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"If you consider multi-generational entrenchments of poverty as its own problem, worth serious merit, then the work disincentive could be a disaster." Multi-ge

"If you consider multi-generational entrenchments of poverty as its own problem, worth serious merit, then the work disincentive could be a disaster." Multi-generational entrenchments of poverty are already a disaster, and not because of fuzzy ideas like "instilling a work ethic", but because many millions of people lack the basic material resources needed to fulfill anything close to their potential. A kid watching their parents break their backs as minimum-wage slaves living paycheck to paycheck doesn't prepare them to do anything other than the same thing with their lives.

Aunche 7y ago
> millions of people lack the basic material resources needed to fulfill anything close to their potential There is a limited amount of capital in the world. Distributing it now might help those at home, but it does not help the billion people who still lack electricity. There simply is not enough capital in the world to build trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure for free. Investment is a much better vehicle for distribution than UBI as it also creates wealth.
- danenania 7y ago
  "There is a limited amount of capital in the world." You've already lost me. This is provably false, as any programmer should know: if you sit down and code something useful today, you've just increased the amount of capital in the world. Out of thin air. A carpenter who buys a bunch of lumber and turns it into a thousand-dollar piece of furniture does the same. The more people can learn to add value to the world, and the more value they can add, the bigger the total pie of wealth can grow. Investment distributes wealth primarily from the elite to the slightly-less elite. It doesn't break the cycle of poverty and immediate survival focus that prevents millions and millions of potential Einsteins or Feynmans or Musks from doing anything with their lives other than scraping by.
  - Aunche 7y ago
    I mean that there isn't enough capital to distribute to everyone in the world, not that it's fixed forever. You can grow it. That's my point. It's better to increase capital than redistribute it. > Investment distributes wealth primarily from the elite to the slightly-less elite. If you've seen how China changed in the last couple decades, you'd see how this obviously isn't true. Basically all electronics are manufactured in a developing Asian country by the children of subsidence farmers.
    - danenania 7y ago
      Yeah, so now instead of barely getting by on subsistence farming, they barely get by working 16 hour shifts in dangerous conditions with no rights. While the workers may be mostly better off than they were before, they still have to spend almost all their time and energy on meeting the basic needs of survival. The people who benefitted by far the most from all that investment were the owners, executives, and shareholders of the companies that run the factories. So I would say that distribution of capital was still quite lacking in terms of where it could have the most leverage to increase opportunity.
      - Aunche 7y ago
        People aren't so stupid that they'd do something that completely against their best interests. If you're a subsidence farmer and get sick, you have no means of making enough money to see a doctor. Historically, people didn't care about leisure until they accomplished stability.
        claudiawerner 7y ago
        >People aren't so stupid that they'd do something that completely against their best interests. The world is actually full of such examples. There's quite a bit of work done in psychology and sociology as to why this happens. Often, the move from, for example substinence farming to other jobs is a kind of throffer - and so it was, historically documented, in the 16th and 17th centuries in England, too with the move from rural cottage industry to wide-scale factory production.
- Joeri 7y ago
  UBI doesn’t get stuffed under the mattress, it gets spent, buying electricity, funding investment into electricity networks. Give money to the poor and most of it will end up back at the rich. It doesn’t work as well trickling down.
  - zepto 7y ago
    Since trickling down doesn’t work, if UBI doesn’t work either, we need a new proposal.
  - EthanHeilman 7y ago
    Trickle up economics?
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    The money to pay for UBI doesn't come from a mattress, either. It comes out of money that was invested.
  - Aunche 7y ago
    Money will eventually circulate everywhere, but it's a matter of efficiency. This is an immense simplification, but to illustrate the intuition, consider 2 options: 1. Apple spends $10 million dollars to build a factory in a developing country. This creates 2,000 jobs over a couple years. These people can finally afford to see a doctor and heat up their homes during the winter. 2. Apple gets taxed $10 million that funds 1000 people's UBI. Their lives are somewhat less stressful. There is a higher demand for Iphones, so Apple can charge a bit more money for them. After a decade, they are able to open an additional factory. However, within that decade, 100 people in that developing country died of a disease that would be easily cured with medicine had they had they been able to work at the factory 10 years ago.
YinglingLight 7y ago
You neglect any psychological effects of Scarcity Mentality, entitlement, and avoidance of responsibility for one's life situation. It is far less a resource problem than you would suggest.
luckylion 7y ago
