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Arguments like this assume you can change one thing and society won't change around it. With a basic guarantee many people who are marginally employed would sto

Arguments like this assume you can change one thing and society won't change around it. With a basic guarantee many people who are marginally employed would stop working. You'd have two classes of citizens: the workers and those who are effectively parasites off of the workers. I don't like people being poor but society is just not wealthy for poverty to disappear. The said a person living in poverty is probably better off than all the but the richest people at any time in human history. Part of the issue is that we lack an understanding of poverty and what actually causes people to not be in poverty. Considering that in human history poverty has always been the norm it makes sense to look at what causes poverty to not be the norm first before moving onto just "fixing" it.

transfire 13y ago
Here's the problem with your analysis: Just because someone doesn't have a job, doesn't make them a parasite. Here's an example, a granddaughter who lives with and helps take care of her poor grandmother who has Alzheimer's. In her spare time she does sonogram analysis to determine the sex of babies for newly pregnant mothers (Yes, this does exist.) But there is no money in any of this, even though she provides a service to society. Give it some thought and you can realize there are many variations on this. The problem with capital-driven society is that it only values a narrow range of activities that have high rates of money exchange. But there are many things in life worth doing, indeed that need to be done, that do not.
- jknightco 13y ago
  Except your granddaughter isn't providing services to society. She's providing one service to her grandmother, as a family member (which could almost be seen as repaying a debt). The other service she's providing is the equivalent of a hobby: if it was valuable enough to other people to be considered a "service to society," then she could be getting paid for it.
  - eCa 13y ago
    > Except your granddaughter isn't providing services to society. I think it's arguable that she does. By doing what she does she relieves the system from taking care of her grandmother, and thereby making whatever small amount of taxpayer money usable for something else meanwhile taking that economic burden on herself. (Edit: It can of course be seen that whatever wellfare money she gets is the equivalent of her service to grandmother/society, but in that case it's still at worst a zero sum scenario.)
  - RWeaver 13y ago
    It's a service to society if the grandmother would otherwise be taken care of by the government (at enormous expense probably) I can imagine other fulfilling activities like helping less fortunate people get back on their feet, which could provide a giant boost to the economy but aren't really directly profitable (as the poor have no money)
  - saraid216 13y ago
    > if it was valuable enough to other people to be considered a "service to society," then she could be getting paid for it. Why do you assume she couldn't be getting paid for it? Maybe she's just not charging.
    - jknightco 13y ago
      If she's doing something she could be getting paid for bit she's not charging, then society definitely should not have to pick up the bill. That's just unfair.
      - ihateloggingin 13y ago
        Generally it works so that you get paid to do things for rich people, but if you do those things for poor people you don't get paid.
  - whiddershins 13y ago
    Forget society, she's doing a service to ME. Why? Because if all else failed and her grandmother were dying in the street in front of me, I would feel a moral, ethical, and emotional obligation to assume her care. I would rather pay in to BI, if that worked to remove this scenario from possible things that might happen. That's my personal felling about it, without parsing all the possible socioeconomic ramifications.
- pdonis 13y ago
  Isn't the granddaughter getting paid for the sonogram analysis? If not, why not?
- noonespecial 13y ago
  The "parasite" in your story is actually the grandmother. Realizing that the system having "parasites" is not avoidable and is not a moral failing is huge.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    "Parasite" is kind of a charged word. Trying to reinvent it as something OK is walking blithely into doublespeak territory. If you feel you need to redeem it, then okay, but I'm not seeing your reasons for wanting to.
  - moocowduckquack 13y ago
    Ignoring for the moment the argument that the grandmother may well have paid a load of taxes before getting alzheimers, one thing that would seem fundamental is that the grandmother gave birth to a parent of the carer, without which the carer would not have existed at all, so how can the grandmother be considered a parasite?
eigenvector 13y ago
