4 ms·

Yet nowhere has this been "field tested" for any length of time. Unless one makes the case that it has been tested in the form of several countries in the 20th

by DiffEq 11y ago

Yet nowhere has this been "field tested" for any length of time. Unless one makes the case that it has been tested in the form of several countries in the 20th century. Places like the the Soviet Union, China, etc. We see that it failed in those places and in Soviet countries it failed fantastically. The fatal flaw in all of this...who is going to pay for it?

sbuttgereit 11y ago
That and what economic activity will be suppressed as capital moves away from prior uses. Nobody is talking about generating new wealth to make this happen: it's pure consumption and some of that will be at the expense of capital investment. The seen and the unseen indeed. Unless there's more than hand-wavy dismissive talk about the negatives such schemes bring, one is foolish to think that this does anything positive at all.... and that's just the utilitarian perspective. Morally, that any one person, by virtue of their relative wealth alone, is judged a provider, at gunpoint if necessary, to others who, by virtue of their relative lack of wealth alone, is considered worthy of substance, is such an inversion of right and wrong as to warrant some serious soul-searching about what makes one worthy of punishment or reward. Yes, poverty is a problem. Yes, there are institutional barriers to getting out of poverty. I don't see how doubling down on those problems does anything than ease the conscious of the haves.
- VLM 11y ago
  Capital investment and production are effectively dead sectors in our economy. Central bank manipulation that theoretically used to create both, recently has only created financialization bubbles and corruption. That operation model is dead, but still shuffling like a zombie... for awhile. If the factories ARE never coming back, there is no point in being concerned about financing them or goosing the economy to try to encourage them. Its kinda like the transition from agricultural economy to industrial economy, economic terms and theories and S.O.P. and problem areas that used to work are simply obsolete. If an economic system exclusively rewards the lucky and the corrupt, like ours, then it deserves its destruction. Wealth has no virtue if its source is exclusively non virtuous. Or rephrased, where did the virtue come from that wealth supposedly has? Certainly not from honest labor and skill, not in this economic system, not in the future we're headed toward.
- nmrm2 11y ago
  Life isn't fair. So either it isn't fair because a poor person can't claw their way out of poverty while a lazy dullard skates through life doing easy work for Father's friends, or it isn't fair because an enterprizing capitalist who scraped his way up from the bottom is taxed heavily to pay for another's laziness or stupidity. (to fairly characterize both side's straw men.) Appeals to fairness as an argument for or against various wealth redistribution schemes always strike me as odd for this reason. Neither side gets an exclusive claim to fairness. Both situations can end up equally unfair for equally reasonable definitions of fairness. No society-level policy -- especially doing nothing -- can possibly hope to be remotely fair in at least an infinitely of possible senses of the word.
- kbenson 11y ago
  > Morally, that any one person, by virtue of their relative wealth alone, is judged a provider, at gunpoint if necessary, to others who, by virtue of their relative lack of wealth alone, is considered worthy of substance, is such an inversion of right and wrong as to warrant some serious soul-searching about what makes one worthy of punishment or reward. That makes quite a few assumptions about the nature of money, the ownership of money, and how it is accumulated. Given, those assumptions are shared by most people in capitalistic systems, but that doesn't mean they are sacrosanct and we should reexamine them from time to time. For example, one possible interpretation is that it's the system that allows this accumulation of wealth, and that the system favors certain people and starting conditions over others. If we accept that the system is responsible for quite a bit of the wealth (could the same be achieved in a drastically different system, say, North Korea?), then it can be viewed less as taking money from one and giving to another as much as fees and discounts, or incentives and disincentives built into the system in the hope of either making it more efficient in the end or better in some desired respect. Note: I'm not necessarily pushing the above view, but instead using it to illuminate that perspective informs our opinions quite a bit, and that stepping back and reexamining our assumptions may have benefit or change how we think. At worst it will be a waste of time and we'll come away with the same opinion.
- Retric 11y ago
  Innovation often happens from the ground up. Harry Potter for example was written by someone on housing assistance. Clearly the England made far more money from her than the cost of her benefits. Further, if you tax a company at 10% or 20% the same investments are going to profitable. So, for the most part they behave the same which makes corporate tax breaks a very poor investment. PS: More generally, people with a safety net are far more likely to invest in things like a home.