Multi-generational poverty is a thing in Western + Northern Europe as well, so it may be something other than the US model.
commandlinefan 7y ago
> doesn't prepare them to do anything Wait, what? I mean, I guess that just watching your parents work doesn’t “prepare” you for work any more than watching TV does, but that’s because it’s completely unrelated. Watching your parents go to high-powered executive jobs doesn’t “prepare” you for work in the 21st century either, education does. My father was a police officer (they don’t make much money) and my mother stayed home with us - they both encouraged us to study so we could do better than they did. Watching my father go off to a dangerous job every day didn’t “prepare” me for work, but it did help me grow up with a sense of “work is part of adult life” that I wouldn’t have gotten if he’d spent every day watching TV and drinking beer.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  Watching your parents handle a high-powered executive job very much does prepare you for work in the 21st century - a certain kind of work, anyway.
  - pault 7y ago
    I grew up poor in a very wealthy suburb and went to high school with a lot of children of high powered executives and attorneys. In my experience they were in no way prepared for the real world, unless by prepared you mean living with zero parental guidance and no sense of the value of money.
- danenania 7y ago
  "they both encouraged us to study so we could do better than they did" And the parents who do this are not the ones who will sit home and drink beer all day just because they're getting a $2k/mo basic income. Instead, they could go back to school, or start a business, or travel outside the country once in awhile, or spend more time teaching their kids an important skill like music or math or programming because the intense, ceaseless, soul-destroying pressure of just getting by has been lifted a bit. Also, while I understand that police officers don't make a lot and it's very tough job, it's also a very stable job with benefits, a pension, etc. so I imagine that despite not being anywhere close to wealthy, your parents also didn't need to spend their days focused solely on survival like someone who works minimum wage with no job security, who has possibly no health insurance, who likely has to frequently get high interest payday loans to make rent or buy food... that kind of lifestyle is extremely difficult to dig out of, and it leads inevitably towards family breakdown, crime, health-destroying habits, mental illness, and general despair. That's who basic income is really for. I mean these people are literally killing themselves just to get by, and the response of many folks with far more privilege is "eh, you'd just be sitting around drinking beer otherwise".
easytiger 7y ago
> A kid watching their parents break their backs as minimum-wage slaves living paycheck to paycheck doesn't prepare them to do anything other than the same thing with their lives. I'm sorry but you don't have the first clue. Plenty of immigrant families leave low opportunity nation states and work what you consider demeaning work whilst taking steps to ensure their children seek more aspirational jobs and careers.
- danenania 7y ago
  Some do, but it's a small percentage. Many more struggle their whole lives to survive without being able to make any significant improvement to their family's economic status.
  - refurb 7y ago
    It's not a small percentage. 43% of children born into the bottom quintile (bottom 20%) remain in that bottom quintile as adults.
    - danenania 7y ago
      Posting statistics without a source or context isn't very helpful. Though I have no idea where you got it from, or whether it refers to one country or the whole world, getting out of the bottom 20% and ending up the in the bottom 30%, for example, would still leave you in a situation where you're struggling to get by in most countries in the world. Which is why this doesn't contribute much without more context. Edit: found it - https://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_assets/2012/pursuingamericandreampdf.pdf https://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_a... It's quite interesting that you left out the very next phrase, cutting off your quote in the middle of a sentence: "Forty-three percent of Americans raised in the bottom quintile remain stuck in the bottom as adults, and 70 percent remain below the middle." Also, right above that is: "Americans raised at the bottom and top of the family income ladder are likely to remain there as adults, a phenomenon known as 'stickiness at the ends'." No wonder you didn't post a link.
whiddershins 7y ago
If you knew why multi-generational poverty existed you would win a Nobel Prize and who knows what else. No one has been able to figure this out so far, and what you wrote above is not necessarily even a good description of what multi-generational poverty looks like.
- danenania 7y ago
  Well, given that UBI studies have been promising so far (despite their limitations), there seems to be a decent chance that quite a lot of multi-generational poverty is primarily caused by... multi-generational poverty, meaning it's a self-reinforcing cycle that's difficult for people to escape. Or in other words: when you're broke, it's really hard to build wealth, so you're likely to stay broke. Perhaps it's an over-simplification, or perhaps a lot of people have been over-complicating the problem, particularly when they're trying to prop up a pet political bias. If we implement UBI on a large scale and it drastically increases upward mobility, I suppose this hypothesis will be more or less proven. I hope that day comes sooner rather than later so we can find out.

