Arguments like this assume you can change one thing and society won't change around it. With a basic guarantee many people who are marginally employed would stop working. You'd have two classes of citizens: the workers and those who are effectively parasites off of the workers. I don't like people being poor but society is just not wealthy for poverty to disappear. The said a person living in poverty is probably better off than all the but the richest people at any time in human history. Part of the issue is that we lack an understanding of poverty and what actually causes people to not be in poverty. Considering that in human history poverty has always been the norm it makes sense to look at what causes poverty to not be the norm first before moving onto just "fixing" it.
>With a basic guarantee many people who are marginally employed would stop working.
I believe with basic guarantee many people who are unemployed would start working. Social security in many countries mean that it's rational to either work many hours per week or work zero hours per week. Basic income means that every hour worked or dollar earned increases your standard of living, thus creating a higher incentive to work.
>You'd have two classes of citizens: the workers and those who are effectively parasites off of the workers. I don't like people being poor but society is just not wealthy for poverty to disappear.
There are countries like Finland with a social security guarantee. You can pretty much refuse to work and get $1000/month as a social security (though there are details and sanctions which make this more complex in reality). Anyway, the point is this: in Finland you can already be a "parasite" and some people do that.
Finland doesn't have a basic income guarantee. We also have a system where living on basic social security (toimeentulotuki) working 5 hours per week doesn't really make sense. The effective tax rate for working only a little is 90-100%. If you make 100 euros per week, the social security is decreased by 100 euros. With basic income the effective tax rate would be 20-30%, so working would make sense.
In Finland you pretty much have either full-time/part-time workers (20+ hours) or people who are completely unemployed.
Why should a citizen living on basic income would want to work? To get paid more.
An unemployed person living on $1000/month basic income can increase his or her standard of living substantially by getting paid $200/month more. If someone is working full time and getting paid $3000/month, a $200 increase per month has a lesser increase in standard of living.
The current social security system has an incentive to be completely unemployed. Basic income means that it makes sense to work 1 hours, 2 hours, 5 hours, 10hours, 20 hours or 40 hours per week. All different kinds of working situations are naturally covered under basic income guarantee.
>I believe with basic guarantee many people who are unemployed would start working. Social security in many countries mean that it's rational to either work many hours per week or work zero hours per week. Basic income means that every hour worked or dollar earned increases your standard of living, thus creating a higher incentive to work.
I am what in the US you would consider a "strong libertarian" - and I would say, I would be in favor of instituting a basic income if we got rid of the minimum wage.
A basic income would hardly be libertarian. Although I also tend to libertarian, I do see a role for government in addressing cases of market failure, or where the market fails to meet certain moral standards. An example would be if somebody working in the best job they can find doesn't earn enough to pay for basic accommodation and food. The government would provide the safety net in this case. However there must still be some incentive for people in this situation to try and find better work (or perhaps move to a better location). Otherwise, you have people simply taking whatever job they find the most enjoyable, living off the government subsidy, and leaving other less desirable jobs unfilled(paying slightly better, so according to the market more important, but leaving the employee no better off due to the government subsidy.)
It's particularly silly with the current system that you can legally work for nothing, be a volunteer or an unpaid intern, but you can't work for $1 per hour. If you make low paid work illegal, you make the low paid unemployed.
Perhaps some day all of this "scarcity economics" will be moot, if we could invent the star-trek style replicator, I suspect "work" would move to a volunteer model.
> Otherwise, you have people simply taking whatever job they find the most enjoyable, living off the government subsidy, and leaving other less desirable jobs unfilled
What's wrong with this, honestly? If less desirable jobs go unfilled, I'd expect that people would find ways to mitigate the need for human beings in those jobs. Let's let the market figure out what those jobs are and if we can do such mitigation. That seems preferable to the current situation, where people such as yourself say that we need people to be placed into explicitly undesirable positions.
Let's actually see this problem before we anticipate it.
> Let's actually see this problem before we anticipate it.
The problem has always existed. It's the reason that people need to be paid for most jobs, since they won't do them just for fun. If people know that they'll be paid a decent amount for doing any job at all, then there will be a lot of recreational activities which are thinly disguised to look like jobs.
That's why it's an income guarantee - so you don't have to invent an activity that looks like work in order to receive money.
