Why are reddit and 4chan actually talking politics and economics according to random WTDWTF users
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It means I don't consider the question of who is or is not deserving to be the one to which most attention is paid when formulating economic distribution policy.
Ah, I see. Sorry for getting distracted by the red herrings, then.
I agree with the sentiment, which is one reason why I praised things like work requirements above. That allows the people to sort themselves out and maybe helps some of the "undeserving" to learn some deserving ways.
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Can we, for the sake of argument, agree that undeserving people are those who consistently make choices that lower the quality of their own lives and that of those close to them?
Undeserving of what? I mean, sure, those people are generally assholes and unpleasant to be around. That doesn't make them sub-human. So what are they "undeserving" of, exactly?Not to mention, those "undeserving" are part of the problem that keeps "deserving" people in poverty. If the father in a family is a drunk or addicted to gambling, no amount of money funneled into that family is going to get them out of poverty. Which then causes the children to live in a shitty situation and perpetuates the problem.
Providing a stable environment for the "deserving" that the "undeserving" can't piss away helps them both. The "undeserving" can perhaps even find help for his condition and hopefully stop being "undeserving". You would leave him to his own devices, because fuck him for having grown up in a shitty environment that didn't equip him to handle life, right? Do you think children decide, at some point in their lives, "I'm going to grow up to be a complete fuck up"?
Again, the available data do not support that conclusion. Handouts work just fine for most people whose immediate problem is a lack of personal funds.
The book is made available to read from your link, here, and I actually glanced at the table of contents. Which has a whole chapter devoted to "The targeting dilemma". Meaning, who should receive the money. Reading over it, it turns out that the book you have been using to base your position that everyone should just be given money does not endorse that. It discusses the different methods different countries use in their cash transfer systems, and clearly states there is no "best" solution, that there is debate in different circles, and that they won't resolve the debate but only want to "give some flavor of the most outspoken arguments on the non-academic side."See, while well targeted cash transfer programs can have a positive effect, widespread cash transfers will run face first into harsh economic realities, such as inflation, and can have unexpected side-effects. And no, you can't use a book that doesn't uphold your argument as a shield, because someone will actually waste their time reading it eventually.
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I deserve
Ridicule.
That is the only word that can follow those that precede it, regardless of which idiot says it.
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Reading over it, it turns out that the book you have been using to base your position that everyone should just be given money does not endorse that.
I honestly did not see this coming.
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I honestly did not see this coming.
But... but it's in the title and everything...
Filed under: in other news, western civilization is indeed coming to an end
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@loopback0 said:
That's exactly what Reddit said was the reason.
from a business sense that makes sense..... kinda.
I don't get the SJW movement, I mean i get that there's a lot of social injustice and that's bad, but do they really think the best way to deal with it is by being so abrasively beligerant? Honestly looking from the outside of all these SJW crusades i have a hard time telling them apart from a mob of bullies...
:-/
so yeah. i don't get it. Social justice, yeah that's a good goal, right on. SJW, that i don't get.
but then i don't get the fascination with 'murican handegg either.
Bullying is a human characteristic, one we would be better off without, but there it is.
We bullied the indians. We bullied the blacks. We bullied every foreigner. We bully fat people, the disabled, Libtards, commies, libertarians, atheists, rednecks, trailer trash, movie stars fallen from grace...
Germany bullied the Jews; now the Jews are bullying the Palestinians.
People have held whole revolutions to get rid of the bully in power...and as soon as the old bully is gone, the revolutionaries bully the people.
And you find it a surprise that, given a bit of power, SJW starts bullying people?
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And this is why I try not to get involved in any economical debate aside from a micro level (as in: What's the best course financially for oneself).
All those theories, models and economic structures are nice and well - but since they're based on multi-factorial interdependencies, it always reminds me of an ape being confronted with a million of levers, where pushing one lever will randomly result on the ape being offered a banana, being offered a 100 bananas or being slain by a crate of bananas falling on its head.
Of course, pushing one lever will pull or push others. Which just might smite apes beyond the wall. Or give them bananas. Or push a lever over there which will offer our ape here a pineapple.
While I may now get myself a well-deserved
banan... err, Glenmorangie, I' d like to conclude with this: Economics is fuckin' complex and probably even more beyond our understanding than Quantum Mechanics.
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Economics is fuckin' complex and probably even more beyond our understanding than Quantum Mechanics.
