Topic: Basic income guarantee - opinions&criticism welcome - page 6. (Read 14389 times)

Well, in my country you CAN do exactly that. There is no demands that you have to work at all, and if you choose not to, you get support money from the state for basic needs.(Place to live, money for food, entertainment etc.) Still I don't personaly know a single person who does. And the statistics show only 2.3 % live off it(2007), and that is probaly mostly people who need it cause they are psyical or mentaly ill, criminals and/or drug addicts.

I can agree that number could increase thought if it was seen more "legitimate" to live only off basic income.

Ok, I'm sorry if my question intruded into your personal space. That was unintentional.


I understand what you meant, but the proposal is that if the basics are so cheap that it costs society very little, what's the big deal? Australia spends 2% of it's national budget on "I can't find a job but I need to eat" welfare...hardly back breaking for society to support this right now, and there's a pervading view here that all welfare recipients are permanent "dole bludgers" too, so at most, all the people who absolutely will not work under any circumstances costs 2% of tax revenue.

If the cost of giving everyone a basic life, factoring in all of the people who simply wouldn't work at all, managed to fit into that 2% of budget, purely because productivity was so incredible, wouldn't it be nice to have? Of course this probably isn't possible right now, but it's potentially foreseeable within 50 years. The other question to answer is what % is acceptable - how cheap must it be to feed/clothe/house/healthify a population compared to all other productivity for a society to implement it? 0.1%? 10%?

Sure a lot of people would quit jobs they hated, and people would only ever do "work" that they enjoy...but I see that as a positive end goal for our species. The ultimate fulfillment in the mastery of our environment, if you will. Working for food is so...cave man.

I'm sorry I can't answer your questions.  It's just too personal.   What I can tell you is that I think I'd probably not be aware of bitcoin right now, had I been keeping on doing that job.  Sometimes I happy I did quit, just because of that.  


I'm not sure you get my point.  Right now I don't do much but at least I don't cost society anything.  Were your proposal to be implemented, I wonder how many people would immediately quit their job and start leaving on other people's work and money.

Fair enough, I don't think I do, as it seems you were anything but lazy in earning those 10 years off. What do you generally do with your time now? Is there anything you do that would otherwise be considered productive? You don't have to be, of course, I'm just curious what your plan was for 10 years (if there was one), and whether you were sticking to it.

You earned that time off yourself, but would you have been getting this income while you were working, you'd still be getting it now and would been able to achieve the same thing you're doing now anyway with a slightly higher quality of life. If the economy was that awesome anyway, then the same should happen provided you're needed for something.

That's a funny question, since I did actually quit my job four years ago.

Once I gathered enough money so I would not need to work in the next ten years, I just stopped working.

So I can actually answer your question without any "if".

In a sense, I'm a living proof that this basic income is not a good idea.

You should not underestimate people's laziness.

Possibly a combination of group behavior and peer pressure would describe it adequately.

But yes, monkey see, monkey do for the majority of people.

What would you do if this happened tomorrow? Would you continue working or quit your job? Why?

too much to read but adding another useless opinion

OP sounds like the views or purpose of Nancy Pelosi

Ok, ok...   Group behavior then?  You mean that I would accept to work for others mainly because that's what people around me do?

How is what I described charity?

It was already established in the OP that this is a big state solution, not libertarian castle state one.



That would depend on what motivates him. Einstein worked as an IP clerk to pay for food. He changed the world in his spare time.

Oh... you meant "charity".

It's ok.  I'm fine with working for other people and buying them stuff, as long as I don't have to.

No, but the lack thereof might make him decide against it.

There's probably a better word for it, maybe social conscience, but by peer pressure I mean: the presence or influence of any human(s), causing someone to act without a necessary reward save recognition or acceptance by the peer(s).

This includes doing what your parents say, what your friends are doing, what your town is doing (e.g. saving water in a drought), as well as getting a job to have a bigger TV than your neighbour only to invite him over to show it off.

If a society has a minimum income for all, how many will actually stop working completely, if 70% of people ostracize them for doing so? At the moment, it seems only those that don't care what others think of them do it...I very seriously doubt it will grow that much, but I'm sure studies can be done for a better prediction. There's only a major risk of collapse if the prevailing thought is that everyone is better off doing nothing, which I just don't see happening. I could be wrong, but people will still want to show off their bigger houses, cars, etc. If these people outnumber those who want to sit on the beach all day, and enough basic stuff is still made, then who cares if they get it imo.


I don't know about most people, but certainly a lot of people...but even then, so what? What amazing thing are these people doing with their lives such that them working menial jobs to pay for basic things achieve the dreams of humanity? Is the threat of starvation going to cause someone to decide to become a nuclear physicist?

You might say they could work in a car factory so the nuclear physicist can drive to work, but this discussion is about there no longer being a requirement for humans to do these menial tasks.

Make it all voluntary and libertarians will love it

I'm a direct witness to something simlilar

Now that is the /endofthread

I used to think shit like this, but I came to understand that, sadly, without the threat of starvation most people will not do a god dammed thing.

/endofthread

India has big problems with its cheap food distribution.  There is more than enough food for everyone in India, but due to poor incentives the subsidized food does not make it to starving people.

Well, to motivate someone you can give him a reward.  It doesn't have to be money.  It's basically anything that has value.  The thing is, in a highly interpenetrated economy, money is the most efficient way to transfer value, so it did indeed become the simplest way to reward a human being.   But as you say it only has been turned as such.

To me, more important is that it's a way to measure value in a decentralized way.  If I exchange a commodity against money and I notice that suddenly I need more money to get a certain amount of this commodity, then, because I know the global amount of money in existence is globally stable, it has to mean that somehow the availability of the commodity has decreased.  The price of the commodity is therefore a measure of its availability.  This price signal is an economic information that I can use to induce some changes in my economic behavior.

The scale of energy production is probably the same as the scale of energy demand.   All civilizations on the Kardashev scale probably have the same energy issues.  Otherwise they would not develop such elaborated devices to extract energy.

To determine price, what matters is the ratio between offer/demand, not the absolute value of the offer.

Edit.  I just realize this contradicts what I wrote earlier.   Oh well.


Please explain what you mean by "peer pressure".