Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Financial desperation squeezes the cognitive juice right out of you.

In 2013, Harvard researchers did a study of how financial stress affects decision making. Denise Cummins, Ph.D. explains their findings in Psychology Today:

"When the cost of [a car] repair was increased to $3,000, a very different picture emerged: The cognitive performance of those at the upper end of the income distribution was unaffected by the increase. But those at the lower end suffered a 40% decline! The authors interpreted this to mean that scarcity impaired people’s ability to think clearly. The threat—even an imagined threat—of a large bill made it difficult for poor people to focus on the cognitive tasks at hand."

Financial stress impedes human thinking / problem solving. People get consumed by the short term challenges in front of them, and can’t see the big picture.

Sources: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976 http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/good-thinking/201309/why...




I was thinking about that, and about the story of Ferguson Missouri, where some huge portion of the (largely African American) population had arrest warrants over petty fines that had blossomed through late fees and default judgements into financial catastrophes levied by the (largely middle class white) municipal government, with the last few suggestions.


Instead of Universal Basic Income, how about Universal Basic Food Stamps?

It feels like, rather than a basic income, we need two orthogonal currencies: one for necessities (food, rent, utilities) and one for niceities. Everyone would just have two numbers in their bank account, for each of the country's two official currencies. Basic income would be paid in one, while all income from trade in the economy would be in the other.

Economists liken money to votes for demand in a decentralized allocation scheme. They liken taxes and fines to punishing people by taking away their voting-weight in said scheme, relegating them to suboptimal options that they wouldn't have voted for. (Basically, the equivalent of pairing them up with a non-first-choice partner in the Stable Marriage Problem.)

This works fine at a theoretical level where every agent is participating in economy X without depending on economy X (e.g. an economy consisting wholly of foreign investors), but falls apart when people are expected to also eat and live in some of the things they vote for, because those things have inelastic demand—taxing/fining people doesn't make them consume any less of those things, because they need to consume those things; and frequently inelastic supply—there just aren't options for places to live below a certain cost, because all the suppliers' prices are being "floated up" by said inelastic demand.

If, instead, we said something like:

• A new currency—"necessity dollars"—is allocated to people by the government each month to pay for a basket of goods with inelastic demand. The original currency persists, renamed "nicety-dollars."

• Necessity-dollars can only be used for goods and services with inelastic demand (as found by the BLS during CPI calculation), though they are not restricted to goods with any particular "moral cleanliness" value (so cigarettes are just as applicable as bread†.) This is enforced by only permitting certain sellers to accept necessity-dollars, and only on certain transactions.

• At point-of-first-sale, necessity-dollars are actually sent off to the government and the seller receives nicety-dollars instead. There's probably some exchange-rate involved, that the government can manipulate to some interesting end. Thus, companies never hold necessity-dollars, or pay out in necessity-dollars; they're just a thing individuals have and transparently give back to the government at payment-processing time.

• You can't tax or fine anyone in necessity-dollars. People just receive them, hold them in an account, and spend them voluntarily, and that's it: no other operations are valid. Importantly, banks aren't allowed to impose necessity-dollar fees on necessity-dollar accounts for holding them, and so forth. (They could impose nicety-dollar fees on fancy necessity-dollar accounts, but see the next point:)

• If you get taxed or fined or liened or collected on for anything in nicety-dollars, and you don't have enough nicety-dollars, this doesn't "spill over": you can't pay a nicety-dollar cost in necessity-dollars. You're not allowed. This means that if you run out of nicety-dollars, you're effectively bankrupt (in all the current meanings of that word—all the same machinery kicks in), while still being able to afford necessities. Your niceity-creditors get chased off/annulled by your bankruptcy, without disrupting your ability to afford necessities.

---

† Addiction causes need just like hunger does. You can't really economically disincentivize addicts from seeking a fix; that's basically definitional. Addicts under pressure commit crimes to get the money to pay for their fix, rather than going without. Just freakin' build the infrastructure to treat addiction, if you don't want people spending taxpayer money that way.


This sounds like unnecessary complexity as well as something that could cause problems. I don't think there is a need to restrict people to necessities when paying them a minimal income, they'll do that themselves.

It is overly judgemental of what people living on a basic income are allowed to do, thus making living on only the basic income less viable. Your mother is dying and you need to fly to a different city to visit her? Nope sorry, long distance transit is a nicety. You want to take some time to switch careers? Sorry, books are a nicety. Have back trouble? Sorry a fancy chair is a nicety. You may say that those things could be necessities but a huge fraction of goods typically a 'nicety' can be a 'necessity' in the right circumstances. Better not to tie people's hands.

I think this adds a lot of complexity, cost and bureaucracy for a net loss in how effective the basic income is.


> I don't think there is a need to restrict people to necessities when paying them a minimal income, they'll do that themselves.

I don't actually want to restrict people from deciding what to buy; I want to restrict the government and corporations from wielding the tool of economic incentivization—a tool that works in most of the market—near the margins, where it just becomes a punishment to no end.

