4 ms·
The idea is to have a floor on consequences, people make bad choices or are just plain unlucky. Think of basic welfare as a utility, to draw upon as and when yo
by grinnbearit 12y ago
The idea is to have a floor on consequences, people make bad choices or are just plain unlucky. Think of basic welfare as a utility, to draw upon as and when you need it, hopefully temporarily as you get back on your feet. Eliminating choice is important, it solves the underlying issue (people dying) while removing opportunities to exploit (reselling food stamps).
Incentives to be productive don't go away, can you create something other people want? Art? Literature? Take a loan or find investors. Worst case scenario you end up back on welfare.
Welfare needs to be thought of as a cost, not an investment.
- dragonwriter 12y ago> Think of basic welfare as a utility, to draw upon as and when you need it, hopefully temporarily as you get back on your feet. That's a not-entirely-unreasonable (though, still, I'd argue basically flawed) idea for welfare in an economy that is heavily labor dependent and in which the presumption that being jobless is a short-term, transitional situation and where the share of output going to labor (as opposed to capital) is relatively high. One of the reasons I think ideas like BI have been catching on more recently is that it is increasingly obvious that the economy is, to the extent it ever was like that in outline, increasingly moving away from it and not likely to return to it. > Incentives to be productive don't go away With a guaranteed floor rather than guaranteed addition, yes, within a certain range incentives to be productive go away, because any gains up to the amount of the guaranteed floor have zero net return to the person producing them.