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On September 29 2016 04:31 TheDwf wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2016 04:07 Sent. wrote:
Do you guys think universal income can bring back housewives? Since you seem to be Polish, what's happening with the anti-abortion law in your country? Where does it come from and what are the reactions in the society?
It comes from citizens' initiative, not straight from the ruling party (PiS, or Law and Justice). The party made a promise to give a full legislative procedure to all initiatives like this one instead of just rejecting them at first opportunity. It comes from hardcore Catholics who obviously are the core of PiS voter base.
However PiS leadership also understands that most Poles don't want to change our abortion laws (as in no liberalization or tightening, just leave it as it now). PiS won the vote to proceed that law further but they said that there will be no party disciplne in the final voting (each MP can vote his conscience) and that the party leadership is against that law. So unless the MPs are more radical than the leadership, which is unlikely but not impossible, the anti-abortion law will not be enacted.
Last thing I want to mention is that even though most of us are pro abortion, we have relatively low voter turnouts (barely 50% in last parliamentary elections). People who are against abortion are more likely to vote which means their opinions are more "important". I think it's noteworthy because it forces PiS to constantly choose between pleasing their radical base and people who may or may not vote in the next elections.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On September 29 2016 04:07 Sent. wrote:
Do you guys think universal income can bring back housewives?
No, because it's not that much money. Job stability and a societal arrangement that lends itself better to families would, however, help with that. Too many families don't have that arrangement simply because the job stability for the husband isn't there.
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On September 29 2016 04:07 Sent. wrote:
Do you guys think universal income can bring back housewives?
Assuming it's on a per person rather than per household basis, it might be able to in some circumstances. $1200 a month in additional income is basically a full time minimum wage job in the US.
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On September 29 2016 04:13 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2016 03:59 RvB wrote:On September 29 2016 03:01 LegalLord wrote:On September 29 2016 01:24 RvB wrote:On September 29 2016 00:38 LegalLord wrote:
There are also people (troika etc) who loan out money to governments which are obviously incapable of using that money responsibly, see that money evaporate without ever being used for its intended purpose (government-funded economic development), and then use that debt as leverage to force said government to create structural adjustments (which damage the population) to restructure the country around debt repayments.
In other words, predatory lending. The money was loaned out to prevent bankruptcy. And the whole point of the structural adjustments is that it makes the country able to service the debt in the future and makes it economically stronger in the long term. It would have happened that way if not for the inability to to implement the reforms and all the political fighting. It has worked in other countries so no it's not predatory lending. The criticism I mentioned was actually originally applied to IMF loans in Africa, though Greece isn't a bad example either. Structural adjustments are about making nations more able to service the debt, though the long term economic benefits are disputable. Lending to a country with an unstable political situation is a bad risk that no honest profit-driven entity would ever approve. Greece was not a good risk, that much is clear now. Ukraine was an obvious terrible risk and it was plain to see for anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of its political situation (a basket case the magnitude of Greece, but the size of Italy). The international lenders may be obtuse at times but they are not complete idiots, so I'm sure they knew. This suggests ulterior motives, i.e. predatory lending. You were saying the Troika which only acted in Greece. The IMF is supposed to be a lender of last resort for near bankrupt countries. That's their role. So no not predatory lending but yes extremely risky. A wiki search says that's not quite true, that all of the PIIGS countries use that term to refer to their creditors. Nevertheless, I would agree that perhaps I used too specific a term, and I really should have spelled out that I referred to the financial institutions that make up the troika, rather than the collective itself. I think the IMF has certainly done what could qualify as predatory lending. Unviable loans to win control of governments and public assets. Predatory in a government sense, which is not necessarily analogous to the civilian equivalent of the term.
Sorry yes. The troika is the EC, ECB and IMF so it would only be in Europe where they work as a team.
It's not predatory lending. They're high risk loans. Again the whole point is that the countries, in exchange for the loans, fix the underlying structural issues which caused to crisis. Another condition is indeed to provide collateral but that collateral is usually hardly worth a lot anyway. It's more to counter the moral hazard that would exist without any conditionalities on the loans. For low income countries there are also concensional loans for low income countries which bear 0% interest rates for a time not to mention that debt relief from private creditors can be a condition for the loans. There's also no control of governments. They choose to go to the IMF and if they don't like the programme they don't have to follow it. You just won't get a loan either (no shit).
