"In the distributive era free-market efficiency will no longer be justifiable if it creates whole classes of people who lose."
I lean towards the positive side of Universal Basic Income (my core argument is that no kid grows up thinking they want to be inactive) so it's heartening to see more of these arguments come to the fore.
The only problem I see - who will pay for it? Considering that in the future most jobs are automated/remote moving a company somewhere else will pose no problem so taxing them will simply fail
The important question! I value (the late, amazing) Alan Watts' take on this: "The answer is the machine. The machine pays for it, because the machine works for the manufacturer and for the community."
or put another way "It will simply come from the share of productivity gains made possible by technology that should already be shared."
The answer is to (re)-impose capital controls to prevent the capital flight you mention. If we're going to live in a bright future then the days of corporations strip-mining the societies they exist in with impunity have got to come to an end.
UBI is lazy tech guilt thinking. Not to mention it's arrogant. The idea that we've solved all that needs to be done is remarkable. Just look around you. Do you think we are in a place without problems that need resolving? Or work to be done? It's truly a problem of goals of humanity that lead to this disaster of demoralizing pay people to exist UBI thinking. Pay people for education first. We aren't even doing this!! Pay people to resolve climate change. Pay for more research. Pay for xyz that drives humans to new levels while enabling them to valuably contribute to our society. I'm going to write further on this but the UBI mindset is nothing more than lazy arrogant tech people who have no historical frame.
Yes but the lack of jobs is a political problem. It's a problem of vision and goals. Just like a housing crisis. These can be resolved by changing the rules and goals of the group.
People are not things to be engineered. This is our largest collective blindspot. Some people may look at what you see as utopia and say "no, thanks." This can happen for something as simple as UBI. In fact, I'm sure it will.
Progress is defined by enabling people to do more. Do we really want to go back to making energy with coal? It creates lots of jobs. Jobs that can replace with new better ones. I truly believe we are in a crisis of vision. We have food and many material things met but we haven't moved on to pushing for more progress that creates the new jobs politically.
There's danger there. Politics is easily corruptible and divisive when issues of resource allocation are included. Re progress, I don't have an answer. We could argue that despite eliminating all of the jobs, moving to self-driving cars would be good in the same way that reducing coal mining jobs is: both increase safety. But safety isn't everything. It never has been.
Of course there is work to be done. The problem is usually getting someone to pay for it. You need to look at why people don't spend.
One obvious reason is when they don't have the money. Put money in the hands of people who need it and they will spend it, so the work gets done.
You mention various forms of work. Do you know they are more urgent than what people will spend their money on if given the choice? Maybe it's arrogant to assume you know better than them?
I like the leap of logic where insuring everyone has a minimum standard of living means nobody will ever work again.
UBI has a B in it for a reason. You get to Star Trek "no money replicator based economy" way later. But the fact people go hungry and homeless in a nation where companies hoard trillions of dollars in tax havens is abjectly amoral.
> The idea that we've solved all that needs to be done is remarkable.
Yeah, true. The last time society worried that new technology and machines would lead to mass unemployment, the opposite happened. We're in a bigger hurry than ever. Maybe that will accelerate even more.
But, if the human labor need for the trucking industry goes away, for example, it doesn't matter whether we've solved all problems, we will have a very large class of people out of work, even if it's temporary.
> Pay people for education first. We aren't even doing this!! Pay people to resolve climate change. Pay for more research. Pay for xyz that drives humans to new levels while enabling them to valuably contribute to our society.
I agree with this too, but one way to think about UBI is that it could, for the first time, pay people for doing things that are valuable to society, but not profitable. The reason we don't pay much for education or fixing climate change or research is our economy is driven on short term economics. If it doesn't lead to more customers or more dollars in the next year, it doesn't get funding. At it's imagined best, maybe UBI could enable an economy of social good rather than profit.
>The reason we don't pay much for education or fixing climate change or research is our economy is driven on short term economics.
I don't think that's the case at all.
1) How can our economy be driven by 'short term economics' when we have trillions of dollars locked away in 20+ year investments (government bonds)? That's hardly 'short run' thinking. But it illustrates that there are trillions of dollars available for longer term thinking.
2) We do pay a lot for education [0]. We spend something like 9k/student/year. that's a substantial amount of money. But we get bad results, a lot of kids don't live in very good environments and school funding goes towards things their parents should be doing - like teaching them how to read and feeding them breakfast. I think we'd invest more in education if we could demonstrate better returns, but the bleeding hearts in charge of education want to spend more money on the worst investments. Teachers and admins have created a system where education for the intellectually disabled gets funded 30:1 - 100:1 over education for the gifted. People with too many chromosomes aren't going to fix climate change or do the research our economy needs, yet down syndrome students get a lot more funding than genius students.
Hilariously, the solution to education funding is more of the 'short term economics'. We should spend less money on educating would-be gangsters and more money education would-be scientists.
Ooh, you might have had a point about spending on education for mentally disabled people far outpacing that for the average student, but adding in the part about having to pay to feed children and "would-be gangsters" makes me think you might have an ulterior motive beyond fixing the education system.
I also want to point out that you included teaching to read in you list of things parents should be doing and not the teachers. Because teaching is not something teachers should be doing
>you might have had a point about spending on education for mentally disabled people far outpacing that for the average student, but adding in the part
Do you discredit an idea because of the person espousing it? If so, go hang out with normies who read gossip mags.
>you might have an ulterior motive beyond fixing the education system.
My ulterior motive is a society where the productive people are unleashed to be as great as they can be, and the lazy/incompetent aren't given things at the expense of better investments.
>I also want to point out that you included teaching to read in you list of things parents should be doing and not the teachers.
Yeah, I want to live in a society with a norm of parents reading to their children and participating in their child's development. The expectation that only teachers are responsible for an individual's education is the reason we can dump so much money into the system and have little to show for it.
You can just say eugenics. Hiding your argument behind vague terms like "My ulterior motive is a society where the productive people are unleashed to be as great as they can be, and the lazy/incompetent aren't given things at the expense of better investments." when one of the things you mention is food, just makes your argument seem weaker.
Just to clarify, do you donate to planned parenthood cause you support people having a right to an abortion and/or access to other health services, or do you do it so that there are less undesirables in the world?
