8 ms·
> You can reduce poverty by giving people money ... until you run out.
by commandlinefan 6y ago
> You can reduce poverty by giving people money
... until you run out.
- bioinformatics 6y agoWhen everything is free, nothing is. Some people have no understanding that infinite money doesn't mean infinite problems in the end. At some point in time, someone will pay the bill.
- shakezula 6y agoYeah but no one is saying to give people infinite money? Poverty is expensive, and it’s cheaper in the medium term to house homeless for free and get them on track to paying taxes again than to let them run up hospital bills for preventable injuries or illnesses.
- AnHonestComment 6y agoIs there good evidence for this? My experience with “housing first” programs is the buildings end up destroyed and we pay indefinitely to rebuild them while almost none of the population recovers — a negative ROI. That’s setting aside the morality of working construction workers to the point their bodies are broken to subsidies the idle lifestyle of another group.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- toomuchtodo 6y agoA central bank with the authority over a reserve currency never runs out. We (the US Fed, specifically) incinerated $3 trillion in USD value in response to COVID. We've borrowed and continue to service trillions in debt for useless decades+ wars. We can afford it (because it's cheaper to pay for these things upfront, before they're more expensive down the road), and those who say we can't use that as an excuse to avoid the uncomfortable conversation about why they don't want to pay for it. Providing the homeless with housing reduces social service and ER costs [1]. Paying for IUDs and other forms of long term birth control reduces unwanted pregnancies [2]. These are just two examples, but the thesis is sound: spend now, get ahead of the curve, and have less spend need in the future. Instead of technical debt, this is policy debt, which leads to actual debt. [1] https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic-homelessness-by-91-percent-heres-how https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chroni... [2] https://powertodecide.org/what-we-do/information/national-state-data/national https://powertodecide.org/what-we-do/information/national-st...
- RHSeeger 6y agoAssuming you just print unlimited amounts of money because it convenient, how do you deal with the inflation that comes with that?
- jcranmer 6y agoAt some point, the inflation does become a problem. But notice how it hasn't yet? Take a look at Japan, which has printed an awful lot of money and yet inflation is still hard to come by.
- freedomben 6y agoFYI to people trying to follow, this is MMT, Modern Monetary Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago> notice how it hasn't yet? We've been pumping new money into financial channels. A UBI would pump it into real channels. That said, this article is about a municipal program. Cities don't print money. They transfer it from some groups to others.
- RHSeeger 6y agoThe comment I was responding to was about the central bank.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoI don't see the need to plan for inflation until a future point arrives that demonstrates there might be inflation. Looking at evidence from developed countries and their central banks, they are unable to generate an appreciable amount of inflation from monetary policy (significant quantitive easing operations). Maybe generous fiscal policy causes it (UBI, "helicopter money", and the like), it just seems a bit disingenuous to argue what we'll do about a hurdle that seems unlikely to present itself (many developed country central banks are near zero, at zero [ZIPR], or below zero interest rates [NIRP] [1] [2] and you're still not generating inflation [3] so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). Spain is experimenting with something not quite UBI [4] (but close enough for this comment I will refer to it as such), and their inflation rate is currently negative [5]. Something to follow. EDIT: jcranmer said it better in a sibling comment ("To me, it seems a case of economists clinging to models that predict the opposite of reality, and it contributes to my general impression that economists prefer mathematical models even if their correlation to reality is poor.") [6]. [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-the-downward-spiral-in-interest-rates/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-the-downward-spiral-i... [2] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/central-bank-moves.jpg https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/... [3] https://voxeu.org/article/great-disinflation-emerging-and-developing-economies https://voxeu.org/article/great-disinflation-emerging-and-de... [4] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01993-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01993-3 [5] https://tradingeconomics.com/spain/inflation-cpi https://tradingeconomics.com/spain/inflation-cpi [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24629128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24629128
- retrac 6y agoThat's assuming there's no return on the investment, of course. One of the strongest arguments for heavy foreign aid and development in my opinion is the squandered human potential. The man or woman who could be the next Einstein may well be tending a cassava field right now. That's our loss as well as theirs.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago> The man or woman who could be the next Einstein may well be tending a cassava field right now. Probably not. Einstein was not a solitary genius. He lived in a culture and society that placed high value on learning and especially math. He was also in communication with some very gifted people such as Emmy Noether who actually discovered the mathematical foundation for much of his work. Srinivasan Ramanujan on the other hand is a much better example of finding someone who had super human abilities in an unexpected place.
- nitrogen 6y agoHe lived in a culture and society that placed high value on learning and especially math. Thus the aid, to attempt to create that society.