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On September 29 2016 00:04 Velr wrote:
One main benefit would also be... You could scrap like half, if not more, the workforce of the social security agencies. BIG MONEY could be safed.
I doubt it will work, but i sure wish for it to work.
Hardly a benefit. Universal income would be far lower than the salary most public servants get, meaning that you'd be pushing a pay decrease down a lot of public servants' throats, in addition to mass redundancies (in Belgium the number of redundancies would range in the hundreds of thousands).
One thing I hardly see anyone mention with regard to universal income schemes is the inevitable price increases that will occur when many people suddenly has a significantly higher income than they previously had. The risk is then that the divide between people who earn an income in addition to a universal income and those who just have a universal income will be far greater than the divide between rich and poor we have now.
I also doubt that many people would agree to pay close to 65-70% income tax on their pay just to fund universal income schemes. After all, why bother working if you barely take anything home? There's those on the left that romanticise this as saying that one's work will then primarily serve society and that this is reward enough, but most people seem to be of the opinion that there is a limit to the degree other people should be allowed to profit from (or leech off of, depending on your personal convictions) someone else's work.
It's a very complicated topic.
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On September 30 2016 01:30 maartendq wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2016 00:04 Velr wrote:
One main benefit would also be... You could scrap like half, if not more, the workforce of the social security agencies. BIG MONEY could be safed.
I doubt it will work, but i sure wish for it to work. I also doubt that many people would agree to pay close to 65-70% income tax on their pay just to fund universal income schemes. After all, why bother working if you barely take anything home? There's those on the left that romanticise this as saying that one's work will then primarily serve society and that this is reward enough, but most people seem to be of the opinion that there is a limit to the degree other people should be allowed to profit from (or leech off of, depending on your personal convictions) someone else's work.
Because otherwise the poor are going to knock your door in and slaughter you and your family before robbing the shit out of your place.
The biggest reason in favor of UBI as I can see it is the fact that the world population is growing but at the same time the amount of work done by machines is growing as well. There is fewer work that actually requires many human beings. Many will be left without a job because there are no jobs.
Eventually there will be an uprising, a revolution. With UBI the governments may try to keep people just happy enough not to do anything violent.
Not saying I am in favor of UBI. I am undecided. I'd say lets wait for the test results before making hasty decisions.
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There's no limit to jobs. When people are freed up from some form of labour they come up with new forms of labour. Automatisation only displaces labour temporarily. We've had technical revolutions over and over and economies have always returned to normal employment levels.
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Zurich15352 Posts
On September 30 2016 03:11 Nyxisto wrote:
There's no limit to jobs. When people are freed up from some form of labour they come up with new forms of labour. Automatisation only displaces labour temporarily. We've had technical revolutions over and over and economies have always returned to normal employment levels.
That's a fairytale people should really stop believing in.
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How is this a fairy tale? Take a look at technological disruption and the unemployment rate. Every time we eliminated manual labour through some form of productivity gain we created new sectors to work in. That's why most people are still employed. Where does belief enter the equation?
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On September 30 2016 03:14 zatic wrote:Show nested quote +On September 30 2016 03:11 Nyxisto wrote:
There's no limit to jobs. When people are freed up from some form of labour they come up with new forms of labour. Automatisation only displaces labour temporarily. We've had technical revolutions over and over and economies have always returned to normal employment levels. That's a fairytale people should really stop believing in.
It is difficult to make predictions - especially about the future.
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History is no guarantee for the future but is there any reason to believe that this time is different and that what Nyxisto is saying won't happen this time?
