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Basic income doesn’t do anything. We already have food stamps and so on. The largest sector of US federal spending is health and social welfare. We’d have to en

Basic income doesn’t do anything. We already have food stamps and so on. The largest sector of US federal spending is health and social welfare. We’d have to end pretty much all those programs to run a minuscule basic income.

dymk 11mo ago
That’s a matter of where you get your taxes from. Plenty of corporations can afford to pay a more fair share. And studies on basic income have so far shown it to be effective.
- jlawson 11mo ago
  Studies on basic income have shown that it's harmful to the people who receive it. They report no improvements on any measured outcome. Not lower stress, not more education, not better health. They work a bit less but that doesn't help them or their kids. Over the long term it harms them because their productive skills, values, and emotional capacities atrophy away from lack of use.
  - RobertoG 11mo ago
    what studies are those?
  - ragazzina 11mo ago
    > Studies on basic income have shown that it's harmful to the people who receive it. That's extremely interesting, can you link such studies?
    - jlawson 11mo ago
      This podcast covers a bunch of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5nj3DLvT64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5nj3DLvT64 It's one of those things that can be tricky to research because almost all the researchers and journalists on the topic very much don't want to see this conclusion. So there's a tremendous amount of misrepresentation and wishful reasoning about how to interpret the data. The truth comes out from actually reading the data, not researcher or journalist summaries.
  - Analemma_ 11mo ago
    What’s the alternative, if AI does turn out to be able to replace large swathes of the workforce? Just kill everyone? You could ban it and then turn all existing employment into a makework jobs program, but this doesn’t seem sustainable: work you know is pointless is just as psychically corrosive, and in any event companies will just leave for less-regulated shores where AI is allowed.
  - ororoo 11mo ago
    "Final verdict on Finland's basic income trial: More happiness but little employment effect" https://yle.fi/a/3-11337944 https://yle.fi/a/3-11337944 https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/fair-society/universal-basic-income-experiment-finland-new-research-reveals-significant-diversity-participants-experience https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/fair-society/universal-basic... so basic income caused more happiness, less stress. but those are not profitable things, so, no basic income in finland.
  - NickC25 11mo ago
    >Over the long term it harms them Yes, but not for the reasons you state. It harms them because we have an zero desire as a society to effectively combat inflation, which negates any benefits we can give people who receive the basic income. The powers-that-be don't take action to make sure the people who get basic income can actually use it to improve their lives. Food prices rapidly inflate, education costs skyrocket, medical costs increase exponentially almost overnight. Much like how the government backstopping student loans basically got university costs to jump, promising to give people a basic income while not addressing the root causes of inequality and wealth disparity just makes things worse. If you want basic income to truly work, you have to engage in some activities in the short term that are inherently un-capitalistic, although if done correctly, actually improve capitalism as a whole for society. Price controls and freezes, slashing executive pay, increasing taxes on the wealthiest, etc.
- philipallstar 11mo ago
  If everything's automated then you don't need taxes to pay people.
  - dymk 11mo ago
    Let me know when we live in The Culture, but I’ve got a feeling fully automated luxury gay space communism is a long ways off
    - philipallstar 11mo ago
      Then what's the problem? AI is a problem (apparently) if everything is automated. Otherwise people have jobs and carry on as before.
      - int_19h 11mo ago
        Imagine a society that is halfway to that. So, say, there are only enough jobs for half of the people, but the rest still want to eat.
- philipallstar 11mo ago
  > Plenty of corporations can afford to pay a more fair share Can we stop pretending with the word "fair"? If you want to squeeze out more money then you do it by force. It's not "fair". It's just "we can do this".
zwnow 11mo ago
Whats the alternative? Kill off all humans replaced by AI unable to do something else for a living? Its sad enough that there are food stamps given the amount of food that regularly ends up in a dumpster on a daily basis. Humans come first, not machinery.
- AndrewKemendo 11mo ago
  Nobody needs to kill anyone, people will just stop having kids which is what’s happening
  - zwnow 11mo ago
    Whats with the people already alive? If u continuously replace them with AI u need to support them in case of their inability to provide for themselves. Im afraid the worldwide available social security nets in place aren't made for withstanding this kind of unemployment.
    - AndrewKemendo 11mo ago
      They’ll have to adapt like every other generation has had to My grandmother was born in 1924 and died in 2019 please appreciate how much change she had to adapt to over that period
      - zwnow 11mo ago
        Your grandma had plenty of opportunities in the post war eras. During her time there was always a need for human workers. While I dont think AI can actually replace anyone reliably, I still can see how executives buy into this promise and try it. This is a unique situation humanity never was confronted with. Even the industrialization required a lot of human work. If all white collar jobs went away there is a huge imbalance in available workers vs available work. Simply adapting to this isn't a thing given that monopolies killed competition and its not feasible for your everyday Joe to break into markets anymore. Kudos to your grandma for making it this long, simply not a comparable situation however.
lotsofpulp 11mo ago
>The largest sector of US federal spending is health and social welfare. On old people who can't or don't work.
- enigma101 11mo ago
  they will likely die first when society collapses
NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo ago
The people who own the magical AIs won't decide that they want to keep us all as pets, we won't have leverage to demand that they keep us all as pets, and they will have the resources to make sure they no longer need to keep us as pets. Shouting "You should keep humans as pets" is unlikely to change this fundamental equation.
wongarsu 11mo ago
> We’d have to end pretty much all those programs to run a minuscule basic income Isn't ending all those programs one of the core ideas of universal basic income? Instead of having a huge bureaucracy administering targeted social welfare you cut all the overhead and just pay everyone enough to exist, regardless of whether you actually need it. It'd still be more expensive, but giving people something dependable to fall back on would hopefully increase innovation and entrepreneurship, offsetting some of the costs
- renewiltord 11mo ago
  Okay so let’s divide the US federal budget by the number of people. So $21k per person. Now what happens to the guy who needs dialysis. It costs $60k. Right now the federal government pays. Now it’s given him a third the cost back. He just dies?
  - adamauckland 10mo ago
    He gets it on the healthcare like all developed nations.

