6 ms·

Great article until the very end... Basic income is not the answer to this. Basic income will lead to terrible social decay caused by apathy and laziness, fueli

Great article until the very end... Basic income is not the answer to this. Basic income will lead to terrible social decay caused by apathy and laziness, fueling even more government corruption and ultimately, totalitarianism. I can't help but think all of this talk and rhetoric in recent years is deliberate propaganda, conditioning left-leaning people. I have seen a number of websites posted on HN, especially in comments, which are overly rhetoric and nudge the reader towards utopian left ideas. The sites are well developed both in the application and in the information architecture sense. They don't seem to have revenue model and saying that tracking their financing proved difficult, would be an understatement. Please remember that changing the social framework is a VERY delicate matter. Oftentimes things sound very good on paper, but are not practical at all. Basic income sounds dangerously close to "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". When people believed this can happen, it ended terribly. Not because of the specific people in charge at the time. Socialism/Communism as a model is doomed to fail because of human nature. When you make social policy, you have to think about the lowest common denominator and currently, it is very low indeed.

waterlesscloud 11y ago
I'm not even vaguely "left leaning", at least not economically. I think capitalism has done a fantastic job of improving living conditions in the West. But I can see that capitalism is coming to its end in the next several decades. Things change. That's the constant. There must be something that's post-capitalist, because capitalism is very close to becoming unsustainable. It's not going to be the old leftist ideas, but it's not going to be capitalism either. We need to adapt. Not like we have a choice, really.
- blumkvist 11y ago
  I'm not advocating against reforms. I'm advocating against people tripping over ideas who sound too good. The majority of people I've talk to, who believe in basic income, have put very little thought about the ramifications of it. They have very little understanding of politics and social sciences. They read a bunch of articles, like this one, and thought "Hey, that's great, gimme free monies, I read an article that says people are more productive when they are not motivated by money". Next thing you know, they are advocating for it, convincing their friends how great it is. Politicians are always ready to ride the wave, chasing their grandiosity. The conservative way has proved to be a very stable path towards improvement. Slow, but stable. Stability and balance, are in my opinion, the most important characteristics of meaningful improvement.
  - mrrrgn 11y ago
    "The conservative way has proved to be a very stable path towards improvement. Slow, but stable. Stability and balance, are in my opinion, the most important characteristics of meaningful improvement." Can you give some evidence supporting the idea that this has been proved? My thinking is that technologies are improving at a non-linear pace, and technological change leads directly to social change. Given that, a conservative approach often leads to policies which are out of touch with reality (as political/social trends diverge).
    - chiaro 11y ago
      A strange point to make, given that the second biggest factor leading to economic growth over the last century (after the information revolution) was women joining the workplace post WW2.
      - blumkvist 11y ago
        Conservatism does not mean clinging to the status quo. I'm not sure if there is any point in replying at all since you can't make the difference. Conservatism is about slow, but deliberate moves. Carefully contemplated, but decisive actions.
        chiaro 11y ago
        Was not the opposition of equal participation based on enforcing traditional gender roles? My apologies if you mean something different, you just can't ignore that this position is very strongly aligned with conservatism as most understand it.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
egypturnash 11y ago
Anecdotes are not data, but here is my anecdote about Not Having To Work. A few years ago, I came into enough money that I don't have to work for several years. I have not been spending this time just lying on the beach; instead, I've been spending this time doing a thing I dearly want to do, which doesn't bring in much money. I leverage the skills I gained in the time I spent hanging around the animation industry to draw weird comics. I have been able to turn this into something that mostly pays my rent over the past four years. I could not have done this if I had to spend the bulk of my time working for someone else. Sure, some people will sit around and play video games all day. But I think you may be underestimating the number of people who have a thing they'd be spending a lot of time working on if not for that pesky day job. Even the most burnt-out and broken-seeming homeless folks.
- blumkvist 11y ago
  You are probably in the top %1 of the specimen. People who are naturally gifted are not the problem. The problem are the ones who are not. They don't aspire to achieve like you or me. Read very carefully the last line of my comment. Social policy needs to be made with the lowest common denominator in mind. You can look at education for cues. You have experimental programs that show tremendous improvement over current ones. But they are done with the top 1% of teachers tutoring the top 1% of kids. When they try to roll it out to a random school, they fail miserably.
orangecat 11y ago
Read Charles Murray on this (e.g. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/libertarian-charles-murray-the-welfare-state-has-denuded-our-civic-culture/ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/libertarian-charles...). He's a libertarian, specifically concerned about "social decay", and argues that a basic income would be a large improvement over what we have today. Basic income sounds dangerously close to "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". Not at all. A basic income gives you enough to live on, but if you want more than that you're going to have to produce something of value.
- blumkvist 11y ago
  The dangerous part is after the comma. If you read my comment at all you would know that my point is that guaranteeing the existential minimum to everyone means that they just stop caring about other shit and the political elite goes down the slippery slope.
chiaro 11y ago
Poverty is not considered to be a unsolved problem in academic economics. An NIT has wide support as a way to both directly eliminate poverty while taking away the need for distortionary measures such as minimum wage and the administrative costs they entail. Slippery slopes to totalitarianism aside, you're afraid of terrible social decay? The social decay I'm worried about is people falling into crime or prostitution out of desperation, or people's lives becoming unbearable to the point where drugs seem like a necessity. Enabling laziness to any degree is less deleterious to society than requiring single parents to work multiple minimum wage jobs to support their families. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is merely a natural consequence of diminishing marginal utility and subsequently underpins a lot of welfare economics. It doesn't necessitate any trappings of communism and to make that causal leap is beyond disingenuous.
- blumkvist 11y ago
  Proponents of basic income use the same rhetoric. This is what I find dangerous. Overly ambitious politicians tripping the masses to rise against the evil rich bastards. Like for example in the heart of Europe - France. Or Hungary. Or plenty of other populist political parties in Europe. Most all of which linked with sponsorship from the Russian government.
  - chiaro 11y ago
    And what's your point? That the efficacy or applicability of these ideas is somehow diminished by their presence in the political rhetoric of European minor parties?
    - blumkvist 11y ago
      That we are going to make awful, rash decisions because of a bunch of self-entitled pricks, lead by a bunch of gullible and vain mr.know-it-alls. For the benefit, and sponsored by a few unscrupulous KGB officers.
      - chiaro 11y ago
bithive123 11y ago
The whole point is that technological advances also change the social framework and we need to have a constructive plan for how to maintain a society in the face of that. Politics that tell us that poor people are naturally lazy, immoral children who can't run their lives may not be the most productive framework in the years to come.
lkbm 11y ago
> Basic income will lead to terrible social decay caused by apathy and laziness, fueling even more government corruption and ultimately, totalitarianism. I actually thought this line was satire until reading the rest of your comment. How's Alaska doing right now? Is it a totalitarian regime? Guaranteed basic income isn't a never-tried-before idea. Yeah, it sounds similar to the USSR, but the USSR had a lot of things beyond just redistribution. Alaska is clearly a much, much more apt analogy, and it doesn't seem worse off than other rural states.

