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Basic income. Free tuition. An outright grant, no repayments. Literally zero barriers except ability for anyone, for any level of academic achievement in anythi

Basic income. Free tuition. An outright grant, no repayments. Literally zero barriers except ability for anyone, for any level of academic achievement in anything. Result: a culture with a lot more understanding of the real world, and the preservation of human and humane values, rather than a laser focus on the hand-to-mouth of Jobs Right Now.

chronic6l 10y ago
> Basic income. Free tuition. An outright grant, no repayments. Literally zero barriers except ability for anyone, for any level of academic achievement in anything. Result: a culture with a lot more understanding of the real world, and the preservation of human and humane values, rather than a laser focus on the hand-to-mouth of Jobs Right Now. Incorrect. This will foster a culture of inferiority because not everyone is equal. No matter what you do, the lower class will be jealous of the upper class and will always demand for more. Money and education is solved? What about universal access to entertainment? Universal food? Universal housing?
- conanbatt 10y ago
  By this line of argument, its not "incorrect" its just a wall to keep to separate ones of the others. Just because theres always a demand doesnt mean satisfying demands wouldnt make peope happier or better.
shaftoe 10y ago
That sounds great, but there's no free lunch and when you ask people to pay (a lot) for something, you're going to get their opinion. Here's mine. I roughly divide human activities into jobs and hobbies. One ultimately builds enough value to support existence, one is primarily done for enjoyment. Education for the former can and should pay for itself over the long haul, so we're discussing who pays for hobby education. Personally, I don't want to pay for other people's hobbies. I've volunteered to teach people some of mine, spending hundreds of hours with educational groups. But, I can't imagine forcing taxpayers to pay for university education in these things.
- awinder 10y ago
  I'm sorry but, insinuating that humanities and arts are "hobby educations" is pretty rude and smacks of superiority complex. Look at the achievements that have stood the test of time and become valuable to us as a species. It's a pretty beautiful blending of scientific achievement and artistic achievement. If this system can't encourage both, let's not go to war with the arts, let's make the system that we invented, support the things that are important to us. Beyond that, from my perspective, more of my tax dollars will go towards issues and causes that I am personally conflicted with than ones that I agree with. The college loan issue will never compete with the size and scope of something like the military. So it's beautiful that you would be personally affronted by this use of tax dollars but: welcome to the club, est. 1776
  - zaroth 10y ago
    Don't apologize for personal attacks, just refrain from them. Any argument made by starting with calling someone rude or accusing them of having a superiority complex, can only be made better by instead empathizing with rather than dismissing opposing viewpoints. What's even worse is patronizing a mis-characterization of someone's statement. > I roughly divide human activities into jobs and hobbies. This indeed is a rough characterization of life. At no point does shaftoe insinuate humanities and arts are 'hobby educations'. Rather it seems to me a simply capitalistic view that anything humans do well can be done for money, at which point we call it a job. Certainly that also includes artists and philosophers. Or another way to think about it, to be truly great at something you must spend the majority of your life doing it, at which point it probably also needs to pay the bills. People should only be investing 5-figure sums of taxpayer's dollars to learn what they expect will be lifelong skills that will significantly increase their lifetime earning potential. In almost all cases, this is not Art History class.
    - awinder 10y ago
      Telling someone that their humanities education was all a hobby is a much greater insult than calling someone out, so I'll let the universe sort out who was the true meanie-head here lmao.
Lazare 10y ago
That sounds like a very nice world to live in. It also doesn't sound much like our world. It's certainly not how any country on Earth operates. One day, I hope and imagine, we will live in a post-scarcity world, and then yes, that sounds like a great plan for organizing society. > rather than a laser focus on the hand-to-mouth of Jobs Right Now. Perhaps we should wait to relax that focus once we've actually solved the problem. If you look around, you'll notice employment, especially among people 18-29, is a real challenge, while government finances and pensions are grossly underfunded. It's the old hierarchy of needs thing; self-actualization is at the top of the pyramid not only because it's the most important, but because it relies on all the others being fulfilled in order to be an acheivable goal.
- ap22213 10y ago
  It is extremely unlikely that a post-scarcity world will ever occur without, say, a collective global work project. There is no financial incentive for private capital to initiate it. Just like the Internet (in its current form) would have never occurred without government funding. The technology to bring about a post-scarcity world mostly exists, and we could get there very quickly (maybe 5-10 years). But, how do you convince the upper classes (who control the capital) to support it? How do you temper the common idea that 'the lazy people' will just do nothing all day? (like that's a bad thing)
  - lkbm 10y ago
    This seems more optimistic than I usually hear. Do you mind going into what you mean by "post-scarcity" and how we'd achieve it? Does it just mean a living UBI, or is there tech/infrastructure (extensive solar, e.g.) to be developed/built out as well?
