7 ms·

Everybody should be you, if possible. Having enough savings to be able not to worry about the nearest future is not just a perfect option, it's a necessity.

nicoburns 6y ago
Unfortunately it's not a realistic option for most people. If we're talking about "shoulds", then we should have a welfare state that covers these scenarios rather than putting the burden on individuals, many of whom will not have the means to implement it even if they wanted to.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  I'm inclined to agree, but I do wonder how we avoid people just adjusting their risk threshold to account for the welfare state. I know it seems to work in other places, but I'm not convinced that what works in Scandinavia (or wherever) will work in the US. It seems like the US has a lot of other problems that it needs to sort out in order to be in the same ballpark as these model countries with respect to successful government programs. Notably, our bureaucracy seems distinctly ineffective and incompetent, our body politic is highly divided, and our media apparatus optimizes for divisiveness and misinformation (maybe some or all of these are common problems among countries that have strong safety nets, I really don't know). This isn't to say we must sort out our government competence, etc before implementing a stronger social safety net, but I do wish we at least tried to solve for these problems in tandem with other policy issues.
  - claudeganon 6y ago
    Maybe if we had a functioning welfare state, the government would be encouraged to respond to a pandemic appropriately so as not to overwhelm its resources. Scandinavia seems to be doing better than the US at the moment. As it stands, it looks like the US is using its lack of a social floor to force people back to work under unsafe conditions, regardless of whether that’s rational or necessary, which will result in masses of unnecessary injuries and deaths.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      This is true in the same way that if a homeless person had a million dollars he might not be homeless. The trick is how to get a functioning welfare state when your government is fundamentally broken. Note that the even the CDC failed spectacularly at its primary job; its literal raison d'etre. You can criticize that the CDC lacked funding, but that is wrong[^1] and it misses the point: not being able to properly fund our agencies is itself evidence (if not proof) of government incompetence. [^1]: Procuring masks and other PPE or even planning for a supply chain shortage is the cheapest, most impactful thing they could have done even without the benefit of hindsight (we knew from previous epidemics like SARS and MURS that the most likely epidemic would be respiratory in nature). Similarly, it's cheap enough to plan for standardized outbreak data collection and reporting (we should have known right away how many confirmed cases, deaths, recoveries, and tests we had in every locale). Similarly, we should have also had plans for scaling out testing capability. We also shouldn't have rolled our own (fallible, time consuming) tests if we were cash strapped--we should have used the WHO tests. Planning is relatively cheap and by all appearances the CDC didn't do it at all.
      - fzeroracer 6y ago
        > You can criticize that the CDC lacked funding, but that is wrong[^1] and it misses the point: not being able to properly fund our agencies is itself evidence (if not proof) of government incompetence. I'm not sure how this works out, considering we have one party whose entire stated goal is to defund the government and reduce government size. They are also the ones pulling the levers right now and have admitted over and over again to slash-and-burn styles of governing. Our government is fundamentally broken because we elect people who break the government and then say it's broken, so we need less of it. > Similarly, we should have also had plans for scaling out testing capability. We also shouldn't have rolled our own (fallible, time consuming) tests if we were cash strapped--we should have used the WHO tests. Planning is relatively cheap and by all appearances the CDC didn't do it at all. We had a pandemic response team and the previous admin did make plans in case of a future pandemic. Our current one decided to toss most of that out and downsize said response team. Additionally the US Government was literally seizing masks and undermining the CDC every step of the way.
  - majormajor 6y ago
    > I'm inclined to agree, but I do wonder how we avoid people just adjusting their risk threshold to account for the welfare state. Which direction are you picturing this going? I would be a lot more flexible in what jobs I would take, what things I would consider doing with my life (starting my own company, taking time off and pursuing some sort of artistic side project...) if I had a good health care safety net. So that adjustment to my risk tolerance would be good if you're pro-entrepreneurship or pro-arts, but bad if you're pro-giant-faceless-companies-that-can-treat-employees-like-crap.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      I was specifically concerned that people would take unproductive risks. Worse business investments, having children outside of an unstable family situation more often, etc. But your point is a good one; my concern could be unfounded and maybe people would be more productive? I genuinely don't know. One question I would have about your model is how it stacks up against countries with strong social safety nets? Do they tend to be more entrepreneurial as your model predicts? If not, why not? Note that while by certain measures, those countries tend to be less productive than the US, I don't necessarily think that comes down to welfare, and in either case I don't think it's an awful thing to be somewhat less productive. I would personally like to work less.
      - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
        > Worse business investments, having children outside of an unstable family situation more People do this regardless.
        throwaway894345 6y ago
        We don’t know that they would do it in equal distributions, and it stands to reason that more people would take worse risks if they had less to lose.
  - rebuilder 6y ago
    As I see it, the welfare state model has the benefit of moving towards maximizing the potential of each individual. If you have free education and a strong safety net, you can take a lot of risks in terms of career choice without even realizing it, and never be worse off for it. The 'individual responsibility' model of states like the USA seems to be more based on blunt acceptance of the idea that someone needs to take out the trash and tend the lawns, and that gets too expensive if people have a choice in whether or not they want to do manual labour.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      It’s not a scheme to make anyone do anything. Notably most Americans take out their own trash and tend their own lawns. It’s more to do with individualism and independence (quite the opposite of a scheme to force people to do manual labor)—the belief that the government has no right to take your money and redistribute it to others. That’s the philosophy, anyway. In my view this hasn’t held up well in practice and we need to move toward a more socialized society, but we also need to reform our government agencies so they are competent to perform these social services. Lastly I’ll say that manual labor isn’t stigmatized in the US as it is in the UK and other parts of the commonwealth). People are pretty proud of their humble roots (I’m from a working class family and I would never think to be embarrassed of that in most parts of the US). Further, many skilled labor jobs in the US pay comparably to engineering jobs in the UK. The highest figure I found for average software engineering salary in the UK is 48000 GBP which comes out to $60K, which is the average salary for a plumber (https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/plumber-salary https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/plumber-sal...) or an electrician (https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/electrician/salary https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/electrician/salar...) in the US. The average salary for a general contractor is $90K (https://www.indeed.com/career/general-contractor/salaries https://www.indeed.com/career/general-contractor/salaries). For an HVAC repair technician, $70K (https://www1.salary.com/HVAC-Salary.html https://www1.salary.com/HVAC-Salary.html). Arguably these positions won’t have the same quality of health insurance and they’ll be working ~10% more than our UK SWE, but they’re not making bad money by UK standards even after adjusting for healthcare and hours worked, and they’re making great money by UK standards when you factor in cost of living differences.
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    Um, I'm not sure it's easy at all for people to live as precariously as they do in the US now with a decent safety net. Imagine a UBI that pays a smidgen every 10 seconds: how does one emulate living "paycheck to paycheck" that way? You'd have to be pretty clever to emulate that.
    - nybble41 6y ago
      > Imagine a UBI that pays a smidgen every 10 seconds: how does one emulate living "paycheck to paycheck" that way? It's not that difficult. You just take out a big interest-only loan with payments exactly equal to your UBI. The process doesn't change significantly just because you're getting paid every 10 seconds rather than once per week: the money is already promised to someone else before you even receive it.
- devtul 6y ago
  There is no avoiding personal responsibility, we give power to bureaucrats to run some stuff for us but you can't solely rely on their judgment. Unless we are talking about the helpless and inept in our society, then I agree with you.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
  It's not "should" in the sense of some moral obligation, but rather your main aim in life: once it's realized, you can move on to realizing other aims. Of sourse many people really can't do it. But there are many who can but choose short-term gratification instead. I'm telling them: you're making a big mistake.
- deevolution 6y ago
  A welfare state isn't necessary if people save aggressively like in Singapore. People are actually required to save something like 35% of their income and their employers have to contribute an additional 15%. Some welfare exists but only for special circumstances like for the needy or disabled. Simply telling people to save more wouldn't cut it in America. If we end welfare like the Republicans want, I think we would need a government mandated savings rate or employment matching program similar to Singapore. We also need to go back to a gold standard and end inflationary fiat money - this is exactly why people dont have a rainy day fund / have no incentives to save in the first place. Its left the individual and the family vulnerable, fragile, and it has lowered our time horizons and corrupted our institutions and increased our dependence on the government.
