and then either end up working all the time anyway at some dumb job or stream myself playing japanese srpgs for 14 hours a day

basically no matter what happens i will be making spreadsheets whether its for work or to track stat progression in tierinu ni soma: radiant angel saga

I would work part time and learn the trumpet and french and get a dog and take it for lots of walks and cook more labour intensive food

not so sure about this since everyone who came from money i've ever met is harder working, smarter, with better taste and generally more deserving of the best opportunities than everyone else. UBI might be unfair to them. what if they stopped being so productive and making life better for the rest of us? it could spell disaster

they can still be productive its ok with me

if there's one thing I can't stand, it's the undeserving poor ruining the lives of the hard working inheritors of wealth

if it weren't for the hard working inheritors of wealth everything would fall apart. let's make sure they stay protected and comfortable

i love the tent life

― lag∞n, Friday, January 29, 2016 12:21 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

pvmic

the 'will people still work?' concern is kind of silly for at least a couple reasons.

1. if everyone just wanted a subsistence/hair-above poverty line income and the desire to work cuts off at that level more people would, like, only work enough to achieve that income. the vast majority of people want considerably more money than that. people want swimming pools in their backyards, they want to travel, they want to spend money on their stupid kids' hobbies. they also just want to be middle class because it gives them a sense of validation. since the middle-middle and upper-middle class would be net-paying into the UBI, they would have to work even more to achieve the same status.

2. giving people money for nothing sounds bad relative to the hypothetical of not giving anyone any money for nothing. but that's not what we currently we have. the current system is getting money if you earn nothing, and then we take it away pretty quickly once you start earning money. that actually has a worse anti-work incentive than UBI, where no one takes away your money if you work more. that's why UBI is popular on the right; one of the first American advocates was Milton Friedman (although iirc the welfare system is much less bad in this regard than it was in his time).

also, the people who do choose to work less will be better off; they're the people who hate work so much the only reason they were previously working was to not die. people who want to earn more than subsistence but couldn't find work won't suddenly not want to work, they'll just have more money during the periods when they're not working.

btw if anyone is not too spooked by the work of 'wildly ideological' economist, this is a good paper that compares Earned Income Tax Credit (poor people pay negative taxes on their labour income) with a UBI (he calls it Negative Income Tax but they're virtually identical) and how they are effective depending on the behavioural response to transfers/taxes. if it helps, it is written by a prof who is French, teaches at Berkeley, and who co-authored papers with Piketty saying that the top marginal tax rate in the US should be 70%. it gets a bit technical but the first five pages give the main idea and have no math.

http://www.uib.cat/depart/deaweb/personal/profesores/personalpages/hdeeasp9/workingpapers/bibliosecpub/SaezQJE.pdf

another fanciful labour market policy that i have been thinking about recently is to give UI to workers who quit their jobs: http://democracyjournal.org/arguments/quitters-prosper/

good post flopson :)

bad post flopson :)

oh shut up

btw, a previous Minimum Income experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome

[consumes politics, thinks its science, pats self on back]

this is also intuitively appealing to the right because a basic minimal commitment to their fellow citizens not being dead and homeless requires minimal state architecture to implement, and would create tier of hateful people who admit no desire to work, a sort of elective caste of vocational losers who elect not to be economic agents, they could be disparaged as flatliners or basics or whatever

that dutch city trialling basic income, utrecht i think, claimed that social security admin costs are 18% of the total expenditure of the program

flopson, I'd appreciate yr takes on subsidy programs/grants and how those are diminishing (but still exist) in Canada, especially compared to the US

i hung out w/a couple canadians in montreal who were taking advantage of the french learning program. from my understanding, quebec will basically subsidize your living in quebec for a short period as long as you attend the french language program in the hopes of retaining your residence. pretty good deal, imo

basic income is literally the worst nightmare of the right

the american right, sure

xp lagoon- you think you can come closer to the truth about best way to raise income of poor people by, what, ignoring research on it and just saying 'unions lol'?