You think that's bad: we haven't even worked out whether or not humans have free will!
Can the
monkeyourangatan choose the lever, or will he simply pull it because of how two particles bounced off each other a billion years ago?
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Reading over it, it turns out that the book you have been using to base your position that everyone should just be given money does not endorse that. It discusses the different methods different countries use in their cash transfer systems, and clearly states there is no "best" solution, that there is debate in different circles, and that they won't resolve the debate but only want to "give some flavor of the most outspoken arguments on the non-academic side."
All of which is irrelevant to the refutation of your claim:
homelessness, malnutrition, and poor education for the children of the homeless or poor. Giving people money doesn't solve those problems, because those problems lead to poor spending habits.
Poor spending habits are very much a second-order issue compared to having nothing to spend in the first place.
I agree with you to the extent that I think provision of more public housing would certainly be a good thing. I disagree that it should be thought of as a substitute for income support.
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Can the monkeyourangatan choose the lever, or will he simply pull it because of how two particles bounced off each other a billion years ago?
Is the wheel really round, or is it simply that the tyre surface is a constant distance from the axle?
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I agree with you to the extent that I think provision of more public housing would certainly be a good thing. I disagree that it should be thought of as a substitute for income support.
Ok, can you clarify what you think the purpose of income support should be? So far it has been argued as a means of providing the bare necessities to everyone, but when presented with alternative ways of providing those necessities, you now seem to claim that income support is an end in itself, not a means to something else.
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Human labor is being displaced by automation at an ever-increasing rate. At present, this mostly affects low-skilled jobs but technology is continuously improving; there are jobs being replaced by machinery now that are much more skilled than those being replaced ten years ago. I see no particular reason to believe that this trend has a well-defined endpoint.
It is already the case that getting any kind of job is a more competitive process than it was in decades past. People need to spend much more time and much more money on education and training than used to be the case in order to secure employment. It's much harder now to leave school at 16 and get a start in the workforce than it was when I was 16. Given the trend toward replacing human work with automation from the lower-skilled end upwards, I see no reason to believe that this trend has a well-defined endpoint either.
Instead, what I expect we'll increasingly see is more and more people competing for fewer and fewer available jobs. We simply don't need as much human productivity as we used to; the entire point of labor-saving devices is that they save labor.
In my view, we need to start to loosen the connection between the choices it is reasonable for a person to have open to them, and what they are able to sell their labor for. We need to let go of this idea that the only way to be a respectable member of society is to be an economically productive member of society. Because if we don't, then we are on a one way path to any of assorted kinds of dystopia.
So yes, I do see income support as an end in itself. Because as things are at present, I think respectability depends on economic productivity to an extent that's already causing major difficulty for large numbers of people, and I can only see the underlying drivers of that difficulty getting worse.
I don't believe we currently have an economy well-organized enough to offer every human being alive on Earth a life of luxury based solely on the productivity of our machines. But it does seem to me that such a state of affairs makes a perfectly good aspirational goal, and that the economic and social adjustments we would need to make in order to implement a universal minimum income greater than zero are necessary steps on the way to achieving it.
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We simply don't need as much human productivity as we used to; the entire point of labor-saving devices is that they save labor.
So that the labor can be focused on things we can't do using automation. If you don't need people to flip burgers, those people can man a space program.
You can maybe sustain a society of lazy bums, but you can't have any meaningful progress in it until you invent artificial creativity.
We need to let go of this idea that the only way to be a respectable member of society is to be an economically productive member of society. Because if we don't, then we are on a one way path to any of assorted kinds of dystopia.
On which we are since the beginnings of civilization. That's a damn long path.
At least we don't push the disabled off a cliff.
But it does seem to me that such a state of affairs makes a perfectly good aspirational goal
Fuck aiming for the stars, the future of mankind is screwing around? I think even Nietzsche would be like "dude, what the fuck".
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Human labor is being displaced by automation at an ever-increasing rate. [...] I see no particular reason to believe that this trend has a well-defined endpoint.
I completely agree.
Instead, what I expect we'll increasingly see is more and more people competing for fewer and fewer available jobs.
Here we disagree. You seem to think that the only jobs that can exist are "productive" jobs. However, you ignore the service, research, entertainment and similar industries, where productivity is not the main factor. People don't need to be "productive", they just need to be useful, in some way, to other people. Contribute, in a way that other people value, to society. That is what a job is, and there is no end to the ways that people can help each other.So yes, I do see income support as an end in itself.