    - LesZedCB 10y ago
      we bulldoze away houses, we throw away food. meanwhile, people are homeless and hungry. Clearly we already live in a society of overproduction. The difference is that the owners of the capital aren't willing to lose on their investments, and it's cheaper to bulldoze and throw away than to give it away or provide work maintaining the communities that these properties exist in/on.
matwood 10y ago
Basic income I think is going to have to happen at some point in our lifetime. There are just simply not enough jobs. Please stop saying 'free' tuition. It's not free, it is just not paid by the student. Keep in mind that many states already have just this setup for in state students to use lottery money.
- awinder 10y ago
  It's also the mode of operation for ages 5-18, with a nation wide avg of 12K / year in spending per student. So that 160k-ish in spending is downright American, but spending 1/4-1/2 of it on college is a give-away, socialism, the very demise of lady liberty
  - koolba 10y ago
    Why stop there? Why not have it be open to everyone, forever, at any point of their life? Why should anyone have to work at all?
    - awinder 10y ago
      The scope of someone going to college for say 40 years (from 20-60, for sake of argument) is a lot different than saying 4 years of education should maybe be an institutionalized cost. If you figure: 1. At 12K/year, base education runs a cost of 156K 2. At 20K/year, college education for 4 years runs 80K 3. At 20K/year, college education for 40 years runs 800K Then what we're saying is 80K represents 50% of the educational costs we're all comfortable with sinking into base education. But letting someone never work and just go to college for free for 40 years would cost over 400% of the base educational costs. That seems like a totally different scale of issue to me. We're also probably hitting diminishing returns over what 4 years would prepare someone for, and I don't think the audience is that large. Most people want to go to college to get skills to then contribute something to society, whether or not today's economy specifically values what they want to contribute.
      - koolba 10y ago
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
If we have basic income, why do we need to be educated at all? Just stay home and live minimally.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  Because democracy. One of the major reasons we need education now.
- Fargren 10y ago
  Because self-actualization is a human need and for a lot of people education is a means for that. Because some of us enjoy creating things that are of value to others. Because life is more than survival, basically.
  - exclusiv 10y ago
    You may be right on some, but if it was a good idea you would have said most.
    - Fargren 10y ago
      Are we talking about UBI, or about education? Because if it's UBI, what I mentioned was just one of the mechanisms by which it could work. But I honestly don't know if it would. I suspect it would, but we can't know without more research and tests. Human behaviour is too complex to model a priori.
- JulianMorrison 10y ago
  People like to learn things, if the desire hasn't been regimented out of them and their energy drained to the dregs.
cpursley 10y ago
If someone can just get on Basic Income, why even bother with attending college and putting in all that hard work? This is a serious question. Most people are not intrinsically motivated; the hacker news echo-chamber is an anomaly.
- drabiega 10y ago
  People always want more. I've met plenty of people who had enough inheritance / other random windfall to just get by who still went to college and careers. If those who get it by random chance or family act as such, why should we assume that those who would get it from Basic Income would be any different?
  - msandford 10y ago
    You do realize that you met those people who did get that random windfall because they were working, not because they just took the money and ran, right? Sure you might have met 20 of them. How many haven't you met because you're busy working instead of being where those folks hang out while they're not working?
- JulianMorrison 10y ago
  Most people ARE intrinsically motivated. It's just that in this society, the things you do for intrinsic motivations are called "hobbies" or "play". Hobbies are basically non-job things to get good at that don't pressure you with an economic sword of Damocles. In a Basic Income world, essentially, ALL jobs are hobbies. Those that suck too hard to be hobbies had better automate.
programmarchy 10y ago
Terrible, dystopian idea. You know education can't be "free", right? Unless you want to enslave educators and force them to work for nothing. In reality, the middle class will have half their income seized to subsidize the dependent class, being worked to the bone in mega corporations. Meanwhile, the elite will reap all the profits and pour them into more social control programs. Result of basic income will be a culture of demoralized serfs, totally dependent on a feudal corporate state for their survival.
- tombo2008 10y ago
  Mr. Orwell? Big fan - may I have your autograph? :)
wang_li 10y ago
> Basic income. Free tuition. An outright grant, no repayments. Literally zero barriers except ability for anyone, for any level of academic achievement in anything. Result: a culture with a lot more understanding of the real world, and the preservation of human and humane values, rather than a laser focus on the hand-to-mouth of Jobs Right Now. Scarcity is a thing in the real world. We are nowhere near a point where we can produce more than is necessary for everyone to have everything they want at every point in their lifetime. Assuming that's even possible as there are things that are naturally limited. I mean, under the everything is free to everyone model, how do you determine who gets to live in the house on the cliff overlooking the ocean and who gets to live inland surrounded by tract housing?