  - jschwartzi 6y ago
    You're basically replacing an insurance program that everyone pays into with safety guarantees with a savings account that each individual pays into with zero guarantees and each individual now has to know how to save enough for themselves, oh and the government will take some of your money if you don't save enough of it. I can't imagine anything more regressive. The entire purpose of the Federal Reserve is to ensure our economy devalues our savings at about 5% a year. So every year those of us required to save are losing money to the people who have easy access to credit. And like every "plan" in this country it will be 100% based on W-2 income meaning the extremely rich won't ever be affected by it, just like they're not affected by insurance costs or social security insurance.
  - peruvian 6y ago
    We can't even suggest people wear masks without them saying we're taking their freedom away. Not way we're forcing people to save money.
  - tschwimmer 6y ago
    I don't think anyone's in favor of rampant money supply expansion like we've seen over the past decade or so, but I think you have to ignore or disagree with some pretty basic conclusions to be in favor of returning to the gold standard. Despite the potential negative effects, printing money seems to be effective in staving off the most severe effects of economic downturns. Evidence from 2008 and the coronavirus stimulus seems clear - you can fairly effectively prop up employment and demand without driving up inflation too badly. And yes, I'm aware that the way that official inflation is measured is bad - but is it really terrible? Technology is definitely under-measured but it's also still relatively cheap. You can get a decent laptop that will last a few years for a couple hundred bucks. You can get Netflix or other streaming service that's very arguably better than for $100 a year. Healthcare and real estate are super jacked up (and maybe education) are super jacked up, but that's arguably due more to terrible policy and a fundamentally limited supply (God isn't making more land in Manhattan). In theory MMT[0] sounds like this shady conspiracy to force the working man to buy more Coca Cola and Ford Trucks but in practice it turns out that unemployment is very painful and inflation isn't. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory
- ufmace 6y ago
  It might be nice to have a strong welfare state that covered all possible scenarios. The problem is that it is fundamentally incompatible with the open-borders immigration that seems to be all the rage with some these days. Promise free money for nothing, and billions of third-worlders will be beating down your door. We might be able to afford something like that for all current citizens. We'll never be able to afford it for every single person who figures out a way to come to our shores. This means that you have to choose one or the other. Both ways have people who lose, and it won't be pretty for them.
thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
What happens if everyone uses it at the same time?

nicoburns 6y ago

Unfortunately it's not a realistic option for most people. If we're talking about "shoulds", then we should have a welfare state that covers these scenarios rather than putting the burden on individuals, many of whom will not have the means to implement it even if they wanted to.

throwaway894345 6y ago
I'm inclined to agree, but I do wonder how we avoid people just adjusting their risk threshold to account for the welfare state. I know it seems to work in other places, but I'm not convinced that what works in Scandinavia (or wherever) will work in the US. It seems like the US has a lot of other problems that it needs to sort out in order to be in the same ballpark as these model countries with respect to successful government programs. Notably, our bureaucracy seems distinctly ineffective and incompetent, our body politic is highly divided, and our media apparatus optimizes for divisiveness and misinformation (maybe some or all of these are common problems among countries that have strong safety nets, I really don't know). This isn't to say we must sort out our government competence, etc before implementing a stronger social safety net, but I do wish we at least tried to solve for these problems in tandem with other policy issues.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  Maybe if we had a functioning welfare state, the government would be encouraged to respond to a pandemic appropriately so as not to overwhelm its resources. Scandinavia seems to be doing better than the US at the moment. As it stands, it looks like the US is using its lack of a social floor to force people back to work under unsafe conditions, regardless of whether that’s rational or necessary, which will result in masses of unnecessary injuries and deaths.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    This is true in the same way that if a homeless person had a million dollars he might not be homeless. The trick is how to get a functioning welfare state when your government is fundamentally broken. Note that the even the CDC failed spectacularly at its primary job; its literal raison d'etre. You can criticize that the CDC lacked funding, but that is wrong[^1] and it misses the point: not being able to properly fund our agencies is itself evidence (if not proof) of government incompetence. [^1]: Procuring masks and other PPE or even planning for a supply chain shortage is the cheapest, most impactful thing they could have done even without the benefit of hindsight (we knew from previous epidemics like SARS and MURS that the most likely epidemic would be respiratory in nature). Similarly, it's cheap enough to plan for standardized outbreak data collection and reporting (we should have known right away how many confirmed cases, deaths, recoveries, and tests we had in every locale). Similarly, we should have also had plans for scaling out testing capability. We also shouldn't have rolled our own (fallible, time consuming) tests if we were cash strapped--we should have used the WHO tests. Planning is relatively cheap and by all appearances the CDC didn't do it at all.