- DINKDINK 6y ago>That's assuming there's no return on the investment, of course. Was there an assertion that there isn't a return on investment? Asserting that the inevitable outcome of rampant income redistribution is systemic collapse is compatible with "investment in personnel has returns" Forcing the most productive workers to subsidize the consumption of unprofitable workers always leads to failure. "How am I to eat when I only grow 10kg of wheat a year but need to eat 11kg? We should use the state's violence to take 1kg from the farmer who grows 20kg and eats 12kg, Now I can grow 13kg of wheat for every 12kg I eat! A net gain in production!" It's a misallocation of capital, simultaneously (the apparent) investing in the more profitable producer would have been better and (the non apparent) that deluding the worker into believing farming 13kg of wheat for every 12kg increases the price of the input goods and input labor for other industries. Marxist Communism's argument is essentially: "While capitalism's losses are privatized, the fact that the profits are also privatized causes everyone to suffer. Instead of allow bricolage economics, the state's central planners will be to sole source of investment and sole consumer. Profits will be nationalized but losses will also be nationalized." Having that state be the sole investor in an economic -- a monopoly on entrepreneurship -- dooms it to failure. It does not mean "investments [even centrally planned ones] don't returns"
- vsareto 6y ago>... until you run out. Hm, maybe we should chill on these COVID bailouts then
- LargeWu 6y agoLet's look at this a different way. How many people dealing drugs are doing so because they feel they don't have better prospects. How much does drug abuse cost society? If society took the money they put towards policing, treatment, etc., and prevented that problem in the first place by just giving cash handouts, could it save both money and suffering? I don't know the answer, but I'm pretty sure just reflexively looking at top-line costs isn't the way to improve society.
- nitrogen 6y agoThe only ex-dealer I've met was doing it because he could make $800 in an hour in semirural southern California. It's hard to convince someone making easy, risky money to switch to making less, hard, but sure money
- dsr_ 6y agoA government can make it harder, increase the risk, or lower the profitability. For example, if you register heroin addicts and supply them with clean heroin on a regular basis, you destroy the market for heroin. If you legalize and regulate cocaine like tobacco, you can destroy billions of dollars worth of criminal activity.
- phone8675309 6y agoThe for-profit prison industry, who use incarcerated people as labor for pennies an hour, has enough political sway in this country that I have reluctantly accepted that these reforms are essentially never going to happen in my lifetime.
- asdff 6y agoIn places like Alabama prisoners aren't always paid. Slavery still exists as a punishment in this country.
- gonzo41 6y agoWell if you're American. You've got this big military costing you heaps that could probably have some fat trimmed of it. 1 less JSF would feed and cloth and house a lot of homeless.
- 0xffff2 6y agoIf you're the American Federal government, you don't need to trim military spending. You can just print more money. We've been doing it for quite a while now with hardly any ill effect.
- gonzo41 6y agoOh I totally agree, money's only really 'real' on the small scale. When you're able to wield the authority and sovereignty to make you're own central bank. That's when money becomes a policy tool. Hence why central bankers hate bitcoin.
- kyuudou 6y ago> hardly any ill effect. Surely you're being sarcastic? There's this minor issue of inflation which results in constantly paying more $ for the same goods.
- 0xffff2 6y agoWe've been printing money hand over fist since 2008. Inflation has been been normal. Classical economics no longer correctly models reality.
- noworriesnate 6y agoNo it's still accurate. The idea of classical economics here is that when the money supply in circulation increases and the total goods for sale stay the same, prices increase as well. What we're seeing is that because the USD is the world's exchange currency, it is a good way for foreigners to store wealth. So all these dollars end up locked away overseas which means that the money supply in circulation doesn't expand. Of course, the US can only play this game so long before we devalue our currency enough that it's worth it for the world to switch to another currency. And when that happens, the USD will no longer be a good store of value, which means all those dollars will come flooding back. And we'll experience decades of inflation in a very short period of time, with disastrous consequences.
- nicoffeine 6y agoThis is a tired line that needs to die. It was popularized by Thatcher in 1976. Take a look at Norway's finances from that date until today.[1] Norway decided that the profits from natural resources belonged to every citizen of Norway, not just the companies that landed the leases. The profits were invested in infrastructure, including education, and conservatively invested in external markets as a hedge to internal economic crises. The results speak for themselves.[2] America has more natural resources, more workers, more opportunities to make sensible economic decisions that provide for the well being of everyone. Instead we have an oligarchy that write laws to benefit themselves. The claims that it won't work here because market socialism "doesn't work", or because America is "too different" are pure bullshit. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NOR/norway/gdp-per-capita https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NOR/norway/gdp-per-cap... [2] http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/norway/ http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/norway/
- Apocryphon 6y agoThe Fed disagrees.