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That is so depressing. No wonder suicide rates are up. You know there's a difference between "give a man a fish" and "teach a man to fish", but what do you do

That is so depressing. No wonder suicide rates are up. You know there's a difference between "give a man a fish" and "teach a man to fish", but what do you do when the fish are just gone? It was mentioned in the article, but not extensively discussed. I think maybe the largest distinct segment of the economy in ex-coalcountry regions is now pharmaceuticals, legal and illegal. There's the legal root and mushroom hunting, which go into supplements, but a large fraction of the people are growing marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms, collecting sassafras root bark for MDMA cooks, and reselling their prescription opioids, in addition to the older traditions of moonshining and tobacco cigarette smuggling. And everyone is on social security disability. If all you ever knew is coal mining, that's your condition that prevents you from finding gainful employment. If you need to see what happens with bare-bones basic income, that's it. The whole community barely scrapes along, and everyone has to do some niche hustle to earn their gas money a dime at a time. If you threw out the penalty for working, most of those people would be doing something productive, even if it's manufacturing ugly tchotchkes to be sold in a tourist trap, because whatever it is would give them beef in their stew instead of just barely enough gas in the tank to keep going.

tdb7893 9y ago
One good thing about a true basic income is that there wouldn't be conditions for receiving it so it would significantly lessen the penalty for working legitimately (obviously there would still be tax reasons to have income you don't need to report). My hope for basic income is that by simplifying how we give aid it can take out much of the ridiculous bureaucracy of it but I'm obviously no expert
- hpcjoe 9y ago
  The concern I have with this will be inflation. People now have money, sellers can now raise prices. Which eventually gets us right back to where we were. You can give them more money, but then you are accelerating the cycle.
  - lg 9y ago
    sellers who raise prices will need to compete with ones who don't.
    - hpcjoe 9y ago
      And ... how well is that working out in markets like, say, high speed internet (from someone who is struggling to find competitive offerings in a large market near major cities). The point is that sellers may attempt to partition markets to reduce competitive pressure, allowing each to increase their pricing without worrying about being undercut.
      - walshemj 9y ago
        that's because the FCC didn't deregulate the last mile LLU would promote more competition
  - ianai 9y ago
    Not quite. Inflation isn’t the outright awful thing people assume it is. Further, the concept is to give people just enough to survive. That creates demand for only the basics. The basics are largely standardized items. When was the last time there was a shortage in corn, cotton, flour? They’re all commodities. If anything modern prices for these goods and services are likely to be indifferent to the increase in demand from simple basic income. Another example is the cost of additional real estate outside the city. Building costs in rural America are essentially linear with demand. There’s no shortage of land out there and basic income would allow people to live in such areas.
    - hpcjoe 9y ago
      Its not awful over a short term. Over a longer term, it will price commodities out of reach. I've watched milk prices rise dramatically over the last 5 years or so. This is in part due to the costs of production rising, not necessarily the farm margins. These costs of production rise for any number of reasons, but mostly its because rising costs tend to spread out through the economy. [1] My point is that prices will rise and find their time dependent values, in a way that will diminish the purchasing power of those you'd be attempting to help. You give enough so they have some left over, and enterprising groups will realize that they can raise prices to reflect the larger purchasing power. Economics 101 in this case. [1] http://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0212/inflation-and-economic-recovery.aspx http://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0212/inflation-an...
hpcjoe 9y ago
This is replicated all over the rust belt. One of the saddest portrayals of this is the photo essay, The Ruins of Detroit[1]. These once mighty economic engines have been silenced: manufacturing, coal, etc. What happens next is that the people who depend upon these industries to make a living, and live ... do less well of a job of this. Some argue that unions would help (they wouldn't), or anti-globalism would stop factories/industries from moving (maybe temporarily). The sad fact remains that industries are, to a degree, tied to regions, and people grow up depending upon those industries in those regions. Once the industry finds a lower cost mechanism to come to market, those dependent people are cut free. Its the short term, profit focused mindset and all it brings that is a huge part of the problem. Note that I am a staunch capitalist, and I see this. I don't have a solution to this. I wish I did. None of the political parties have anything close to a solution for this. Giving money directly to people may help for a while, but is likely to spark inflation, which will cause