dymk 11mo ago

That’s a matter of where you get your taxes from. Plenty of corporations can afford to pay a more fair share. And studies on basic income have so far shown it to be effective.

jlawson 11mo ago
Studies on basic income have shown that it's harmful to the people who receive it. They report no improvements on any measured outcome. Not lower stress, not more education, not better health. They work a bit less but that doesn't help them or their kids. Over the long term it harms them because their productive skills, values, and emotional capacities atrophy away from lack of use.
- RobertoG 11mo ago
  what studies are those?
- ragazzina 11mo ago
  > Studies on basic income have shown that it's harmful to the people who receive it. That's extremely interesting, can you link such studies?
  - jlawson 11mo ago
    This podcast covers a bunch of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5nj3DLvT64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5nj3DLvT64 It's one of those things that can be tricky to research because almost all the researchers and journalists on the topic very much don't want to see this conclusion. So there's a tremendous amount of misrepresentation and wishful reasoning about how to interpret the data. The truth comes out from actually reading the data, not researcher or journalist summaries.
- Analemma_ 11mo ago
  What’s the alternative, if AI does turn out to be able to replace large swathes of the workforce? Just kill everyone? You could ban it and then turn all existing employment into a makework jobs program, but this doesn’t seem sustainable: work you know is pointless is just as psychically corrosive, and in any event companies will just leave for less-regulated shores where AI is allowed.
- ororoo 11mo ago
  "Final verdict on Finland's basic income trial: More happiness but little employment effect" https://yle.fi/a/3-11337944 https://yle.fi/a/3-11337944 https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/fair-society/universal-basic-income-experiment-finland-new-research-reveals-significant-diversity-participants-experience https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/fair-society/universal-basic... so basic income caused more happiness, less stress. but those are not profitable things, so, no basic income in finland.
- NickC25 11mo ago
  >Over the long term it harms them Yes, but not for the reasons you state. It harms them because we have an zero desire as a society to effectively combat inflation, which negates any benefits we can give people who receive the basic income. The powers-that-be don't take action to make sure the people who get basic income can actually use it to improve their lives. Food prices rapidly inflate, education costs skyrocket, medical costs increase exponentially almost overnight. Much like how the government backstopping student loans basically got university costs to jump, promising to give people a basic income while not addressing the root causes of inequality and wealth disparity just makes things worse. If you want basic income to truly work, you have to engage in some activities in the short term that are inherently un-capitalistic, although if done correctly, actually improve capitalism as a whole for society. Price controls and freezes, slashing executive pay, increasing taxes on the wealthiest, etc.
philipallstar 11mo ago
If everything's automated then you don't need taxes to pay people.
- dymk 11mo ago
  Let me know when we live in The Culture, but I’ve got a feeling fully automated luxury gay space communism is a long ways off
  - philipallstar 11mo ago
    Then what's the problem? AI is a problem (apparently) if everything is automated. Otherwise people have jobs and carry on as before.
    - int_19h 11mo ago
      Imagine a society that is halfway to that. So, say, there are only enough jobs for half of the people, but the rest still want to eat.
philipallstar 11mo ago
> Plenty of corporations can afford to pay a more fair share Can we stop pretending with the word "fair"? If you want to squeeze out more money then you do it by force. It's not "fair". It's just "we can do this".

