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ModusPwnd
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The point is relative poverty is not so impoverished when you adopt a broad (global) perspective. The people in "poverty" in the US and the EU often consume more resources than the Earth can even support, per capita.
mheslep has a good sense of smell. The number is accurate but for the wrong thing.AlephZero said:There are references given for both numbers. If you want to be skeptical of the original sources, that's a different issue from just dismissing it as a "student essay".
So 3.5M isn't the "homeless population" right now, it is the number that have at least one night of homelessness in a given year. If you want to know the homeless population on any given night, that number is a little further down:Another approximation is from a study done by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty which states that approximately 3.5 million people, 1.35 million of them children, are likely to experience homelessness in a given year (National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, 2007).
So the number we're really looking for (albeit 10 years old) is about 650,000 at anyone time. Now this poverty advocacy site prefers the 3.5M number:These numbers, based on findings from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, Urban Institute and specifically the National Survey of Homeless Assistance Providers, draw their estimates from a study of service providers across the country at two different times of the year in 1996. They found that, on a given night in October, 444,000 people (in 346,000 households) experienced homelessness – which translates to 6.3% of the population of people living in poverty. On a given night in February, 842,000 (in 637,000 households) experienced homelessness...
Whether that is more appropriate or not I leave to you, but clearly when playing whisper-down-the-lane, the number gets misinterpreted. That is a good reason why you shouldn't cite a student essay.Many people call or write the National Coalition for the Homeless to ask about the number of homeless people in the United States. There is no easy answer to this question and, in fact, the question itself is misleading. In most cases, homelessness is a temporary circumstance -- not a permanent condition. A more appropriate measure of the magnitude of homelessness is the number of people who experience homelessness over time, not the number of "homeless people."
By not providing the timeframe, our poor student was forced to guess...One approximation of the annual number of homeless in America is from a study by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, which estimates between 2.3 and 3.5 million people experience homelessness.
I think you're serious there, but no developed nation uses a $1 a day threshold for poverty so you are badly misunderstanding the issue. The US poverty threshold varies by family size, but for an individual is $11,500 per year in income ($31.50 per day).DrDu said:I really don't get your point. Based on some absolute definition like e.g. earning less than 1 Dollar a day, poor people in the EU would not only be poor but starving...
http://www.oecd.org/social/soc/OECD2013-Inequality-and-Poverty-8p.pdfMeasures of relative poverty refer to the current
median income and are therefore difficult to interpret
during recessions. In a situation where the incomes of
all households fall but they fall by less at the bottom
than at the middle, relative poverty will decline.
Therefore, different more “absolute” poverty indices,
linked to past living standards, are needed to
complement the picture provided by relative income
poverty.
To address this issue, Figure 7 describes changes in
poverty using an indicator which measures poverty
against a benchmark “anchored” to half the median
real incomes observed in 2005. Using this measure,
recent increases in income poverty are much higher
than suggested by “relative” income poverty.
For a comparison between rich and poor countries that is true, but when tracking the income, poverty and prices of a particular rich country it is not. I checked a handful of OECD countries and only the US experienced any price reduction (and then only a pinch) during the recession:DrDu said:...as prices are somehow proportional to the median income...
That mortality in developed countries is affected more
by relative than absolute living standards is shown by
three pieces of evidence. Firstly, mortality is related
more closely to relative income within countries than
to differences in absolute income between them.
Secondly, national mortality rates tend to be lowest in
countries that have smaller income differences and
thus have lower levels of relative deprivation. Thirdly,
most of the long term rise in life expectancy seems
unrelated to long term economic growth rates.
Although both material and social influences
contribute to inequalities in health, the importance of
relative standards implies that psychosocial pathways
may be particularly influential.
I disagree with basically all of that - even the part about it being "European" - it is just liberal; it most certainly applies to American liberals.Ryan_m_b said:Relative poverty is a very important measure. There have been a wealth of studies showing that relative poverty causes health problems, even amongst people of the same socioeconomic class working in the same places doing similar jobs. It's not just imagined out of thin air due to some European liberal ideology.
It doesn't take much searching on pubmed or a similar site to find epidemiological studies into this, for example:
http://epirev.oxfordjournals.org/content/26/1/78.full.pdf
Agreed. But that isn't what you claimed. You claimed that inequality itself causes health problems, not that lower income causes health problems. The difference - again - is that in a poor economy, incomes go down and inequality also goes down. By your measure, a recession should improve the health of a nation whereas the paper you cite means that a recession would worsen the health of a nation.It is widely acknowledged that individual income is a
powerful determinant of individual health. It is also
acknowledged that the relation between individual income
and health status is concave, such that each additional dollar
of income raises individual health by a decreasing amount.
Again, the reason for the discrepancy should be obvious: European countries don't have an association between inequality and health because Europeans countries all have nationalized healthcare and Americans don't! So Americans' health is more impacted by income than Europeans.First, in a comparison of tables 1 and 2, it is evident that
the bulk of studies that suggest an association between
income inequality and poor health have been conducted so
far within the United States (16–25). However, even within
the United States, several studies have not corroborated this
association (26–30).
Second, studies conducted outside the United States have
generally failed to find an association between income
inequality and health (31–35).
So the general hypothesis that inequality impacts health failed. The alternative hypothesis is that inequality only impacts health when it is above a certain threshold. I think the lack of comment on the lack of national healthcare is a glaring omission (caveat: I haven't finished reading), but either way, the association cannot be as strong as people like to think.. The absence of an association between income distribution and health in the countries listed on table 2 may therefore reflect a threshold effect of inequality on poor health.
When we turn to countries that are relatively more unequal than the United States (e.g., Chile (table 2)), we find some support for the relation (37).
Using the existing evidence, can we conclude that income
inequality is a public health hazard? The answer to that question is far from settled...
That's a strawman. I've never said that everything was fine or that we shouldn't work to fix issues with poverty - here or anywhere else. What I say is that accurate understanding of problems and useful discussion of them requires useful and honest statistics and in my opinion, relative poverty is not a useful and honest statistic. To be clear, I think the OECD's adding of a chained threshold is an acknowledgment that the stat has failed to show what it is designed to show. But I also think - and this part is opinion - that the statistic was created for political purposes in the first place.Ryan said:Just because absolute poverty has been almost eradicated in the western world doesn't mean we can sit back and declare everything is fine...
Unless you believe that whether or not one is poor or rich is purely down to personal choice I can't see why anyone would be opposed to policies aimed at measuring and addressing this.
Again, that point is not being debated - I don't know if I'm misunderstanding you or you are misunderstanding me, but it is obvious that in a country where you buy your own healthcare, having more money means having better healthcare. But that isn't what you said before: you said inequality causes health problems. That's a very much different claim. You seem to be reading a lot of things from my posts that I haven't said.The fact remains that the poorer classes in society face significant bigger health problems (amongst others but health is the area I have encountered most research on) than those above.
Indeed he is well known and if I remember correctly, due to significant problems with his work he was banned as a source here. This illustrates one of the significant difficulties in discussing this issue: it is often the advocates who are doing the research.Pythagorean said:Richard Wilkinson is well known for his research comparing relative to absolute.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2126067/pdf/9055723.pdf
russ_watters said:So the number we're really looking for (albeit 10 years old) is about 650,000 at anyone time.
I didn't realize that - a buddy of mine had a poorly coordinated apartment transition a few months ago that left him begging for couch space and keeping his stuff in a friend's garage for two weeks. So he would have been counted as "homeless" as well.mheslep said:Also note from that NCH reference that homeless does necessarily mean on the streets. The definition is "lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate night-time residence ..." which includes not only temporary shelters but also those that are "sharing the housing of other persons due to loss of housing, economic hardship, or a similar reason; are living in motels, hotels, ..." a definition that included me for some months long ago, though I never would have counted myself 'homeless'.
mehslep said:a definition that included me for some months long ago
pagetheoracle said:...because they do not protest too much (quote from Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar')...
Then get a high paying job. That's the beauty of the BI, it adds up with your income.nsaspook said:I for one welcome our 'Free Basic Income' overlords but I would like a little more than basic income please, Master.
For some people, perhaps. But again, since someone has to pay for it, it subtracts from those people. For someone with "a high paying job", implementing a BI would substantially reduce their net (after tax) income. After implementation, acquiring "a high paying job" when you currently have none will be worth substantially less than without the BI, as you go from being a payee to a payer.Another God said:Then get a high paying job. That's the beauty of the BI, it adds up with your income.
This particular article -- it isn't a news source I've ever heard of. Who is the author? What is the basis for his claims -- such as the title and thesis:A new article on this subject:
Uh, what? Is this guy too big of a Terminator fan? Where did he get this? A lot is apparently bloggers quoting bloggers, which imo leads to a self-reinforcing crackpot counter-culture (like climate change deniers or 9/11 truthers):How Universal Basic Income Will Save Us From the Robot Uprising...
Given the ever-increasing concentration of wealth and the frightening prospect of technological unemployment, it will be required to prevent complete social and economic collapse. It's not a question of if, but how soon.
That's a quote of a quote originating from Marshall Brain, founder of Ask.com. Frankly, such bad analysis from a successful entrepreneur is unforgivable. He even linked the actual stats to show how wrong he is! The combined forces of womens' lib and the coming of age of the Baby Boomers in the 1960s caused forty years of increasing workforce participation -- though the increase was not actually that big: from about 58% to 67%. Since the recession and with the retirement of the Baby Boomers and with increasing life expectancies, it has started falling again.Another interesting fact about the United States is that a surprisingly large portion of working age adults are not working, primarily because there are too few jobs to go around. This may not be obvious, because the declared unemployment rate in the United States seems low, at consistently less than 10% over a long period of time. The problem is that the official unemployment rate hides the huge number of working-age Americans who are no longer considered a part of the workforce. Currently, only 63% of working-age adults are actually working.
