Comments by "Trazyn" (@Trazynn) on "Joe Rogan u0026 Sam Harris on Universal Basic Income" video.

I just wish Molyneux wouldn't rely on making convenient analogies to support his arguments all the time.
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If you think the radiative forcing spectrum of a carbondioxide molecule is a matter of statistics then someone has been vomiting bullshit in your ear. As for the climate models. The ones that have been used in the latest IPCC report (predicting from 1998 to 2012) have been exactly on point. Those are the ones your Oregon Institute of Science hacks are disputing and that rebuttal has been laid to the wayside by a third party. Here's the study, enjoy: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n9/full/nclimate2310.html
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Basic Income is the capitalist answer to a socialist big government meddling welfare system. An income spendable at your own discretion keeps money circulating, stimulates the economy, rewards entrepreneurs and small businesses. No conditions for it bypasses a giant bureacracy and welfare traps and the income being adequate enough to sustain a person on will greatly reduce all the poverty-related costs a society faces, costs that far exceed the overall budget for such an income.
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You didn't click that link did you? The model I refer to is the one that got disputed the most by the sceptics. They picked it. Oh and FYI, the sun is responsible for 0.15C of the observed 1.0C at most http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v7/n2/full/ngeo2040.html "We instead conclude that solar forcing probably had a minor effect on Northern Hemisphere climate over the past 1,000 years, while, volcanic eruptions and changes in greenhouse gas concentrations seem to be the most important influence over this period."
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Democratic Republic of the Congo
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Are you disputing that CO2 has radiative forcing?
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The difference is that it's unconditional. That means no expensive social workers that decide who gets it and how they can spend it. A large chunk of our welfare budget doesn't actually end up at the recipients, it's a racket. UBI means more money ends up straight into the free market from the bottom up (poor people can't hoard the cash) and less goes to centralized goverment.
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Or let's put it differently: Not all labour with societal value is labour that can be monetized. There is plenty of work that is crucial to everyone but completely without cash flow. If everyone had a baseline income then people could start devoting their time and effort to this kind of labour without having to worry about their next meal. There will be plenty of work left to be done once automation takes over. It's called charity. And not just quaint shoe string 'take care of grandma's garden' type of labour. Think education, entertainment, innovation. Hell, look at what's happening here on Youtube. I've learned more about software, math, statistics and language through Youtube videos than I learned in university. For free!
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It's demand-side capitalism. The supply-side model treats an economy like a fountain where money flows down to each layer. Boost the flow and everyone benefits. That worked up to the 80's. But then the flow stopped and money slowly circulated slower and slower throughout society. The logical response is to take on the demand-side model which treats an economy like an aquarium that needs oxygen pumped in from the bottom and let it flow through the entire ecosystem before it ends at the top again. UBI is that oxygen pump. Poor people will spend the money directly on urgent solutions in their lives. Solutions offered by the free market not the government, those companies and innovators benefit and so will their shareholders. The only losers are big, static corporations that lose touch with their consumer base, the ones that fail to provide adequate value to the general public. Those deserve to fail.
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Try 'Rutger Bregman' for the most accessible and comprehensive material on UBI. And yes, on the scale of communities or smaller. The most robust one is the Mincome experiment on Canada in 1970. The study was ended prematurely due to political reasons (new government, Thatcher being hip and all). Further analysis much later on showed that the effects were greatly positive and that it resulted in net financial gains due to myriad of other costs it prevented. Then there was an experiment in London for homeless people. They received and UBI and one year later many of them were able to deal with addiction problems or even found a house (through other programs). This particular experiment is important because the budget was a rounding error on the normal security and emergency costs that come with homeless people in the streets. Then there was a project on a community in Ghana. Rather than material aid or micro loans the people simply received a monthly income. The conclusion of that report was that the one 'income coach' that came with the project could probably sanitised out as the added value was unclear to the huge benefits the community otherwise received.