chronic6l 10y ago

> Basic income. Free tuition. An outright grant, no repayments. Literally zero barriers except ability for anyone, for any level of academic achievement in anything. Result: a culture with a lot more understanding of the real world, and the preservation of human and humane values, rather than a laser focus on the hand-to-mouth of Jobs Right Now. Incorrect. This will foster a culture of inferiority because not everyone is equal. No matter what you do, the lower class will be jealous of the upper class and will always demand for more. Money and education is solved? What about universal access to entertainment? Universal food? Universal housing?

conanbatt 10y ago
By this line of argument, its not "incorrect" its just a wall to keep to separate ones of the others. Just because theres always a demand doesnt mean satisfying demands wouldnt make peope happier or better.

shaftoe 10y ago

That sounds great, but there's no free lunch and when you ask people to pay (a lot) for something, you're going to get their opinion. Here's mine. I roughly divide human activities into jobs and hobbies. One ultimately builds enough value to support existence, one is primarily done for enjoyment. Education for the former can and should pay for itself over the long haul, so we're discussing who pays for hobby education. Personally, I don't want to pay for other people's hobbies. I've volunteered to teach people some of mine, spending hundreds of hours with educational groups. But, I can't imagine forcing taxpayers to pay for university education in these things.

awinder 10y ago
I'm sorry but, insinuating that humanities and arts are "hobby educations" is pretty rude and smacks of superiority complex. Look at the achievements that have stood the test of time and become valuable to us as a species. It's a pretty beautiful blending of scientific achievement and artistic achievement. If this system can't encourage both, let's not go to war with the arts, let's make the system that we invented, support the things that are important to us. Beyond that, from my perspective, more of my tax dollars will go towards issues and causes that I am personally conflicted with than ones that I agree with. The college loan issue will never compete with the size and scope of something like the military. So it's beautiful that you would be personally affronted by this use of tax dollars but: welcome to the club, est. 1776
- zaroth 10y ago
  Don't apologize for personal attacks, just refrain from them. Any argument made by starting with calling someone rude or accusing them of having a superiority complex, can only be made better by instead empathizing with rather than dismissing opposing viewpoints. What's even worse is patronizing a mis-characterization of someone's statement. > I roughly divide human activities into jobs and hobbies. This indeed is a rough characterization of life. At no point does shaftoe insinuate humanities and arts are 'hobby educations'. Rather it seems to me a simply capitalistic view that anything humans do well can be done for money, at which point we call it a job. Certainly that also includes artists and philosophers. Or another way to think about it, to be truly great at something you must spend the majority of your life doing it, at which point it probably also needs to pay the bills. People should only be investing 5-figure sums of taxpayer's dollars to learn what they expect will be lifelong skills that will significantly increase their lifetime earning potential. In almost all cases, this is not Art History class.
  - awinder 10y ago
    Telling someone that their humanities education was all a hobby is a much greater insult than calling someone out, so I'll let the universe sort out who was the true meanie-head here lmao.

Lazare 10y ago

That sounds like a very nice world to live in. It also doesn't sound much like our world. It's certainly not how any country on Earth operates. One day, I hope and imagine, we will live in a post-scarcity world, and then yes, that sounds like a great plan for organizing society. > rather than a laser focus on the hand-to-mouth of Jobs Right Now. Perhaps we should wait to relax that focus once we've actually solved the problem. If you look around, you'll notice employment, especially among people 18-29, is a real challenge, while government finances and pensions are grossly underfunded. It's the old hierarchy of needs thing; self-actualization is at the top of the pyramid not only because it's the most important, but because it relies on all the others being fulfilled in order to be an acheivable goal.

ap22213 10y ago
It is extremely unlikely that a post-scarcity world will ever occur without, say, a collective global work project. There is no financial incentive for private capital to initiate it. Just like the Internet (in its current form) would have never occurred without government funding. The technology to bring about a post-scarcity world mostly exists, and we could get there very quickly (maybe 5-10 years). But, how do you convince the upper classes (who control the capital) to support it? How do you temper the common idea that 'the lazy people' will just do nothing all day? (like that's a bad thing)
- lkbm 10y ago
  This seems more optimistic than I usually hear. Do you mind going into what you mean by "post-scarcity" and how we'd achieve it? Does it just mean a living UBI, or is there tech/infrastructure (extensive solar, e.g.) to be developed/built out as well?
  - LesZedCB 10y ago
    we bulldoze away houses, we throw away food. meanwhile, people are homeless and hungry. Clearly we already live in a society of overproduction. The difference is that the owners of the capital aren't willing to lose on their investments, and it's cheaper to bulldoze and throw away than to give it away or provide work maintaining the communities that these properties exist in/on.

