5 ms·

It is premature but inevitable: automation, stagnant growth, migrations and deflation are all pushing towards universal basic income. Not 2k euros/month but eno

by DrNuke 10y ago

It is premature but inevitable: automation, stagnant growth, migrations and deflation are all pushing towards universal basic income. Not 2k euros/month but enough to allow surviving and decency.

raverbashing 10y ago
Welfare without limits is incompatible with Open Borders Remains to be seen who will want to actually do the (needed) jobs when staying at home is enough I am in favour of Basic Income, but it's not such clear cut
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Given that open borders will help hundreds of millions escape dire poverty, whereas basic income will (at best) reduce some administrative costs and allow some people to live a life of leisure, how do you justify this preference? Do the prospective brown people who might want to escape dire poverty (i.e., gain access to clean running water, flush toilets, and adequate food) just not count? Even if they counted only as 3/5 of a person, the numbers would still be drastically in their favor.
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    > how do you justify this preference? One is helping the ones that are already in the country, the other one isn't. I'm not against helping, but there is a limit. How do you propose to help "millions" when a lot of them can't even read http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/syrian-read-english-1.3541276 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/syrian-read-englis... > Do the prospective brown people who might want to immigrate just not count? Sure. Let's open the doors so we have more harassment of women, homosexuals and increased Anti-semitism. Which is funny, because some of my ancestors came from the same region that is in trouble today (maybe they were "Infidels" and were kicked out because of that, who knows)
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      Why are people "already in the country" more deserving than those outside? Why is this a meaningful moral distinction rather than "already in the right religion" or "already of the right race"? I propose helping the millions by not using violence to prevent them from performing labor for willing employers (an action which makes both them and the employer better off). That's all. Sure. Let's open the doors so we have more harassment of women, homosexuals and increased Anti-semitism. If we have adequate law enforcement, isn't this a problem that will rapidly solve itself? The solution is simple: immigrant assaults a homosexual, has his possessions confiscated, goes do jail and is then permanently deported on exit. The ones who don't commit crimes can continue to peacefully trade with locals. If you want to impose collective punishment over statistical disparities in crime, should we also collectively punish Black Americans due to their high crime rate?
      - raverbashing 10y ago
        > Why are people "already in the country" more deserving than those outside? In average, they aren't. But life isn't fair. You might as well ask why those that came are deserving of help and not others, and your ability to help before it gets detrimental to the collective. > I propose helping the millions by not using violence to prevent them from performing labor for willing employers (an action which makes both them and the employer better off). I don't disagree with this, and I'm sure several do that under the table already. But it seems some have a "rosier" idea of what you'll get http://www.ardmediathek.de/tv/Exakt/Falsche-Versprechen-locken-Fl%C3%BCchtlinge-a/MDR-Fernsehen/Video?bcastId=7545124&documentId=35277952 http://www.ardmediathek.de/tv/Exakt/Falsche-Versprechen-lock... > If we have adequate law enforcement, isn't this a problem that will rapidly solve itself? The solution is simple: immigrant assaults a homosexual, has his possessions confiscated, goes do jail and is then permanently deported on exit. If it worked like this I would be satisfied. But it's usually not so effective.
        yummyfajitas 10y ago
        If you support unfair collective punishment and protectionism, why limit it to nationality-based groups? Why not restrict work opportunities for Black Americans also? And to protect "us" from the high rate of crime committed by Blacks, why not force them to live on the other side of town where they are less likely to harm "us"? (I put "us" in quotes, since I don't consider "us" to refer to any morally meaningful group.)
