Growth as a result of consumption is destructive. We need to find ways to 'grow' our economy without increasing consumption. For example, measure growth by how people are becoming more educated. If people could live healthily and intelligent and only work 10 hours a week until they were 100, wouldn't that be better than being able to buy a new car every year? Or a 5000sq house with the latest big screen tv?
I believe (or rather, I pray) that we have hit peak consumption which will lead to this problem forevermore. We need to find new ways to improve ourselves than shopping more.
Exciting to see that this is the top comment (at least for now) because I think this is the sort of attitude and vision for the future that will solve many of the health problems in this world. I'm also very excited by YC's UBI experiment.
People should be able to not worry about basic needs and be able to focus on enriching their lives and, by doing so, the world around them.
The idea is that with UBI people don't need to work 40 hours per week at a miserable job if they don't want to. This in theory causes prices for stuff like McDonalds to go up which should reduce consumption. In addition, people are free to pursue things like further education and the arts that are much harder when you're working two jobs to put food on the table.
UBI comes from tax money though. If the idea behind UBI is that people don't need to go work, and won't go buy McDonalds anymore, then tax income is going to plummet. If tax income plummets, what pays for UBI ?
UBI can only succeed if people continue to consume, preferably at higher levels than currently, which would allow others who want to live a life at a higher standard to sell things to UBI recipients, who can then be taxed and support everyone else on UBI.
If UBI encouraged too large a portion of the population to pursue non-taxable income (say, making art and games and giving them away for free because they don't need money), then UBI would collapse from lack of income. Especially so if that art is given away freely to other countries over the internet. So it's a fine line that is probably a lot more complex than people give it credit. There's certainly no guarantee as to what the results of UBI would be, and no guarantee that the medicine won't be far worse than the symptoms.
EDIT: Even if you assume that a UBI could survive if it decreased with a fall in taxable income from a policy and livability perspective, if a person on UBI received $100 one week, and then had it drop to $75 the next, he would get a major shock and public opinion of a UBI would fall apart. You could print money to make sure UBI never falls, but if UBI is going out to the entire population, the amount of money needed would be enormous. That much money added to a system without an increase in real demand (people on UBI would still buy the same stuff), could easily cause hyperinflation. So another constraint that UBI has and I've never heard anybody mention - UBI can never decrease, even if tax income decreases. Plus there's no way anybody could trust politicians to manage something that complex. UBI practically demands a complete restructure of government, society and the economy. Instead of being a 'patch' as many have described, UBI is closer to 'The World 2.0'. It would be the most incredible Second System Syndrome ever seen.
While this is true mathematically, I prefer to think about the opportunity cost of not having a UBI. I (like perhaps many people on HN) basically wasted my 20s trying to make rent while I worked on my shareware game company. I basically failed at that and all of that code went obsolete before it earned me income.
Had I had a relatively small UBI of perhaps $12,000 per year, I could have met expenses long enough to get ahead of the curve. I wouldn't have spent that time burned out and getting sucked into dead end $20,000 per year jobs that took all of my time and energy.
So for me, not having a UBI and throwing away a rather prolific 20 something probably cost the US GDP growth whatever my business might have contributed for a decade, say whatever a typical game developer salary might be (perhaps $60k/yr), call it $600,000. That could easily be 2, 4, 10 times that much if we grew enough to hire other employees.
By not investing in the workforce like the country did with public works before the information age started in 1980, my generation (gen x) lost out on at least a 5x rate of return. My struggles happened just before Prosper and Kickstarter got big, so I ran up staggering credit card debt. Had we chosen a more progressive route, even at a 20% tax rate I would have paid the government back what it paid me, with the bonus of life sucking a whole lot less.
I think a UBI might be one of the few things that can raise the 10% startup success rate because it attacks burn rate directly. It would also allow startups to focus on things more meaningful than video games and social media apps because it wouldn’t just be about trying to get enough F.U. money to get left alone anymore. I had always planned to save enough to be able to work on AI and alternative energy, and now with consistent hard work I have a chance of doing it, but with a middle aged realism that is just not helping my motivation. To be 20 again and told “go do all the things” is one of my deepest wishes and I hope it happens for future generations.
That $600k of production is based on the idea that you would have worked at some point, and people would have consumed your work. That is very different from "let's all stop producing and consuming."
There are many ways to gain funding now if you are expecting returns of the investment. The only thing different about UBI is that it is unconditional.
> If the idea behind UBI is that people don't need to go work, and won't go buy McDonalds anymore, then tax income is going to plummet.
The idea is that people don't need to go work, because robots do all the work, and thus any economic value attached to labor, either real or nominal, converges to zero. It doesn't matter whether people have financial incentives to do work, because people /do no work/. You don't tax labor income to finance UBI, because nobody will have labor income; all taxes will be on capital of some sort, such as land or securities, and such taxes would be sustainable because all income will accrue to capital and none to labor.
Except the value of labor - especially labor such as marketing, or government gruntwork such as FDA approvals - cannot be done by robots. At least today, and probably not in the next 50 years. So there is still a lot of labor that will have to go on.
As for shifting all taxes from income to capital - this can't work without enormous changes to free trade. This means that we'd have to stop free trade entirely (catastrophic for developing countries) or implement UBI across all countries at the same time (definitely impossible in the near future).
The problem is that all the capital holders would have immense pressure to move their businesses overseas if they're going to lose substantial parts of their capital every year from tax. Income and profit taxes don't do this because the business still has to be growing to pay the tax, so you can just increase prices to offset the tax, etc. But a capital tax big enough to cover income for the entire country would be significant percentage of capital every year. Any hole left open in free trade would have that capital rush to other countries where such a tax does not exist.
Plus even if capital stayed, that would further reinforce 'growth at all costs' mindset. You'd have to grow your capital at a rate greater than the tax every year to be successful. You'd have massive corporate thuggery - such as pricing things just above UBI to force people to come in to work as marketers and other roles to push each business above the competition and beat the capital taxes.
What if your whole economy had a bad decade and assets failed to outgrow your capital tax? As with income tax, your tax base has just shrunk. But you can't decrease UBI because your whole population and economy is based around a set price level. You're back to having to take extreme measures to keep everything running, and a mistake will blow your now-fragile economy out the water.
The takeaway for me is that UBI isn't something we could just graft onto our existing system and pretend it's a miracle cure. We are going to need to change our entire system.
> This means that we'd have to stop free trade entirely (catastrophic for developing countries) or implement UBI across all countries at the same time (definitely impossible in the near future).
That's a valid and important concern, and one that I don't have any answers to right now. One possibility is keep capital fixed while making people mobile, i.e. very tight capital controls combined with very loose immigration controls. Capital thus cannot escape to low-tax regimes, and people in developing countries can take still advantage of capital by moving to where the capital is. If that's too difficult to handle, there is also the possibility of "virtual" immigration through political union.
> You'd have to grow your capital at a rate greater than the tax every year to be successful
Since the tax would be about the same as the current (or 1960s, if you're generous) share of the national income from capital captured by wages, capital already grows at at least this rate--otherwise wages alone would be dragging down all economies today, and that's just not happening.
> What if your whole economy had a bad decade and assets failed to outgrow your capital tax?
We'd do what we do today, and draw down the sovereign wealth fund and/or borrow from the bond markets.