You're assuming that the goal of a social safety net is to avoid or eliminate parasitic behaviour. I would suggest that reducing parasitism to zero is not possible. In fact the nature of any wealth transfer system is that some people will be drawing more out of it than they contribute. One political problem with welfare schemes is getting over the psychological hurdle that hard-working people are funding welfare abusers. I, for one, do not care if there are a few egregious abusers if the overall system is cost-effective. Focusing on eliminating parasitism leads to wasting even more money on administration, e.g. drug testing for welfare recipients.
- mikeash 13y ago
  I wonder how many of the people who argue against a basic income because of parasitic behavior also argue against paying people for work for the same reason. Paid labor has unbelievable amounts of abuse, yet we go on. Edit: man, typos galore. How embarrassing.
- aznjons 13y ago
  A similar analogy that occurs to me is the justice system. Yes, there will be guilty criminals who walk free of a innocent-until-proven-guilty, trial-by-jury-of-your-peers justice system. The alternative is convincingly worse enough that we accept the false negatives and outliers of the system that protects us. In this case, letting millions suffer in poverty with real effects of poor healthcare (instead of investing in preventative care), restricted access to better opportunities for themselves and their children seems thoroughly worse than accepting the outlier "parasites." I am of the belief that given the foundations of Maslow's hierarchy and a real education, many of those "parasites" with limited opportunities can be changed into people who feel they have a chance and pursue "self actualization." Poverty is a vicious cycle; it's hard to be ambitious in a "i want to change the world" way when you have no choice but to take whatever you can to support your family on minimum wage. I agree completely that instead of throwing money at administrative peripheral problems like eliminating any parasitism, we should address the root problem. Overall, people living in poverty do not have the same opportunities as the wealthy. Given the same opportunities there is no reason that they would not pursue the same "worthier" career aspirations. The assumption that poor people are parasites is the most colossal example of Fundamental Attribution Error[1] I can think of. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
nawitus 13y ago
>With a basic guarantee many people who are marginally employed would stop working. I believe with basic guarantee many people who are unemployed would start working. Social security in many countries mean that it's rational to either work many hours per week or work zero hours per week. Basic income means that every hour worked or dollar earned increases your standard of living, thus creating a higher incentive to work. >You'd have two classes of citizens: the workers and those who are effectively parasites off of the workers. I don't like people being poor but society is just not wealthy for poverty to disappear. There are countries like Finland with a social security guarantee. You can pretty much refuse to work and get $1000/month as a social security (though there are details and sanctions which make this more complex in reality). Anyway, the point is this: in Finland you can already be a "parasite" and some people do that. Finland doesn't have a basic income guarantee. We also have a system where living on basic social security (toimeentulotuki) working 5 hours per week doesn't really make sense. The effective tax rate for working only a little is 90-100%. If you make 100 euros per week, the social security is decreased by 100 euros. With basic income the effective tax rate would be 20-30%, so working would make sense. In Finland you pretty much have either full-time/part-time workers (20+ hours) or people who are completely unemployed. Why should a citizen living on basic income would want to work? To get paid more. An unemployed person living on $1000/month basic income can increase his or her standard of living substantially by getting paid $200/month more. If someone is working full time and getting paid $3000/month, a $200 increase per month has a lesser increase in standard of living. The current social security system has an incentive to be completely unemployed. Basic income means that it makes sense to work 1 hours, 2 hours, 5 hours, 10hours, 20 hours or 40 hours per week. All different kinds of working situations are naturally covered under basic income guarantee.
- rdl 13y ago
  In reality I think you'd see people moving from collecting social security/SSDI/etc. and getting paid in cash under the table to collecting BI and working in licit jobs and paying some taxes/having some employment protections. You might also lose some people who "can't work" for economic reasons of UI/SSDI/etc. and volunteer instead to the paid workforce.
- dnautics 13y ago
derefr 13y ago
> With a basic guarantee many people who are marginally employed would stop working. You'd have two classes of citizens: the workers and those who are effectively parasites off of the workers. We already have this, it's just horribly mislabeled. http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
rayiner 13y ago