But again, since someone has to pay for it, it subtracts from those people.
That is pure conjecture. The reality of the situation very much depends on how the BI is funded, and many suggestions don't involve changing income tax at all. Also, what most people would consider 'High Income' is not really the target, but rather the people with excessively large incomes, and more importantly, corporations with excessively large profits.But again, since someone has to pay for it, it subtracts from those people.
Also completely untrue. A person acquiring the high paying job would still be a payee - that is part of the charm. And again, high paid people already pay more tax - this is universally accepted in all modern progressive productive societies, and only political extremists challenge the idea.After implementation, acquiring "a high paying job" when you currently have none will be worth substantially less than without the BI, as you go from being a payee to a payer.
Since he previously said that part of the motivation for this is wealth redistribution, this is a terrible way to find it because it redistributes the wealth in the opposite direction from what he wants!Futurist Mark Walker says we could pay for it all by slapping down a 14% VAT (value-added tax) across all goods and services, which in the U.S. would yield a guaranteed income of $10,000. It would be a start, but clearly not enough.
I understand all of that. That isn't the problem, this is:Another God said:But that is how functional societies work. The people who have more than they need are taxed and that tax is spent to ensure every has basics provided to them. The current system already does that, and has done so for hundreds of years.
No. This system claims to give everyone money. It is, at face value, an impossible claim.This proposal is no different in that regard at all. The only change here is that this system is claiming to be more efficient, more effective and more equal.
Right. That's part of the problem here: the ideas are so jumbled/unfocused/non-specific/lacking in details that we are forced to conjecture/guess about how they might work. But there are certainly fundamental mathematical and physical realities that must be true. Most critical here is:That is pure conjecture...I would guess...
We've had many previous discussions about how far into oblivion we would have to tax the rich to achieve some goal (balancing the budget, bringing social security back into the black, etc.). Most proponents of that simply don't have any idea how little money that will actually bring in because of how few super-rich there actually are. Because I'm not sure I can find the stats as easily on the 0.1%, let's use the whole 1%:The reality of the situation very much depends on how the BI is funded, and many suggestions don't involve changing income tax at all. Also, what most people would consider 'High Income' is not really the target, but rather the people with excessively large incomes, and more importantly, corporations with excessively large profits.
I would guess 99% of the population would be net better off with a BI, and 0.9% would be essentially unaffected at all, and 0.1% would feel something - but don't worry about that 0.1%, they probably won't starve.
You're just guessing again. When it comes to the normal income tax in the US, about half of American households pay it and half don't. That balancing point can't move up and still support a vast increase in tax revenue, as BI proponents propose. The middle class would have to remain payers.Also completely untrue. A person acquiring the high paying job would still be a payee - that is part of the charm. And again, high paid people already pay more tax...
This must be an intentionally obtuse comment. Of course some people are losing more money than they gain - there is no obfuscation of this fact. The point is that at the end of the day, *everyone* gets given the same basic income (regardless of all other taxes in effect).russ_watters said:This system claims to give everyone money. It is, at face value, an impossible claim.
...
So when a thesis statement starts with "Everyone in society receives...", you may as well stop reading there because everything that comes after it is mathematically impossible.
That is simply because no one has run the experiment yet. The idea that we can accurately know which exact version of it will work the best without real world application is absurd. We need to implement something, then course correct. Like we do with everything we do in life, society and business.russ_watters said:Right. That's part of the problem here: the ideas are so jumbled/unfocused/non-specific/lacking in details that we are forced to conjecture/guess about how they might work.
Why are you just limiting it to individuals? I would think that the corporations would be where most of the money is.russ_watters said:We've had many previous discussions about how far into oblivion we would have to tax the rich to achieve some goal (balancing the budget, bringing social security back into the black, etc.). Most proponents of that simply don't have any idea how little money that will actually bring in because of how few super-rich there actually are. Because I'm not sure I can find the stats as easily on the 0.1%, let's use the whole 1%
Average income: $717,000
Another God said:Then get a high paying job. That's the beauty of the BI, it adds up with your income.
