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Comment by iamthepieman | Hacker News Reader

Selection bias right there in "people who've never had to work"

What if you took people who have always had to work/chosen to work and give them resources to free up their time. Of course, you'd probably get a lot of bad things as well as good since sudden changes will always generate some churn and chaos short-term.

Think about this for yourself. If you didn't have to work, or only had to work 25-30 hours a week what would you do with the extra time?

Now apply that to every middle class individual. Sure some would spend the time in less productive or even harmful ways. But others would spend it even more wisely than you imagine yourself spending it.

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Sure. But steady state, nobody's working. Us old guard will die off and leave just young'uns that never had to work. That was the idea I was getting at.

If you old people would stop working and retire, the young people would have work to do. What's that? you didn't save anything after the best financial boom time in history? You have to work until you're 80? Well, then stop complaining.

The topic was of a Basic Income that meant no one has to work any more unless they want to.

To be fair, a lot of market-based savings schemes were wiped out in 2008.

My in-laws, who diligently spent their entire lives working boring jobs in banks (as accountants and such, not wall street), who prepared for their retirement by paying off their modest $250,000 home (in Nashville, it's nicer than the dollar amount makes it seem), found themselves screwed when they went to retire, as their 401Ks were now worth fractions of what they'd expected.

So they're still working, extending their retirement in the hopes that their portfolios will recover, or that they can continue earning enough while they're healthy that they can offset it.

It literally never occurred to me until your comment that someone might resent them for trying to earn a living for themselves without burdening the rest of society.

I gotta wonder, what were they invested in? I just checked my records, and my investments went down about 35% in 2008, and have long since recovered. I'm not a particularly good investor or anything. How do they manage to have their investments drop to fractions, implying much greater than 50% loss, and still have not recovered in 2015?

Not trying to judge or anything, just wondering what the deal is, because from everything I've seen around me, that is far from typical.

In the case of my dad's 401k: The company's fund manager actively traded shares on the way down, repeatedly moving the balance from declining symbols to those that seemed more stable but were really just slightly behind the curve. ...Then did the same thing when things started recovering, trying to target the stocks that seemed to be going up the fastest. Quite literally decimated their retirement.

Thanks for clarifying. Do you think that people will sit listlessly in front of their televisions if they don't have to work to provide for basic necessities? Even if not everyone would do that do you think that the majority, or a even large minority would?

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