    - fzeroracer 6y ago
      > You can criticize that the CDC lacked funding, but that is wrong[^1] and it misses the point: not being able to properly fund our agencies is itself evidence (if not proof) of government incompetence. I'm not sure how this works out, considering we have one party whose entire stated goal is to defund the government and reduce government size. They are also the ones pulling the levers right now and have admitted over and over again to slash-and-burn styles of governing. Our government is fundamentally broken because we elect people who break the government and then say it's broken, so we need less of it. > Similarly, we should have also had plans for scaling out testing capability. We also shouldn't have rolled our own (fallible, time consuming) tests if we were cash strapped--we should have used the WHO tests. Planning is relatively cheap and by all appearances the CDC didn't do it at all. We had a pandemic response team and the previous admin did make plans in case of a future pandemic. Our current one decided to toss most of that out and downsize said response team. Additionally the US Government was literally seizing masks and undermining the CDC every step of the way.
- majormajor 6y ago
  > I'm inclined to agree, but I do wonder how we avoid people just adjusting their risk threshold to account for the welfare state. Which direction are you picturing this going? I would be a lot more flexible in what jobs I would take, what things I would consider doing with my life (starting my own company, taking time off and pursuing some sort of artistic side project...) if I had a good health care safety net. So that adjustment to my risk tolerance would be good if you're pro-entrepreneurship or pro-arts, but bad if you're pro-giant-faceless-companies-that-can-treat-employees-like-crap.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    I was specifically concerned that people would take unproductive risks. Worse business investments, having children outside of an unstable family situation more often, etc. But your point is a good one; my concern could be unfounded and maybe people would be more productive? I genuinely don't know. One question I would have about your model is how it stacks up against countries with strong social safety nets? Do they tend to be more entrepreneurial as your model predicts? If not, why not? Note that while by certain measures, those countries tend to be less productive than the US, I don't necessarily think that comes down to welfare, and in either case I don't think it's an awful thing to be somewhat less productive. I would personally like to work less.
    - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
      > Worse business investments, having children outside of an unstable family situation more People do this regardless.
      - throwaway894345 6y ago
        We don’t know that they would do it in equal distributions, and it stands to reason that more people would take worse risks if they had less to lose.
- rebuilder 6y ago
  As I see it, the welfare state model has the benefit of moving towards maximizing the potential of each individual. If you have free education and a strong safety net, you can take a lot of risks in terms of career choice without even realizing it, and never be worse off for it. The 'individual responsibility' model of states like the USA seems to be more based on blunt acceptance of the idea that someone needs to take out the trash and tend the lawns, and that gets too expensive if people have a choice in whether or not they want to do manual labour.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    It’s not a scheme to make anyone do anything. Notably most Americans take out their own trash and tend their own lawns. It’s more to do with individualism and independence (quite the opposite of a scheme to force people to do manual labor)—the belief that the government has no right to take your money and redistribute it to others. That’s the philosophy, anyway. In my view this hasn’t held up well in practice and we need to move toward a more socialized society, but we also need to reform our government agencies so they are competent to perform these social services. Lastly I’ll say that manual labor isn’t stigmatized in the US as it is in the UK and other parts of the commonwealth). People are pretty proud of their humble roots (I’m from a working class family and I would never think to be embarrassed of that in most parts of the US). Further, many skilled labor jobs in the US pay comparably to engineering jobs in the UK. The highest figure I found for average software engineering salary in the UK is 48000 GBP which comes out to $60K, which is the average salary for a plumber (https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/plumber-salary https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/plumber-sal...) or an electrician (https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/electrician/salary https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/electrician/salar...) in the US. The average salary for a general contractor is $90K (https://www.indeed.com/career/general-contractor/salaries https://www.indeed.com/career/general-contractor/salaries). For an HVAC repair technician, $70K (https://www1.salary.com/HVAC-Salary.html https://www1.salary.com/HVAC-Salary.html). Arguably these positions won’t have the same quality of health insurance and they’ll be working ~10% more than our UK SWE, but they’re not making bad money by UK standards even after adjusting for healthcare and hours worked, and they’re making great money by UK standards when you factor in cost of living differences.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  Um, I'm not sure it's easy at all for people to live as precariously as they do in the US now with a decent safety net. Imagine a UBI that pays a smidgen every 10 seconds: how does one emulate living "paycheck to paycheck" that way? You'd have to be pretty clever to emulate that.