  - dTal 11y ago
    Nitpick: Harry Potter was written in Scotland, not England :)
- mikeash 11y ago
  Helping people in need is not an inversion of right and wrong. What's an inversion of right and wrong is declaring somebody to be unworthy of even the most basic sustenance merely because they possess an insufficient quantity of green paper. Basic human morality is that those who can help those who can't. Once we moved beyond the tribal village the whole question of how that works exploded in complexity and has never been satisfactorily answered, but that basic principle remains. If Basic Income doesn't work, then obviously that's problematic. But I see no moral problem with the concept.
- shkkmo 11y ago
  > Nobody is talking about generating new wealth to make this happen: it's pure consumption and some of that will be at the expense of capital investment. I've been talking about how minimum income can make the minimum wage obsolete and thus allow for the existence of a wider variety of jobs (and creation of wealth) that was previously unviable while also fixing the market inefficiencies created by putting an artificial price floor on labor. > Morally, that any one person, by virtue of their relative wealth alone, is judged a provider, at gunpoint if necessary, to others who, by virtue of their relative lack of wealth alone, is considered worthy of substance, is such an inversion of right and wrong as to warrant some serious soul-searching about what makes one worthy of punishment or reward. No, completely wrong. > by virtue of their relative wealth alone Wealth exists only within an economy and thus is a social construct that makes it's owner intrinsically beholden to that society. Wealth thus increases the moral obligation to the society from which that wealth is derived. > by virtue of their relative wealth alone, is considered worthy of substance It is not their lack of wealth, but their mere existence that makes them 'worthy of substance'. > warrant some serious soul-searching about what makes one worthy of punishment or reward Taxes on wealth are not a punishment, they are the cost of maintaining and improving the society and allows the wealth to exist. Minimum income is not reward since it is given to everyone.
  - gwright 11y ago
    > Wealth exists only within an economy and thus is a social construct that makes it's owner intrinsically beholden to that society. Wealth thus increases the moral obligation to the society from which that wealth is derived. This notion pops up quite a bit in HN discussion of basic income. Can anybody provide some references to any sort of scholarly work on this concept? Presumably it has been described and discussed in depth and I'd like to be able to understand it better or even associate a name to the concept. In any case, I'm not sure I follow the logic in this particular description. Why does wealth being a 'social construct' make the 'owner intrinsically beholden' to that society? What does 'intrinsically beholden' mean? These seem like arbitrary and poorly defined assertions to me. > Minimum income is ... given to everyone. Define minimum income. Do you imagine it enough to provide food, shelter, clothing? If so explain what other mechanisms would prevent the emergence of a large group of people who simply lived off the efforts of others as a choice. What mechanism would keep that sort of system in equilibrium rather than the consuming group growing and the producing group shrinking and the resulting tensions escalating? And don't we want to construct a system that moves towards a state that maximizes the number of self-sufficient people rather maximizing the number of dependent people?
kbenson 11y ago
While I would agree Minimum Income is more along the spectrum towards Socialism that Capitalism from our current point, I don't think we can fairly equate it with Communism. There are a few places trying it out though[1][2][3]. > The fatal flaw in all of this...who is going to pay for it? Well, the simple, possibly simplistic answer is "the same people that pay for wellfare". Which is everyone not receiving it. To be sure, it would need quite a lot of work on the details to even be possible in an economically viable way. Edit: Added more references. 1: http://www.businessinsider.com/this-dutch-city-is-giving-basic-income-a-try-2015-6 http://www.businessinsider.com/this-dutch-city-is-giving-bas... 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11273482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11273482 (Alaska) 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11273482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11273482 (Ontario)
warfangle 11y ago
Soviet Union and China didn't really have a universal basic income. They had a state defined income, if anything. Which meant you couldn't make more than that, either. It actually has been "field tested" - and in the US of A, no less. The entire state of Alaska has a guaranteed minimum income. Granted, it isn't much - on average it's been about $1,000 per anum.
- scrupulusalbion 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund
tankenmate 11y ago
Actually it was tested in Canada; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome
Mithaldu 11y ago
Please review my comment here to consider whether it counts as "field testing": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11339951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11339951

