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"It might also shift the norm whether to work. Work = being part of society " - Markus Brunnermeier(1) I love how simply Markus arrived at the fundamental poli

• btilly 10y ago
  It is a simplistic but very ironic claim. One of the main problems with the existing social net is that it comes with "economic cliffs" where making a little more is not to your economic advantage. And then people who make the rational decision are seen as "lazy". For a real example, my niece had to turn down a job because it paid her $0.20 too much to stay on food stamps. And she couldn't be paid less because it would have broken union rules. So she did the rational thing and turned down the better job. Which meant that her skills and education went underutilized. One of the big arguments for UBI is that this kind of thing doesn't happen.
  • jcizzle 10y ago
    Would the better job been the first in a series of steps to even better jobs/promotions in the future? Did that job have the same pay from now until retirement? Would a year of hard work in this job yield a raise that offset the loss to food stamps? If any of these are true, her's wasn't the rational decision, it was the most convenient, least risky decision.
    • ___eponymous___ 10y ago
      You're talking about the "rational decision" as if there's only one value to optimize. If their "utility function" is described by more than just how much money they have/make, then it could be perfectly rational to turn down the job. That being said I do agree that if there's a huge difference in future earning power, it would still generally worth it to go for the job that involves giving up food stamps.
      • dllthomas 10y ago
        > That being said I do agree that if there's a huge difference in future earning power, it would still generally worth it to go for the job that involves giving up food stamps. If you can manage to hold your life together well enough to continue to do the job, with fewer resources available.
    • btilly 10y ago
      The answers are unclear, no, and no. Also your conclusion about "rational decision" is clearly wrong. Taking risks is not necessarily rational. Doubly not when you are a single mother with 3 kids and a deadbeat ex. Taking the job guaranteed losing her money. If she kept the job for a couple of years, she would have started to break even, but it would be quite a few years until she was ahead of where she was. Instead she continued to look for a job that either paid just little enough to keep food stamps, or offered a prospect of paying enough to offset losing food stamps. Your reasoning is based on the theory that your best way up is to take the best job you can and then work your way up. That was how things worked when I was a kid. But today people tend to improve their job by switching jobs, not by being promoted in their current one. Therefore staying underpaid is often a better route up than switching to a job you don't want in the hope of maybe being promoted some day.
    • stcredzero 10y ago
      If any of these are true, her's wasn't the rational decision, it was the most convenient, least risky decision. It shouldn't take far-seeing, risk taking, and great inconvenience to get out of poverty. If our society wants to bring people out of poverty, it should make the choices leading to that obvious, low risk, and convenient. If the context was game development, this wouldn't even be an issue. People do what they're incentivized to do.
• vkou 10y ago
  Unless you're rich. If you're rich, and not working, your opinions are valued and respected.
  • cmdrfred 10y ago
    You aren't working, you're even better. You're a "job creator".
  • twoquestions 10y ago
    I don't know, where I'm from we look down pretty hard on trust fund babies. This may be different on the coasts.
  • harryh 10y ago
    I don't think that's necessarily true. It's true for some people, mostly those that are rich because of their past work. But I don't think it's true for people that didn't earn their money through work like those that inherited it or won the lottery. Society can be pretty dismissive of people in these categories. I even think that we differentiate between people who are rich from work. Some people are seen has "having really earned it" while others "just got lucky." Shades of grey for sure, and people might disagree here but I think this is a real phenomenon that those who are seen as having done more valuable work are held in higher esteem.
    • nine_k 10y ago
      BTW most people who won a lottery end up spending up the fortune, not living off it for a long time.
• natrius 10y ago
  Agreed. While I think a basic income is a good idea, the people I think it will make better off don't actually want it. They want jobs. Perhaps we should be considering a new Works Progress Administration instead.
  • malka 10y ago
    Let's bury lots of 100 USD bills and give people a shovel.
  • RangerScience 10y ago
    A portion of those people will make their own jobs. Most of that portion are some form of artist - I know dancers, leatherworkers, acrobats, and event planners that would readily go after UBI - although what's interesting is that al those people already DO have jobs, just not the ones they want, or that pay the bills well enough.
    • natrius 10y ago
      Underpaid people who are pursing their passions will be fine with a UBI. People who lose their jobs to machines will have to rebuild their idea of why their life has value from scratch, and a UBI makes it clear that other people are still creating lots of value in the world—enough to fund checks for you. Lots of people don't have productive passions. They were focused on being valuable to their family and community instead. What now for them?
      • RangerScience 10y ago
        This is an extremely good point. Adaptation, classification, a change in how people define themselves? You point out what I think would end up being a rough patch, but one worth going through.
  • Retra 10y ago
    Maybe you should let those people speak for themselves. But I guess if you did that, we'd never hear anything.
• jcizzle 10y ago
  That's not a political issue, although it somehow has been made out to be. Society is a group of people whose contributions - however large or small - are beneficial to the rest of that group. Those contributions are called 'work'. There are many benefits to being a part of a society. Receiving those benefits without contributing to the rest of the society is selfish. This doesn't have much to do with Trump or gut-reactions. This has to do with some folks feeling entitled to the benefits created by hundreds of millions of people's effort because they were born in a certain place and time. Those benefits should be reserved for people who contribute to society. The good thing is none of this will ever happen, as most people are good-hearted folks that want to contribute to society. A better discussion would be figuring out society can help facilitate that, instead of placating those who currently don't have a good way of contributing.
  • Retra 10y ago
    The "work culture" is built upon the very narrow understanding of 'work' that is prevalent in American culture: that of making money in a self-beneficial way. You don't have this kind of work culture when you're looking at people in the abstract and measuring their ability to benefit society.
