Universal Basic Income...

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I don't see as being viable ATM.

It already exist to a limited extent in the gulf state. IMO these are amongst the most amoral, selfish places on earth. Of course they import indentured labour many time the population, who are not citizens.

It is a lot easier if you have a small population, with plenty of resources (particularly energy).

The reality is a breakthrough in energy development would totally change economics as we know it. Especially if their is cheap freely available energy, where people may even be their own producers. This would democratize standard of life.

My prediction is this would be in quantum or fission technologies. How I have no idea if it would happen in my lifetime, if at all. I hope it does happen.

That is how trustafarians live.( http://money.howstuffworks.com/personal ... farian.htm) It does look like a sweet lifestyle. The catch is that this is sustainable only as long as very few people do it. It's great to find pro-social ways to keep busy (as opposed to crimes of boredom which seem to be committed largely by the youthful very poor and very rich). What makes living comfortable is a dense infrastructure of work being done very cheaply so that food will continue to appear, buildings will stay maintained, sewage and trash will be removed etc. Currently this is done in small part by tech (robots/computers/various machines) and in large part by people who found it to be the best job they could get in their circumstances.

The article makes the bold promise that all this infrastructure work will be done by tech.


I think it is far more likely it will be done by an underclass working on the cheap in horrible conditions. 0-equals-true points out that the oil-wealthy countries already do this via their oil money in combination with non-citizen underclass labor. It already happens in the U.S. where our comfortable lifestyle (although not comfortable enough to not work) is made possible by the labor of immigrant farm workers (for the affordable food) and 3rd world factory workers (for the affordable tech). It's absolutely true that tech removes a lot of the white collar paper pusher jobs (as outlined by aghogday). It is poised to remove many of the blue collar service industry jobs (such as cashiers who can be phased out by auto-checkout). What it doesn't phase out is some of the necessary but unpleasant jobs like garbage pickup, CPS worker, raspberry picker. And of course tech factory worker. That stuff still has to get done. Who does it while the 1st world is living the comfortable-but-not-extravagant life paid for by taxing the multinationals? At some point that system gives way.

But on the other hand, it is a legit point that when a whole type of job goes away, the remaining unemployed make for a very unstable country. So what to do? I personally favor large government projects as were done in the past to create jobs and build our infrastructure. If we can cobble together the money for Guaranteed Universal Income, we could as easily use that theoretical money to restore our crumbling infrastructure- salary, not a guaranteed income. There is a lot of work to be done so why not pay people to do it rather than pay people to not do it?

I think the premise behind the problem is correct. The problem is serious and real. The proposed solution, however, doesn't seem feasible even in theory, let alone in practice.

Everyone who says "what a great idea" is thinking about how great it would be to receive something valuable ("wealth") for free, but who is going to produce that wealth? Current welfare systems are all based on a majority producing and a minority receiving. An income guarantee would certainly discourage people from producing anything other than children, which means the ratio of producers:consumers would only continue to decrease. At some point it becomes unsustainable - the only question is when.

The only solution I see to the above is if robots could produce enough to provide for all humans. We would be very lucky indeed if this worked out, but even then there is another problem: limited space and resources on our planet. You can't buy more of that, unless you go to other planets, but now we're really getting into sci-fi territory.

To boil this down to a simple mathematical argument:

1. The number of humans that can be born, given guaranteed resources per person, is unlimited.
2. The amount of resources on the planet is limited.
3. Therefore it is impossible to guarantee any amount of resources > 0 to each person.

Last edited by FMX on 04 Nov 2014, 1:19 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I see no point in giving monetary handouts to people who have already demonstrated an obvious lack of personal responsibility.

A lot of resources are renewable, I am not so sure there actually are such limited resources there's not enough for everyone....or if our current systems just use resources so wastefully and continue relying on non-renewable resources.

Clearly my point was entirely missed that was not what I had in mind at all...aside from what I mentioned people would have to be responsible for a lot of aspects of their life to keep the society running smoothly, it just would not be via working a potentially pointless job for less than a living wage. I was thinking more of a classless society......not anything about some sub-set of rich people living on trust funds or whatever the crap....more like there would be no wealthy for there to be a sub-set of since there would be no seperate classes, but as I said nothing like that is likely to occur in my lifetime.

My whole point was moving towards a system in which living a comfortable lifestyle does not take a dense infrastructure of work being done very cheaply...by workers treated like crap and exploited in third world countries just so a few people can have some extravagant lifestyle, and some can have a comfortable lifestyle but then you have people barely scraping by....that class division probably does not have to exist.

HOLY SH*T! I'm largely agreeing with you two!
But the same people who oppose a minimum wage would also be fighting this, maybe with the argument that this would discourage hard work, or leave people in poverty... without offering any sort of counter solution.

I've pointed out to you that I support this at least a dozen times, I'm not sure why you're acting so surprised.