Left to their own devices, UBI will be treated as "free votes" in the economy: it will be entirely soaked up by corporations raising prices, because people will still have all the same "non-free votes" they had before, along with the free ones, and everything will adjust to the expectation that people spend both.

Along with this, the government will continue to levy harsh fines, liens will continue to be applied, etc. In UBI, these will take away the money that was supposed to be people's social support. (In fact, in the "pure" UBI most advocate for, these will take away more their social support than is possible today, since we'll have also disassembled welfare, disability assistance, medicare, pensions, etc.)

---

Now, you're right in that people's needs vary. I don't agree that (pure) UBI is the best possible solution to this problem; it's just an easy one to conceptualize.

Do note that, of your hypothetical scenarios, I'd posit that the "fancy chair" is probably a medical device (and the entire healthcare system would be paid only in necessity-dollars; all demand there is inelastic.) And the book is probably a nicety. (Why not use a library? Unless it's a textbook—those are really, really inelastic, which is why they've gotten to be as expensive as they are.)

The flight situation is the truly confounding one. I would agree that this is something that people should be able to do. Yet most flights are for leisure or business, and it's nearly impossible to distinguish from any sort of government-verifiable context why someone is flying somewhere. There's no component of the economy-wide pricing of flights to pick out as being inelastic demand. It's a good example.

I'm not sure what to do about it, though. Even if you allocated people regular (nicety-dollar) UBI along with the necessity-dollars I've been talking about, that UBI would still suffer all the same problems plain UBI does. Flights (and anything else you could spend the UBI on) would just get more expensive by exactly how much everyone was getting.

---

Now, maybe I'm coming at the problem all wrong. The problem is that suppliers of goods with inelastic demand right now get to charge $(elastic demand + inelastic demand), whereas everyone would be better off if they could only charge $(elastic demand), and then get the $(inelastic demand) paid from some other source.

You probably don't need a separate currency to do that. You don't need UBI, either. You just need, basically, the cheapest house in a market to cost $0, and for all other houses in that market to be shifted down in price by that same adjustment. That could be accomplished with simple government rebates, probably. Find products+services with inelastic demand, write people rebates for the amount of that inelastic demand, done.


Yes, having more to lose can make people more cautious. But if you're worried about money's effects on the poor then you should be even more worried about its effects on the middle classes and the rich, since they have even more to lose, right?

The idea that the poor can't handle money or would somehow be better off without it is silly paternalistic thinking of the sort that basic income is supposed to do away with. The income streams we're talking about are pretty modest and all the evidence so far is that most people can handle it.

Its effects on inflation are overblown too. Other than real estate, we're not seeing much in the way of inflation. And on the margin, an income that's not tied to a job makes it easier to move to cheaper places. (Why do you think so many retirees live in Florida?)


> it will be entirely soaked up by corporations raising prices, because people will still have all the same "non-free votes" they had before, along with the free ones, and everything will adjust to the expectation that people spend both.

Is there any evidence for this, or is this purely conjecture?


There is some evidence, e.g. Government childcare subsidies in Australia. On the other hand, targeted subsidies may be worse than basic income in this respect.


Why not just cover all flights and tack it up to a citizen's right to travel?


To my mind, Universal Basic Income (UBI) is the most radical attempt to address the complexity that is introduced by trying to only give benefits to the "deserving": there's often a view that social benefits (food stamps, income support, child benefits, health care, etc, etc) should only be given to those who "need" it. So then you need to:

- decide who actually "needs" the benefit

- figure out how to recognise these people ("means-tested" benefits!)

- catch the people defrauding the system

Instead, you could just say, e.g. for the case of child benefit, that every child receives $400/month and get rid of:

- the complexity in deciding who gets $400/month

- the enforcement of fraud

The "underserving" middle- and upper-income will receive this money too, but it doesn't matter - it's effectively coming out of the higher taxes they are paying already.

UBI is just a generalization of this idea to all benefits.

Introducing two kinds of dollars smacks, to me, of the same mindset that introduced means-testing/etc in the first place: "we don't want fraud", "we want this to only go to deserving purposes". Lots of complexity, hard to manage, and for no convincing benefit.


Yes. Even structuring a two-tier payment type implies central planning and the thought that some group of people in front of a whiteboard can choose best for others who they have never met.

Even if some people waste the money on drugs the net benefit is still higher. The person determined to waste whatever income, in whatever form, will do so. The person who just needs cash to make ends meet doesn't need ever changing rules and calcified structures to try and work around.

Just give everyone the money, including the entire buildings of people who follow around making up rules and then making sure the rules are followed.

Welfare by basic income can be run by a set of scheduled tasks in a server. It's sheer simplicity outweighs all other drawbacks. Add a flat tax rate to the income side of the ledger and shackles are really starting to fall off.


I don't see how this will get rid of the need to enforce fraud.

Such a system will still require systems to prevent multiple claims, ensure people aren't claiming for others and making sure people aren't claiming on behalf of dead people.

Sure you remove means testing, but that is only one part of it. The measures which will need to be in place will still require a lot of bureaucracy.


