Thett and Spacetime discussion thread

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@ResurgetExFavilla
I mean who honestly thinks that people need work to socialize when most holidays have, historically and presently, been reserved for socializing? If anything, work breeds insularity because it expends a person's social energies on absolutely toxic human contact.

I’m gonna respectfully disagree here. I was just reading in Peasants into Frenchmen about how once mechanized agriculture arrived, the harvest festivals immediately disappeared because the holiday became divorced from the work whose end they used to be celebrating. That’s not to say that modern capitalistic office work or driving a truck are these wonderful things, but people absolutely need to feel like they are contributing to the continuation of their existence...if every day is a holiday, no day is 
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@thett3
I’m gonna respectfully disagree here. I was just reading in Peasants into Frenchmen about how once mechanized agriculture arrived, the harvest festivals immediately disappeared because the holiday became divorced from the work whose end they used to be celebrating. That’s not to say that modern capitalistic office work or driving a truck are these wonderful things, but people absolutely need to feel like they are contributing to the continuation of their existence...if every day is a holiday, no day is
It's not labor that I'm against or see as unnecessary, it's employment. The state of selling one's labor for a wage. Typically peasants didn't do that; they worked to pay rents and were able to keep a portion of their harvests directly. Laboring is part of being human, and I don't think that most people would stop if the condition of employment ended. Rather, I see the institution of employment as a restriction on human labor because it depends on the exclusive control of the means of production to propagate the power of the ruling class. I think that if we don't start looking at alternative models, we're going to slide into a horrifying, senseless techno-dystopia.
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@spacetime
<3
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@thett3

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@bsh1
Some kind of negative income tax or some income-based solution which tries to make up the difference might be useful. Suppose we assess that a person needs to make $40,000 a year. If you make $0, the government should give you $40,000. If you make $20,000, the government should give you $20,000. If you make $39,000, it should give you $1,000. If you make $40,000, you should not get the rebate. I like this better than a UBI, because it's arguable more targeted to those who need it most. Bill Gates doesn't need UBI checks.
I think I agree with this, but the key area of uncertainty for me is whether it’s possible to reach 100% well-paid employment even with automation—if it is, I’d prefer that the negative income tax function more as a wage subsidy and simply the provision of unemployment benefits for the unemployed.

I support some form of NIT system, though. Most economists do. 

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@ResurgetExFavilla
It's not labor that I'm against or see as unnecessary, it's employment. The state of selling one's labor for a wage. Typically peasants didn't do that; they worked to pay rents and were able to keep a portion of their harvests directly. Laboring is part of being human, and I don't think that most people would stop if the condition of employment ended. Rather, I see the institution of employment as a restriction on human labor because it depends on the exclusive control of the means of production to propagate the power of the ruling class. I think that if we don't start looking at alternative models, we're going to slide into a horrifying, senseless techno-dystopia.
You're not wrong, but what you're advocating is a fundamental restructuring of the way our society is organized -- it's never gonna happen unless some sort of large-scale catastrophe burns the current structure to the ground. I guess I just prefer to think within the bounds of the current structure.
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There are two realistic options here:

(1) allow the total number of jobs to continue declining, as an increasingly large portion of the population subsists off the social safety net

(2) actively intervene to ensure that there are enough jobs to sustain the population
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@spacetime
You're not wrong, but what you're advocating is a fundamental restructuring of the way our society is organized -- it's never gonna happen unless some sort of large-scale catastrophe burns the current structure to the ground. I guess I just prefer to think within the bounds of the current structure.

Talk to anyone living one hundred years ago about the 'current structure' and they would call you insane. There's no such thing as a persistent structure, it's always changing. I just want it to change for the better. That doesn't require a disaster, it can happen incrementally as well.
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@thett3
The NIT does seem like a reasonable alternative to TANF and other welfare programs that have lost effectiveness in fighting poverty. From my research, (and take this with a grain of salt,) the EITC seems to be able to alleviate poverty while inspiring work in a very similar fashion to the NIT. It functions as such: 

Enrollees start having a portion of their taxes covered the moment they earn their first dollar. Coverage increases steadily for a while as the enrollee accumulates more earnings. Eventually, these enrollees pass a certain threshold at which point, coverage is phased out. At the end of the process, the recipient acquired a decent job and, (hopefully,) the job is sustainable enough so that future coverage through other transfer payments is unnecessary. 

