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Once people reach a livable income, do they totally stop learning, inventing, or creating? I know I don't, and I know other people I see with financial security

Once people reach a livable income, do they totally stop learning, inventing, or creating? I know I don't, and I know other people I see with financial security don't just "stop" either. Because of that, I believe it's at least worth a try.

cobrausn 13y ago
My ability to invent and create is limited by my education. If I never got one in the first place because I had my basic needs met, there are quite a few things I could never do that I could now. And 'worth a try' on something this potentially disruptive needs more evidence than wants and feels for me to ever consider it viable. I don't think I'm alone.
- jchrisa 13y ago
  It seems you'd get more folks w education, not less, if they weren't starving.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > My ability to invent and create is limited by my education. If I never got one in the first place because I had my basic needs met This is wierdly backwards. The people least like to get an education are the people whose basic needs are not met. Its not like people who grow up rich have on average lower levels of educational attainment than those who grow up poor.
pstuart 13y ago
I'm sure many would be happy to watch tv all day long. But likely a majority would want to do something with their lives. If we were to do a program like this it should also include free birth control and even the option to sell reproductive rights. I've seen Idiocracy and while it is hyperbolic, I think there are elements of truth there.
rayiner 13y ago
No, of course not. But the idea that minimum income would cause everyone to just quit their jobs is predicated on the presumption that the poor are morally inferior. Thus, analogies to what middle and upper class people do once they reach a certain level of income are irrelevant, because those people are not morally inferior. You might see a middle class person leave his comfortable line engineer job to get an MBA or PhD to increase his earning power, but that's a mark of the moral virtue of the middle class. A poor person given any sort of income security would just sit on his ass and eat mcdonalds all day. Or so they say.
- cobrausn 13y ago
  Nice straw man, but no - I'm not concerned about the poor who work for a living, they genuinely tend to want to improve their lives and their families lives - that's why they are willing to work 40 hours or more a week for barely more money than could be gained on welfare. I've been there. I'm worried about the children of middle and upper-income families deciding that 'mincome' is good enough. I have yet to see any actual study or research on this that isn't 40 years old. The results were fairly positive then, but I'd like to see it replicated today. Maybe I'm worried about nothing.
  - DougWebb 13y ago
    Just look at the children today who have parents that are wealthy enough to support their children through adulthood. Most of them, I suspect, go through college and then work, either in the family business, some business of their own (possibly a boutique business that can never earn a profit but still pays rent and tax and maybe some salaries), or in some kind of charity/fundraising business. With mincome, more children whose parents couldn't give them that kind of support would probably behave this way. And that would probably be a good thing. There are also the brats of the super-rich which do nothing but throw away money, but even they are throwing their money towards people who can make better use of it. So maybe we'd have middle-income brats living off mincome and throwing it all away without doing productive work, but so what? They're not going to hoard the money, they're going to spend it, and that will drive the economy and put the money into the hands of people who are working productively.

cobrausn 13y ago

My ability to invent and create is limited by my education. If I never got one in the first place because I had my basic needs met, there are quite a few things I could never do that I could now. And 'worth a try' on something this potentially disruptive needs more evidence than wants and feels for me to ever consider it viable. I don't think I'm alone.

jchrisa 13y ago
It seems you'd get more folks w education, not less, if they weren't starving.
dragonwriter 13y ago
> My ability to invent and create is limited by my education. If I never got one in the first place because I had my basic needs met This is wierdly backwards. The people least like to get an education are the people whose basic needs are not met. Its not like people who grow up rich have on average lower levels of educational attainment than those who grow up poor.

pstuart 13y ago

I'm sure many would be happy to watch tv all day long. But likely a majority would want to do something with their lives. If we were to do a program like this it should also include free birth control and even the option to sell reproductive rights. I've seen Idiocracy and while it is hyperbolic, I think there are elements of truth there.

rayiner 13y ago

No, of course not. But the idea that minimum income would cause everyone to just quit their jobs is predicated on the presumption that the poor are morally inferior. Thus, analogies to what middle and upper class people do once they reach a certain level of income are irrelevant, because those people are not morally inferior. You might see a middle class person leave his comfortable line engineer job to get an MBA or PhD to increase his earning power, but that's a mark of the moral virtue of the middle class. A poor person given any sort of income security would just sit on his ass and eat mcdonalds all day. Or so they say.

cobrausn 13y ago
Nice straw man, but no - I'm not concerned about the poor who work for a living, they genuinely tend to want to improve their lives and their families lives - that's why they are willing to work 40 hours or more a week for barely more money than could be gained on welfare. I've been there. I'm worried about the children of middle and upper-income families deciding that 'mincome' is good enough. I have yet to see any actual study or research on this that isn't 40 years old. The results were fairly positive then, but I'd like to see it replicated today. Maybe I'm worried about nothing.
- DougWebb 13y ago
  Just look at the children today who have parents that are wealthy enough to support their children through adulthood. Most of them, I suspect, go through college and then work, either in the family business, some business of their own (possibly a boutique business that can never earn a profit but still pays rent and tax and maybe some salaries), or in some kind of charity/fundraising business. With mincome, more children whose parents couldn't give them that kind of support would probably behave this way. And that would probably be a good thing. There are also the brats of the super-rich which do nothing but throw away money, but even they are throwing their money towards people who can make better use of it. So maybe we'd have middle-income brats living off mincome and throwing it all away without doing productive work, but so what? They're not going to hoard the money, they're going to spend it, and that will drive the economy and put the money into the hands of people who are working productively.