#1 One system, one set of rules, easier to administrate. Much like single payer healthcare systems have less fraud.

#2 Uniquely, correctly identifying every single person participating in the economy is currently being done by data aggregators like LexisNexis (nee Seisent), ChoicePoint, others. Basically a private (non govt) RealID. This could and should be a government function.


#1 Less fraud, but not no fraud.

#2 The system you describe is also bureaucracy.


Do you agree with the fact that UBI means less fraud and less bureaucracy? I can safely assume that you do. Attempting to reject solution by calling it imperfect is a strawman.


Nowhere in my posts did I seek to reject UBI. In fact, I am excited at the possibilities it may bring.

The claims made by davidgay are flawed and if UBI is a good policy, it should work despite those claims.

Making weak, unsubstantiated claims about anything is a good way of undermining it. My criticism here is to stop muddying of the waters and focus the discussion on the core arguments around how social protection should be done.

For a pretty balanced fictional treatment of a future with UBI I recommend James S. A. Corey's novel series "The Expanse" (now a SyFy TV show). Specifically, the novella "The Churn" deals with characters living in a society with universal basic income, and to a lesser degree "The Vital Abyss".


Thanks for clarifying, because I also interpreted your comments as opposition. (And out of step with your comment history.)

Thanks also for "The Churn" tip. I'm enjoying syfy's version.


One comment on higer taxes + UBI. This curve is interesting to think about, slowly ramping or fixed percentage? I prefer simpler when it comes to large scale concepts, but maybe it needs to ramp up and affect all income equally (long term capital gains as well).


I get paid 20% of my salary in "food stamps"/"food vouchers" (they're more lightly taxed both for employees and employers so companies try to foist as much as possible upon employees). And they suck, a lot.

They're called "Ticket Alimentación", and they're provided by Edenred. They're electronic these days to prevent the easiest ways to convert them into real money.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edenred

Among the problems:

- most places don't accept it, so you HAVE to go to the places where they accept them. That sucks a lot (nowadays I can't go to the small local places as they don't have the infrastructure to process them, since government heavily monitors their use)

- you can only buy essentials with them, but that does not include stuff like paying rent.

- all taxes and stuff are taken from the "real" money, and you can have a negative "real" income while having too much in food vouchers (which can't be used to pay rent or utilities or transportation).

- you're basically forced to spend them (I make more than what I'd like to spend on food & essentials), you can't save unless you do some kind of hoarding or buy-to-sell scheme. I'm pretty sure some kind of black market would emerge where your proposed "necessity dollars" would be exchanged for "nicety dollars"

I don't have enough leverage to individually negotiate not getting paid in food vouchers, but it's definitely a factor I'm going to consider.


I had never heard of Edenred before. That is very interesting and it might actually solve a problem that I ran into about eight years ago.

Thank you very much for posting this. I owe you.


Glad to know it helps. Not sure what kind of problems they might solve for you, but they're definitely a big and established corporation.


* This is enforced by only permitting certain sellers to accept necessity-dollars, and only on certain transactions.

there are so many reasons why this wouldn't work. The whole point of UBI is that you are not creating a judgemental system by which certain products are or are not reified by the system. Would tampons be covered by UBFS? Let's say then we allow for UBFS to cover female menstrual products. Would cups then be covered? Why or why not? How would you validate a product as being "for a given use"? How much political maneuvering would be required to get a permit for a product?

* inelastic demand (as found by the BLS during CPI calculation)

Pray tell how does one measure demand elasticity[0]? And if you're entrusting the BLS to do this, will they apply fudge factors? Why or why not? Who gets to influence the BLS to get the 'stats right' on their

* You can't tax or fine anyone in necessity-dollars

one word: Arbitrage.

[0] usually a merchant does this by dicking around with the price.


> Pray tell how does one measure demand elasticity[0]?

The phrase "during CPI calculation" should be the key to understanding here. CPI tells you how much prices have gone up or down generally, by just sending a bunch of secret-shoppers around to measure a bunch of prices.

Knowing the treasury's current bond interest rates, the current exchange rate, and Core CPI, you can derive economy-wide aggregate demand—which is the point of the whole exercise. You can then look at any given good's economy-wide demand (i.e. the same formula, where Core CPI is calculated in terms of just that one good) relative to total demand as a time series, take their co-variance, and that's the good's demand-elasticity. (All the numbers are public at every step; there's no real way to fudge them.)

> Would tampons be covered by UBFS? Let's say then we allow for UBFS to cover female menstrual products. Would cups then be covered? Why or why not?

Again: you plug in the demand-elasticity formula and get an answer. No politics, just cold automated logic. Female menstrual products as a category are very likely to be calculated to be inelastic.

