Basic income

the community requires work in order to sustain itself

There's 'work' and there's involuntarily giving away a third of one's waking hours - at a bare minimum - to someone else to do something very probably boring, irritating, outside of one's interests and of doubtful benefit to the community.

Is there not a risk that, in the absence of full automation (or full communism), the irritating, unpleasant work would just increasingly fall to immigrants who, through the necessity of their labour to the functioning of the system, would be kept in perpetual limbo - forever denied citizenship that would give them equal access to basic income?

How would we ever value 'benefit to the community' eh

As ShariVari indicates some people may define 'community' more narrowly than others.

Switzerland seems to have voted against it by a margin of four to one.

comments on the WSJ article? I just lurk ITT and don't really have the economic background to contribute but my skim-take on it was "most people use way more than $3K of Medicare a year and this article doesn't say anything about fixing health care" but I may have missed the part where the author just assumed that would happen.

Give the author is the racist crackpot libertarian Charles Murray, of Bell Curve fame, and has spent his entire career trying to find ways to destroy the welfare state I wouldn't assume he intends to fix anything.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/05/john-mcdonnell-labour-universal-basic-income-welfare-benefits-compass-report

A personal essay from the interior, amongst people not finding work at any price

https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/

How Giving Free Money Actually Saves Money

https://medium.com/utopia-for-realists/why-do-the-poor-make-such-poor-decisions-f05d84c44f1a#.321hdio18

have we gotten this rolling yet

basic income is basic common sense at this late date in human habitat despoliation imho

lol this thread really brings it out, flopson jerking off to economic speculative fiction completely divorced from the real world suffering of the situation, tombot wanting ubi so he wont have to deal with incompetents who dare inhabit the same space as his genius

I just want lagoon to have plenty of time to post pictures of beers and coffees to ilx and not worry about a job

― μpright mammal (mh), Saturday, June 4, 2016 6:17 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

thank u for yr support lol

icymi

"During the decades after World War II, wages went up hand in hand with productivity. Since the mid-1970s, as union membership has declined, that’s largely stopped happening. Instead, most of the increased wealth from productivity gains has been seized by the people at the top.

Even conservative calculations show that if wages had gone up in step with productivity, families with the median household income of around $52,000 per year would now be making about 25 percent more, or $65,000. Alternately, if we could take the increased productivity in time off, regular families could keep making $52,000 per year but only work four-fifths as much – e.g., people working 40 hours a week could work just 32 hours for the same pay.

So more and better unions would almost certainly translate directly into higher pay and better benefits for everyone, including people not in unions."

https://theintercept.com/2016/09/05/happy-labor-day-there-has-never-been-a-middle-class-without-strong-unions/

lol this thread really brings it out, flopson jerking off to economic speculative fiction completely divorced from the real world suffering of the situation, tombot wanting ubi so he wont have to deal with incompetents who dare inhabit the same space as his genius

― lag∞n, Wednesday, July 20, 2016 9:12 AM (one month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

bring it bitch

he brought it a month ago but you weren't home, maybe if u look he left it in the mailbox or something

can u just.. not post

Still floppin

I'm the only good poster in this thread.

it's possible that you could schedule a redelivery from lagoon

My posts might not be good but I still deserve your basic attention

https://amp.businessinsider.com/givedirectly-basic-income-experiment-unexpected-trouble-2016-9

Basic income as charitable international aid is way more fraught than as a domestic policy for what I think are obvious reasons

There have already been countless RTCs with unconditional cash transfers, idg how this one is suddenly testing UBI, it's neither universal nor basic

otm

it's not like people turn down tax credits

the problem with ppl turning it down is it creates selection bias into treatment which is supposed to be random. but trust is a big problem with all these Development RCTs not unique to this one

also maybe I'm wrong Actually and maybe 1$ per day is basic

https://salon.thefamily.co/enough-with-this-basic-income-bullshit-a6bc92e8286b#.kj46ek8mv

Basic income is to the social state what the flat tax is to the tax system. It flatters the engineering mind with its apparent simplicity.

if that guy got hit by a bus i would be ok with it

Too much emphasis

what's so attractive about basic income is that you don't have to actually organize collectively with actual dispossessed human beings to grab wealth back from elites, you just have to install BASIC_INCOME.EXE job done let's organize a conference to explain how we did it

That article was a mess. Seems like the writer was for a basic income + universal healthcare, but worried that it would be a political non-starter. Well yeah! No shit. That's why we're talking about it. If the jobs really do start drying up permanently, then maybe it becomes more possible.

yeah the article is terrible. the quote i pulled out (and tracer's point) is fair though imo.

Yeah I guess so. I'm an engineer, and I admit I am drawn toward simple solutions. However, libertarianism is just plain stupid. I feel like there are a small (but loud) minority of libertarian engineers that:

a. Have horrible ideas
b. Make any idea that comes from techies instantly suspect

Which is too bad, IMO. OTOH, techies seem to be running everything and hoovering up all the money in the economy these days, so boo hoo.