The U.S. doesn't have much real poverty, at least as long as you leave out people with mental illness or veterans with psychological issues. Bottom decile personal income in U.S. is above $5,000 which puts people in that bracket above the median person in Mexico and not terrible far below the median person in Poland: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/04/median-earnings-higher-in-us-than-in.html http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/04/median-earnings-hi... (note the chart is in PPP-adjusted dollars). Poverty in the U.S. means subsidized housing, terrible schools, food stamps, etc. But survival is guaranteed. So the issue with basic income is not eliminating poverty. It's about changing the mechanism by which we have eliminated poverty.
- rtpg 13y ago
  moving, goalposts,etc. Just because many people are in extreme poverty doesn't mean that the US doesn't have "real" poverty. Also poverty is more or less defined in the society in which it happens. And the "standards" for not being poor in the US is not met in a lot of cases.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    But if you define poverty as "the bottom decile of the population", how exactly will you get rid of it?
    - moocowduckquack 13y ago
      There are many definitions of poverty. The use of a quick percentage is used for policy as it is easy to put figures to, however it is being used as a measurable indicator for a deeper definition. If you do not have people living hand to mouth in your society, then you have got rid of poverty, until then it helps to have some quick and dirty economics to work out where to direct your efforts.
    - frobozz 13y ago
      Your question is like saying "if you define green as the colour of grass, how can you make grass yellow?" If you take a sensible real-world definition of the poverty threshold, such as "earning less than 60% of the median full-time wage", then you can do so by pegging the BIG to 60% of the median full-time wage.
rtpg 13y ago
You know, you call them 'parasites' but it could be argued, firstly, that spending their 'free' cash is the service rendered (think utility functions: do you trust "average joe" or bureaucrats to be more effecient spenders of tax dollars?). Also, by giving these people basic income, you allow these families to build their own lineage and estate: over generations, families will be less likely to fall through the cracks, and thus can start producing "useful" members of society. Parasites you might call them, but they can be producing something even in this state.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  >do you trust "average joe" or bureaucrats to be more effecient spenders of tax dollars? This is an excellent point. Even when one points to the dregs of society, those people are likely to spend their 'free' money in a way that is beneficial to me, by spending at local businesses.
  - RodericDay 13y ago
    It's not unlike how you get to use Facebook "for free", but in reality you're feeding them information. Guaranteed Minimum Income could be seen as a way to ensuring everyone is able to express their purchasing desires with less distortion from necessity, and that you're paying them for that "social service". Idk.
    - saraid216 13y ago
      I think it'd be an interesting philosophical exercise to posit that we sell Facebook data traces about ourselves in return for easy access to data traces about others. What would that really mean, and what moral or economic consequences can be concluded from that? I personally have no idea.
ams6110 13y ago
Thank you. People live in poverty because they don't know how to not live in poverty. We think we can buy our way out of the problem by providing housing, foodstamps, welfare (or, as proposed, scrapping all those things and providing a "basic income") but all this really does is make poverty a bit more comfortable without actually teaching those in poverty that everything they know about how to live is wrong and counterproductive and contrasting that with what works. From the article: A Basic Income Guarantee would establish economic security as a universal right. It gives each of us the assurance that, no matter what happens, we won’t go hungry. I don't see that it provides that guarantee at all. It doesn't mandate that the money be spent on food, housing, or anything sensible. One of the things that people in living in long-term (generational) poverty tend to do is to immediately spend any money they get on "escaping" the drudgery of their survival, e.g. on alcohol or drugs, flashy jewelry or clothing, gambling or other entertainment. It simply doesn't occur to them that money can be managed, invested, or saved. If you don't break this way of looking at life, then the money will be gone in a week or two (or less) and they'll struggle for the rest of the month until the next payday comes, and repeat the cycle again. [Edit: Cite for my last paragraph: A Framework For Understanding Poverty, Ruby K. Payne]
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- jwatte 13y ago
  When you work for 7.75 an hour to support a family, you don't have enough money to "manage," much less gamble or buy jewelry. That's what it means to be working poor. I don't think you could hack that.