The National Bureau of Economic Research published a study in May of 2015 which analyzed existing research on the subject. They summarized the findings of multiple studies and consistently found an immense poverty-alleviating effect due to the EITC. This included data from the Census Bureau which projected that upwards of 9 million people, roughly half of whom are children, were lifted out of poverty due to the EITC (1). The EITC also targeted households within 75-150% of the FPL which helped target the most vulnerable families (1).

The system is not without its flaws, of course. Single people with no children do not reap as much benefit, with less coverage overall. While this makes sense from a policy perspective, as people with less children do not need additional transfer payments to accommodate them, the percentage paid is dismally low regardless. The maximum credit that a childless worker can expect to receive from the EITC is a measly $519 dollars per the Tax Policy Center (2). Additionally, payments in error plague the tax credit. A staggering 23% of EITC payments are in error, mostly due to misunderstandings as to whether a child qualifies under the EITC guidelines (2). Perhaps clearer instructions given to those who signed up for the EITC and an expansion of coverage for childless workers would be able to aid lower class people while incentivizing work.

Since you were worried about unemployment in regards to the NIT, perhaps this is a middle ground that can be reached. Tax credits would only be given to those who worked, and the expansion of such a credit could lift more people out of poverty. But of course, automation is going to kill more jobs in the short term, presenting an issue in which plenty of people are going to be looking for a job and are probably not going to be able to find one. Perhaps an addendum to the credit would be a plausible solution. As long as you can prove that you are taking steps to find employment through vocational training, education in a valid institution (as in, trade schools, universities, colleges etc.) credits could be distributed at a certain, fixed percentage until one finds a job.

Nevertheless, an NIT contingent on work might be the best solution if resources are available to aid people in finding employment. Of course, that is a big "if" and would require the collective efforts of political institutions to start doling out more student aid, improve the quality of education through more vocationally-driven classes, and create jobs through public works.

Additional steps that could be taken include actually hiring competent people to deal with children with physical, psychological, and emotional disabilities. Too often, people with severe disabilities are placed in segregated workplaces where they perform menial tasks under the pretense of "job building skills." They are often paid a sub-minimum wage, which is legal under 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act (3). Pay could be as low as 40 cents an hour, and is often not heavily regulated due to a lack of investigators at the Wage and Hour division of the DOL (3) (4). Early intervention and social support could remedy many of the problems keeping disabled students back from work. Unfortunately, special education teacher employment has dropped rapidly, by over 17% in the last decade according to Education Week (5). Without enough teachers, the pool of possible candidates have shrunk for these positions. Thus, less competent teachers can receive employment in the ESE department out of virtue of not having to compete against talented teachers also vying for the position. While national averages of teachers considered "highly qualified" in special education has been relatively high, this measure tends to vary considerably by state. In Kansas, for instance, only 70% of special education teachers are considered "highly qualified" (5).


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It would be beneficial for us to tap into this pool of students to boost job growth. Even if the students are never able to hold down a highly technical job, it is better to properly educate them so they have a job that can raise their quality of life. It also benefits the US through more aggregate demand, which can mitigate the effects of recessions and boost output as more people in this "disabled pool" are able to earn actual wages and spend it on final goods in the marketplace.
 

P.S. Sorry for going off on a tangent there.

14 days later

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@blamonkey
sorry, i've been really busy the past few weeks 

excellent post. I definitely agree with you that a NIT is way better in theory than UBI if we decide that we want/need to go that route. However one thing I still can't wrap my head around is the logistics of it. Right now as you point out we basically have a miniature version of NIT with Earned Income Tax Credit. But taxes are only filed once a year, so incentives like EITC come in one lump sum...and as you point out, even this comes with a ton of issues. If we were to implement NIT, how do we accurately determine throughout the year who gets it? The only realistic way I see is to give it out as a lump sum like EITC based on the previous years taxes, which is a big problem.

Say we decide that we want to guarantee all citizens a minimum income of $20,000 a year. So someone who made only $10,000 in income would get an additional $10,000 from the government, an unemployed person would get $20,000, etc. We know how most Americans spend money. While the average person could (barely) get by on a stipend of $1700 a month, there's no way they are going to make it through the year if you gave them twenty grand cash on January 1st. There's just no way. However this is the only way I could see a NIT put into practice unless we went started assessing taxes on a month to month basis which would be a complete nightmare for so many reasons and would probably cost hundreds of billions in overhead a year.