matwood 10y ago

Basic income I think is going to have to happen at some point in our lifetime. There are just simply not enough jobs. Please stop saying 'free' tuition. It's not free, it is just not paid by the student. Keep in mind that many states already have just this setup for in state students to use lottery money.

awinder 10y ago
It's also the mode of operation for ages 5-18, with a nation wide avg of 12K / year in spending per student. So that 160k-ish in spending is downright American, but spending 1/4-1/2 of it on college is a give-away, socialism, the very demise of lady liberty
- koolba 10y ago
  Why stop there? Why not have it be open to everyone, forever, at any point of their life? Why should anyone have to work at all?
  - awinder 10y ago
    The scope of someone going to college for say 40 years (from 20-60, for sake of argument) is a lot different than saying 4 years of education should maybe be an institutionalized cost. If you figure: 1. At 12K/year, base education runs a cost of 156K 2. At 20K/year, college education for 4 years runs 80K 3. At 20K/year, college education for 40 years runs 800K Then what we're saying is 80K represents 50% of the educational costs we're all comfortable with sinking into base education. But letting someone never work and just go to college for free for 40 years would cost over 400% of the base educational costs. That seems like a totally different scale of issue to me. We're also probably hitting diminishing returns over what 4 years would prepare someone for, and I don't think the audience is that large. Most people want to go to college to get skills to then contribute something to society, whether or not today's economy specifically values what they want to contribute.
    - koolba 10y ago

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

If we have basic income, why do we need to be educated at all? Just stay home and live minimally.

dragonwriter 10y ago
Because democracy. One of the major reasons we need education now.
Fargren 10y ago
Because self-actualization is a human need and for a lot of people education is a means for that. Because some of us enjoy creating things that are of value to others. Because life is more than survival, basically.
- exclusiv 10y ago
  You may be right on some, but if it was a good idea you would have said most.
  - Fargren 10y ago
    Are we talking about UBI, or about education? Because if it's UBI, what I mentioned was just one of the mechanisms by which it could work. But I honestly don't know if it would. I suspect it would, but we can't know without more research and tests. Human behaviour is too complex to model a priori.
JulianMorrison 10y ago
People like to learn things, if the desire hasn't been regimented out of them and their energy drained to the dregs.

cpursley 10y ago

If someone can just get on Basic Income, why even bother with attending college and putting in all that hard work? This is a serious question. Most people are not intrinsically motivated; the hacker news echo-chamber is an anomaly.

drabiega 10y ago
People always want more. I've met plenty of people who had enough inheritance / other random windfall to just get by who still went to college and careers. If those who get it by random chance or family act as such, why should we assume that those who would get it from Basic Income would be any different?
- msandford 10y ago
  You do realize that you met those people who did get that random windfall because they were working, not because they just took the money and ran, right? Sure you might have met 20 of them. How many haven't you met because you're busy working instead of being where those folks hang out while they're not working?
JulianMorrison 10y ago
Most people ARE intrinsically motivated. It's just that in this society, the things you do for intrinsic motivations are called "hobbies" or "play". Hobbies are basically non-job things to get good at that don't pressure you with an economic sword of Damocles. In a Basic Income world, essentially, ALL jobs are hobbies. Those that suck too hard to be hobbies had better automate.

programmarchy 10y ago

Terrible, dystopian idea. You know education can't be "free", right? Unless you want to enslave educators and force them to work for nothing. In reality, the middle class will have half their income seized to subsidize the dependent class, being worked to the bone in mega corporations. Meanwhile, the elite will reap all the profits and pour them into more social control programs. Result of basic income will be a culture of demoralized serfs, totally dependent on a feudal corporate state for their survival.

tombo2008 10y ago
Mr. Orwell? Big fan - may I have your autograph? :)

wang_li 10y ago

> Basic income. Free tuition. An outright grant, no repayments. Literally zero barriers except ability for anyone, for any level of academic achievement in anything. Result: a culture with a lot more understanding of the real world, and the preservation of human and humane values, rather than a laser focus on the hand-to-mouth of Jobs Right Now. Scarcity is a thing in the real world. We are nowhere near a point where we can produce more than is necessary for everyone to have everything they want at every point in their lifetime. Assuming that's even possible as there are things that are naturally limited. I mean, under the everything is free to everyone model, how do you determine who gets to live in the house on the cliff overlooking the ocean and who gets to live inland surrounded by tract housing?