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If society can get the same productivity with ever fewer people, then it starts making sense to have a Guaranteed Minimum Income. http://www.xamuel.com/ten-rea

by itmag 15y ago

If society can get the same productivity with ever fewer people, then it starts making sense to have a Guaranteed Minimum Income. http://www.xamuel.com/ten-reasons-for-guaranteed-minimum-income/ http://www.xamuel.com/ten-reasons-for-guaranteed-minimum-inc... The notion of full employment is not necessarily good or realistic. Sooner or later, a hi-tech society is going to have to answer the existential question of "what to do with life?". Low-tech societies can get away with answering it with "work!" because they truly need everyone to do that. Point is: if productivity keeps increasing more and more, why is it such a God-given thing that the point of our lives should be to work? We need to start thinking about how to achieve personal fulfillment in a post-scarcity world.

capisce 15y ago
That would work if the richest 1 % weren't accumulating all the wealth instead.
_delirium 15y ago
I more or less agree, and it's interesting that while it's now seen as a (very) "left" policy proposal, much of its historic support has been from people who are more associated with free-market economics. Various reasons, but they boil down to a mixture of negative and positive ones. The negative ones are that it's better than the likely alternatives: Milton Friedman thought it was better and less distorting to just hand people one cash payment than deal with the huge mess of welfare, Section 8 housing, food stamps, unemployment benefits, medicaid, etc., etc. that the U.S. currently has. That's sort of the case here, in that just paying people a basic minimum income is probably less distorting than trying to adopt policies to force full employment (France-style policies that make it hard to fire people, protectionist trade tariffs, etc.). Arguably, it makes people more willing to accept major shakeups caused by markets if there's some minimum floor for what happens to people caught in transitions or left out of shifts; otherwise people are more likely to try to push back against the markets. (Actually that last point is why classic Marxists were against these kinds of things, because they thought it had the effect of sugar-coating the markets' effects, thereby making people less willing to revolt against them.) Positive reasons include promoting entrepreneurship (provides a safety net making people, especially those not from middle-class-or-better families, more likely to take the risk of jumping from a stable job to start a business), and giving people more freedom to choose their associations, as opposed to feeling they need to cling to their ethnic group, religious group, or other such organization for quasi-welfare (e.g. many non-believing Mormons stay in the church because it provides a safety net). F.A. Hayek described that as a necessary part of moving towards a less tribalist/group-centric society: "The assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be a wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society in which the individual no longer has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he was born."

by itmag 15y ago

capisce 15y ago

That would work if the richest 1 % weren't accumulating all the wealth instead.

_delirium 15y ago

I more or less agree, and it's interesting that while it's now seen as a (very) "left" policy proposal, much of its historic support has been from people who are more associated with free-market economics. Various reasons, but they boil down to a mixture of negative and positive ones. The negative ones are that it's better than the likely alternatives: Milton Friedman thought it was better and less distorting to just hand people one cash payment than deal with the huge mess of welfare, Section 8 housing, food stamps, unemployment benefits, medicaid, etc., etc. that the U.S. currently has. That's sort of the case here, in that just paying people a basic minimum income is probably less distorting than trying to adopt policies to force full employment (France-style policies that make it hard to fire people, protectionist trade tariffs, etc.). Arguably, it makes people more willing to accept major shakeups caused by markets if there's some minimum floor for what happens to people caught in transitions or left out of shifts; otherwise people are more likely to try to push back against the markets. (Actually that last point is why classic Marxists were against these kinds of things, because they thought it had the effect of sugar-coating the markets' effects, thereby making people less willing to revolt against them.) Positive reasons include promoting entrepreneurship (provides a safety net making people, especially those not from middle-class-or-better families, more likely to take the risk of jumping from a stable job to start a business), and giving people more freedom to choose their associations, as opposed to feeling they need to cling to their ethnic group, religious group, or other such organization for quasi-welfare (e.g. many non-believing Mormons stay in the church because it provides a safety net). F.A. Hayek described that as a necessary part of moving towards a less tribalist/group-centric society: "The assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be a wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society in which the individual no longer has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he was born."