It is distressing that so many have become 'useless' in this modern economy. I think we are all very aware of the problem as well as the fact that it is likely to get worse.
What can be done? I have seen very little on this subject. Guaranteed basic income is probably a step in the right direction. At least such a system offers a real opportunity to drop what you are doing currently and sincerely try for a new career.
A guaranteed minimum income may heighten the importance of citizenship. Rather than a state being little more than a place to make money for any and all that arrive within a state's borders - in other words, a global free market - the state's prosperity would be tied to an individual's well being through ties of relation. Proof of citizenship would be of paramount in a guaranteed minimum income scheme, and yet the concept of citizenship seems to have been discarded for the notion of global citizenship in recent decades. It will be interesting to see how a guaranteed basic income survives in the age of border-less states.
Fully with you - it would seem that the trifecta of a modern and most productive society is:
- Education for all: To increase your productivity / fulfillment
- Healthcare for all: To keep you productive / happy for as long as possible
- Basic Income for all: To remove the risk that you can't earn your "living credits", thereby allowing greater risk taking and social beneficial / poorly compensated work to be paid (like volunteering, etc.)
100% in favor of guaranteed minimum income. I think its doable. All the research seems to say that people make poor decisions when in dire straits. It seems like a great optimization.
I like the universal basic income idea too, but haven't we gone through a similar crisis during the industrial revolution? How did we pull out of that?
This is a genuine question, I'm a poor student of history.
What if working would provide you with a basic income? Would it then not make sense for people working poor jobs to quit and just get the guaranteed basic income along with all their free time?
It is distressing. I'm in favor of a living wage for everyone that works or is disabled/retired. What I can't decide on is what to do with those that will choose not to work. What if it was 1% of the population? Or 5%? Or...?
You say that you have seen very little on this subject yet somehow you are able to judge what is a step in the right direction?
What is baffling is how many HNers who are apparently eager to downvote anyone in disagreement with the basic income argument and ask for counter-arguments yet fail to prove it in details (or even links) that the idea will work.
It's really distresses me whenever I read economic discussions on HN because basic economics is relatively simple and objective and because most folks on HN have the chops to understand this stuff, but it seems like many don't. In particular, one big facet of economics is equilibrium as it pertains to markets and most discussions here completely gloss over this (even though everyone here is completely comfortable with the concept of equilibria in other domains.)
I think a lot still needs to be done, and can be done, to educate the public about basic economic principles. I hope to do my part to help by creating quality online resources for this in the near future.
To give a more concrete example of what worries me: It should be obvious to everyone here that an idea like "minimum guaranteed income" is a very dangerous idea. Yes, there are credible economists that believe these things are a good idea (and it might even be a correct idea) but they believe this for very different, and much better informed reasons than the arguments being bandied about in this forum. Many of the arguments made here in favor of "minimum guaranteed income" are wrong and even the Economists who support these things would agree that your arguments are wrong.
Anyway, as I said, I hope to create some online resources soon that will show more clearly what the difficulty is with these types of ideas.
EDIT: For those asking me what the precise problem is with "minimum guaranteed income", I can't give you a satisfying answer, because I can only make an obvious qualitative argument right now (i.e. people will stop taking minimum wage jobs if they can get the same income without working, or by working in some less efficient fashion prescribed by a "guaranteed minimum income" scheme.) What needs to be done is to bring this discussion into the realm of mathematical "economic models" so we can quantify these things and ask questions like "How much will a guaranteed income help people?" and "How much will poor people be hurt indirectly by putting such a scheme in place?" (and of course ask additional meta questions such as "Is this model appropriate?") But these types of questions can't be addressed in an HN thread and require a more in depth treatment.
Would you please describe some of the faulty arguments for the "minimum guaranteed income" and also maybe link to the credible economic arguments to contrast? Otherwise you aren't really providing any information to further the discussion. Thanks!
Would you mind expanding what you wrote in that third paragraph ? All the better if there was a nice youtube video interview with said economist explaining him/herself.
Came here to say the exact same thing; thanks for saying it better than I ever could.
I don't get the basic income thing - pay people to not work? What?
Where's the money come from? How to you prevent massive inflation and a massive decrease in economic output as people quit their jobs? Who decides who gets this basic income?
Frankly, I am still waiting for a good introduction to general economic principles. I literally feel like an idiot when following economic discussions: it seems to me like it's all a long infinite chain of valid arguments and counter-arguments that are perfectly valid, true and completely opposite.
