I agree. A lot of people would just secretly buy real estate or some other investment instead of actually doing the work.

Balkanization of the real estate market into the hands of less savvy, more competitive operators might be a good thing, actually?

Are you We CEO?

The big boy wisdom is that most social problems are probably not solvable. And that’s why they remain problems.

Because they are not solvable? Or because big boy wisdom says they're not solvable? I would say the cynicism of the latter is indeed a large part of the problem.

Yes I did, and no you did not. You made a drive-by shoot-down of an innocent idea without suggesting a better one or giving a single valid reason why you feel the idea is bad. If you don't have something to say that will improve the situation then maybe you should not comment.

The idea is bad because you just created an involuntary venture capital fund by taking money from people that didn’t necessarily want to “invest” it. It’s also a bad idea because we already have venture capitalist who fund “far fetched” ideas using money from willing participants rather than the public coffers.

If you want to encourage more innovation, cut taxes on investment and capital gains to make it cheaper to invest. Cut regulations to make it easier for upstarts to disrupt the entrenched.

But a national million dollar giveaway program for wild ideas? What could possibly go wrong?

You made a couple good points. Now we're having a conversation!

1. You don't have a choice about investing in the future of your own country. You do that when you pay taxes. Like it or not. It does not matter.

2. Venture capitalists do not fund far fetched ideas, they FOMO lemming-like fund whatever every other idiot is already funding.

Lots of people in favor of UBI simultaneously hate the idea of merit-based "big money" grants for ideas. Maybe because they don't want public opportunity programs to dry up the pool of broke-ass idealistic post-docs with big ideas and no chance to ever see any of them get funded.

> I guess you didn't read the test [sic] of the comments then.

>> Yes I did

>>> No. Not that I can find

Not sure where you'd find that. I read your comments, and found them wanting.

While this is just a very basic idea I put out, still, corruption is rampant everywhere anyway. I suspect it would be a net positive to have a ton of Brilliant students getting money for their projects even if half of the money are corrupted away.

You can't satisfy corruption by throwing money at it and hoping it only takes its share. It won't. It will take it all, and then it will find a way to take more besides.

So what is the solution to corruption?

It does seem like it's getting worse, or maybe media coverage about it is getting better.

Has any country in the world successfully fought corruption in a peaceful way? (ie. no revolutions, no guillotines)

Most of the west is not corrupt. You have to visit eastern europe, latin america, middle east and east asia to experience it

The solution is not throwing more free money in public coffers. It definitively exacerbated corruption in greece for example

So you are saying that free money is not a solution. Ok, then what is a solution?

Also, how do you measure and compare corruption?

The US has gone to war killing millions of people, including hundreds of thousands of their own, motivated by (oil/industrial-military) money and justified with lies.

The US political system is controlled mostly by corporations and rich people that pay for lobbying.

So are you saying the west is not corrupt because it is more publicly/"legally" corrupt?

I do agree with the sentiment that via political donations the U.S. political system is corrupted, but I hope you can offer a citation for the millions killed and hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens, and a clear cause and effect of the stated motivation, please. I think most of what you said is an overstatement, not to belittle those that suffered because of greed.

You are right, millions might be an exaggeration, I was going off of numbers read elsewhere online.

Here's a source that estimates total deaths, post-9/11 so far (by November 2018) at hundreds of thousands: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/20...

That doesn't take into account the previous war with Iraq.

By the way, I never said US citizens. Do you think US citizens' lives are somehow more important than people from other parts of the world?

Also, oil/greed seems to be the most apparent motivation (you might want to watch the movie Vice, or just revise non-US media coverage from the time).

It would be great if you could provide a source that has a clear (real) cause/effect of whatever motivated the US to start a war with Iraq and Afghanistan, and please don't say weapons of mass destruction.

I'm limiting it to U.S. citizens (soldiers) because I can with some confidence say that U.S. policy at least can be traced as a cause of their death.

No, I don't think US citizen's lives are more important defacto, but I don't see all lives as equal either, for the record.

Oil/greed fit the leftist narrative, but I'm not convinced, and since you made the claim that it's about oil and greed, the onus is on you to prove it! I don't have to provide motivation of my own, though I suspect two planes crashing into a building might have something to do with it.

> I suspect two planes crashing into a building might have something to do with it.

The first war with Iraq was pre-9/11, so nothing to do with two planes.

Now, about 9/11, what did Iraq or Afghanistan had to do with those planes? If anything, the US should have gone to war with Saudi Arabia, whose citizens piloted those planes.

So how do those planes justify going to war with two totally different countries, that potentially had nothing to do with 9/11? Or how do those planes justify going to war at all?