this to repeat in a few years. I remember one of the political parties crowing about how they saved the auto industry in Michigan during the last major financial crisis. Funny, as I live there, and I remember one of the people who lives in my sub whose business was destroyed by this "saving" thanks to many long held overdue invoices at one of the car company's being zeroed out, coming to my front door, with his son to ask for help. Food specifically. Foolish policies that do not contemplate consequences for actions, apart from the groups that the politicos favor, help decimate regions like this. Coal is evil as I've heard. And the people who mine it? They are the ones now suffering because, you know, its evil, and coal must die. Every decision, every policy has consequences. There are never any easy solutions. (edits to correct spelling/punctuation errors) [1] http://www.marchandmeffre.com/detroit http://www.marchandmeffre.com/detroit
- javajosh 9y ago
  The good capitalist would say that if a firm moves out of a region, that another firm will happily pounce on all of those experienced, employable workers they left behind! Hiring is hard, so having a big pool of applicants is great! What the good capitalist ignores is the extent to which workers become specialized at the firm, become a cog not shaped correctly for any other firm. Call this lack of fungibility. (It's one reason why company loyalty used to a) be a popular feature, and b) work both ways.) The good capitalist also ignores the fact that the conditions that drove the firm away in the first place will generally drive away other firms, too. Company analysts think in herds. Consider the enormous cost to give up an employed work-force, since acquisition and maintenance cost for a large work-force is high. Why wouldn't a second firm, faced with the same inputs as the first, make the same decision as the first?
ams6110 9y ago
> what do you do when the fish are just gone? Move to where the fish are. The economy isn't terrible everywhere.
- banned1 9y ago
  This is the Hacker News' equivalent comment of "Let them eat cake". I hope things are going well in The Capitol. Where do you suppose they would live? Under a bridge in San Francisco? Unless you are going to host them.
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    Tangentially related, I do a bit of urban/suburban exploring on paths under overpasses or railroad right of ways and nearly every where I have been in California from San Francisco to San Diego there are homeless people living wherever there is a bit of shade.
- hpcjoe 9y ago
  Assume, as the story implies, that they haven't the money to move. Moving costs money. Exactly what should they do? Channeling Marie Antoinette is obviously not the right answer (e.g. moving to the jobs) as they are functionally immobile, and as the article notes, they are disabled. Note: the above question is somewhat rhetorical. There is no real answer, or rather no easy answer. Basic income may help, or it may delay eventual help.
  - iamatworknow 9y ago
    "I'm going to start explaining to people, when you have an area that just isn't working like upper New York state, where people are getting very badly hurt, and then you'll have another area 500 miles away where you can't get people, I'm going to explain, you can leave. It's OK. Don't worry about your house." http://www.timesunion.com/7day-business/article/Trump-says-upstate-New-Yorkers-should-move-leave-11437258.php http://www.timesunion.com/7day-business/article/Trump-says-u...
  - ianai 9y ago
mmirate 9y ago
> If all you ever knew is coal mining, that's your condition that prevents you from finding gainful employment. Why can they not expand their knowledge? And if they truly cannot, then ... What productive purpose can we possibly expect them to have? Or in other words: why should we evaluate them as non-negligible?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- fallingfrog 9y ago
  You know, you should really think about your usage of that word "evaluate". These are people, but you're talking about them in the language that a master might use to discuss the value of a slave- as in, how many dollars do they bring in. What's the value of a bedtime story read to a child? We are all going to die man, life is not about money and profit. Go outside and breathe the fresh air and rethink your life.
  - mmirate 9y ago
    The world is indifferent to people's existence. People will only ever mean something if they accomplish something, not because they're people. Why should I, or anyone, see differently? > What's the value of 1 bedtime story read to a child? Well, if we could perform a large study, starting during the participants' childhood, with half the children read X bedtime stories and the other half read X-1, and could somehow control for every possible source of confounding influence across the participants' entire lifetime, then we could see whether there is a statistically-significant difference in the two groups' distributions of net worth at retirement ... then we could begin to answer that question. (In order to get a complete answer, we would need to repeat that experiment for many different values of X and fit a curve to all the results.) Needless to say, neither you nor I will be alive when that study is published, even if we are alive when that study becomes less-than-impossible to perform. So today we can at 2nd-best say "not enough information", and at best make a slightly-educated guess of "it's likely negligible among all other influences on children". > We