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Education and training is solving a different issue, one that is orthogonal to the one solved by minimum wage or basic income. I think making public colleges f

by shkkmo 6y ago

Education and training is solving a different issue, one that is orthogonal to the one solved by minimum wage or basic income. I think making public colleges free (similar to germany) would be a massive benefit to our economy. But making all education free doesn't do anything to help remove the need for the minimum wage. If you have an alternative to the minimum wage that isn't UBI, I would love to hear it.

chii 6y ago
> one that is orthogonal to the one solved by minimum wage or basic income. no it isn't orthogonal - UBI and minimum is based on the premise that there exists people who would not be able to produce value that is enough to sustain themselves (aka, they consume more resources than they produce), and thus need the rest of society to pick up that slack (otherwise, they'd just die). I'm saying that people would always be able to sustain themselves if they are able to get trained to do something useful. As more knowledge is required in the modern day, this training becomes more expensive, and so society should make this investment, rather than place the entire risk onto the individual.
- shkkmo 6y ago
  That is not the premise on which UBI is built. If I had to pick just one it would be that we have more productive capacity than we need, so threatening people with death (your words) to be productive is no longer necessary.
  - chii 6y ago
    > we have more productive capacity than we need i'm not convinced that this is true, except with very basic necessities like food and water, and even then, those require a lot of energy to produce, and those aren't free yet since science hasn't discovered cheap or free energy yet.
    - shkkmo 6y ago
      We have distribution and allocation problems, but we definitely have sufficient productive capacity to provide a reasonable standard of living. Even if you pick a standard of living that makes this premise not true, this is still the primary motivating premise for UBI. This is why UBI is so closely linked with the rise of Automation to a point where there simply won't be enough jobs to retrain people to do.

by shkkmo 6y ago

chii 6y ago

> one that is orthogonal to the one solved by minimum wage or basic income. no it isn't orthogonal - UBI and minimum is based on the premise that there exists people who would not be able to produce value that is enough to sustain themselves (aka, they consume more resources than they produce), and thus need the rest of society to pick up that slack (otherwise, they'd just die). I'm saying that people would always be able to sustain themselves if they are able to get trained to do something useful. As more knowledge is required in the modern day, this training becomes more expensive, and so society should make this investment, rather than place the entire risk onto the individual.

shkkmo 6y ago
That is not the premise on which UBI is built. If I had to pick just one it would be that we have more productive capacity than we need, so threatening people with death (your words) to be productive is no longer necessary.
- chii 6y ago
  > we have more productive capacity than we need i'm not convinced that this is true, except with very basic necessities like food and water, and even then, those require a lot of energy to produce, and those aren't free yet since science hasn't discovered cheap or free energy yet.
  - shkkmo 6y ago
    We have distribution and allocation problems, but we definitely have sufficient productive capacity to provide a reasonable standard of living. Even if you pick a standard of living that makes this premise not true, this is still the primary motivating premise for UBI. This is why UBI is so closely linked with the rise of Automation to a point where there simply won't be enough jobs to retrain people to do.