So in your case under a BIG, they would get some money and pursue leisurly activities. This in contrast to someone doing a task that needs to be done (say dispose of garbage), who would get some money from the BIG and a substantially bigger sum in actual wage. The service (getting your garbage disposed) would have to be priced accordingly.
Some activities (such as musicians) would be a gray area, but it's not a problem - people can make music and if someone buys it the musicians get extra income.
If there are services needed which are very unappealing, they will be priced high. Also, the incentive to automate them (and thus reduce human suffering) will be high as well.
These sort of pensions are already available to some people, in some countries (typically the elderly and the disabled). However governments are struggling to pay for them, and the eligibility criteria tend to get tightened (in my country, the old-age pension age will increase to 67). I don't see how they could be expanded to the entire population without destroying the governments' budget, and if they tried to raise such massive sums through taxation, destroying the economy too (and causing massive flight of the wealthy to lower-taxing countries.)
The availability of BIG to people who don't actually need it is about the principle of BIG: that it doesn't care who you are. I'd find it interesting to consider how we might let people decline their BIG stipend in return for... something.
> I'd find it interesting to consider how we might let people decline their BIG stipend in return for... something.
Why would we do that? We could instead just sell the
"something", which has the same effect, without defeating the point of BIG by complicating the BIG administration.
> It's the reason that people need to be paid for most jobs, since they won't do them just for fun.
There's a huge difference between (a) not being interested in doing a job, but doing it because you're getting money for it and (b) not being interested in working and doing it because you're getting money for it.
A basic income is libertarian in that it allows individuals to actually participate in the free market as rational actors, and puts control over use into the hands of many individuals instead of in the hands of the government.
I think eliminating the minimum wage is reasonable combined with a guaranteed stipend. However, I think you will find that "undesirable" jobs are (rightfully) paid quite well. Possibly even better than now since this system would better balance the power between employers and employees.
I am what most would call a conservative and if what was being offered was a complete elimination of all social services, entitlements, and government largess, then count me in.
I would much rather a BI than having this menacingly powerful centralized vote buying machine.
Under-the-table arrangements are like the majority of BitTorrent traffic, economies that occur despite rules because there is net utility. People still pay taxes and still license (not own) retail movies.
In reality I think you'd see people moving from collecting social security/SSDI/etc. and getting paid in cash under the table to collecting BI and working in licit jobs and paying some taxes/having some employment protections.
You might also lose some people who "can't work" for economic reasons of UI/SSDI/etc. and volunteer instead to the paid workforce.
> Why should a citizen living on basic income would want to work? To get paid more.
What in the case that the person doesn't want to get paid more? They can live comfortably enough on what is given to them and value the free time more than the extra money.
Essentially, by keeping the basic income guarantee sufficiently low that most people don't want to do that. Note that having everyone want to work is not necessary or even necessarily desirable, you just need to be able to maintain a low enough dependency ratio that the working people don't have to sacrifice much more than what they gain from such system.
I personally think that the employment market for next few decades will continue to be characterized by endemic structural unemployment. We will continue to destroy jobs faster than they are created, through automation and efficiency improvements. What's going away especially quickly are the "middle-difficulty" kind of jobs -- between highly trained specialists and burger flippers. For a simple example, self-driving cars will soon revolutionize long-distance trucking. They won't eliminate the jobs completely, but they will significantly reduce their number. There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the USA. How do you retrain a 55-year old truck driver to be a software engineer? If you can't, should he go work at Burger King for a much lower wage instead? Maybe as a society we could just allow people like him the possibility of not working at that point?
> Essentially, by keeping the basic income guarantee sufficiently low that most people don't want to do that.
Which, it should be noted, it is pretty much economically impossible not to do except in the very short term, barring vast increases in productivity (or decreases in people's expectations of acceptable living standards.)
> There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the USA. How do you retrain a 55-year old truck driver to be a software engineer? If you can't, should he go work at Burger King for a much lower wage instead?
And, even if you can, how do you do it when he still needs to work full-time to pay his existing bills?
Right now the people who don't want to work cost us a lot of money, a large fraction of which doesn't even go to them.
To a certain degree, I see it like the war on drugs. Yes, ending the war on drugs will increase drug usage, but not as much as many people think, and the costs of dealing with that will be less than the costs we spend on prohibition.