zwnow 11mo ago

Whats the alternative? Kill off all humans replaced by AI unable to do something else for a living? Its sad enough that there are food stamps given the amount of food that regularly ends up in a dumpster on a daily basis. Humans come first, not machinery.

AndrewKemendo 11mo ago
Nobody needs to kill anyone, people will just stop having kids which is what’s happening
- zwnow 11mo ago
  Whats with the people already alive? If u continuously replace them with AI u need to support them in case of their inability to provide for themselves. Im afraid the worldwide available social security nets in place aren't made for withstanding this kind of unemployment.
  - AndrewKemendo 11mo ago
    They’ll have to adapt like every other generation has had to My grandmother was born in 1924 and died in 2019 please appreciate how much change she had to adapt to over that period
    - zwnow 11mo ago
      Your grandma had plenty of opportunities in the post war eras. During her time there was always a need for human workers. While I dont think AI can actually replace anyone reliably, I still can see how executives buy into this promise and try it. This is a unique situation humanity never was confronted with. Even the industrialization required a lot of human work. If all white collar jobs went away there is a huge imbalance in available workers vs available work. Simply adapting to this isn't a thing given that monopolies killed competition and its not feasible for your everyday Joe to break into markets anymore. Kudos to your grandma for making it this long, simply not a comparable situation however.

lotsofpulp 11mo ago

>The largest sector of US federal spending is health and social welfare. On old people who can't or don't work.

enigma101 11mo ago
they will likely die first when society collapses

NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo ago

The people who own the magical AIs won't decide that they want to keep us all as pets, we won't have leverage to demand that they keep us all as pets, and they will have the resources to make sure they no longer need to keep us as pets. Shouting "You should keep humans as pets" is unlikely to change this fundamental equation.

wongarsu 11mo ago

> We’d have to end pretty much all those programs to run a minuscule basic income Isn't ending all those programs one of the core ideas of universal basic income? Instead of having a huge bureaucracy administering targeted social welfare you cut all the overhead and just pay everyone enough to exist, regardless of whether you actually need it. It'd still be more expensive, but giving people something dependable to fall back on would hopefully increase innovation and entrepreneurship, offsetting some of the costs

renewiltord 11mo ago
Okay so let’s divide the US federal budget by the number of people. So $21k per person. Now what happens to the guy who needs dialysis. It costs $60k. Right now the federal government pays. Now it’s given him a third the cost back. He just dies?
- adamauckland 10mo ago
  He gets it on the healthcare like all developed nations.