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We call that capitalism... this is my biggest concern from the “universal basic income” argument. Effectively, we are seeing what happens when people stop work

We call that capitalism... this is my biggest concern from the “universal basic income” argument. Effectively, we are seeing what happens when people stop working. The system starts to falter and honestly it looks like it could collapse.

habitue 5y ago
I'm a big fan of tying the basic income directly to tax revenue collected (ideally monthly instead of yearly). That way, people can adaptively choose how much work they want to do, and it feeds back from what the actual economic production is. Basic income is really complementary to capitalism. It provides a cushion to people on the very bottom, allowing them to stay in the game, and for other people it helps push them out of a subsistence loop and into "maybe I should start a small business" or "Hmm, I've saved enough that I could pay my bills with basic income so I could retrain on this new technology" etc.
joshsyn 5y ago
Totally agree with you. The nihilists want to burn everything to the ground so they can prove themselves wrong.
danShumway 5y ago
> Effectively, we are seeing what happens when people stop working There are a huge number of inputs going into supply chain breakdowns, and I find all of these takes to be wildly oversimplistic. Taking a look at even just one aspect, the chip shortage: what you're seeing is a combination of underestimated demand (manufacturers assumed demand would decrease during Covid), bottlenecks in production, factory shutdowns, inflexible scheduling and sourcing, transportation difficulty, increasing demand from both companies/individuals who have shifted to remote and from cryptocurrency attention, etc... And all of these shortages affect each other too, increasing and redirecting other goods and services, which can form complicated feedback loops. Chip shortages make transportation harder, which makes it harder to manufacture chips. Employment is certainly a factor, but it's also certainly not the only factor. We are seeing stress fractures in a global system right now. There is no one cause (other than I guess the existence of Covid in general), and there is no single, one policy that anyone, Progressive or Conservative, can pass to fix the problem. Anyone (Progressive or Conservative) who is trying to sell you the current shortage as simple proof of their ideology is not doing a good job of looking at the issue from a holistic perspective.
- imtringued 5y ago
  I honestly don't get why companies cut orders. Just keep producing. If you have too much inventory then you get to reduce production whenever it is convenient. If you cut production beforehand you just get screwed.
  - adwn 5y ago
    Because those orders have to be paid for. When the bill is due, what good is a warehouse full of finished products nobody's buying?
imtringued 5y ago
Income sharing (like UBI) doesn't work because the underlying problem is the unfair allocation of work. If you're going to redistribute something why not just tell the person with too much money to work less and the person with too little money to just work more? In that sense, it is the act of work piling that is unfair because the person that ends up with all the work doesn't intend to actually make use of all the money he earns in the process. The problem with the rich isn't that they earn too much, it's that they spend too little on consumption or investment.

habitue 5y ago

I'm a big fan of tying the basic income directly to tax revenue collected (ideally monthly instead of yearly). That way, people can adaptively choose how much work they want to do, and it feeds back from what the actual economic production is. Basic income is really complementary to capitalism. It provides a cushion to people on the very bottom, allowing them to stay in the game, and for other people it helps push them out of a subsistence loop and into "maybe I should start a small business" or "Hmm, I've saved enough that I could pay my bills with basic income so I could retrain on this new technology" etc.

joshsyn 5y ago

Totally agree with you. The nihilists want to burn everything to the ground so they can prove themselves wrong.

danShumway 5y ago

> Effectively, we are seeing what happens when people stop working There are a huge number of inputs going into supply chain breakdowns, and I find all of these takes to be wildly oversimplistic. Taking a look at even just one aspect, the chip shortage: what you're seeing is a combination of underestimated demand (manufacturers assumed demand would decrease during Covid), bottlenecks in production, factory shutdowns, inflexible scheduling and sourcing, transportation difficulty, increasing demand from both companies/individuals who have shifted to remote and from cryptocurrency attention, etc... And all of these shortages affect each other too, increasing and redirecting other goods and services, which can form complicated feedback loops. Chip shortages make transportation harder, which makes it harder to manufacture chips. Employment is certainly a factor, but it's also certainly not the only factor. We are seeing stress fractures in a global system right now. There is no one cause (other than I guess the existence of Covid in general), and there is no single, one policy that anyone, Progressive or Conservative, can pass to fix the problem. Anyone (Progressive or Conservative) who is trying to sell you the current shortage as simple proof of their ideology is not doing a good job of looking at the issue from a holistic perspective.

imtringued 5y ago
I honestly don't get why companies cut orders. Just keep producing. If you have too much inventory then you get to reduce production whenever it is convenient. If you cut production beforehand you just get screwed.
- adwn 5y ago
  Because those orders have to be paid for. When the bill is due, what good is a warehouse full of finished products nobody's buying?

imtringued 5y ago

Income sharing (like UBI) doesn't work because the underlying problem is the unfair allocation of work. If you're going to redistribute something why not just tell the person with too much money to work less and the person with too little money to just work more? In that sense, it is the act of work piling that is unfair because the person that ends up with all the work doesn't intend to actually make use of all the money he earns in the process. The problem with the rich isn't that they earn too much, it's that they spend too little on consumption or investment.