Having some of that happen is a non-problem. It's a post-unskilled-jobs world. There are only a few workable solutions: A shorter work week, mincome, or some combination.
Some people get offended by mincome because it means someone with lower qualifications for work gets to enjoy leisure. They should get over it.
Speaking as one who could live comfortably off a Basic Income of $1,000/month (Which would be 2,000/month for my family- wife and myself and our 1 year old): If this plan were implemented, I would likely do a few things with my new found free time:
1) Develop more open source software
2) Work on my small 4.5 acre farm, growing produce to sell to locals for extra cash.
3) Spend more time helping other people with their needs and wants.
4) Do more substitute teaching, perhaps volunteering to teach a programming class or similar.
While most of the time I would not be earning any significatn income from these activities, I think the societal benefits would far outweigh the cost of providing the Basic Income.
> What in the case that the person doesn't want to get paid more? They can live comfortably enough on what is given to them and value the free time more than the extra money.
And...so, what's the problem with this?
> What would be the way to deal with this?
Why would you want to deal with this? That's a feature, not a bug.
You're assuming that the goal of a social safety net is to avoid or eliminate parasitic behaviour. I would suggest that reducing parasitism to zero is not possible. In fact the nature of any wealth transfer system is that some people will be drawing more out of it than they contribute.
One political problem with welfare schemes is getting over the psychological hurdle that hard-working people are funding welfare abusers. I, for one, do not care if there are a few egregious abusers if the overall system is cost-effective.
Focusing on eliminating parasitism leads to wasting even more money on administration, e.g. drug testing for welfare recipients.
A similar analogy that occurs to me is the justice system. Yes, there will be guilty criminals who walk free of a innocent-until-proven-guilty, trial-by-jury-of-your-peers justice system. The alternative is convincingly worse enough that we accept the false negatives and outliers of the system that protects us.
In this case, letting millions suffer in poverty with real effects of poor healthcare (instead of investing in preventative care), restricted access to better opportunities for themselves and their children seems thoroughly worse than accepting the outlier "parasites."
I am of the belief that given the foundations of Maslow's hierarchy and a real education, many of those "parasites" with limited opportunities can be changed into people who feel they have a chance and pursue "self actualization." Poverty is a vicious cycle; it's hard to be ambitious in a "i want to change the world" way when you have no choice but to take whatever you can to support your family on minimum wage.
I agree completely that instead of throwing money at administrative peripheral problems like eliminating any parasitism, we should address the root problem.
Overall, people living in poverty do not have the same opportunities as the wealthy. Given the same opportunities there is no reason that they would not pursue the same "worthier" career aspirations. The assumption that poor people are parasites is the most colossal example of Fundamental Attribution Error[1] I can think of.
> Overall, people living in poverty do not have the same opportunities as the wealthy.
This is the basic issue every argument against any social program needs to address.
The last time basic income came up I saw a poster strawmanning it by claiming that the "producers" would be financing everyone else to have daily parties. Actually nobody is suggesting that we give enough money for people to throw parties every day. The suggestion is to give people enough money to survive in a way that eliminates government waste on the program. Then we will see what sort of jobs or tasks they create for themselves. The majority will not be content to watch TV all day.
I wonder how many of the people who argue against a basic income because of parasitic behavior also argue against paying people for work for the same reason. Paid labor has unbelievable amounts of abuse, yet we go on.
You are obviously right, but it doesn't contribute to a solution of the political problem.
Today, means-tested aid receives a huge amount of criticism about supposed "leechers", even though abuse is basically a rounding error, and the vast majority of recipients are not at fault for their situation.
Imagine how much worse the criticism could get when there really are leechers because leeching is officially approved.
So no matter how nice a BIG is, I often wish that at least part of the massive amount of political energy spent on promoting it would instead be targeted towards poverty-reducing and power-shifting policies that have a higher chance of being implemented and remaining implemented.
Here's the problem with your analysis: Just because someone doesn't have a job, doesn't make them a parasite. Here's an example, a granddaughter who lives with and helps take care of her poor grandmother who has Alzheimer's. In her spare time she does sonogram analysis to determine the sex of babies for newly pregnant mothers (Yes, this does exist.) But there is no money in any of this, even though she provides a service to society. Give it some thought and you can realize there are many variations on this. The problem with capital-driven society is that it only values a narrow range of activities that have high rates of money exchange. But there are many things in life worth doing, indeed that need to be done, that do not.
