Re:Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart
by resu_nimda on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @01:36PM
(#14960273)
That sounds essentially like Basic Income, depending on how it's doled out. Especially with the rise of automation "taking all our jobs," it seems like some form of this is inevitable. But of course things will probably have to get much worse before our culture starts accepting the idea (despite the fact that statistically it will directly benefit most of the people).
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Re:Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart
by jpster on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @02:31PM
(#14960988)
Some observers argue that basic income has been tried in the past and failed.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/01/the-failure-of-a-pas...
Re:Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart
by resu_nimda on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @03:01PM
(#14961321)
Interesting article. One key difference is that this was done before/during the Industrial Revolution, so it was probably too early. The amount of human labor it takes to provide basic needs for one human is an important factor. For example:
It was intended as an emergency measure to help the poor when grain prices had risen sharply due to meager harvests.
Today we can produce so much food we have to come up with creative ways to keep it valuable - subsidies, dumping it, etc. We've "lost" a ton of agriculture jobs since that experiment was tried, because we can do it with less people. Seems reasonable to transfer those gains back to the people instead of all of them going to the guy that owns the harvester.