Tag Archives: basic income

Abigail Disney

Posted on by
Reply

Abigail Disney (Disney Heiress worth $120 million) thinks that governments should tax the rich more. I guess the assumption is that then the government would do “good” with that money? But would they? Data says that giving money to people directly often is much better than having “someone else” decide what is best for them. 

There are multiple examples of this

Home

The Finnish Experiment 

California Program Giving $500 No-Strings-Attached Stipends Pays Off, Study Finds

So, instead of deciding what is good for others, why doesn’t she embark on a personal redistribution? I proposed a similar, self funded, basic income idea to Mark Zuckerburg in 2017. He never took me up on that. 
Here is the basic setup.

$30k/year*500 people =$15 million *5 years = Cost of program $75 million over 5 years.

Since Abigail is worth $120 million and has rising stock, she will likely come out with over $75 million at the end of the project!

I am sure someone in Stockton who did this project would be happy to take some money to fund a larger project. 

Or I am sure Andrew Yang would be happy to help facilitate such a project. 
We are waiting for a large donor to step up and fund such a large scale, long term project. 

Be a leader Abigail. 

Working From Home, UBI, $600 Unemployment

Posted on by
Reply

I have seen complaints from Republicans about how the $600/week unemployment benefit has worked out. There are many complaints that it is too much and is disincentivizing people to go back to work. I agree, to some extent. If you give people incentives to not go back to work, they obviously won’t go back! But we should consider if there is a better alternative. $2,400 month (4 weeks) for people is a lot, on top of any other planned unemployment benefits. As I recall Andrew Yang was proposing $1,000 month for people as a basic income. There was huge push back on “How would you pay for that?” despite Yang having a very clear way to pay for it. (see picture below). 

$2,400/month is 2.4x the $1,000 proposed. Why was it so much? My understanding is it was set at $600/week to get “the average” worker too 100% of their pre-layoff income. I am unclear why that was a goal. I think there could be a little personal liability to try to cover a little of your lost earnings when there is a mess like we are in. But what I really want to point out is the PPP cost $669 billion of which most went to workers (per the law) and a bit was available to cover utilities etc. 

Why didn’t we just let people be laid off and collect unemployment, give businesses a much smaller lifeline (25% of $669 billion to cover utilities etc) and let the rest be used for a UBI to some extent. I don’t even care if I was personally left out of the UBI. Give it some arbitrary cut off of $50k or less a year 2019 income. That would have been $500 billion dollars for 4 months. 

$500 billion could have provided a UBI of $1,000/month for 125 million people for 4 months. In 2018 there were only 150 million people working full time so that is nearly the full amount of people! Why did we have to use the PPP, serve less people and make people continue to be tied to their work? We are so obsessed with tying people to a job, it is insane. 

““You’re turning the business into a pass-through for the federal government,” said Joe Walsh, who owns Clean Green Maine, a cleaning service in Portland, Maine with 35 employees. “You’re doing very little to actually help the business.” – Chicago Tribute

It is almost as crazy as the feeling for employers that they “Need to get employees back to the office asap”. Many people have been working from home for 4 months.  If people have been successfully working from home for 4 months, what is the rush to get them “back to the office”? I understand some people need to be in the office. Personally my job has some interaction with manufacturing so I am in the office every day now. But many of my colleagues are successfully working from home. I don’t see a reason to “rush them back”. It seems to me the only reason to do that is because of some deeply ingrained mistrust of employees from the very upper echelons of business that if employees are not being watched like hawks they will be screwing off. Some companies are getting it, like Square, which seems to be transitioning to fully work from home permanently. 

Another thing I don’t get is how Republicans, “the media” and many essential workers are angry at people who are unemployed and receiving $600/week. On a very surface level it makes sense, you see someone “getting paid to do nothing” while you are a hard working essential person. Think “I am paying for that lazy loser.” Etc. But realistically, most of the laid off people would be happy to have continued to keep working, or at least being able to provide for their families, if possible. There is an odd set of circumstances that some people are laid off adn some aren’t. But the “essential vs unemployed” fight is a fight between THE SAME GROUP OF PEOPLE! Or at least they were part of the same group of people until right before some of them lost their jobs. It is crazy to me that the “essential” people so quickly turned their anger towards the people who are getting money from the government program that it is likely they could have received money from too except for a specific set of circumstances. That person receiving $600 has no impact on your life. You are not receiving less because of that, except for the fact that you all are not demanding a UBI! 

