4 ms·

Since minimum income and negative income taxes are an often discussed topic on HN, I wonder what supporters of these ideas think about this article? It's pretty

by bglazer 12y ago

Since minimum income and negative income taxes are an often discussed topic on HN, I wonder what supporters of these ideas think about this article? It's pretty troubling to me that 27% of the surveyed men were watching TV at 2 in the afternoon. I'm intrigued by the idea of a guaranteed minimum income and especially the effect that it could have on allowing people to pursue risky or creative projects. I'm very much not intrigued by a quarter of the population watching daytime TV.

ep103 12y ago
1) Unemployed is a mixed category of people who can work, and those who can't. Without meaningful statistics on how those two groups make up the sample of people in the survey, it might make complete sense for so many people to not have a primary activity of looking for a new job. 2) We're ~5 years after the last economic collapse, but with minimal actual economic recovery. I don't have the statistics handy, but IIRC U6 went up significantly during that period. A _lot_ of people simply gave up trying to find a new job after being unable to do so for so long. We would want statistics on what portion of the unemployed fall into that category too before making an opinion.
- desdiv 12y ago
  >U6 Here's a succinct explanation for those of us who are not fluent in Americanese :D http://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate http://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate
- DanBC 12y ago
  > 1) Unemployed is a mixed category of people who can work, and those who can't. Sorry - this line triggers a knee jerk response from me. Please feel free to ignore the rest of this post. There are very few people who are so disabled they are unable to work. There are people who face discrimination; or who have learnt patterns of livingthat are not compatible with work; or people who have learned helplessness. Employers are understandably nervous about employig someone with no work in the past three years (and even if they're not nervous they usually get to chose between the person with large gaps and the person with recent work history). Modern approaches to getting people with disability back into work concentrate on "place then support" - you get someone a jon and then you provide support to them and their employer to keep them in that job. This is prefered to "train then place" where you put people through work-preparation courses and then eventually try to get them a job and don't support them in work. I'm particularly interested in barriers to employment for people with mental illness. When someone has a leg amputated there is a period where they are rehabilitating and having prosthetics fitted, but then they can return to work. From time to time they may have problems with their stump and they will need new prosthetics. We don't expect those people to never work again. So it's weird to me why we don't see severe mental illness as havig similar times of illness and wellness. This organisation has good quality information about curret best practice. http://www.centreformentalhealth.org.uk/employment/index.aspx http://www.centreformentalhealth.org.uk/employment/index.asp...
  - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    >There are people who face discrimination; or who have learnt patterns of livingthat are not compatible with work; or people who have learned helplessness. And there are also people with crippling depression, fibromyalgia, and/or pain disorders. >I'm particularly interested in barriers to employment for people with mental illness. When someone has a leg amputated there is a period where they are rehabilitating and having prosthetics fitted, but then they can return to work. From time to time they may have problems with their stump and they will need new prosthetics. We don't expect those people to never work again. So it's weird to me why we don't see severe mental illness as havig similar times of illness and wellness. Maybe it's better in the UK, but in many countries, employers simply don't want to hire someone with a history of chronic semi-disability. This can be particularly bad in the United States, where disability and health insurances are provided by the employer instead of the state.
    - UrMomReadsHN 12y ago
      We do have social security disability provided by the state.
    - MichaelCrawford 12y ago
      I myself have quite severe Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder. Among my symptoms are visual hallucinations, paranoia, delusions (other than paranoid delusions), depression which can be suicidal, actual suicide attempts - no suicide completions so far :-D - a euphoric state known as mania, which can feel good to some extent but, when extreme, is far worse than all the other symptoms - sleep disturbances (at times insomnia, other times hypersomnia), catatonia and flat affect, that is, an inability to outwardly express my emotions. My flat affect makes it difficult to connect to other people, which itself can lead to depression. However, the specific reason that I work as a coder, is that computer programming accomodates my illness in a way that physics does not. (My degree is in Physics, not Computer Science.) I hated coding with a passion at my first full-time programming job, I wasn't any good at it, and fully intended to do just about anything else once I was able to find a "real job". However I happened to notice that I could still write software even when I was floridly paranoid. I mean like that NAZIs having Panzer exercises in the office parking lot. I didn't see any soldiers or weaponry when I looked directly out the window but when I turned away I could feel their presence. I decided to stick with programming in part because of that, as well as some other reasons. These days I am contemplating going back to complete my Physics PhD. What I find these days is rampant age discrimination, as well as no one believing that my resume is for real. I wrote my first computer program in 1976, in FORTRAN, with a pencil on a coding form, then typed it into a paper teletype terminal, where it ran on an IBM 360 mainframe. That box was so expensive that the University of Idaho had just that one computer for the entire campus to share. I'm pretty sure it had magnetic core memory.