I don't support the right to an abortion, but I do support abortions. My motivation for donating to planned parenthood is altruistic - if the mother doesn't want the kid, society really doesn't want the kid and doesn't want the mom to have a kid. Society can't be more invested in the kid than their parents.
Ideally we'd tie (reversible) sterilization with welfare participation but the horseshoe of fundies / progressives make that neigh impossible.
And I don't support eugenics at all. I just think that the social contract should have an 'out' and there should be a place in the world where we can put the undesirables (a la Australia). This is why we need to colonize mars (and other planets). There should be enough societies that people can find one that works for them and that societies can isolate themselves from factions they don't want. Look around, liberalism is failing and doesn't offer a credible alternatives to tribal politics. The only way we can make tribal politics safe is to reduce friction in interactions which means more space.
How can you state that you don't support eugenics, but you want to take a set of people and put them in a more hostile environment. That is going to kill off people, in the set you defined, which is eugenics. Your idea about there being enough societies that people can find one that works for them has some merit, but I don't see how that fits with you choosing another group and moving them to an area with less resources. That's not people choosing a society that works for them, that's conquest and exile
If you think taking away resources (which people are not entitled to) is tantamount to murder, then every regime that collects taxes is murderous.
Your definition of 'killing people off' is asinine and lacks nuance. I'm not strong enough take your points seriously, so allow me to take them to absurd conclusions:
Right now, you're taking oxygen out of the air and depositing CO2. Right now, people are dying from polluted air and lack of oxygen, are you responsible for their deaths?
I think there's a pretty good argument that if you create pollution you're responsible, at least in part, for people who die early because of it. I also think you could argue that taxing people, and providing no benefit in return, is murderous.
That benefit part is important though, which I don't see your system providing by just removing people.
But let's ignore all that for a moment and just say we go ahead with your system. Why are other groups moved to Australia, Mars, etc but you and whatever group you've decided you belong to get to stay where you are? What makes these other people move, because you asked? Paid? Forced? I am legitimately curious as to how your plan would work
> down syndrome students get a lot more funding than genius students.
Uh, Wow. The magnitude of this problem is...? Your solution is...? This rant is relevant to UBI because...?
> How can our economy be driven by 'short term economics' when we have trillions of dollars locked away in 20+ year investments?
20 years is not long term in my book, but that's entirely beside the point. The private profit motive is the short term thinking I was referring to. Financial investments seeking a return for the benefit of a private party are a completely different thing than funding climate change research or education.
> We do pay a lot for education
We spend a lot. That's different than paying teachers a lot or giving students performance based incentives. It's different than having adequate facilities and training for teachers.
> We should spend less money on educating would-be gangsters and more money education would-be scientists.
How? What actual change are you proposing here that utilizes short term profits to produce more scientists than criminals?
>How? What actual change are you proposing here that utilizes short term profits to produce more scientists than criminals?
I'd make it much easier to expel students. Some bad kid brings a gun to school in elementary school? They're out for the rest of their life - freeing up resources to spend on better kids. Some bad kid molests another? Gone for life. Some bad kid punches a teacher? Gone for life.
I'd bust the teacher's unions just so I could align pay with performance. They complain about being underpaid, but they have Cadillac health insurance and defined benefit pensions - both of those have astronomical costs and make their compensation much higher than their salary.
I'd also give teachers top cover to conduct the classroom how they like. Teachers shouldn't have to waste time talking to idiot parents about dumb topics. Ideally, teaching would be a six-figure position (albeit with an HSA and a 401k) so we would want to respect teachers' time.
I'd fund it by cutting the administration and special education departments to the bone.
> I'd make it much easier to expel students. Some bad kid brings a gun to school in elementary school? They're out for the rest of their life - freeing up resources to spend on better kids. Some bad kid molests another? Gone for life. Some bad kid punches a teacher? Gone for life.
This would do the exact opposite of what you claim. It would produce criminals faster than now. This would also tend to transfer the burden from education to social services, and somewhat to incarceration. Both of those are more expensive than education. You're proposing to increase taxes to pay for people's bad behavior, rather than do anything substantive to fix it at all. No thanks, and good luck.
> Teachers shouldn't have to waste time talking to idiot parents about dumb topics.
What are you referring to? How big of a problem is this? Do you have children in the public education system?
> I'd fund it by cutting the administration and special education departments to the bone.
Again, what percent of the system is special education? How much effect will this have? And what do you propose to do with people who need extra help? Leave them to rot? You again are proposing to transfer the special education burden onto even higher cost social services. And with less education, people with special needs will have less power to contribute back to the economy.
Kids who molest other kids and bring guns to school are criminals. We should lock them up early, and we can reduce the cost of prison by getting more labor out of prisoners and busting the guard unions.
Teachers spend a non-zero amount of time dealing with parents. I know a few teachers personally and all of them have stories about parents who take up too much of their time.
In the school districts near me, special ed and admin costs can take ~40% of the budget. I wouldn't displace the students onto social services because there'd be no social services.
> Kids who molest other kids and bring guns to school are criminals. We should lock them up early, and we can reduce the cost of prison by getting more labor out of prisoners and busting the guard unions.
This seems like short-term economic thinking to me. We can also reduce the cost of prison by keeping more kids in school, rather than kicking kids to the curb the minute something bad happens. Inclusion, not exclusion, is how to feed the virtuous cycle.
Also, if it's so easy to reduce the cost of prisons even though people have been debating it for centuries, why hasn't it happened already? How do you just extract more labor out of prisoners?
And what happened to your plan to produce more scientists and fewer criminals? For three comments in a row you've ignored the question of how to convert more would-be criminals into scientists, and talked about reducing dollar costs instead. Pretend I don't care about dollar costs and help me understand how increasing expulsion and
incarceration rates leads to more scientists.
> Teachers spend a non-zero amount of time dealing with parents. I know a few teachers personally and all of them have stories about parents who take up too much of their time.
So what? Part of being a teacher is interacting with parents, it's a good thing, not a bad thing. Some parents will take up more time. What is the actual problem here? What is the economic cost to teachers talking to parents? Since teachers mostly talk to parents outside of school hours, how much extra money for the education budget or the economy will solving this "problem" yield?