Because you can't distinguish between means and ends, and you've convinced yourself that the end you want can only be achieved through an income.There are many ways in which you are wrong, but I'll just tackle a couple. First, money is not wealth. Giving people money doesn't make them better off by itself. Money is an exchange medium. Having money essentially means that at some point in the future, people may agree to do something for you. You need to know what to ask for to turn money into wealth. If what you want is to provide people with a minimum level of comfort so that they can live while trying to figure out how to be of use, then provide that. That way there's an incentive to find ways in which to be of use (you are at the bottom of the social scale), without punishing unduly those that for different raisins</reasons> can't.
Another problem is that prices are economic signals, that indicate the relative worth of goods and services. When you give people a universal income, you are pricing doing nothing relative to doing something (the income of someone with a job). The problem is, doing something, no matter how trivial, is infinitely more useful to society than doing nothing. But you are telling people that doing nothing, if we assume that the lowest income job pays twice the UBI, is worth half as much as the most trivial job.
By giving people an universal income, you are introducing a distortive effect into the economy. These kinds of effects are what lead to bubbles, inflation, monopolies and other unexpected results. Actions don't happen in a vacuum.
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Here we disagree. You seem to think that the only jobs that can exist are "productive" jobs. However, you ignore the service, research, entertainment and similar industries, where productivity is not the main factor. People don't need to be "productive", they just need to be useful, in some way, to other people. Contribute, in a way that other people value, to society. That is what a job is, and there is no end to the ways that people can help each other.
We've invented so many new jobs. We're going to be inventing so many more. But the scary thought is that some people will never be able to do these jobs and are only "suitable" for manual labor.
First, money is not wealth.
Another problem is that prices are economic signals, that indicate the relative worth of goods and services. When you give people a universal income, you are pricing doing nothing relative to doing something (the income of someone with a job).
+ƞ
By giving people an universal income, you are introducing a distortive effect into the economy. These kinds of effects are what lead to bubbles, inflation, monopolies and other unexpected results. Actions don't happen in a vacuum.
I think @flabdablet's idea is an interesting approach to what to do with people who just aren't skilled enough and are unable or unwilling to gain the necessary skills. But I agree with you that it simply won't work. Not that I have a better idea. We'll probably just end up regressing a lot at some point and stuff will suck a lot more than it does now in currently wealthy nations. I hope there's enough ruin to go around for that to be a long time off.
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Fuck aiming for the stars, the future of mankind is screwing around?
Personally, I have aiming for the stars filed pretty firmly under "screwing around". If aiming for the stars is what floats your boat, that's all well and good and I'm happy it makes you happy; I am more interested in exploring ways to live a creative, fulfilling, satisfactory, sustainable life on the perfectly good spaceship we already inhabit.
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People don't need to be "productive", they just need to be useful, in some way, to other people.
Well at this point we should probably try to stop talking past each other, because when I use the word "productive" I'm using it in the sense of exercising a saleable skill; productivity, in this sense, is included in the wider notion of usefulness.
I absolutely agree that the drive to be useful to other people is wired pretty deep into the human psyche, and that organizing ourselves in a way that allows this drive to be expressed is the right thing to do.
I remain unconvinced that "useful to other people" and "required to compete with other similarly useful people in the labor market in order to provide for oneself and one's family" are necessarily the same idea.
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Money is an exchange medium.
Agreed; money itself is pretty much value-neutral.
However, possession of money amounts to social endorsement for decision-making power. The more money I have, the wider is the scope of the decisions I get social licence to make. As I see it, the amount of money a society allocates to an individual is a direct reflection of the extent to which that society recognizes that individual's right to decide what to do with their time.
When you give people a universal income, you are pricing doing nothing relative to doing something (the income of someone with a job). The problem is, doing something, no matter how trivial, is infinitely more useful to society than doing nothing. But you are telling people that doing nothing, if we assume that the lowest income job pays twice the UBI, is worth half as much as the most trivial job.
That's one way to look at it; it's not the way I look at it. I believe that very few people actually "do nothing", in the sense that their existence offers no value to those around them; it seems to me that your argument here is a perfect example of the very conflation between a person's income and society's collective opinion on their social contribution that I think needs re-evaluating.
By giving people an universal income, you are introducing a distortive effect into the economy. These kinds of effects are what lead to bubbles, inflation, monopolies and other unexpected results. Actions don't happen in a vacuum.