DanBC 12y ago
At the moment a quarter of the population spends their time watching TV and society has a costly bureaucratic infrastructure to funnel money around a variety of government agencies to and for these people. (I have some experience with the English system and that feels decidely sub-optimal.) So, in the new system you'd still have a quarter of the population watching TV but you'd also have a bunch of bureaucrats and money free to spend on, say, healthcare and health promotion. I accept that I am overly optimistic about this.
cm2012 12y ago
If someone's work has close to zero or negative value, who cares if they're watching TV as opposed to digging up holes and filling them in?
rayiner 12y ago
There's a saying: idle hands do the devil's work. Nobody here puts any stock in traditional experience and understandings, but I don't think the idea was conjured out of thin air. Also, while I'm burning karma: the point at which 50% of men are awake is 39 minutes later than for women, and the point at which 50% of each sex are asleep is only 13 minutes earlier for women. I.e. men are sleeping substantially longer, in addition to watching a lot more TV and doing a lot less housework, shopping, and child/elder-care. Says a lot about how our culture coddles men.
- judk 12y ago
  Coddles some men. You know statistics better than this. Care to poll a coal mine or oil rig?
  - rayiner 12y ago
    The fact that men overall are coddled does not mean that every man is coddled. The societal expectation is that men do hard/dangerous work, while women do housework and childcare. Technology has automated away most of the former jobs, such that only a tiny minority of men are working in a coal mine or oil rig. Technology has yet to do much to automate childcare. The result has been a windfall for men--they have five more hours of leisure time per week than women.[1] Judging by these statistics of the non-employed, I imagine such trends will only be magnified with increased automation, and under policies like guaranteed minimum income. [1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/10/another-gender-gap-men-spend-more-time-in-leisure-activities/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/10/another-gend...
    - Camillo 12y ago
      Did you read your own link? It adds up paid work, housework and child care, and shows that the total is 45.6 hours for men and 45.2 hours for women. It doesn't say what women are doing in those five hours they don't spend on leisure (personal care? sleeping?), but we do know that it is not childcare or housework, which invalidates your entire argument.
judk 12y ago
Is daytime tv really worse than hacker news?
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  It's no worse than reddit, but it is a marker of low class status.
  - cm2012 12y ago
    Right on the money.
danielweber 12y ago
This is why wage subsidy (or, related, a job guarantee) is way better than a guaranteed income. If you only hang out with over-achievers, you might be able to convince yourself that, once freed from the need to earn income, people will become super productive. (Although my own experience at MIT, over-achievers all, was that many people will stop working if they can.) And once you have defined the ground-floor as people sitting around watching TV and playing video games, what kind of lifestyle do you have for the people manning the fast food restaurants being patronized by those video game players?
Simp 12y ago
Many factors can be the cause of this: You're not really free to pursue long term projects since you have to be available to work/look for a job. You are also stressed because the future is very uncertain. You do not earn money so you have to do activities that are really cheap. You are looking for a job, but a lot of that is just waiting for replies on resumes you have sent out. There is also some social isolation because of the negative stigma that comes with being unemployed. An example: It's hard to start a business with no money, that you might have to give up next week because you might have a job then and won't have the time for it. It's not making any money yet and you need to pay the bills! You need to focus on looking for a job. Meeting the right people would help get it started, only you're socially isolated and most people are working during the week. You can't think of all that right now. Your mind is preoccupied with job and money related worries. You watch some TV while you wait for replies from companies, it's free and stops your mind from worrying.
UweSchmidt 12y ago
My impression is that the proponents of guaranteed minimum income would blame the current system on all that TV watching. People right now would sometimes be discouraged from earning a little money if it reduces benefits. What else can be done? Volunteering, experimenting, even education (if not 100% applicable for job-hunt) is not encouraged or regarded highly as people are under pressure to find work. Finally, being unemployed is automatically a failure on some level, and if that persists, hopelessness and maybe a mild depression might set in. So the idea would be to remove that pressure and see if people are really intrinsically lazy, or in general let's see if that changes society in a cool way. Maybe some stable, smaller country could go ahead and try it out?
- MichaelCrawford 12y ago
  The penalty for riding the TriMet MAX light rail without a ticket is a $170.00 citation. I ride without paying all the time. I just dress respectably. Like today I'm wearing a dress shirt and silk necktie. I've never been cited. I got caught red-handed once by a cop; when I told him I was on my way to see my doctor, he pulled a transit pass out of his pocket, popped it in the validation machine, handed it to me then requested I pay for my future train rides. The main reason I do ride around the trains without paying, is that I am more effective at looking for a job when I take the train to downtown Portland. Most of the places I've lived around here haven't been so conducive to my work productivity.
  - MichaelCrawford 12y ago
    To be clear, I do pay when I can. Just today I bought a two-week pass. When I get some steady work, I'm going to send a big fat check to the TriMet board, along with a letter of apology.