are all going to die man, life is not about money and profit. Even if I assume so, my experience is that life utterly sucks without the freedom imbued by money (which, incidentally, is obtained via profit). Yet I also dispute your assertion to the core. Life is most definitely all about money and profit. Because (a) whatever you think life is about ... you will invariably need money to pursue that goal, and (b) unless you're a farmer or hunter or etc., you literally cannot live without it, unless you steal, which is unethical and criminal. (Under some governments, I'll grant, it is possible to not earn one's money; so the "and profit" portion is not as applicable. Still, even in such cases, someone earned it before having it stol- uhh, taxed from them.) Oh, and because you're making this assertion, I can also tell that you have at least some modicum of money and profits; otherwise, you would not find this assertion so easy to make.
Mediterraneo10 9y ago
> And everyone is on social security disability. I spent several years during and after university hitchhiking all around the world. After seeing most of Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa, I had a general idea of what kind of people are driving around during the day. And then I traveled across the USA . It turns out that benefits cheats are a very distinct category there in a way they aren’t a thing in most other countries (even Canada). With so many of my drivers, conversations would go like this: "So, what do you do?" "I’m on disability.” "Are you disabled?" "No, but I fool the government into giving me a cheque". They had nothing better to do during the day than drive around, though I have no idea how how they could afford petrol. > If you threw out the penalty for working... Indeed, basic income might be a better solution. It would let people claim benefits and work. And people would no longer have to be lying and deceitful to get their money; the prevalence of that kind of behaviour must have some spiritual impact on the community and trust in government. On the other hand, unlike certain countries that heavily fund culture in rural areas so that perpetually unemployed people have libraries and theatres and regional chamber orchestras to spend their time at productively, people in the complete cultural vacuum described in the linked article would probably continue to act self-destructively even with basic income.
- thehardsphere 9y ago
  > unlike certain countries that heavily fund culture in rural areas so that perpetually unemployed people have [places] to spend their time at productively Could you cite examples of what countries these are who pursue these policies for the stated objective of giving poor people things to do while not working? I've never heard of this as a policy objective before for subsidizing libraries and "culture", and I am very curious about how well it works.
  - Mediterraneo10 9y ago
    The Nordic countries are good example; look at how many regional orchestras Finland has, for instance. The "stated objective" isn't expressly to give the unemployed something to do; rather, the general idea is that people in the provinces have the right to culture just as much as people in the big cities. But the consequence is that in backwaters where a substantial percentage of people are unemployed, they still have access to healthy activities, and to community gathering places that are non-profit and not centered around drinking.
rgrieselhuber 9y ago
This was indeed a depressing article. It would be interesting to see the data around this phenomenon - how many instances of this are occurring now vs. 10-20-30-40 years ago? Surely globalism is having some measurable impact on the capability of rural populations to find work and make a living. Curious about other factors as well.
- Mediterraneo10 9y ago
  "Surely globalism is having some measurable impact on the capability of rural populations to find work and make a living." Globalism has had a huge, positive impact on the ability of many rural populations to find work by allowing them to no longer be rural populations. Look at how the growth of outsourced manufacturing in China led to the largest migration in human history, as dirt-poor subsistence farmers were able to find better jobs in the cities. Similarly, European integration has allowed people from miserable places in rural Romania or Bulgaria to move to Spain or Germany for better jobs. Even the people who stay in those rural places benefit, because prosperous people in the cities send money back home to their families. I get the impression that in the USA, however, people who have made a good life in the cities don’t send much money back home.
  - rgrieselhuber 9y ago
    Sure, that's great for China and the countries where globalism has positively impacted those rural populations but there isn't much accounting for those populations that are left behind at home.
    - notyourday 9y ago
      That's because rural Chinese or Cambodian makes a lot less than a rural American described in this article.
      - rgrieselhuber 9y ago
        Hence one of the critiques of globalism.
johnvanommen 9y ago
That's a good point. I grew up poor as fuck, and there's a huge set of rules which incentivize poverty. For instance, if the family makes more than a certain amount, you lose health care. So you wind up in a situation where you're basically discouraged from working. I remember going to the dentist when I turned 18, and I was stunned to see the bill. I'd never seen a medical bill in my entire life.