> That's a valid and important concern, and one that I don't have any answers to right now. One possibility is keep capital fixed while making people mobile, i.e. very tight capital controls combined with very loose immigration controls. Capital thus cannot escape to low-tax regimes, and people in developing countries can take still advantage of capital by moving to where the capital is. If that's too difficult to handle, there is also the possibility of "virtual" immigration through political union.
For real immigration: that is already happening massively in the form of economic migrants into Europe. If you restrict capital from traveling out of the developed world, you'll turn the developing world into a hellscape that everyone will try to escape. Real immigration of that size would make housing unaffordable, overwhelm all infrastructure, overwhelm local water resources, etc. It's the exact opposite of what we want: we don't want all of humanity in a 100km big city. We really really don't.
For "virtual" immigration - you basically mean annexing the sovereignty of citizens of developing countries. Extremely unlikely, no government would allow that without a fight. But assuming they do, you now have a billion new voters living outside of your country. What do they do the next election? They'll vote in their own leader who will promptly redirect all the social grant money overseas. Hell, I know African leaders, they'll redirect all tax money to themselves in massive quantities. We don't want all of the developing world electing leaders for us, we really really really don't. You'll likely end up with a devout religious leader of some kind because of uneducated voters.
On the tax stuff - we'd need hard numbers to draw a conclusion. I was just giving some examples of how a capital tax would not necessarily solve the problems faced by an income tax and may have far more unknown problems that would only come up after we face the unintended side effects. There's always unintended side effects.
So why would anybody bother to put themselves through school to become something like a doctor or an engineer to build the robots that do all of the work?
People are geared to competing with one another in the social domain.
In order to maintain status, people will continue to get well educated and 'contribute to society' in some way rather than simply sit and be mediocre.
Granted, if you have a UBI, lots more people can maintain their status by say.... becoming top ranked at a video game, but even then so long as it doesn't lead to societal collapse... does it really matter how fast we are improving our civilisation?
I'm willing to allow us to improve slower if it means we grant everyone freedom from worrying where their next meal is coming from.
>does it really matter how fast we are improving our civilisation
Yes, when you consider the global problems we have with energy, climate, food supplies, water supplies, and general poverty it's pretty selfish to just stop pushing forward.
This really, really, is not true at all. Only people who aren't doctors tell themselves it's all about passion. If you remove the financial motivation you will have far less people going through the rigorous schooling and sacrifice of youth required to become a physician.
I would also argue that the vast majority of engineers became so because it was a "good job" not because they're fueled by some extraordinary passion.
The point you're missing is that a lot of people cannot even attend medical school because their parents are too poor to support a child which could be working an underpaid job at mcd instead. And I'm only taking about cost of living, not tuition.
Too poor to attend medical school is not an excuse. If you have the aptitude for medical school there are plenty of scholarships available for people that poor. There are also student loans, which a doctor will be able to pay back without much difficulty.
> rigorous schooling and sacrifice of youth required to become a physician
Which wouldn't be such a barrier to entry if medicine were an undergraduate degree (i.e. an MBBS) as in the rest of the world, instead of a graduate one, and residents and fellows were paid market wages instead of government-depressed ones. Creating skilled and knowledgeable doctors does not require stacking a 4 year degree on top of another 4 year degree--a single 5 or 6 year program should be enough.
I think the comment your replying to is saying that, if you have the passion/desire/drive to become a doctor, having a basic income can help that person get there. Especially so that they don't have to work as much while also going through rigorous schooling.
In addition, those jobs would still be good jobs on top of the UBI. Depending on how the implementation of robots plays out, they may be the only jobs if you wanted to make more than the living wage.
There's a lot of countries where financial motivation to become a doctor is far lower, yet people keep doing it. Don't assume your own drives are shared by others to the same extent.
I have a friend who lived in the USSR and I asked him the same question. In a world where everyone is paid the same, why become a physicist when you could just be a cab driver? His answer was pretty much what you'd expect: different people aspire to do different things. It's not about the money (physicists were working multiple jobs to make ends meet), it was about what they wanted to do with their lives.
And how did that work out for the USSR? An unfortunately small minority of people are driven by enough passion to ignore how they are being screwed by society (sacrifice all of your 20s to go through med school to get the same compensation as a high school dropout that sweeps floors).
But not everyone had the same amount of privileges. People in politics often had bigger apartments, for example. So if you wanted "more" in a communist state, you went into politics.
Because of the psychological joy of self expression doing work like that entails (see Maslows hierarchy of needs).
Some people like helping people, some people like the prestige of being a doctor.
Besides, it's ones family background which predicts ones future career path far more than economic insentives. I would imagine the social strata that is now educated will prefer to have their offspring educated in the future.
Human culture is often a far greater determinant of behaviour than any economic cost-benefit analysis done at an individual level.
I would also point out that in the 17th century there was very little financial insentive to pick up natural sciences and people did just because they could and because they were interested.
I for example would gladly work in my current field (software engineering) even if it did not grant financial benefits because I like it so much.
I think americans are so preoccupied with money because everything is so expensive there. There are far more interesting ways to spend ones life than by surviving (if one goes to a job just to survive - i.e. to get shelter and food, one really is just satisgying ones lower needs on the maslows hierarchy of needs).
Maslows hierarchy of needs is mostly garbage. There is not really any evidence to support those rankings being innate to humans (other than basic survival being top priority).
There is little psychological joy in collecting garbage, cleaning gutters, and shoveling manure. It seems to me that all of the arguments for UBI are predicated on ubiquitous automation of every mundane job, which is a long ways out of reach from where the most advanced countries are (let alone the whole world).
> There is not really any evidence to support those rankings being innate to humans (other than basic survival being top priority).
There's actually considerable evidence that even "basic survival being top priority" doesn't reflect actual human behavior in some important ways.
> There is little psychological joy in collecting garbage, cleaning gutters, and shoveling manure. It seems to me that all of the arguments for UBI are predicated on ubiquitous automation of every mundane job
Well, that depends what you mean by UBI: a mature UBI that can afford to pay a high standard of living will require phenomenal productivity which requires a level of automation which would go far beyond ubiquitous automation of every mundane job.
OTOH, the basic idea of a universal unconditional grant as a replacement for some subset of the existing social benefit system reducing the administrative costs to benefits ratio of the replaced programs and eliminate the adverse incentives of the means-tested programs replaced obviously doesn't require any additional automation than we have now.
"The idea is that people don't need to go work, because robots do all the work, and thus any economic value attached to labor, either real or nominal, converges to zero. "
This is entirely theoretical and will never happen.
My friend, the industrial revolution represented a vastly bigger shift to automation than anything we are witnessing today.
Imagine a 'magic machine' that could do the work of 10 000 horses (i.e. 10 000 horse-power) - and move people from Penzance to London - on coal - no horses or drivers needed!
To be more precise: at the dawn of the industrial revolution, almost 95% of people were doing 'laborious' jobs. 95% of jobs at that time were 'at risk' of being replaced. Most of them were.
Not only did we move forward, but there were so many surpluses, and so much more to do that even common household jobs (maids, butlers, footmen, valets) - could find higher paying work doing other things.
Today, only about 30% of jobs are 'at risk' - and I'd argue they are not at as much risk as we think.