  - greedo 13y ago
    Funny how demographically, lower income citizens in the US are the backbone of almost every state lottery...
    - gnud 13y ago
      Do you really think it's funny? I don't.
steveklabnik 13y ago
> Considering that in human history poverty has always been the norm it makes sense to look at what causes poverty to not be the norm first before moving onto just "fixing" it. "When I give the poor bread, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist."
vacri 13y ago
It's likely that job-sharing would increase. Instead of one unemployed person and one 'full-time' waiter, you'd have two part-time waiters. Waiting being a menial job that's not awesome, but is easy to pick up and easy to manage when it's only a couple of shifts per week. The focus would have shifted from "I must do all this to survive" to "a bit of extra money on top"
CleanedStar 13y ago
> You'd have two classes of citizens: the workers and those who are effectively parasites off the workers You already have that, it's called workers, and the heirs who don't work and live like parasites off workers. Paris Hilton, the Rockefellers etc. - look at the Forbes 400, the list is chock full of them. Oh wait, they're "job creators", right? I'm supposed to be grateful they are parasites living off my labor. I am a skilled worker who creates wealth. Part of the wealth I create is sent off to these parasite heirs who have never worked a day in their life. Just like money used to go to kings and whatnot. These parasites have all kind of lackeys to spit out nonsense about why they were born with the right to live high on the hog off of my labor. I'm sure the czars of Russia had people arguing about how God had appointed them head of Russia up until they were put in front of a Bolshevik firing squad. The parasites are in power now. They live off the labor of workers like me. They're about to start bombing Syria, trying to wipe out the last remnants of the old Nasserite pan-Arab socialism. If you look at history through the centuries though, you realize parasites who are the de jure heads of things, that drift further and further from production, sooner or later get bumped off by those with de facto control over production. It has happened so many times through history it is probably the only historical constant. So many "entrepreneurs" and whatnot here. A lot of BS artists. You're groveling nothings, begging VCs for the chance to have limited partners expropriate labor value from the workers you want to hire. So turn around, tell me how these limited partners and heirs and parasites who have not had anyone in their family work for generations deserve to expropriate my labor. Tell me how I have an "attitude problem" which might prevent me from "succeeding", although it's pretty transparent to try to give that kind of advice to someone you know absolutely nothing about. Blah blah. Go get on your knees and beg the VC limited partners for money. You people are really a shining vision of the future.
moocowduckquack 13y ago
With a basic guarantee many people who are marginally employed would stop working. Why do the rich work? a person living in poverty is probably better off than all the but the richest people at any time in human history I'd imagine that hunger feels much the same now as it did a thousand years ago.
dragonwriter 13y ago
> With a basic guarantee many people who are marginally employed would stop working. So what? > You'd have two classes of citizens: the workers and those who are effectively parasites off of the workers. We already have that; the latter class is called "capitalists". With a BIG, the public commons become an equally-owned, dividend-paying asset, which in effect makes everyone at least a very-small-scale capitalist. > I don't like people being poor but society is just not wealthy for poverty to disappear. Reducing the necessity of continuous wage labor for those without large personal fortunes increases labor market mobility, opportunities to explore higher-risk, higher-potential return activities, and opportunities for job retraining for better fit to changing markets. Yes, a cost of that is that some people will opt-out of work without engaging in even potentially socially-useful activities, but this is to an extent self-limiting (the more people do it, no matter the nominal level of the BIG, the less goods and services the BIG will suffice to purchase, so that the more people that opt out, the less attractive opting-out becomes.) > Part of the issue is that we lack an understanding of poverty and what actually causes people to not be in poverty. We actually understand poverty quite well, and understand very well that the combination of limited goods and inequality in the distribution of goods cause people to be in poverty. What we don't have is a mechanism that works with human nature to encourage enough production and equal-enough distribution of goods to eliminate poverty, and BIG isn't, itself, intended to be a solution to that. Its mostly a self-regulating partial solution on the distribution side, since, as productivity increases, the sustainable minimum level under the BIG increases as well.