> In the school districts near me, special ed and admin costs can take ~40% of the budget. I wouldn't displace the students onto social services because there'd be no social services.
It sounds like regular students take ~60% of the budget. By your math, we could get more bang for our buck by eliminating the non-special-ed services.
Do you have any policy study or experience at all? The more suggestions you add, the more it sounds like you aren't aware of any policy or government or education funding history. People have tried some of the kinds of things you're suggesting in the past, and gotten wildly different results than they expected.
1. Expelling a student for bringing a gun to school is hardly tantamount to 'kicking kids to the curb the minute something bad happens'. It's preserving the safety and the integrity of the school.
2. We can also reduce the cost of prison by keeping more kids in school
To the extent that school can persuade people to trade a life of crime for a more virtuous path. There are some people who are going to be criminals regardless of how much schooling is available to them, those people are lost causes and we should stop investing in them the moment they reveal themselves.
3. The cost of incarceration is high because people are concerned with human rights and getting their cut of the expenditures. Prison would be much cheaper if we just put all the convicts on an island and catapulted basic supplies to them, and just made sure no one swam off the island.
4. I never claimed that my plan would produce more scientists and fewer criminals - just that we'd spend less money on criminals and free up resources that could be spent on educating scientists or funding their experiments.
5. Part of being a teacher is interacting with parents, but some parents demand extensive communication that's above and beyond what we should expect. And you're right that parents talk to teachers outside of school hours, however, there's no free lunch - we have to pay for it in some way whether that's teacher job dissatisfaction, teacher salary expectations, etc. We should respect parents' interest but empower teachers to tell them to hit the sand if they're overbearing.
6. the 60% of the budget that goes to normal and high achieving students is the only part of the budget that has a positive ROI. Ideally we'd have more of it, but at the least we'd do better if we didn't spend 40% on the failures.
> I never claimed that my plan would produce more scientists and fewer criminals
You literally said this morning: "Hilariously, the solution to education funding is more of the 'short term economics'. We should spend less money on educating would-be gangsters and more money education would-be scientists."
> Expelling a student for bringing a gun to school is hardly tantamount to 'kicking kids to the curb the minute something bad happens'
Expelling a student for hitting a teacher is, and you mentioned that too. The gun issue depends entirely on why it happened. Some kids are already expelled for bringing guns to school. Some kids don't have a clear concept of why bringing the gun to show off to their friends is so bad. Education, not expulsion, is the only way to prevent it, and the only way to (literally) teach them the lesson. Expulsion only does one thing: disenfranchises the child and leaves them more likely to escalate their bad behavior outside of school. It leaves them at a disadvantage socially and economically and more likely to have to resort to crime in order to live.
How about instead of having a contrived debate about a very tiny minority of kids with guns, we enact some actual gun control in this country, and prevent any kids from having any guns in the first place like other countries do? Then we don't have to criminalize children, and we don't have to expel them in a fit of incredulity. Best of both worlds, and far cheaper than expulsion and incarceration.
What does any of your tirade about child criminals have to do with solving education funding? How many kids in the US are bringing guns to schools, and how much money does it cost in the aggregate?
> We should respect parents' interest but empower teachers to tell them to hit the sand if they're overbearing.
What does that have to do with education funding? What is your point here? You suggested that keeping time-hogging parents from teachers was a solution to the education funding problem. How, exactly?
> the 60% of the budget that goes to normal and high achieving students is the only part of the budget that has a positive ROI.
Lower than average achieving healthy students make up 50% of that group you say has a positive ROI. There are also plenty of special needs kids that are physically handicapped and not mentally handicapped.
What is the ROI of education, exactly? How is it measured? Care to share any sources to back that claim up? You just ruled out both all school administration and all special education. How do schools function without administration? Do you believe that school principals and school districts are useless?
If you stopped special education programs and the social services that go along with them, as you suggested, suddenly the parents of those children will need to find alternative care. In many cases that will mean the parent has to care for them during the day themselves, which will pull them out of the workforce. Regardless of the cost of special education, your suggestions could be a net drain on the economy.
> but at the least we'd do better if we didn't spend 40% on the failures.
What data do you have that it's failing? Under what metric are you declaring all school admin and special education to have zero return? I'm pretty stunned how deeply discriminatory your statements have been repeatedly. I hope you never have to be on the receiving end of your own ideas.
Do you think there's a difference between these two statements:
i. We should spend less money on educating would-be gangsters and more money education would-be scientists.
ii. My plan would produce more scientists and fewer criminals?
>Expelling a student for hitting a teacher is {the moment something bad happens}.
Hitting people is a severe violation of liberal norms. We can get rid of those norms, but where do we draw the line? Should parents be allowed to hit teachers?
And why do you put the burden on the school to teach students things that are clearly right and wrong? It's not about criminalizing kids, it's about punishing criminals for their transgressions. Kids can be criminals.
I'm game for a gun control discussion. There are at least 300 million firearms in this country, the only way to keep them out of criminal hands is to grab them all. Who's going to grab the guns? NPR listeners?
The ROI of education is this: incremental lifetime earnings / cost of education. Use the t-bills as a guidance on discount rate.
Your needling for sources is derailing this discussion. If you don't get why someone might think special education is overfunded, go visit a special ed classroom and wonder "how much does it cost society to give these kids places to drool on each other?".
> If you don't get why someone might think special education is overfunded, go visit a special ed classroom and wonder "how much does it cost society to give these kids places to drool on each other?".
Man, I hope some day, maybe when you have kids, you come to realize what a truly awful thing to say that was. In the mean time, it might be worth reading a bit of history to understand why our country has repeatedly re-affirmed it's decision to uphold the values in the Declaration of Independence to spend money to take care of all it's citizens and not just the lucky healthiest smartest richest ones.
> Your needling for sources is derailing this discussion.
I can totally empathize with feeling like you're being needled, as you say, when you're asked multiple times for evidence to support your claims that you don't have. I will stop asking. Is it possible that the lack of evidence says more about the value of those claims?