Call centers are not going away. For every task that is automated, 2 more will appear that need human intervention, and 5 more customers will be added (thereby creating more work) - new consumers from the current 4 billion human being who have yet to come into the world economy.
UBI comes from tax money though. If the idea behind UBI is that people don't need to go work, and won't go buy McDonalds anymore, then tax income is going to plummet. If tax income plummets, what pays for UBI ?
People will still have the same incentive to work they always had (to make money) -- but some people will quit jobs they don't like, which will drive wages up (due to falling supply in the labor market). But the reason why UBI is so interesting now is that, with increasing automation, increased wages will have less of an impact on general prices. So prices will hold steady, as people continue to go to McDonalds.
Note that there are other ways to collect tax revenue: sales tax, VAT tax, property tax, wealth tax, etc.
UBI can only succeed if people continue to consume, preferably at higher levels than currently
What basis do you have for saying this? Deflation may actually be beneficial in a basic income scenario (falling prices makes a fixed basic income worth more).
If UBI encouraged too large a portion of the population to pursue non-taxable income (say, making art and games and giving them away for free because they don't need money), then UBI would collapse from lack of income.
Why would they give it away for free when they could sell it for money instead?
> People will still have the same incentive to work they always had (to make money) -- but some people will quit jobs they don't like, which will drive wages up (due to falling supply in the labor market).
The market is already "suffering" from labor shortage, but it's just a cover for companies to demand more H1-B visas. Seeing jobs Americans are perfectly good at doing go overseas says American labor isn't being cut for quality or demand, it's being cut out for cost.
You're right. What H1-Bs do though is allow companies to replace a worker with full mobility and bargaining power (a US citizen) with one who has limited mobility and bargaining power, which drives down industry wages. Now, if the visa were attached to the person but not the company and were valid as long as the holder has a job, this would be much less of an issue.
Give immigrants the same bargaining power a citizen has and both would benefit.
> Why would they give it away for free when they could sell it for money instead?
I think the entire line of thinking is a bit flawed...
UBI isn't about making sure any thing we do for money today remains a skill that anyone else will pay for.
Like with open source some software will be given away, most software will not exclusively solve a problem or even do it well and complex problems will still require paid collaboration to produce complex software.
I think there is a third path that could work even better. If you think about how money really works it first goes to those the bankers deem most worthy. Tech founders, producers of fine products, schools. It flows down a cascade of people's perceptions. If you really think about it money does not necessarily go to that which benefits society as a whole, it does somewhat, but it really the majority goes to those that have the perception of being the best from the perspective of a small subset of society. Possibly a more impartial and scientific method of deciding who gets money would be more beneficial instead of the whim of cabals of bankers.
Not necessarily. It's quite possible to have UBI be part of the money creation process. In order to understand this approach, it's useful to understand how money is currently created. I'd recommend the 4 minute video found here as a starting point:
New money is necessary for our current economy to function. Making UBI part of the distribution of this new money makes it possible to get spending power directly in the hands of all citizens, as well as doing so without raising money through taxation.
In short, a UBI will make us all poorer because people will refuse to provide the things that others actually want, and instead will engage in hobbies that provide little value to the world?
Your phrasing suggests you favor a UBI, yet your actual claims echo mine (and I'm a UBI opponent). I'm intrigued.
A UBI might make us all poorer because we will no longer be able to get dirt cheap goods like McDonald's food produced by people in situations that amount to wage slavery made survivable only by welfare. Without the hidden subsidy of welfare and the stronger bargaining power that comes from the other party being desperate, McDonald's would have to charge a more realistic price that many customers would find makes their food even less palatable. But does this change make the market more or less efficient? I don't think it's a foregone conclusion either way—that's why it's a fun topic to consider.
Welfare is a subsidy for people, not for companies. It raises the cost of labor for companies since it gives potential workers th - in fact ie "stay home and play video games but get money anyway" option.
Absent welfare we'd have far more people working since they'd have no other choice, which would lower prices for companies and create more value for consumers.
I'm also not sure why you are so dismissive of the fact that McDonald's will become more expensive and less available to consumers. Is it because McD's customers are mostly low status poor people that it's so easy to ignore their utility? If the result of a UBI was less healthy organic GMO free vegetables sold to starving artists at farmers markets (or less child care for working women) would that change things?
> Welfare is a subsidy for people, not for companies. It raises the cost of labor for companies since it gives potential workers th - in fact ie "stay home and play video games but get money anyway" option.
When a restaurant pays its full-time employees a wage so low that they need to be on food stamps to survive, that's a subsidy for the company as much as anyone. Since we have a minimum wage, McDonald's can't legally get labor any cheaper than they currently do, no matter how much the labor supply increases.
> Playing with the market causes deadweight losses
Only a diehard capitalist thinks this. We already have a name for this type of pure capitalism. It's called anarchy. I.e. zero government interference.
>In short, a UBI will make us all poorer because people will refuse to provide the things that others actually want, and instead will engage in hobbies that provide little value to the world?
>Your phrasing suggests you favor a UBI, yet your actual claims echo mine (and I'm a UBI opponent). I'm intrigued
Your phrasing, with respect to the GP, suggests that you consider "things like further education and the arts" to be "hobbies that provide little value to the world", and "the things that others actually want" to be "stuff like McDonalds".
As a consequence, I'd encourage supporters of UBI to avoid engaging you on the topic. Your revealed worldview speaks more eloquently than any argument you could come up with.
Unless, of course, that's not your position in re higher education/McDonalds, and you're just mocking him. Either way!
> Provide an argument supporting the notion that people shouldn't be incentivized to produce things that the market values.
Most people should agree that things that "market value" is a means to obtain things people intrinsically value, such as comfort, security, happiness, meaning, procreation, etc.
If, on a macro level, there is a more efficient means to achieve these end goals other than creating things the market values, theres no reason to incentivize that by itself.
In some cases creating things the market values can actively work against these goals, such as many types of advertising and consumer product marketing.
You can't provide comfort, happiness, and meaning without the market to offer those goods. If we have UBI, people are still going to want their toilet unplugged and who will do that if UBI eliminates the need for plumbers to seek income plumbing?
It's likely going to drive the cost of everything up so quickly (because of a massive goods and labor shortage) that the UBI will quickly become useless.
Getting sick of this argument. Just look around you. Tons of people do tons of things all the time even though they don't get paid or don't need the money, or could get by on less.
If a minimal UBI (say, $700/month, similar to today's SSI in the US) is enough in your view to deter people from seeking employment, then how on earth is it that so many people today make more than that, even though they didn't need that much? (You can change the amount around and rerun the thought experiment. Whatever the amount of UBI would be, the existence of many people currently willingly working for more than that amount is proof that people will still strive to make more than UBI)
Enough with this tired argument, think a little before repeating it or at least state a version that explains why somehow we have people today who willingly work for more than the bare minimum
>Provide an argument supporting the notion that people shouldn't be incentivized to produce things that the market values
What?! That's crazy! Even if I were intending on debating any of you guys, I could hardly do it being prompted by this intentional strawman. But, of course, you're one of them! By which I mean an arch-capitalist, or whatever, who cares, whose internal value system precludes the understanding of what UBI might accomplish because, of course, people are just going to "do anything they want[ed] without contributing to society" [0] rather than behave differently under a system whose fundamental assumptions have changed. Just because you're absolutely certain that people would stop taking jobs in "construction, plumbing, electrical, farming, etc if they can choose to do nothing instead" [0] doesn't mean it's true, and dropping that slimy ostensible fact instead of an actual argument is hardly adding value to the discussion, either! At least my actions provided some value to those intending on discussing UBI in good faith -- ie, do it somewhere else, these guys don't seem capable.
