This makes some sense, but honestly I'm not seeing much new in these endless repetitions of the same debate. It goes back to at least the 1960s and the debate over the "Me generation" [1]. Probably earlier. There's a tension between raising armies of cogs-in-the-machine on the one hand, and beautiful butterflies on the other, and some orthogonal other questions besides.
Some of it also interacts with politics, and I'm not sure I accept all the premises. For example, from my current vantage point in Denmark, society does generally believe that you are entitled to at least a basic living (food/shelter/healthcare), even if not a great one. Then it becomes a question of what you wish to do above that, in both economic and non-economic senses. One presumably wishes to both earn more money than the absolute minimum, but also to contribute to society beyond the absolute minimum; the two desires may or may not be aligned, and there are many paths to doing either/both. In other countries (notably the USA), political views are different on that question. In my own personal opinion I do think it is, in part, "a moral or systematic failure on the part of society" that the situation in the USA is as it is, but that's sort of its own debate (I'm not really anti-market, as I feel they're useful and in any case inevitable, but I don't necessarily think that maket valuation is everything).
You clearly don't work with college-aged students in the United States if you think the material in this essay is old hat. Regardless of what's been written or how often, the vast majority of students entering top universities today are deluded.
The general arguments are that it's worth sacrificing some of the top end to reduce the severity of the bottom end, partly for ethical and partly for economic reasons. The hypothesis is that in successful Western societies, at least, the majority of value is not created by people who are working solely to avoid dying. And therefore there is no great loss if we remove fear of dying from the list of motivators to work.
The hope is that it can be administered in a way such that it will not greatly harm incentives to be successful either, merely dampen the curve by some percentage: so there are still rich and poor people, but the rich people maybe will only be 20x as rich as the poor instead of 200x. It's still much better to be successful than to be on welfare, both in terms of prestige and social standing, and material comfort (you can think of it as an order-preserving nonlinear mapping). And there are some arguments that it may help economically in some cases: by raising the floor of what bad outcomes look like, it becomes more plausible for individuals who don't have a family safety net to take risks.
As for what possible societal benefit, the Scandinavian societies are fairly nice places to live, partly as a result, though making like-for-like comparisons in economics is notoriously difficult. They certainly have lower levels of severe poverty, crime, homelessness, etc. But there are many books arguing for and against these views, so I'm not sure I can convince you in a comment.
Not having a job generally means you won't have health insurance, nor an income, and thus won't have access to non-emergency health care. Recent estimates are that there are about 45,000 excess deaths annually due to lack of health insurance (source: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-find...).
Furthermore, homelessness and malnutrition also increase the death rate. There are lots of homeless and hungry people in the US.
So while you might not immediately die due to being unemployed, as there are a variety of safety nets, being without a job will, statistically decrease your expected lifespan. Food assistance does not prevent people from going hungry. Homeless shelters are packed to the brim, and in some cases quite unsafe. You can't get non-emergency care if you are unemployed and broke, at least until Obamacare kicks in (or if you are covered by Romneycare).
Literally die the hour you lose your job? No. But lose a job and become homeless? Or desperately find another job that barely supports your family and you end up living in poverty in a neighborhood with high crime? Almost every major US city.
I don't think delirium was suggesting someone would keel over and die after N weeks without a job. Rather, not having a job makes paying for healthcare, eating well, owning or renting a home difficult or impossible (these are difficult for many people with jobs!). All of these are significant factors in increasing both life expectancy and quality of life.
While working solely to live longer and live decently doesn't have quite the same ring as working solely to avoid dying, the meaning of his statement seems clear.
The problem with positive rights such as these [1] is that it's difficult to say that someone has a right to something when it may actually be impossible to actually make good on it.
This is part of the difficulty with the USA's current healthcare debate. It's simply impossible to offer to every person, every imaginable medical care. There are not sufficient resources.
So from a philosophical perspective, how can there exist a fundamental right that cannot be fulfilled?
And then from a practical perspective, someone is going to have to decide where to draw a line. Someone will have to decide who will be given what procedures. The effect of this is that, at the very least, our rights (and not just these new positive ones) will be tossed around like political volleyballs. And at the worst, it creates an explicitly class-ful society, where some people are granted privileges that are withheld from others (which is the universal outcome in all Communist nations thus far)
[1] "Positive rights" are those where we say that someone must be given something, as with food, shelter, or healthcare. "Negative rights" are when a person is guaranteed to be free of something, as with freedom of speech (government may not limit speech), freedom from double jeopardy, etc.