waterlesscloud 11y ago

I'm not even vaguely "left leaning", at least not economically. I think capitalism has done a fantastic job of improving living conditions in the West. But I can see that capitalism is coming to its end in the next several decades. Things change. That's the constant. There must be something that's post-capitalist, because capitalism is very close to becoming unsustainable. It's not going to be the old leftist ideas, but it's not going to be capitalism either. We need to adapt. Not like we have a choice, really.

blumkvist 11y ago
I'm not advocating against reforms. I'm advocating against people tripping over ideas who sound too good. The majority of people I've talk to, who believe in basic income, have put very little thought about the ramifications of it. They have very little understanding of politics and social sciences. They read a bunch of articles, like this one, and thought "Hey, that's great, gimme free monies, I read an article that says people are more productive when they are not motivated by money". Next thing you know, they are advocating for it, convincing their friends how great it is. Politicians are always ready to ride the wave, chasing their grandiosity. The conservative way has proved to be a very stable path towards improvement. Slow, but stable. Stability and balance, are in my opinion, the most important characteristics of meaningful improvement.
- mrrrgn 11y ago
  "The conservative way has proved to be a very stable path towards improvement. Slow, but stable. Stability and balance, are in my opinion, the most important characteristics of meaningful improvement." Can you give some evidence supporting the idea that this has been proved? My thinking is that technologies are improving at a non-linear pace, and technological change leads directly to social change. Given that, a conservative approach often leads to policies which are out of touch with reality (as political/social trends diverge).
  - chiaro 11y ago
    A strange point to make, given that the second biggest factor leading to economic growth over the last century (after the information revolution) was women joining the workplace post WW2.
    - blumkvist 11y ago
      Conservatism does not mean clinging to the status quo. I'm not sure if there is any point in replying at all since you can't make the difference. Conservatism is about slow, but deliberate moves. Carefully contemplated, but decisive actions.
      - chiaro 11y ago
        Was not the opposition of equal participation based on enforcing traditional gender roles? My apologies if you mean something different, you just can't ignore that this position is very strongly aligned with conservatism as most understand it.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

egypturnash 11y ago

Anecdotes are not data, but here is my anecdote about Not Having To Work. A few years ago, I came into enough money that I don't have to work for several years. I have not been spending this time just lying on the beach; instead, I've been spending this time doing a thing I dearly want to do, which doesn't bring in much money. I leverage the skills I gained in the time I spent hanging around the animation industry to draw weird comics. I have been able to turn this into something that mostly pays my rent over the past four years. I could not have done this if I had to spend the bulk of my time working for someone else. Sure, some people will sit around and play video games all day. But I think you may be underestimating the number of people who have a thing they'd be spending a lot of time working on if not for that pesky day job. Even the most burnt-out and broken-seeming homeless folks.

blumkvist 11y ago
You are probably in the top %1 of the specimen. People who are naturally gifted are not the problem. The problem are the ones who are not. They don't aspire to achieve like you or me. Read very carefully the last line of my comment. Social policy needs to be made with the lowest common denominator in mind. You can look at education for cues. You have experimental programs that show tremendous improvement over current ones. But they are done with the top 1% of teachers tutoring the top 1% of kids. When they try to roll it out to a random school, they fail miserably.

orangecat 11y ago

Read Charles Murray on this (e.g. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/libertarian-charles-murray-the-welfare-state-has-denuded-our-civic-culture/ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/libertarian-charles...). He's a libertarian, specifically concerned about "social decay", and argues that a basic income would be a large improvement over what we have today. Basic income sounds dangerously close to "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". Not at all. A basic income gives you enough to live on, but if you want more than that you're going to have to produce something of value.

blumkvist 11y ago
The dangerous part is after the comma. If you read my comment at all you would know that my point is that guaranteeing the existential minimum to everyone means that they just stop caring about other shit and the political elite goes down the slippery slope.

chiaro 11y ago

Poverty is not considered to be a unsolved problem in academic economics. An NIT has wide support as a way to both directly eliminate poverty while taking away the need for distortionary measures such as minimum wage and the administrative costs they entail. Slippery slopes to totalitarianism aside, you're afraid of terrible social decay? The social decay I'm worried about is people falling into crime or prostitution out of desperation, or people's lives becoming unbearable to the point where drugs seem like a necessity. Enabling laziness to any degree is less deleterious to society than requiring single parents to work multiple minimum wage jobs to support their families. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is merely a natural consequence of diminishing marginal utility and subsequently underpins a lot of welfare economics. It doesn't necessitate any trappings of communism and to make that causal leap is beyond disingenuous.

blumkvist 11y ago
Proponents of basic income use the same rhetoric. This is what I find dangerous. Overly ambitious politicians tripping the masses to rise against the evil rich bastards. Like for example in the heart of Europe - France. Or Hungary. Or plenty of other populist political parties in Europe. Most all of which linked with sponsorship from the Russian government.
- chiaro 11y ago
  And what's your point? That the efficacy or applicability of these ideas is somehow diminished by their presence in the political rhetoric of European minor parties?
  - blumkvist 11y ago
    That we are going to make awful, rash decisions because of a bunch of self-entitled pricks, lead by a bunch of gullible and vain mr.know-it-alls. For the benefit, and sponsored by a few unscrupulous KGB officers.
    - chiaro 11y ago

bithive123 11y ago

The whole point is that technological advances also change the social framework and we need to have a constructive plan for how to maintain a society in the face of that. Politics that tell us that poor people are naturally lazy, immoral children who can't run their lives may not be the most productive framework in the years to come.

lkbm 11y ago

> Basic income will lead to terrible social decay caused by apathy and laziness, fueling even more government corruption and ultimately, totalitarianism. I actually thought this line was satire until reading the rest of your comment. How's Alaska doing right now? Is it a totalitarian regime? Guaranteed basic income isn't a never-tried-before idea. Yeah, it sounds similar to the USSR, but the USSR had a lot of things beyond just redistribution. Alaska is clearly a much, much more apt analogy, and it doesn't seem worse off than other rural states.