The more I think about it, UBI might be better even though it does have the issue of cutting Bill Gates a check every month because it is just so simple. This is probably why someone as smart as Andrew Yang is pushing for it over NIT. There has to be a middle ground, but I'm not sure exactly where it would fall

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@ResurgetExFavilla
It's not labor that I'm against or see as unnecessary, it's employment. The state of selling one's labor for a wage. Typically peasants didn't do that; they worked to pay rents and were able to keep a portion of their harvests directly. Laboring is part of being human, and I don't think that most people would stop if the condition of employment ended. Rather, I see the institution of employment as a restriction on human labor because it depends on the exclusive control of the means of production to propagate the power of the ruling class. I think that if we don't start looking at alternative models, we're going to slide into a horrifying, senseless techno-dystopia.
Nah bro, the dream team is gonna be split up here. Peasants absolutely did sell their labor, they were typically required to either pay up a certain percentage of their crops to the lord or to work a day a week in the lords fields. I don't see a meaningful difference between that and being paid for your labor with cash. Cash was simply hard to come by back then. 

Outside of a Jeffersonian nation of self sufficient farmers and self employed small businessmen there's always going to be a reliance on those with economic power to make a living. It's just the way it is and always has been. Like you said, laboring is just a part of being human and I don't see what is so inherently bad about trading that labor for cash, or what the alternative is supposed to be

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@thett3
Say we decide that we want to guarantee all citizens a minimum income of $20,000 a year. So someone who made only $10,000 in income would get an additional $10,000 from the government, an unemployed person would get $20,000, etc. We know how most Americans spend money. While the average person could (barely) get by on a stipend of $1700 a month, there's no way they are going to make it through the year if you gave them twenty grand cash on January 1st. There's just no way. However this is the only way I could see a NIT put into practice unless we went started assessing taxes on a month to month basis which would be a complete nightmare for so many reasons and would probably cost hundreds of billions in overhead a year.

The more I think about it, UBI might be better even though it does have the issue of cutting Bill Gates a check every month because it is just so simple. This is probably why someone as smart as Andrew Yang is pushing for it over NIT. There has to be a middle ground, but I'm not sure exactly where it would fall

Maybe just do it through the Social Security system instead of the tax system? Send monthly checks to everyone who qualifies, with the size of the check being determined by a formula. I propose naming it the $ocial $ecurity $tipend (abbreviated to $$$).
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actually nah "Freedom Dividend" is better.
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Modern western society is hyper-urban; the vast majority of people are either in cities or cramped suburbs. Living in the countryside may come with difficulties due to the lack of jobs present, as companies consolidate and purchase land for commercial farming - killing smaller family/community based farming.

If there was a larger sentiment of an agrarian lifestyle, wouldn't the issue of technology and automation be much less of an issue? If more people lived off the land, not only is there more inherent social stability from an agrarian society, but there's more economic security. Urban poverty is a severe issue that leads to crime and chaos because people are merely fending for a way to live. However, the poorest of people in stable agrarian societies generally lived a more comfortable life as they were self reliant off growing their own food.

Another conceivable benefit I could see from an agrarian society co-existing among technocratic cities would be an increase in the quality of food that would lead to healthier lifestyles for all people. The food Americans consume is full of hormones and toxic pesticides. 

So, wouldn't agrarianism be a win-win solution? You increase the quality of food, providing more jobs to people (especially those of lower class), while adding social stability. 


And if I didn't make this clear, I'm not suggesting agrarianism as an alternative to UBI. Rather, it would serve as a supplement to stabilize it. I imagine that mass scale unemployment would lead to back-breaking stress-inducing social competition. 
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Probably going to be a bit repetitive, but here's what I imagine as an ideal society that can cope with the times:

- People either live in the countryside or in large cities. The suburbs are non-existent.
- The government takes an active role in cooperating with and limiting business and market activities.
- UBI or NIT is enacted for safety.
- Distributism is put in place for certain industries to prevent the consolidation of power by plutocratic elites.
- Government policies would put restrictions on commercial farming, emphasizing family and community-based farms. As a result, you create work and opportunity for people through farming.
- Automation is restricted and is usually present in more unsafe or mundane tasks, preventing it from totally taking over. As a result, you can reap the benefits of automating some things while leaving more creativity-based tasks for humans to partake in. You preserve quality and provide more work.


