|
oliwan posted:Why are there still people who think that ubi = no one works anymore? If anything, research shows that people work more when they have ubi. who's done work on this/could you link them? i'm legit curious about this. i was thinking about it back in january and, as menial jobs become more automated, i think there is a real free market argument for ubi - markets only work if there is wide scale participation. a 'market' of only a couple people doesn't produce any good returns. it could be argued that an increasingly automated economy is only actually viable with ubi so there's enough participation in the economy for it to be self-perpetuating. wouldn't that be a shitter? a market-based, psuedo-libertarian argument for basic income?
|
#
¿
May 6, 2017 08:03
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 20:03 |
|
|
GlyphGryph posted:Yeah its pretty ironic that replacing most of the financial safety net with a UBI would actually let us hew far more closely to free market systems and in a way that benefits nearly everyone. To qualify myself for this thread, economically I'm notably right of center especially for SA, but in my view it's a pretty simple logical line. If someone cannot participate in the free market, the free market is diminished and by definition does not work as well. A market functions as a collective brain for a society, which is why it's so awesome. Doesn't matter if I don't know how to make an awesome chair, as long as someone's in the market doing it for a reasonable price I can have an awesome chair just fine. If UBI gets more people participating in the market at a higher level (by, for example, making beer or designing landscapes instead of cleaning houses and mowing lawns), then the market will benefit and become better. It'd be nice to see some real data on the matter, though. It's really nice to think this is the case but nothing's reliable until it has data, and even then it's probably not completely right.
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2017 19:02
|
|
|
Venom Snake posted:almost every single economist worth a drat thinks UBI would be a huge boon for the economy you moron i'd be very interested to read these papers if you have access to them
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2017 23:35
|
|
|
rudatron posted:"inflation!!!" just happens to be the boogeyman that bulgogi has landed on, but he could just have easily landed 'laziness!!' or 'incentive to succeed!!' - they all have exactly the same empirical basis (ie none).
|
|
#
¿
May 7, 2017 06:37
|
|
|
hey still want those papers from economists providing analyses on why ubi is good
|
|
#
¿
May 8, 2017 16:31
|
|
|
double dip my anus
|
|
#
¿
May 8, 2017 17:09
|
|
|
super sweet best pal posted:UBI doesn't get me a job, JGs will. if you had UBI and you stay at home doing nothing, that is your own fault and your family would be right to harass you for it. the opportunity UBI provides you is to develop your skills to get an actual job or to even go out and create your own job without worrying about dying of exposure or starvation in the process. there is no way anyone will be able to figure out what job suits you better than you, so a job guarantee is stupid on its face from both an economic perspective and from a personal liberty perspective.
|
|
#
¿
May 11, 2017 20:29
|
|
|
Fullhouse posted:I could get a job guarantee and have the benevolent bureaucracy decide that my best fit is in loss prevention for a reverse mortgage company or I can get UBI and jack off in a van in the woods for as long as I like https://twitter.com/nihilist_arbys/status/831499781310644224
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2017 16:41
|
|
|
H.P. Hovercraft posted:the best job guarantee program is compulsory military service double as good if they let you keep your assault rifle after the end of your tour because what we need in this country is more guns
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2017 17:06
|
|
|
R. Guyovich posted:the only argument against ubi that has any traction is that bundling a patchwork quilt of social programs into one makes it easier to cut but the benefits outweigh the drawbacks imo lol there is basically no precedent for social support programs ever going away and the one currently on the chopping block right now does not affect the entirety of the professional class and the specter of its removal is making people threaten riots and get thrown out of townhalls for getting aggressive with representatives globally the only reason a large scale social welfare project has ever been removed is because the government collapses/goes bankrupt because of it (see: greece, any communist bloc country) all data suggests that trying to revoke basic income or even reduce it in any significant way after it's been the law of the land for ~5 years would probably result in the ringleader getting literally murdered. it would have to bring the entire government down.
|
|
#
¿
May 13, 2017 19:29
|
|
|
Lamebot posted:what if they just killed all the unemployed people with the grey death? 