1. if everyone just wanted a subsistence/hair-above poverty line income and the desire to work cuts off at that level more people would, like, only work enough to achieve that income. the vast majority of people want considerably more money than that. people want swimming pools in their backyards, they want to travel, they want to spend money on their stupid kids' hobbies. they also just want to be middle class because it gives them a sense of validation. since the middle-middle and upper-middle class would be net-paying into the UBI, they would have to work even more to achieve the same status.

this is all based on the idea that people have infinite consumption wants / that there aren't alternate ways for people to achieve status. it's a pretty narrow view of history.

doesn't have to be infinite, just has to be > subsistence

anyway basic income is a good aspiration, and has to remain so due to reality

clarity and intuitive appeal is exactly why basic income is much better as a teleology than whatever expanded scheme of tax credits etc

flopson earlier was arguing how basic income would be implemented in america in 2016, which is not really any less pointless than arguing about whichever third way subsidy program that also will not happen in foreseeable future would be better

the US does have an earned income tax credit! it helps a little

lagoon- you think you can come closer to the truth about best way to raise income of poor people by, what, ignoring research on it and just saying 'unions lol'?

― flopson, Friday, January 29, 2016 4:07 PM (11 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

acknowledging that whats happening is a political/ideological struggle wld be much more enlightening that yr prosumer totemic relationship to research is

or you cld continue read the economist like its a text book, a tragic customer of sophistry

flopson, I'd appreciate yr takes on subsidy programs/grants and how those are diminishing (but still exist) in Canada, especially compared to the US

i hung out w/a couple canadians in montreal who were taking advantage of the french learning program. from my understanding, quebec will basically subsidize your living in quebec for a short period as long as you attend the french language program in the hopes of retaining your residence. pretty good deal, imo

― μpright mammal (mh), Friday, January 29, 2016 4:04 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

don't know much about it. a few friends have done the get payed to go to french class thing and some artists i know make use of the grants. the music grants tend to go to people who make really bad music with notable exceptions

actually, that's an interesting post, flopson. ignore lagoon and his twitter hot takes

lol saying "twitter hot takes" while throwing "idiot" around

cant u guys make a pretend economist thread or something

figure i'd speak the language of yr trbe

dont try to act too smart

i'm just always kind of amazed by this outpouring of united states economic talk and am thinking you are a really studied dude and then i hang in mtl and think about how it's such an outlier when it comes to cities of that critical mass that are affordable and think maybe you have figured out how to game the system somehow

teach me yr flopways

the united states is economics

we're so much more, we have some nice bars

for all the talk of craft beer, you really can drink a lot cheaply

acknowledging that whats happening is a political/ideological struggle wld be much more enlightening that yr prosumer totemic relationship to research is

or you cld continue read the economist like its a text book, a tragic customer of sophistry

― lag∞n, Friday, January 29, 2016 4:11 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://yuq.me/achievements/01/116/SqoYFcH0hf.jpg

i've long know ilx overall was but i genuinely never suspected you were this corny. as someone who admires you a lot it's kind of eye-opening tbh

my serious answer to this patronizing admonition (tragic consumer of sophistry lmao) is that there are political/ideological and non-political/ideological parts to poverty/income inequality/teh struggle. i think partisan leftists tend to ignore the non-political ideological parts and yeah for sure a lot of economists and technocrats ignore the political/ideological parts. i try to be open minded and read both critically because i care and am very interested by this stuff and always have been

Most economists and technocrats are heavily invested in and committed to the neoliberal hegemony, that's how they got to be technocrats.

hence my skepticism of the ycombinator ppl even muttering the words "basic income," they are very idealistic in that they think they can address any problem from the bay area/cloud, but they tend to see only the things that exist in their sphere as problems

there's always an angle

When is Bnad going to come back and talk about West Berlin?

flopson you do not at all seem to be placing the ecnommics you are citing within any ideological context, and in fact seem completely unaware that yr views align perfectly with certain ideology, if you werent all i am the first person to ever look at a chart about it it wld be easier to take

i meanyou realize that theres tons of research that indicates that the decline in unions are a huge part of the decline of the middle class right, its just not the stuff you like

tim o'reilly's response and editing of that paul graham essay isn't perfect but it gets at the core of the way tech figureheads word things -- any time problems with economics or labor are brought up when it comes to income inequality they instantly think it's either an indictment of their wealth or a call to action for them to personally weigh in on the problem

it's like the classic relationship stereotype where one partner comes home from work and lays out the issues of the day and their significant other, instead of being a sympathetic ear, thinks they need to break down the problems through conversation and address them all personally. maybe it's time for them to be supportive