>Hinting that someone's argument is absurd adds no value to the discussion unless you illustrate why
I think I'm doing a pretty good job, but just in case, said argument attempted to imply that higher education is a stupid hobby, those seeking higher education without the material means to pay for it in fact desire McDonalds, and for those reasons UBI upsets the natural order of things and deserves throwaway comment mockery. Am I really bound to provide something more substantive? I think I've made the 'response' that 'argument' deserves.
No, you haven't provided anything of value beyond personal attacks at people that had the gall to suggest that UBI might not align well with economics.
Nobody implied that someone would desire to work at McDonald's instead of attend school. However, there is no evidence that people would attend school if they were free from work. If that were true, colleges would be packed with retired people auditing classes.
>No, you haven't provided anything of value beyond personal attacks at people that had the gall to suggest that UBI might not align well with economics
Without some evidence that it is true, the claim that started this all, namely that people who would use UBI to "pursue things like further education and the arts [that are much harder when you're working two jobs to put food on the table]" [0] are in fact "hobbies that provide little value to the world" [1], is insane. The things that "others actually want" [1] are implied to be "stuff like McDonalds" [0]. The comment authored by 'yummyfajitas [1] is a direct reply to the comment authored by 'mason55 [0]; the correlation of arguments are clearly outlined above. Unless you take issue with my interpretation, or unless you believe that 'yummyfajitas was just fucking with 'mason55, his reply is hardly a suggestion that "UBI might not align well with economics" and more "the rightful place of poor people is to provide low-pay services like McDonalds; those who couldn't aspire to higher education without UBI will provide little value to the world with their taxpayer-supported hobbies".
>Nobody implied that someone would desire to work at McDonald's instead of attend school
I never claimed this, but it sure would be handy for you if someone had. Coupled with your apparent belief that casting aspirations on those who can't afford higher education is not only acceptable but self-evident economic theory, the intentional twisting of my words in this way is a pretty clear indicator of what you're trying to do with this reply.
>However, there is no evidence that people would attend school if they were free from work. If that were true, colleges would be packed with retired people auditing classes
Ah yes, retirees -- the very people who might benefit from release from their low-income McDonalds wage-slavery, and who, with UBI, might aspire to go to college in order to bec-- wait, wait, wait. Why are you talking about retirees? That has little bearing on the discussion at hand, unless, of course, retirees are the people we've been talking about all along and I've missed it somehow.
>You are using your assumption that your position is objectively correct as an excuse to not even defend it
I'm making no claim to correctness, and I don't think you could actually state my position, because I haven't yet elaborated it; somehow, this didn't stop you. Please read this [2]. I'm ridiculing the sort of person who can, without the slightest twinge of conscience, drop two smug paragraphs detailing how UBI will make us all poorer by stating his hunches about the behaviour of the poor and the uneducated as objectively correct facts.
I suppose it's possible that the notion that UBI will lead to a new era of sloth, economic chaos, job loss and plagues of frogs is actually factually correct. But that claim is just as untested as my "claim", which is merely NOT(prevClaim). The illustration of the classist notion that people who couldn't aspire to higher education without UBI will become hobbyists who won't produce value is all the point I'm trying to make -- if you don't immediately see how that's intuitively wrong, our conflicting perspectives probably can't allow us to have a meaningful discussion about UBI and the poor and higher education, either.
>In short, a UBI will make us all poorer because people will refuse to provide the things that others actually want
People being forced to "provide the things that others actually want" in a job they hate or hurts them, just to make a living and feed themselves is what makes us really poor.
>If everyone were allowed to do anything they wanted without contributing to society, things would collapse very quickly.
Citation needed.
Especially one that takes into account increasing automation and software, not merely medieval society needs, and which solves a large part of grunt jobs.
Besides, there are people genuinely love working in the fields you mentioned: construction, plumbing, electrical, farming, and that would do them over nothing. Especially with a pay increase over UBI, so that they do them as a choice, not merely because they're forced to not starve.
Maybe not so many for things like sewage cleaning, garbage disposal and burger flipping, but again a pay increase over UBI would help with that too.
This will also help compensate those jobs according to the value they offer to society, not according to how many people starve and can do them at piss poor compensation to feed themselves.
Very few people do construction because they love it. (source: worked in construction after high school) The same applies to most labor intensive jobs with little room for creativity (all of the ones I mentioned).
There is no citation needed to show that society would collapse if essentially all manual labor stopped overnight. To suggest otherwise is silly.
I think there's a big question of what "allowed to" means here.
"We throw them in jail if they don't"? We don't do that presently.
What we're talking about is "in addition to anything they earn, they choose the disposition of $X/yr", for various values for X. If X is $1, clearly everyone is still working. I agree with you that the $40k figure you cite downthread is extremely likely to be higher than we can support. I think there are intermediate values that might work substantially better than $0. Based on toying with numbers that I've done in the past, my guess is that the optimum value $4k and $9k/yr (though I'm not all that confident in that and would probably want to see it ramped up gradually). If you claim that this would mean "essentially all manual labor stopped overnight", that certainly needs a citation.
Ah, so it's a hand-wave of us somehow getting to a point where everyone was perfectly incentivized to automate everything (without price gouging in the case of monopolies) and pay enough taxes to cover the 12 trillion dollars to give 300 million people $40,000 anum? Last year the US brought in a bit over 3 trillion in tax receipts to put that in perspective.
People being forced to give the fruits of their labor to others who are unwilling to do anything in return is also harmful. Strangely, your calculus seems to exclude them.
Take this analogy. Some people have rare diseases. However, because the diseases are rare and not common, not enough resources go into finding cures for this disease. Should no one work on the cure for a rare disease because it will provide little value to the world, in comparison to a more common one?
I'm not saying this directly translates to UBI, but it is something to think about.
Heck, the way capitalism works, people wont invest in cures even for popular diseases killing tens of millions, if they can't make a nice buck from them (e.g. if the majority victims are poor Africans).
And by the same token, they will milk a cure that they've found as much as possible, even if that means that millions (who can't afford it at the price) will die or get bankrupt etc. (Of course if they could sell it a two different prices to different groups (price differentation) they wouldn't say no to poorer people's money, but they can't).
(And the massive profits from such drugs and of such companies overall, reveal that it's not just "recuperating" money spend on R&D).
> the way capitalism works, people wont invest in cures even for popular diseases killing tens of millions, if they can't make a nice buck
1) You're wrong. Bill Gates, etc, are counter-examples.
but,
2) The problem is the word "invest". You're saying in the same sentence that the investment is a loser. That you won't be able to eat if you take it. So change the word to donate, where it's clear the money is gone, and you'll see that people do indeed donate to things that don't help them. All the time.
3) It's not "how capitalism works", it's how any self-sustaining system of value allocation works.