tdb7893 9y ago

One good thing about a true basic income is that there wouldn't be conditions for receiving it so it would significantly lessen the penalty for working legitimately (obviously there would still be tax reasons to have income you don't need to report). My hope for basic income is that by simplifying how we give aid it can take out much of the ridiculous bureaucracy of it but I'm obviously no expert

hpcjoe 9y ago
The concern I have with this will be inflation. People now have money, sellers can now raise prices. Which eventually gets us right back to where we were. You can give them more money, but then you are accelerating the cycle.
- lg 9y ago
  sellers who raise prices will need to compete with ones who don't.
  - hpcjoe 9y ago
    And ... how well is that working out in markets like, say, high speed internet (from someone who is struggling to find competitive offerings in a large market near major cities). The point is that sellers may attempt to partition markets to reduce competitive pressure, allowing each to increase their pricing without worrying about being undercut.
    - walshemj 9y ago
      that's because the FCC didn't deregulate the last mile LLU would promote more competition
- ianai 9y ago
  Not quite. Inflation isn’t the outright awful thing people assume it is. Further, the concept is to give people just enough to survive. That creates demand for only the basics. The basics are largely standardized items. When was the last time there was a shortage in corn, cotton, flour? They’re all commodities. If anything modern prices for these goods and services are likely to be indifferent to the increase in demand from simple basic income. Another example is the cost of additional real estate outside the city. Building costs in rural America are essentially linear with demand. There’s no shortage of land out there and basic income would allow people to live in such areas.
  - hpcjoe 9y ago
    Its not awful over a short term. Over a longer term, it will price commodities out of reach. I've watched milk prices rise dramatically over the last 5 years or so. This is in part due to the costs of production rising, not necessarily the farm margins. These costs of production rise for any number of reasons, but mostly its because rising costs tend to spread out through the economy. [1] My point is that prices will rise and find their time dependent values, in a way that will diminish the purchasing power of those you'd be attempting to help. You give enough so they have some left over, and enterprising groups will realize that they can raise prices to reflect the larger purchasing power. Economics 101 in this case. [1] http://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0212/inflation-and-economic-recovery.aspx http://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0212/inflation-an...

hpcjoe 9y ago

This is replicated all over the rust belt. One of the saddest portrayals of this is the photo essay, The Ruins of Detroit[1]. These once mighty economic engines have been silenced: manufacturing, coal, etc. What happens next is that the people who depend upon these industries to make a living, and live ... do less well of a job of this. Some argue that unions would help (they wouldn't), or anti-globalism would stop factories/industries from moving (maybe temporarily). The sad fact remains that industries are, to a degree, tied to regions, and people grow up depending upon those industries in those regions. Once the industry finds a lower cost mechanism to come to market, those dependent people are cut free. Its the short term, profit focused mindset and all it brings that is a huge part of the problem. Note that I am a staunch capitalist, and I see this. I don't have a solution to this. I wish I did. None of the political parties have anything close to a solution for this. Giving money directly to people may help for a while, but is likely to spark inflation, which will cause this to repeat in a few years. I remember one of the political parties crowing about how they saved the auto industry in Michigan during the last major financial crisis. Funny, as I live there, and I remember one of the people who lives in my sub whose business was destroyed by this "saving" thanks to many long held overdue invoices at one of the car company's being zeroed out, coming to my front door, with his son to ask for help. Food specifically. Foolish policies that do not contemplate consequences for actions, apart from the groups that the politicos favor, help decimate regions like this. Coal is evil as I've heard. And the people who mine it? They are the ones now suffering because, you know, its evil, and coal must die. Every decision, every policy has consequences. There are never any easy solutions. (edits to correct spelling/punctuation errors) [1] http://www.marchandmeffre.com/detroit http://www.marchandmeffre.com/detroit

