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posted by martyb on Tuesday December 08 2015, @11:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the handouts-instead-of-gov't-jobs-or-worker-owned-cooperatives dept.

Common Dreams reports

As a way to improve living standards and boosts its economy, the nation of Finland is moving closer towards offering[1] all of its adult citizens a basic permanent income of approximately 800 euros per month.

[...] The monthly allotment would replace other existing social benefits, but is an idea long advocated for by progressive-minded social scientists and economists as a solution--counter-intuitive as it may first appear at first--that actually decreases government expenditures while boosting both productivity, quality of life, and unemployment.

[...] The basic income proposal, put forth by the Finnish Social Insurance Institution, known as KELA, would see every adult citizen "receive 800 euros ($876) a month, tax free, that would replace existing benefits. Full implementation would be preceded by a pilot stage, during which the basic income payout would be 550 euros and some benefits would remain."

[...] Under the current welfare system, a person gets less in benefits if they take up temporary, low-paying or part-time work--which can result in an overall loss of income.

[...] As Quartz reports, previous experiments with a basic income have shown promising results:

Everyone in the Canadian town of Dauphin was given a stipend from 1974 to 1979, and though there was a drop in working hours,[PDF] this was mainly because men spent more time in school and women took longer maternity leaves. Meanwhile, when thousands of unemployed people in Uganda were given unsupervised grants of twice their monthly income, working hours increased by 17% and earnings increased by 38%.

[1] Link to The Independent in TFA was redundant IMO.

...and, before anyone shouts SOCIALISM!, this is actually Liberal Democracy (of the Bernie Sanders type).

An actual move toward Socialism would subsidize the formation of worker-owned cooperatives. An initiative to do that was floated in 1980. 5 percent of taxes would have gone into a pool (kinda like USA's Social Security fund). The Finns rejected it. Source: Prof. Richard Wolff


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 08 2015, @02:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 08 2015, @02:44PM (#273361)

    Only a minority of people work on new and exciting things. The majority of people work on old and boring things that will eventually be rationalized away. And actually, if those people do not need to get boring, badly paid jobs just to survive, maybe they can use the time to learn something that enables them to work on new and exciting things.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday December 08 2015, @03:25PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 08 2015, @03:25PM (#273406)

    The majority of people work on old and boring things that will eventually be rationalized away.

    Explain otherwise normal people none the less putting on their peasant hat and growing a garden. They'll always be social signalling BS like that. When the weather is foul and I'm stuck doing peasant work on my suburban estate I complain to myself about this, why can't all these bastards just have a natural prairie instead of trying to emulate a crap middle class imitation of a feudal English manorhouse? Bastards. Then I go back to mowing the lawn and clearing brush.

    Another example of weird seemingly pointless social signalling is in neocon circles they have a nearly sexual fetish for small retail business, a couple hundred bucks a month guaranteed will go right into renting that quaint little store front for our froo froo antique store. "Job Creatuhs! Job Creatuhs!" Or our filthy family restaurant will be full of people because no one can microwave reheat processed glop from Sams Club quite like we can. Neocons have a huge fetish over it and as long as running a small business gets them immense social capital they'll keep on losing money every year. From an economic standpoint having a hundred people in a city center LARP that they're real retailers is strangely useful and moderately entertaining to the tourists. It keeps them out of trouble and off the streets anyway.

    I bet plenty of tech type people here would live in eternal startup land, kinda like every unemployed loser in California has been a wanna be actor for the last century or so, every goof who can string two lines of code together but isn't good enough to actually get hired will be "running his own startup". You get a lot of social capital for being a startup founder, well, at least until everyone else figures out that everyone knows every loser can be a tech startup founder.

    boring, badly paid jobs

    Market pressure will eliminate boring just like financial markets eliminate lack of capital. Come on, be honest, every guy's got a little kid in him who would like to F around with heavy construction equipment. Due to labor market pressure there won't be obnoxious overseers and crap working conditions either. If you could basically F around with a bulldozer all day with some friends having fun while incidentally digging a ditch, they'll be people willing to do it. Heck, people might pay to access a nice enough playground. Its the minecraft effect. People will build insane stuff in minecraft even if you mildly stand in their way or slightly make fun of them. You can whip slaves to build a pyramid, or you can have a fun working environment and get out of the way of the people who make a pyramid in minecraft for the sheer fun of it. Here's an interesting thought experiment. Making AI to replace people is really hard... Isn't it easier to make an AI that is just smart enough to prevent drunk people from killing each other? So me and the boys from work will head down to the gravel pit with a couple six packs and the AI will make sure we call get home drunkenly safe in a (robot-)cab and maybe we fill some rail cars with gravel and maybe we just dig trenches to spell out obscene words and pix for passengers of airplanes to look at and wonder who let those drunken idiots play with construction equipment...

    Its kinda like painting. You can torture an illegal alien with beatings, non-OSHA gear, and low pay to paint a room, but the world also has people that you just can't stop from painting fine art, its gotta be expressed by them or they burst, you don't even have to whip them (unless they like that kind of thing).

    You have to pay people a lot of money or threaten them with prison if you want to treat them like soldiers aka treat them poorly. Yet, the boring sequel game industry shows people will pay boatloads of money to run around with guns and shoot anything that moves. How interesting is that, that merely changing management style converts a workplace of mercenaries and convicts into freely paying donors and volunteers...

    And from the powerful bird:

    Progress creates more work not less.

    Progress always eliminates work. Its just that for a century, temporarily, we've been explosively ramping up energy consumption. Mostly by the one time gift of burning fossil fuels. And increasing energy consumption expands work faster than progress can destroy it. So far, for about a century. And that's ending.

    Now what happens to work when energy consumption declines because the cheap stuff has all been burnt, and progress destroys another bazillion jobs on top of it? Basically the civilized world looks like the 3rd world, best case scenario, while the 3rd world basically starves and dies. Or fights till we're all dead, perhaps on both sides. Or immigrate till we all starve equally?