  - patrickg_zill 10y ago
    Your snide comments imply that those who disagree with you are racist. Not exactly your highest quality contribution to HN.
    - harryh 10y ago
      Those that disagree with him are racist. They're explicitly valuing the lives of some people over others simply because of where they were born.
      - yummyfajitas 10y ago
        Technically that's not racism (in the original sense of bias due to race), since the people being discriminated against due to an accident of their birth might be white. Of course, if we adopt the modern left's definition of racism (which includes actions which have statistically disparate impacts) then this pretty clearly is racism.
  - AJ007 10y ago
    There is a pretty good case that a vacuum of talent created by the brain drain in poor countries makes it extraordinarily difficult for those countries to reform their governments and develop in to functional economies.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      If those countries wish to keep their slaves inside, they are free to build their own Berlin wall or other barriers to exit. Meanwhile, back in civilization, people aren't property. Similarly, I'm an American working for an Indian company attempting to disrupt multiple US industries. I have no plans to remain remotely attached to the US once our demographic issues start to collapse. Should the US create some sort of barriers to my exit?
      - jessaustin 10y ago
        ...once our demographic issues start to collapse. It's probably a mistake for me to respond to something so vague, but do you think this will happen in USA before most of the rest of the world? Unless you "escape" to Africa, I don't see anywhere better-suited for riding out the Great Aging, in the long term.
        yummyfajitas 10y ago
        There are two sorts of demographic issues. The first is a mere shift in demographic profiles. This leads to a desire for more consumption and a reduction in production - nothing capitalism can't handle. Prices will change a bit, that's all. The second is a kleptocratic wealth transfer from the young to the old. Witness contemporary Greece, Detroit, Italy, and similar locales. Then look at many US localities (Texas being one of the few exceptions [1]) and recognize what the future contains. The latter makes me very afraid, and that's what I seek to escape. Not all countries are set up for that. In terms of mitigating the impact of the first, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Phillipines all have relatively favorable age profiles. Singapore can also maintain a good age profile via immigration - given how well governed they are, I expect that to occur. [1] Although Texas is well governed and has a solid economic future, it's unfortunately tethered to NY and CA by being in the US. Further, it's unclear that Texas' good governance will continue given how much immigration it's getting from the rest of the US.
  - sbmassey 10y ago
    Racist immigration policies are perfectly reasonable if you are a relatively small country whose culture would be at risk from large numbers of people from alien cultures.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      What makes them reasonable? Do you subscribe to some sort of corporatist ideology, where the needs/rights of some vague swiss-german corporate outweigh the needs/rights of individual humans? If so, I'm curious about something. There are 2^{6 billion} possible subsets of humanity. Any individual human is a member of 50% of them. This makes it impossible to treat all corporates equally, so how do you determine which corporates have these rights and which don't? (I use "corporatist" in the original sense, where a "corporate" is simply some collective of humans rather than specifically a state registered limited liability corporation. I'm also very deliberately NOT mentioning a scary associated word.)
      - sbmassey 10y ago
        In a given country at a given time, the set of people who are citizens of that country will have a given set of cultural norms, speak a particular language, have a particular understanding of the relation between the government and the people and the law. The immigration of enough people from outside that set will change those attributes, and therefore change how the country is run, which may be displeasing to the original set of people. You seem to be assuming that cultural attributes are randomly distributed across the world in your second paragraph.