It should be pretty clear by now that I am firmly of the opinion that there is already a distortive effect operating in the economy, with terrible social consequences, and that I see a universal basic income as corrective of that distortion. The baseline economic value of human existence is currently defined, completely arbitrarily, at zero. I think that's wrong.
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I think @flabdablet's idea is an interesting approach to what to do with people who just aren't skilled enough and are unable or unwilling to gain the necessary skills. But I agree with you that it simply won't work.
Here's a thought experiment for you to contemplate:
Picture a hedge fund. It doesn't make any products, it doesn't sell any services, it has no customers. Its sole purpose is to invest in other businesses, collect its share of the dividends on those investments, distribute some of those as dividends to its own shareholders, and keep itself going.
Such things exist now. They make a tremendous amount of money for their shareholders. Nobody seriously argues that they rely on coercion.
Now picture a huge hedge fund. It works just like the first one you thought about, except that it's organized as a co-operative: every single citizen is a single-unit shareholder. It controls enough capital, and its managers are skilled enough at investing, that it can consistently pay out in dividends an amount sufficient to cover the basic costs of living for each of its shareholders.
What is it, in your view, that makes such a hypothetical structure impossible, unsustainable, coercive or otherwise undesirable?
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Well at this point we should probably try to stop talking past each other, because when I use the word "productive" I'm using it in the sense of exercising a saleable skill; productivity, in this sense, is included in the wider notion of usefulness.
Well, you might want to review your premises then, because before you said
Given the trend toward replacing human work with automation from the lower-skilled end upwards, I see no reason to believe that this trend has a well-defined endpoint either.
All these uses of "productive" strongly imply productivity in the sense of performing some activity that could be automated. My point is, there are infinitely many activities that can't be automated that are valued. Take art, for example. You can't automate the creation of art. Sure, you can have machines that make perfect statues, or perfect paintings, but the point of art is that it is created by people. It's not just the finished product. And it's even safe from perfect reproduction, because an original is always worth more than any reproduction simply because there is only ever one original. And even if there is one "best" artist, they can't build a monopoly on art. The same can be said for other services. Even if the creation of food is automated, having a human chef make you a unique meal becomes valuable simply because it is something rare.Instead, what I expect we'll increasingly see is more and more people competing for fewer and fewer available jobs. We simply don't need as much human productivity as we used to; the entire point of labor-saving devices is that they save labor.
In my view, we need to start to loosen the connection between the choices it is reasonable for a person to have open to them, and what they are able to sell their labor for. We need to let go of this idea that the only way to be a respectable member of society is to be an economically productive member of society.
I remain unconvinced that "useful to other people" and "required to compete with other similarly useful people in the labor market in order to provide for oneself and one's family" are necessarily the same idea.
Which is something we agree on. I just don't agree that giving everyone a free income is the way to do it. If you want people to be able to have food, housing, health and such basic requirements, just give them that. It's cheaper, more efficient, and scales better. Then money can be continued to be used for what it's best at, signaling relative worth of things, and used to obtain less-essential things.So everyone gets a room, but if they want a whole house to themselves, they have to be useful to someone else.
Your proposal, by the way, still leaves people that for whatever reason can't manage their incomes out in the street. Your answer to that before was "screw those people", which doesn't convince me. If I'm going to spend untold amounts, I want the problem actually fixed. So until you have a better solution, you aren't going to convince me that a UBI is step in the right direction, much less better than my counter-proposal. Not when your objection to it is basically "I really just want to give everyone money".
I believe that very few people actually "do nothing", in the sense that their existence offers no value to those around them;
The question is not whether they're of value to those around them, it's whether those around them recognize that, and value it relative to everything else in their lives. And the way to see how much they really value it, is by seeing how much of their scarce resources they are willing to trade in exchange for that. Money is just the exchange medium.When you make money available to everyone, it looses it's value because what is actually intended to be traded is the thing the money represents. And no matter how much you automate society, there are things that are finite and as such scarce. For example, time. Or property; people can't have infinite things, they can't occupy infinite space, they can't all be in the best spot, etc. The physical universe imposes scarcity. Scarcity is what money represents. Giving people more money doesn't make the scarcity go away. It makes the money worth less, and robs some people of the value they accumulated, in a way that is unfair because it hurts the people that had less more than those that had more. Inflation always hurts the poor before it hurts the rich.