Now, how that breaks down to individual items within the category is something I didn't define. As a raw guess, the government could define base inelastic-value for the category, which would apply as a sort of rebate to all the items in that category. Any individual item's price should, after this "rebate", reflect exactly and only its additional elastic demand—making the "premium" products cost some number of nicety-dollars, while the "economy" products in that class cost "nothing" in nicety-dollar terms. (The real key there is the creation of a law preventing companies from increasing their prices in response to this—because, without market manipulation, of course prices would rise to reflect all the same competitive demand as before, plus the extra "free" votes each person got. The law would just need to force companies receiving necessity-dollars to price according to demand in an alternate world where demand was exactly [the amount of inelastic-demand] lower.)

> one word: Arbitrage.

No reason to allow individuals to trade in necessities at all, which would nearly completely prevent arbitraging opportunities. (e.g. it's obvious enough that you shouldn't be able to rent your necessity-dollar-paid apartment out on AirBnB.) Consider anything paid for in necessity-dollars to be tainted and have no legal nicety-dollar value after that.


> The phrase "during CPI calculation" should be the key to understanding here. CPI tells you how much prices have gone up or down generally, by just sending a bunch of secret-shoppers around to measure a bunch of prices.

CPI tells you how much prices have changed, it doesn't explain the source of the changes (and, particularly relevantly, it doesn't measure isolate effects of changes in the supply of dollars chasing the good -- that would be attributed to the degree of elasticity -- vs. other influences on the price of an item.)


It also doesn't tell you the elasticity. How much the demand would change if the price were increased by a unit increment. The only way to truly know that is... to change the price. The CPI can only measure how the price changed, which is a dependent variable, not an independent variable. You may be able to infer the elasticity, but it is at best a weak inference.


The gap that I see in this approach is everyone has a different definition of what is a nicety and what is a necessity.

To go with your tobacco example, I personally don't believe that tobacco should be considered a necessity. (Though I have no problem with Nicorette / nicotine gum being in that category, which could be used by someone unable to buy cigarettes to satisfy their craving.) Someone else may have a different definition of a necessity vs nicety altogether.

It's much simpler IMO to just give people ordinary currency, and let them decide how to spend it best.


Note that by my specific definition above, it doesn't really matter what's a "necessity"—that's just a cute flavor-word. They're really "inelastic-demand dollars."

And my point was that even UBI falls over when someone gets their UBI taken away by a fine. Starving is starving.


Not sure on the viability of it, but couldn't there be something in place that states that fines can only be levied at a maximum 10%/month of the UBI?

So if you get a parking ticket (presumably <1% UBI), you can just pay it, but if you get a large fine (20% UBI), you'd pay it off in two monthly payments of 10% each.

You'd probably need something in place to intervene if someone's constantly paying 10% every month due to multiple fines to prevent people racking up daft amounts of fines and just 'living on 90%'


Agree with you about the fines.

Everyone has a slightly different demand elasticity for certain goods. To use myself as an example, I would buy the same amount of coffee if the price doubled tomorrow, but someone else may choose to cut back on their coffee consumption.


There is a long track record and large body of research on this topic in economics, and there's no need to reinvent the wheel as the results are well known and largely uncontroversial. TL;DR: Money outperforms vouchers and stamps.


For anyone interested in why this would not work (coming from someone in the left) please see the "MUC dollar" used by a Peruvian president in the 70s[1](https://books.google.ca/books?id=8M6ueEbn3GUC&pg=PA343&lpg=P...)


We could call it the Universal Black Market Dollar! Are you unfamiliar with the process of trading food stamps for money that already exists?


I am. How does it work? I assume someone with cash who really wants groceries buys stamps at a discounted rate so they end up having more grocery buying power?


It can work in many ways. In my country(India), it was common for people to collect subsidized rations and sell them to hotels. Hotels get the rations at subsidized prices, and people make money on the free rations they recieve.

You could also see food stamps as a parallel currency. You get work done, you fix the payment as N food stamps. The guy who takes this, uses the same method to pay others... and so on, until the final guy in the chain exchanges those N food stamps for actual rations. This has other side effects, since there is a parallel currency, it can't be regulated, its supply cannot be controlled. You can't levy taxes on it and so on...

These sort of parallel currencies already exist in India.


The way I've heard of it working (third-hand, so grain of salt and all that) is basically that an unscrupulous grocer fails to report some cash transactions. He then "sells" those groceries to someone with food stamps, in reality trading some fraction of the cash for the food stamps.


According to "Debt, the first 5,000 years", that's pretty close to how things worked in prehistoric societies.

Necessities were more or less shared communistically, while "money" was mainly used to elevate status within a social group.

There was little to no trade surrounding necessities.

Your suggestion might or might not be impractical, but I think the general thrust is correct.

If you provide UBI and people can have fines, interest, judgements, etc. levied against it, many predatory practices will render people destitute even with it.


The dual currency is how it works in Cuba- one currency for locals that buys mostly food, and another for imports, which is mostly "luxuries".

Needless to say, it distorts all kinds of incentives and the black market thrives anyway.


>It feels like, rather than a basic income, we need two orthogonal currencies: one for necessities (food, rent, utilities) and one for niceities.