How would they afford to stay open, to give the drug away, if it cost them more to develop and produce it than they made? Literally, how do they pay their suppliers and employees so they can eat and keep producing the drug, if they don't make as much or more than they expend?
The short-term example of this is the guideline that you should put your own oxygen mask on before helping others.
>1) You're wrong. Bill Gates, etc, are counter-examples.
Bill Gates is an example only of (a) the kindness of his heart, or (b) tax-incentives for philanthropy, depending on your level on cynicism.
Both tell us nothing about the system he operates in though (well, except the (b), which tells us something about the government and IRS).
Obviously anybody in any era and system could arbitrary out of kindess/a whim or for some hidden motive give money for a good cause. The question was whether the system encourages such a behaviour, not whether it can happen in some counter-examples.
>2) The problem is the word "invest". You're saying in the same sentence that the investment is a loser.
No, I'm saying that an investment shouldn't necessarily aim for the maximum profit, everything else be damned. I'm saying what enterprises only pay lip service to in their ads and brochures, their "social responsibility". I'm saying that if you can have a lesser profit (still profit mind you) but do far more good, you should do it instead of being a greedy bastard.
As for charity and donations, those existed both before and after capitalism. (In fact they predate capitalism by some millenia), so are no argument pro or against to our topic.
>3) It's not "how capitalism works", it's how any self-sustaining system of value allocation works.
There have been tons of "self-sustaining system of value allocation" (which pretty much means: any society) that didn't value profit first and foremost, or at least better juggled it with other concerns.
That doesn't mean that tons individuals or leaders in these didn't value profit first and foremost -- only that the societies at large had other moral/ethical/etc priorities and, err, values. In Ancient Athens for example, it was all about being a good citizen.
>How would they afford to stay open, to give the drug away, if it cost them more to develop and produce it than they made?
Nobody asked them to give it "away" or to have it cost them more to develop than they made.
That said, an organization can also operate at zero or marginal profit. Amazon did it for more than a decade, and not even for a good cause, just to gain market share.
No, that's the way humans work in a specific belief and motivational system.
Historically societies have had many incentives and motives for behaviour, advancement, job production, etc, outside of profit, that were as or more important to it. This includes religion, morals, ideals, customs, laws, etc.
Christians, for example, were for centuries not loaning with interest, not because they weren't humans, but because they valued a moral code more than profit.
As a fact, we do such stuff too, and have even put it in laws, e.g. against child labour, slavery etc. All those could bring huge profit too, but we value our morals (e.g. anti-slavery) more. People certainly didn't stop doing them because they weren't profitable.
> Christians, for example, were for centuries not loaning with interest, not because they weren't humans, but because they valued a moral code more than profit.
That confuses who's making the choices with who they're making them for.
There were always christians willing to lend for interest, what stopped them was the other xians who thought it was bad.
Also, look as islamic banking as a modern example. It charges almost exactly as much as a system with interest would but the payments are structured as fees, etc.
There's still usury, it's just in the form of ruinous collateral-backed fees, instead of compound interest. A late-payment fee, on the capital plus a previous late-payment fee, is economically identical.
> Should no one work on the cure for a rare disease because it will provide little value to the world, in comparison to a more common one?
Well obviously. We should invest in whatever saves the most expected quality adjusted life years per unit of resource spent. Investing in rare diseases is just silly and missing a huge opportunity cost. Usually.
With or without UBI, people actually don't want crappy mcdo food. They want good food. But good food cost money and and/or takes time to prepare.
So instead of having minimum wage workers working their asses to make some owner millionaire, we may actually get chefs and cooks paid what they deserves.
So, bring UBI, at least it will stop this stupid race to the bottom. And then lets cancel UBI, I don't believe it is anymore sustainable than the current narcissistic/corporatism regime going own, but it cold be a buffer, while we move forward without back-pedaling.
I'm not sure you mean it to be, but your comment reads like an anti-UBI argument.
My hope is that UBI will help grow the labor share of GDP by providing mobility to a segment of the workforce that currently lives paycheck to paycheck.
Whether they do or they don't, I guarantee they make significantly more than the proposed UBI amount.
Given the choice between making $12k with UBI and sitting on one's ass, or making $50k (guessing here) + 12k UBI to work as a garbage man, do you really think people would just up and quit?
A 40" TV is, like, $300 [0]. The average American watches 5 hours a day [1]. Replace your TV every year, that's $0.16 per hour of entertainment. I probably pay more than that in bus fare and late fees to use the public library.
Big-screen TVs don't belong on the list of excessive consumption items anymore. They are incredibly cheap and deliver enormous utility relative to expenditures that get drastically less hate, like a data plan for even the cheapest smartphone, plane tickets/vacations in general, picking the crossover instead of the compact sedan, picking the very slightly nicer apartment, etc.
I don't know about you, but I don't see watching 5 hours of TV per day as being compatible with the living healthily and being intelligent that the poster you're replying to offered as an alternative, so putting TV on that list seems appropriate.
Money isn't the only currency we use to pay for our current lifestyle. Time, attention, energy, passion and such are all necessary to participate in the kinds of life we want to be living. TVs may not cost a lot in money, though as another poster rightly pointed out, TV also includes programming charges too, but that sedentary activity (both physically and mentally) has a lot of non-monetary costs that prevent you from doing and experiencing other things.
There are a lot of people telling me to be angry that poor people on welfare have big-screen TVs. In the internet personal finance community, big-screen TVs are the #1 example of frivolous irresponsible spending.
Those people aren't mentioning cable or the time spent watching TV. Just the fact that the screens are large. That may have been ostentatious in the 90s but it really isn't anymore - that's all I'm saying.
I think "TV" is a stand-in for "watching TV". That is a common sense reading. And what do you watch on TV? Your statement is correct if you only watch broadcasts, but that is only 9% of the USA public. Almost 90% of USA households have cable. The cable is a monthly fee. That changes the economics that you suggested.
In the UK, the economics are slightly different, but recall that UK taxpayers pay a fee to the BBC.
Going to go off topic here, but I grew up in communist Slovenia back in the day where you had to pay the TV license fee if you owned a TV set. Now, the government provided an official method of canceling the TV "subscription" without physically hauling off the TV appliance, by sealing the electrical plug.
I have a fond memory of one day when my grandma decided to cancel her TV fee. An actual lineman came in at some point, came into the house, stuck this metal lockout device over the plug, and sealed it with a lead (Pb) seal. It was one of my favorite things to play with because it was so squishy and easy to dent.
Wow, that plug is quite, well, foreign to US ears.
In the US, selling a house built before lead paint was outlawed requires a lead disclosure to the buyers (at least in some states). Repainting a house that old requires capturing all the paint chips and dust lest some bit of lead escape and be eaten by a kid.
Intentionally putting a chunk of lead into a house where a child could reach it... you might as well stick a giant, neon "SUE ME" sign right next to it.
Uk taxpayers do not pay a fee to the BBC. Every household that uses equipment to receive live broadcasts much purchase a TV license, but that's quite different.
That's a semantic argument really. The license fee funds the BBC, and the BBC are the ones who care about collecting it (even if at arms length with the official 'enforcer'). Every argument about the future of the license fee, or not paying it on an individual level, explicitly state the BBC as the benefactor of this fee.