transfire 13y ago

Here's the problem with your analysis: Just because someone doesn't have a job, doesn't make them a parasite. Here's an example, a granddaughter who lives with and helps take care of her poor grandmother who has Alzheimer's. In her spare time she does sonogram analysis to determine the sex of babies for newly pregnant mothers (Yes, this does exist.) But there is no money in any of this, even though she provides a service to society. Give it some thought and you can realize there are many variations on this. The problem with capital-driven society is that it only values a narrow range of activities that have high rates of money exchange. But there are many things in life worth doing, indeed that need to be done, that do not.

jknightco 13y ago
Except your granddaughter isn't providing services to society. She's providing one service to her grandmother, as a family member (which could almost be seen as repaying a debt). The other service she's providing is the equivalent of a hobby: if it was valuable enough to other people to be considered a "service to society," then she could be getting paid for it.
- eCa 13y ago
  > Except your granddaughter isn't providing services to society. I think it's arguable that she does. By doing what she does she relieves the system from taking care of her grandmother, and thereby making whatever small amount of taxpayer money usable for something else meanwhile taking that economic burden on herself. (Edit: It can of course be seen that whatever wellfare money she gets is the equivalent of her service to grandmother/society, but in that case it's still at worst a zero sum scenario.)
- RWeaver 13y ago
  It's a service to society if the grandmother would otherwise be taken care of by the government (at enormous expense probably) I can imagine other fulfilling activities like helping less fortunate people get back on their feet, which could provide a giant boost to the economy but aren't really directly profitable (as the poor have no money)
- saraid216 13y ago
  > if it was valuable enough to other people to be considered a "service to society," then she could be getting paid for it. Why do you assume she couldn't be getting paid for it? Maybe she's just not charging.
  - jknightco 13y ago
    If she's doing something she could be getting paid for bit she's not charging, then society definitely should not have to pick up the bill. That's just unfair.
    - ihateloggingin 13y ago
      Generally it works so that you get paid to do things for rich people, but if you do those things for poor people you don't get paid.
- whiddershins 13y ago
  Forget society, she's doing a service to ME. Why? Because if all else failed and her grandmother were dying in the street in front of me, I would feel a moral, ethical, and emotional obligation to assume her care. I would rather pay in to BI, if that worked to remove this scenario from possible things that might happen. That's my personal felling about it, without parsing all the possible socioeconomic ramifications.
pdonis 13y ago
Isn't the granddaughter getting paid for the sonogram analysis? If not, why not?
noonespecial 13y ago
The "parasite" in your story is actually the grandmother. Realizing that the system having "parasites" is not avoidable and is not a moral failing is huge.
- saraid216 13y ago
  "Parasite" is kind of a charged word. Trying to reinvent it as something OK is walking blithely into doublespeak territory. If you feel you need to redeem it, then okay, but I'm not seeing your reasons for wanting to.
- moocowduckquack 13y ago
  Ignoring for the moment the argument that the grandmother may well have paid a load of taxes before getting alzheimers, one thing that would seem fundamental is that the grandmother gave birth to a parent of the carer, without which the carer would not have existed at all, so how can the grandmother be considered a parasite?

eigenvector 13y ago

You're assuming that the goal of a social safety net is to avoid or eliminate parasitic behaviour. I would suggest that reducing parasitism to zero is not possible. In fact the nature of any wealth transfer system is that some people will be drawing more out of it than they contribute. One political problem with welfare schemes is getting over the psychological hurdle that hard-working people are funding welfare abusers. I, for one, do not care if there are a few egregious abusers if the overall system is cost-effective. Focusing on eliminating parasitism leads to wasting even more money on administration, e.g. drug testing for welfare recipients.