A new article on this subject: http://io9.com/how-universal-basic-income-will-save-us-from-the-robot-1653303459
Handing a person a check with one hand and taking a check from them with the other is a silly game. It most certainly is wrong/an obfuscation to say "everyone" is getting money if in the net, not "everyone" is and to say that the money still gets added to a "higher paying job" when it may or may not depending on where the undefined cutoff is. And indeed, your post is the first I've seen in any article or discussion of a suggested dividing line between who actually gives and who gets -- so if no dividing line is given, it is indeed an obfuscation when the only thing we're told about who gets it is that "everyone" gets it! The guy in the TED talk goes one step even worse by saying "everyone" should get it and then providing an implementation cost estimate that was based on giving it only to a small fraction of the population.Another God said:This must be an intentionally obtuse comment. Of course some people are losing more money than they gain - there is no obfuscation of this fact. The point is that at the end of the day, *everyone* gets given the same basic income (regardless of all other taxes in effect).
You need to back-up a step: before you can run an experiment, you have to devise the experiment. Don't you think it is absurd and irresponsible to support a plan that hasn't even been devised yet, much less tested? It's like with Obamacare: don't read it, just vote for it! It'll be great, I promise!That is simply because no one has run the experiment yet. The idea that we can accurately know which exact version of it will work the best without real world application is absurd.
Nonsense. In business and life, people plan. Indeed, in order to implement "something", that "something" first has to be written down. At least then, we'll know what it is that is being planned! (assuming we are allowed to read the plan before voting on it)We need to implement something, then course correct. Like we do with everything we do in life, society and business.
You're guessing again. The US corporate tax rate is the highest in the developed world, at 15-35% on profits of about $1.5 trillion. Most companies pay close to the 15% low end.Why are you just limiting it to individuals? I would think that the corporations would be where most of the money is.
Sure, you could take wealth/savings as well, but of course you could only do that once since once you take it, you can't take it again (once you take it from them, they no longer have it to give to you in year 2!). I wonder what wealth level you'd pick as your cutoff? $100,000? $1,000,000? Careful: if you go too low, you'll need to create a new retirement income program as well, since you'll be taking the retirement savings from ordinary Americans (who already can't count on Social Security).And why limit it to just the income?
Yes seizing wealth is short-sited. But also, seizing property is theft, if done for no other reason than the fact that the target has some and the mob wants it.russ_watters said:Sure, you could take wealth/savings as well, but of course you could only do that once since once you take it, you can't take it again
Nassim Taleb called TED a "monstrosity that turns scientists and thinkers into low-level entertainers, like circus performers." He claimed TED curators did not initially post his talk "warning about the financial crisis" on their website on purely cosmetic grounds.[80]
Nick Hanauer spoke at TED University, analysing the top rate of tax versus unemployment and economic equality.[81] TED was accused of censoring the talk by not posting the talk on its website.[82][83] The National Journal reported Chris Anderson had reacted by saying the talk probably ranked as one of the most politically controversial talks they'd ever run, and that they need to be really careful when to post it.[82] Anderson officially responded indicating that TED only posts one talk every day, selected from many.[84] Forbes staff writer Bruce Upbin described Hanauer's talk as "shoddy and dumb"[85] while New York magazine condemned the conference's move.[86]
According to UC San Diego Professor Benjamin Bratton, TED talks efforts at fostering progress in socio-economics, science, philosophy and technology have been ineffective.
TED events are also held throughout North America and in Europe and Asia, offering live streaming of the talks. They address a wide range of topics within the research and practice of science and culture, often through [b[storytelling.[/b][10] The speakers are given a maximum of 18 minutes to present their ideas in the most innovative and engaging ways they can
...I think I already did that, no?Evo said:Can I say that the Ted talk was stupid and unrealistic?
Or is pointing out the obvious problems not ok? And no, I don't want to debate it, I think it's assinine. That's all. Just IMO. This person didn't do *due dilgence* to check if his idea was even feasible, which it's not, IMO.
GMTA :)russ_watters said:...I think I already did that, no?
Evo said:GMTA :)
I did pick crops on my aunt's farm as a child.OmCheeto said:Sometimes.
Other times, they have differing opinions.
This idea is a bit "out there", but I think it needs more discussion.
Btw, did you have to pick crops when you were 9?
I think it matters, from where you came, as to what is, and is not, a viable solution.
Me too, on my grandparents' farm...not that I see how this is relevant though...Evo said:I did pick crops on my aunt's farm as a child.
IMO it is irresponsible to release "out there" ideas onto the public from a forum that looks like it is supposed to have credibility. It causes people to believe the ideas are already well developed and credible. That's a good way to generate scams and give wings to bad ideas.OmCheeto said:This idea is a bit "out there", but I think it needs more discussion.
Oy, no. I cannot disagree more strongly. "Viable" is, for the most part, not a judgement call at all, it is a measurement (or calculation/prediction) of objective success or failure. If a business profits it is viable and if it doesn't profit, it is not viable. If this idea can "function" insofar as it is capable of collecting enough money to be self-sustaining and doesn't cause a collapse in society due to millions of people losing their jobs, that would be "viable".I think it matters, from where you came, as to what is, and is not, a viable solution.