The "parasite" in your story is actually the grandmother. Realizing that the system having "parasites" is not avoidable and is not a moral failing is huge.
Ignoring for the moment the argument that the grandmother may well have paid a load of taxes before getting alzheimers, one thing that would seem fundamental is that the grandmother gave birth to a parent of the carer, without which the carer would not have existed at all, so how can the grandmother be considered a parasite?
"Parasite" is kind of a charged word. Trying to reinvent it as something OK is walking blithely into doublespeak territory. If you feel you need to redeem it, then okay, but I'm not seeing your reasons for wanting to.
Except your granddaughter isn't providing services to society. She's providing one service to her grandmother, as a family member (which could almost be seen as repaying a debt). The other service she's providing is the equivalent of a hobby: if it was valuable enough to other people to be considered a "service to society," then she could be getting paid for it.
> Except your granddaughter isn't providing services to society.
I think it's arguable that she does. By doing what she does she relieves the system from taking care of her grandmother, and thereby making whatever small amount of taxpayer money usable for something else meanwhile taking that economic burden on herself.
(Edit: It can of course be seen that whatever wellfare money she gets is the equivalent of her service to grandmother/society, but in that case it's still at worst a zero sum scenario.)
It's a service to society if the grandmother would otherwise be taken care of by the government (at enormous expense probably)
I can imagine other fulfilling activities like helping less fortunate people get back on their feet, which could provide a giant boost to the economy but aren't really directly profitable (as the poor have no money)
Forget society, she's doing a service to ME. Why? Because if all else failed and her grandmother were dying in the street in front of me, I would feel a moral, ethical, and emotional obligation to assume her care. I would rather pay in to BI, if that worked to remove this scenario from possible things that might happen. That's my personal felling about it, without parsing all the possible socioeconomic ramifications.
But why should your personal moral dilemma define legislation for all citizens across the country? I have an issue with "it makes ME feel bad, therefore make it law." You can use the same basic argument against gay marriage.
Regardless, the grandma won't be doing in the street without BI, just like she isn't now. I'm not arguing against providing care for the elderly. I'm just saying that if a single individual chooses to spend her life caring for another single individual, maybe that person isn't performing a service to society. Maybe she's performing a service to her grandma, and nobody else.
And hence "society". Social costs and benefits (also known as "externalities") are simply costs and benefits to anyone outside of the decision to engage in a excahnge.
Look HN, I understand that people disagree. That's the point of this site, right? If you don't like what I said, let's talk about it. Down voting opinions you don't agree with seems childish at best.
If she's doing something she could be getting paid for bit she's not charging, then society definitely should not have to pick up the bill. That's just unfair.
The U.S. doesn't have much real poverty, at least as long as you leave out people with mental illness or veterans with psychological issues.
Bottom decile personal income in U.S. is above $5,000 which puts people in that bracket above the median person in Mexico and not terrible far below the median person in Poland: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/04/median-earnings-hi... (note the chart is in PPP-adjusted dollars).
Poverty in the U.S. means subsidized housing, terrible schools, food stamps, etc. But survival is guaranteed.
So the issue with basic income is not eliminating poverty. It's about changing the mechanism by which we have eliminated poverty.
Just because many people are in extreme poverty doesn't mean that the US doesn't have "real" poverty.
Also poverty is more or less defined in the society in which it happens. And the "standards" for not being poor in the US is not met in a lot of cases.
Your question is like saying "if you define green as the colour of grass, how can you make grass yellow?"
If you take a sensible real-world definition of the poverty threshold, such as "earning less than 60% of the median full-time wage", then you can do so by pegging the BIG to 60% of the median full-time wage.
The use of a quick percentage is used for policy as it is easy to put figures to, however it is being used as a measurable indicator for a deeper definition.
If you do not have people living hand to mouth in your society, then you have got rid of poverty, until then it helps to have some quick and dirty economics to work out where to direct your efforts.
The USA poverty line is some 20x world median income.
If you're making more than twenty times what the top of half the people on the planet are, you're not poor. That other people in your vicinity make more than you does not make you poor.