by DiffEq 11y ago

sbuttgereit 11y ago

That and what economic activity will be suppressed as capital moves away from prior uses. Nobody is talking about generating new wealth to make this happen: it's pure consumption and some of that will be at the expense of capital investment. The seen and the unseen indeed. Unless there's more than hand-wavy dismissive talk about the negatives such schemes bring, one is foolish to think that this does anything positive at all.... and that's just the utilitarian perspective. Morally, that any one person, by virtue of their relative wealth alone, is judged a provider, at gunpoint if necessary, to others who, by virtue of their relative lack of wealth alone, is considered worthy of substance, is such an inversion of right and wrong as to warrant some serious soul-searching about what makes one worthy of punishment or reward. Yes, poverty is a problem. Yes, there are institutional barriers to getting out of poverty. I don't see how doubling down on those problems does anything than ease the conscious of the haves.

VLM 11y ago
Capital investment and production are effectively dead sectors in our economy. Central bank manipulation that theoretically used to create both, recently has only created financialization bubbles and corruption. That operation model is dead, but still shuffling like a zombie... for awhile. If the factories ARE never coming back, there is no point in being concerned about financing them or goosing the economy to try to encourage them. Its kinda like the transition from agricultural economy to industrial economy, economic terms and theories and S.O.P. and problem areas that used to work are simply obsolete. If an economic system exclusively rewards the lucky and the corrupt, like ours, then it deserves its destruction. Wealth has no virtue if its source is exclusively non virtuous. Or rephrased, where did the virtue come from that wealth supposedly has? Certainly not from honest labor and skill, not in this economic system, not in the future we're headed toward.
nmrm2 11y ago
Life isn't fair. So either it isn't fair because a poor person can't claw their way out of poverty while a lazy dullard skates through life doing easy work for Father's friends, or it isn't fair because an enterprizing capitalist who scraped his way up from the bottom is taxed heavily to pay for another's laziness or stupidity. (to fairly characterize both side's straw men.) Appeals to fairness as an argument for or against various wealth redistribution schemes always strike me as odd for this reason. Neither side gets an exclusive claim to fairness. Both situations can end up equally unfair for equally reasonable definitions of fairness. No society-level policy -- especially doing nothing -- can possibly hope to be remotely fair in at least an infinitely of possible senses of the word.
kbenson 11y ago
> Morally, that any one person, by virtue of their relative wealth alone, is judged a provider, at gunpoint if necessary, to others who, by virtue of their relative lack of wealth alone, is considered worthy of substance, is such an inversion of right and wrong as to warrant some serious soul-searching about what makes one worthy of punishment or reward. That makes quite a few assumptions about the nature of money, the ownership of money, and how it is accumulated. Given, those assumptions are shared by most people in capitalistic systems, but that doesn't mean they are sacrosanct and we should reexamine them from time to time. For example, one possible interpretation is that it's the system that allows this accumulation of wealth, and that the system favors certain people and starting conditions over others. If we accept that the system is responsible for quite a bit of the wealth (could the same be achieved in a drastically different system, say, North Korea?), then it can be viewed less as taking money from one and giving to another as much as fees and discounts, or incentives and disincentives built into the system in the hope of either making it more efficient in the end or better in some desired respect. Note: I'm not necessarily pushing the above view, but instead using it to illuminate that perspective informs our opinions quite a bit, and that stepping back and reexamining our assumptions may have benefit or change how we think. At worst it will be a waste of time and we'll come away with the same opinion.
Retric 11y ago
Innovation often happens from the ground up. Harry Potter for example was written by someone on housing assistance. Clearly the England made far more money from her than the cost of her benefits. Further, if you tax a company at 10% or 20% the same investments are going to profitable. So, for the most part they behave the same which makes corporate tax breaks a very poor investment. PS: More generally, people with a safety net are far more likely to invest in things like a home.
- dTal 11y ago
  Nitpick: Harry Potter was written in Scotland, not England :)
mikeash 11y ago