  - nybble41 6y ago
    > Imagine a UBI that pays a smidgen every 10 seconds: how does one emulate living "paycheck to paycheck" that way? It's not that difficult. You just take out a big interest-only loan with payments exactly equal to your UBI. The process doesn't change significantly just because you're getting paid every 10 seconds rather than once per week: the money is already promised to someone else before you even receive it.
devtul 6y ago
There is no avoiding personal responsibility, we give power to bureaucrats to run some stuff for us but you can't solely rely on their judgment. Unless we are talking about the helpless and inept in our society, then I agree with you.
dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
It's not "should" in the sense of some moral obligation, but rather your main aim in life: once it's realized, you can move on to realizing other aims. Of sourse many people really can't do it. But there are many who can but choose short-term gratification instead. I'm telling them: you're making a big mistake.
deevolution 6y ago
A welfare state isn't necessary if people save aggressively like in Singapore. People are actually required to save something like 35% of their income and their employers have to contribute an additional 15%. Some welfare exists but only for special circumstances like for the needy or disabled. Simply telling people to save more wouldn't cut it in America. If we end welfare like the Republicans want, I think we would need a government mandated savings rate or employment matching program similar to Singapore. We also need to go back to a gold standard and end inflationary fiat money - this is exactly why people dont have a rainy day fund / have no incentives to save in the first place. Its left the individual and the family vulnerable, fragile, and it has lowered our time horizons and corrupted our institutions and increased our dependence on the government.
- jschwartzi 6y ago
  You're basically replacing an insurance program that everyone pays into with safety guarantees with a savings account that each individual pays into with zero guarantees and each individual now has to know how to save enough for themselves, oh and the government will take some of your money if you don't save enough of it. I can't imagine anything more regressive. The entire purpose of the Federal Reserve is to ensure our economy devalues our savings at about 5% a year. So every year those of us required to save are losing money to the people who have easy access to credit. And like every "plan" in this country it will be 100% based on W-2 income meaning the extremely rich won't ever be affected by it, just like they're not affected by insurance costs or social security insurance.
- peruvian 6y ago
  We can't even suggest people wear masks without them saying we're taking their freedom away. Not way we're forcing people to save money.
- tschwimmer 6y ago
  I don't think anyone's in favor of rampant money supply expansion like we've seen over the past decade or so, but I think you have to ignore or disagree with some pretty basic conclusions to be in favor of returning to the gold standard. Despite the potential negative effects, printing money seems to be effective in staving off the most severe effects of economic downturns. Evidence from 2008 and the coronavirus stimulus seems clear - you can fairly effectively prop up employment and demand without driving up inflation too badly. And yes, I'm aware that the way that official inflation is measured is bad - but is it really terrible? Technology is definitely under-measured but it's also still relatively cheap. You can get a decent laptop that will last a few years for a couple hundred bucks. You can get Netflix or other streaming service that's very arguably better than for $100 a year. Healthcare and real estate are super jacked up (and maybe education) are super jacked up, but that's arguably due more to terrible policy and a fundamentally limited supply (God isn't making more land in Manhattan). In theory MMT[0] sounds like this shady conspiracy to force the working man to buy more Coca Cola and Ford Trucks but in practice it turns out that unemployment is very painful and inflation isn't. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory
ufmace 6y ago
It might be nice to have a strong welfare state that covered all possible scenarios. The problem is that it is fundamentally incompatible with the open-borders immigration that seems to be all the rage with some these days. Promise free money for nothing, and billions of third-worlders will be beating down your door. We might be able to afford something like that for all current citizens. We'll never be able to afford it for every single person who figures out a way to come to our shores. This means that you have to choose one or the other. Both ways have people who lose, and it won't be pretty for them.

thrwyoilarticle 6y ago

What happens if everyone uses it at the same time?