|
|
#
¿
May 17, 2017 03:10
|
|
|
housing's price is so incredibly hosed up by so many different factors that it's not even worth talking about in a social welfare context. even bringing it up shows staggering ignorance of how deep that hosed up legislative rabbit hole goes. the current tax code mammothly rewards people who own land in dozens of ways, be it as a tax write-off nexus for keeping "fallow farmland" in the middle of a suburb or just owning a large lot with a reasonably sized house. this artificially inflates the cost of housing, because in general the house is a depreciating liability on top of an appreciating asset (the land). zoning laws are rampantly used to keep prices of existing structures from falling, which penalizes everyone who does not currently own property. governments then are forced to fund 'affordable housing projects' to create new bottom-dollar housing in speculative districts or slums to try to hastily get some disenfranchised renters from voting them out of office and causing more chaos and pain in the overall housing system. if you look at the fundamentals of building a home, there is absolutely no reason for a new construction house to be as expensive as a 30 year old home. - are building materials more expensive? no; in fact, pretty much every material you can think of is cheaper nowadays, whether due to increased/more efficient production (woods, brick, sheet rock, etc - all good signs) or shoddier substitutes (many kinds of plaster and insulation - bad signs) - is the actual construction more expensive? no; tooling has continued to improve and fewer workers can put together 10 houses faster than more workers could put together 10 houses in 1980. these inputs are markedly less expensive, not more. - are the logistics more complicated? no; matter of fact it's a hundred times easier to get what you need to build a house to a site now vs 1980 due to the logistics revolutions that drove the 1990s economic expansions in retail seeping into other disciplines. - is the land itself more expensive? no; due to the above massive rewarding of existing homeowners, it's very rare for existing lots to be abandoned entirely. consequently, almost all new construction happens in marginal areas that are not developed and connected to services yet. the services follow the homeowners, not the other way around. literally the only adequate explanation for why housing costs as much or more in real terms vs 1980 is due to existing laws that treat housing as an investment or rent farm rather than a malthusian need for shelter and family rearing. look at any of the other basic needs malthus called out to compare it: food is objectively cheaper than it was in 1980, whether by resisting inflation or outright falling in price. fuel, in terms of heating so you don't die of exposure is also cheaper on average, though price spikes still occur and that's terrifying and bad. clothing (or fiber, as malthus calls it out) is more expensive on the high end to look very stylish, but is substantially less expensive to buy basic shirts, pants, coats, and blankets due to increasing mechanization. the shelter need is outside of normal market forces and every financial professional out there knows it. this is precisely why the 2008 bullshit was so bad. nobody questioned that housing and land prices would ever fall, because every government from federal to locals in every western country on the planet was treating housing and land so preferably it seemed impossible. morons took that idiot belief to its extreme and whoops, turns out you can't legislate away basic loving math. trying to indict a UBI scheme based upon the variable and high cost of shelter is basically saying 'the government can't do something good, because they're already doing something bad.' it's not an economic argument, it's not a market argument. it's a circular government vs government argument. you can't even say 'well, let's fix housing laws before worrying about UBI then' because housing laws are insanely complicated and touching their preferred status in any way will have real economic shockwaves. they will need to be handled over the course of decades in order to not cause widespread chaos. in the meantime, you still have people needlessly going underclothed, underfed, and shivering in the cold - and THAT isn't even a bleeding heart liberal appeal to compassion. people who are underfed, underclothed, and overstressed cannot perform in the general labor market, which reduces the available labor, shrinks the size of the market, and damages its overall effectiveness. even libertarian thinking grants that it's in our best interest to make sure our markets are as large and widely-inclusive as possible because that's literally how they work best - and therefore, this hunger and crushing poverty bullshit must be eliminated for the good of the market at large. oh, and as a matter of fact, a UBI scheme that ensures everyone has some level of purchasing power regardless of housing shockwaves happen is, in fact, one of the better currently proposed ways to handle this potential turmoil. e: also, the above is part of why it's not even clear that prices of other malthusian needs would fluctuate at all if a half-livable UBI scheme was implemented; between existing welfare schemes and charities, so much food, clothing, and heating material is outright given away that the lost commerce is a market in and of itself. a UBI scheme would bring every a huge chunk of soup kitchen and coat exchange patrons into the regular market, which creates all new incentives for those able to provide the highest quality product at the lowest price - precisely the incentive that has seen milk, eggs, and jackets cost less and less year over year. Coolguye has issued a correction as of 07:51 on May 24, 2017 |