Quote: "The median of a finite list of numbers can be found by arranging all the observations from lowest value to highest value and picking the middle one"
Therefore the USA poverty line is not 20x the world median income, because the world median income is roughly half of Bill Gates' income. (Technically it's (H-L)/2 + L, where H = highest income, L = lowest income.)
> If you're making more than twenty times what the top of half the people on the planet are ...
Wait, that's not the median, that's the average (or mean). They're not the same. In a symmetrical distribution, the mean and median are the same, but most distributions aren't symmetrical. Personal incomes are most certainly not symmetrical, anywhere in the world.
So when specifying median or average, be sure you know the difference.
> The median is not found by (H-L)/2+L. Read that Wikipedia entry again.
I really did read it, but I managed to take it to mean the midpoint of the range, all evidence to the contrary. It seems I tripped on the words "middle value", which is ambiguous.
Yeah! Modes of centrality can mean lots of things. It's why it can be so frustrating when media folks casually toss out "average" for long-tailed things that require way more specificity.
I think you should be using average or mean, in particular because you're comparing a median to a mean (the U.S. poverty level). What's the point of choosing the middle value in a billion income figures when the average produces a more meaningful result? Just look for the point on the distribution that has a first derivative of zero.
I'm not sure you want to get my point. I'm sure I do want the median: if half the people on the planet are doing much worse than you, then the term poor doesn't apply ... yet the term "poor" keeps getting revised upwards into historical levels of luxury.
If you're at the USA "poverty line", you are doing better than 87% of people on the planet. That. Is. Not. Poor.
All valid points, but you were comparing a world median with a U.S. average. Surely comparing two medians (or two averages) would be more appropriate. For example, one could establish a median "poverty level" representing the point below which 25% of Americans fall (or another percentage on which people agree). That might be more enlightening.
It would be interesting to know how many Americans fall above and below the average represented by the poverty threshold, i.e. using a straightforward count -- more in keeping with using a median measure.
> yet the term "poor" keeps getting revised upwards into historical levels of luxury.
I agree with that point, entirely. I also think it's bizarre that so many people end up being defined by absence of an arbitrary property -- homeless person, childless couple, unemployed worker -- which to me seems an underhanded way to enforce social conformity.
"you were comparing a world median with a U.S. average."
No, I was comparing to the official legal definition of "poverty line".
My gripe is that in all this talk about "poverty", either nobody defines it or they define it upwards to rediculous. If someone earns more than 87% of everyone on the planet and is still deemed "poor" then the definition of "poor" is absurd.
Interestingly, your other argument does apply here.
It's inappropriate to use the mean for world average income because it's inflated by very high earners. Very high earners (outliers) have a disproportionate effect on the mean that makes it unrepresentative.
Imagine if salaries were ${1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1000000}
Then the mean average would be $200000 - but you could not claim this represents most people.
The median is $1, which is more fairly representative.
As with any skewed distribution, the standard way to measure average income is by using the median.
There is broad agreement in official figures to use the median.
The BBC article is wrong to use the mean: the journalist appears to be confused in comparing the mean (which she calculates) to the median (standard published figure) and then claiming the difference results from patchy stats.
You can have A/C, cable TV, meals, and still have a totally unstable housing situation, unable to maintain personal property over the long-term... Sorry but just because TV is cheap doesn't mean poverty is eliminated. Keep an eye on the rent checks.
Relative poverty is still poverty. If you can't improve your lot in life because you don't have the resources, you're impoverished even if you're objectively better-off than someone rotting on the streets of Somalia.
Such poverty isn't necessarily a problem though. I live in relative poverty compared to most people in my city. Basically all I spend money on is rent (of a cheap apartment), food, electricity, and Internet. Yet I find this lifestyle quite acceptable, and a good trade-off as I can avoid the need to work. What do I care if my neighbours are wasting a fortune on cars, boats and overseas travel?
Yes, but can you advance or are you hamstrung by living hand-to-mouth?
If you felt you had to get an advanced degree to get a better job, is that an option or would you be economically devastated by working fewer hours to fit schoolwork in?
If you had to move to a different city, is that an option for you? Would you be homeless when you got there?
If you got seriously ill, is that it for you? Could you recover economically?
In short: Relative poverty the way I used the term involves running as fast as you can just to stay in the same place. Advancement is impossible. Any major disaster sinks you.
You are still talking about absolute poverty, not relative poverty. If somebody got seriously ill and could no longer afford food, for example, then that's not just relative poverty, they actually have a serious problem.