There isn't really a difference here. Need vs. want isn't a binary classification, even though we treat it as one. It is a spectrum. Even worse, it is a spectrum where ever people with choice don't always make the choices of need. Take someone thirsty who is drinking soda. Enough so that they are lowering their life expectancy. They have a need for water, not soda. Soda is worse, comparable to slightly dirty water in how it impacts their life expectancy, but they choose it for other reasons.

It would be far easier to give people money and let them choose how to allocate it. If someone's immediate needs is a safer location to shelter in then they can decide what do they need less (maybe reduce their food budget to compensate). The only issue needing government involvement is with ensuring parents meet the needs of their children (but once again, needs isn't a distinct classification).


Doesn't this just set up a complex laundering scheme? Safeway can accept necessity dollars and cash them in for nicety dollars at 1:1. A startup wants to sell their new gadget which isn't approved for nicety dollars. They accept nicety dollars anyway and pay Safeway 1.1:1 to be a back door exchange.


"Economists liken money to votes for demand in a decentralized allocation scheme."

No we don't. "Vote with yer dollers" is a political talking point.


We have something along those lines where I live. People without jobs can apply for job at a local municipal job center. They centralize demands from people for small jobs like lawn mowing, cutting the bushes, painting, etc. People buy checks from them and pay the worker with those checks (with a fixed price per hour). Then the worker goes back to the center to deposit the checks. Then the center forwards the checks to the social welfare administration that converts them into real money for the worker.

I knew someone in a rough spot that went there and spent a day building a rabbit cage or something. When he got back to the center he was told that his SO earned too much for him to work there, they had failed to mention that when he got there first. So now he has checks worth nothing hanging on his walls.


  You can't really economically 
  disincentivize addicts from 
  seeking a fix; that's basically 
  definitional.
Not sure I agree. Seems like we cut down smoking drastically in the USA through heavy taxation? Not an expert in that area, however.


Not really. Smoking went down as it became less socially acceptable to do so. Case in point: cigarettes are $6/pack in California, but very few people smoke because those who do are seen as unhealthy louts. Meanwhile in New York cigarettes are $13 yet it's much more prevalent.


If the necessity payments are biweekly or whatever, and actually scaled to necessities, and spending of them is actually limited to necessities, it shouldn't be possible to save many of them up, and not very beneficial either. So there isn't a huge benefit to making them survive bankruptcy (the court could even award an extra necessity payment right after adjudicating the bankruptcy).

So I think that is a good argument against them being, uh, necessary, and then there is the whole thing where if it is a real currency, it will be fungible, so people will still be able to use them stupidly on things that aren't necessities.


  1. Buy allowed item with necessity dollars.
  2. Merchant credited with nicety dollars.
  3. Return item to merchant.
  4. Receive refund as X% of the nicety dollars.

  1. Buy $X banana with necessity dollars.
  2. Merchant credited with nicety dollars.
  3. Give $Y rebate card to merchant.
  4. Receive rebate in nicety dollars.
Your well-intentioned scheme fails utterly at the third bullet point, because as soon as you allow the exchange to general-purpose currency, you no longer control how it is spent.


That is a crazy complex system. Compare this to the current Food Stamp system where the government loads money on a pre-paid card (for free - no transaction fees), and that card can only be spent on certain types of goods.


That's a really interesting idea, but another issue to consider is that a lot of food/housing could be considered "nicety" rather than necessity: sushi, craft beer, luxury penthouse apartments, etc. How would you decide how much of your mansion is covered by necessity money, and how much is nicety?


See my sibling comment: figure out how much inelastic demand there is for a good-category, rebate that amount off of all prices using necessity-dollar allocation, and then whatever's left over is the true nicety-dollar (i.e. elastic demand) cost.

One interesting effect of this is that if you calculated it per-market, then different goods would have different inelastic-demand floors in different markets. In e.g. Vancouver, where tiny one-bedroom detached homes can cost >$1mm, there'd be a pretty large necessity-dollar allocation for rent/mortgage. In Cleveland, where houses go for $65k, it'd be much lower.

You might not want this effect—you might want to incentivize people to move to cheaper markets instead. But the network-effect of cities is another of those things economic incentives just don't seem to work very well to treat.


  It feels like, rather than a basic income, we need two orthogonal currencies: 
  one for necessities (food, rent, utilities) and one for niceities. Everyone 
  would just have two numbers in their bank account, for each of the country's two 
  official currencies. Basic income would be paid in one, while all income from 
  trade in the economy would be in the other.
I think this would be bad, as you limit a persons ability to choose and as such you're limiting freedom by government planning. Basically as was described by F. A. Hayek in his book "The Road To Serfdom":

… that in a planned society "political democracy can remain if it confines itself to all but economic matter". Such assurances are usually accompanied by the suggestion that by giving up freedom in what are, or ought to be, the less important aspects of our lives, we shall obtain greater freedom in the pursuit of higher values. On this ground people who abhor the idea of a political dictatorship often clamour for a dictator in the economic field.