    • jcizzle 10y ago
      If you believe that the only reason people work is to selfishly make money, then OK, there's not much convincing I can do here. It reminds me of the argument that supporting Brexit can only be accounted for by xenophobia or racism. Is it really true that that many people are bigots? Or maybe there is another explanation that isn't being accounted for? Either way, earning money is not a selfish thing - it requires another party to agree. Taking money is selfish. There is a big distinction.
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• stcredzero 10y ago
  Is there anything particularly Trump-esque about, "Work = being part of society?" Is your logic that anything Trump likes is automatically wrong? Or is that an entirely subjective appeal? My personal experience with periods of time where I was under-employed, is that "Work = being part of society." People feel better when they know they are actively contributing. That's just a simple truth.
  • aresant 10y ago
    I appreciate your response because I probably needed to qualify that. I am resolutely apolitical, but very much ADMIRE Trump's ability to state & capture - in a tweet - the underlying fears / motivations of voters. And, to get completely off topic, there's a lovely article quantifying Trump's approach - based on the gunning-fog index - vs clinton / sanders. (1) http://www.ibtimes.com/donald-trump-tweets-lower-reading-level-his-competitors-maybe-he-shouldnt-2371423 http://www.ibtimes.com/donald-trump-tweets-lower-reading-lev...
    • stcredzero 10y ago
      The under-educated are probably a sizable and growing segment of the populace, so why shouldn't a politician be pandering to them?
  • ___eponymous___ 10y ago
    >People feel better when they know they are actively contributing. That's just a simple truth. I find this interesting, because it's a great example of some of the values implicit in American society. Note that the way you expressed it, essentially the only way to contribute to society is by working a job. I don't think it's a stretch to claim that that's a very narrow-minded way of looking at it. In my opinion American society is really, really good at all things economic, but really, really bad at actually enjoying/finding value in the things that go on outside the office.
    • stcredzero 10y ago
      Note that the way you expressed it, essentially the only way to contribute to society is by working a job. Note the way I expressed it, the emphasis is on contributing. Your particular spin strikes me as an eagerness to oppose a particular POV, then you go on to project that POV onto me. I don't thrive as well when contributing as a volunteer, which I did when under employed, as when I have a full time job. Keep in mind the efficient market hypothesis. Most of the jobs constituting valuable contributions are going to be paid. There are going to be exceptions, of course, but not all of those roles are going to be suitable for everybody.
• nine_k 10y ago
  Certain part of a society are definitely different than other parts. For instance, children are definitely a part of the society, and a very important part, but they differ from grown-ups in many regards. For one thing, they are dependent on their parents / guardians. Other people, even totally grown up, may be considered so dependent on e.g. the government that they are not even allowed to vote due to the conflict of interest. E.g. US troops were not allowed to vote for most of the US history. Were UBI enacted, I'm sure people who choose to live entirely off it, and people who choose to work (and thus provide the means for the UBI, among other things), will inevitably be seen differently, and you can't help it. Consider it when thinking about equality, integration of the society, etc.
  • undersuit 10y ago
    Maybe prejudices will develop, but choosing to work or choosing to subsist on UBI are entirely choices. It's racist to prejudice someone because of their skin color, skin color isn't a choice. It's mean to prejudice someone because of their hair style, hair style is a choice. We already make similar prejudices now, for a number of reasons.
• saturdaysaint 10y ago
  Yet being part of society is something that people desire deeply, so it's possible that they'll just make their own work. I found Tim O'Reilly's musing on Econtalk last year (link - http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/10/tim_oreilly_on.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/10/tim_oreilly_on.html) to be persuasive - he posited that in a potential future where a min income is necessary, humans will spend a lot more time entertaining each other. Hey, Harry Potter was written while JK Rowling was "on the dole" and a lot of my favorite Twitch streamers (who have raised Street Fighter to both art and science) also seem to be awfully unoccupied Brits... I actually wrote an album during a brief unemployed period - see moneyhousegold.bandcamp.com - so I tend to imagine a society without need of work as a potential creative Golden Age in the making.
  • harryh 10y ago
    Why won't the people doing all that work to entertain each other earn an income for doing so, thus making it so a min income isn't necessary?
    • undersuit 10y ago
      Then there is no safe way to fail. It would discourage innovation. You would have to stay with what works; even if you don't like it, it's getting harder to iterate, or there is a solid wall in the near future that you know you can't cross.
      • harryh 10y ago
        Well now you've significantly lowered the benefit of a UBI in our fully automated future. Before it was "if we don't do this then 90% of people will literally have no money and won't be able to live." You've changed it to "innovation among entertainers will be discouraged." I think you might be able to get people on board to support the first justification. The second one is going to be a lot harder to sell.
        • undersuit 10y ago
• enraged_camel 10y ago
  I don't think it's a cultural issue. I think it's deeper than that: it's about identity and self-worth. The reason I say this is because a lot of people base who they are on what they do for a living and how well they do it. The feeling of being needed by other people is what gives a lot of people their sense of self-worth. IMO the biggest risk with a UBI program is that it will cause huge gaps in this equation as a lot of people realize they no longer have to work to feed and clothe themselves. So, when we finally come around to rolling out UBI nationally (I see it as simply inevitable), it needs to be accompanied by lots and lots of social programming that aims to decouple people's sense of self-worth from their perceived worth to society. I envision a future where traditional introductions go from: "My name is Bob, I'm from Cleveland, and I'm an electrician." to: "My name is Bob, I'm from Cleveland, and I spend my time tending to my garden and teaching the kids in the neighborhood how to grow plants."