Tl;dr, I don't think UBI by itself is going to solve much. Rather, the whole economy should be restructured. Through control over the economy, you could add human labor to industries or areas that may benefit from it while simultaneously allowing for technological advancement and increases in production. 
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@thett3
Nah bro, the dream team is gonna be split up here. Peasants absolutely did sell their labor, they were typically required to either pay up a certain percentage of their crops to the lord or to work a day a week in the lords fields. I don't see a meaningful difference between that and being paid for your labor with cash. Cash was simply hard to come by back then. 

Outside of a Jeffersonian nation of self sufficient farmers and self employed small businessmen there's always going to be a reliance on those with economic power to make a living. It's just the way it is and always has been. Like you said, laboring is just a part of being human and I don't see what is so inherently bad about trading that labor for cash, or what the alternative is supposed to be.
I think that it's bad history to see the Middle Ages as economically contiguous with the present age, as usury was banned for much of them and the means of production were structured entirely differently. You just assert that there's no difference between land rent and a wage; I think that's a bit crazy. They couldn't be farther apart: in the case of a land wage, you have control over the material means by which you produce that rent, which also provides you with your own basic needs: food, shelter, water. In the case of a wage, you explicitly do not have any of those things, it is your labor itself which you sell, NOT the product of your labor, which does not belong to you. The gravity of this distinction is literally the basis of several centuries worth of brutal conflict and bloodshed. Power should not be economic, it should be political. That's the central perversion of capitalism: control by a class with no martial skin in the game, and no real productive capacity; it is at its root exploitative.
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My new opinion on this is that nobody knows anything and nothing matters.
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@spacetime
My new opinion on this is that nobody knows anything and nothing matters.
I mean, insofar as there’s a non-zero probability that we know things and that things matter, it’s worth having this discussion.

In fact, even if p = 0, since we live in societies where we assume those two things are false, we might as well have this discussion.

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@triangle.128k
However, the poorest of people in stable agrarian societies generally lived a more comfortable life as they were self reliant off growing their own food.
As far as the broader historical trend is concerned, I don’t think this is necessarily true? It seems like if you compare standards of living across three periods—hunter-gatherer societies, agrarian societies, and modern non-agrarian societies—the second period would show the lowest standard of living, on average. I haven’t actually looked at the data, this is mostly informed by reading one book (Yuval Harari’s Sapiens), so take my opinion with a grain of salt. Also, these data probably aren’t controlled for technological progress, which has the potential to improve standards of living in some societal structures and decrease standards of living in other structures. 
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@ResurgetExFavilla
You just assert that there's no difference between land rent and a wage; I think that's a bit crazy. They couldn't be farther apart: in the case of a land wage, you have control over the material means by which you produce that rent, which also provides you with your own basic needs: food, shelter, water. In the case of a wage, you explicitly do not have any of those things, it is your labor itself which you sell, NOT the product of your labor, which does not belong to you.
I’m not sure I follow.

What is a “land wage”?

And, hold on, the laborer is the equivalent of the landlord in the rent analogy, right? In that the laborer supplies their labor, whereas the landlord supplies land, and both are rented? I’m actually really confused and would appreciate a simple explanation of this conversation. 
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@Tejretics
"Standard of living" can be qualitative, and technology (while convenient) may be exaggerated since people would have found alternate ways of comfort. A fireplace and electric heater aren't inherently different at the end of the day.
Regarding conditions, the average peasant in medieval Europe worked less hours than we do today, enjoying more overall free time. Arguably, they were in a better environment. Hunter-gatherer societies dealt with the hostility of nature, and urban societies may be too isolated. By their nature, social capital may have been higher.

And as to self-sufficiency, the urban poor may resort to crime and chaos in order to fend for themselves. Meanwhile, agrarian societies were much more peaceful. With the exception of famine, the food supply was stable while an impoverished urbanite would have to obtain money in some sort of way (perhaps through illicit means) to feed their family. 