It should be pretty clear by now that I am firmly of the opinion that there is already a distortive effect operating in the economy, with terrible social consequences, and that I see a universal basic income as corrective of that distortion.
Adding another distortion doesn't fix the original distortion. Removing the original distortion fixes the distortion. If the original distortion is that people are required to obtain certain goods and services from others, which means they are not truly free, then remove that distortion directly.Because, and here's is another way in which you are wrong, an amount of money $X, and a good or service priced at $X, are not the same value. Here's a simple thought experiment to explain what I mean: If I offer to give you a house, or an amount equivalent to the market price of that house, what would you choose? Now, anyone with a head for finance will go for the money. After all, the money can get the house, but it could potentially also get other things. When you get the house, you've already paid the opportunity cost. When you get the money, you haven't. Which means that the money is worth more than the house. So if you really want to make an equitable choice, you have to offer the house, or an amount of money that is not enough to buy the house. Then you'll start to see some people choose the house and some choose the money. Continue to lower the amount of money offered until the split is 50-50, and then you'll know how much money is equivalent to the house.
You want to give people enough money to get them to purchase a certain basic "package", rent and food, but giving them money for rent and food gives them something that is worth more than rent and food. Which you might try to weasel out of by saying "good", but is actually a mess for everyone else because you're creating an even greater distortion. And if you give them an amount that is worth the same as rent and food, then you are not giving them enough to buy rent and food.
What is it, in your view, that makes such a hypothetical structure impossible, unsustainable, coercive or otherwise undesirable?
Well, for starters, that to create it you had to come up with money from somewhere. Considering you're talking about essentially buying a significant portion of all the capital of the nation, you're talking about either confiscatory taxes or massive printing, which leads to massive inflation. Sure, it's nice once it exists, but your hypothetical skips over the important bit: how it gets set up.Look, I live in a country with about 25% to 30% inflation annually. I get that when you have a 2% to 5% inflation, phrases like
amount sufficient to cover the basic costs of living
sound like they make sense. But that amount is a moving target, and the more you try to fix it the worse the situation becomes. You don't fix structural issues like widespread poverty from the bottom up, by handing out money. The best way to fix these issues is by investing in infrastructure, services and such, and by removing as many barriers to entry as possible in every market.
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If you want people to be able to have food, housing, health and such basic requirements, just give them that.
I want people to have the freedom to choose, within a budget sufficient to cover the basics, what kind of basics are most important to them. I am not comfortable with centralizing those choices.
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I take no issue with most of your points. I can see how a reasonable person could have arrived at the positions you express, and I respect them.
I would like to suggest, though, that you spend some time pondering the points you make about the economics of unique and therefore irreplaceable art, and those you make about the economics of unique and therefore irreplaceable people.
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You don't fix structural issues like widespread poverty from the bottom up, by handing out money.
I understand that this approach is largely untested. All I'm saying is, I think it's worth testing. Because we can argue back and forth on it all we like, but the simple fact is that economics as a discipline does not have laws in the same sense that thermodynamics does; much economic reasoning is circular, and nobody really knows what the consequences of changing the ground rules are. The only way to find out is to try doing it and see what happens.
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Well, for starters, that to create it you had to come up with money from somewhere. Considering you're talking about essentially buying a significant portion of all the capital of the nation, you're talking about either confiscatory taxes or massive printing, which leads to massive inflation. Sure, it's nice once it exists, but your hypothetical skips over the important bit: how it gets set up.
Yes it does, and quite deliberately so. I put the hypothetical to get people to think about whether or not an economy that includes a universal basic income must necessarily achieve the required income distribution by coercive means, and whether such an economy could indeed be self-sustaining, based on their understanding of present-day economic structures.
The question of how we get to such a hypothetical economy from the one we have now - or how long that would take, or even if we could - is separate. However, the existence of structures like the Norwegian pension fund suggest that it may already be on the way to happening.
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@Maciejasjmj said:
Fuck aiming for the stars, the future of mankind is screwing around?
Personally, I have aiming for the stars filed pretty firmly under "screwing around". If aiming for the stars is what floats your boat, that's all well and good and I'm happy it makes you happy; I am more interested in exploring ways to live a creative, fulfilling, satisfactory, sustainable life on the perfectly good spaceship we already inhabit.
Do you even know what an idiom is?
@Kian said:
Money is an exchange medium.
Agreed; money itself is pretty much value-neutral.