The fact that it's tied to equipment capable of receiving live broadcasts (until September) is not much more than a clever workaround.
It's not a semantic argument! The BBC is paid for by people who want to use television equipment (modified slightly to account for new technology). It's not paid by taxpayers, it's paid by users.
Maybe if Cable is free but...most places it's ~$50 a month[1]. Which means the cost of entertainment is closer to $.53 per hour[2]. Which isn't cheap as cheap as you say.
Keynesianism says that spending money on anything is good, no matter what. War is good, make work projects that do nothing are good, spending money on frivolous consumer goods is good, etc.
Austrian school recognizes that investing in productive capital that lowers the cost of production and resources consumed in production is actual real economic progress. For example, let's say you have an island with coconuts. If you pay everybody $100 to go out and buy coconuts, the price is going to just go up. If you pay them $100 to plant more coconut trees or make tools to harvest them more efficiently, there are going to be more coconuts and the price is going to go down. Keynesianism would say the two are equivalent economically because AD = C + I + G + (X-M) and in this equation C and I are perfectly interchangeable.
Hayek is one of the reasons we're in this mess, so - coconuts or no - it's hard to believe that more Hayek is a solution.
I don't recall Keynes saying any of the things you claim he said. He actually said this:
"If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing."
Perceptive readers may notice a certain hint of irony in the above, which Austrian economists - being literally minded, on the whole - may have missed.
Hayek is NOT one of the reasons we're in this. He has been largely ignored as an economist, unless one makes the assumption that Satoshi was influenced by Hayek's "The Denationalization of Money".
As a political theorist he has had a fair amount of impact with the "Road to Serfdom", which he worked on after Keynes was mysteriously elevated to Sainthood after his death and Hayek largely ended his pure economics writing. There's a great interview with Hayek where he bemoans his lack of impact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oqhe4K1Jz-8
Borrow/confiscate money from non-struggling groups and hand out to struggling groups. Might work in some cases, but hardly a long term solution.
Besides, how is current economical fragility Hayek's fault?
Edit: re-read the original comment. Seems like the irony, or rather sarcasm is in Keynes's suggestion to organise note-digging as a form of free enterprise with tenders and competition for digging rights. (Sounds like Bitcoin by the way.) If that is the hidden message, it looks rather pointless.
The irony is that people look only at the first inequality and think that Keynes advocates for make-work, whereas if one looks at the implicit inequality, Keynes is actually advocating for productive stimulus, or failing that, handing out money without wasteful, feel-good conditions such as requiring people to break rocks (or dig for notes).
The problem is that the media almost always use this implicit syllogism:
"70% of GDP is consumer spending. Therefore, the economy depends on consumer spending. Therefore, we need to goose consumer spending if we want to help the economy."
No, the problem is that the whole western economy can "logically" function only based on "growth" as in "more consumption, more production every year." But math is not on our side:
Well, obviously not unlimited in the mathematical sense (the ordering of elementary particles in the visible universe is finite), but there is a lot of stuff that the laws of physics allows which we would like to do, but are currently incapable of doing. Just to name a few:
Ensure sustainable energy production, halt and reverse global climate change, eradicate all disease and suffering, make aging and death optional, ensure that working for a living is optional, allow all humans the possibility of ethically experiencing most experiences and capabilities available to the richest 0.01%, cure all physical and mental disabilities and enhance human bodies with new senses and physical capabilities, create easily-available artificial intelligence which is at least as capable as the smartest human alive and acts in humanity's interest, and so on.
The fact that we would like to achieve something is very different from proving that we're even capable to reach that: until proved it's just a wishful thinking.
And the "growth" is mathematically impossible. Even growth of "just 7%" in energy use, for example, means doubling the use in just 10 years. And doubling is not "just times two, easy" once you've already used a half of everything you have. It's physically impossible. Watch the video.
On one hand, I guess it's good we have creative, unbounded thinking.
Sadly - I'm starting to think that most Engineers have never opened a book outside of Engineering, certainly not any history, ethics, politics or economics books.
--> Human potential is definitely unlimited.
Since the dawn of recorded history - and even beforehand - we have, by enlarge, almost always been innovating and moving forward. From neolithic, to ancient Egypt, to antiquity, to the Renaissance, Enlightenment, Industrial revolution, Modern era and information era - it's always been moving forward. Even the 'dark ages' were not really dark, only compared to those writing history in East Roman Empire / Byzantium.
My Grandparents were born on farms. No electricity. No running water. No radio, tv, cars, radio, internet. They passed away very recently.
What makes your skepticism a little funny is that right now on planet earth there is more 'innovation' going on than at any time in all of history. It's like an 'innovation explosion'. It's such a big shift that we are in a new epoch.
-----> As for your interesting ideas (aging death option, work only if needed) ...
You must be young. I don't think you've met enough types of people yet. Your treatise is missing a moral foundation (arguably), more importantly the nature of life. 'Cures disease'. Is 'dwarfism' a disease? What about being just a little short? What about sagging eyes from age 40-90? What about kids born with super genes? Or blue skin because their parents think it's cool?
These ethical questions will have to be answered long before we even start to fix things like 'cancer'. But even then - is cancer at age 80+ really a disease, or is it just literally 'death'?
More pragmatically, you're missing the bit about distribution of surpluses. The age old question. "nsure that working for a living is optional". Working for a living is already optional. It's called 'welfare'. Some of my neighbours do it. One guy, on my street collects his welfare every month and spends 4 days high on crack, and then the rest of the month sleeping in the park. Is this what you mean? Because I can assure you that people in this state are not happy, and it's a far more complicated thing than we know. So, should people who work their entire lives, very hard, and take great risk ... have to pay for his crack habit?
It's just one example, but it's the biggest issue missed when any of these techie types start to talk about 'the future'. Technology will surely improve our lives on the whole - but the issue of distribution is as old as time, and technology will probably only exacerbate, not solve the issue. At the foundation is both an understanding of human nature - and also a moral cause. The later of which is even harder to found, we do it today by rough consensus, not necessarily by understanding.
I wish more techies would study finance and history, I think these conversations would be different and we'd be better at solving problems.
More just "energy use explosion." We've probably already used half of all oil available to us (at the prices under which we can do what we do now). It took nature some hundreds of millions of years to accumulate so much easily usable energy. We've released half of it in just around 100 years. All the projections that "prove" that we can continue are always based on the "current use" and never on the "projected growth" (like noted: just 7% yearly growth means doubling in 10 years).
" It took nature some hundreds of millions of years to accumulate so much easily usable energy"
You're thinking in terms of an epoch.. namely our current one.
Energy sources change over time.
Oil is just the latest incarnation.
Nuclear is the next, obvious solution, when fools who don't actually understand it get out of the way.
There is enough known Uranium deposits to power the world for 100's of years and this is assuming: A) ancient, inefficient reactors (we have made so much progress, but not allowed to build newer things, and can do even more), and B) we haven't used any new fancy techniques or explored for more Uranium in 50 years.
Your bit about Oil is a little wrong (we don't know what 1/2 is): we keep finding new deposits. Using new tech (indirect drilling, undersea, deep digging, Oil Sands, more efficient extraction) we keep moving back 'peak Oil' they keep telling us we're supposed to be at. Eventually we will, but something better will be available by then.