Has killing thousands more people somehow redeemed or justified the deaths of people during 9/11?

> but I don't see all lives as equal either, for the record.

On the off chance of you having some plausible explanation for this outrageous statement I invite you to expand on this.

> I don't see all lives as equal

?!

Which west? The one that has legal corruption under name of lobbying? Or the west which has internally, without the need of pescy public's say, elected chair of governance?

>Most of the west is not corrupt.

That's laughable.

Well, a lot of the budget of any given government is corrupted away, regardless of what you put that into. But some inevitably goes to what it was meant to address. It won’t take it all, or no one would have any access to healthcare facilities and public transport. But we do.

Corruption is not rampant everywhere. And perhaps that gets at the root of why some places have functioning modern economies and others do not.

I'd say it does. During a modeling project I worked on back when I was in school, my team found that beyond any other social or economic factor the value of the corruption index was the best correlated to how f'd up a country was. The next best was, I think, women's literacy or some other equality measure.

What was surprising to me was how uncorrelated other factors of economic health were. We found examples of countries with pretty poor indicators but very low corruption, and they had a lot of opportunity, future, and growth.

Switzerland, Norway and who else exactly? Out of 100+ countries

Full list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

It would have been faster if you just replied with “CA and NZ”, since those are the only other countries on that list, which btw, I’m skeptical of.

In your quest to rattle of glib retorts, you have failed to bother even reading the list. There are about a dozen countries with similar levels of corruption as Switzerland, Sweden, Canada, and New Zealand. And then there’s a whole bunch of other countries that are pretty close.

Yes I barely checked the index because the index I consider good from the UN doesn’t list them as the least corrupted ones. This is a perceived index. I’m pretty skeptical of Sweden, NZ and CA being corruption free. They don’t have anything exceptional to back it up anyway.

You still haven’t actually provided any evidence for your position. At this point, you’re just some person on the Internet with strong opinions. Most people on this site won’t take you seriously because our lived experience is in the first world and corruption is not a thing most of us have ever encountered.

NZ is surprisingly corrupt, especially at the regional and district health board (DHB) level. Not in an absolute sense, just compared to expectations.

I suspect it another millenial fantasy much like basic income et al

I suspect giving people with no life experience, exposure to failure or real life dynamics will end badly. The single digit number of success stories in limited domains aren't representative of any real meaning

> giving people with no life experience, exposure to failure or real life dynamics will end badly

By that measure no one could ever become an adult.

Exposure to failure and real life dynamics is exactly what people with no life experience need. At least that's the only way they will gain life experience.

> millennial fantasy

At least millenials are dreaming about a better society and trying to fight for it.

What are you doing besides spitting out unprovoked hate towards a whole generation of people?

Apprently I'm a millenial so I'm more than happy to use the moniker .

> spitting out unprovoked hate towards a whole generation of people?

Care to cite the basis of your assertion?

Giving people money at minimum redistributes wealth, so it cannot possibly be any worse, than letting wealth concentrate.

It's a slippery slope as to whom you disenfranchised to redistributed that cash: but it will inevitably be a large group of people in the middle, not the minority elite you sold the policy on.

If some people can't accumulate something they can't do bigger things as creators or create bigger markets as consumers.

You won't disenfranchise anyone, because the investment will more than pay for itself. That's the point.

It's just another form of seed funding for ambitious start-ups.

And $30bn/yr is absolutely trivial compared to the opportunity costs of an economy geared more to financialisation and regressive wealth extraction than to productive engineering and invention.

To put $30bn a year in perspective, that buys you a basic income of about $10.12 a month in the US for all adults.

If you take an extra $20k from me per year in the form of taxes, how does some kid’s invention actually pay me back? Am I a shareholder in this project? Will I get a return on that $20k? Will the government give me my $20k back plus a profit?

This silly proposal is nothing more than socialized venture capital. We have real venture capital who invest in “far fetched” ideas already — and they have willing participants who know what they are getting into — not people being forced, literally at the point of a gun, through taxes.

> Will I get a return on that $20k?

Yes you will (according the basic theory of the idea).

Unfortunately, even though you will get a return, when you get it you will believe that you haven't had the return because it will take the form of $100k of life improvements that you will believe you "would have had anyway" without the investment.

You might even get $100k of cash, in the form of your salary increasing by much more than that, and costs of quality of life things increasing by less (enough to make the difference >$20k). But when it happens you will almost certainly attribute it to other causes.

And so, today, you will argue against the investment, it won't happen, and you will end up poorer than you would have been.

While believing you are richer, because $20k cash in the hand today feels more real than $100k quality of life cost differential improvements in future whose attribution is difficult or impossible to verify.

That's the theory anyway.

From where I stand, I seems not very far from that argument to arguing in favor of trickle down economics being a success by the same mechanism.

I see parallels too, but trickle down economics is about sending capital "up" in the hope that what's produced trickles back down from wealthy people, whereas the idea of investing in lots of people is more like sending capital "down", or at least sideways.

I think a plausible factor in the failures of trickle down economics to enrich the masses as much as hoped by those who advocate it, is wealthy groups of people acting so as to keep what wealth they have in their own control, away from others. And, over generations, perhaps ceasing to be wealth generators (e.g. inventors and industrialists) and becoming wealth controllers (e.g. "old money" families).

Widespread investing in lots of people isn't subject to the same problem, by definition. (Assuming those people are paid decently, rather than indentured servants to some capital controller).

The minute you give a bunch of people $1-3MM as upthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21034871), you're sending $30-90BB "up", by definition, from the perspective of the typical American (median household wealth of $97,300). It's perhaps just not as far up, so not as far that it needs to trickle down, but it seems more or less the same on a zoomed out level and puts the recipients at 10-30x the median wealth. Simply investing that sum in index equity funds would typically provide a income to place a household around the median household income over a four decade period without working.

Maybe trickle down actually works. Maybe we all got a return on it in invisible ways. Maybe things would be a lot worse for the median taxpayer than they are after the policy was enacted. How would we know for sure?

I think the proposed idea is not supposed to allow people to simply invest the money and live off the proceeds.

Just like when a VC or government grant agency gives you money, you can't simply invest it and live off the proceeds in those cases either.

With that ruled out, the $1-3MM is not really the recipient's money, and they are not really wealthy in the way you are comparing to other households.

Is great that a random made up number justifies your argument.

>Giving people money at minimum redistributes wealth, so it cannot possibly be any worse

Of course it will. Basic income is so expensive that the wealth don’t have enough to take to fund it. It’s going to require massive taxes in the middle class that result in a quality of life loss.

I think the parent is a variation on the "poor should stay poor, rich should stay rich" argument. With the poor not mentioned, and implicitly not counted.

Any cash given to the poorer classes and taken from the middle classes likely has greater quality of life value to the poorer classes - because it would be used for things that are more essential to life.

This means the quality of life loss to the middle classes is more than offset by quality of life gain to the poorer classes. And the poorer classes have many more people.

By some ethical standards, this makes it unequivocally beneficial to redistribute.

(I don't actually agree with that approach, because money in some hands is more potent for creating benefit to others, than in other hands. But I think the parent's argument, that it's bad because the middle class would suffer, is essentially a "poor people don't matter" argument.)

Shall we take a kidney from the healthy to transplant into those with need? If we don't, are we essentially saying "people with kidney failure don't matter"?

Many voters in the middle class feel like they've worked (and continue to work) very hard to get where they are and object to the meager spoils of their work being taken for redistribution. Right or wrong, it's a very real feeling. (Obviously, I'm not saying dollars are kidneys, but they will cause a similar reaction in people.)

I disagree only with the grandparent post's argument that an administrative approach would be bad because a subset of people would be worse off under it.

I think that type of reasoning is fallacious because every policy leaves a subset of people worse off (you can just choose your preferred subset to make the point). Including the status quo.

I like your kidney analogy, and I think it makes a strong counter point that is worth considering when weighing up policy ideas.

Though, the status quo in that analogy looks to me like the majority of people in the world currently are having one kidney removed during childhood, mostly to feed the middle classes and build toys for them. Some unlucky ones have two; they are sick and dying. But we couldn't take a kidney from the healthy middle class folks to give back to those, could we, because voters in the middle class feel like they've worked (and continue to work) very hard to get their kidney from some unspecified source we don't like to think about, and they object to the meager spoils of their hard-earned spare kidney being taken for redistribution back to the people they came from.

Making the middle class poor by taking away their ability to own a home, etc is absolutely not a “poor people don’t matter” argument. It’s a “let’s not destroy a stable part of society in a ham-fisted attempt to help the poor”.

Refuting dumb ideas to help the poor doesn’t mean I don’t care about helping them.

This is only if you outright ignore the second+ order effects of doing such and the incentives created.

I agree with you; that's what I meant when I said I don't agree personally with simplistic redistribution.

Very concerning reply. While you’re at it, don’t ever step outside or use a knife. You might injure yourself

Cortuption is one of the biggest differentiating factors between successful/unsuccessful countries