javajosh 9y ago
The good capitalist would say that if a firm moves out of a region, that another firm will happily pounce on all of those experienced, employable workers they left behind! Hiring is hard, so having a big pool of applicants is great! What the good capitalist ignores is the extent to which workers become specialized at the firm, become a cog not shaped correctly for any other firm. Call this lack of fungibility. (It's one reason why company loyalty used to a) be a popular feature, and b) work both ways.) The good capitalist also ignores the fact that the conditions that drove the firm away in the first place will generally drive away other firms, too. Company analysts think in herds. Consider the enormous cost to give up an employed work-force, since acquisition and maintenance cost for a large work-force is high. Why wouldn't a second firm, faced with the same inputs as the first, make the same decision as the first?

ams6110 9y ago

> what do you do when the fish are just gone? Move to where the fish are. The economy isn't terrible everywhere.

banned1 9y ago
This is the Hacker News' equivalent comment of "Let them eat cake". I hope things are going well in The Capitol. Where do you suppose they would live? Under a bridge in San Francisco? Unless you are going to host them.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  Tangentially related, I do a bit of urban/suburban exploring on paths under overpasses or railroad right of ways and nearly every where I have been in California from San Francisco to San Diego there are homeless people living wherever there is a bit of shade.
hpcjoe 9y ago
Assume, as the story implies, that they haven't the money to move. Moving costs money. Exactly what should they do? Channeling Marie Antoinette is obviously not the right answer (e.g. moving to the jobs) as they are functionally immobile, and as the article notes, they are disabled. Note: the above question is somewhat rhetorical. There is no real answer, or rather no easy answer. Basic income may help, or it may delay eventual help.
- iamatworknow 9y ago
  "I'm going to start explaining to people, when you have an area that just isn't working like upper New York state, where people are getting very badly hurt, and then you'll have another area 500 miles away where you can't get people, I'm going to explain, you can leave. It's OK. Don't worry about your house." http://www.timesunion.com/7day-business/article/Trump-says-upstate-New-Yorkers-should-move-leave-11437258.php http://www.timesunion.com/7day-business/article/Trump-says-u...
- ianai 9y ago

mmirate 9y ago

> If all you ever knew is coal mining, that's your condition that prevents you from finding gainful employment. Why can they not expand their knowledge? And if they truly cannot, then ... What productive purpose can we possibly expect them to have? Or in other words: why should we evaluate them as non-negligible?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
fallingfrog 9y ago
You know, you should really think about your usage of that word "evaluate". These are people, but you're talking about them in the language that a master might use to discuss the value of a slave- as in, how many dollars do they bring in. What's the value of a bedtime story read to a child? We are all going to die man, life is not about money and profit. Go outside and breathe the fresh air and rethink your life.
- mmirate 9y ago
  The world is indifferent to people's existence. People will only ever mean something if they accomplish something, not because they're people. Why should I, or anyone, see differently? > What's the value of 1 bedtime story read to a child? Well, if we could perform a large study, starting during the participants' childhood, with half the children read X bedtime stories and the other half read X-1, and could somehow control for every possible source of confounding influence across the participants' entire lifetime, then we could see whether there is a statistically-significant difference in the two groups' distributions of net worth at retirement ... then we could begin to answer that question. (In order to get a complete answer, we would need to repeat that experiment for many different values of X and fit a curve to all the results.) Needless to say, neither you nor I will be alive when that study is published, even if we are alive when that study becomes less-than-impossible to perform. So today we can at 2nd-best say "not enough information", and at best make a slightly-educated guess of "it's likely negligible among all other influences on children". > We are all going to die man, life is not about money and profit. Even if I assume so, my experience is that life utterly sucks without the freedom imbued by money (which, incidentally, is obtained via profit). Yet I also dispute your assertion to the core. Life is most definitely all about money and profit. Because (a) whatever you think life is about ... you will invariably need money to pursue that goal, and (b) unless you're a farmer or hunter or etc., you literally cannot live without it, unless you steal, which is unethical and criminal. (Under some governments, I'll grant, it is possible to not earn one's money; so the "and profit" portion is not as applicable. Still, even in such cases, someone earned it before having it stol- uhh, taxed from them.) Oh, and because you're making this assertion, I can also tell that you have at least some modicum of money and profits; otherwise, you would not find this assertion so easy to make.

