Why doesn't this article discuss the repercussions of such a plan?
These ideas of "helping everyone and feeling good" fail to understand human behavior. Basic income would reek havoc on the real estate market as people (of the trashy uncivilized variety) would try to move into nice neighborhoods with their new funds that they didn't work for and earn and "fuck up the neighborhood" basically.(This already occurs with section 8 housing) Another consequence is that rent and housing would rise substantially.
The price of a home isn't just determined by the value of the home itself but by the highest price the local market can afford to pay. People who are not in real estate don't understand this.
The flawed assumption to this plan is that all or most poor people are poor because they just haven't been given enough chances or nice things. This emotional ideology usually belongs to young collage students who have never worked with the public and seen the real asshole-ery and primitive baboon-ism of humanity and believe everyone is a nice person. Or adults who grew up in their parent's nice neighborhood miles away from reality. I know you're going to think I'm the biggest most evil asshole in the world but after working with the public (everyone in my family does) NOT a cool startup in a collage town I have to tell you the truth: Quite a few poor people (not all of course) are poor for a reason. Sitting down and talking with them will usually give away these reasons immediately. They don't bring value, they can't hold jobs because they have poor impulse control, they're short term decision makers, they don't want to educate or better themselves, they're hyper-sexual, were born with a lower IQ, they can't commit to jobs they do have, they smoke pot like crazy. Basically they don't have nice things for a reason. And every time you try to give them nice things they ruin them and don't appreciate them.
I used to be one of those "help everyone and make the world happy and good feelings and gosh I just wish we could all hold hands". I have completely left that ideology as it's a fantasy. A lie. These smart intellectual folks with ideas on how to help the poor completely forget to include the above mentioned human problems. All they see is numbers and an equation and they want to balance it all out on the table. But it never works like that in real life.
I know during this recession a lot of people who deserve nice things have had them taken away, but any attempts to correct this through government, welfare, and basic income is just going to go in the wrong hands.
There are devastating repercussions for paying people to do nothing or giving people something they haven't earned. Let's stop chasing pipe-dreams because they "sound nice".
I think your philosophy is leading your opinions rather than the evidence. In those places where basic income has been trialled, it seems to work. For example:
reduced the dependency of women on men for their survival.
The criticism that the BIG is leading to increasing alcoholism is not supported by empirical evidence.
... Note that I am not suggesting that a basic income is guaranteed to work, just that it is worth looking into. Further experiments will reveal the truth, not prejudices about the poor.
Put in other words, what we need is policy based on evidence, not opinion.
Those people you describe have no place in the job market. Their only value is to consume. Give them free money, so that they consume WoW, THC, beer and the like. Someone has to consume our overproduction.
But, I'm living in an area the US would call a project. Most of my neighbors are unemployed. Not because they are lazy bums, but because there are no jobs for those who are over 50, or are uneducated, or are single moms, or ... And there are no jobs that would pay a living wage. So its easier/better for them to stay unemployed, and earn unemployment money.
The people you describe are only a small fraction of the unemployed masses.
When another human being drops out of FREE high school and sleeps around and gets pregnant you want me to reward them for that? When you subsidize people's bad decisions you will get more bad decisions. When you give a safety net for purposely being stupid you will get more of it.
You want me to pay for someone else to do nothing with their life. Think about that for a moment.
My parents only had 2 children because they could only afford 2 children. If the US government rewarded my parents for having children, they would have the incentive to have more children. Technically it does (through taking advantage of the welfare system) but my parents are hard working immigrants and not freeloaders (not to be confused with people who are on short term welfare due to legitimate unforeseen events). They did not have more kids. Other people aren't so well behaved. Other people purposely have children so they can get welfare.
If the US funded planned parenthood more, legalized abortion in all 50 states (which women already want, see below), turn off welfare for pregnant women who cannot provide for their children but got pregnant anyway, and subsidized contraception to make it affordable beyond excuse, the kids of which you speak would not exist.
I know I sound like a cold android and YES you may call me an asshole but that's life, that's nature.
Every human has a right to reproduce but is responsible for taking care of their offspring. I am not responsible for funding YOUR children's existence. Civilized people already live this way:
"The biggest reasons why women have abortions are: that having a child would interfere with a woman’s education, work or ability to care for dependents (74%); that she could not afford a baby now (73%); and that she did not want to be a single mother or was having relationship problems (48%)." - http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3711005.pdf
Morality is well and good, but in the real world we have to focus on what works. Finland works. Germany works. The United States doesn't work as well, and desperately needs to improve.
