5 ms·

Most people, given a no-strings-attached basic income, will NOT use it as an opportunity to educate themselves and become entrepreneurial; instead, they get LAZ

Most people, given a no-strings-attached basic income, will NOT use it as an opportunity to educate themselves and become entrepreneurial; instead, they get LAZY and fiercely protective of that state. Not having a job isn't about being a social outcast, it's about not producing enough value/wealth to exchange for the cost of continuing existence. As an old book famously observed, "He who does not work, neither shall he eat"; that's not punitive, that's the economics of biology.

pi18n 15y ago
What happens if you make the stipend contingent on educating yourself somehow?
- randomdata 15y ago
  Education is a symptom of value creation, not the cause of it. In other words, education alone brings no value to society. If there is no incentive to create value, because you are already given an income with no strings attached, that education will not be put to any meaningful use. It seems to me that the stipend would need to be based on a plan to create value for society. If some level of education is required in order to proceed with that plan, it could be granted as part of the implementation. This reasonably mirrors the way entrepreneurs operate, which is essentially what we want to duplicate. The dream always comes before the education. The education is only a means to an end.
  - nickik 15y ago
    Well education by itself creats value for you and the people you talk. It not socialism, when you acctully learn something/do something you will be able to get more.
    - ctdonath 15y ago
      You have to want to create value. As a teacher, I am amazed at how many students lack the will to create, to do the work - and they fail at great cost.
- chc 15y ago
  Then you get a rush on Underwater Basket Weaving 101. California allows young adults to continue getting their parents' benefits until their late 20s if they're in school. This does not actually encourage people to get a useful eight-year education.
- jerf 15y ago
  Then it will be gamed, with whatever minimal thing will satisfy "the system". And that's the answer to pretty every other "well, what if we put this requirement in" question, because the root problem is that you've created an incentive to put whatever minimal work will make the system happy, even if it means breaking the putative formal rules. People are smart, and you can't create a system with bad incentives and then just legislate the bad incentives away, because the mass of people you're trying to legislate is smarter and has way more time than you do. I am intrigued by the question of how income would be distributed in a still-hypothetical post-industrial world, but I fear the easy answer of just giving people a certain minimal income can't be made to work, which is unfortunate because I haven't got a better answer any more than anybody else does....
nickik 15y ago
Well see (at least in Switzerland and other European Staats) we allready giving people money if the dont have a job and we make them do stuff like "send in 20 application" or force them to go into some stupid class where you have to learn something you don't like doing for a week and then you can go back home and chill. I am pretty liberarian but just like Hayek I think one function of the state is help pure people. You could never get a law past that basiclly says "He who does not work, neither shall he eat". Here in Switzerland pretty much everybody agreeds that helping the pure threw the staat is a good thing. The system im proposing would at least be (a) fair (b) be much much much less complicated does getting read of a lot of human workforce that is no bound up in stupid jobs pushing around papers. I would say the insentives to work are still there, this is not sozialim, im not taling about a basic income of min. wage or something.

pi18n 15y ago

What happens if you make the stipend contingent on educating yourself somehow?

randomdata 15y ago
Education is a symptom of value creation, not the cause of it. In other words, education alone brings no value to society. If there is no incentive to create value, because you are already given an income with no strings attached, that education will not be put to any meaningful use. It seems to me that the stipend would need to be based on a plan to create value for society. If some level of education is required in order to proceed with that plan, it could be granted as part of the implementation. This reasonably mirrors the way entrepreneurs operate, which is essentially what we want to duplicate. The dream always comes before the education. The education is only a means to an end.
- nickik 15y ago
  Well education by itself creats value for you and the people you talk. It not socialism, when you acctully learn something/do something you will be able to get more.
  - ctdonath 15y ago
    You have to want to create value. As a teacher, I am amazed at how many students lack the will to create, to do the work - and they fail at great cost.
chc 15y ago
Then you get a rush on Underwater Basket Weaving 101. California allows young adults to continue getting their parents' benefits until their late 20s if they're in school. This does not actually encourage people to get a useful eight-year education.
jerf 15y ago
Then it will be gamed, with whatever minimal thing will satisfy "the system". And that's the answer to pretty every other "well, what if we put this requirement in" question, because the root problem is that you've created an incentive to put whatever minimal work will make the system happy, even if it means breaking the putative formal rules. People are smart, and you can't create a system with bad incentives and then just legislate the bad incentives away, because the mass of people you're trying to legislate is smarter and has way more time than you do. I am intrigued by the question of how income would be distributed in a still-hypothetical post-industrial world, but I fear the easy answer of just giving people a certain minimal income can't be made to work, which is unfortunate because I haven't got a better answer any more than anybody else does....

nickik 15y ago

Well see (at least in Switzerland and other European Staats) we allready giving people money if the dont have a job and we make them do stuff like "send in 20 application" or force them to go into some stupid class where you have to learn something you don't like doing for a week and then you can go back home and chill. I am pretty liberarian but just like Hayek I think one function of the state is help pure people. You could never get a law past that basiclly says "He who does not work, neither shall he eat". Here in Switzerland pretty much everybody agreeds that helping the pure threw the staat is a good thing. The system im proposing would at least be (a) fair (b) be much much much less complicated does getting read of a lot of human workforce that is no bound up in stupid jobs pushing around papers. I would say the insentives to work are still there, this is not sozialim, im not taling about a basic income of min. wage or something.