|
#
¿
May 24, 2017 07:34
|
|
|
so a paper came out about a UBI scheme that rolled out in iran: http://erf.org.eg/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/1090.pdf here is a sum-up article if you're not in the mood to read the nerdy data: https://theoutline.com/post/1613/iran-introduces-basic-income and my sum-up: iran pays everyone $16k/yr regardless of their employment status productivity on the whole falls 0.0%, except in service industry, where it went up educational enrollment rose (this is the supermajority of the explanation of increase in productive hours; poor people were using their UBI to enroll in school) younger people worked less but stayed in school more (this is a cultural quirk, since iran has always had really bad young people employment so it makes no sense to go look for a job - this is counterbalanced by evidence 20-somethings were staying in school longer) even the paper's author concedes this is not conclusive evidence but it is overall a resounding recommendation for UBI
|
|
#
¿
Jun 4, 2017 20:43
|
|
|
the same anti trust and anti collaboration laws that keep them from doing it today i mean you can argue that they do it regardless of the regulation and you wouldn't be entirely wrong (but you also wouldn't be very right either) but that's a discussion about and regarding those regs and they have relatively little to do with ubi. they are critical to a functioning market regardless.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 17, 2017 17:09
|
|
|
Moose_Knuck posted:It does have to do with UBI, though, and it's part of the problem of universal healthcare as well. Why are hospital bills so high? If the government is going to foot the bill, it has to have some leverage or means of price control, which is not put into law at this time. the government cannot and does not dictate prices for things under a universal healthcare system. i'm utterly at a loss as to how you got this idea. the entire 'death panel' argument from the right on the matter hinges on this being the case. if no companies are willing to provide the service requested at a price the customer is willing to pay, the service effectively does not exist. this turns the matter into a discussion between the government on what it considers essential and what it can get for the money it has allocated from taxes to purchase these essential services on behalf of the citizenry. if you call this 'semantics' then you're completely out of touch with the basic concept of supply and demand, which it seems like you are because you're trying to pretend like this flawed interpretation means that under a UBI scheme, the government is having this same conversation with every industry everywhere. that is baldly not the case. let's unpack another one of your dumb posts. Moose_Knuck posted:Ok, well let's apply that to UBI where it is not paying companies directly. I assume UBI will have to keep pace with the cost of living. the government already exerts an insane amount of control over all the industries involved in basic life support. in the USA you have: food: departments of agriculture, both federal and local fuel: department of energy federally, controlled harshly by permits at the state level. a power company literally lives and dies by the whims of the state legislatures. fiber/clothing: health and human services, again both state and local. shelter: department of transportation cares deeply about this at the federal level and every zoning law on the planet is effectively control over shelter needs. whether or not they do this within the target of a sliding UBI scheme is irrelevant. whether or not the UBI scheme allows people to move away from 'hand to mouth' economic behavior is the point. the benefits to an overall market are felt when people move past subsistence and into specialization. the economic activity of one engineer with an associate's degree paid for by UBI is worth five paycheck-to-paycheck day laborers who have no wherewithal to produce or consume anything. this is the actual point of UBI: does it move large numbers of people who cannot find work into industries and positions where they can adequately exercise their economic voice? or, more generally, does it increase the size of the productive labor market? if yes, then it 'works'. if no, then it 'doesn't'. you meander around worrying about price fixing and price gouging and it's like listening to a critic carp about Westworld's writing because it doesn't have wyatt earp. it's not the point and never was. go look at the iran study i posted on this page. it does not mention price changes during the study time period because nobody cares, it isn't the point, and the larger supply/demand dynamic is way more complicated than life support payments. quote:Monsanto, for instance, could manufacture a shortage of pesticide chemicals, you've already presumed a blatant market manipulation that would get Monsanto slapped with an antitrust suit so fast your head would spin. it is illegal for anyone to collude and sabotage the market this way even under current laws; no UBI scheme will matter on this one. do not even try the whole 'monsanto owns everything and we are in a corporatist dystopia' bullshit either because the saying 'every country is three meals from a revolution' is both a lot older than that marxist nonsense and unlike that byline actually has been supported by events and evidence in the last 50 years. microsoft got slapped with an antitrust suit in the 90s for way, way, way less than this assumption. quote:Sure, you can argue "oh, we have laws to prevent that", but you forget about the burden of proof and the fiasco that is our legal system. Coolguye has issued a correction as of 04:15 on Jun 18, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Jun 18, 2017 04:09