I am beginning to turn to Praxology: economics is just psychology under conditions of scarcity. Because most discussion on economics and minimum wage is a peak behind people's own perceptions and prejudices.
So peak behind my veil. It may not be a coherent argument, but it is trying to form from a different direction I usually see on here.
1. Welfare payments (paying people not to work) are about avoiding the human cost of moving from one equilibria to another. We do not have an ethicall acceptable way to judge if one person is deservedly poor and another is a scrounging parasite. So we pay everyone.
2. Welfare payments are getting really expensive. Partly because of their complexity, partly because we fiddle with it too much.
2.a. Welfare payments act as insurance for society. You have a bad year its not worth forcing you and your family onto the streets.
2.b. Forever welfare payments (benefits scroungers, 13 kids and never had a job etc) may be a reflection of a persons true economic worth. see below
3. Paying everyone a minimum guaranteed income is not so crazy - it is merely a monetary reflection of the value and utility derived from other public goods like medicine, science, roads, clean air. I get a lot of value from these things. The NHS means I don't monetarily pay a US level insurance. So I can put a pretty accurate number on a minimum payment already made to me.
For me the situation now is paying people who are not currently econmically productive enough to survive, and turn into productive citizens. It is messy, it has problems, but for my ethical point of view it beats not having a welfare system and seeing people starve. Thats why we brought it in and thats why we want to keep it.
However we are seeing demographic changes (which is what the article is about) that may well negate a lot of this - more and more human beings, with moral value, may find they are no longer economically in the black.
So we might have a future that is golden, of robots growing food, houses built from nanostructures in days, of the human basics for 10 bn provided for tiny effort or cost.
But getting there is not a clear road. And for my money holding the people who will fail to cross that bridge to the future, and giving them a decent life with the bounty of new productive technologies, is a moral duty. And also a sensible hedge for hubris.
In short, we pay for welfare because it is the right thing to do, it is usually short term for each individual, we might need it personally, and as we transition into a new world, we have no idea how bumpy it will get - so safety nets are a good idea. But is the current system(s) perfect, desirable or sustainable. Almost certainly not, and we shall see wide experimentation with different variations before settling on something similar to Singapore.
I agree and I am looking forward to what you come up with! :)
Passing around statements like 'give everyone a guaranteed basic minimum income' seems to be no better than Marie Antoinette saying "Let them eat cake" ... it's cute because it has a bit of merit(cake would feed people as a basic gauranteed income would give people some money) but it completely and naively oversimplifies everything. :P
The pool of idle and unwanted labor will likely increase until the assumptions underlying the industrial revolution are questioned. Great public works of art and architecture are scarcely being erected today as their mere existence is seen to be "inefficient". Efficiency is a means rather than an end.
From Tawney's "Acquisitive Society":
"Such societies may be called Acquisitive Societies, because their whole tendency and interest and preoccupation is to promote the acquisition of wealth. The {30} appeal of this conception must be powerful, for it has laid the whole modern world under its spell. Since England first revealed the possibilities of industrialism, it has gone from strength to strength, and as industrial civilization invades countries hitherto remote from it, as Russia and Japan and India and China are drawn into its orbit, each decade sees a fresh extension of its influence. The secret of its triumph is obvious. It is an invitation to men to use the powers with which they have been endowed by nature or society, by skill or energy or relentless egotism or mere good fortune, without inquiring whether there is any principle by which their exercise should be limited. It assumes the social organization which determines the opportunities which different classes shall in fact possess, and concentrates attention upon the right of those who possess or can acquire power to make the fullest use of it for their own self-advancement. By fixing men's minds, not upon the discharge of social obligations, which restricts their energy, because it defines the goal to which it should be directed, but upon the exercise of the right to pursue their own self-interest, it offers unlimited scope for the acquisition of riches, and therefore gives free play to one of the most powerful of human instincts. To the strong it promises unfettered freedom for the exercise of their strength; to the weak the hope that they too one day may be strong. Before the eyes of both it suspends a golden prize, which not all can attain, but for which each may strive, the enchanting vision of infinite expansion. It assures men that there are no ends other {31} than their ends, no law other than their desires, no limit other than that which they think advisable. Thus it makes the individual the center of his own universe, and dissolves moral principles into a choice of expediences. And it immensely simplifies the problems of social life in complex communities. For it relieves them of the necessity of discriminating between different types of economic activity and different sources of wealth, between enterprise and avarice, energy and unscrupulous greed, property which is legitimate and property which is theft, the just enjoyment of the fruits of labor and the idle parasitism of birth or fortune, because it treats all economic activities as standing upon the same level, and suggests that excess or defect, waste or superfluity, require no conscious effort of the social will to avert them, but are corrected almost automatically by the mechanical play of economic forces.