        yummyfajitas 10y ago
        If enough local people engage in political activism or other cultural activities, then those attributes may also change. Those changes may be displeasing to people who favor the original values. Therefore, should we also ban political activism? If not, why not? I'm assuming nothing about cultural attributes. I'm simply not understanding why the use of violence to preserve certain statistical distributions of cultural attributes is justified morally. And if it is justified morally, I also can't see why one can't use the same justification to suppress various local cultural movements which might also change how the country is run and displease a bunch of people.
  - sbmassey 10y ago
    Racist immigration policies are perfectly reasonable if you are a relatively small country whose culture would be at risk from large numbers of people from alien cultures.
  - aninhumer 10y ago
    It's possible that by providing a fraction of the population with greater luxury than an equal allocation of resources would allow for, those people are able to achieve greater advances in technology than otherwise, which lead to better results in the long run. Or more pithily: Maybe we need gardens to cultivate civilisation. That said, I am very aware that this is probably a post-rationalisation for my tribal intuition that nearby people are more important than distant ones.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      This is a plausible argument, and a favored one among some neoreactionaries. But those folks point out that if we accept the "garden" premise, many folks currently in the garden (non-Asian minorities, various lower class white people) should be ejected. Do you have any argument against this? Coming up with arguments to keep out foreigners is easy. Coming up with arguments that don't also suggest kicking out blacks/hispanics/west virginia is tougher.
      - naveen99 10y ago
        Just playing devils advocate. You can't kick people out because of existing contracts / promises based on citizenship. Currently borders are leakier for big corporations / the rich, then they are for the individuals / poor. Corporations do have walled gardens across borders. A google employee is better off than a us citizen on average regardless of physical location in Palo Alto or Hyderabad. If you did have open borders, you would probably end up with more privatized cities where all the land is spoken for by rich people. Eventually countries would be replaced by cities or corporations... I think we are kind of headed that way anyway in effect.
      - aninhumer 10y ago
        I don't see how ejecting anyone follows from the premise? The idea is just vaguely that wealth imbalances between arbitrary groups could be beneficial overall. That in itself doesn't specify anything about the size of those groups, or who should be in them. And if we were setting out to create such arbitrary divisions, geography seems like a fairly practical way to do it. It's easy to keep people in separate areas separate, whereas segregating currently integrated races would be a significant undertaking.
- qudat 10y ago
  Agreed about open borders. I'd rather focus more on removing the limitations for complete emigration. Ubi might be marginally better than the slew of welfare programs currently in existence but it doesn't solve much more than removing political inefficiencies. "Let's solve government inefficiency with another government program."
tomp 10y ago
I really can't follow this logic. If anything, at least automation and deflation are strongly pushing towards everything getting much cheaper. So soon, 2k/month will be plenty!
- DrNuke 10y ago
  Everywhere less and less jobs vs more and more people unemployed because of automation and stagnation. Industrial and immaterial output you can't sell because priced out of the market. Wages going down. It will be cheaper to give 10 euros/month where the poor live now than 2k euros/month (or 300 euros/month as for Italy plan) after they migrate to rich countries. Every place has its own cost of basic life and a grandtotal needed not to starve. It is 300 euros/month in Italy, it may be 500 euros/month in Switzerland (instead of 2k/month), it is half the daily benefit given in the UK, it may be 10 euros/month in Congo. You allow this universally or millions will come from poorer to richer countries destroying their welfare state.