We could go Nuclear today and wipe out Co2 emissions and cut energy costs by more than 50%. Probably more.
Fusion is maybe not that far off.
When the Nuclear and Fusion revolution take off - the 'Oil' era will look to people living in that era as 'wood burning' looks to us now - totally arcane, inefficient and 'low power'.
Do the proper research, the nuclear option is much less promising as the proponents claim (again, "wishful thinking" not the facts). Again not under the assumption of zero growth that they use. Check the real numbers and the technologies known to actually work, and see how long the "growth" is physically possible. That's our subject: the possibility of continual growth.
"Do the proper research, the nuclear option is much less promising as the proponents claim"
I agree that Nuclear Tech today has problems, but we haven't made real investments in 50 years. Do you realize how far airline, rail, and road safety has come in that time?
I firmly believe that if we put as much $$$ into Nuclear - as we have in Solar - that we'd be way past the safety problems.
Also - there is absolutely no physical limit to 'growth'.
Yes - commodities are limited and so is space. But we are making better use of both at an exponential level.
As some things become scarce, the prices rises, we figure out how to better make use of them.
My friend: Plastic.
Plastic did not exist 100 years ago. It was not 'on the horizon'. Nobody was even dreaming of it. But imagine life without plastic. We couldn't make a thing without it!
So 'plastic'. A single, new, and unforeseen innovation that fundamentally changed everything. And that's only one of many innovations of that era.
What is the next 'plastic'?
Will we be able to simply forge metals or other minerals as we need them in a fusion reactor?
If fusion ever works - this is within reach.
Fusion means not only cheap energy, put possibly the ability to make many elements on the periodic table like Star Trek.
Again - the possibilities are unlimited.
As long as we don't wipe ourselves out, this will go on forever.
That said - we measure 'growth' in dollars, and we don't measure dollars in anything :). I suppose you could make the comparative value argument for real growth, and that it depends on 'happiness' or some sort of intangible.
At least in classical economic terms - growth will go on ad nauseum.
Ever considered what plastic is made of? Ever tried to read why the fusion rectors don't work? Ever asked some who knows physics if "forging metals in a fusion reactor" has any scientific sense?
The possibilities are unlimited only in unsupported dreams.
This is very true its destructive to the environment to just be zombie consumers buying more "stuff". If you would be given carbon emissions as a currency and then you could choose to spend it. Products may be different. A long lasting product would be cheap and a short lasting product would be expensive.
Instead of measuring GDP as our metric, measure how much basic income can be generated without causing inflation. Rising basic income levels with stable GDP and stable prices (or even falling) is utopia.
Agreeable, in theory at least. The fact is, though, when one person gains, someone else loses out, in this case, biz owners. Corporate execs aren't going to raise wages and keep prices the same, not unless they have some means to compensate for it (Hello, McDonalds!)
> We need to find ways to 'grow' our economy without increasing consumption. For example, measure growth by how people are becoming more educated.
That isn't the same as growing the economy. Changing the definition of a word doesn't not change the reality of the thing it refers to. In this case, economic stagnation due to lack of growth.
'we have hit peak consumption'. I'm wondering - who is the 'we' you have in mind? Folk across vast areas of the planet might be at a loss to know what you're on about.
Other than spending money, there is only saving and investment. Some believe that our current lack of demand is caused by too much money chasing too few investments.
Most consumption doesn't involve big houses and TVs. Those exist as signal items mainly because they're paid for with debt, which increases the amount of money in circulation.
Education is now a good that also increases debt, with mixed results. Throwing money at it does not change the predictive value of the standardized tests used to "ration" education.
Without increases in the money supply, there simply won't be growth. There's only so much the central banks and government can do; at some point, people either spend or they don't.
The one thing that can be done is to try to adjust inflation upwards, which increases the risk of lazy investments.
Absolutely agree. Check out videos on youtube under the search "New Economics" for more info about this. There's some great channels (like the New Economy Coalition) with full lectures, but check out this short primer video on the concept:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrIhloNEwT8
But the measurement of consumption is in currency, typically USD. If you get that education via a free MOOC, then its contribution toward consumption measures is the cost of the electricity and bandwidth you used... essentially zero.
Our culture of consumption has roots in our biological drives. We are more attractive reproductive mates if we have more material resources. Therefore, a bigger house >> a small house, etc. although, as a side note, we seem to have lost the direct connection between the two -- people continue to want fancy stuff well past their reproductive age.
For the world you want to become true, something else must become biologically attractive.
That sounds veeeery far-fetched. How about societies where material resources aren't the main goal? How does that explain poor people having more babies? Is there any known correlation between "having more stuff" and reproduction at all?
If any, the somewhat accepted reproductive drive is "passing down your genes" - and people/animals/any creature that displays more "power" tends to attract more mates. And power doesn't translate to material resources in most cultures/societies/animal races...
Material resources are the most obvious way to demonstrate you have "power".
As for poor people with many babies -- it could be due to lack of access to birth control, or sometimes an insurance against high infant mortality rates. When your livelihood depends on how many hands are helping you in the farm, you want to make sure you have at least X babies.
You both missed the most obvious answer as to why poor people generally have more children; poor people typically have more time on their hands and encounter boredom more frequently, thus they fill this time with intercourse. Couple this with a lack of birth control and viola, more children. Of course in the context of farming having more hands around is essential to survival, in most other cases though more children will further impoverish the couple.
Or because poor people are generally not using up 5-10 additional years of peak reproductive age in education and career building before starting a family. It's complicated, but starting to produce children at 18 vs 30 tends to mean that you have more chances and those chances are somewhat higher quality, due to fewer complications, lower chance of congenital defects, and lower rate of cesarean section, among other factors.
Very excellent point, obtaining an education is quite the time investment and humans are definitely more fertile in their early 20s than any other time. I actually had not taken this into consideration...
>>You both missed the most obvious answer as to why poor people generally have more children; poor people typically have more time on their hands and encounter boredom more frequently
Wow... you basically equated "poor" with "lazy." Nice.
The reality, on the other hand, is that most poor people have to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet, and have a lot less leisure time than rich people do.
You can't deny that social welfare programs feed a self enforcing cycle of apathy in some segments of the population that contribute to the ability to remain lazy while still surviving. You are 100% correct that I should have phrased it better to not generalize all poor people, only a specific subgroup. I understand that some people bust their asses to scrap by and it wasn't my intention to demonize them or throw them under the bus.
Does anyone have metrics on what portion of the welfare receiving population falls into the "apathetic" segment vs the "bust their asses" segment? Seems to me that what side of this issue people end up on comes down to which segment they believe is the majority, and that belief seems to almost never involve critical thinking.
The US has a really high number of working poor that continue to have children at higher rates. Lack of determination and motivation to stay away from lifestyles that increase your chance of early pregnancies certainly factors at the individual level. Low achievement environments tend to socially entrench the values or conditions that keep people from achieving economic success (demonizing education, emphasis upon group responsibility over individual achievement, sports or religion celebrated as a center of social functions instead of something like academic or economic symbols, familial responsibility guilt trips, ad infinitum). This happens both in rural and urban areas in the US as well. I'm not sure how relevant this would be in the rest of the world, but children leaving home for economic opportunity via education is something most of Asia has shown some cultural validity in my experience.