"Under the impulse of such ideas men do not become religious or wise or artistic; for religion and wisdom and art imply the acceptance of limitations. But they become powerful and rich. They inherit the earth and change the face of nature, if they do not possess their own souls; and they have that appearance of freedom which consists in the absence of obstacles between opportunities for self-advancement and those whom birth or wealth or talent or good fortune has placed in a position to seize them. It is not difficult either for individuals or for societies to achieve their object, if that object be sufficiently limited and immediate, and if they are not distracted from its pursuit by other considerations. The temper which dedicates itself to the cultivation of opportunities, and leaves obligations to take care of themselves, is set upon an object which is at once simple and practicable. The eighteenth century defined it. The twentieth century has very largely attained it. Or, if it has not attained it, it has at least grasped the possibilities of its attainment."
People get very attached to their theory of how economies and civilizations work.
On one side we have "Luddites" who think that machines are taking over. We have no use for most people's labour and we need to start dealing with that by having a guaranteed basic income or somesuch. Seems like common sense. What use are all the people that were working in factories or data entry or whatnot in the robot age!
On the other side we have Misans? Ludwigians? (I dunno, I need a name for Ludwig von Mises people). They point out that this current crop of Luddites are just following in the footsteps of historical Luddites that think everyone will be unemployed because of tractors or looms. The sky never fell. Economies sort themselves out.
Realistically, we don't know. Technology has been moving very fast for a long time and its accelerating. We don't know what this does to economic paradigms. How can anyone be as confident as so many people seem to be about this stuff.
Actually, the Luddites in the current conversation are the ones decrying technological advancement itself. On the policy side, they tend to favor propping up old, inefficient industries (essentially subsidizing them at the expense of the rest of the population).
A basic income has been considered common sense in economic theory for a long, long time (as in, it's been discussed by economists for at least a century). It has less to do with the obsolescence of human labor than it does to the fact that it's simply grossly inefficient to tie "the ability to take entrepreneurial risk" to "I was born middle-class or higher".
Economic models would show that low wage jobs are such due to lack of specialization and supply/demand for that job. Nonetheless, articles like this make "the Economy" sound more and more like the Matrix. Do humans exist merely to serve the Economy?
It's interesting that this article has garnered so much interest on hacker news. Automation, streamlining, and outsourcing appears to have worked its way "up" to the STEM fields. The technical minded may soon received a taste of what the factory labor received in the eighties.
>It means fixing inequality without the need to resort to redistributive taxation.
National taxation in Britain doesn't redistribute, it regulates demand. The British government does not need to tax a pound to spend a pound. The limits on spending are inflation and real resources.
What exactly is the difference between a guaranteed minimum income and welfare? Are people talking about you get paid X regardless of what you do, because if you want to see what that kind of thing looks like, look at life on an indian reservation. In many cases, that doesn't really solve the problems of poverty, alcoholism, etc. even if there is humungous opportunity to work, get a free education, etc.
Some people don't want to do what society asks of them. How do you solve that?
[+] [-] mberning|12 years ago|reply
What can be done? I have seen very little on this subject. Guaranteed basic income is probably a step in the right direction. At least such a system offers a real opportunity to drop what you are doing currently and sincerely try for a new career.
[+] [-] kingmanaz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickpinkston|12 years ago|reply
- Education for all: To increase your productivity / fulfillment
- Healthcare for all: To keep you productive / happy for as long as possible
- Basic Income for all: To remove the risk that you can't earn your "living credits", thereby allowing greater risk taking and social beneficial / poorly compensated work to be paid (like volunteering, etc.)
[+] [-] andrewvc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahoy|12 years ago|reply
This is a genuine question, I'm a poor student of history.
[+] [-] scrabble|12 years ago|reply
What if working would provide you with a basic income? Would it then not make sense for people working poor jobs to quit and just get the guaranteed basic income along with all their free time?
[+] [-] DougN7|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StandardFuture|12 years ago|reply
What is baffling is how many HNers who are apparently eager to downvote anyone in disagreement with the basic income argument and ask for counter-arguments yet fail to prove it in details (or even links) that the idea will work.
