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  • Who's in debt to whom?

    Here's a blog post from a psychiatrist/insightful essayist arguing that society owes its citizens, not the other way around, and this implies that society should at the very least provide a basic income to everybody.

    [Content note: Suicide. May be guilt-inducing for people who feel like burdens. All patient characteristics have been heavily obfuscated to protect confidentiality.] The DSM lists nine criteria for…


    The DSM lists nine criteria for major depressive disorder, of which the seventh is “feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt”.

    There are a lot of dumb diagnostic debates over which criteria are “more important” or “more fundamental”, and for me there’s always been something special about criterion seven. People get depressed over all sorts of things. But when they’re actively suicidal, the people who aren’t just gesturing for help but totally set on it, they always say one thing:

    “I feel like I’m a burden”.

    ...

    Another patient. 25 year old kid. Had some brain damage a few years ago, now has cognitive problems and poor emotional control. Can’t do a job. Got denied for disability a few times, in accordance with the ancient bureaucratic tradition. Survives on a couple of lesser social programs he got approved for plus occasional charity handouts plus some help from his family. One can trace out an unlikely sequence of events by which his situation might one day improve, but I won’t insult his intelligence by claiming it’s very probable. Now he attempts suicide, says he feels like a burden on everyone around him. Well, what am I going to say?

    It’s not always people with some obvious disability. Sometimes it’s just alcoholics, or elderly people, or people without the cognitive skills to get a job in today’s economy. They think that they’re taking more from the system than they’re putting in, and in monetary terms they’re probably right.

    ...

    There is something else I’ve never said, because it’s too deeply tied in with my own politics, and not something I would expect anybody else to understand.

    And that is: humans don’t owe society anything. We were here first.

    If my patient, the one with the brain damage, were back in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, in a nice tribe with Dunbar’s number of people, there would be no problem.

    Maybe his cognitive problems would make him a slightly less proficient hunter than someone else, but whatever, he could always gather.

    Maybe his emotional control problems would give him a little bit of a handicap in tribal politics, but he wouldn’t get arrested for making a scene, he wouldn’t get fired for not sucking up to his boss enough, he wouldn’t be forced to live in a tiny apartment with people he didn’t necessarily like who were constantly getting on his nerves. He might get in a fight and end up with a spear through his gut, but in that case his problems would be over anyway.

    Otherwise he could just hang out and live in a cave and gather roots and berries and maybe hunt buffalo and participate in the appropriate tribal bonding rituals like everyone else.

    But society came and paved over the place where all the roots and berry plants grew and killed the buffalo and dynamited the caves and declared the tribal bonding rituals Problematic. This increased productivity by about a zillion times, so most people ended up better off. The only ones who didn’t were the ones who for some reason couldn’t participate in it.

    (if you’re one of those people who sees red every time someone mentions evolution or cavemen, imagine him as a dockworker a hundred years ago, or a peasant farmer a thousand)

    Society got where it is by systematically destroying everything that could have supported him and replacing it with things that required skills he didn’t have. Of course it owes him when he suddenly can’t support himself. Think of it as the ultimate use of eminent domain; a power beyond your control has seized everything in the world, it had some good economic reasons for doing so, but it at least owes you compensation!

    This is also the basis of my support for a basic income guarantee. Imagine an employment waterline, gradually rising through higher and higher levels of competence. In the distant past, maybe you could be pretty dumb, have no emotional continence at all, and still live a pretty happy life. As the waterline rises, the skills necessary to support yourself comfortably become higher and higher. Right now most people in the US who can’t get college degrees – which are really hard to get! – are just barely hanging on, and that is absolutely a new development. Soon enough even some of the college-educated won’t be very useful to the system. And so on, until everyone is a burden.

    (people talk as if the only possible use of information about the determinants of intelligence is to tell low-IQ people they are bad. Maybe they’ve never felt the desperate need to reassure someone “No, it is not your fault that everything is going wrong for you, everything was rigged against you from the beginning.”)

    By the time I am a burden – it’s possible that I am already, just because I can convince the system to give me money doesn’t mean the system is right to do so, but I expect I certainly will be one before I die – I would like there to be in place a crystal-clear understanding that we were here first and society doesn’t get to make us obsolete without owing us something in return.
    I don't have crystal clear thoughts on this matter (especially because depression ****s with my thinking in exactly the way he describes), so I'm opening up the floor for discussion here.
    Click here if you're having trouble sleeping.
    "We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones." - François de La Rochefoucauld

  • #2
    I do agree that there should be some type of safety net for those that can not, but no way would I support a basic income. I guess I'm old school and believe it would take away the incentive to contribute. I know many claim that everyone would then be free to contribute how they want instead of how they must, but I just don't buy it. If there's no incentive many (of course not all) would be satisfied to live off of it.
    It's almost as if all his overconfident, absolutist assertions were spoonfed to him by a trusted website or subreddit. Sheeple
    RIP Tony Bogey & Baron O

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    • #3
      As an Eurocom, I support a relatively far reaching safety net, though I find the reason "cuz humans were here 1st" somewhat strange, but oh well.

      How exactly it's going to look like (what kind of social welfare measures, UBI, whatever) is another matter, something that different countries answer differently right now. Not one has really UBI yet (IIRC) on a country wide scale, though some attempts have been made on a smaller scale.

      IMO the arguments for this kind of stuff are on principle (ppl should be more than just economic factors, so they do deserve basic stuff in any case, regardless their overall "usefulness" or "worthiness", etc) and practical (like: limiting poverty would also limit neg. side effects a la crime or so). At the same time we live in economic conditions we can't just ignore, so whatever social measures are offered they have to be sustainable.

      I do see some downsides, like a certain tendency in poltics to de facto "bribe" ppl with social safety measures. Which is esp. a prob in case where short term political gain is made by promising/handing out stuff that is problematic/not affordable/sets wrong incentives long term.

      For me it's not so much a question of who owes to whom, but what I think a society worth living in should look like, and how to organize it so it works best.
      Blah

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      • #4
        People owe the society for providing a structure for enjoying a fruitful life.
        Society owe the people a reasonable structure so the people don't revolt and overthrow the society.
        It's almost as if all his overconfident, absolutist assertions were spoonfed to him by a trusted website or subreddit. Sheeple
        RIP Tony Bogey & Baron O

        Comment


        • #5
          basic income should defnatley(there) be tried out

          Originally posted by BeBro View Post
          I find the reason "cuz humans were here 1st" somewhat strange, but oh well.
          PragmaTalk???!

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          • #6
            The Wizard of AAHZ

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            • #7
              Originally posted by rah View Post
              I do agree that there should be some type of safety net for those that can not, but no way would I support a basic income. I guess I'm old school and believe it would take away the incentive to contribute. I know many claim that everyone would then be free to contribute how they want instead of how they must, but I just don't buy it. If there's no incentive many (of course not all) would be satisfied to live off of it.
              I hink it depends on the amount of basic income that is given to people.
              If it is low enough (so that people really can only afford basic things (like the necessary insurances, their meals,and cheap consumer electornics), there will still be incentives for people to be able to afford more (i.e. by getting a job).
              There will surely be people who are satisfied by it ... but I guess that this applies to many people who nowadays on welfare as well.

              On the positive side there will be less bureaucracy (as you don't have a bloated administration which determines who is eligible for welfare and who not (as everyone gets the basic income)) (and therefore less costs for said bureaucracy), you will have people covered who, out of no fauilt of their own are long term, unemployed (for example because their jobs have been taken over by machines) and, even more, you also have students covered (meaning that they don't have to get a job in order to cover their living expenses (which, ideally, also means that they ´finish their studies more quickly (or, alternatrively, have more time to spend their time besides the study in order to try to get a startup running)))

              AFAIK there are several practical field studies running, with regards to a basic income, all around the world (usually time limited and on a municipial level ... IIRC even a small town in the USA does such an experiment, but I may be mistaken there) but I haven't looked through any papers of them so far
              Tamsin (Lost Girl): "I am the Harbinger of Death. I arrive on winds of blessed air. Air that you no longer deserve."
              Tamsin (Lost Girl): "He has fallen in battle and I must take him to the Einherjar in Valhalla"

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              • #8
                It's late and I should get to bed, so I'll try to be brief: the social implications of UBI are nontrivial. One that just hit me, as I was mulling this over, is location. What it costs to support yourself in the US is heavily dependent on where you want to live. You can live quite nicely in Kentucky off the same income that would make you intermittently homeless in NYC or San Francisco. I don't think anyone's proposing enough cash to allow everyone to live in the latter--where would it come from?--so in effect it would be a much better sop for Reds than Blues, ironically enough.
                1011 1100
                Pyrebound--a free online serial fantasy novel

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                • #9
                  The were is the money coming from is one HUGE issue. In other discussions I've had, some have argued that we could just print the money. These are the same people people that said we couldn't afford Trump's tax cuts. UBI would probably cost more.
                  It's almost as if all his overconfident, absolutist assertions were spoonfed to him by a trusted website or subreddit. Sheeple
                  RIP Tony Bogey & Baron O

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by rah View Post
                    The were is the money coming from is one HUGE issue. In other discussions I've had, some have argued that we could just print the money. These are the same people people that said we couldn't afford Trump's tax cuts. UBI would probably cost more.
                    Perhaps it would just cost the same.
                    I have meanwhile read this Wikipeia page about pilot projects for the basic income:


                    One field study in finland, that probably resembles most how the basic income would look in reality, gave out a monthly amount of 560 Euro € per person taking part in the study.

                    Lets round this down to 500 $ as basic incomecosts per person and calculate this over a population of 300 million americans,
                    then this would be 1.5 trillion dollar over 10 years, which is roughly the same amount as the tax cut for the rich will (according to many (and not even the most pessimistic) calculations) would cost the state

                    In return, some of the current welfare payments, along with thir bureaucratic costs, may be canceled without replacement (as the basic income would be cosidered to be a replacement for the money that formerly was paid by these welfare programs)
                    Tamsin (Lost Girl): "I am the Harbinger of Death. I arrive on winds of blessed air. Air that you no longer deserve."
                    Tamsin (Lost Girl): "He has fallen in battle and I must take him to the Einherjar in Valhalla"

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                    • #11
                      Unfortunately, $500 a month or $6,000 a year is nowhere near enough money for somebody to survive.
                      The figure probably needs to be closer to $1,000 a month.
                      Keep on Civin'
                      RIP rah, Tony Bogey & Baron O

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                      • #12
                        Also I just noticed that I forgot to take it by 12 (i.e. use 6k instead of 0.5k per year) .. so, even for the 500$ per month and taking into account around 25% persons under 18 (who would not eligible for a basic income) the actual amount for the USA for 10 year would rather be around 13.5 trillion.

                        So, if wwe take Mings figures (of 1000 $ pP per month) this would be around 27 trillion for 10 years
                        (without taking into account the savings you get by being able to cancel welfare programs (and their bureaucratic costs) without replacement, however)
                        Last edited by Proteus_MST; January 11, 2018, 12:50. Reason: 1000 not 100
                        Tamsin (Lost Girl): "I am the Harbinger of Death. I arrive on winds of blessed air. Air that you no longer deserve."
                        Tamsin (Lost Girl): "He has fallen in battle and I must take him to the Einherjar in Valhalla"

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          The taking out part is a BIG part but even then the cost is quite high. I'm all up for squeezing part of it from the wealthy but you can only squeeze so much. I can't see anyway that it would be practical.
                          It's almost as if all his overconfident, absolutist assertions were spoonfed to him by a trusted website or subreddit. Sheeple
                          RIP Tony Bogey & Baron O

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                          • #14
                            Originally posted by Proteus_MST View Post
                            One field study in finland, that probably resembles most how the basic income would look in reality, gave out a monthly amount of 560 Euro € per person taking part in the study.
                            yah but lets wait til the trial proprley begins

                            i guess the participants also are entitled to ca 200-400€ in housing benefits(?) in addition to the BI

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                            • #15
                              And would that include health benefits also?
                              It's almost as if all his overconfident, absolutist assertions were spoonfed to him by a trusted website or subreddit. Sheeple
                              RIP Tony Bogey & Baron O

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