The arguments used appeal to our best instincts and often attract the finest minds. If planning really did free us from the less important cares and so made it easier to render our existence one of plain living and high thinking, who would wish to belittle such an ideal? If our economic activities really concerned only the inferior or even more sordid sides of life, of course we ought to endeavour by all means to find a way to relieve our- selves from the excessive care for material ends, and, leaving them to be cared for by some piece of utilitarian machinery, set our minds free for the higher things of life.

Unfortunately the assurance people derive from this belief that the power which is exercised over economic life is a power over matters of secondary importance only, and which makes them take lightly the threat to the freedom of our economic pursuits, is altogether unwarranted. It is largely a consequence of the erroneous belief that there are purely economic ends separate from the other ends of life. Yet, apart from the pathological case of the miser, there is no such thing. The ultimate ends of the activities ofreasonable beings are never economic. Strictly speaking there is no "economic motive" but only economic factors conditioning our striving for other ends.

What in ordinary language is misleadingly called the "economic motive" means merely the desire for general opportunity, the desire for power to achieve unspecified ends. If we strive for money it is because it offers us the widest choice in enjoying the fruits of our efforts. Because in modern society it is through the limitation of our money incomes that we are made to feel the restrictions which our relative poverty still imposes upon us, many have come to hate money as the symbol of these restrictions. But this is to mistake for the cause the medium through which a force makes itself felt. It would be much truer to say that money is one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by man. It is money which in existing society opens an astounding range of choice to the poor man, a range greater than that which not many generations ago was open to the wealthy.


Those last two sentences are textbook non-sequitur, and use a depressing collection of rhetorical tricks to make a point that's entirely fact-free.

Money is a good way to avoid abject poverty, but it doesn't give poor people freedom, because poverty for most is a matter of education and socialisation. Basic income can pay your bills and put a roof over your head, but it won't create opportunity.

Nor will free markets. Left to its own unregulated devices, no form of social organisation is quite so good at destroying economic freedom for most of the population as a laissez-faire zero-regulation regime.

Most of the civilised world has affordable health care precisely because it offers financial freedoms that market-based "solutions" reliably try to destroy. The cost of health insurance in the US is literally crippling. It's a prime driver of personal bankruptcy, it makes would-be entrepreneurs think more than twice about setting up - and none of this is an issue in countries where public health care is available.

Likewise with student loans. Who has more freedom - a student with $100k of debt, or a student with no debt?

Who benefits from a generation of students with huge debt burdens? It's certainly not the students.

The real road to prosperity and economic freedom is a regulated market in a broadly prosperous economy with minimal cost of entry for entrepreneurs. That means easy and cheap access to investment funding, plenty of high quality blue sky government-funded seed R&D, a strong culture of academic research and independence, serious investment in public infrastructure, a broad variety of independent media, free unrationed access to world class educational resources, and seed level support for entrepreneurs and business creators from all social backgrounds.

It doesn't mean the "freedom" that makes the proverbial 1% extremely rich while everyone else's economic and personal freedoms are diminished.


UBI means dignity. Anything else put a huge dent in how one and others see him.


"When the cost of [a car] repair was increased to $3,000, the cognitive performance of those at the upper end of the income distribution was unaffected by the increase. But those at the lower end suffered a 40% decline! The authors interpreted this to mean that scarcity impaired people’s ability to think clearly. The threat—even an imagined threat—of a large bill made it difficult for poor people to focus on the cognitive tasks at hand."

That's me. I was recently fired for having severe narcolepsy. (Irony: The medication that might help with this condition for the first time in my life arrives tomorrow, a few days before our health insurance runs out.) It's been surreal to be excluded from most life aspirations due to being unable to participate in the 9 to 5 that society expects. Part of why it's hard is that no one can relate to this at all. When you throw your back out and are unable to work, people understand. When you arrive at 1pm because you have no memory of waking up and turning off all three of the alarms you'd set, no one cares why. You're damaged goods.

A basic income would at least assist with searching for my next job. My wife and I are now in a situation where we either start receiving income within three months max, or completely run out of money.

I know intellectually what needs to be done: Port a webapp from an older framework to a next-gen framework, then write a detailed post about how it was done and what the benefits were. That would be enough social standing to at least get some freelancing gigs.

Trouble is, I'm completely frozen. It's not quite fear -- closer to profound loss of hope. When a medical condition excludes you from society, it's easy to let it get the better of you, or feel bitter. Those are precisely the opposite feelings that will result in income.

In that light, it's not strange that a $3,000 bill would reduce someone's performance by 40%. Even if it's not a disaster, you end up wishing that you could take your wife on that honeymoon you've talked about for four years. When it took 6 months to save up $3,000 dispite a decently high salary, you know that your future will never be free from the "money problem," and that it will permeate every aspect of your life.

So what do you do? Try to be intelligent, of course. Try to see your situation as amusing. Amusement, yes; anger, no. It's easier to deconstruct a problem when it feels like a puzzle rather than a prison.

Easy to say that. What do I do? Pull up React docs while trying not to cry.

None of my ambitions matter anymore. Life is a years-long process of trying to recover from a tailspin. I'm 28; blink a few times and I'll be 50.

A basic income might help. When the company fired me without notice, they mentioned that our health and dental insurance will expire at the end of the month. This translates into a few things: (a) an extra $350/mo of bills, which accelerates our impending bankruptcy; (b) choose to remove my wisdom teeth and get a root canal right now, this week, which will knock me out for at least two weeks when I have to perform, and will cost at least 15% of our reserves anyway, so I'm not going to do that. Maybe it will result in messed up teeth for life, but that's an abstract problem that Future Me will deal with later.

On the other hand, maybe a basic income would hurt. I don't want handouts. I want to participate in life and to add value to my pursuits, just like you. It's easy to imagine feeling like maybe this basic income should be my lot in life. At least if I know we'll hit a brick wall in 3 months and that my wife won't be able to graduate, I can sort of force myself to try to use React / etc, and to otherwise hustle.

But I miss being 13, when life was an endless intellectual playground, and that "forcing yourself to have fun learning a programming framework" was an absurd contradiction.

Why post this? I don't know. It's not a sob story, and it's not really a warning. It seems like no one else will learn a thing from any of this. But at least it won't seem so mysterious that a $3,000 bill can subvert you.


I have chronic fatigue that, until treated, was quite disabling. I have some other more private health concerns that add up to about twice my rent. If you have a chronic health condition, access to health care is a major and fundamental concern: I just left a job that was killing me, and am temporarily unemployed, and COBRA with a $500 premium is my cheapest option by far. If I hadn't spent the last year saving as much as I could, I'd be in a lot of trouble.

I didn't choose to be sick. I don't want handouts either. I am very fortunate. But I do think it's a damn shame that health insurance is so tightly coupled with employment when employers come and go but your health follows you everywhere. I can't imagine that a public option would be worse than this.


<COBRA with a $500 premium is my cheapest option by far>

Why isn't buying a subsidized ACA policy an option?


I'm not actually sure what the criteria for subsidies are; I made too much to qualify last year, I hope to get back to work soon and make too much to qualify this year. I don't know how "annual income" shakes out in this situation.

Either way I had a $2500 out of pocket max on my old plan that I usually met in January. $6k a year in premiums + $2500 out of pocket + some out of network costs is a relatively palatable deal.


Was your employer covered by the ADA? If they have more than 15 employees, you have a great EEOC case to get un-fired.


Allowing someone to come into work more than half way through the day (presumably with no way to get a concrete time from them in advance) may not be considered a "reasonable accommodation" depending on what the job is.

Even for software development it's not always reasonable.


What do you do? I am hiring and we have remote roles and a global team so everyone keeps their own hours.


I'll second that. I'm not 'hiring', but as a freelance web developer I'm always open to people working with me for an hourly rate.

EDIT: and while I don't currently have a steady stream of work available, when I do, I favor working with people who for whatever reason have trouble finding or keeping 'normal' work (having dealt with my own share of issues in this area).


I'm truly sorry to hear that.

I don't see why narcolepsy should be a problem, especially in our area. I mean sure, meetings and stuff like that might be harder to do, but our industry is/should be lenient to things like office hours. There have been tons of times where I go to the office at "late hours" (e.g. 1+ PM), and as long as I turn in my deliverables on time (or let my lead know I won't be able to), there is no issue.

So again, very sorry to hear that.

Also, if I may, I would like to give you the following suggestion.

What about, instead of porting something and then writing about it for the PR, why not take the lowest hanging fruit you can find and do some local web dev/mobile dev, even if you only get a small fraction of the money you need each month.

I am saying this not without reason. I have a friend that is doing bad financially, and doing only one gig that got him around 1k USD (different country and situation of course, but at the current exchange rate, it's about that amount) gave him some hope.

And the thing is that he got a big relief when he saw with his own eyes that he could basically turn code into money. Not enough money necessarily, but at least some amount. That in turn lowered his stress and things started to look less bleak.

Just to tell a bit of his situation: he has kids and a wife that for medical reasons as well, can't work, so he is the sole wage earner at home. His job is very likely going to end soon, and has about 1 month runway.

So just in case you check back the comments, and if you are willing to take some random advice from a random guy on the Internets, why not try this? Just take a gig, very very simple one you can find through friends, your local laundromat/liquor store/etc, family, that consists of doing a simple but sleek-looking webpage or something very low hanging-fruity, and after you get your first few bucks, rinse and repeat.

Hopefully the boost in morale will be enough to get you to try maybe a bigger gig, etc, or at least buy you some time while you get to find another job.

Sorry if this is of no use to you, since I know that this route might not afford you the medical care you need and that definitely sucks. But I truly feel you and I was hoping I could chip in at least a very very minor idea in case it's helpful in any way.

Not sure what else to say except to try to keep going as hard as you can, and that I can definitely lend an ear if you are so inclined (let me know and I can send you an email or something). If not, I sincerely hope things get better soon.


    I don't see why narcolepsy should be a problem, especially in our area. I mean sure, meetings and stuff like that might be harder to do, but our industry is/should be lenient to things like office hours.
I blame scrum. Or, more specifically, people who drink the cool-aid and don't understand the actual purpose.