[+] [-] drcode|12 years ago|reply
I think a lot still needs to be done, and can be done, to educate the public about basic economic principles. I hope to do my part to help by creating quality online resources for this in the near future.
To give a more concrete example of what worries me: It should be obvious to everyone here that an idea like "minimum guaranteed income" is a very dangerous idea. Yes, there are credible economists that believe these things are a good idea (and it might even be a correct idea) but they believe this for very different, and much better informed reasons than the arguments being bandied about in this forum. Many of the arguments made here in favor of "minimum guaranteed income" are wrong and even the Economists who support these things would agree that your arguments are wrong.
Anyway, as I said, I hope to create some online resources soon that will show more clearly what the difficulty is with these types of ideas.
EDIT: For those asking me what the precise problem is with "minimum guaranteed income", I can't give you a satisfying answer, because I can only make an obvious qualitative argument right now (i.e. people will stop taking minimum wage jobs if they can get the same income without working, or by working in some less efficient fashion prescribed by a "guaranteed minimum income" scheme.) What needs to be done is to bring this discussion into the realm of mathematical "economic models" so we can quantify these things and ask questions like "How much will a guaranteed income help people?" and "How much will poor people be hurt indirectly by putting such a scheme in place?" (and of course ask additional meta questions such as "Is this model appropriate?") But these types of questions can't be addressed in an HN thread and require a more in depth treatment.
[+] [-] jomtung|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gyom|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpursley|12 years ago|reply
I don't get the basic income thing - pay people to not work? What?
Where's the money come from? How to you prevent massive inflation and a massive decrease in economic output as people quit their jobs? Who decides who gets this basic income?
This all reminds me of a south park episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO5sxLapAts
[+] [-] johnchristopher|12 years ago|reply
Hope you get something online soon.
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|12 years ago|reply
So peak behind my veil. It may not be a coherent argument, but it is trying to form from a different direction I usually see on here.
1. Welfare payments (paying people not to work) are about avoiding the human cost of moving from one equilibria to another. We do not have an ethicall acceptable way to judge if one person is deservedly poor and another is a scrounging parasite. So we pay everyone.
2. Welfare payments are getting really expensive. Partly because of their complexity, partly because we fiddle with it too much.
2.a. Welfare payments act as insurance for society. You have a bad year its not worth forcing you and your family onto the streets.
2.b. Forever welfare payments (benefits scroungers, 13 kids and never had a job etc) may be a reflection of a persons true economic worth. see below
3. Paying everyone a minimum guaranteed income is not so crazy - it is merely a monetary reflection of the value and utility derived from other public goods like medicine, science, roads, clean air. I get a lot of value from these things. The NHS means I don't monetarily pay a US level insurance. So I can put a pretty accurate number on a minimum payment already made to me.
For me the situation now is paying people who are not currently econmically productive enough to survive, and turn into productive citizens. It is messy, it has problems, but for my ethical point of view it beats not having a welfare system and seeing people starve. Thats why we brought it in and thats why we want to keep it.
However we are seeing demographic changes (which is what the article is about) that may well negate a lot of this - more and more human beings, with moral value, may find they are no longer economically in the black.
So we might have a future that is golden, of robots growing food, houses built from nanostructures in days, of the human basics for 10 bn provided for tiny effort or cost.
But getting there is not a clear road. And for my money holding the people who will fail to cross that bridge to the future, and giving them a decent life with the bounty of new productive technologies, is a moral duty. And also a sensible hedge for hubris.
In short, we pay for welfare because it is the right thing to do, it is usually short term for each individual, we might need it personally, and as we transition into a new world, we have no idea how bumpy it will get - so safety nets are a good idea. But is the current system(s) perfect, desirable or sustainable. Almost certainly not, and we shall see wide experimentation with different variations before settling on something similar to Singapore.
But that is a long way off and I am late.