This discussion was derailed right from the start when you decided to pin the country's economic problems on difficult children and parents with questions -- things that objectively don't affect the overall budget very much, if at all. I've just been trying to figure out where your anger is coming from, what makes you think that some parents talking to teachers is some kind of drain on the economy, what you think makes it a serious problem that needs solving.
The irony here is 1) you jumped on me over a comment about education that I didn't make, the parent comment did, and 2) your entire calculus of fixation on short-term budget efficiencies is obsolete under UBI & other future possibilities. Using ROI for education is at best specious today. Should UBI come to pass, ROI will not be a meaningful metric at all.
>Man, I hope some day, maybe when you have kids, you come to realize what a truly awful thing to say that was. In the mean time, it might be worth reading a bit of history to understand why our country has repeatedly re-affirmed it's decision to uphold the values in the Declaration of Independence to spend money to take care of all it's citizens and not just the lucky healthiest smartest richest ones.
HA! We got ourselves a liberal here. The world is revolting against your slave morality ideals. The authoritarian left and the authoritarian right are rising - neither of which are ideologies that affirm the rights of all American citizens.
>Is it possible that the lack of evidence says more about the value of those claims?
It's possible but not likely. I don't think the pencil necks would give anyone a lot of money to study the outcomes of the profoundly retarded. And cost-benefit will not be resolved in their favor unless we say that it's worth a sizable amount of money for parents to play dress up with their retard babies. It's funny to see a retard dressed like an elf, but it's not funny when I think about the resources we've wasted on that mouth breather.
This comment is so deeply uncivil that we've banned the account. If you email us hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll never do anything like this again we can unban you.
We have huge problems that could be solved with Ubi. Has nothing to do with working or not working for those already without work, a home, food etc. Besides people are capable of creating a tremendous amount of value in their spare time and often do. Ubi could prove to be a decentralised way of paying people for all the things you mentioned.
Whether technology takes us forward or backwards depends on whom controls it and for what purpose.
The implications of technological revolution is also based on dispersement of information.
Widespread private car ownership, to take one example, has arguably harmed average quality of life.
Pollution, reduced freedom to walk/bike, extra time having to work out as a result of those last two things (or simply reduced health), and, at an average income, total time lost to the car, including working to pay for it, for insurance, for gas, for maintenance, et c., being so high that it often results in a net loss of time versus foot-powered transportation (without even considering how much denser cities would be without cars), all conspire to create a world where many are pressured to own a car (life is harder without it, areas with good schools may be inaccessible without it, geographical distribution of jobs in cities may be inconvenient to put it mildly, and public transit has largely gone to hell, all because of the side-effects of widespread car ownership) but they actually lose out in terms of time-saved, and a number of other factors, compared with a world where car ownership was restricted.
Just setting technology loose, even with something as seemingly great as the automobile, isn't always a straightforward win for the average person.
I think it makes sense to have something other than a pure universal basic income for redistribution of wealth. You want to design an incentive based system to encourage people to contribute to their community, pursue higher education and learning, as well as work.
Some kind of income supplement if you work at least 15 hours per week makes sense, along with a bonus for 'community contribution' of some kind. It makes sense to reduce the overall amount worked, but to still encourage work, and to improve the skillset of workers.
Pure universal basic income has dubious incentives. It's a solution, but I don't think it's close to the best one. Of course, any system, including the idea I'm proposing will be gamed, and have unfortunate side effects from its policies.
It has many benefits, including its simplicity. Sure, you could create a framework of incentives and enforcement to make sure only certain people get cash for doing certain things, but those structures will absorb money that might have otherwise gone to the poor. The whole story of international aid, and of UBI if it's done wrong, is a story of propping up inefficient bureaucracies and giving money to aid workers instead of the people who were meant to benefit.
> It makes sense to reduce the overall amount worked, but to still encourage work, and to improve the skillset of workers.
You're right, just because robots can automatize production doesn't mean we're left with nothing to do. We still have a job - taking care of ourselves, our families and communities.
A jobless person might be a doctor, an engineer, a farmer or a teacher by training. They don't automatically become stupid by being jobless. They have many needs to fulfill and little money, but lots of time. So they will need to become more self reliant.
The life of a community can be self reliant in many ways - a community could cultivate its own food, build houses, primary medical care, kindergarten and primary school education, install solar panels, drill for water, repair and maintenance for various devices - all of these are needs of local people that can be solved by local work.
If, on top of self reliance, people receive an UBI, it will make it count for so much more, and they won't be just idling around all day long. There is a whole economy that can exist just by providing services to each other.
There's a lot of talk about how AI will "steal jobs". But I think one aspect that doesn't get enough attention is how our physical bodies seem to have major problems adapting (fast enough) to where technology is taking us. Take for example how immobile jobs , combined with bad food (industrialized processed food) and driving has all sorts of negative physical impact. To add to this, self-driving cars will remove the need of a driving skill. Or how address books removed the need to remember phone numbers. I remember in the 90s (4th grade) when could recall the phone number of everyone in my class. Today I honestly don't know anyone's phone number but my own.
How do we account for the fact that the human body and mind seem to need a certain amount/kind of stimulation to not entirely fall apart?
Should we just settle with the new bodies technology gives us?
Should we settle with simple compensatory measures like going to the gym for lack of moving otherwise?
> How do we account for the fact that the human body and mind seem to need a certain amount/kind of stimulation to not entirely fall apart?
By giving them it. There's vastly more access to mental stimulation than there was a generation ago. I'd be much more concerned about over-stimulation, disruption of sleep patterns etc.
Also, I have no concerns about driving, phones numbers and so on. These were just temporary, inefficient and ineffective means to other ends.
Especially driving. I mean, what a terrible idea. Put a human being into a projectile and make them concentrate, potentially for hours, to not die. What could possibly go wrong?
Physical stimulation is more of a concern for me but there again, it's what we are leaving behind that's truly terrible. Why has there been a profusion of sedentary jobs for the last few decades? Because so many of the devices we interacted with were immovable (or require a fixed posture like driving).
How do you solve that? By removing the need for the fixed posture i.e. mobile devices, automatons to freeing up concentration. We're in a transition phase but I'm very optimistic that the opportunity to act day to day in a healthy way will get better and better.