|
|
|
Lindsey O. Graham posted:also, if the government is so concerned with everyone eating, why are we as politicians perfectly comfortable cutting food stamps, welfare assistance, and social security as we are doing now? why would this be? because SSI is as sacrosanct as actual social security (which will literally go bankrupt before benefits are cut a dime and the last three presidential administrations have said so). it's the third rail of politics. you touch it, you die. and while receiving SSI benefits, people eat, stay clothed, stay warm, and don't vote their sitting politicians out of office or start food riots. further, the exploding cost of education is a real problem for a lot of things that people would want to do, but vocational and associates' studies are still entirely affordable even under a 16k/yr UBI scheme such as Iran's. the total cost of education for electrician training is between 8-11k in most areas. a welding certification in many places is somewhat less due to construction companies outright subsidizing the training as there are so few welders around. an associate's degree varies on what you want to do, but in general it has a TCE that hovers around 15k. this is a huge amount of money to someone making 10 dollars an hour and can barely make ends meet. someone making 10 dollars an hour supplanted by 16k/yr, however, can afford to take a few classes. maybe it takes them 4 years to finish an associate's and trade up in jobs. but it's a way out they currently do not have. i don't pretend like that's the end-all, be-all for everyone. the cost of a 4 year education is absurd, and many universities are recruiting in a very predatory manner by scooping people up into programs that have a TCE of 50k when they know goddamn well the expected yearly salary for a graduate is 35k. that's completely immoral and it's one of the things in that ecosystem that really ought to be illegal. but a 4 year education is neither required nor beneficial for tons of jobs that could really use people right now, so it doesn't ring real to not consider UBI valuable simply because not everyone can go study computer science. Coolguye has issued a correction as of 05:52 on Jun 18, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Jun 18, 2017 05:45
|
|
|
Moose_Knuck posted:All you've listed off are reasons why the price of goods increase for each industry. If I was the head of a major corporation--and not being very smart--this would be a convenient excuse for me to drum up a scheme to raise prices when this sudden windfall of UBI money falls into the hands of my target consumer base. this is horseshit. government regulation has done more to lower food prices than any one company in the history of the country by forcing people to stop selling rancid meat and rotten vegetables, maintain proper refrigeration, and wash their products. negligence has costs and distrust has costs. if you want to see the real cost of distrust look at interpersonal trust attitudes around the world. is it a surprise that commodities in brazil, where roughly 9.2% of people feel that others are in general trustworthy, are more expensive year-on-year versus the united states, where it is 38%? no, because the people in the united states do not have to worry about squirting a tube of toothpaste out on their finger to make sure it is not, in fact, filled with water. that level of trust allows actually honest merchants to make a living and get ahead with real innovations instead of racing to the bottom in the most slipshod way possible and/or accruing massive costs simply earning the trust of every schmo on the street, the way they do currently in countries where regulation is weak. a collective way to bust recalcitrant idiots is the prime example of the tragedy of the commons and why even righties (which, for the record, i lean right) will happily admit that some government is good. this isn't even a new phenomenon. you know the merchant-princes of venice, the doges that had so much money it made them kings in their towns? do you know what their revolution was that let them drop prices so hard they out-competed every other city and country out there? double entry bookkeeping and convoy organization. when people came into the port, they gave motherfuckers receipts, stamped their export logs, and made copy logs for their official import logs that came into the port. and when those motherfuckers finished their business they pointed to a board that said poo poo like "yo dawgs, convoy to africa is leaving on thursday, gonna be 4 warships protecting any of yall bitches that wanna come with. it's gonna hang out there for a week and then it's gonna roll up to the mid-east before coming back to venice. if you want to not be robbed by pirates you should probably get your poo poo together come with us. on time." the net effect of this was that people always wanted to buy from venice because you could actually rely on them getting poo poo done the way you wanted. the number one role of government is to build trust between people so they can trade with each other, and more trade with bigger markets LOWERS prices on the whole, not RAISES them. this is on the whole, to stress, and paints a picture of government that's rather idealized. there's dozens of individual regulations you can point to that probably increase prices fractionally. but there's hundreds of regulations that definitely decrease prices by similar fractions by fostering this trust. to say these departments and government control increase prices overall is to forget how loving retarded things were under laissez faire. so yeah: you make this assertion but what, exactly, is your data and illustrating your alternative? quote:Yes, it was blatant, and no, I am not intelligent enough to come up with a truly intriguing scheme for price fixing. While, yes, some companies do get prosecuted, there are plenty of others that fall by the wayside. Case in point: Do you remember gas prices in 2011? Can you explain to me why they were so outrageous at the time? Sure, you can cite the war in Iraq, Saudi Arabia's production, and price fuckery on the futures market, but explain to me why the US was affected so when we are fully capable of producing enough of our own oil to meet the country's demand? You are aware that oil is one of our major exports, right? Why the christ was gas so expensive and what could the government do about that in the future to negate big oil's, for instance, ability to manipulate prices like that again and take a huge chunk out of the purchasing power of UBI? quote:I see where you are going with this, and thank you for citing actual cases with dates. My problem with this is how the US government intends to prosecute post-2008. Maybe it's just the financial industry that is exempt? I think it's fair to acknowledge the paradigm shift post-recession. i think what you're actually concerned about is that nobody was guillotined for the mammoth amounts of hubris and incompetence in the 2008 crisis, which i feel is completely fair. but that has nothing to do with the articulated point of market making and price fixing that you're talking about, and has no actual relevance to the merit or downfall of UBI as a concept; that is an inherent problem in capitalism that marx pointed out close to a hundred years ago now. capitalist economies tend toward a bubble that results in a painful loss for common people every 10-15 years or so. the data has proven him to be mostly correct about this. it's just as correct to say that planned economies that he generally advocated tend toward complete implosion on the same general time scale, though, so again: what is your alternative? without an alternative it's just a vague boogeyman concern troll. Coolguye has issued a correction as of 06:38 on Jun 18, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Jun 18, 2017 06:34
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 20:03 |
|
|
I'm on my phone and hoo buddy is there a lot to unpack hereMoose_Knuck posted:
quote:Around 2015, the prices went down because of more fuckery by OPEC. Saudi Arabia oversupplied crude, which pushed a lot of small-to-medium companies in the US out of business, due to the fact that margins were too small to repay their debt, much less turn a profit. The North Dakota Bakken formation that we heard so much about was hit especially hard. quote:My point about the oil is this: we supply enough to meet our own demand, couldn't there be some legislation that re-channels our exports to meet our own demands, instead of importing crude at hosed up prices? Yes, I'm aware that that opens up a whole other can of worms about isolationism/protectionism, free market, yadda yadda, but hear me out. Wouldn't the decrease in tax revenue from oil companies be offset by the reduced impact on consumer spending as a whole, especially as it pertains to the added purchasing power of UBI? markets work better the bigger and more accessible they are. this is neither news nor controversial, it's the entire lesson of the 19th century, and most of the 20th. literally every single government that engaged in protectionism hurt their own economies relative to their more trade hungry neighbors. this happened one hundred percent of the time. every single time import substitution has been attempted it's gone horribly wrong for the country advocating it, whether that was Japan having an industrious revolution instead of an industrial one in the 1870s and regressing to naked rice stompers instead of automated grinders or India trying to foster a native fertilizer industry and triggering famines a century later. government overstepping their bounds and saying "well we don't like the way that is working right now so we are cutting and running" hurts its citizenry by disallowing them from competing with that market in any way. again, this isn't some libertarian screed, this is the entire point of comparative advantage and specialization, which is a principle that has driven not just our own species' prosperity, but the prosperity of a tiny handful of other species that have managed to capture it. ants are one of the most successful life forms on the planet largely because they harness these economic principles. I realize I'm repeating myself but I have to on these forums since most people have allergic responses to market arguments, no matter how cold hard factual they are. the microeconomic reality is that the profits gained by companies working in that sector and the taxes garnished from them hugely outweigh the price of kowtowing to that sort of dirty market pressure and you only need to look at tax collections by state and federal governments to prove that. your question is a false one because you presume that by doing this we would decrease tax collections from oil companies. that is not the case. if you make a company pay an extra 5% in taxes but reduce their incidental costs or increase their earnings by 7%, they still want to work with you over, say, Venezuela or Guatemala because they still take home more money. and once again this is the overall proposition a UBI offers. pay us 5% more money and you'll get a citizenry that is more capable of reacting to market moves so you can actually seize 10% more of them (or whatever the numbers shake out to). that is exactly what the data suggests in the Iran study as well. Coolguye has issued a correction as of 22:01 on Jun 18, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Jun 18, 2017 18:46
|
|