A basic income party (Bündnis Grundeinkommen) was founded in Munich two weeks ago; the platform consists of establishing a nationwide UBI, and disbanding the party immediately afterwards. UBI.EXE, now with installer cleanup utility, just in time for next year's Bundestag election.

Simple. Elegant. Powerful.

http://zdnet1.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2015/06/11/c6ae5747-100b-11e5-9a74-d4ae52e95e57/jobs-headshot-chin-102011.jpg

Having a basic income and rallying the dispossessed are not mutually exclusive imo.

I quite liked the article myself. I don't agree with all of it, particularly where he's coming from with his digitization of all work implications, but I thought it was far from a "mess".

it's like a roaring geyser of missed points and false premises. you may enjoy his other recent work "actually trump is smart and tax avoidance is good" and "actually brexit is good"

posted to the Netflix thread. There's a new French show called Trepalium which takes place in the near-ish future, about a society where there is only enough work for 20% of the population. A massive wall is built separating them from the other 80%. The latter live in rags and misery. The former live in sleek apartments and wear ridiculous outfits. A reforming politician strikes a deal with terrorists from the 80% who have been holding a government minister hostage for the last 10 years. They release the minister, and in exchange the elites agree to take 60,000 "non-workers" to live on the other side of the wall (doing what is not quite yet clear). it promises to be, at least in part, a meditation on whether work is what makes someone valuable or not.

I've come across two articles recently that show people in the know acknowledging this world is on it's way.

Michael Bloomberg

https://www.cnet.com/news/michael-bloomberg-trump-represents-the-scared-tech-taking-away-jobs/

Elon Musk

http://fortune.com/2016/11/06/elon-musk-universal-basic-income/

There examples of such worlds in many different science and pop fiction. Mega City One in the Judge Dredd comics is one example.

Mick Farren used this type of world in quite a few of his novels. There is one where people get into obsessively dressing up in period costuming that is kind of like cosplay as a way to get around the boredom.

Kurt Vonnegut's first novel seems pretty prescient in some ways, considering it was before the computer age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_%28novel%29

I <3 me some Elon, but this is a little o_O

“Ultimately I think there will need to be some sort of improved symbiosis with digital superintelligence,” he said, “But that’s a pretty involved discussion.”

He also has come out and said he thinks it's highly probable that we're living inside a simulation

people who think we're living in a simulation are just indulging in a variant of believing in divine providence, but with less beneficence.

im p sure what Musk believes is that if such a simulation could ever be invented the possibility that we are in one is close to 1, because most universes would be simulations

altho I recently saw some headline about him wanting to break us out of it lol

don't do drugs

i mean, the logic is sound. the question is how you want to react to it. "breaking us out" is the actually demented part

ya exactly

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8b/Moby_Dick_final_chase.jpg/220px-Moby_Dick_final_chase.jpg

http://www.vox.com/first-person/2016/11/14/13513066/universal-basic-income-crowdfund

The author makes a bunch of good points. One passage that spoke to me:

Another frequent question is if everyone will stop working once they have that ability. That is another question I’ve studied in-depth, where the answer is basically that very few people want to earn and spend only $1,000 per month, and that basic income is not giving people money to do nothing, but enabling people with money to do anything. Immigration is another big concern for people, usually because they’re assuming UBI will be given to everyone instead of only citizens, and therefore the potential for UBI to actually incentivize legal immigration is missed.

There are many other questions, and most all have likely answers for those willing to spend the necessary time to study the available evidence, but for me personally, these questions are translated in my brain at this point to sound more like, “What are the potential downsides of abolishing slavery? Will cotton get more expensive? Will former slaves just kind of sit around reading and dancing all day? Will the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free decide to walk in greater numbers through our lamp-lit golden door?” This is what I hear as someone who already has a basic income, so it’s not to say such questions aren’t valid, it’s that the very fact we’re asking them is itself something to question.

Why should only the lucky few have any choice but to do paid work? What is our infatuation with work, and why is it only paid work that seems to matter so much? What about unpaid work? Why is it considered valuable work worthy of pay when two people are paying each other to watch each other’s kids, but not valuable work when they’re each raising their own kids? If one concern is that people given basic incomes will work less, and another concern is that there will be half as many jobs due to automation, then everyone working half as much is exactly what we want so as to better share the available employment, isn’t it? Plus productivity tends to increase as hours worked decrease, so we’d accomplish more with less as well.

Perhaps most curious of all is the question of consumption without production – this fear that people given basic incomes will do nothing but consume. Why is making bread considered valuable but eating bread considered frivolous? Bertrand Russell once questioned why getting money is good and spending money is bad. He wrote, “Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd; one might as well maintain that keys are good, but keyholes are bad.” So if people decide to use their basic incomes to just buy what’s being produced (by lots of machines mind you) and we have a problem with that, what’s the point of producing it all?