6 ms·

> a lot of people who opposed it are just regular people who understand just how lazy regular people are I feel like your underlying assumption is that "if UBI

> a lot of people who opposed it are just regular people who understand just how lazy regular people are I feel like your underlying assumption is that "if UBI leads people to leave their jobs, UBI has obviously failed", whereas it's literally the very goal of UBI to reduce (or even eliminate, in the case of "full" basic income) the need to hold a job just to have enough income to merely survive. You can argue that's a bad goal if you want, but expecting everyone to continue working despite receiving free money is kind of missing the entire point of handing out that money. Btw, just because people act a certain way in a short period of time (especially during a time that was so out of the ordinary) that doesn't mean they'd act the same way for ~half a century. Sure some fraction of them might, but lots of people would get bored and try new things. Having nothing to do for months or even a year or two can be fun and exciting for some, but that doesn't mean they'd love the idea of having nothing to do for the rest of their lives. People get bored, people want luxury, people want variety, people want fulfilment, people have kids to raise, etc.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
> it's literally the very goal of UBI to reduce (or even eliminate, in the case of "full" basic income) the need to hold a job just to have enough income to merely survive Without significantly raising taxes on the people who decide to continue to work, how can this be paid for? Genuine question.
- dataflow 4y ago
  Why do you rule out raising taxes on people who do work? Does that lead to a logical impossibility of some sort?
  - californical 4y ago
    I mean, do you really have an incentive to work if 90% of the money is going to taxes which pay for the other people not working? Obviously not, that’s a terrible deal. And if it’s that hard to find employees, companies will just have to pay a LOT for labor, most of which still goes to taxes, but also causes prices to go up because the company’s costs are so high. Which causes COL to increase because all products have higher costs. Which means “basic” income needs increases, driving up costs, etc etc.
    - dataflow 4y ago
      > I mean, do you really have an incentive to work if 90% of the money is going to taxes which pay for the other people not working? Obviously not, that’s a terrible deal. It's not obvious at all; in fact the tax percentage is meaningless on its own. People get too hung up on tax rates instead of focusing on purchasing power and quality of life. It's almost like adding zeros to the currency. The only thing that matters is your purchasing power (which comes from your net income), not your gross income or what percentage tax that corresponded to. Like if (in today's economy) you pay me $10M/year and I have to pay 90% of that in taxes, I would happily work for you. If you pay me $10k/year, I wouldn't even work for you if my "tax" rate was -100%. Is there a way to make the math work out? Honestly, I don't know. Maybe it's impossible, maybe it's practical, or maybe it would come with so much baggage that we'll prefer the status quo. What I do know is that the people who declare the answer is obvious consistently arrive at that conclusion by artificially constraining the problem in some way that is not implied by the premises, like "you can't raise taxes significantly", or "you can't touch defense spending", or "we won't decrease healthcare costs", or numerous other things.
      - gruez 4y ago
        >It's not obvious at all; in fact the tax percentage is meaningless on its own. People get too hung up on tax rates instead of focusing on purchasing power and quality of life. 1. in an economy where 30% (or whatever) of people aren't working and the remaining are getting taxed higher % of their income to fund the people who are not working, how is the living standard of the people who are working go up? 2. A sense of "fairness" factors into this as well. People are known to reject "unfair" deals, even though the said unfair deal would still give them strictly positive values.