As for "running as fast as you can just to stay in the same place", well that depends. Why would I need to advance? I already have everything I need. I don't work at all, and disasters aren't likely to be much of a problem since I don't have a lot of expensive assets to lose. If I ever need healthcare I can use a government scheme (I don't live in the USA btw). So in this regard, you could say my lifestyle is partly subsidised by the government.
Given that the experience disutility of poverty seems to be driven more by relative deprivation than absolute deprivation, its arguably that relative poverty is actually the more important kind to address, from a utilitarian perspective.
The problem is that this is comparing apples to oranges.
Things also cost more in the US than in many places with lower incomes, so it's not fair to say "But people in country x make lots less money, so our poor people aren't /real/ poor people."
Beyond this most social programs people mention are harder the be eligible for than one might think. The only thing that pretty much any US citizen will be consistently eligible for if they have a low enough income is food stamps. Most other programs require having kids or a disability to be eligible for.
And to be poor enough to get much out of food stamps, you're likely to be in a situation where you're struggling to afford a place to live and associated costs, even with food stamps factored in.
You know, you call them 'parasites' but it could be argued, firstly, that spending their 'free' cash is the service rendered (think utility functions: do you trust "average joe" or bureaucrats to be more effecient spenders of tax dollars?). Also, by giving these people basic income, you allow these families to build their own lineage and estate: over generations, families will be less likely to fall through the cracks, and thus can start producing "useful" members of society.
Parasites you might call them, but they can be producing something even in this state.
>do you trust "average joe" or bureaucrats to be more effecient spenders of tax dollars?
This is an excellent point. Even when one points to the dregs of society, those people are likely to spend their 'free' money in a way that is beneficial to me, by spending at local businesses.
It's not unlike how you get to use Facebook "for free", but in reality you're feeding them information.
Guaranteed Minimum Income could be seen as a way to ensuring everyone is able to express their purchasing desires with less distortion from necessity, and that you're paying them for that "social service".
I think it'd be an interesting philosophical exercise to posit that we sell Facebook data traces about ourselves in return for easy access to data traces about others. What would that really mean, and what moral or economic consequences can be concluded from that?
Thank you. People live in poverty because they don't know how to not live in poverty. We think we can buy our way out of the problem by providing housing, foodstamps, welfare (or, as proposed, scrapping all those things and providing a "basic income") but all this really does is make poverty a bit more comfortable without actually teaching those in poverty that everything they know about how to live is wrong and counterproductive and contrasting that with what works.
From the article: A Basic Income Guarantee would establish economic security as a universal right. It gives each of us the assurance that, no matter what happens, we won’t go hungry.
I don't see that it provides that guarantee at all. It doesn't mandate that the money be spent on food, housing, or anything sensible. One of the things that people in living in long-term (generational) poverty tend to do is to immediately spend any money they get on "escaping" the drudgery of their survival, e.g. on alcohol or drugs, flashy jewelry or clothing, gambling or other entertainment. It simply doesn't occur to them that money can be managed, invested, or saved. If you don't break this way of looking at life, then the money will be gone in a week or two (or less) and they'll struggle for the rest of the month until the next payday comes, and repeat the cycle again.
[Edit: Cite for my last paragraph: A Framework For Understanding Poverty, Ruby K. Payne]
When you work for 7.75 an hour to support a family, you don't have enough money to "manage," much less gamble or buy jewelry. That's what it means to be working poor. I don't think you could hack that.
The main value one receives from buying a lottery ticket is not the statistical expected value of return on investment, but the sense of hope for a better life that you get when you but the ticket. This hope is much more valuable for someone struggling with poverty than for someone who's relatively well off.
Therefore, it's perfectly rational for poor people to put a higher dollar value on a lottery ticket.
His point wasn't that it was funny, it was that the parent was making a poor argument. And he's right. If you spend any time at all around people working low/minimum wage jobs, you'll see that many of them spend money on non-essential things: alcohol, tobacco, lottery tickets, drugs, expensive cell phones, renting stereos and TVs, etc.
My mom spent many years working with low-income families as a social worker. She told me repeatedly that many of these families just lack the basic skills of managing money. If they had $40 a week left after paying all their bills, they see nothing wrong with spending $30 of that on cigarettes and beer.
Yeah, if they took that $40 / week and invested it in an index fund with a 7% after-expenses return, then after 47 years of working from age 18 through age 65, they'd have an inflation-adjusted $185,000. Combined with Social Security, that would provide them almost $20,000 / year to retire on.
But humans aren't just satisfied with being alive. They all have hopes and dreams; they have needs, sure, but also wants. We need food but we also need some pride. It may not make sense to you, it may not seem logical, but it's human. Lottery tickets are a way to have hope: that it's going to be ok one day, better than ok. A smart phone says, I may be cleaning toilets but that's not who I am.
If you spent a year or more working a minimum wage job and living off of it, you too would start to do some of this. It's just human nature.
The problem with poverty is often not that you have no excess income, but that you have so little (or should have none, but sacrifice some food to have some) that you're exhausted and can't help but want what little luxury you can afford.
It's easy to say that if someone was better disciplined they could save what little extra they have and make something of it in the long run, but it's very different to actually be in that situation and have the resolve to do that.
You can be smart enough to know you're being irresponsible and keep doing it, which just makes it that much more painful, but many aren't even smart enough to be aware of this.
This does not mean that giving people in this situation additional means would always be a total waste; often, people just want/need a certain baseline, and beyond that will use additional means to lift themselves up.
Sure, these are common values. But damaging values. When people learn to defer things for future gains, they get the chance to improve their lot in life, or the lot of their children. But blowing it all on lotto tickets with a pack of cigs and a forty isn't doing anyone any good.
One idea I've casually pondered is if things would be better if you had a card that got a daily, or even hourly top up, instead of the status quo of a monthly top up. Bills would have to be similarly broken up into continuous payment, or some people might not be able to save up enough continuous income to pay them.
I think it at least sounds possible that it could shift people to a more even expenditure rate instead of the rich for a week, starve for three, some people lead.
You talk about poor people as if they are a different kind of human being from "normal" people.
In fact, 80% of USA citizens are poor at _some_ point in their life. _Most_ people experience poverty. It's not necessarily because they "don't know how" to be anything but poor. (Often it's a result of becoming too old to work.)
Agree with first paragraph a hundred percent. How can we teach those in poverty that the way they live their lives is counter productive? The politics have to get out of the damn way or it will never happen.
It's likely that job-sharing would increase. Instead of one unemployed person and one 'full-time' waiter, you'd have two part-time waiters. Waiting being a menial job that's not awesome, but is easy to pick up and easy to manage when it's only a couple of shifts per week. The focus would have shifted from "I must do all this to survive" to "a bit of extra money on top"
> Considering that in human history poverty has always been the norm it makes sense to look at what causes poverty to not be the norm first before moving onto just "fixing" it.
"When I give the poor bread, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist."
> With a basic guarantee many people who are marginally employed would stop working. You'd have two classes of citizens: the workers and those who are effectively parasites off of the workers.
> With a basic guarantee many people who are marginally employed would stop working.
So what?
> You'd have two classes of citizens: the workers and those who are effectively parasites off of the workers.
We already have that; the latter class is called "capitalists". With a BIG, the public commons become an equally-owned, dividend-paying asset, which in effect makes everyone at least a very-small-scale capitalist.
> I don't like people being poor but society is just not wealthy for poverty to disappear.
Reducing the necessity of continuous wage labor for those without large personal fortunes increases labor market mobility, opportunities to explore higher-risk, higher-potential return activities, and opportunities for job retraining for better fit to changing markets.
Yes, a cost of that is that some people will opt-out of work without engaging in even potentially socially-useful activities, but this is to an extent self-limiting (the more people do it, no matter the nominal level of the BIG, the less goods and services the BIG will suffice to purchase, so that the more people that opt out, the less attractive opting-out becomes.)
> Part of the issue is that we lack an understanding of poverty and what actually causes people to not be in poverty.
We actually understand poverty quite well, and understand very well that the combination of limited goods and inequality in the distribution of goods cause people to be in poverty. What we don't have is a mechanism that works with human nature to encourage enough production and equal-enough distribution of goods to eliminate poverty, and BIG isn't, itself, intended to be a solution to that. Its mostly a self-regulating partial solution on the distribution side, since, as productivity increases, the sustainable minimum level under the BIG increases as well.