Why is it "simply impossible" to provide healthcare for all? I can name many counter examples of countries that can and do. Have you made the calculation based on finite resources in the world and the size of the world population that it's simply impossible? Even if it would be impossible by today's technological standards to provide care to all, that doesn't mean it's true for the future when there might be additional productivity gains, preventing disease etc.
I don't think anyone's arguing that there's a fundamental right to all possible health care, but many people would argue that all have a fundamental right to basic health care, which is absolutely possible to offer to all Americans. In fact, many other countries do it while spending less per capita on health care. Of course, there are hard decisions to be made, but the status quo seems worse to me by a long shot.
My concern here isn't the breadth (who is covered), but the depth (what and how much is covered). That is, regardless of the number of people we're covering -- whether it's everyone, or excluding the poorest 20% who can't afford insurance, it is impossible to cover every conceivable treatment.
Consider, for example: a headache could be a symptom of brain tumor or other problem, the best diagnosis of which would be through an MRI. We'd like to catch these things as early as possible, so we'd like to do MRIs on everyone who is a possible victim. But imagine that every time a patient walks into the doctor's office with a headache, the doctor orders an MRI for him. How long do you think this practice can be sustained for?
The fact is that in a world with scarce resources, we must make decisions about how to allocate those resources. When the field of medical care is controlled by politicians, then politicians will be making those decisions. The questions over who is covered for what maladies with how much treatment becomes a political question.
So you can expect that maladies that cluster on easily-identifiable demographic groups will receive a disproportionate amount of funding. For example, one might expect that because gays may comprise a voting bloc and suffer from HIV more than others, politicians will pander to them for votes by allocating funds for HIV treatment that are out of proportion with the number of sufferers and the severity. By contrast, other maladies -- say, my Crohn's disease, which has weaker demographic ties -- are likely to be relatively overlooked.
And in the end, although the GOP is certainly using hyperbole in referring to "death panels", someone is going to have to make a decision at some point that treating this 90-year-old geezer just isn't going to have the ROI in terms of quality-life-years saved, and that it's not cost effective to continue treatment.
Anyway, my claim is that when the politicians can decide what and how much you're getting of something, it's difficult (in my mind, at least) to call something a "right". What other rights do we have for which the politicians get to make the decision about how much of that right each of us is entitled to?
Firstly, I don't think your hypothetical qualifies as basic health care. I understand your concerns, but they just don't seem to be huge issues in the countries that actually have implemented universal health care, especially compared to the current situation in the US. Getting caught up in the semantics of where your rights start and end (by the way, many rights are regulated by laws created by politicians) is a distraction from the pragmatic approach of looking at expected outcomes.
I don't think your hypothetical qualifies as basic health care.
And there is the problem. Someone has to make this judgment call. It's all a matter of opinion. And it changes over time, there's no single objective answer. Today, "take this Z-pack and keep the wound clean and dry" is a completely ordinary treatment; a century ago it was sci-fi, that wasn't even available to the hyper-rich. When does it cross the lines from experimental to esoteric to mundane?
by the way, many rights are regulated by laws created by politicians
That's only sort of true, at least in the USA. If something is understood to be a right, then those regulations are limited to only what can clear various tests as defined by the courts. Enumerated rights like speech, for example, are protected by a strict scrutiny test; at the other end of the spectrum is the rational basis test.
But in the end, these are actually judged by the courts. In other words, it's ultimately the non-political branch of the government that makes the call.
By contrast, these positive rights are entirely driven by political caprice.
(Caveat: I'm referring to Federal regulation here. It may vary somewhat state-to-state, because of how state Constitutions are designed.)
The line has to be drawn somewhere. Why do we provide police protection to unemployed people? I would think that as a society grows wealthier, it could grow more humane and, like _delirium said, "there is no great loss if we remove fear of dying from the list of motivators to work".
Why do we provide police protection to unemployed people?
Since we provide police protection to unemployed people, should that also mean we provide them ponies? What are the limits of this argument you're attempting to make regarding "providing unemployed people things for free since they get police protection"?
as a society grows wealthier, it could grow more humane
You're assuming that it's humane to teach people to not be self-sufficient. I would argue that the cycle of dependency created by not incentivizing people to get up and go work for a living every day is inhumane. Often, it is done by politicians who benefit from the perpetuation of that cycle for reasons of maintaining their power base.
>Since we provide police protection to unemployed people, should that also mean we provide them ponies? What are the limits of this argument you're attempting to make regarding "providing unemployed people things for free since they get police protection"?
You never answered the question about providing police protection. Instead you changed the subject.
Any system of decision making is arbitrary at some point. "Letting the market decide" is no different, it just absolves society from culpability of life outcomes. In many ways, it's not that different from people who claim things happen because of "God's will."