I will share a meme (below) to try to get the point across. Not that I hold anything personally against Jeff Bezos (although many people do). But it’s trying to make a point. 

So, anyone who is working a job currently, please stop being mad at the unemployed people who got $600/week for a few months. Start being mad at the government for a shitty response. Then start writing your senators and House of Representatives and asking why a Basic Income is still not being considered, for ALL!

One Way A Basic Income Could Work

Posted on by
2

There is probably more than one way a basic income could work but I want to share at least one that I have considered to help people see that it might be possible.
First I want you to consider if there are people living with a basic income in today’s society? What provides for their income if they are? Why is there a basic income provided for them?

There are many people living on a basic income today. There are many different groups receiving a basic income and they receive their basic income under different circumstances and provided from by different sources. Analyzing these groups and sources could help us understand the opportunities for more widely possible basic incomes.

The first obvious example of people receiving a basic income is children. They are provided for by their parents because the kids can’t provide for themselves.

Another group is the mentally disabled, again, because they can’t provide for themselves they are provided for by loved ones.

The third group that receives a basic income is those on physical disability from the government. Again, the requirements is that they can’t provide for themselves so they are provided for, this time, not by loved ones but because the government has mandated that it is important for us to take care of others who can’t take care of themselves.

The final group that receives a basic income is the retired. Their basic income is slightly different from the previous groups because they have created their own basic income. The reason they need a basic income is similar, in that many of them might not be able to physically work anymore so they have to create a situation where income is provided for them while they can’t actively create it.

So the similarities between all the groups is that they need money to provide their daily needs and they aren’t working themselves to create the income. The first 2 groups, kids and mentally disabled, are provided for by loved ones.

The physically disabled are provided for by the government and the retired are provided for by themselves.

Which of these is most applicable to a world wide model?

First, the love model? Where does the money for the love model come? The money from the love model comes from working income of the parents or loved ones who care for the disabled or children. The guardians have to continually create new income to cover the needs of those in their care. If they lose their job the basic income provided for the loved disappear. The important idea here is that income comes from continued work/creation of value.

Unfortunately love, doesn’t seem to be working for the world. It doesn’t seem like we’ve produced enough love to take care of all the people who need it. Love usually comes from a place of closeness and stems from family ties. I want to believe we are one human family, but by our mass actions, we have shown we are not there yet.

The 2nd way, governmental care, has an income collected from the working class. This class is likely providing for some loved ones already, and are also providing a basic income for another class, the disabled, who they don’t necessarily know personally or love directly. At a fundamental level, the income from the government really comes from the same place as the money from the first group, from working people continually creating value.

The government assistance model for basic income has shown some more success in places that have more government oversight as well as a more robust economy that can handle more being “siphoned” (taxed) from the working populace. The difficulty here is that that the governments money ultimately comes from the working people. They are only able to support so many non-working people. .

The final group, the retired, have their money come from growth or dividends of capital from businesses that they are owners in, stock owners or direct private business owners, that they have accumulated their whole life. Dividends are actually income (value), produced by the first group, the working class, but that is not awarded to the working class! It is awarded to the owners of the business. This is a very important concept because it gives us a glimpse of where we can obtain income if we aren’t working. If you are a business owner you will gain some profits from the business you own.
It is important to understand a business idea here. Your employees must produce at least as much value as you are paying them. Most businesses employees actually produce more value than they cost the company. They have to if the business wants to show a profit!

Think of the business that you work for. You should ask, how does this business make money. Then you should ask “How much profit per employee a year does this business create?” You should also ask “How much profit do I create for the business a year?”

Good businesses know how much profit they make per employee. For example, Facebook makes $188,000 per employee per quarter! That’s $752,000 per employee per year. That is why starting employees at Facebook can make over $100k a year, because they add way more value than that to the company each year. The profit you make over the salary you pay the employees is the extra profit that can be paid to the business owners. They are awarded this extra income for taking the initial financial risk of starting a business, investing in capital, etc. It is just as easy, or even easier, to invest in a business and lose all your money if you are starting from scratch.