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Outsourcing to cheap labour economies and large scale automation will only increase further and no amount of supply-side thinking is going to solve that. We have a demand-side solutions. UBI is one of them but feel free to come up with your own if you have better ideas. Not all options have been explored yet.
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And keep in mind that starving unemployed people don't just roll over and disappear. They become very expensive burdens on law enforcement.
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You're right in that a giant con is being played here, bear with me for a few sentences: It worked up to the 80's because the median income then grew in lockstep with the GDP as well as the economic productivity. From the 80's onward the GDP kept growing but the median income as well as economic productivity started faltering. A nation can't prosper for long when it's median income declines. People can no longer take care of themselves, become costly burdens, while at the same time they can no longer participate as consumers in a market that relies on them. That's when economic growth starts to strain. Now, the current (supply-side) solution to the lack of this circulation is quantitative easing. Banks taking out loans without the need for collateral, IE, money pushed into the economy top-down without being backed by real value but still taking interest on it, that's your illegitimate siphons and I agree that it needs to end fast or we're in deep problem. And we're already seeing this solution doesn't work. Banks don't invest long-term, they just keep on buying their own stock and acquiring more real estate without any real risk. I agree that this centralized system is a racket. It's also exactly what UBI would counter. If you route our economy's revenue straight through the bottom it disperses into the 'real economy' not the one that only exists on paper in stock indexes and plot registers. That's where the growth really takes off, and with the incredibly low point of entry for technology and small enterprises that growth is going to be bigger than anything we've ever seen.
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Somehow a lot of people seems to think a basic income is about encouraging unemployment. However, the unemployment is the given problem and basic income is one of the proposed solutions. I think that reflects the disbelief in how drastic the upcoming changes are going to be. People WILL lose their good jobs, most of us will. The jobs that remain are highly niche, in low supply and highly cheap and menial in high supply. That's the future we're trying to deal with. We can chose to let the pieces fall where they may but that's guaranteed to leave us with unemployed desperate people who will uproot society (like Venezuela does now, people have no work, no food, rioting is the only option). A basic income keeps the unemployed as functioning members of society. They can sit on the coach all day, get depressed, commit suicide or do more positive things. A stable base line to live off gives people more flexibility in their lives, better means to re-orient themselves and find new occupations. The negativity will still be there, it just won't be the overall status quo that we will get when we do nothing.
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One third of all American jobs involve transportation. There's no way these jobs will be replaced by an equal amount of jobs with the same income. What I'm saying is that there are still plenty of jobs left for the people who feel inclined to work for the sake of it even when an UBI no longer necessitates it. And because UBI will (intentionally) cause a drop in labour supply, those hard-to-automate jobs will pay better for it.
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"They're talking about computers delivering mail, I just find that to be a bad idea. Email addresses are mostly hand-written and require a keen eye to categorize them properly. I just don't see that ending well."
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The whole point of UBI is to hand out free money. That way they can still feed their families while their jobs are being destroyed.
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Harris never mentions Molyneux while Molyneux often refers to Harris. The stakes are too high for him. If a person can't afford to lose face in front of an audience then there's no way that person is going to be intellectually honest. It'll just two men talking past each other.
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People would pick it any time over being abused at their two jobs while trying to figure out how to pay their debts on their debts.
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If you're going to replace 30% of the total workforce with automation you're going to have to find 30% of completely new jobs or drive down the wages of existing jobs. Simple supply and demand. We can't just make 30% of completely new jobs out of thin air and therefore we need a different solution.
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Median income is plummeting. That shows we're running out of human jobs.
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What does that have to do with automation?
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There are several ways to define economic growth. I think Median Household Income is the best indicator to measure the health of an economy by.
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People are free to be working bees and work some menial jobs while receiving their basic income. There's plenty of niche jobs that are hard to automate and the reduced supply for that labour will mean they'll be handsomely rewarded.
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