I would beg to differ, as I'd argue the living standard or quality of life is inherently better in semi-agrarian societies. Of course, a lot of this may be subjective in all fairness. I'm advocating for a certain balance of some sort, since modern industrial society is hyper-urban.
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@Tejretics
I mean, insofar as there’s a non-zero probability that we know things and that things matter, it’s worth having this discussion.

In fact, even if p = 0, since we live in societies where we assume those two things are false, we might as well have this discussion.
-___________-
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@triangle.128k
Regarding conditions, the average peasant in medieval Europe worked less hours than we do today, enjoying more overall free time.
Do you have data regarding this? I'm quite interested. 

Also, I recommend reading Sapiens. You may not agree with it—I didn't agree with all of it either—but it's a really fun read, at the very least. 
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Lots of good chatter going on...I should be able to respond to everybody by the end of this weekend 
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@Tejretics
Do you have data regarding this? I'm quite interested. 
Yup, medieval peasants lived a much more relaxed and leisureful life - contrary to the common perception of them being unenlightened and under constant oppression.
Also, I recommend reading Sapiens. You may not agree with it—I didn't agree with all of it either—but it's a really fun read, at the very least. 
I would consider it, is it one of those books that hold paleolithic societies as superior to "civilization?" That idea seems to be a recently popular trend in the study of history. 

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@triangle.128k
I would consider it, is it one of those books that hold paleolithic societies as superior to "civilization?" That idea seems to be a recently popular trend in the study of history. 
Sort of, but a bit more nuanced than that.

The book argues that (1) standards of living today are better than standards of living for much of human society (better than paleolithic society as well), especially due to technological progress, the development of science, and the Industrial Revolution, but that (2) the standards of living for much of history after the Neolithic Revolution was not only much worse than today, it was likely worse than pre-agricultural societies as well. 

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@thett3
If you delve into the empirical literature on this topic, many of the most comprehensive projections indicate that more jobs are gonna be created than automated over the next several decades. I'm not sure how much I trust those projections, but it's certainly worth noting.
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@thett3
Stopping technological advancement is a good way to get curbed stomped in a few decades by countries that don’t. There is no easy solution 

This only applies to industries where American companies actually have to compete against foreign companies. Obviously, we shouldn't stop those vulnerable companies from improving the efficiency of core business processes such as procurement, manufacturing, and distribution.

However, it doesn't apply to industries where foreign competition isn't an issue. For example, I don't see the harm in preventing restaurants and fast food chains from automating themselves. It would deprive customers of potential cost savings, but that may be worth it to save millions of jobs.

Even within globally competitive industries, it may be possible to restrict less important forms of automation. For example, I doubt that preventing companies from automating (or offshoring) their customer service call centers is going to seriously undermine their global competitiveness. If anything, it would vastly improve the quality of their customer service. 

Idk if I actually support any of that, but if the techno-optimist projections turn out to be wrong, it may be necessary to preserve full employment. 
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@spacetime
There are two realistic options here:

(1) allow the total number of jobs to continue declining, as an increasingly large portion of the population subsists off the social safety net

(2) actively intervene to ensure that there are enough jobs to sustain the population

It's gotta be the second option. The first option would be terrible for social cohesion and political stability (not to mention the fiscal costs involved). A full employment economy is the most stable form of socioeconomic organization, and we need to do everything in our power to preserve it.

There are many different policy options we could pursue to maximize the number of jobs available:

  • Establish a federal infrastructure bank to fund projects across the country, thus directly creating millions of jobs in the construction industry.
  • Increase aggregate consumer demand by implementing policies that alleviate the heaviest financial burdens faced by American consumers, such as housing, healthcare, childcare, transportation, student loan debt, credit card debt, personal income taxation, etc.
  • Facilitate the growth of new businesses through regulatory simplification, targeted tax incentives, and stronger antitrust enforcement.
  • Negotiate international trade deals that expand our access to foreign consumer markets while making offshore outsourcing less profitable.
  • Reduce immigration levels substantially (I reject the notion that immigration creates enough jobs to compensate for the jobs it takes away).
  • Ban certain types of labor-automating technologies (see the above post for details).
But creating all those jobs is pointless if American workers aren't able to fill them. We need to develop a publicly-funded vocational training system that efficiently equips people with marketable skills and directly coordinates with employers to match them with available job opportunities. Unemployment assistance should be made conditional on enrolling in that system.