by bglazer 12y ago

ep103 12y ago

1) Unemployed is a mixed category of people who can work, and those who can't. Without meaningful statistics on how those two groups make up the sample of people in the survey, it might make complete sense for so many people to not have a primary activity of looking for a new job. 2) We're ~5 years after the last economic collapse, but with minimal actual economic recovery. I don't have the statistics handy, but IIRC U6 went up significantly during that period. A _lot_ of people simply gave up trying to find a new job after being unable to do so for so long. We would want statistics on what portion of the unemployed fall into that category too before making an opinion.

desdiv 12y ago
>U6 Here's a succinct explanation for those of us who are not fluent in Americanese :D http://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate http://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate
DanBC 12y ago
> 1) Unemployed is a mixed category of people who can work, and those who can't. Sorry - this line triggers a knee jerk response from me. Please feel free to ignore the rest of this post. There are very few people who are so disabled they are unable to work. There are people who face discrimination; or who have learnt patterns of livingthat are not compatible with work; or people who have learned helplessness. Employers are understandably nervous about employig someone with no work in the past three years (and even if they're not nervous they usually get to chose between the person with large gaps and the person with recent work history). Modern approaches to getting people with disability back into work concentrate on "place then support" - you get someone a jon and then you provide support to them and their employer to keep them in that job. This is prefered to "train then place" where you put people through work-preparation courses and then eventually try to get them a job and don't support them in work. I'm particularly interested in barriers to employment for people with mental illness. When someone has a leg amputated there is a period where they are rehabilitating and having prosthetics fitted, but then they can return to work. From time to time they may have problems with their stump and they will need new prosthetics. We don't expect those people to never work again. So it's weird to me why we don't see severe mental illness as havig similar times of illness and wellness. This organisation has good quality information about curret best practice. http://www.centreformentalhealth.org.uk/employment/index.aspx http://www.centreformentalhealth.org.uk/employment/index.asp...
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  >There are people who face discrimination; or who have learnt patterns of livingthat are not compatible with work; or people who have learned helplessness. And there are also people with crippling depression, fibromyalgia, and/or pain disorders. >I'm particularly interested in barriers to employment for people with mental illness. When someone has a leg amputated there is a period where they are rehabilitating and having prosthetics fitted, but then they can return to work. From time to time they may have problems with their stump and they will need new prosthetics. We don't expect those people to never work again. So it's weird to me why we don't see severe mental illness as havig similar times of illness and wellness. Maybe it's better in the UK, but in many countries, employers simply don't want to hire someone with a history of chronic semi-disability. This can be particularly bad in the United States, where disability and health insurances are provided by the employer instead of the state.
  - UrMomReadsHN 12y ago
    We do have social security disability provided by the state.
  - MichaelCrawford 12y ago
    I myself have quite severe Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder. Among my symptoms are visual hallucinations, paranoia, delusions (other than paranoid delusions), depression which can be suicidal, actual suicide attempts - no suicide completions so far :-D - a euphoric state known as mania, which can feel good to some extent but, when extreme, is far worse than all the other symptoms - sleep disturbances (at times insomnia, other times hypersomnia), catatonia and flat affect, that is, an inability to outwardly express my emotions. My flat affect makes it difficult to connect to other people, which itself can lead to depression. However, the specific reason that I work as a coder, is that computer programming accomodates my illness in a way that physics does not. (My degree is in Physics, not Computer Science.) I hated coding with a passion at my first full-time programming job, I wasn't any good at it, and fully intended to do just about anything else once I was able to find a "real job". However I happened to notice that I could still write software even when I was floridly paranoid. I mean like that NAZIs having Panzer exercises in the office parking lot. I didn't see any soldiers or weaponry when I looked directly out the window but when I turned away I could feel their presence. I decided to stick with programming in part because of that, as well as some other reasons. These days I am contemplating going back to complete my Physics PhD. What I find these days is rampant age discrimination, as well as no one believing that my resume is for real. I wrote my first computer program in 1976, in FORTRAN, with a pencil on a coding form, then typed it into a paper teletype terminal, where it ran on an IBM 360 mainframe. That box was so expensive that the University of Idaho had just that one computer for the entire campus to share. I'm pretty sure it had magnetic core memory.

DanBC 12y ago

At the moment a quarter of the population spends their time watching TV and society has a costly bureaucratic infrastructure to funnel money around a variety of government agencies to and for these people. (I have some experience with the English system and that feels decidely sub-optimal.) So, in the new system you'd still have a quarter of the population watching TV but you'd also have a bunch of bureaucrats and money free to spend on, say, healthcare and health promotion. I accept that I am overly optimistic about this.

cm2012 12y ago

If someone's work has close to zero or negative value, who cares if they're watching TV as opposed to digging up holes and filling them in?

rayiner 12y ago

There's a saying: idle hands do the devil's work. Nobody here puts any stock in traditional experience and understandings, but I don't think the idea was conjured out of thin air. Also, while I'm burning karma: the point at which 50% of men are awake is 39 minutes later than for women, and the point at which 50% of each sex are asleep is only 13 minutes earlier for women. I.e. men are sleeping substantially longer, in addition to watching a lot more TV and doing a lot less housework, shopping, and child/elder-care. Says a lot about how our culture coddles men.

judk 12y ago
Coddles some men. You know statistics better than this. Care to poll a coal mine or oil rig?
- rayiner 12y ago
  The fact that men overall are coddled does not mean that every man is coddled. The societal expectation is that men do hard/dangerous work, while women do housework and childcare. Technology has automated away most of the former jobs, such that only a tiny minority of men are working in a coal mine or oil rig. Technology has yet to do much to automate childcare. The result has been a windfall for men--they have five more hours of leisure time per week than women.[1] Judging by these statistics of the non-employed, I imagine such trends will only be magnified with increased automation, and under policies like guaranteed minimum income. [1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/10/another-gender-gap-men-spend-more-time-in-leisure-activities/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/10/another-gend...
  - Camillo 12y ago
    Did you read your own link? It adds up paid work, housework and child care, and shows that the total is 45.6 hours for men and 45.2 hours for women. It doesn't say what women are doing in those five hours they don't spend on leisure (personal care? sleeping?), but we do know that it is not childcare or housework, which invalidates your entire argument.

judk 12y ago

Is daytime tv really worse than hacker news?

eli_gottlieb 12y ago
It's no worse than reddit, but it is a marker of low class status.
- cm2012 12y ago
  Right on the money.

danielweber 12y ago

This is why wage subsidy (or, related, a job guarantee) is way better than a guaranteed income. If you only hang out with over-achievers, you might be able to convince yourself that, once freed from the need to earn income, people will become super productive. (Although my own experience at MIT, over-achievers all, was that many people will stop working if they can.) And once you have defined the ground-floor as people sitting around watching TV and playing video games, what kind of lifestyle do you have for the people manning the fast food restaurants being patronized by those video game players?

Simp 12y ago

Many factors can be the cause of this: You're not really free to pursue long term projects since you have to be available to work/look for a job. You are also stressed because the future is very uncertain. You do not earn money so you have to do activities that are really cheap. You are looking for a job, but a lot of that is just waiting for replies on resumes you have sent out. There is also some social isolation because of the negative stigma that comes with being unemployed. An example: It's hard to start a business with no money, that you might have to give up next week because you might have a job then and won't have the time for it. It's not making any money yet and you need to pay the bills! You need to focus on looking for a job. Meeting the right people would help get it started, only you're socially isolated and most people are working during the week. You can't think of all that right now. Your mind is preoccupied with job and money related worries. You watch some TV while you wait for replies from companies, it's free and stops your mind from worrying.

UweSchmidt 12y ago

My impression is that the proponents of guaranteed minimum income would blame the current system on all that TV watching. People right now would sometimes be discouraged from earning a little money if it reduces benefits. What else can be done? Volunteering, experimenting, even education (if not 100% applicable for job-hunt) is not encouraged or regarded highly as people are under pressure to find work. Finally, being unemployed is automatically a failure on some level, and if that persists, hopelessness and maybe a mild depression might set in. So the idea would be to remove that pressure and see if people are really intrinsically lazy, or in general let's see if that changes society in a cool way. Maybe some stable, smaller country could go ahead and try it out?

MichaelCrawford 12y ago
The penalty for riding the TriMet MAX light rail without a ticket is a $170.00 citation. I ride without paying all the time. I just dress respectably. Like today I'm wearing a dress shirt and silk necktie. I've never been cited. I got caught red-handed once by a cop; when I told him I was on my way to see my doctor, he pulled a transit pass out of his pocket, popped it in the validation machine, handed it to me then requested I pay for my future train rides. The main reason I do ride around the trains without paying, is that I am more effective at looking for a job when I take the train to downtown Portland. Most of the places I've lived around here haven't been so conducive to my work productivity.
- MichaelCrawford 12y ago
  To be clear, I do pay when I can. Just today I bought a two-week pass. When I get some steady work, I'm going to send a big fat check to the TriMet board, along with a letter of apology.