However, possession of money amounts to social endorsement for decision-making power. The more money I have, the wider is the scope of the decisions I get social licence to make. As I see it, the amount of money a society allocates to an individual is a direct reflection of the extent to which that society recognizes that individual's right to decide what to do with their time.
Yeah, and skilled individuals make more money, thus being more entitled to their time, while those who can't bring in the skills, need to bring in their time. What on earth is wrong with that model?
Now picture a huge hedge fund. It works just like the first one you thought about, except that it's organized as a co-operative: every single citizen is a single-unit shareholder. It controls enough capital, and its managers are skilled enough at investing, that it can consistently pay out in dividends an amount sufficient to cover the basic costs of living for each of its shareholders.
What is it, in your view, that makes such a hypothetical structure impossible, unsustainable, coercive or otherwise undesirable?
Because in a hedge fund, somewhere at the bottom, you have people who do shit and get accordingly paid for it. If you eliminate that from the equation, you're playing with numbers that don't mean shit.
Your "hedge fund" would end up lending money for people to lend money to people who lend them to someone else. But nobody's doing anything to have those money have value, because you're handing them out money for free.
I understand that this approach is largely untested. All I'm saying is, I think it's worth testing.
We did. It was called communism.
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I would like to suggest, though, that you spend some time pondering the points you make about the economics of unique and therefore irreplaceable art, and those you make about the economics of unique and therefore irreplaceable people.
So the real question is: why is unique and irreplaceable art valued but not unique and irreplaceable people? Fix that, and the rest may follow. Just giving them a guaranteed basic income won't by itself fix that.
A good starting point may be examining why the vast majority of people go out of their way to hide their uniqueness.
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I want people to have the freedom to choose, within a budget sufficient to cover the basics, what kind of basics are most important to them. I am not comfortable with centralizing those choices.
If you are given a basic budget, what decisions are open to you? "I will sacrifice housing for more food", "I will sacrifice the food for a better house", "I will sacrifice healthy food for beer". A budget that covers the basics, by definition, leaves you no options. Only the option to choose how to spend wrong. Otherwise, your definition of "covering the basics" is more than covering the basics.I would like to suggest, though, that you spend some time pondering the points you make about the economics of unique and therefore irreplaceable art, and those you make about the economics of unique and therefore irreplaceable people.
The points I made are nearly equivalent, except that I assign people a basic intrinsic worth independent of how other people value them. Unique art is solely valuable depending on how other people value it. My point, however, is that money is a way to get other people to do things for you. If you haven't done things for other people that they value, why do you have the right to get them to do things for you?@flabdablet said:
No, communism would mean no one owns anything. Giving money to the poor so they fix things themselves is commonly done by populism, because it gets votes but doesn't actually fix the problems of most people. It does, however, lead to inflation (which they of course claim is done by the companies, not the massive printing to cover the huge deficit from giving money away).I understand that this approach is largely untested. All I'm saying is, I think it's worth testing.
We did. It was called communism.I'll concede it hasn't been done by people who aren't also ridiculously corrupt, as far as I know.
The question of how we get to such a hypothetical economy from the one we have now - or how long that would take, or even if we could - is separate.
No its not. How you get to that point is fundamental to the question of whether it is sustainable or if it can be achieved in the first place. Hedge-funds work the way they do because they are relatively small and have few beneficiaries. You can't just say "come up with a hedge-fund that is massive and has everyone as a beneficiary" and expect to be able to make any meaningful parallels.Or to put it another way: an ant can lift several times it's own weight. Would a 10 m tall ant be able to lift buildings? The answer is no, a 10 m tall ant would collapse under it's own weight because keratin (the stuff their exoskeleton is made of) can't hold up when you increase mass cubically but cross section cuadratically. Also it would asphyxiate because their respiratory system depends on air traveling through tubules into their bodies, but it doesn't work when the distances are large. It's why in previous time periods, when the oxygen concentration in the air was higher, insects got bigger. Ants have the properties they have BECAUSE they are the size they are. You can't make them bigger and extrapolate.
Similarly, you can't alter the fundamental variables of hedge-funds and expect them to work the same way.
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Henry Ford understood this principle, and paid his employees accordingly.