by DrNuke 10y ago

It is premature but inevitable: automation, stagnant growth, migrations and deflation are all pushing towards universal basic income. Not 2k euros/month but enough to allow surviving and decency.

raverbashing 10y ago

Welfare without limits is incompatible with Open Borders Remains to be seen who will want to actually do the (needed) jobs when staying at home is enough I am in favour of Basic Income, but it's not such clear cut

yummyfajitas 10y ago
Given that open borders will help hundreds of millions escape dire poverty, whereas basic income will (at best) reduce some administrative costs and allow some people to live a life of leisure, how do you justify this preference? Do the prospective brown people who might want to escape dire poverty (i.e., gain access to clean running water, flush toilets, and adequate food) just not count? Even if they counted only as 3/5 of a person, the numbers would still be drastically in their favor.
- raverbashing 10y ago
  > how do you justify this preference? One is helping the ones that are already in the country, the other one isn't. I'm not against helping, but there is a limit. How do you propose to help "millions" when a lot of them can't even read http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/syrian-read-english-1.3541276 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/syrian-read-englis... > Do the prospective brown people who might want to immigrate just not count? Sure. Let's open the doors so we have more harassment of women, homosexuals and increased Anti-semitism. Which is funny, because some of my ancestors came from the same region that is in trouble today (maybe they were "Infidels" and were kicked out because of that, who knows)
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    Why are people "already in the country" more deserving than those outside? Why is this a meaningful moral distinction rather than "already in the right religion" or "already of the right race"? I propose helping the millions by not using violence to prevent them from performing labor for willing employers (an action which makes both them and the employer better off). That's all. Sure. Let's open the doors so we have more harassment of women, homosexuals and increased Anti-semitism. If we have adequate law enforcement, isn't this a problem that will rapidly solve itself? The solution is simple: immigrant assaults a homosexual, has his possessions confiscated, goes do jail and is then permanently deported on exit. The ones who don't commit crimes can continue to peacefully trade with locals. If you want to impose collective punishment over statistical disparities in crime, should we also collectively punish Black Americans due to their high crime rate?
    - raverbashing 10y ago
      > Why are people "already in the country" more deserving than those outside? In average, they aren't. But life isn't fair. You might as well ask why those that came are deserving of help and not others, and your ability to help before it gets detrimental to the collective. > I propose helping the millions by not using violence to prevent them from performing labor for willing employers (an action which makes both them and the employer better off). I don't disagree with this, and I'm sure several do that under the table already. But it seems some have a "rosier" idea of what you'll get http://www.ardmediathek.de/tv/Exakt/Falsche-Versprechen-locken-Fl%C3%BCchtlinge-a/MDR-Fernsehen/Video?bcastId=7545124&documentId=35277952 http://www.ardmediathek.de/tv/Exakt/Falsche-Versprechen-lock... > If we have adequate law enforcement, isn't this a problem that will rapidly solve itself? The solution is simple: immigrant assaults a homosexual, has his possessions confiscated, goes do jail and is then permanently deported on exit. If it worked like this I would be satisfied. But it's usually not so effective.
      - yummyfajitas 10y ago
        If you support unfair collective punishment and protectionism, why limit it to nationality-based groups? Why not restrict work opportunities for Black Americans also? And to protect "us" from the high rate of crime committed by Blacks, why not force them to live on the other side of town where they are less likely to harm "us"? (I put "us" in quotes, since I don't consider "us" to refer to any morally meaningful group.)
- patrickg_zill 10y ago
  Your snide comments imply that those who disagree with you are racist. Not exactly your highest quality contribution to HN.
  - harryh 10y ago
    Those that disagree with him are racist. They're explicitly valuing the lives of some people over others simply because of where they were born.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      Technically that's not racism (in the original sense of bias due to race), since the people being discriminated against due to an accident of their birth might be white. Of course, if we adopt the modern left's definition of racism (which includes actions which have statistically disparate impacts) then this pretty clearly is racism.
- AJ007 10y ago
  There is a pretty good case that a vacuum of talent created by the brain drain in poor countries makes it extraordinarily difficult for those countries to reform their governments and develop in to functional economies.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    If those countries wish to keep their slaves inside, they are free to build their own Berlin wall or other barriers to exit. Meanwhile, back in civilization, people aren't property. Similarly, I'm an American working for an Indian company attempting to disrupt multiple US industries. I have no plans to remain remotely attached to the US once our demographic issues start to collapse. Should the US create some sort of barriers to my exit?
    - jessaustin 10y ago
      ...once our demographic issues start to collapse. It's probably a mistake for me to respond to something so vague, but do you think this will happen in USA before most of the rest of the world? Unless you "escape" to Africa, I don't see anywhere better-suited for riding out the Great Aging, in the long term.
      - yummyfajitas 10y ago