Is it all roses? No, of course not. Just because you can live healthily doesn't mean you will if you're not required to. What we do about that could easily get us into Black Mirror territory but I'm confident the solutions will be there of we want them i.e. they'll be political not technological challenges.
> I remember in the 90s (4th grade) when could recall the phone number of everyone in my class.
Seems like a waste of brainpower to me.
I remember in the 90s when I couldn't listen to music I wanted without paying £12.99 for a CD. Or when I couldn't do my maths homework because I lost my textbook which my parents had to replace at a cost of £30. Or when I was really upset after going to meet a friend who never showed up and couldn't talk to me to say why until the next day at school (his parent's car had broken down).
Technology is AMAZING, people will be fat even without self driving cars, it's greed and laziness that causes fat to accumulate, not tech.
All living things are greedy and lazy. It's not good, but it's also not evil. It's just physics. Humans aren't unusually greedy or lazy. They are just the only ones that beat themselves up over it. Particularly the American ones.
a general reply to the replies of my original post..
When I mentioned mental stimulation I should have emphasized the kind. Stimulation can trigger many mental activities of course - reasoning, analysis, entertainment, contemplation, etc. It's this unbalance, a majority of entertainment that worries me. Don't get me wrong, I love entertainment and mindless stuff and I think it's part of healthy life! So, I don't think it's over stimulation per-se, but a gross unbalance of kinds of stimulation..
But I'm moving away from my main point/question which I think is: can we off-sourcing most our mental abilities without major negative impact on our health? It's not just these mental abilities aren't needed. What are the consequences of a brain that barely uses its memory? What are the consequences when you almost never use your brain for any challenging task? Maybe this will lead to all sorts of mental illnesses...
A 4 day work week is the answer. Ford changed the work week from 6 days to 5 days. It's time for another major corporation to set an example and make this move. Pay employees the same they make now for 5 days. For many professions, the same work can be done in 4 days, and for other menial jobs you give peole the opportunity to grow.
I'd like to read more on how Ford managed to change the work week from 6 days to 5 days. Would you kindly direct me to some articles/ books/ PDF's? Sincerely,
In short, Ford likely realized in the 1920s that with the usage of mass manufacturing / shifts, worker effort was more important than hours spent working, and could afford to make the change.
This eventually became codified in the US via the Fair Labor Standard Act of 1938 [1], which defined overtime as anything over 40 hours a week.
>Throughout the Industrial Revolution there were periodic panics about the impact of automation on jobs, going back to the so-called Luddites, - textile workers who in the 1810s smashed the new machines that were threatening their jobs.
This is such a common misconception that the wikipedia entry for luddite mentions it in the first paragraph.
They destroyed weaving machinery for the same reason French taxi drivers shut down roads in 2016.
Revisionist historians depict luddites as anti-technology for the same reason Forbes chose to depict the French taxi drivers as anti-smartphone.
This question is asked wrong because of informal interest groups and their control, not to mention formal control of technological development (like NSL in USA). So you could pose the question as: Where are the groups limiting access to certain technology trying to take us? Or: Where should technological evolution really take us?
From pol. science standpoint:
The service society has been spoken of long (the shift where the BNP is composed by a larger degree of revenue from services than from physical products) and has been happening in the scandinavian countries afaik (been too long so can't say if it has actually transpired as of yet). The information age is what followed, landing in today and the missinformation age - the age where access to information is largely limited by oligopolies (like search engines and informal interest groups).
The obvious answer is not to ask where it is taking us but to exclude what AI canno't do for humanity - manage the creative side. -Yes there are programs such as those which design after evolutional pattern, but what humans can do is jump the gun and instead of using evolution understand what the objective is and set up goals that aim to furfill or do more than that towards the goals and future ones.
Humans are simply more efficient than computers at intelligent design (no pun intended).
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[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 65.6 ms ] threadI lean towards the positive side of Universal Basic Income (my core argument is that no kid grows up thinking they want to be inactive) so it's heartening to see more of these arguments come to the fore.
or put another way "It will simply come from the share of productivity gains made possible by technology that should already be shared."
https://steemit.com/basicincome/@scottsantens/who-pays-for-u...
https://medium.com/basic-income/machine-labor-day-d77931dca9...
One obvious reason is when they don't have the money. Put money in the hands of people who need it and they will spend it, so the work gets done.
You mention various forms of work. Do you know they are more urgent than what people will spend their money on if given the choice? Maybe it's arrogant to assume you know better than them?
This is one of the most obvious points that too many miss.
UBI has a B in it for a reason. You get to Star Trek "no money replicator based economy" way later. But the fact people go hungry and homeless in a nation where companies hoard trillions of dollars in tax havens is abjectly amoral.
Yeah, true. The last time society worried that new technology and machines would lead to mass unemployment, the opposite happened. We're in a bigger hurry than ever. Maybe that will accelerate even more.
But, if the human labor need for the trucking industry goes away, for example, it doesn't matter whether we've solved all problems, we will have a very large class of people out of work, even if it's temporary.
> Pay people for education first. We aren't even doing this!! Pay people to resolve climate change. Pay for more research. Pay for xyz that drives humans to new levels while enabling them to valuably contribute to our society.
I agree with this too, but one way to think about UBI is that it could, for the first time, pay people for doing things that are valuable to society, but not profitable. The reason we don't pay much for education or fixing climate change or research is our economy is driven on short term economics. If it doesn't lead to more customers or more dollars in the next year, it doesn't get funding. At it's imagined best, maybe UBI could enable an economy of social good rather than profit.
I don't think that's the case at all.
1) How can our economy be driven by 'short term economics' when we have trillions of dollars locked away in 20+ year investments (government bonds)? That's hardly 'short run' thinking. But it illustrates that there are trillions of dollars available for longer term thinking.
2) We do pay a lot for education [0]. We spend something like 9k/student/year. that's a substantial amount of money. But we get bad results, a lot of kids don't live in very good environments and school funding goes towards things their parents should be doing - like teaching them how to read and feeding them breakfast. I think we'd invest more in education if we could demonstrate better returns, but the bleeding hearts in charge of education want to spend more money on the worst investments. Teachers and admins have created a system where education for the intellectually disabled gets funded 30:1 - 100:1 over education for the gifted. People with too many chromosomes aren't going to fix climate change or do the research our economy needs, yet down syndrome students get a lot more funding than genius students.
