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A comment on Finnish basic income pilot improved wellbeing, study finds. Parent comment

Re:Finnish basic income pilot improved wellbeing, study finds by ThrowawayR2 on Thursday May 07, 2020 @03:44PM (#23107324)
> "But as sure as you can be those people will exist, there will also be people who could have been the next Newton, the next Kierkegaard, slaving away in a warehouse somewhere, dead in the gate before the race even started."

There are surely far more efficient ways of nurturing the next Newton or Kierkegaard than by spraying economy-breaking quantities of money around blindly. That's simply being wasteful.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Finnish basic income pilot improved wellbeing, study finds by hnarn on Thursday May 07, 2020 @04:10PM (#23107664)
That's assuming that there's a decent way to identify these people and that people's potential is pretty much constant across their first 30 years. I'm not saying our current "filters" are useless but I don't think anyone can claim that they are without fault.

I'm also not sure that it's true that this would require "spraying money around", I think a lot of man-hours are already spent on useless work and/or basically doing nothing, but doing nothing during salaried time is not equivalent to doing nothing during your own time in terms of potential.

Sure, it's a utopia and a dream but I think it's naive to say that our current economy is already ideal when it comes to distribution of necessary goods and realizing the potential of the individual.

[ Parent | on HN ]