Moralizing sermons have never solved problems and never will; only actual reform work can do that. Why are you so opposed to getting your hands dirty with reforming our system?
Have you lived, worked, or interacted with people who have been on long term welfare? What works in other countries can't be transferred over and work here like people think they can. Reform? Sure! I'm all up for it. In fact check my comment history about 6 months back and you'll see that I'm actually the one that suggested paying people a minimum income for being peaceful, since 100 years from now most jobs will be automated and the unemployment rate will skyrocket to over 50%. I have since abandoned that plan after careful consideration that things don't work out the way we intelligent human calculators think they will. Adjusting numbers on paper doesn't take into account for primitive human behavior.
I know we here at Hacker News are entrepreneurs and are dead set on trying 100 new crazy ideas of which 99 will fail and cost investors hundreds of millions and 1 will succeed and exit, ipo, or fizzle out in 5 years. We're so crazy we even try ideas that have already failed 12 times over thinking we're going to do something different this time. Humanity doesn't change as much as you think. You can't take the human out of the human. And this plan for giving away money or housing or food (which has already been tried numerous times) is dead on delivery.
> Adjusting numbers on paper doesn't take into account for primitive human behavior.
No, but treating humans like humans gets us to behave like good humans. Even in our own country we've seen murder rates go down year by year, with few anomalies, as we've cleaned up things like child abuse and spousal abuse and so on.
Primitive human behavior used to include bear-baiting and beating children bloody for not being able to recite a Latin passage correctly. Is it any wonder that reducing that has lead to fewer people who have no real compassion?
> You can't take the human out of the human. And this plan for giving away money or housing or food (which has already been tried numerous times) is dead on delivery.
Except in all the countries where it's worked for decades, right? Is the Nordic Model a fantasy, then?
Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are genetically and ethnically homogeneous, making it easier and faster for the society to enforce social norms and standards. Japan and South Korea are as well. That's why that system works so well and those countries are so...well... civilized and developed. What works for a homogeneous country will not automatically work for a heterogeneous country like America. There are some fucked up people living here. You really don't get it because you haven't been here. Again, like I said in my first comment, you have a good heart and good intentions but you might think this way because you've been living in a nice walled garden away from shitty people.
The people of a country determine the majority of its success. Not just it's laws. People from different countries, people from different backgrounds have different levels of civility. It may be cultural (which can be changed) or it may be genetic (which cannot be changed unless weeded out genetically). This is why I'm saying what works in one country won't automatically work in another.
Few people I have the chance to listen about such maters actually know what they are talking about. I upvoted your strings of replies here.
I live in Romania and here we always have had all kinds of immigrants from all around us. Maybe there were inter-ethnic tensions but the environment was always civilized, and the minorities integrated themselves (mostly) as a part of society. ...well, with one notable exception - the gypsies. The rest of the Europe are blaming us for not putting enough efforts on their education and integration but they do not seem to have an idea who the gypsies are and that is especially irritating. There are all kind of... let's say "peculiar" people in this world with whom it is difficult to accomplish things, but many of us are not willing or prepared to acknowledge this.
> Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are genetically and ethnically homogeneous, making it easier and faster for the society to enforce social norms and standards.
I have absolutely no time for racism. BTW, I'm American, born and raised.
Currently students earn grades A-F. From now on we should have a 'basic grade', all students will be given a 'D' - a basic passing grade.
You get your 'D' even if you don't even go to class.
and since don't go to school well we might as well just give them the diplomas too...
I would like to see the idealistic college students and professors apply this concept to their real world and see how it works out...
The idiocy of this becomes obvious in this context.
You're missing the reward for those who get higher grades.
If students with higher grades got better food, chair and transport (that's what happens in basic income), you would probably see some students trying their best.
Off-topic: I always wondered why there is A-F instead of A-Z. In your order of ideas it is explainable - everyone gets a "G" by default (for "F" one should at least be present) therefore all the rest are left out.
On-topic: If you make "D" the default, when the reality sets in, the new valuable scale becomes A-C (nobody will care or consider one's graded studies if those were "completed" on D "pass" grades). The same is with free money - the amount of pension money will shortly become meaningless because of inflation.
What's your alternative? Put them in prison and pay more than the basic income cost or leave them free with no support or way to earn a living except by being a menace to society? Something else entirely?