Helping people in need is not an inversion of right and wrong. What's an inversion of right and wrong is declaring somebody to be unworthy of even the most basic sustenance merely because they possess an insufficient quantity of green paper. Basic human morality is that those who can help those who can't. Once we moved beyond the tribal village the whole question of how that works exploded in complexity and has never been satisfactorily answered, but that basic principle remains. If Basic Income doesn't work, then obviously that's problematic. But I see no moral problem with the concept.
shkkmo 11y ago
> Nobody is talking about generating new wealth to make this happen: it's pure consumption and some of that will be at the expense of capital investment. I've been talking about how minimum income can make the minimum wage obsolete and thus allow for the existence of a wider variety of jobs (and creation of wealth) that was previously unviable while also fixing the market inefficiencies created by putting an artificial price floor on labor. > Morally, that any one person, by virtue of their relative wealth alone, is judged a provider, at gunpoint if necessary, to others who, by virtue of their relative lack of wealth alone, is considered worthy of substance, is such an inversion of right and wrong as to warrant some serious soul-searching about what makes one worthy of punishment or reward. No, completely wrong. > by virtue of their relative wealth alone Wealth exists only within an economy and thus is a social construct that makes it's owner intrinsically beholden to that society. Wealth thus increases the moral obligation to the society from which that wealth is derived. > by virtue of their relative wealth alone, is considered worthy of substance It is not their lack of wealth, but their mere existence that makes them 'worthy of substance'. > warrant some serious soul-searching about what makes one worthy of punishment or reward Taxes on wealth are not a punishment, they are the cost of maintaining and improving the society and allows the wealth to exist. Minimum income is not reward since it is given to everyone.
- gwright 11y ago
  > Wealth exists only within an economy and thus is a social construct that makes it's owner intrinsically beholden to that society. Wealth thus increases the moral obligation to the society from which that wealth is derived. This notion pops up quite a bit in HN discussion of basic income. Can anybody provide some references to any sort of scholarly work on this concept? Presumably it has been described and discussed in depth and I'd like to be able to understand it better or even associate a name to the concept. In any case, I'm not sure I follow the logic in this particular description. Why does wealth being a 'social construct' make the 'owner intrinsically beholden' to that society? What does 'intrinsically beholden' mean? These seem like arbitrary and poorly defined assertions to me. > Minimum income is ... given to everyone. Define minimum income. Do you imagine it enough to provide food, shelter, clothing? If so explain what other mechanisms would prevent the emergence of a large group of people who simply lived off the efforts of others as a choice. What mechanism would keep that sort of system in equilibrium rather than the consuming group growing and the producing group shrinking and the resulting tensions escalating? And don't we want to construct a system that moves towards a state that maximizes the number of self-sufficient people rather maximizing the number of dependent people?

kbenson 11y ago

While I would agree Minimum Income is more along the spectrum towards Socialism that Capitalism from our current point, I don't think we can fairly equate it with Communism. There are a few places trying it out though[1][2][3]. > The fatal flaw in all of this...who is going to pay for it? Well, the simple, possibly simplistic answer is "the same people that pay for wellfare". Which is everyone not receiving it. To be sure, it would need quite a lot of work on the details to even be possible in an economically viable way. Edit: Added more references. 1: http://www.businessinsider.com/this-dutch-city-is-giving-basic-income-a-try-2015-6 http://www.businessinsider.com/this-dutch-city-is-giving-bas... 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11273482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11273482 (Alaska) 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11273482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11273482 (Ontario)

warfangle 11y ago

Soviet Union and China didn't really have a universal basic income. They had a state defined income, if anything. Which meant you couldn't make more than that, either. It actually has been "field tested" - and in the US of A, no less. The entire state of Alaska has a guaranteed minimum income. Granted, it isn't much - on average it's been about $1,000 per anum.

scrupulusalbion 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

tankenmate 11y ago

Actually it was tested in Canada; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome

Mithaldu 11y ago

Please review my comment here to consider whether it counts as "field testing": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11339951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11339951