And one of the benefits of democratic government is that society gets to answer these questions. You can see the very different solutions countries like Denmark and the US have come to (and Denmark has done more for unemployed people than the US has without resorting to giving them ponies).
>You're assuming that it's humane to teach people to not be self-sufficient. I would argue that the cycle of dependency created by not incentivizing people to get up and go work for a living every day is inhumane. Often, it is done by politicians who benefit from the perpetuation of that cycle for reasons of maintaining their power base.
This is a straw man argument. There is incentive for people to get up and go work for a living. Denmark has an unemployment rate is 6%, and their welfare state is far, far more generous than that of the US. I would suggest your anger at unemployment benefits is misdirected.
Sorry, tongue in cheek ... but do you say that you are self-sufficient? You are never using any public transport? Never drive on a street that wasn't built by yourself? Only eat things that you grew yourself. (No, it is not enough to counter with "I'm paying for it/I pay taxes.") First world societies are made up of people that _can't_ no longer be self sufficient.
The normal projected benefit for this kind of social model is that people don't have to work for sustenance. Instead, the whole range of human motivation can become a driving force.
It is assumed that you get more focused, happier and more committed working people, because they can choose their work based on whatever motivation drives them. That could be money, curiosity, laziness, skill, chance etc. It is also assumed that people would be willing to take greater risks, since they can be sure they a) won't become homeless and b) won't starve.
If society provides a safety net for everyone, you don't have to build your own while trying to do all of the above work on top of creating a baseline of security.
Then the children of really rich people should really be an interesting lot, since they have all their needs met plus have plenty of money to do whatever they want, right?
Personally, all the people I know who inherited their money are useless and/or dysfunctional. I'm not saying that none find the motivation to do much with their lives after their needs are met... but to assume that enough of society is going to behave that way to change the way that society works seems to be wishful thinking.
Selection bias. You're specifically selecting for people whose only money is money they inherited; failures, in other words.
There's a lot of children of rich people who are quite successful in their own right. Bill Gates, for example, did not come from a poor home. And the other thing you have to watch out for is reversion to the mean. It's unlikely Gates' children will outdo him.
"Personally, all the people I know who inherited their money are useless and/or dysfunctional."
So you don't know a lot of people who inherit then. That is probably because most of those people do not show off this money and you will never know.
You only see those that show of and why not to say it? what you want to see based on your prejudices.
I have known a lot of people who inherited, some of them are useless or dysfunctional, some of them are really resourceful and know how to make good use of his money. E.g the creator of "Zara" inherit a small clothing store:
http://www.zara.com/
Now is one of the biggest in the world.
Half of the greatest philosophers, mathematicians, physicist of all time came from wealthy families, so they could dedicate time for non-primary necessities, a luxury even today.
Not a fair comparison. Children of really rich people are way more richer than the people living with only what is needed for "basic sustenance" (food/shelter/health).
Hasn't Marxism already failed enough to avoid proposing it as a solution to anything?
Didn't communists in the USSR find that when you give everyone a "right" to have all their basic needs met and when you took away their motivation to work hard to succeed, a lot of people decided not to work or they decided to work at things that the community didn't need?
Then, to make up for the fact that there was no reward incentive model, they had to bring in authoritarian force.
The most insightful criticism of communism that I've ever heard was from a bunch of Romanians I know who grew up in a country under control of the Soviets. When they hear Americans or other Westerners espousing pseudo-communism as a solution to society's problems, they get apoplectic. They can't even begin to grasp why a society that has discovered and nurtured capitalism would turn to empirically failed socioeconomic models.
Seriously, if you're going to want to stand on someone's shoulders to move society forward, why Karl Marx's?
"This argument has several problems. I’ll discuss two of them. The first problem with it is that BIG cannot be accurately characterized as something for nothing. All societies impose many rules on every individual. Consider the discussion of homelessness above. Why can’t homeless people build their own shelter and their own latrine? Why can’t they drink out of a clean river? Why can’t they hunt, gather, or plant and harvest their own food? They cannot do these things because the state has made rules saying they don’t have the right to do these things. The state has imposed rules saying that almost all the resources of the Earth belong to someone else. Those of us who benefit from the rules by which our society distributes ownership of the Earth’s natural resources benefit every day from the state’s interference with the propertyless, and we pay them no compensation. A state without BIG is the state that has something for nothing.
BIG is (and should be seen) not as something for nothing but as the just compensation for all the rules of property and property regulations society imposes on individuals."
I think of it as more closely associated with libertarians than Marxists, though I assume American libertarians have since disowned it. Its most prominent 20th-century advocates were Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who viewed it as the most economically efficient way to add a basic safety net to an otherwise un-meddled-with market economy. Marxists generally want a more fundamental change in the economy, not a Hayekian economy, not even a Western-Europe-style social market economy (it would be a surprise to Scandinavians, for example, to find out that they were on the USSR side of the Cold War!).
Friedman wasn't a Basic Income proponent. He was a proponent of negative taxation. He was only interested in being consistent with the way we treat income tax and welfare. He felt that the welfare manager's job of determining exactly how to administer relief to recipients was something that couldn't be done properly. He preferred just giving cash based upon income levels on a sliding scale.
Given the abuse of the Welfare system over the half century since Friedman supported negative taxation, I don't doubt that he would have different views and controls for such a system were he alive today.
A lot of ideas sounded good 50 or 100 years ago that we have tried but have failed. It doesn't mean we should keep trying them.
You're mistaken about Friedman not being for Basic Income. In an interview only 12 years ago, Friedman was asked about basic income as an "alternative" to the negative income tax, and Friedman replied that both were the same thing. Friedman wrote, "A basic or citizen's income is not an alternative to a negative income tax. It is simply another way to introduce a negative income tax if it is accompanied with a positive income tax with no exemption. A basic income of a thousand units with a 20 percent rate on earned income is equivalent to a negative income tax with an exemption of five thousand units and a 20 percent rate below and above five thousand units."
Didn't communists in the USSR find that when you give everyone a "right" to have all their basic needs met and when you took away their motivation to work hard to succeed, a lot of people decided not to work or they decided to work at things that the community didn't need?
Not the way that you assume, no. Huge strawman here.
> society does generally believe that you are entitled to at least a basic living (food/shelter/healthcare)
That and the OA "The market doesn’t care what you love" are why I'm very socialist very anti the attitude/mantra "free market solves everything!!!".
Markets should not dictate how our society operates. Society should not value efficiency and profit over all else. Society should provide everyone with minimum food/shelter/health/education and let them choose what else to do. Whether that's make assloads of money as investment banker or play drums at love ins.
The markets do not dictate the fact that we can't afford to just all sit around and be total hippies. It's the universe and ecosystem we live in. The natural state of being is such that if you just sit around and play in the stereotypical sense of the term, you will die. If you can just sit and do nothing, yet still be watered, fed, clothed, sheltered, and medically cared for, it is because someone is working for you to have those things. They don't just spontaneously burst into being. It isn't capitalism creating this reality, it's entropy and evolution.
Despite superficial appearances, we are not rich enough to just let everyone do as they please. Efficiency and profit aren't "just" evil things, they are the lifeblood that allows people to do something other than work. You decry them, yet without them, you have no foundation to stand on to create the world you say you want. Be careful, lest you get what you are asking for.
It is the capitalist system that has created enough wealth to allow you to become detached enough from this reality to even begin to think these thoughts. It is a rare anomaly in human history, not our natural state of being.
There is no "natural state of being" that we know of. Yours is just a prejudiced view of the ones "you have to sustain".
We do have the resources to provide a basic life for everyone (exactly what happens in nordic countries as posted elsewhere). Most people will want to do something with their lifes instead of sitting around, simply because it's boring not to.
There's a long, long road between everyone having food & shelter to the whole humanity fucking around. This reductionism is absurd.
Could you be more specific with respect to 'empirical evidence'?
In Germany, according to the Federal Statistical Office (https://www.destatis.de), more hours are spent for unpaid work (100 billion hours) than for paid work (60 billion hours) (as of 2009). This gap seems to keep increasing.
Also in Germany, numerous (sorry, can't find a citation right now) polls showed that about 80% of the people still want (and will) work more or less fulltime with a BIG. Funny enough, also about 80% of the people think that with a BIG the _other_ people won't continue to do so and instead become (or are already) lazy.
Suffice to say, countries don't last when ever more people rely on relative fewer producers. Greece and Spain tried and went too far: they just ran out of other people's money. Much of Europe is heading the same direction. Every communist country grids to a halt, with socialists tending the same. There is a glorious time of high living on other people's efforts, but greed and weariness win out.
So, you are saying that the majority (or, too many? how much is 'too many') of people in Greece and Spain are lazy? I don't understand 'pick up the tab', but the 'dwindling actual [german] workforce' will also become soon lazy? Why is the german workforce dwindling? Because of some 'lazyness' that's catching german workers?
And then these workers will cease doing unpaid work (which e.g. encompasses stuff like running theater groups, looking after the elderlies, ...)? Of course they'll do, because now they have to work on underpaid jobs to 'prove their worth' to society and get enough food on the table for their families.
It is widespread thinking here in Germany that those on welfare are 'keeping the welfare coming in and acquiring luxuries; they don't seem particularly motivated to work'.
It is 'supported' by numerous shows (for whom? for those on welfare?) on TV.
It is on the other hand clearly refuted by a huge range of studies from various disciplines (economics, social studies).
I guess it would have been nice if you just left your original text here and replied to my comment, pointing out how I misparsed a key point. Apart from that, (a) the Greece story is much more complex than how you try to frame it here (b) Greece and Spain are pretty different and shouldn't be thrown together. I also don't see a connection between communism and what has been discussed here under 'BIG' (I don't know of any communist country, actually -- mind you, 'communism' as it was/is meant!). And what 'socialist' countries grinding to halt do you think of?
As far as I understand most essays/reports from 'rather neutral' (yes, difficult to get an unbiased view) institutions here in Germany usually tell the story that nowadays a small minority lives on people's efforts, and this minority is well above welfare level.
Is there any 'proof' for your starting sentence? (countries don't last when ever more people rely on relative fewer producers). After all, automation levels increase ever more, and thus productivity, too. E.g. the number of people working in farming has shrunken dramatically (at least in first world countries), yet we have overall more than enough to eat ('overall'!). The fact that any country runs out of money is not an argument: Did Spain's productivity suddenly (or maybe also slowly) fell to zero? Did the people in Spain suddenly all lose their ability to work and think?
It was my mistake, not yours. Didn't elaborate the correction because writing essays on an iPod Touch is inconvenient.
The proof is obvious. If consumption exceeds production, necessities run out eventually. "The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money." Of course Spain and Greece are more complex than this, but the short version is too many people rely on too few producers; it's not that productivity went to zero, it's that production minus consumption did. The USA is facing the same issue, and driving up hugely infeasible debts to forestall the inevitable.
The point of YCombinator is to work real hard on something clever and create a valuable business and reap the rewards; not motivating if those rewards are taken and given to those who do nothing for them.
If there were only investment bankers and drummers, it would almost make sense to force the bankers to support the drummers (in effect what you are proposing). But the reality is there are mostly people like me, working very hard to support a family, making less than 100k, and I find the idea very hard to swallow that I should be supporting a drummer because they'd rather play than work.
I agree it's fairly complex, but I think there is a lot more than some people working hard, providing value, and making money, while others are just "playing", not providing value and not making money. Ability to capture value is central, and not as easy in all valuable areas as others. One longstanding debate is over scientific research: patents are an attempt to allow it to be monetizable, so the market will ensure that scientists are able to capture some of the value of their discoveries. But they also have a lot of problems, and in addition tend only to allow near/medium-term value to be captured, so don't help much with basic research that will only be commercialized in terms longer than the patent term. That's one specific example, but I don't think entirely unique.
In the case of Denmark, taxes. The idea is that in a Western country with a reasonably high standard of living, it's possible to shift the playing field on which individuals compete so that it takes place between, say [$20k,inf] rather than [$0,inf]. The tradeoff is some percentage taken off the upside in return for a cap on the downside. Seems reasonably fair to me, and I don't mind paying taxes for that safety net to exist. One can make all sorts of arguments about exactly where to set the thresholds, but the American attitude that seems to be a kind of visceral anger baffles me. As someone well into the middle class, I don't feel some kind of moral indignation that I could be making 10% more money if only there wasn't this healthcare and housing for poor people.
Yeah, that's pretty much the point I was getting at - the price for "everyone should get [...]" comes from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually taxes.
What it says is basically that for a BIG of 800 Euro (per month per person) in Germany there are only 20 billion Euro's missing (per year), that's nothing compared to e.g. what's currently spent for banks and other fancy things without blinking an eye (or in other words: our society is already working with such a high productivity that a BIG is already possible) The tax system (and social welfare system) needs to be changed completely, but the level of taxation will stay the same.
Some of it also interacts with politics, and I'm not sure I accept all the premises. For example, from my current vantage point in Denmark, society does generally believe that you are entitled to at least a basic living (food/shelter/healthcare), even if not a great one. Then it becomes a question of what you wish to do above that, in both economic and non-economic senses. One presumably wishes to both earn more money than the absolute minimum, but also to contribute to society beyond the absolute minimum; the two desires may or may not be aligned, and there are many paths to doing either/both. In other countries (notably the USA), political views are different on that question. In my own personal opinion I do think it is, in part, "a moral or systematic failure on the part of society" that the situation in the USA is as it is, but that's sort of its own debate (I'm not really anti-market, as I feel they're useful and in any case inevitable, but I don't necessarily think that maket valuation is everything).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_generation