Aunche 7y ago

> millions of people lack the basic material resources needed to fulfill anything close to their potential There is a limited amount of capital in the world. Distributing it now might help those at home, but it does not help the billion people who still lack electricity. There simply is not enough capital in the world to build trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure for free. Investment is a much better vehicle for distribution than UBI as it also creates wealth.

danenania 7y ago
"There is a limited amount of capital in the world." You've already lost me. This is provably false, as any programmer should know: if you sit down and code something useful today, you've just increased the amount of capital in the world. Out of thin air. A carpenter who buys a bunch of lumber and turns it into a thousand-dollar piece of furniture does the same. The more people can learn to add value to the world, and the more value they can add, the bigger the total pie of wealth can grow. Investment distributes wealth primarily from the elite to the slightly-less elite. It doesn't break the cycle of poverty and immediate survival focus that prevents millions and millions of potential Einsteins or Feynmans or Musks from doing anything with their lives other than scraping by.
- Aunche 7y ago
  I mean that there isn't enough capital to distribute to everyone in the world, not that it's fixed forever. You can grow it. That's my point. It's better to increase capital than redistribute it. > Investment distributes wealth primarily from the elite to the slightly-less elite. If you've seen how China changed in the last couple decades, you'd see how this obviously isn't true. Basically all electronics are manufactured in a developing Asian country by the children of subsidence farmers.
  - danenania 7y ago
    Yeah, so now instead of barely getting by on subsistence farming, they barely get by working 16 hour shifts in dangerous conditions with no rights. While the workers may be mostly better off than they were before, they still have to spend almost all their time and energy on meeting the basic needs of survival. The people who benefitted by far the most from all that investment were the owners, executives, and shareholders of the companies that run the factories. So I would say that distribution of capital was still quite lacking in terms of where it could have the most leverage to increase opportunity.
    - Aunche 7y ago
      People aren't so stupid that they'd do something that completely against their best interests. If you're a subsidence farmer and get sick, you have no means of making enough money to see a doctor. Historically, people didn't care about leisure until they accomplished stability.
      - claudiawerner 7y ago
        >People aren't so stupid that they'd do something that completely against their best interests. The world is actually full of such examples. There's quite a bit of work done in psychology and sociology as to why this happens. Often, the move from, for example substinence farming to other jobs is a kind of throffer - and so it was, historically documented, in the 16th and 17th centuries in England, too with the move from rural cottage industry to wide-scale factory production.
Joeri 7y ago
UBI doesn’t get stuffed under the mattress, it gets spent, buying electricity, funding investment into electricity networks. Give money to the poor and most of it will end up back at the rich. It doesn’t work as well trickling down.
- zepto 7y ago
  Since trickling down doesn’t work, if UBI doesn’t work either, we need a new proposal.
- EthanHeilman 7y ago
  Trickle up economics?
- WalterBright 7y ago
  The money to pay for UBI doesn't come from a mattress, either. It comes out of money that was invested.
- Aunche 7y ago
  Money will eventually circulate everywhere, but it's a matter of efficiency. This is an immense simplification, but to illustrate the intuition, consider 2 options: 1. Apple spends $10 million dollars to build a factory in a developing country. This creates 2,000 jobs over a couple years. These people can finally afford to see a doctor and heat up their homes during the winter. 2. Apple gets taxed $10 million that funds 1000 people's UBI. Their lives are somewhat less stressful. There is a higher demand for Iphones, so Apple can charge a bit more money for them. After a decade, they are able to open an additional factory. However, within that decade, 100 people in that developing country died of a disease that would be easily cured with medicine had they had they been able to work at the factory 10 years ago.