Hilariously, the solution to education funding is more of the 'short term economics'. We should spend less money on educating would-be gangsters and more money education would-be scientists.
[0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-glob...
I also want to point out that you included teaching to read in you list of things parents should be doing and not the teachers. Because teaching is not something teachers should be doing
Do you discredit an idea because of the person espousing it? If so, go hang out with normies who read gossip mags.
>you might have an ulterior motive beyond fixing the education system.
My ulterior motive is a society where the productive people are unleashed to be as great as they can be, and the lazy/incompetent aren't given things at the expense of better investments.
>I also want to point out that you included teaching to read in you list of things parents should be doing and not the teachers.
Yeah, I want to live in a society with a norm of parents reading to their children and participating in their child's development. The expectation that only teachers are responsible for an individual's education is the reason we can dump so much money into the system and have little to show for it.
If you really believe in it back it up
Ideally we'd tie (reversible) sterilization with welfare participation but the horseshoe of fundies / progressives make that neigh impossible.
And I don't support eugenics at all. I just think that the social contract should have an 'out' and there should be a place in the world where we can put the undesirables (a la Australia). This is why we need to colonize mars (and other planets). There should be enough societies that people can find one that works for them and that societies can isolate themselves from factions they don't want. Look around, liberalism is failing and doesn't offer a credible alternatives to tribal politics. The only way we can make tribal politics safe is to reduce friction in interactions which means more space.
Your definition of 'killing people off' is asinine and lacks nuance. I'm not strong enough take your points seriously, so allow me to take them to absurd conclusions:
Right now, you're taking oxygen out of the air and depositing CO2. Right now, people are dying from polluted air and lack of oxygen, are you responsible for their deaths?
That benefit part is important though, which I don't see your system providing by just removing people.
But let's ignore all that for a moment and just say we go ahead with your system. Why are other groups moved to Australia, Mars, etc but you and whatever group you've decided you belong to get to stay where you are? What makes these other people move, because you asked? Paid? Forced? I am legitimately curious as to how your plan would work
Uh, Wow. The magnitude of this problem is...? Your solution is...? This rant is relevant to UBI because...?
> How can our economy be driven by 'short term economics' when we have trillions of dollars locked away in 20+ year investments?
20 years is not long term in my book, but that's entirely beside the point. The private profit motive is the short term thinking I was referring to. Financial investments seeking a return for the benefit of a private party are a completely different thing than funding climate change research or education.
> We do pay a lot for education
We spend a lot. That's different than paying teachers a lot or giving students performance based incentives. It's different than having adequate facilities and training for teachers.
> We should spend less money on educating would-be gangsters and more money education would-be scientists.
How? What actual change are you proposing here that utilizes short term profits to produce more scientists than criminals?
I'd make it much easier to expel students. Some bad kid brings a gun to school in elementary school? They're out for the rest of their life - freeing up resources to spend on better kids. Some bad kid molests another? Gone for life. Some bad kid punches a teacher? Gone for life.
I'd bust the teacher's unions just so I could align pay with performance. They complain about being underpaid, but they have Cadillac health insurance and defined benefit pensions - both of those have astronomical costs and make their compensation much higher than their salary.
I'd also give teachers top cover to conduct the classroom how they like. Teachers shouldn't have to waste time talking to idiot parents about dumb topics. Ideally, teaching would be a six-figure position (albeit with an HSA and a 401k) so we would want to respect teachers' time.
I'd fund it by cutting the administration and special education departments to the bone.
This would do the exact opposite of what you claim. It would produce criminals faster than now. This would also tend to transfer the burden from education to social services, and somewhat to incarceration. Both of those are more expensive than education. You're proposing to increase taxes to pay for people's bad behavior, rather than do anything substantive to fix it at all. No thanks, and good luck.
> Teachers shouldn't have to waste time talking to idiot parents about dumb topics.
What are you referring to? How big of a problem is this? Do you have children in the public education system?
> I'd fund it by cutting the administration and special education departments to the bone.
Again, what percent of the system is special education? How much effect will this have? And what do you propose to do with people who need extra help? Leave them to rot? You again are proposing to transfer the special education burden onto even higher cost social services. And with less education, people with special needs will have less power to contribute back to the economy.
Teachers spend a non-zero amount of time dealing with parents. I know a few teachers personally and all of them have stories about parents who take up too much of their time.
In the school districts near me, special ed and admin costs can take ~40% of the budget. I wouldn't displace the students onto social services because there'd be no social services.
This seems like short-term economic thinking to me. We can also reduce the cost of prison by keeping more kids in school, rather than kicking kids to the curb the minute something bad happens. Inclusion, not exclusion, is how to feed the virtuous cycle.
Also, if it's so easy to reduce the cost of prisons even though people have been debating it for centuries, why hasn't it happened already? How do you just extract more labor out of prisoners?
And what happened to your plan to produce more scientists and fewer criminals? For three comments in a row you've ignored the question of how to convert more would-be criminals into scientists, and talked about reducing dollar costs instead. Pretend I don't care about dollar costs and help me understand how increasing expulsion and incarceration rates leads to more scientists.
> Teachers spend a non-zero amount of time dealing with parents. I know a few teachers personally and all of them have stories about parents who take up too much of their time.
So what? Part of being a teacher is interacting with parents, it's a good thing, not a bad thing. Some parents will take up more time. What is the actual problem here? What is the economic cost to teachers talking to parents? Since teachers mostly talk to parents outside of school hours, how much extra money for the education budget or the economy will solving this "problem" yield?
> In the school districts near me, special ed and admin costs can take ~40% of the budget. I wouldn't displace the students onto social services because there'd be no social services.
It sounds like regular students take ~60% of the budget. By your math, we could get more bang for our buck by eliminating the non-special-ed services.
Do you have any policy study or experience at all? The more suggestions you add, the more it sounds like you aren't aware of any policy or government or education funding history. People have tried some of the kinds of things you're suggesting in the past, and gotten wildly different results than they expected.