[+] [-] StandardFuture|12 years ago|reply
Passing around statements like 'give everyone a guaranteed basic minimum income' seems to be no better than Marie Antoinette saying "Let them eat cake" ... it's cute because it has a bit of merit(cake would feed people as a basic gauranteed income would give people some money) but it completely and naively oversimplifies everything. :P
[+] [-] kingmanaz|12 years ago|reply
From Tawney's "Acquisitive Society":
"Such societies may be called Acquisitive Societies, because their whole tendency and interest and preoccupation is to promote the acquisition of wealth. The {30} appeal of this conception must be powerful, for it has laid the whole modern world under its spell. Since England first revealed the possibilities of industrialism, it has gone from strength to strength, and as industrial civilization invades countries hitherto remote from it, as Russia and Japan and India and China are drawn into its orbit, each decade sees a fresh extension of its influence. The secret of its triumph is obvious. It is an invitation to men to use the powers with which they have been endowed by nature or society, by skill or energy or relentless egotism or mere good fortune, without inquiring whether there is any principle by which their exercise should be limited. It assumes the social organization which determines the opportunities which different classes shall in fact possess, and concentrates attention upon the right of those who possess or can acquire power to make the fullest use of it for their own self-advancement. By fixing men's minds, not upon the discharge of social obligations, which restricts their energy, because it defines the goal to which it should be directed, but upon the exercise of the right to pursue their own self-interest, it offers unlimited scope for the acquisition of riches, and therefore gives free play to one of the most powerful of human instincts. To the strong it promises unfettered freedom for the exercise of their strength; to the weak the hope that they too one day may be strong. Before the eyes of both it suspends a golden prize, which not all can attain, but for which each may strive, the enchanting vision of infinite expansion. It assures men that there are no ends other {31} than their ends, no law other than their desires, no limit other than that which they think advisable. Thus it makes the individual the center of his own universe, and dissolves moral principles into a choice of expediences. And it immensely simplifies the problems of social life in complex communities. For it relieves them of the necessity of discriminating between different types of economic activity and different sources of wealth, between enterprise and avarice, energy and unscrupulous greed, property which is legitimate and property which is theft, the just enjoyment of the fruits of labor and the idle parasitism of birth or fortune, because it treats all economic activities as standing upon the same level, and suggests that excess or defect, waste or superfluity, require no conscious effort of the social will to avert them, but are corrected almost automatically by the mechanical play of economic forces.
"Under the impulse of such ideas men do not become religious or wise or artistic; for religion and wisdom and art imply the acceptance of limitations. But they become powerful and rich. They inherit the earth and change the face of nature, if they do not possess their own souls; and they have that appearance of freedom which consists in the absence of obstacles between opportunities for self-advancement and those whom birth or wealth or talent or good fortune has placed in a position to seize them. It is not difficult either for individuals or for societies to achieve their object, if that object be sufficiently limited and immediate, and if they are not distracted from its pursuit by other considerations. The temper which dedicates itself to the cultivation of opportunities, and leaves obligations to take care of themselves, is set upon an object which is at once simple and practicable. The eighteenth century defined it. The twentieth century has very largely attained it. Or, if it has not attained it, it has at least grasped the possibilities of its attainment."
[+] [-] drcode|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netcan|12 years ago|reply
On one side we have "Luddites" who think that machines are taking over. We have no use for most people's labour and we need to start dealing with that by having a guaranteed basic income or somesuch. Seems like common sense. What use are all the people that were working in factories or data entry or whatnot in the robot age!
On the other side we have Misans? Ludwigians? (I dunno, I need a name for Ludwig von Mises people). They point out that this current crop of Luddites are just following in the footsteps of historical Luddites that think everyone will be unemployed because of tractors or looms. The sky never fell. Economies sort themselves out.
Realistically, we don't know. Technology has been moving very fast for a long time and its accelerating. We don't know what this does to economic paradigms. How can anyone be as confident as so many people seem to be about this stuff.
[+] [-] wutbrodo|12 years ago|reply
A basic income has been considered common sense in economic theory for a long, long time (as in, it's been discussed by economists for at least a century). It has less to do with the obsolescence of human labor than it does to the fact that it's simply grossly inefficient to tie "the ability to take entrepreneurial risk" to "I was born middle-class or higher".
[+] [-] AJ007|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaa2102|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beyondarmonia|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kingmanaz|12 years ago|reply
http://www.vdare.com/print/17686
Perhaps in another decade lawyers will face the chopping block, and thereafter the politicians who outsourced their nation.
[+] [-] kaonashi|12 years ago|reply
National taxation in Britain doesn't redistribute, it regulates demand. The British government does not need to tax a pound to spend a pound. The limits on spending are inflation and real resources.
[+] [-] programminggeek|12 years ago|reply
Some people don't want to do what society asks of them. How do you solve that?
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply