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"Under BIG, production drops, consumption rises, and so do prices. Suddenly, the value of the BIG grant has been eroded. Great success: the poor are still poor.
by a-saleh 12y ago
"Under BIG, production drops, consumption rises, and so do prices. Suddenly, the value of the BIG grant has been eroded. Great success: the poor are still poor."
I was under impression, that BIG works on assumption, that production doesn't drop, because the people that would consider not working are often the people that wouldn't produce as much.
On the other hand, the rise in compsumption would be fueled by newly found buying power of the low income population, and that means bussinesses would care about them more.
For employers BIG would basically mean a flat discount on all of the employees.
And for government and people with low income it would mean a large reduction in byrocracy.
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Unfortunately lots of these assumptions on BIG are somewhat culture dependent.
- tomp 12y ago> the people that would consider not working are often the people that wouldn't produce as much. What do you mean? The jobs that suck the most and are paid the least are often the ones that absolutely have to be done (by a human), at least in the today's societies: garbage collector, construction worker, cleaners, store/fast-food workers, ...
- warcode 12y agoAll of the jobs you mention can be done by robots. Some of them can be done by robots TODAY.
- tomp 12y agoPersonally, I haven't seen any of the done by robots (except for Roomba, but that's not even cleaning - I'm talking about things like bathroom, trash, ... i.e. cleaning of corporate offices). Also, even if it's possible in the next decade, it will probably be much more expensive and capital intensive than human labor for quite some time.
- a-saleh 12y agoWell. I remember a time, when every store in my country had a shop-keeper, that would hand you the goods over the counter. Usualy shop had one shopkeeper that tended to all of the shop (counter, refilling, e.t.c) Then somebody figured out, that if you introduce a one way door in, and one way out, you can have larger store tended by much smaller number of people. And now in some shops they replace three counters that had to have people with ten self-checkout counters and one guy doing oversight ...
- dllthomas 12y agoIf workers work less (and they are not "zero marginal product workers"), then that's one pressure pushing production down. The hope of many proponents of BIG is that other pressures push production up, but I don't know that it is clear that those would dominate (though given the modest drop in hours worked in experiments with basic income, I don't think it's unlikely). Also, I have some trouble squaring this claim with the notion that BIG is an "inflation generator" as opposed to the stabilizing JG. If BIG raises prices, eroding the value of BIG, that erosion should slow the rise of prices; sounds like negative feedback, which is often (not always!) characteristic of self stabilizing systems.