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
So could someone link me an argument by an economist of some reputation who makes the case for UBI? I'm sure some of you have that, and it would be helpful since most arguments I've seen come from the leftist "idealists" without any common sense for policy.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On September 29 2016 18:54 RvB wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2016 04:13 LegalLord wrote:On September 29 2016 03:59 RvB wrote:On September 29 2016 03:01 LegalLord wrote:On September 29 2016 01:24 RvB wrote:On September 29 2016 00:38 LegalLord wrote:
There are also people (troika etc) who loan out money to governments which are obviously incapable of using that money responsibly, see that money evaporate without ever being used for its intended purpose (government-funded economic development), and then use that debt as leverage to force said government to create structural adjustments (which damage the population) to restructure the country around debt repayments.
In other words, predatory lending. The money was loaned out to prevent bankruptcy. And the whole point of the structural adjustments is that it makes the country able to service the debt in the future and makes it economically stronger in the long term. It would have happened that way if not for the inability to to implement the reforms and all the political fighting. It has worked in other countries so no it's not predatory lending. The criticism I mentioned was actually originally applied to IMF loans in Africa, though Greece isn't a bad example either. Structural adjustments are about making nations more able to service the debt, though the long term economic benefits are disputable. Lending to a country with an unstable political situation is a bad risk that no honest profit-driven entity would ever approve. Greece was not a good risk, that much is clear now. Ukraine was an obvious terrible risk and it was plain to see for anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of its political situation (a basket case the magnitude of Greece, but the size of Italy). The international lenders may be obtuse at times but they are not complete idiots, so I'm sure they knew. This suggests ulterior motives, i.e. predatory lending. You were saying the Troika which only acted in Greece. The IMF is supposed to be a lender of last resort for near bankrupt countries. That's their role. So no not predatory lending but yes extremely risky. A wiki search says that's not quite true, that all of the PIIGS countries use that term to refer to their creditors. Nevertheless, I would agree that perhaps I used too specific a term, and I really should have spelled out that I referred to the financial institutions that make up the troika, rather than the collective itself. I think the IMF has certainly done what could qualify as predatory lending. Unviable loans to win control of governments and public assets. Predatory in a government sense, which is not necessarily analogous to the civilian equivalent of the term. Sorry yes. The troika is the EC, ECB and IMF so it would only be in Europe where they work as a team. It's not predatory lending. They're high risk loans. Again the whole point is that the countries, in exchange for the loans, fix the underlying structural issues which caused to crisis. Another condition is indeed to provide collateral but that collateral is usually hardly worth a lot anyway. It's more to counter the moral hazard that would exist without any conditionalities on the loans. For low income countries there are also concensional loans for low income countries which bear 0% interest rates for a time not to mention that debt relief from private creditors can be a condition for the loans. There's also no control of governments. They choose to go to the IMF and if they don't like the programme they don't have to follow it. You just won't get a loan either (no shit).
In theory, yes, that's how it's supposed to work. In reality those financial institutions really just act as an arm of the foreign policy of more successful nations, most notably the US but also others within the EU. A loan made to a poorer country is a high-risk loan - they have a large chance of default. A loan made to a corrupt government that is just going to pocket the money and do nothing for the population is worse than just high risk. It's a guarantee of default. However, those loans are given to obtain political leverage - to force a political alignment, to create dependency upon cash infusion from the banks, and in some cases to buy valuable government assets for cheap when they are used as collateral (most European countries have at least some highly valuable collateral to lose). What ends up happening is the government officials pocket the money, structura adjustments are made to make the country more payable (often leading to policies that hurt the poor in the debtor country), and an arrangement that looks rather predatory is the result.
The people who take the money are not the people who pay it. In this case the dichotomy between "country X" and "the population of country X" is about as large as it can get. The motivation for government officials to take free billions is obvious.
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The machine used to be only as smart as its user. The machines of the future will be orders of magnitude more intelligent than the people who created them. Their limitation will only be the mechanics and sensors they use to take in information and interact with the world around them.
Autonomous cars are already proving to be more reliable than human drivers for example. This means that in the future there will be no productivity reason to hire a TIR driver, pizza delivery driver, taxi driver... Commercial pilots these days only control their planes on takeoff and landing, and apparently even that could be done through autopilot.
Any trivial labour, such as unskilled construction, flipping burgers, data entry can be watched by a robot that learns and then does the task.