2. We can also reduce the cost of prison by keeping more kids in school
To the extent that school can persuade people to trade a life of crime for a more virtuous path. There are some people who are going to be criminals regardless of how much schooling is available to them, those people are lost causes and we should stop investing in them the moment they reveal themselves.
3. The cost of incarceration is high because people are concerned with human rights and getting their cut of the expenditures. Prison would be much cheaper if we just put all the convicts on an island and catapulted basic supplies to them, and just made sure no one swam off the island.
4. I never claimed that my plan would produce more scientists and fewer criminals - just that we'd spend less money on criminals and free up resources that could be spent on educating scientists or funding their experiments.
5. Part of being a teacher is interacting with parents, but some parents demand extensive communication that's above and beyond what we should expect. And you're right that parents talk to teachers outside of school hours, however, there's no free lunch - we have to pay for it in some way whether that's teacher job dissatisfaction, teacher salary expectations, etc. We should respect parents' interest but empower teachers to tell them to hit the sand if they're overbearing.
6. the 60% of the budget that goes to normal and high achieving students is the only part of the budget that has a positive ROI. Ideally we'd have more of it, but at the least we'd do better if we didn't spend 40% on the failures.
You literally said this morning: "Hilariously, the solution to education funding is more of the 'short term economics'. We should spend less money on educating would-be gangsters and more money education would-be scientists."
> Expelling a student for bringing a gun to school is hardly tantamount to 'kicking kids to the curb the minute something bad happens'
Expelling a student for hitting a teacher is, and you mentioned that too. The gun issue depends entirely on why it happened. Some kids are already expelled for bringing guns to school. Some kids don't have a clear concept of why bringing the gun to show off to their friends is so bad. Education, not expulsion, is the only way to prevent it, and the only way to (literally) teach them the lesson. Expulsion only does one thing: disenfranchises the child and leaves them more likely to escalate their bad behavior outside of school. It leaves them at a disadvantage socially and economically and more likely to have to resort to crime in order to live.
How about instead of having a contrived debate about a very tiny minority of kids with guns, we enact some actual gun control in this country, and prevent any kids from having any guns in the first place like other countries do? Then we don't have to criminalize children, and we don't have to expel them in a fit of incredulity. Best of both worlds, and far cheaper than expulsion and incarceration.
What does any of your tirade about child criminals have to do with solving education funding? How many kids in the US are bringing guns to schools, and how much money does it cost in the aggregate?
> We should respect parents' interest but empower teachers to tell them to hit the sand if they're overbearing.
What does that have to do with education funding? What is your point here? You suggested that keeping time-hogging parents from teachers was a solution to the education funding problem. How, exactly?
> the 60% of the budget that goes to normal and high achieving students is the only part of the budget that has a positive ROI.
Lower than average achieving healthy students make up 50% of that group you say has a positive ROI. There are also plenty of special needs kids that are physically handicapped and not mentally handicapped.
What is the ROI of education, exactly? How is it measured? Care to share any sources to back that claim up? You just ruled out both all school administration and all special education. How do schools function without administration? Do you believe that school principals and school districts are useless?
If you stopped special education programs and the social services that go along with them, as you suggested, suddenly the parents of those children will need to find alternative care. In many cases that will mean the parent has to care for them during the day themselves, which will pull them out of the workforce. Regardless of the cost of special education, your suggestions could be a net drain on the economy.
> but at the least we'd do better if we didn't spend 40% on the failures.
What data do you have that it's failing? Under what metric are you declaring all school admin and special education to have zero return? I'm pretty stunned how deeply discriminatory your statements have been repeatedly. I hope you never have to be on the receiving end of your own ideas.
i. We should spend less money on educating would-be gangsters and more money education would-be scientists.
ii. My plan would produce more scientists and fewer criminals?
>Expelling a student for hitting a teacher is {the moment something bad happens}.
Hitting people is a severe violation of liberal norms. We can get rid of those norms, but where do we draw the line? Should parents be allowed to hit teachers?
And why do you put the burden on the school to teach students things that are clearly right and wrong? It's not about criminalizing kids, it's about punishing criminals for their transgressions. Kids can be criminals.
I'm game for a gun control discussion. There are at least 300 million firearms in this country, the only way to keep them out of criminal hands is to grab them all. Who's going to grab the guns? NPR listeners?
The ROI of education is this: incremental lifetime earnings / cost of education. Use the t-bills as a guidance on discount rate.
Your needling for sources is derailing this discussion. If you don't get why someone might think special education is overfunded, go visit a special ed classroom and wonder "how much does it cost society to give these kids places to drool on each other?".
Man, I hope some day, maybe when you have kids, you come to realize what a truly awful thing to say that was. In the mean time, it might be worth reading a bit of history to understand why our country has repeatedly re-affirmed it's decision to uphold the values in the Declaration of Independence to spend money to take care of all it's citizens and not just the lucky healthiest smartest richest ones.
> Your needling for sources is derailing this discussion.
I can totally empathize with feeling like you're being needled, as you say, when you're asked multiple times for evidence to support your claims that you don't have. I will stop asking. Is it possible that the lack of evidence says more about the value of those claims?
This discussion was derailed right from the start when you decided to pin the country's economic problems on difficult children and parents with questions -- things that objectively don't affect the overall budget very much, if at all. I've just been trying to figure out where your anger is coming from, what makes you think that some parents talking to teachers is some kind of drain on the economy, what you think makes it a serious problem that needs solving.
The irony here is 1) you jumped on me over a comment about education that I didn't make, the parent comment did, and 2) your entire calculus of fixation on short-term budget efficiencies is obsolete under UBI & other future possibilities. Using ROI for education is at best specious today. Should UBI come to pass, ROI will not be a meaningful metric at all.
HA! We got ourselves a liberal here. The world is revolting against your slave morality ideals. The authoritarian left and the authoritarian right are rising - neither of which are ideologies that affirm the rights of all American citizens.
>Is it possible that the lack of evidence says more about the value of those claims?