        P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
        Isn't this why states like California have higher tax rates than the rest of the nation? How is this any different from other social programs like Social Security or Welfare?
        4y ago
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    UBI is generally thought of as a solution to rising AI. The taxes would come from the corporations generating income from AI and redistributed towards the people, in a sort of "fake" market economy, because the alternative is that the rich own all assets and their economy grinds to a halt because consumers don't have money to buy the corporations' goods anymore, which also causes the corporations to fail too.
    - WHYLEE1991 4y ago
      lol yeah the guy up there who uses the example of a worker now needing to make "two cars" is very short-sighted and kinda misses the point overall, I can't think of an industry that is a better example of human beings regularly being replaced by machines than manufacturing.
  - prepend 4y ago
    I think the reason youd want to rule this out is because of democracy and the unwillingness of workers to pay UBI to non-workers. I don’t see a situation where people would be comfortable where workers pay more taxes so people can choose not to work. There’s not enough billionaires (yet) to tax at 90% to cover this. I think a more reasonable approach to UBI is to reduce costs for staple goods to such a low rate that it doesn’t cost as much and the need to work is reduced without raising taxes or introducing a freeloader problem. This is positive outcome of AI and cheap energy (think Star Trek).
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Genuine answer: Either tax the stuffings out of everyone, or "money printer go brrrr".
coding123 4y ago
I love how it's just admitted at this point that the endgame is just "more people smoking weed all day" except for those that have ambition.
- Der_Einzige 4y ago
  I personally know several 1000+ GitHub projects where the author is a hugee stoner. A non trivial amount of code from WFH engineers is written while they are blazed.
spoonjim 4y ago
If you spend your time around artists and engineers you might think that freeing people from their jobs will lead to a modern-day Italian Renaissance but if you knew the people I knew growing up you’d realize that the need to go to work is the only thing keeping them from being even more violently alcoholic than they already are.
- prepend 4y ago
  Brave New World addressed this by classifying members of society into “alpha,” “beta,” “gamma,” etc. The lower classes just worked and took drugs (soma) so they could withstand working. Of course Huxley was writing sci-fi but it does fit into human nature of kind or messing around if possible. Look at chimps… they basically just gather food, sex, and lounge about. We aren’t too far evolved from chimps.
  - ItsMonkk 4y ago
    Huxley's Island is his counter-point to the world of BNW. In it they take drugs for enlightenment. He creates a society inspired by Confucian meditation as well as through the economic lens of Henry George. Henry George advocated for a UBI(what he called citizen's dividend) funded through the taxation of land values. I think this alpha and beta framing is a useful one. I just watched the John Carmack keynote where he is talking about the Oculus operating system, and in it he is seething that the team around him is not valuing simple and piling complexity and its resulting slowness. In a world where only the people who were truly interested in innovation were working with him, I expect that the accidental complexity would be minimized, and the efficiency of his work would go through the roof even more than it has. Trying to make everyone as productive as possible turns out to have large negative effects on those who are as driven for innovation and those people are so productive that this is a net loss long term.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago

> it's literally the very goal of UBI to reduce (or even eliminate, in the case of "full" basic income) the need to hold a job just to have enough income to merely survive Without significantly raising taxes on the people who decide to continue to work, how can this be paid for? Genuine question.

dataflow 4y ago
Why do you rule out raising taxes on people who do work? Does that lead to a logical impossibility of some sort?
- californical 4y ago
  I mean, do you really have an incentive to work if 90% of the money is going to taxes which pay for the other people not working? Obviously not, that’s a terrible deal. And if it’s that hard to find employees, companies will just have to pay a LOT for labor, most of which still goes to taxes, but also causes prices to go up because the company’s costs are so high. Which causes COL to increase because all products have higher costs. Which means “basic” income needs increases, driving up costs, etc etc.
  - dataflow 4y ago
    > I mean, do you really have an incentive to work if 90% of the money is going to taxes which pay for the other people not working? Obviously not, that’s a terrible deal. It's not obvious at all; in fact the tax percentage is meaningless on its own. People get too hung up on tax rates instead of focusing on purchasing power and quality of life. It's almost like adding zeros to the currency. The only thing that matters is your purchasing power (which comes from your net income), not your gross income or what percentage tax that corresponded to. Like if (in today's economy) you pay me $10M/year and I have to pay 90% of that in taxes, I would happily work for you. If you pay me $10k/year, I wouldn't even work for you if my "tax" rate was -100%. Is there a way to make the math work out? Honestly, I don't know. Maybe it's impossible, maybe it's practical, or maybe it would come with so much baggage that we'll prefer the status quo. What I do know is that the people who declare the answer is obvious consistently arrive at that conclusion by artificially constraining the problem in some way that is not implied by the premises, like "you can't raise taxes significantly", or "you can't touch defense spending", or "we won't decrease healthcare costs", or numerous other things.
    - gruez 4y ago
      >It's not obvious at all; in fact the tax percentage is meaningless on its own. People get too hung up on tax rates instead of focusing on purchasing power and quality of life. 1. in an economy where 30% (or whatever) of people aren't working and the remaining are getting taxed higher % of their income to fund the people who are not working, how is the living standard of the people who are working go up? 2. A sense of "fairness" factors into this as well. People are known to reject "unfair" deals, even though the said unfair deal would still give them strictly positive values.
      - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
        Isn't this why states like California have higher tax rates than the rest of the nation? How is this any different from other social programs like Social Security or Welfare?
      - 4y ago
- cercatrova 4y ago
  UBI is generally thought of as a solution to rising AI. The taxes would come from the corporations generating income from AI and redistributed towards the people, in a sort of "fake" market economy, because the alternative is that the rich own all assets and their economy grinds to a halt because consumers don't have money to buy the corporations' goods anymore, which also causes the corporations to fail too.
  - WHYLEE1991 4y ago
    lol yeah the guy up there who uses the example of a worker now needing to make "two cars" is very short-sighted and kinda misses the point overall, I can't think of an industry that is a better example of human beings regularly being replaced by machines than manufacturing.
- prepend 4y ago
  I think the reason youd want to rule this out is because of democracy and the unwillingness of workers to pay UBI to non-workers. I don’t see a situation where people would be comfortable where workers pay more taxes so people can choose not to work. There’s not enough billionaires (yet) to tax at 90% to cover this. I think a more reasonable approach to UBI is to reduce costs for staple goods to such a low rate that it doesn’t cost as much and the need to work is reduced without raising taxes or introducing a freeloader problem. This is positive outcome of AI and cheap energy (think Star Trek).
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
Genuine answer: Either tax the stuffings out of everyone, or "money printer go brrrr".

coding123 4y ago

I love how it's just admitted at this point that the endgame is just "more people smoking weed all day" except for those that have ambition.

Der_Einzige 4y ago
I personally know several 1000+ GitHub projects where the author is a hugee stoner. A non trivial amount of code from WFH engineers is written while they are blazed.

spoonjim 4y ago

If you spend your time around artists and engineers you might think that freeing people from their jobs will lead to a modern-day Italian Renaissance but if you knew the people I knew growing up you’d realize that the need to go to work is the only thing keeping them from being even more violently alcoholic than they already are.

prepend 4y ago
Brave New World addressed this by classifying members of society into “alpha,” “beta,” “gamma,” etc. The lower classes just worked and took drugs (soma) so they could withstand working. Of course Huxley was writing sci-fi but it does fit into human nature of kind or messing around if possible. Look at chimps… they basically just gather food, sex, and lounge about. We aren’t too far evolved from chimps.
- ItsMonkk 4y ago
  Huxley's Island is his counter-point to the world of BNW. In it they take drugs for enlightenment. He creates a society inspired by Confucian meditation as well as through the economic lens of Henry George. Henry George advocated for a UBI(what he called citizen's dividend) funded through the taxation of land values. I think this alpha and beta framing is a useful one. I just watched the John Carmack keynote where he is talking about the Oculus operating system, and in it he is seething that the team around him is not valuing simple and piling complexity and its resulting slowness. In a world where only the people who were truly interested in innovation were working with him, I expect that the accidental complexity would be minimized, and the efficiency of his work would go through the roof even more than it has. Trying to make everyone as productive as possible turns out to have large negative effects on those who are as driven for innovation and those people are so productive that this is a net loss long term.