Mediterraneo10 9y ago

> And everyone is on social security disability. I spent several years during and after university hitchhiking all around the world. After seeing most of Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa, I had a general idea of what kind of people are driving around during the day. And then I traveled across the USA . It turns out that benefits cheats are a very distinct category there in a way they aren’t a thing in most other countries (even Canada). With so many of my drivers, conversations would go like this: "So, what do you do?" "I’m on disability.” "Are you disabled?" "No, but I fool the government into giving me a cheque". They had nothing better to do during the day than drive around, though I have no idea how how they could afford petrol. > If you threw out the penalty for working... Indeed, basic income might be a better solution. It would let people claim benefits and work. And people would no longer have to be lying and deceitful to get their money; the prevalence of that kind of behaviour must have some spiritual impact on the community and trust in government. On the other hand, unlike certain countries that heavily fund culture in rural areas so that perpetually unemployed people have libraries and theatres and regional chamber orchestras to spend their time at productively, people in the complete cultural vacuum described in the linked article would probably continue to act self-destructively even with basic income.

thehardsphere 9y ago
> unlike certain countries that heavily fund culture in rural areas so that perpetually unemployed people have [places] to spend their time at productively Could you cite examples of what countries these are who pursue these policies for the stated objective of giving poor people things to do while not working? I've never heard of this as a policy objective before for subsidizing libraries and "culture", and I am very curious about how well it works.
- Mediterraneo10 9y ago
  The Nordic countries are good example; look at how many regional orchestras Finland has, for instance. The "stated objective" isn't expressly to give the unemployed something to do; rather, the general idea is that people in the provinces have the right to culture just as much as people in the big cities. But the consequence is that in backwaters where a substantial percentage of people are unemployed, they still have access to healthy activities, and to community gathering places that are non-profit and not centered around drinking.

rgrieselhuber 9y ago

This was indeed a depressing article. It would be interesting to see the data around this phenomenon - how many instances of this are occurring now vs. 10-20-30-40 years ago? Surely globalism is having some measurable impact on the capability of rural populations to find work and make a living. Curious about other factors as well.

Mediterraneo10 9y ago
"Surely globalism is having some measurable impact on the capability of rural populations to find work and make a living." Globalism has had a huge, positive impact on the ability of many rural populations to find work by allowing them to no longer be rural populations. Look at how the growth of outsourced manufacturing in China led to the largest migration in human history, as dirt-poor subsistence farmers were able to find better jobs in the cities. Similarly, European integration has allowed people from miserable places in rural Romania or Bulgaria to move to Spain or Germany for better jobs. Even the people who stay in those rural places benefit, because prosperous people in the cities send money back home to their families. I get the impression that in the USA, however, people who have made a good life in the cities don’t send much money back home.
- rgrieselhuber 9y ago
  Sure, that's great for China and the countries where globalism has positively impacted those rural populations but there isn't much accounting for those populations that are left behind at home.
  - notyourday 9y ago
    That's because rural Chinese or Cambodian makes a lot less than a rural American described in this article.
    - rgrieselhuber 9y ago
      Hence one of the critiques of globalism.

johnvanommen 9y ago

That's a good point. I grew up poor as fuck, and there's a huge set of rules which incentivize poverty. For instance, if the family makes more than a certain amount, you lose health care. So you wind up in a situation where you're basically discouraged from working. I remember going to the dentist when I turned 18, and I was stunned to see the bill. I'd never seen a medical bill in my entire life.