To clarify for others though, what I support is more like Friedman's reverse income tax, and is not intended to fully support the majority of the population, but rather as a more efficient and less demeaning way of providing a social safety net that actually works.

Never mind that if you guaranteed a "minimum" income for everyone, what would the economy do in compensation?

We see this with anything that's government subsidized....the market prices go up to exploit what's being dolled out because they know the money is there.

You'd likely put the masses stuck on the bottom into a new era of poverty.

I clipped out the rest of your post and even the rest of this sentence because this^^^^right here is the crux of the problem. How do you build a system in which a comfortable lifestyle does not take a dense infrastructure of work being done very cheaply by workers treated like crap and exploited in third world countries?

The concept of Universal Basic Income does not address that problem at all. FMX is right in that this is being looked at just from the perspective of receiving this, not from the work that needs to be done to produce it. Much of the work that must be done to create a comfortable lifestyle is boring, dangerous or otherwise unpleasant. That's why I posted the comment from a guy who addresses how to motivate people to be the ones to do the unpleasant jobs. The article blithely assumes those jobs will be done by tech without ever stopping to think who will work in the factories to build the tech (even if that job is ultimately robot maintenance) or who will work in the mines to excavate the raw materials.

Mao's communist revolution addressed this problem by forcing people to do the unpleasant jobs. But that didn't work too well since it turns out that enslaved paper pushers make terrible farmers. It also didn't create a classless society since it simply rearranged classes into the forcers and the forced. Capitalism addresses this problem by floating the idea that classes can be transcended with work, ingenuity and talent. Since that actually works for some people (such as sports stars) it keeps the idea alive even though it doesn't work out that way for most people.

I don't think it's possible to have a truly classless society but it may be possible to expand the middle and clip off the top and bottom extremes of multimillionaire plutocrats and the starving.

What I'd like to see:
-make a new New Deal to create jobs doing the work of re-building our crumbling infrastructure (applies to U.S.)
-work on tech to make the unpleasant jobs less unpleasant and dangerous so they won't be avoided by all but the most desperate

Fun Fact (that is actually a horrible fact). I recently learned that the internet has created a whole new horrific job that is being done by the well educated and computer savvy desperate (i.e. recent college grads with loans and no other job on the horizon). Apparently the reason that evil videos of beheadings/child pornography etc. don't show up on mainstream websites is because there are people paid to screen them out. These people now have PTSD from the horror they are paid to watch out for. Can a bot be designed for that?

^^^

I think with better image recognizing technology, a bot can be made for that, probably within at least the next two decades.

But again, what will those folks find next to do.

That truly is the conundrum now, for around 50% of recent college grads that do not care to pick in the fields for metaphor, and would rather stay at home with mom and dad as long as possible, to avoid such a menial tasked fate.

I could have chosen that route too, as without the verbal and written skills in the 1980's there was no job for me, appropriate as such after three college degrees, and no I didn't expect to learn much from passing out shoes to human beings, in a close to minimum wage at a Military Bowling Center.

But truly the surprise was I learned more in the real flesh and blood herd of human beings, about the most important type of intelligence, emotional intelligence, than from any book or computer I'll ever learn from, and I will never be able to price that intelligence with a dollar figure, as it led to a marriage, and eventual financial independence that might not have otherwise happened without that increase in emotional intelligence.

I suppose there is something to be learned from picking fruit too, if nothing more than we are part of nature, when the illusion of machines and books, are removed from our human senses.

But working in a sweat shop with machines all day, without any human interaction, truly sucks in my opinion, even though it may be easier overall, for some folks, than working behind a cash register at McDonalds and doing mechanical and social cognition in customer service all at one time.

At least on this website, per the demographic here, some folks might choose the sweatshop, if forced a choice.

The Bowling Center job, particularly before I quickly moved up to supervisory and management duties, was the best job I ever had as I basically just connected to humans in social cooperative ways, and we made each other happy campers.

Pretty much what we are evolved to do anyway, in much smaller social group units in so-called primitive forager ways of life. Cooperate and share is still inherent human nature, overall.

Big populations with over 150 to 200 sets of human eyes, create truly insane cultural ways of living, in a metaphor of attempting to walk on straight sidewalks, where humans are evolved to walk IN 'golden spirals' instead, yes kind of like that Movie the Wizard of Oz, with Dorothy on the spiraling Yellow Brick Road.

Yes, even the rich folks live in cultural prison; they just know not what they do, as culture is a mighty brainwasher, even capable of convincing some women in other countries, that female genital mutilation is a great self-esteem booster.

Humans are now more like 'sheep'/'robots' than 'dogs'/'humans', that's for sure, and truly the sad part to me, is money can't solve that, only looking inside to true human instinct and intuition, can make true awakening and enlightenment happen, as fortunately it's still in our genetics, just waiting to come out, with the right challenge of stimulus and adaptation to escape, all the illusions of culture, possible, in one life to live, now.

It works for me now, and hopefully it will work for more and more folks in future nows.