Found an article in reaction to someone proposing UBI and using Henry Ford as justification:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/419128/imaginary-economics-henry-ford-kevin-d-williamsonIt's not long, but here are a couple of on point excerpts:
The lesson has not been forgotten, because it was never learned—because it is not a lesson. Ford didn’t exactly double the wages of his workers, but he did institute a bonus program that effectively doubled the salary for workers who satisfied the conditions, which were invasive and paternalistic: They were expected to submit to inspections to ensure that they did not drink or gamble, that their wives did not work outside the home, that they were properly Americanizing themselves if they were immigrants, etc. Ford had a turnover problem—it was a tough place to work—and excessive turnover lowers productivity and profits, in no small part because of the need to train new hires.
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The self-financing pay hike represents an especially illiterate and annoying species of magical thinking. The only way to make a society wealthier is to make it wealthier, i.e. to produce more goods and services. Even assuming that government (or the Ford Motor Company) can stimulate demand in an effective and predictable way, demand does not magic automobiles into existence. Nor does it magic cantaloupes, sofa sectionals, skateboards, or self-contained wind-powered camping capsules into existence. Demand won’t clean a house, rebuild a transmission, mow the grass, or pick the cotton.
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What is it, in your view, that makes such a hypothetical structure impossible, unsustainable, coercive or otherwise undesirable?
A hedge fund (or mutual fund or whatever) exists to provide capital to finance things people want to do. I see no problem with people letting others use their capital for a fee (or some possibility of a gain, however that happens). Many people can't see any value in jobs like stockbroker because they aren't producing anything themselves. But this is incorrect as they facilitate liquidity in the market that makes it easier for people to lend out / invest their capital which makes everything work better over all.
I have no problem with people banding their capital together like that. Go for it. One flaw is that most people will probably not be contributing so much that their share produces a return that they could live off of, unless we're talking about only really rich people to begin with, but we kind of already have that with existing funds, so I don't think it's germane.
If you can convince people to accept a very small return on their capital in order to fund the other people, then great. Again, go for it.
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However, the existence of structures like the Norwegian pension fund suggest that it may already be on the way to happening.
So: Have relatively easy access to a valuable and easily transported commodity far out of proportion with its global demand with respect to your local population.
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So the real question is: why is unique and irreplaceable art valued but not unique and irreplaceable people?
The answer in the US is: the 13th Amendment.
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Or is this now the "baw i can't spout my socially unacceptable feelings anywhere anymore, why cant someone force these businesses to agree to support my personal morals" topic?
Somewhat related:
http://popehat.com/2015/06/10/two-kinds-of-freedom-of-speech-or-strangeloop-vs-curtis-yarvin/
@Clark said:
tl;dr
The legal right of free speech is important and worth defending.
The culture of free speech is important and worth defending.
We all profit in the long term if we tolerate – and even encourage – speech that we disagree with.
We all profit in the long term if we tolerate – and even encourage – non-disagreeable speech from people that we dislike for other reasons.
Tolerating everything except the outgroup is no sort of tolerance at all.
It is valid to use cultural means (e.g. this blog post) to pressure people and groups (e.g. Strangeloop) to advance from the Dark Ages to the futuristic year 1650 and accept Enlightenment ideas.
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Also somewhat related:
Fred Phelps is a free man, so if you think your freedom is going to be restricted, you must be planning to outdo Fred Phelps.
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Though recent court decisions seem to have proven that post to be incorrect.
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I suppose if you're willing to print out stupid cardboard signs and go out on a hot sweaty day and remain within a public space (within a "free speech" zone, of course), your "free speech rights" will be guaranteed. Yay!
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Though recent court decisions seem to have proven that post to be incorrect.
I thought Phelps' subsequent death would have proven the first clause quoted to be incorrect...
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@boomzilla said:
Though recent court decisions seem to have proven that post to be incorrect.
I thought Phelps' subsequent death would have proven the first clause quoted to be incorrect...
Pretty free. No one can make him do anything anymore.
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state financed housing.
Not at all what you were proposing, but I was just reading...
Feds making affordable housing more unaffordable to taxpayers
With wealth moving back downtown, the Obama Administration is working on how to get poor inner city blacks to move to the suburbs. Two, three, many Fergusons! In the name of racial justice, of course. From the NYT: Vouchers Help Families Move Far From Public Housing By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM JULY 7,...
Housing vouchers were created in the 1970s to help poor families and their children escape public housing, but they largely failed to improve the prospects for their recipients. Many of the 2.2 million households that are receiving them at any given moment, particularly minorities, remain clustered in low-income neighborhoods in what amount to virtual housing projects.
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This is an alright change, I guess.
One Cheer For Fred Phelps