The important idea from above, business owners can potentially gain income from a business in which they are solely owners, they don’t have to be doing any work and that is a form of basic income we see today.
Somebody has to do the work, today. These are the workers. Now I am going to ask you to take a mental journey to a future with me where we can envision a business, started by a person where they invest a lot of their money into fully autonomous machines, such that there are 0 people actually working in the factory. There is solar energy provided for the plant. There are autonomous robots creating, whatever product you want and the maintenance is also handled by robots. There are 0 people working in this factory, but the factory is producing a product, something of value, that other people will pay for. In this scenario, there is still a business owner, there is still value being created and income coming in, but there is no work being done by any people. This is exactly the scenario in which a basic income is viable. Now let’s say this person’s autonomous factory makes shirts. Now another person has a 100% autonomous factory where he grows food. These 2 people can create enough food and clothes between them, while neither is physically working himself, to feed and cloth each other. Now consider a 3rd person who has no factory of his own. The 2 autonomous factory owners factories can produce enough that they could feed and clothe this 3rd man but will they? That is the critical question! I believe in an abundance economy, which is what you would have when everything is being created from 100% autonomous work, that the capital owners, the factory owners, would be generous people. My belief stems from some fantastically rich people today, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Mark Zuckerberg, who have so much wealth to be in the position of capital owners who have 0 necessity for work and who are working to give it away.

Since we now have one idea for a possibility for how a basic income would work I think it should be pretty obvious that the goal is clear. We should work to invest in factories and other methods of creation that are 100% autonomous.

Once we are creating enough to provide for everyone the desire and ability to distribute the spoils of this abundance should manifest rather quickly from either the care and responsibility we feel towards our fellow humans, when our own survival is not threatened, or from the fear that our survival will be threatened if we keep a large segment of the population under-cared for. Either way, there should be a path for care for all when abundance is possible.

I realize that the thought of fully autonomous factories seems fantastical. But it truly is not! Complete autonomy is just the final step in what has been happening for many years, at least since the start of the industrial revolution. The increase in productivity of any individual is the hallmark of our age. I personally am paid more than the average person because the tools and knowledge I have access to allow me to produce more. Full autonomy is the final act in that progression. Infinite creation with no input. If you can’t see that end you lack creativity. It is the ultimate efficiency, which is what our economy is working towards.

Some examples include the push towards autonomous cars. While there is certainly investment upfront, the final output, value add, work done, autonomously is the obvious outcome. The best thing about the investment is that once the investment is made in full self sustaining autonomy, robots fixing themselves, that is the end of the cycle.

Then the imperative question is, who owns the robots?

How does the value get to the people who don’t own the robots?

These are important questions and ones that must be considered. If you aren’t able to consider that this is a very likely future though, we won’t’ get there and the answers don’t’ matter.

Mark Zuckerberg – Basic Income

Posted on by
1

Upsate 7-24-02018

It looks like UBI potentially funded by “the 0.01% is being discussed again.

Update 9-22-02017

It looks like Y-combinator is embarking on a basic income  experiment similar to what I proposed Mark Zuckerberg do. This is a good thing as it’s still an individual/private group doing experimentation that government can’t/won’t do.

“YC will select 3,000 people across two states and divide them into two groups. The first group will include 1,000 people who will receive $1,000 a month for up to five years. The second group of 2,000 people — which the study will consider its control group — will receive $50 a month.”

Original 5-29-02017

Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech for the Harvard commencement ceremony this year (2017). In it he advocated for a universal basic income, which is something I’ve been thinking and reading about for a few years. The most important question about a basic income is “Who pays for the basic income?” Some people have thought about this more than I have. You can read about how one guy thinks we should pay for a basic income here. There have even been a few basic income programs in the past. You can read about one happening in Finland here, as well as in Kenya here.  

When you have an idea as big as a basic income you need a path to get there. You don’t just implement a basic income to a whole country. I am often trying to figure out how to implement ideas fast, not necessarily perfectly.

I am excited that someone with as much wealth (from Facebook stock ownership) as well as a desire to change the world for the better (as self reported by Zuckerberg multiple times) is interested in a basic income. Luckily Mark Zuckerberg is a billionaire and his stock is rising, literally. Facebook is worth more every year. This gives Zuckerberg the rare opportunity to implement his own basic income study! No one can stop him! And if it goes well he will be able to prove to people that a basic income is a good thing that should be implemented wider.

If Zuckerberg owns $63 billion in Facebook stock. it should grow at at least 4% a year, which means he could sell $2.5 billion a year, and use that to provide a basic income. Which means he could give 25,000 people a basic income of $100k a year!

Since this is a test and that’s a lot of money and this is supposed to be a basic income, he could provide an income of  $30k to say 500 people, this would be $15 million a year, a pittance that Zuckerberg wouldn’t even notice! I think he should do this for say 5 years, and see what happens with those people.

We need this kind of leadership to show us that this type of program could work.

$30k*500 people =$15 million *5 years = $75 million over 5 years.
How much to manage this program? $25 million maybe? (maybe way less!) For a cool $100 million over 5 years.