It's possible but not likely. I don't think the pencil necks would give anyone a lot of money to study the outcomes of the profoundly retarded. And cost-benefit will not be resolved in their favor unless we say that it's worth a sizable amount of money for parents to play dress up with their retard babies. It's funny to see a retard dressed like an elf, but it's not funny when I think about the resources we've wasted on that mouth breather.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Pollution, reduced freedom to walk/bike, extra time having to work out as a result of those last two things (or simply reduced health), and, at an average income, total time lost to the car, including working to pay for it, for insurance, for gas, for maintenance, et c., being so high that it often results in a net loss of time versus foot-powered transportation (without even considering how much denser cities would be without cars), all conspire to create a world where many are pressured to own a car (life is harder without it, areas with good schools may be inaccessible without it, geographical distribution of jobs in cities may be inconvenient to put it mildly, and public transit has largely gone to hell, all because of the side-effects of widespread car ownership) but they actually lose out in terms of time-saved, and a number of other factors, compared with a world where car ownership was restricted.
Just setting technology loose, even with something as seemingly great as the automobile, isn't always a straightforward win for the average person.
Some kind of income supplement if you work at least 15 hours per week makes sense, along with a bonus for 'community contribution' of some kind. It makes sense to reduce the overall amount worked, but to still encourage work, and to improve the skillset of workers.
Pure universal basic income has dubious incentives. It's a solution, but I don't think it's close to the best one. Of course, any system, including the idea I'm proposing will be gamed, and have unfortunate side effects from its policies.
It has many benefits, including its simplicity. Sure, you could create a framework of incentives and enforcement to make sure only certain people get cash for doing certain things, but those structures will absorb money that might have otherwise gone to the poor. The whole story of international aid, and of UBI if it's done wrong, is a story of propping up inefficient bureaucracies and giving money to aid workers instead of the people who were meant to benefit.
You're right, just because robots can automatize production doesn't mean we're left with nothing to do. We still have a job - taking care of ourselves, our families and communities.
A jobless person might be a doctor, an engineer, a farmer or a teacher by training. They don't automatically become stupid by being jobless. They have many needs to fulfill and little money, but lots of time. So they will need to become more self reliant.
The life of a community can be self reliant in many ways - a community could cultivate its own food, build houses, primary medical care, kindergarten and primary school education, install solar panels, drill for water, repair and maintenance for various devices - all of these are needs of local people that can be solved by local work.
If, on top of self reliance, people receive an UBI, it will make it count for so much more, and they won't be just idling around all day long. There is a whole economy that can exist just by providing services to each other.
How do we account for the fact that the human body and mind seem to need a certain amount/kind of stimulation to not entirely fall apart? Should we just settle with the new bodies technology gives us? Should we settle with simple compensatory measures like going to the gym for lack of moving otherwise?
By giving them it. There's vastly more access to mental stimulation than there was a generation ago. I'd be much more concerned about over-stimulation, disruption of sleep patterns etc.
Also, I have no concerns about driving, phones numbers and so on. These were just temporary, inefficient and ineffective means to other ends.
Especially driving. I mean, what a terrible idea. Put a human being into a projectile and make them concentrate, potentially for hours, to not die. What could possibly go wrong?
Physical stimulation is more of a concern for me but there again, it's what we are leaving behind that's truly terrible. Why has there been a profusion of sedentary jobs for the last few decades? Because so many of the devices we interacted with were immovable (or require a fixed posture like driving).
How do you solve that? By removing the need for the fixed posture i.e. mobile devices, automatons to freeing up concentration. We're in a transition phase but I'm very optimistic that the opportunity to act day to day in a healthy way will get better and better.
Is it all roses? No, of course not. Just because you can live healthily doesn't mean you will if you're not required to. What we do about that could easily get us into Black Mirror territory but I'm confident the solutions will be there of we want them i.e. they'll be political not technological challenges.
Seems like a waste of brainpower to me.
I remember in the 90s when I couldn't listen to music I wanted without paying £12.99 for a CD. Or when I couldn't do my maths homework because I lost my textbook which my parents had to replace at a cost of £30. Or when I was really upset after going to meet a friend who never showed up and couldn't talk to me to say why until the next day at school (his parent's car had broken down).
Technology is AMAZING, people will be fat even without self driving cars, it's greed and laziness that causes fat to accumulate, not tech.
Are Americans much greedier and lazier than they were 40 years ago? Are American animals?
When I mentioned mental stimulation I should have emphasized the kind. Stimulation can trigger many mental activities of course - reasoning, analysis, entertainment, contemplation, etc. It's this unbalance, a majority of entertainment that worries me. Don't get me wrong, I love entertainment and mindless stuff and I think it's part of healthy life! So, I don't think it's over stimulation per-se, but a gross unbalance of kinds of stimulation..
But I'm moving away from my main point/question which I think is: can we off-sourcing most our mental abilities without major negative impact on our health? It's not just these mental abilities aren't needed. What are the consequences of a brain that barely uses its memory? What are the consequences when you almost never use your brain for any challenging task? Maybe this will lead to all sorts of mental illnesses...
These are the things I am really curious about
https://www.google.com/search?q=ford+changed+work+week+from+...
In short, Ford likely realized in the 1920s that with the usage of mass manufacturing / shifts, worker effort was more important than hours spent working, and could afford to make the change.
This eventually became codified in the US via the Fair Labor Standard Act of 1938 [1], which defined overtime as anything over 40 hours a week.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Labor_Standards_Act_of_...
This is such a common misconception that the wikipedia entry for luddite mentions it in the first paragraph.
They destroyed weaving machinery for the same reason French taxi drivers shut down roads in 2016.
Revisionist historians depict luddites as anti-technology for the same reason Forbes chose to depict the French taxi drivers as anti-smartphone.
From pol. science standpoint: The service society has been spoken of long (the shift where the BNP is composed by a larger degree of revenue from services than from physical products) and has been happening in the scandinavian countries afaik (been too long so can't say if it has actually transpired as of yet). The information age is what followed, landing in today and the missinformation age - the age where access to information is largely limited by oligopolies (like search engines and informal interest groups).
The obvious answer is not to ask where it is taking us but to exclude what AI canno't do for humanity - manage the creative side. -Yes there are programs such as those which design after evolutional pattern, but what humans can do is jump the gun and instead of using evolution understand what the objective is and set up goals that aim to furfill or do more than that towards the goals and future ones. Humans are simply more efficient than computers at intelligent design (no pun intended).