Without hope, there is not much to gain in life. Finding IT in simple things like a grain of sand is where real wisdom lies, one grain at a time, now.

Thinking deep at core, is not thinking at all, it's only being moved that counts, truly in life.

Yes this true reality, otherwise known as feeling AND MOVING IN LIFE AKA LIVING. :)

And with that said, I think..hmm.. i mean FEEL.. I'll add a song, to express the Moving Feeling part of TRUE living, that never has a price tag, concretely as such. ;)


[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFA64Eq2Fqs[/youtube]

Sure, there are. Land, for one. You can only build skyscrapers so high.



Yes. Image recognition software is progressing well (which is why the CAPTCHAs are getting so difficult, by the way ) and eventually software will be able to replace these humans. It won't be perfect, but it doesn't need to be - it only needs to be as good as the humans. (Same argument as for the safety of driver-less cars.)

IMHO, the way things are headed ["race to the bottom"], it is either gonna be some form of bread and circuses [universal welfare], OR tyranny/anarchy ending civilization in a whimper, mass deaths via starvation/culling of the [over]population with the survivors living as de facto serfs or slaves. I am betting on the latter. America [as we know it, not quite yet a banana republic] is living on borrowed time. today's election will only accelerate things towards the end.

work is a resource, I think there is a better way to phrase this humans need to look at what is effect use of human labor, and what is not and create very utilitarian but still free market systems that make as much use of the resources available has as little impact on the environment, and imposes no or at least very little suffering to sentient life.

I don't think unemployment is an economic problem, if all the work is done all the resources we need are produced and everyone is feed its not an issue how many people are unemployeed we should look at this in a different way as culture evolves and promote a more minimal lifestyle imo. I had somewhere I was going with this but I lost it. I think david wong does the argument better, I'm not sure if this is from my biass from being in the first world we could be just sending all the really intense labor jobs off shores and we are very privileged in america which would destroy the effectiveness of idea, not sure if it'd keep people from getting work, people are greedy and if they have useful skills they'll want more than 710 dollars a month. this system is already in place with the right lawyer and doctor anyone can get ssi. morality wise unacceptable action to most though but the system is there in all but name, and being used for just that for a lot of people.

david wong has a decent pod cast of it up, and there is a huge subculture of "wizards" who are minimalist hermits who either work for years at a time intensely and then take long years to go "neet" for a break and survive on as little money as possible to extend it or get what they refer to as "neet/autism bux" which is ssi. and also live a minimal life style. so its not impossible, the morality of it however is questionable. some even have worked up a huge stock pile of cash and moved to foreign countries where the price of things are cheap due to local population being poor. I think one guy on wizard chan said his living exspensesere like 100-120 dollars a month.

I don't think the technology is there for complete automation but a lot of work is done by very few people now and I think the whole hoard of people trying to climb over each other to find something someone needs in society done unproductive, maybe it would be useful to give some people a chance to sit a round out untill there is something productive for them to do if that makes sense, but its certainly to the point where not everyone needs to be employed imo and there are a lot of fluff and frankly dehumanizing jobs on the market now. (fast food etc.) I think a system like this needs to be voluntary, since I'm against taxes, voluntary donations to the welfare system. instead of tax based so the liberals who care about supporting their fellow man can do so with out imposing that on the people who morally object to it. no ones money is stolen and given to another person and its all done voluntarily unlike how the goverment does it now. think that could work.

http://www.earwolf.com/episode/millennial-panic/

Well exactly, how do we create a system in which a comfortable lifestyle does not take a dense infrastructure of work being done very cheaply by exploited workers? That is the question I am still thinking about, maybe if enough people thought about it an idea would emerge....but really I don't know exactly how to go about that, however it would be ideal.

And sure capitalism does address the issue however as you say for most a ingenuity and talent, and hell even hard work does not allow everyone to 'trancend' class, but because for some it works out people still believe in it and hope they can be one of those people it works out for........So then that is why a classless society is appealing as it would remove that aspect from life, maybe people could focus on more productive things. But maybe what you suggest would be more viable....But yeah it is difficult trying to really think up the details of a system that would be entirely different than what we have now, i mean even I am used to the system as is even if I dislike a lot about it....so yeah I admit I certainly do not have all the answers, just would like to see things improve, to me a classless society would be an improvement...but there is the chance it will never happen at least not in my lifetime so

Issue is for such a system people would have to be willing to do needed jobs on the basis of it keeps things going...there would not be a wealth incentive however since that would be contrary to the classless system, so it would also have to be determined what other things are good motivation. For instance if say 3 friends are renting a place together and instead of hiring someone any time there is a problem with the house...what if they had the skills to fix the problem themselves? Well obviously if they are good friends they aren't going to push all the responsibility on one person, the'd probably split up the needed but rather unpleasant tasks among themselves....but how to create that on a large scale I am not entirely sure. But essentially people would have to do some of the unpleasant jobs, however ideally they'd split it up in such a way it doesn't really bring anyone's life down but still gets done.