mikeash 13y ago
I wonder how many of the people who argue against a basic income because of parasitic behavior also argue against paying people for work for the same reason. Paid labor has unbelievable amounts of abuse, yet we go on. Edit: man, typos galore. How embarrassing.
aznjons 13y ago
A similar analogy that occurs to me is the justice system. Yes, there will be guilty criminals who walk free of a innocent-until-proven-guilty, trial-by-jury-of-your-peers justice system. The alternative is convincingly worse enough that we accept the false negatives and outliers of the system that protects us. In this case, letting millions suffer in poverty with real effects of poor healthcare (instead of investing in preventative care), restricted access to better opportunities for themselves and their children seems thoroughly worse than accepting the outlier "parasites." I am of the belief that given the foundations of Maslow's hierarchy and a real education, many of those "parasites" with limited opportunities can be changed into people who feel they have a chance and pursue "self actualization." Poverty is a vicious cycle; it's hard to be ambitious in a "i want to change the world" way when you have no choice but to take whatever you can to support your family on minimum wage. I agree completely that instead of throwing money at administrative peripheral problems like eliminating any parasitism, we should address the root problem. Overall, people living in poverty do not have the same opportunities as the wealthy. Given the same opportunities there is no reason that they would not pursue the same "worthier" career aspirations. The assumption that poor people are parasites is the most colossal example of Fundamental Attribution Error[1] I can think of. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

nawitus 13y ago

>With a basic guarantee many people who are marginally employed would stop working. I believe with basic guarantee many people who are unemployed would start working. Social security in many countries mean that it's rational to either work many hours per week or work zero hours per week. Basic income means that every hour worked or dollar earned increases your standard of living, thus creating a higher incentive to work. >You'd have two classes of citizens: the workers and those who are effectively parasites off of the workers. I don't like people being poor but society is just not wealthy for poverty to disappear. There are countries like Finland with a social security guarantee. You can pretty much refuse to work and get $1000/month as a social security (though there are details and sanctions which make this more complex in reality). Anyway, the point is this: in Finland you can already be a "parasite" and some people do that. Finland doesn't have a basic income guarantee. We also have a system where living on basic social security (toimeentulotuki) working 5 hours per week doesn't really make sense. The effective tax rate for working only a little is 90-100%. If you make 100 euros per week, the social security is decreased by 100 euros. With basic income the effective tax rate would be 20-30%, so working would make sense. In Finland you pretty much have either full-time/part-time workers (20+ hours) or people who are completely unemployed. Why should a citizen living on basic income would want to work? To get paid more. An unemployed person living on $1000/month basic income can increase his or her standard of living substantially by getting paid $200/month more. If someone is working full time and getting paid $3000/month, a $200 increase per month has a lesser increase in standard of living. The current social security system has an incentive to be completely unemployed. Basic income means that it makes sense to work 1 hours, 2 hours, 5 hours, 10hours, 20 hours or 40 hours per week. All different kinds of working situations are naturally covered under basic income guarantee.

rdl 13y ago
In reality I think you'd see people moving from collecting social security/SSDI/etc. and getting paid in cash under the table to collecting BI and working in licit jobs and paying some taxes/having some employment protections. You might also lose some people who "can't work" for economic reasons of UI/SSDI/etc. and volunteer instead to the paid workforce.
dnautics 13y ago

derefr 13y ago

> With a basic guarantee many people who are marginally employed would stop working. You'd have two classes of citizens: the workers and those who are effectively parasites off of the workers. We already have this, it's just horribly mislabeled. http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

rayiner 13y ago

The U.S. doesn't have much real poverty, at least as long as you leave out people with mental illness or veterans with psychological issues. Bottom decile personal income in U.S. is above $5,000 which puts people in that bracket above the median person in Mexico and not terrible far below the median person in Poland: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/04/median-earnings-higher-in-us-than-in.html http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/04/median-earnings-hi... (note the chart is in PPP-adjusted dollars). Poverty in the U.S. means subsidized housing, terrible schools, food stamps, etc. But survival is guaranteed. So the issue with basic income is not eliminating poverty. It's about changing the mechanism by which we have eliminated poverty.