Data analysis is being done by neural networks. Computers are better than humans at chess. Google recently announced their translation software is rapidly approaching human levels. Big technology companies involved in IM services all believe that chatting with bots will be a part of the future. Robots are beginning to be involved in surgical operations.
A tractor is as good at plowing a field as 5 horses, but still requires a farmer to man it. The tractor of the future will be autonomous, requiring only 1 technician to service 100 tractors on 100 farms.
The level of productivity increase is going to be higher than the previous industrial revolution.
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This time it's obviously different because the intelligence is entering in the equation. The smarter robots become, the harder it gets for people to be better. At the same time the total wealth is increasing as goods get cheaper and faster to make.
So, I think we will move slowly to some of these options:
- Shorter workday
- UBI
- More jobs in entertainment, like art and sports.
- Higher social security spending.
And I'm sure the gap between the rich and the poor will get bigger. The challenge will be to make sure the poor people will get some material advantages and they will have something to occupy their day with.
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That a machine is better than humans doesn't mean that it's going to replace human labour, because the fact of dealing with a human can be something that people will continue to demand. Chess is a pretty good example. Yes, Stockfish and Houdini are chess engines that play almost flawlessly and will beat even the best world players, nonetheless Chess is still a thriving sport, it actually has seen somewhat of a revival in mainstream media over the last few years. People still enjoy playing humans more than playing machines.
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On September 30 2016 03:21 Nyxisto wrote:
How is this a fairy tale? Take a look at technological disruption and the unemployment rate. Every time we eliminated manual labour through some form of productivity gain we created new sectors to work in. That's why most people are still employed. Where does belief enter the equation?
1. Current economical model requires sustained growth.
2. Human technological advancement have centered basically around better tools which allows every human to be more productive. Commonly measured during history as the % of the population required for food production to feed society which has gone from 100 % to just a few % in industrial countries.
3. The spare capacity has commonly gone into providing other services that the population wants.
4. Those services are paid for by income from labor by all working humans.
5. Those services tend to require more skill than the jobs that are replaced by better tools (making flint knives takes more skill than picking berries, making a webpage takes more skills than working an assembly line.
6. In general people value goods higher than personal services.
7. We are now making such good tools that a very large part of the current line of work is going to become obsolete.
8. The in demand services require a very high skill level which is very difficult to achieve for most of the population (due to a wide variety of reasons).
9. Personal services are not in high enough demand to replace most production and administration jobs with a similar level of pay.
10. Raw material and technological investment means all goods have a fixed minimum price point.
11. People with no jobs or low paying service jobs will not have enough spare income to make a meaningful contribution to the economy.
12. Reduced demand along with increased production stops growth.
13. Current economical model requires sustained growth.
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Chess has nothing to do with productivity though, it is entertainment. I only meant it as a demonstration of machine intelligence being superior to human's.
People will want human artists, human sportsmen, human poetry...
Despite the fact that there are machine learning programs that write movie and tv show scripts already, and presumably they will keep getting better and better.
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On September 30 2016 04:15 Thaniri wrote:
Chess has nothing to do with productivity though, it is entertainment. I only meant it as a demonstration of machine intelligence being superior to human's.
People will want human artists, human sportsmen, human poetry...
Despite the fact that there are machine learning programs that write movie and tv show scripts already, and presumably they will keep getting better and better.
General point is that the 'human element' is something that people not always want to see substituted. Even if there's a superior robot lawyer or a robot doctor it's fairly likely that these machines will, just like the old ones, assist rather than completely replace labour.
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On September 29 2016 12:28 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2016 04:07 Sent. wrote:
Do you guys think universal income can bring back housewives? No, because it's not that much money. Job stability and a societal arrangement that lends itself better to families would, however, help with that. Too many families don't have that arrangement simply because the job stability for the husband isn't there.
Depends what kind of universal income we're talking about. Assuming it's equal to the current minimum wage, would a mother of children of young age wouldn't have to work for a living. Thus, would she prefer to stay at home all day or to do a low-skilled work? Or would she choose to invest her time in charities? Or in whatever hobby she likes? Etc.
That's actually what's the most exciting about universal income, imo : it's that it's full of surprises, we have little idea of how it would play out in reality.
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EPT
