Wait, what? I mean, I guess that just watching your parents work doesn’t “prepare” you for work any more than watching TV does, but that’s because it’s completely unrelated. Watching your parents go to high-powered executive jobs doesn’t “prepare” you for work in the 21st century either, education does. My father was a police officer (they don’t make much money) and my mother stayed home with us - they both encouraged us to study so we could do better than they did. Watching my father go off to a dangerous job every day didn’t “prepare” me for work, but it did help me grow up with a sense of “work is part of adult life” that I wouldn’t have gotten if he’d spent every day watching TV and drinking beer.
And the parents who do this are not the ones who will sit home and drink beer all day just because they're getting a $2k/mo basic income. Instead, they could go back to school, or start a business, or travel outside the country once in awhile, or spend more time teaching their kids an important skill like music or math or programming because the intense, ceaseless, soul-destroying pressure of just getting by has been lifted a bit.
Also, while I understand that police officers don't make a lot and it's very tough job, it's also a very stable job with benefits, a pension, etc. so I imagine that despite not being anywhere close to wealthy, your parents also didn't need to spend their days focused solely on survival like someone who works minimum wage with no job security, who has possibly no health insurance, who likely has to frequently get high interest payday loans to make rent or buy food... that kind of lifestyle is extremely difficult to dig out of, and it leads inevitably towards family breakdown, crime, health-destroying habits, mental illness, and general despair. That's who basic income is really for. I mean these people are literally killing themselves just to get by, and the response of many folks with far more privilege is "eh, you'd just be sitting around drinking beer otherwise".
The ones I knew working minimum wage lived cheaply. They didn't worry about losing their jobs because they were hard workers who could be counted on - the type of person who gets the maximum raise until they top out the pay scale. They were also the type of person to be offered job in management and have the potential to make as much as anyone with an engineering degree (we haven't kept in touch - typically the requirement to move for the job every few years catches up and they decide the next promotion isn't worth it and so stagnate at nice wage that is better than average)
I knew people who sit around drinking bear and working part time. Everybody knew they were losers. It wasn't lack of opportunity that is keeping them down it is lack of following up on it. They would abandon their kids even if you paid the a million dollars a year (even assuming they don't overdose on some drug)
I also know mentally ill people. Their abilities vary, but UBI won't help them as they will just waste it on some other scam. (I know someone who lost money to the Nigerian prince scam, and a dozen others - the family is careful to lock down his money now so he can't do that)
This is correct. For scammers this will be a new gold mine. But I guess it will be a gold mine for everyone. It's 2.8 trillion every year injected into the economy. If you look at it like that than the question is, how can I divert some of that money into my own pockets?
A 'fool them once, shame on you... but it won't happen again!' policy would be a welcome thing.
Services? This sounds more like a legislative than a marketplace problem. Pardon if it’s forward to ask, but what service do you envision could have helped protect your mother?
It was in the gap of finding this out and getting myself back in the loop that the home visitor managed to get checks cashed that she didn't know about.
The services are already in existence, just not consistently or as comprehensively as they could/need to be.
A legislative issue to stop nickel and diming social assistance, for sure. These kinds of services should be available for anyone who needs them, not just whatever narrowly defined criteria in current funding mandates.
We as the public just don't care enough.
Lucky for you, if your parents go to high-powered executive jobs, then you’ve won the jackpot and will probably receive a higher education!
No one has been able to figure this out so far, and what you wrote above is not necessarily even a good description of what multi-generational poverty looks like.
Perhaps it's an over-simplification, or perhaps a lot of people have been over-complicating the problem, particularly when they're trying to prop up a pet political bias.
If we implement UBI on a large scale and it drastically increases upward mobility, I suppose this hypothesis will be more or less proven. I hope that day comes sooner rather than later so we can find out.
I'm sorry but you don't have the first clue.
Plenty of immigrant families leave low opportunity nation states and work what you consider demeaning work whilst taking steps to ensure their children seek more aspirational jobs and careers.
43% of children born into the bottom quintile (bottom 20%) remain in that bottom quintile as adults.
Though I have no idea where you got it from, or whether it refers to one country or the whole world, getting out of the bottom 20% and ending up the in the bottom 30%, for example, would still leave you in a situation where you're struggling to get by in most countries in the world. Which is why this doesn't contribute much without more context.
Edit: found it - https://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_a...
It's quite interesting that you left out the very next phrase, cutting off your quote in the middle of a sentence:
"Forty-three percent of Americans raised in the bottom quintile remain stuck in the bottom as adults, and 70 percent remain below the middle."
Also, right above that is:
"Americans raised at the bottom and top of the family income ladder are likely to remain there as adults, a phenomenon known as 'stickiness at the ends'."
No wonder you didn't post a link.
You said: "Some do [make any significant improvement], but it's a small percentage."
I posted the fact that 43% start and stay in poverty, but that means 57% get out. 57% is not "a small percentage".
Even using your new data source of "and 70 percent remain below the middle." (which is counter to your original claim that people stay stuck in poverty - you could still remain below the middle, but not be in poverty any more), that still means 30% make their way out, which once again, is not "a small percentage".
"Plenty of immigrant families leave low opportunity nation states and work what you consider demeaning work whilst taking steps to ensure their children seek more aspirational jobs and careers."
Nothing you posted indicates that's not a small percentage of people. But it certainly does show that growing up poor is a huge obstacle, and that while upward economic mobility does exist in the US, it's quite limited. To me, that all points toward favoring UBI, and against the idea that people can reliably escape living paycheck to paycheck (or worse) just by developing a good work ethic.
Also, it's not "my new data source". It's your data source. You just didn't bother to reference it.
There is a limited amount of capital in the world. Distributing it now might help those at home, but it does not help the billion people who still lack electricity. There simply is not enough capital in the world to build trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure for free. Investment is a much better vehicle for distribution than UBI as it also creates wealth.
You've already lost me. This is provably false, as any programmer should know: if you sit down and code something useful today, you've just increased the amount of capital in the world. Out of thin air. A carpenter who buys a bunch of lumber and turns it into a thousand-dollar piece of furniture does the same. The more people can learn to add value to the world, and the more value they can add, the bigger the total pie of wealth can grow.
Investment distributes wealth primarily from the elite to the slightly-less elite. It doesn't break the cycle of poverty and immediate survival focus that prevents millions and millions of potential Einsteins or Feynmans or Musks from doing anything with their lives other than scraping by.
> Investment distributes wealth primarily from the elite to the slightly-less elite.
If you've seen how China changed in the last couple decades, you'd see how this obviously isn't true. Basically all electronics are manufactured in a developing Asian country by the children of subsidence farmers.
This, in turn, is what made it possible for us today to enjoy a high standard of living unimaginable back then.
The world is actually full of such examples. There's quite a bit of work done in psychology and sociology as to why this happens. Often, the move from, for example substinence farming to other jobs is a kind of throffer - and so it was, historically documented, in the 16th and 17th centuries in England, too with the move from rural cottage industry to wide-scale factory production.
The industrial revolution started in the late 18th century. Keep in mind that the population was booming then, so there wasn't enough space on the cottage to support the same standard of living.
I feel like the concept of a idyllic peasant is the modern iteration of the "noble savage." For complex decisions, you indeed run into the paradox of choice and other strange psychological phenomena. However, choice between sacrificing time in order to accumulate capital is an easy one, as this has been done billions of times. You need extraordinary evidence to prove otherwise.
>However, choice between sacrificing time in order to accumulate capital is an easy one, as this has been done billions of times.
It's curious why so much land had to be expropriated forcefully if it were such an obvious choice to the modern-day noble savages - and even moreso when one considers modern union activity and intense revolts against the increasing duration and intensity of the working day in America, and to no lesser extent other countries which did not have the privilege of being so readily acquainted with capital. These are no edge cases either. The largest debate in the literature being the question of why the majority does not rise up against the unfair conditions implemented by a minority. Whether you subscribe to the false consciousness solution or the capability solution, both allow you to say that the "rational choice" of not rising up (or accumulating capital) is simply an element of playing the game. The only difference between the theories turns on the point of whether the players know it's a game or not.
Consider the notion of leverage where both A and B can increase their capital more in absolute value if some part of A's significant capital is redistributed to poorer B. UBI just takes risk out of this equation so A does not have to lend to B in order for this to happen. Though yeah, this makes A poorer in absolute value than they would have been without this sneaky taxation (= involuntary expropriation of money).
For society, the risk is that A is more efficient at investing money than a blind redistribution scheme. That's a multi-trillion dollar gamble.
Give money to the poor and most of it will end up back at the rich. It doesn’t work as well trickling down.
1. Apple spends $10 million dollars to build a factory in a developing country. This creates 2,000 jobs over a couple years. These people can finally afford to see a doctor and heat up their homes during the winter.
2. Apple gets taxed $10 million that funds 1000 people's UBI. Their lives are somewhat less stressful. There is a higher demand for Iphones, so Apple can charge a bit more money for them. After a decade, they are able to open an additional factory. However, within that decade, 100 people in that developing country died of a disease that would be easily cured with medicine had they had they been able to work at the factory 10 years ago.
Multi-generational entrenchments of poverty are already a disaster, and not because of fuzzy ideas like "instilling a work ethic", but because many millions of people lack the basic material resources needed to fulfill anything close to their potential.
A kid watching their parents break their backs as minimum-wage slaves living paycheck to paycheck doesn't prepare them to do anything other than the same thing with their lives.