rtpg 13y ago
moving, goalposts,etc. Just because many people are in extreme poverty doesn't mean that the US doesn't have "real" poverty. Also poverty is more or less defined in the society in which it happens. And the "standards" for not being poor in the US is not met in a lot of cases.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  But if you define poverty as "the bottom decile of the population", how exactly will you get rid of it?
  - moocowduckquack 13y ago
    There are many definitions of poverty. The use of a quick percentage is used for policy as it is easy to put figures to, however it is being used as a measurable indicator for a deeper definition. If you do not have people living hand to mouth in your society, then you have got rid of poverty, until then it helps to have some quick and dirty economics to work out where to direct your efforts.
  - frobozz 13y ago
    Your question is like saying "if you define green as the colour of grass, how can you make grass yellow?" If you take a sensible real-world definition of the poverty threshold, such as "earning less than 60% of the median full-time wage", then you can do so by pegging the BIG to 60% of the median full-time wage.

rtpg 13y ago

You know, you call them 'parasites' but it could be argued, firstly, that spending their 'free' cash is the service rendered (think utility functions: do you trust "average joe" or bureaucrats to be more effecient spenders of tax dollars?). Also, by giving these people basic income, you allow these families to build their own lineage and estate: over generations, families will be less likely to fall through the cracks, and thus can start producing "useful" members of society. Parasites you might call them, but they can be producing something even in this state.

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
>do you trust "average joe" or bureaucrats to be more effecient spenders of tax dollars? This is an excellent point. Even when one points to the dregs of society, those people are likely to spend their 'free' money in a way that is beneficial to me, by spending at local businesses.
- RodericDay 13y ago
  It's not unlike how you get to use Facebook "for free", but in reality you're feeding them information. Guaranteed Minimum Income could be seen as a way to ensuring everyone is able to express their purchasing desires with less distortion from necessity, and that you're paying them for that "social service". Idk.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    I think it'd be an interesting philosophical exercise to posit that we sell Facebook data traces about ourselves in return for easy access to data traces about others. What would that really mean, and what moral or economic consequences can be concluded from that? I personally have no idea.

ams6110 13y ago

Thank you. People live in poverty because they don't know how to not live in poverty. We think we can buy our way out of the problem by providing housing, foodstamps, welfare (or, as proposed, scrapping all those things and providing a "basic income") but all this really does is make poverty a bit more comfortable without actually teaching those in poverty that everything they know about how to live is wrong and counterproductive and contrasting that with what works. From the article: A Basic Income Guarantee would establish economic security as a universal right. It gives each of us the assurance that, no matter what happens, we won’t go hungry. I don't see that it provides that guarantee at all. It doesn't mandate that the money be spent on food, housing, or anything sensible. One of the things that people in living in long-term (generational) poverty tend to do is to immediately spend any money they get on "escaping" the drudgery of their survival, e.g. on alcohol or drugs, flashy jewelry or clothing, gambling or other entertainment. It simply doesn't occur to them that money can be managed, invested, or saved. If you don't break this way of looking at life, then the money will be gone in a week or two (or less) and they'll struggle for the rest of the month until the next payday comes, and repeat the cycle again. [Edit: Cite for my last paragraph: A Framework For Understanding Poverty, Ruby K. Payne]

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jwatte 13y ago
When you work for 7.75 an hour to support a family, you don't have enough money to "manage," much less gamble or buy jewelry. That's what it means to be working poor. I don't think you could hack that.
- greedo 13y ago
  Funny how demographically, lower income citizens in the US are the backbone of almost every state lottery...
  - gnud 13y ago
    Do you really think it's funny? I don't.

steveklabnik 13y ago

> Considering that in human history poverty has always been the norm it makes sense to look at what causes poverty to not be the norm first before moving onto just "fixing" it. "When I give the poor bread, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist."

vacri 13y ago

It's likely that job-sharing would increase. Instead of one unemployed person and one 'full-time' waiter, you'd have two part-time waiters. Waiting being a menial job that's not awesome, but is easy to pick up and easy to manage when it's only a couple of shifts per week. The focus would have shifted from "I must do all this to survive" to "a bit of extra money on top"

CleanedStar 13y ago

> You'd have two classes of citizens: the workers and those who are effectively parasites off the workers You already have that, it's called workers, and the heirs who don't work and live like parasites off workers. Paris Hilton, the Rockefellers etc. - look at the Forbes 400, the list is chock full of them. Oh wait, they're "job creators", right? I'm supposed to be grateful they are parasites living off my labor. I am a skilled worker who creates wealth. Part of the wealth I create is sent off to these parasite heirs who have never worked a day in their life. Just like money used to go to kings and whatnot. These parasites have all kind of lackeys to spit out nonsense about why they were born with the right to live high on the hog off of my labor. I'm sure the czars of Russia had people arguing about how God had appointed them head of Russia up until they were put in front of a Bolshevik firing squad. The parasites are in power now. They live off the labor of workers like me. They're about to start bombing Syria, trying to wipe out the last remnants of the old Nasserite pan-Arab socialism. If you look at history through the centuries though, you realize parasites who are the de jure heads of things, that drift further and further from production, sooner or later get bumped off by those with de facto control over production. It has happened so many times through history it is probably the only historical constant. So many "entrepreneurs" and whatnot here. A lot of BS artists. You're groveling nothings, begging VCs for the chance to have limited partners expropriate labor value from the workers you want to hire. So turn around, tell me how these limited partners and heirs and parasites who have not had anyone in their family work for generations deserve to expropriate my labor. Tell me how I have an "attitude problem" which might prevent me from "succeeding", although it's pretty transparent to try to give that kind of advice to someone you know absolutely nothing about. Blah blah. Go get on your knees and beg the VC limited partners for money. You people are really a shining vision of the future.

moocowduckquack 13y ago

With a basic guarantee many people who are marginally employed would stop working. Why do the rich work? a person living in poverty is probably better off than all the but the richest people at any time in human history I'd imagine that hunger feels much the same now as it did a thousand years ago.

dragonwriter 13y ago

> With a basic guarantee many people who are marginally employed would stop working. So what? > You'd have two classes of citizens: the workers and those who are effectively parasites off of the workers. We already have that; the latter class is called "capitalists". With a BIG, the public commons become an equally-owned, dividend-paying asset, which in effect makes everyone at least a very-small-scale capitalist. > I don't like people being poor but society is just not wealthy for poverty to disappear. Reducing the necessity of continuous wage labor for those without large personal fortunes increases labor market mobility, opportunities to explore higher-risk, higher-potential return activities, and opportunities for job retraining for better fit to changing markets. Yes, a cost of that is that some people will opt-out of work without engaging in even potentially socially-useful activities, but this is to an extent self-limiting (the more people do it, no matter the nominal level of the BIG, the less goods and services the BIG will suffice to purchase, so that the more people that opt out, the less attractive opting-out becomes.) > Part of the issue is that we lack an understanding of poverty and what actually causes people to not be in poverty. We actually understand poverty quite well, and understand very well that the combination of limited goods and inequality in the distribution of goods cause people to be in poverty. What we don't have is a mechanism that works with human nature to encourage enough production and equal-enough distribution of goods to eliminate poverty, and BIG isn't, itself, intended to be a solution to that. Its mostly a self-regulating partial solution on the distribution side, since, as productivity increases, the sustainable minimum level under the BIG increases as well.