GDP per capita also counts children. $48,000 for a family of four sounds perfectly fine to me.

This isn't a realistic way to project consumption, though. A single adult living alone has more expenses per person than a family of four under one roof. An elderly couple will not get by on $24k. (And half of people are not under 18, 21, or 25 as you may prefer to define childhood.)

The assumes nothing ever goes wrong. One serious illness or injury and you’re bankrupt.

That’s what (mandatory) insurances are for. Not insuring against events you cannot deal with alone is gambling.

At $12,000 per person, you can't insure against much at all without seriously cutting into the food and shelter.

Healthcare is around 10% of GDP (bar some countries that have organized their healthcare system inefficiently like my native Germany).

That still leaves you with $10.800. A liability insurance costs here around 50–100€ per year for a family. What more insurances do you need? GDP per capita also includes pensioners, so you do not need to count pension into this.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?most_...

My understanding is that reducing a single person's income from 12,000 to 10,800 is a big deal. And in any case, my original point was that this is barely "enough," and this is assuming a perfectly efficient and equitable distribution. It may actually, technically be enough, but it's poverty. It's only not poverty if you also receive the income for people you take care of who don't actually need all of the income (like kids). I don't think arguing over whether $11,000 is as good as $12,000 is particularly meaningful because I don't think $12,000 is enough either, and my main disagreement with the original poster was with the statement that there has been enough for a long time. That seems unequivocally untrue to me.

These arguments always ignore the fact that the only reason $X GDP is generated is because people are incentivized. Children don’t produce, so someone else is producing for them. If you tell people they will get $12k no matter how hard they work, they won’t work. We’ve tried socialism.

When did we try socialism?

> If you tell people they will get $12k no matter how hard they work, they won’t work.

This is obviously not true, since in every capitalist society, the hardest working people already make the least amount of money, and the laziest people employed already get given the most amount of money.

Capitalism has already proven that financial incentive has no correlation to how hard someone works.

What?? It’s the exact opposite. Those people HAVE to work that hard precisely for the reason I mentioned: they won’t be paid otherwise. This is precisely the issue. If you paid people irrespective of how much they work, they won’t work.

Your example is evidence of my statement, not refutation.

Do I really work harder as a software engineer than the garbagemen who bust their asses doing a dangerous smelly job? Or teachers wrangling a room full of kids?

I don't think so.

And yet I am paid 5-10X what they are.

I think you're basically agreeing with the comment you replied to. They're saying people who are financially secure (possibly like a software engineer) are less incentivized to work hard. Someone who really needs the money is more incentivized.

If you got the same pay whether or not you showed up to work each day, you'd be less incentivized to show up.

"incentivizing" is such an anodyne word for this cruelty.

I'm not advocating poverty, nor do I think was the parent comment. They were just in agreement with you that poor people work hard.

Do you have an actual argument or are you just going to nitpick word choices?

Words matter. Let's be clear about the human costs of what we are describing.

You are still completely missing the point. Stop deciding you want to be angry about my comment before actually reading it.

If you think I missed your point, perhaps you should consider rephrasing it to make it more obvious.

> "We’ve tried socialism."

I don't remember from school the bit where Mr Socialism said "let the workers sieze the means of production so they can shutdown the means of production, because they are lazy and stupid". "define:Socialism"[1] - "Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively". NB. that it involves production, and is /not/ "Systems of social organization in which lazy people get paid for doing nothing".

> "If you tell people they will get $12k no matter how hard they work, they won’t work"

Have you never seen or heard of volunteers? There are countries where the unemployed get money, e.g. the UK, and yet most people still work. How does this fit into your claim?

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=define%3Asocialism&ia=definition

> Have you never seen or heard of volunteers?

Yes, they are obviously doing the work for other reasons.

> There are countries where the unemployed get money, e.g. the UK, and yet most people still work. How does this fit into your claim?

You aren’t getting it. Those people still work because they can earn more than what the unemployment is. If all of a sudden you said even if you work, you’ll only earn the unemployment benefit, then nobody would work.

Guys please stop deciding you want to be upset about a comment and then trying to backsolve your rationale.

> "Yes, they are obviously doing the work for other reasons."

Yes, and that disproves your claim that people only work for money, and without more money people won't do more work.

> "You aren’t getting it. Those people still work because they can earn more than what the unemployment is." If all of a sudden you said even if you work, you’ll only earn the unemployment benefit, then nobody would work.*"

Volunteers earn no extra money for their work, and yet still work. Many people work unpaid overtime out of loyalty for their employer / coworkers / customers / patients, many people work out of passion and interest and hobbying ("starving artist" trope).

And, again, you're propagandising "Socialism" changing from "people get money without working" to "people can't get more than a fixed limited return on their work", which again it isn't. But let's go with that definition - if everything collectively owned, the more stuff there is the more stuff is collectively owned, so the more benefit everyone gets. When the Federal Government builds more roads, you personally get more roads you can drive on as a benefit. So even if Socialism was "you can't earn more than the minimum wage {because the collective takes it from you!}", you are part of the collective, so it still wouldn't be the case that people got no more benefit for producing more, as you claim.

Or, perhaps you’re just wrong? You can’t even be bothered to answer the simple question of when socialism has been attempted.

I’ve been watching videos about tribes in Papa New Guniea and it makes you realize you don’t need very much for clothes or shelter.

Food is all you really need. For luxury: food, sex, and purpose. The tribes have all 3.

It doesn't snow in Papua New Guinea.

GC claimed that food is all that is needed, and that their wants were satisfied by the additional of the other two things.

The fact is that the average human is not actually content to be one notch above animal with "food, sex, and purpose". That is why we have progressed much further than just accepting those basics as all we need. But I think our improvements on those things do provide enough value for the average person to be happy.

- Tasty food

- Safe sex (and relative ease of reproduction)

- Multi-variate / chosen purpose.

Plus other methods to remove annoying friction from your life:

- Optimized shelter

- Optimized travel

- Consumption of various raw goods (not for food and not for shelter). e.g. 3D Printers!

GDP per capita of $12,000 implies family of 4 is $48,000, because "per capita" is per person in that family.

Yeah that's why I said for a family of 4. $12,000 is hardly enough for food, shelter, and clothing for a single person.