Pay them to work on something. Either creating something, starting a business, or hell, sharpening pencils or even moving dirt back and forth between two holes. Money must be earned. Not given.
Explain that to the wall street banks. If it is ok for the fed to give a trillion dollars printed out of thin air a year trying to pump liquidity into banks, why just not give these money to every US citizen instead. It comes to 3000$ per year per US citizen - yeah even the working citizens should get basic income if implemented properly.
It won't make anyone rich but it will go great lengths to give some security to the most vulnerable of people.
Not convinced it's driven by morality. Consider every video game you've played. It holds your attention, interest and effort when you work for your rewards. Then when you find an "infinite money" cheat code, you spend 30 minutes going nuts and then do something else, never to return to that game.
We're hardwired to have a produce/consume balance.
For a few reasons that would be nearly impossible for the US as-is to implement:
-The safety net is already established. Giving someone something from birth ingrains in them that "this is just the way it is" -- giving them nothing and then turning the switch on results in disaster (see: professional athletes, lotto winners, etc). A catch-22 situation. Perhaps not insurmountable over a long enough period.
-Very low corruption, which in my experience is a function of organizational size. When people think the cards are stacked against them, right or wrong, they tend to opt out. An org the size of the US will never be low-corruption, imo. The reward is too high, and the risk continues to be too low.
-(off topic to my original point) Spending+military. The Nordic model has an obscenely high tax burden (40-50%) which is straight-up untenable with a military spend like the US's. We also have, because of our vast geographic size, a number of infrastructure we have to dump tax money into.
edit to add: also, tax-paid ("free") education, so the barrier to producing is much lower. Think about it, you're born into a society that says "we're going to make sure you have enough to live, always. Go out and do your best", then nature is usually going to take over and you'll do your best at something useful/productive. Do the same in the US and 1/4 of those folks will be using their stipend to pay medical bills, 1/2 will be tapped out from education, and 1/4 will straight up opt-out. It could work, but it'd require reworking education, healthcare & the military. Never going to happen.
Isn't the Nordic model only used in only 4 countries? Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway are also genetically and ethnically homogeneous and have a tiny fraction of the population of the USA.
You live there, it works for you, but you don't see the differences in our locations which is why you keep pushing it. See- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6005734 Hey I'm glad it works and you can enjoy the benefits but what works in your country does not always transfer over to others. You haven't seen how welfare programs have affected the US and the types of people (and children) they've created.
These ideas of "helping everyone and feeling good" fail to understand human behavior. Basic income would reek havoc on the real estate market as people (of the trashy uncivilized variety) would try to move into nice neighborhoods with their new funds that they didn't work for and earn and "fuck up the neighborhood" basically.(This already occurs with section 8 housing) Another consequence is that rent and housing would rise substantially.
The price of a home isn't just determined by the value of the home itself but by the highest price the local market can afford to pay. People who are not in real estate don't understand this.
The flawed assumption to this plan is that all or most poor people are poor because they just haven't been given enough chances or nice things. This emotional ideology usually belongs to young collage students who have never worked with the public and seen the real asshole-ery and primitive baboon-ism of humanity and believe everyone is a nice person. Or adults who grew up in their parent's nice neighborhood miles away from reality. I know you're going to think I'm the biggest most evil asshole in the world but after working with the public (everyone in my family does) NOT a cool startup in a collage town I have to tell you the truth: Quite a few poor people (not all of course) are poor for a reason. Sitting down and talking with them will usually give away these reasons immediately. They don't bring value, they can't hold jobs because they have poor impulse control, they're short term decision makers, they don't want to educate or better themselves, they're hyper-sexual, were born with a lower IQ, they can't commit to jobs they do have, they smoke pot like crazy. Basically they don't have nice things for a reason. And every time you try to give them nice things they ruin them and don't appreciate them.
I used to be one of those "help everyone and make the world happy and good feelings and gosh I just wish we could all hold hands". I have completely left that ideology as it's a fantasy. A lie. These smart intellectual folks with ideas on how to help the poor completely forget to include the above mentioned human problems. All they see is numbers and an equation and they want to balance it all out on the table. But it never works like that in real life.
I know during this recession a lot of people who deserve nice things have had them taken away, but any attempts to correct this through government, welfare, and basic income is just going to go in the wrong hands.
There are devastating repercussions for paying people to do nothing or giving people something they haven't earned. Let's stop chasing pipe-dreams because they "sound nice".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe