Comment by yetanotherphd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yetanotherphd | Hacker News Reader

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For people like me who have trouble making it to the end of an article, I want to repeat the solution that the authors propose:

>Yet however well people are taught, their abilities will remain unequal, and in a world which is increasingly polarised economically, many will find their job prospects dimmed and wages squeezed. The best way of helping them is not, as many on the left seem to think, to push up minimum wages. Jacking up the floor too far would accelerate the shift from human workers to computers. Better to top up low wages with public money so that anyone who works has a reasonable income, through a bold expansion of the tax credits that countries such as America and Britain use.

For basic income advocates, I would also like to point out that this policy is much closer to basic income than increasing the minimum wage.

It is, but then again why compromise? Actual basic income schemes proposed by various economists are better than either propping up the minimum wage or using "public money" to pay workers enough to live.

One single unitary basic income system from which all benefit to the same degree, whether you are now poor, rich, lazy or driven should be our goal.

>"One single unitary basic income system from which all benefit to the same degree, whether you are now poor, rich, lazy or driven should be our goal."

I have to disagree, as my goal is simply for everyone's life to be constantly (but not necessarily monotonically) improving. I am not too choosy about the means by which this is achieved (excepting immoral means such as slavery).

>"It is, but then again why compromise? Actual basic income schemes proposed by various economists are better than either propping up the minimum wage or using "public money" to pay workers enough to live."

This is a great point, as one problem with the minimum wage (MW) is that it is not a transparent policy, as no one knows its true costs. If a basic income or other system were a line item on the governmental budget, the voters might understand its (direct) costs, and weigh the benefits against those. Democracy requires transparency, as citizens must be able to learn what their votes have done, and will do.

Yet another problem of MWs is that their opaqueness makes it easy for firms with low labor costs to lobby for increases in the MW to destroy their competition; while high labor cost companies lobby to keep the MW constant, and increase the money supply (to deflate the MW).

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