Until someone is willing to run this type of program and shows that the people who receive the money come out more successful than otherwise, and that they aren’t just being lazy, it won’t receive large scale acceptance.

I believe this is a program Zuckerberg should take on with his new Chan Zuckerberg Initiative LLC (not a charity, which is fine, I think businesses can potentially make more changes in the world than charities, or at least it takes all kinds!). If he wants to contact me to discuss further why I think he should do this he can find me at hooglandaxel@gmail.com

Alternatively, he could contact the nice people at Give Directly, who I mentioned earlier. They seem more versed in administering something like this and could probably run the program for less than $25 million!

The Last Hungry Person

Posted on by
2

*Note* To foster long term thinking I now use 02016 to indicate the year 2016. See Long Now Foundation

“There are genuinely sufficient resources in the world to ensure that no one, nowhere, at no time, should go hungry.” – Ed Asner

I am interested in what is killing people. Is it diseases? Is it accidents? Is it aging? Many times things like that will catch us off guard and that is unfortunate. Most people I know aren’t interested in dying. I have a real soft spot for those who are dying from things that could be easily prevented, especially starvation and malnutrition, which are things that they might not be able to prevent themselves but they might be able to with a little help. I came upon a very interesting website today while looking up this type of information. http://www.worldometers.info/

When I looked at it 766,867,865 people in the world out of 7,434,785,500 people (9.69%) were listed as “Undernourished”. The great news is it was going down at the rate of about 1 person a second! That comes to 365 days x 24 hrs x 60 minutes x 60 seconds = 31,536,000 seconds in a year. Which mean that 31,536,000 people a year are moving out of malnutrition. With that simple math it will take 24 years and 4 months for there to be no one on the world who is suffering from malnutrition. If we could assume exponential growth in the rate of people leaving the “malnourished” category we’d be there even faster! I really hope I am able to look out my window in 02041 and say “There are no hungry people today.”

While I am excited to see that it is going down that is still a long time and in the mean time there are thousands of people dying every day from hunger.

There are 2 organizations that I like right now that are working to combat hunger (which is usually a result of poverty).  

Children International. You can sponsor a child for $32 a month. For many families that is what they make in a month. This helps provide health services for the kids of the family as well as helping keep them in school. The cool thing about this one is you can write your kids and get letters from them. You can even visit them.
Another I am interested to see what they do is Give Directly. They are starting a new basic income study based on the success of a previous study that I am hoping to (start and) finish reading about soon.

If you don’t like the idea of giving away money there is another option, Kiva (or other microloan companies). They partner with loan companies in developing countries. You provide the capital. Some of the companies charge interest, some don’t. You don’t make interest on your money but you can learn a lot about the world just by reading about what people are applying for loans for.

Here’s a few examples:

A loan to a person in Haiti  “A loan to to import and stock clean energy products such as solar lights or improved cookstove”

A loan to a person in Colombia “A loan to help pay for school supplies.”

If you want to learn more about Kiva you can listen to or read The International Bank of Bob which follows one man’s journey as he meets some of the people who have received the micro loans. .

While these measures might appear to be short term solutions I would argue they are not. They are investments in our world’s most precious resource, people, their minds and their bodies. It will help develop into a long term solution when people are able to take care of themselves once they are able to think ahead of where they will get their food the next day. We can’t afford not to help others.

I know I have at least 1 friend who will argue that the governments of the countries that have high poverty rates are criminal or at least exploitive of their citizens, which may be true. He would argue that we should work for freedom and that will let people determine their own futures and provide for their own security. While I certainly would agree with some of that line of thought, I don’t think physical fighting is particularly useful these days. What I think is a better revolution is a revolution of the mind. If we can feed and educate enough people they will demand their own freedom from tyranny.


So we can acknowledge that there are challenges but on the bright side things are moving in the right direction. How can we push them that way a little faster? Well I shared a few with you above. Are there any others you like personally? Will we be able to make hunger a thing of the past in our lifetimes?
The last bit of good news. As I finished writing this there were 766,864,120 undernourished people (down 3,745!)

The Future

Posted on by
1

I spend a lot of time thinking and reading about things that are coming “in the future” and I often want to write about them after but it often doesn’t happen. Usually future technology or ideas are aimed at making the world a better place and thinking about stuff like that can put you in a good mood.  I wanted to just share a few quick notes and key people related to some future ideas in the hopes that it might spark some of you to look into one or two of them and go boldly into the future with me.