YinglingLight 7y ago

You neglect any psychological effects of Scarcity Mentality, entitlement, and avoidance of responsibility for one's life situation. It is far less a resource problem than you would suggest.

luckylion 7y ago

Multi-generational poverty is a thing in Western + Northern Europe as well, so it may be something other than the US model.

commandlinefan 7y ago

> doesn't prepare them to do anything Wait, what? I mean, I guess that just watching your parents work doesn’t “prepare” you for work any more than watching TV does, but that’s because it’s completely unrelated. Watching your parents go to high-powered executive jobs doesn’t “prepare” you for work in the 21st century either, education does. My father was a police officer (they don’t make much money) and my mother stayed home with us - they both encouraged us to study so we could do better than they did. Watching my father go off to a dangerous job every day didn’t “prepare” me for work, but it did help me grow up with a sense of “work is part of adult life” that I wouldn’t have gotten if he’d spent every day watching TV and drinking beer.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
Watching your parents handle a high-powered executive job very much does prepare you for work in the 21st century - a certain kind of work, anyway.
- pault 7y ago
  I grew up poor in a very wealthy suburb and went to high school with a lot of children of high powered executives and attorneys. In my experience they were in no way prepared for the real world, unless by prepared you mean living with zero parental guidance and no sense of the value of money.
danenania 7y ago
"they both encouraged us to study so we could do better than they did" And the parents who do this are not the ones who will sit home and drink beer all day just because they're getting a $2k/mo basic income. Instead, they could go back to school, or start a business, or travel outside the country once in awhile, or spend more time teaching their kids an important skill like music or math or programming because the intense, ceaseless, soul-destroying pressure of just getting by has been lifted a bit. Also, while I understand that police officers don't make a lot and it's very tough job, it's also a very stable job with benefits, a pension, etc. so I imagine that despite not being anywhere close to wealthy, your parents also didn't need to spend their days focused solely on survival like someone who works minimum wage with no job security, who has possibly no health insurance, who likely has to frequently get high interest payday loans to make rent or buy food... that kind of lifestyle is extremely difficult to dig out of, and it leads inevitably towards family breakdown, crime, health-destroying habits, mental illness, and general despair. That's who basic income is really for. I mean these people are literally killing themselves just to get by, and the response of many folks with far more privilege is "eh, you'd just be sitting around drinking beer otherwise".

easytiger 7y ago

> A kid watching their parents break their backs as minimum-wage slaves living paycheck to paycheck doesn't prepare them to do anything other than the same thing with their lives. I'm sorry but you don't have the first clue. Plenty of immigrant families leave low opportunity nation states and work what you consider demeaning work whilst taking steps to ensure their children seek more aspirational jobs and careers.

danenania 7y ago
Some do, but it's a small percentage. Many more struggle their whole lives to survive without being able to make any significant improvement to their family's economic status.
- refurb 7y ago
  It's not a small percentage. 43% of children born into the bottom quintile (bottom 20%) remain in that bottom quintile as adults.
  - danenania 7y ago
    Posting statistics without a source or context isn't very helpful. Though I have no idea where you got it from, or whether it refers to one country or the whole world, getting out of the bottom 20% and ending up the in the bottom 30%, for example, would still leave you in a situation where you're struggling to get by in most countries in the world. Which is why this doesn't contribute much without more context. Edit: found it - https://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_assets/2012/pursuingamericandreampdf.pdf https://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_a... It's quite interesting that you left out the very next phrase, cutting off your quote in the middle of a sentence: "Forty-three percent of Americans raised in the bottom quintile remain stuck in the bottom as adults, and 70 percent remain below the middle." Also, right above that is: "Americans raised at the bottom and top of the family income ladder are likely to remain there as adults, a phenomenon known as 'stickiness at the ends'." No wonder you didn't post a link.

whiddershins 7y ago

If you knew why multi-generational poverty existed you would win a Nobel Prize and who knows what else. No one has been able to figure this out so far, and what you wrote above is not necessarily even a good description of what multi-generational poverty looks like.

danenania 7y ago
Well, given that UBI studies have been promising so far (despite their limitations), there seems to be a decent chance that quite a lot of multi-generational poverty is primarily caused by... multi-generational poverty, meaning it's a self-reinforcing cycle that's difficult for people to escape. Or in other words: when you're broke, it's really hard to build wealth, so you're likely to stay broke. Perhaps it's an over-simplification, or perhaps a lot of people have been over-complicating the problem, particularly when they're trying to prop up a pet political bias. If we implement UBI on a large scale and it drastically increases upward mobility, I suppose this hypothesis will be more or less proven. I hope that day comes sooner rather than later so we can find out.