Poor people do not have more children because of "boredom." They have more children because they are less educated and because of higher infant mortality rates.
Or you know: lack of access to birth control, particularly the pill. A high infant mortality rate doesn't actually explain anything, particularly in developed nations where that's not true.
You're correct that it was a bit of a pontification, but does it not seem like to much of a stretch to say that the more wealth you have the more options you have for entertainment? If you spend a majority of your time stuck at your house around the opposite sex and can't afford to do much else that in turn you will end up having more intercourse?
I don't buy it either, sounds like something banks made up.
Some people just like material possessions and are attracted to others who can give them more stuff.
A lot of guys have this simplistic, masojanistic view of women, that is, women are attracted to men with money because they're better mates (can provide for offspring); However, I know men who date independent women so they can surf all day.
You know what? Female partners want to mate with them just the same, even though they don't posses "power".
They want to have sex with guys who are in peak physical condition. Something about people who are able to hunt and survive is attractive.
But you said date. How long do these relationships last? Are they getting married and having children?
I myself am attracted to 18 year olds with small tits and firm asses but I wouldn't want to date or marry one. The maturity and outlook on life is not there.
I am however married to a woman two years my senior, she has a great ass and is mature.
Sexual attraction does not make a relationship, it is only a part of the puzzle.
I couldn't agree more, and am ecstatic that there are other like minded people. I believe my response to this Quora question, is one way to get this outcome. Would be curious to get your reaction to the idea.
The U.S. federal government first imposed a [temporary] personal income tax in 1861, in order to pay for the Civil War. The tax was later made permanent in 1913. In other words, our country is stuck on a nineteenth century tax model, collecting 95% of our revenue from labor and investment. I believe government slaps taxes on income and investment out of sheer momentum. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If we were designing a tax framework from the ground up, it would surely look different. In its simplest form, I’d say it would entail taxing “bads” instead of taxing “goods”. Let me explain.Of the $2.4 trillion in federal tax receipts collected every year in the U.S., 95% comes from taxing labor and investment. These are activities that generate social benefits; jobs, goods, and technological progress. Economists call these positive externalities, but we can simply call these “goods”. On the flip side, less than 2% of the $2.4 trillion in federal revenue comes from taxing—waste, pollution, and resource depletion—activities that generate social ills like obesity, heart disease, cancer, urban sprawl, materialism, and resource wars. Economists call these negative externalities but we can simply call these “bads”. A sensible tax policy would entail taxing “bads” instead of “goods”. Today we have it backwards, with the bulk of the federal tax burden, (95%) falling on taxing “goods” like labor and investment, instead of “bads” like resource depletion, waste and pollution.
Some will argue that such a system would be regressive and punish those that can least afford it. However, this system can be combined with a monthly federal stipend of a couple of hundred dollars for every single man, woman and child in the country to make the system progressive. In this scenario, those who save energy and resources, make money, and those that waste it, pay. Nonetheless, everyone, rich or poor would have a strong incentive not to be wasteful. More importantly, it would eliminate the disincentive to work.
This approach would help solve some of our nation’s largest problems. People would be healthier since the prices we pay for food would reflect the energy and resource intensity of meat vs. produce…thus leading people to consume more produce. We’d start seriously investing in energy efficiency, not because of government mandates, but because it would make financial sense. The approach might even help put our fiscal house in order since it would imply eliminating corporate welfare and all subsidies, including those for clean energy. Market forces would take over without all the loopholes that inevitably skew our personal decisions and ultimately the national economy.
Families would have a strong incentive to save and invest, instead of waste and consume, reversing a century of falling savings rate. It might even help reverse the last 60 years of cultural decay…combating materialism, consumerism, and the decline of the family.
I won’t argue at what level our economy should be taxed. My point is that if we will have any tax what-so-ever, it should not come from the work of; the policeman protecting our streets, the agent insuring our home, or the entrepreneur creating new industries and jobs for society. If nothing can be said to be certain except for death and taxes, then let’s use taxes to help us live longer, richer lives, and leave a world for our children that is not worse off than the one we
found.
This led me to create this site http://www.writegreen.org. Might have to give is 30 seconds or so to load (I've got it hosted on slow Heroku tier) The idea was to empower citizens to use their own philosophy to advocate sustainability with our politicians. The ideas is, change your politicians, not just your light bulbs.
Or perhaps we should replace the income tax with a property tax? Thus, you can only keep property if you are productively using it, or some such thing. Perhaps subject to some kind of sliding scale to have a higher rate on more expensive items.
See also: "Jubilee", a topic you will almost never hear mentioned in American churches.
> I believe (or rather, I pray) that we have hit peak consumption which will lead to this problem forevermore. We need to find new ways to improve ourselves than shopping more.
I think if we had more time we could certainly be consuming more, at least it's my limiting factor (besides money).
Imagine if we halved the work week or invented a pill that would let us survive on 1 hour sleep a night, that creates a lot more hours of consumption.
> For example, measure growth by how people are becoming more educated. If people could live healthily and intelligent and only work 10 hours a week until they were 100, wouldn't that be better than being able to buy a new car every year?
At least on the margins, nobody is doing this. And I doubt it's because the GDP numbers says not to.
Likewise, people were very skeptical about centralized currency/printed money when it was first introduced. Or if you want something more recent - skeptical that industry would ever surpass agricultural production, or services would ever overtake industrial goods, without destroying economy. Doesn't mean it _can't_ happen...
If you look at what fiat money had become in past, e.g. Germany of 1920s, you'll see that the doubts were quite founded. Even if you take a look at most important modern currencies, you'll see how much trickery is involved (quantitative easing, etc).
"Growth as a result of consumption is destructive. "
I'm sorry, but this is completely ridiculous.
'Consumption' is the primary driver of economic growth, and it will always be thus.
Without 'consumption' there is literally no economy.
If people want to work 10 hour weeks, they can do that, though I should point out, most kinds of work activities, especially the high value ones, don't work that way.
Better to work 40 hour weeks for 10 years, save everything, and retire.
Surely we need to find a way to clean up after ourselves and solve the problem of fewer resources and more garbage, but in general 'consumption' is good, or else there is no 'work' and no 'jobs' - even 10 hr/week jobs.
Can you elaborate on this? What are you classing as natural forces? Spiritual revolutions?
Such a small comment is so easy to dismiss because what you mean is not clear and those of us reading it can dismiss it as trite, obvious, or irrelevant without consideration or if we do give it consideration we are at the mercy of our own interpretation of the words used - either way it makes something you obviously cared enough about to write a null contribution to the conversation.
You mean 'unnatural forces'? As a species we have made great progress in mitigating natural forces. Not utopian, but there is enough resources, logistics and actors to feed the entire world, if a relative few didn't have to take all they can sequester for themselves. I see more forces pertaining to greed (infinite inflation racket, regulations as barriers, control of *-opolies, artificial shortages boost prices) holding back humanity.
If game theory is natural law then it should apply to all humans, regardless of background. How does it apply to the groups of people who aren't driven by amassing material possessions (hunter-gatherer tribes, monks/nuns, etc...)?
I believe (or rather, I pray) that we have hit peak consumption which will lead to this problem forevermore. We need to find new ways to improve ourselves than shopping more.