        There are two sorts of demographic issues. The first is a mere shift in demographic profiles. This leads to a desire for more consumption and a reduction in production - nothing capitalism can't handle. Prices will change a bit, that's all. The second is a kleptocratic wealth transfer from the young to the old. Witness contemporary Greece, Detroit, Italy, and similar locales. Then look at many US localities (Texas being one of the few exceptions [1]) and recognize what the future contains. The latter makes me very afraid, and that's what I seek to escape. Not all countries are set up for that. In terms of mitigating the impact of the first, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Phillipines all have relatively favorable age profiles. Singapore can also maintain a good age profile via immigration - given how well governed they are, I expect that to occur. [1] Although Texas is well governed and has a solid economic future, it's unfortunately tethered to NY and CA by being in the US. Further, it's unclear that Texas' good governance will continue given how much immigration it's getting from the rest of the US.
- sbmassey 10y ago
  Racist immigration policies are perfectly reasonable if you are a relatively small country whose culture would be at risk from large numbers of people from alien cultures.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    What makes them reasonable? Do you subscribe to some sort of corporatist ideology, where the needs/rights of some vague swiss-german corporate outweigh the needs/rights of individual humans? If so, I'm curious about something. There are 2^{6 billion} possible subsets of humanity. Any individual human is a member of 50% of them. This makes it impossible to treat all corporates equally, so how do you determine which corporates have these rights and which don't? (I use "corporatist" in the original sense, where a "corporate" is simply some collective of humans rather than specifically a state registered limited liability corporation. I'm also very deliberately NOT mentioning a scary associated word.)
    - sbmassey 10y ago
      In a given country at a given time, the set of people who are citizens of that country will have a given set of cultural norms, speak a particular language, have a particular understanding of the relation between the government and the people and the law. The immigration of enough people from outside that set will change those attributes, and therefore change how the country is run, which may be displeasing to the original set of people. You seem to be assuming that cultural attributes are randomly distributed across the world in your second paragraph.
      - yummyfajitas 10y ago
        If enough local people engage in political activism or other cultural activities, then those attributes may also change. Those changes may be displeasing to people who favor the original values. Therefore, should we also ban political activism? If not, why not? I'm assuming nothing about cultural attributes. I'm simply not understanding why the use of violence to preserve certain statistical distributions of cultural attributes is justified morally. And if it is justified morally, I also can't see why one can't use the same justification to suppress various local cultural movements which might also change how the country is run and displease a bunch of people.
- sbmassey 10y ago
  Racist immigration policies are perfectly reasonable if you are a relatively small country whose culture would be at risk from large numbers of people from alien cultures.
- aninhumer 10y ago
  It's possible that by providing a fraction of the population with greater luxury than an equal allocation of resources would allow for, those people are able to achieve greater advances in technology than otherwise, which lead to better results in the long run. Or more pithily: Maybe we need gardens to cultivate civilisation. That said, I am very aware that this is probably a post-rationalisation for my tribal intuition that nearby people are more important than distant ones.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    This is a plausible argument, and a favored one among some neoreactionaries. But those folks point out that if we accept the "garden" premise, many folks currently in the garden (non-Asian minorities, various lower class white people) should be ejected. Do you have any argument against this? Coming up with arguments to keep out foreigners is easy. Coming up with arguments that don't also suggest kicking out blacks/hispanics/west virginia is tougher.
    - naveen99 10y ago
      Just playing devils advocate. You can't kick people out because of existing contracts / promises based on citizenship. Currently borders are leakier for big corporations / the rich, then they are for the individuals / poor. Corporations do have walled gardens across borders. A google employee is better off than a us citizen on average regardless of physical location in Palo Alto or Hyderabad. If you did have open borders, you would probably end up with more privatized cities where all the land is spoken for by rich people. Eventually countries would be replaced by cities or corporations... I think we are kind of headed that way anyway in effect.
    - aninhumer 10y ago
      I don't see how ejecting anyone follows from the premise? The idea is just vaguely that wealth imbalances between arbitrary groups could be beneficial overall. That in itself doesn't specify anything about the size of those groups, or who should be in them. And if we were setting out to create such arbitrary divisions, geography seems like a fairly practical way to do it. It's easy to keep people in separate areas separate, whereas segregating currently integrated races would be a significant undertaking.
qudat 10y ago
Agreed about open borders. I'd rather focus more on removing the limitations for complete emigration. Ubi might be marginally better than the slew of welfare programs currently in existence but it doesn't solve much more than removing political inefficiencies. "Let's solve government inefficiency with another government program."

tomp 10y ago

I really can't follow this logic. If anything, at least automation and deflation are strongly pushing towards everything getting much cheaper. So soon, 2k/month will be plenty!

DrNuke 10y ago
Everywhere less and less jobs vs more and more people unemployed because of automation and stagnation. Industrial and immaterial output you can't sell because priced out of the market. Wages going down. It will be cheaper to give 10 euros/month where the poor live now than 2k euros/month (or 300 euros/month as for Italy plan) after they migrate to rich countries. Every place has its own cost of basic life and a grandtotal needed not to starve. It is 300 euros/month in Italy, it may be 500 euros/month in Switzerland (instead of 2k/month), it is half the daily benefit given in the UK, it may be 10 euros/month in Congo. You allow this universally or millions will come from poorer to richer countries destroying their welfare state.