Transhumanism is the belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology. Zoltan Istvan is a writer currently running for President Of The United States on a Transhuman platform. One of his thoughts is we can potentially live forever. Is he crazy? Maybe.

Cyborgs  are people who have had things implanted in their body to help increase efficiency or capacity of current bodily functions. Implants could help with healing, memory, increasing hearing or sight. We could have phones implanted in our earlobe that could read our brains instead of us having to physically talk. I think that phones already do a lot of the type of things that cyborgs are thinking about but it is just not integrated in our bodies yet. As things get smaller with nanotechnology it will be easier and easier to be a cyborb but the small bots might be able to leave our bodies fast as new models come out so it won’t even be obvious our bodies are being enhanced.

Telomeres are the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes that are linked to aging and disease. They have been linked with longer life spans. It is suspected that exercise is one way we can help keep them healthy. Aubrey de Grey is one of the leading researchers in this area of study and other ways to help telomeres stay long and keep us alive and healthy.This goes directly along with the idea of transhumanism mentioned above.

Cryonics is the study of feezing people as they die or just after to hopefully restore them to better health in the future. This obviously relates to the above studies as the people, if they are unfrozen, would benefit from research in any anti aging information as well as anything that helps people live longer lives.

Nanotechnology can be used for many things from material design to robots that could help us become cyborgs. They could be programed to fight infections or cancers more effectively than our current immune system. They could also be used to stop bleeding, from inside of us. Other robots could be used to manufacture or heal materials.

Augmented reality is having a coming day soon. It is where the current world is projected over by some virtual components. Really I would say that Google maps is already a very basic form of augmented reality as we can get reviews and notifications about things that are near to us we might be interested in.  A new game is coming out soon, Pokemon Go, that is another step for augmented reality.

Virtual reality is the next step after augmented reality. It has a future where we might eventually be plugged into a Matrix type computer. We could do whatever we wanted. Again, I think we have had very basic virtual reality for a long time, at least as long as video games have been around. If you think about it books are even a form of virtual reality that we create in our minds. We are just taking it a step further with a headset that works to trick more of our senses.  This site gives you a neat rough VR tour of Mars. The lines of what “counts” as VR will obviously stay blurred. Current technology such as the Oculus Rift is making VR even more sophisticated than most people realize.  I see a future where we will have VR vacations that will obviously be cheaper than real trips. VR will also allow us to experience historic places and events.

Abundance is more a concept than an actual thing. There was a great book written about it by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler. They promote the idea that we have more than enough to survive now. We need to stop hoarding stuff and being afraid of the future because we will have so much in the future. We need to get rid of the mindset that if someone else has more that means we have to have less. There is plenty to go around. Buckminster Fuller also shared a similar though, over 50 years ago, just without using the term Abundance.

Basic income is the idea that we will have so much via abundance and so little that we have to do thanks to increases in computers and robots that we might have to give people money to live off of because there will be no jobs. Instead of this being bad it could be great as we’ll be able to all spend time doing things we enjoy and taking up challenges we want to do that will lead to more innovation because of the passion we could have for our endeavors. There are many places that are starting to look at this such as Give Directly, the city of Utrecht (in the Netherlands) and Finland.

Mars – If you watched the Martian you know it was rooted in a lot of good science. We are probably going there in my lifetime and that’s just exciting!

Electric cars – With energy being probably the most important thing (after air) to our survival and only some forms of electricity being renewable, I see electric cars coming on strong in the coming years, boosted by better battery technology as well as cheaper electricity.

Autonomous cars – Although the first death was recently recorded that related to an autonomous (or assisted driving) car, it wasn’t actually determined that it was the fault of the car. My bet is it will not be. It wasn’t mentioned how many people died as a result of their own driving that same day but I bet it was a lot more. The systems will only be better as our technology increases.

The technological singularity is a hypothetical event in which an upgradable intelligent agent (such as a computer running software-based artificial general intelligence) enters a ‘runaway reaction’ of self-improvement cycles, with each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly. (Wikipedia). The Singularity Is Near is a great book written by Ray Kurzweil about this idea. You can also learn more about this, and many other topics, from the YouTube channel Singularity Weblog. Obviously such computing power could help solve many of the problems associated with the ideas discussed above and maybe make some of them obsolete.

If you want to read about a few more exciting things that could be in store for the future I encourage you to look up Quantum  physics, Dark Matter, Dark Energy and the Human Genome project.
I know I am excited for the future and hoping to contribute in my own small way. What are you most excited about for the future? How are you helping it come?