I've interviewed at I-don't-even-remember-how-many companies that claim to offer extremely flexible hours, or don't care about telecommuting, just make sure you deliver... until you tell them that you can't promise to be there for the daily stand-up at 9am. This is typically justified by "it's only one meeting a day!", but if that one meeting is in the middle of the night for you because you work in a different time zone, or you can't make it in till 10 because you've got kids to take care of, etc., etc.... that doesn't really seem so reasonable anymore.


Code up an "instant stand-up" team status web page, such that everyone on the team can see at a glance what everyone else is doing, what they just finished, and whether they have any blocks. Update your status once per day.

Congratulations, you have now saved 10 minutes per day for everyone in the office. Oops, now they have to come up with some other reason for everyone to be physically present at 9 AM sharp.

"Flexible hours" have always been BS at almost every company I have worked for.


> Code up an "instant stand-up" team status web page, such that everyone on the team can see at a glance what everyone else is doing, what they just finished, and whether they have any blocks. Update your status once per day.

Basically, kanban, sure; but you've also missed what is (IMO) the main values provided by the "Daily Scrum", and the reason something like it is useful even in systems that use better methods for communicating status of progress items:

1. Coordination and conflict resolution on next tasks, and 2. Early and rapid identification (and, ideally, resolution or escalation) of barriers/issues.

(That's not to say that there aren't ways other than a daily in-person meeting that could be proposed to meet these goals, just that a status board doesn't replace the functionality of the Daily Scrum.)


I haven't had many positive experiences with daily stand-ups, so I'm heavily biased against them.

For the record, I didn't like doing oral reports in front of the entire class in school, either.


I second this (with absolute 0 expertise in the matter). If the problem is a lack of hope, then doing things that demonstrate to yourself that you are in control of the problem should be a big help.


I am not sure of your location (US, etc.) but I would imagine that you might be able to get unemployment benefits, which I hope would help tide you over financially at a minimal level while you focus on the next steps. Again, assuming US location: you might be able to use COBRA or a plan from healthcare.gov to help you continue the medications that you need.

Regardless, I hope you are able to recover from this setback and do better than ever. Please don't lose hope - there is always an option.


Depending on the actual terms of the termination he may not be eligible for unemployment. Chronic lateness might be considered being fired for cause, which typically means you cannot claim UB.


Well, IANAL but given that he has a prescription for the situation that caused him to be late, I can see a case for unemployment. It should be worth filing.


>>It seems like no one else will learn a thing from any of this.

There is a ton to learn from your story.

Most people think retirement is what you do when you get old. Retirement planning begins on the day you get the first pay check of your life. In fact the whole purpose of working should be to eliminate the need to work.

If you are not doing this already. You are sitting on top of risky avalanche which will go downhill any day.


> due to being unable to participate in the 9 to 5 that society expects

As some already mentioned, you are likely covered by ADA - if your company is larger than 15 employees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder


I know a person fired from his Rails dev position who had a sleep issue on the job. They later came under new management and switched to a remote team and let him have his own hours. If you are competent you can do fine with a remote job. You can probably good money and move to a cheaper area.


>> When you arrive at 1pm because you have no memory of waking up and turning off all three of the alarms you'd set

There are some apps that might help you in this regard that require increasingly complex tasks to disable an alarm. (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kog.alarmc...)

It also has an option to resound the alarm 5min after being disabled.

I have used it and it was effective for me even on 'easy' difficulty challenges, though I don't have a condition like yours, just sort of heavy sleeper. If you haven't, you should definately give it a try.


Narcolepsy is a neurological condition that is not solved by a puzzle alarm.


I suppose another person would solve this issue? Or is it an even worse condition than I think it is?


> I suppose another person would solve this issue?

No. The right dose of the right medications for the individual affected might mitigate the issue, but another person wouldn't solve it any more than puzzle alarms would (which is not at all, essentially.)

> Or is it an even worse condition than I think it is?

It is of varying severity, with various interventions available that may mitigate the effects to a greater or lesser extent for some sufferers, but its a different kind of condition than you seem to think it is. That is, its not like being a non-narcoleptic heavy sleeper except superficially to outside observers, at least, based on what I've read and the narcoleptics I've known.


You sound like a pretty interesting guy. Do a Reddit AMA


Your employer sounds like a real piece of shit if they're firing you over a medical condition you're just starting treatment for. If nothing else, they should consent to just deducting your pay for the time you've been sick, but I guess that would mean acknowledging that you're sick and exposing themselves to liability or something. Hang in there.


>>The threat—even an imagined threat—of a large bill made it difficult for poor people to focus on the cognitive tasks at hand.

This issue happens because one has to constantly juggle many priorities in the mind all at one time. This can come down very heavily on a person. To have to make decisions to chose one over the other, a.k.a making sacrifices can be soul depleting if done for a very long time.

There are often conflicting priorities many demanding attention at the same time. In case of trade off you often stand to lose something for the other.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: