Universal basic income and universal healthcare so I (and everybody else) don’t have to worry about a job, being able to work, retirement, disability, and employers will have to offer meaning, increased quality of life, and actual respect to attract employees.
These social safety nets would be a huge win for worker’s rights too. If you can tell a job to go fuck itself on the spot, they can’t operate without treating people right.
The day I got signed on for 120k was the day all my financial anxieties went away. I’m not rich by any means. My rent is still stupid high. My bills never stop coming in. But I can finally afford furniture. I can finally afford to visit my family when I want to. I don’t worry about min-maxing at the grocery store. I’m not “happy” but it’s the closest I’ve ever been
Being able to walk into a store and drop 50 dollars on something on rare occasion without having to have a panic attack and spend the day before doing in depth financial analysis and math, I cant imagine how much healthier my life would be without that stress.
That sounds like a pretty good number to me too. Currently quite a bit lower.
Congratulations! I’m surviving but without furniture lol.
I’ve got a little bit of disposable income, but just had to go out of network for a surgery because my insurance is weak.
I don’t really have financial worries either though. What’s weird is I make just under $50k now, but the most I ever made was $110k, and at that time I had financial stress. Now is the first time I’ve ever gotten off the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle.
But my financial success currently stops at furniture, so I know exactly what you’re saying. I’ve got a futon, a 5x7 rug, a table, a dining chair, and an armchair. The futon and the rug are the only ones I paid for; the rest was free from craigslist. I carried that damn furniture for miles. Well I had a vehicle for the armchair.
Next thing, after my savings recovers from the surgery, is a 7x9 rug to fill the other half of my main living space, so I can cut down on the creaking boards. Then padding for under the rugs. Then finally another dining chair so I can invite someone over for dinner.
120k what? Bananas per hour?
Dumb questions per fortnight
That is far too many bananas. You wouldn’t even be able to sell them fast enough.
Bananas are for eating my friend
UBI paid for by liquidating billionaires
UBI paid for by
liquidatingliquifying billionairesthe logistics of this are a little iffy. People don’t really melt, they burn
They don’t need to be melted, they can be forced through a fine mesh instead.
We need to utilize the expertise of the hydraulic press channel for this task. Spaghettifying billionaires sounds very therapeutic.
You really can justify just about anything when you’re one of the good guys
They will be the luckiest of all.
Like that one Pink Floyd music video
Heat is not the only means of liquidation. If you apply sufficient pressure, they will indeed melt.
Take 1 trillion dollars from the billionaires in total, now distribute 1K to each person each month? Sounds great but you run out of money in only 3 months. Then what?
Enjoy the fruits of liberated market. /s Honestly though you assume that the only value of liquidating assets from billionaires is getting their dollar amounts moved from on bank to another. There is a reasonable assumption that freeing up that capital to be enthusiastically invested or utilized to meet demands would provide more economic growth than it sitting in large hoards being spent in most risk adverse ways or in near total whimsy.
There is also a reasonable assumption that taking away people’s money would result in a decreased expected value from future money, leading to a decrease in the motivation to produce that we currently enjoy.
Let’s say a person goes from having nothing to having $1M in the bank. How does a person do that? Well, in a free market they do that by providing $1M worth of value to other people.
Should that person, who we know is capable of providing serious value, go on to try to have two million? It would be good for our society if they did, so we’d better hope they do.
But if our history includes a day when all the billionaires had everything taken from them, this means that they now have to ask themselves if there’s any danger of going over the threshold, become “evil” in the eye of society, and stripped of their rights.
Suddenly being rich is quite dangerous. It alters the incentives. Assuming a very straightforward connection between potential reward and motivation, it could be very bad for the economy to liquidate the richest people’s accounts.
It’s a fairly ahistorical assumption that wealth accumulattion is done mostly through wealth creation. Anticompetitive practices, rent seeking, and maximize value extraction are all common practices for incumbent market leaders.
You basically create precedent to give away excessive wealth in order to influence it’s effects on the world instead of reinvesting it purely in mechasms of control of wealth.
Sounds great but you run out of money in only 3 months. Then what?
We won’t because billonairs don’t hold the knowledge to run factories, they just monopolize infrastructure and collect a toll. We won’t run out of money because the production is still there.
Then maybe our source of money should be that production, and not the personal wealth of billionaires?
Like, if you make a car that runs on diesel, and there’s a gallon of diesel in the world, you’ve made a car with 1 gallon of fuel.
If you make UBI that runs on the contents of billionaires’ bank accounts, and there’s three months’ worth of money in those bank accounts, you’ve made UBI that works for three months.
I earn enough, I’d rather just halve my hours.
And, did that work out for you?
The more money I make the sooner I can stop working.
So bigger salary = bigger happy. Always. There’s no number that is “enough”.
I enjoy my job, so working 20 more years isn’t that onerous.
But I’d rather retire tomorrow than work for anyone else.
Honestly? If I won the lottery today I would still work. I really really enjoy my work. It keeps me focused and motivated. My problem is having my livelyhood tied to the wims of a chaotic prideful coke filled VC
That’s fair, and also true for me.
I enjoy laboring. I do not enjoy working for others.
I’ve got endless amounts of side projects that I never have enough mental energy for because the job saps it all.
When I got laid off last year I had about a month between jobs where I got to just do whatever I wanted. After about a week of decompressing I started working 5ish hours a day on side projects, because I wanted something that was more mentally stimulating.
There’s no number that is “enough”.
A quadrillion dollars per minute ought to be enough for anybody.
See that means I would instantly retire, so I wouldn’t be working.
You would work until you got your first paycheck. If it were a job that paid you under the table you could theoretically work a single shift. Best job ever.
Putting that much money into circulation would cause hyperinflation and then a gallon of milk would cost 10 quintillion dollars and you’re back to square one.
>Putting that much money into circulation would cause hyperinflation
so dont circulate it.
Right… if one person owns a quadrillion dollars but doesn’t spend it there is no inflation. They’d just spend a billion here… a billion there… buying up all those midsized businesses or swathes of land.
Salary? No. Stipend, yes. Give me enough to comfortably live on and pursue interests and hobbies with no requirement for work. That’s the closest money would get to making me happy.
UBI
DING DING DING DING
I am fine with my current salary. None of the problems I have are due to having too little money. It is more that I have hardly any time to spend that money and live a fairly lonely life. None of that would be fixed by a higher salary, which is why I have little motivation to try to get promoted.
I would suggest volunteering at animal shelters on your days off might help with the fairly lonely life. The one by me let’s you check out dogs to go to the beach with and return.
Might be worth a job change to get better hours and similar or slightly lower income.
Money buys time friend
Not if it’s a salary
What?
Enough to cover my living expenses, working expenses, retirement fund, savings, etc. at about 8-12 hours of work/week.
For varying levels of retirement and savings, this is what non-agricultural humans have done for most of the history of our species.
Time travel has truly revolutionized our understanding of pre-civilized human culture.
If only there was some way to leave traces and/or study left traces. Would definitely cut down on all the time travel pollution
Bills plus car fuel and maintenance plus the cost of good quality food plus full coverage of medical insurance plus deductible (yay America) plus mortgage payments plus 10-20% on top of that.
Basically, cover the cost of very comfortable living and take the financial worry out of being alive.
Edit: echoing other comments, this would not make me happy directly. It would open up more possibilities to pursue the things in life that bring/grow happiness.
Enough that I didn’t have to worry about not being able to pay rent and bills.
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ah no stress, no costs… perfect to increase the population and put more strain on the system.
I’ll wait for you to solve the overpopulation crisis while giving us all a first-class work free experience.
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That won’t stop population growth. Remember… the stress of work is gone. Now we all can have big happy families if we want without ANY pressure to ever juggle all those stressful conflicting priorities that take up familial resources. Voluntary contraception would not keep population stable or provide a sustainable ecosystem. I personally would have at least six kids. My wife would want more than that. You are free to be childless if you so choose of course, but statistically proven biological imperative drives us to procreate as-is, it’s literally human nature.
The biggest problem will quite literally be real estate. Unless you can picture a fully urbanized earth where everyone lives in tiny little cubby holes and not much else as being some kind of utopia. Even then the land on earth is finite.
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Eh? Why does birth rate drop in countries with top economies versus those that don’t?
Developed countries tend to have a lower fertility rate due to lifestyle choices associated with economic affluence where mortality rates are low, birth control is easily accessible and children often can become an economic drain caused by housing, education cost and other cost involved in bringing up children. Higher education and professional careers often mean that women have children late in life. This can result in a demographic economic paradox. sauce
In order to maintain that high quality of life you have to work a shitload and to get those high paying jobs you have to spend years of your life upskilling and competing for better jobs.
Remove the economic factor and give everyone that astounding QOL and boom… we can breed without worries of providing and we don’t even have to stress about maintaining our QOL. We can all be stay at home parents who just raise our kids if we choose to.
I can’t afford a 4-6+++ bedroom house in the Greater Boston area where my friends and family are without having soul-crushing long commute times. I need a commute because I need to work to put food on the table and pay for rent. Remove the barriers and keep at least even QOL and I will not work, i’ll instead devote my time to doing literally anything else.
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We’re talking about a potential utopia where education is available to everyone, not restricted to first world countries. If you bring everyone UP to western world QOL and they are educated, you have to consider it in that aspect.
The immigrant fertility rate thing is because they come from a place with low expected QOL so they don’t think they need the american dream with air conditioning, going out to eat or having nice things and instead go with more kids because they were raised that way. The second generation gets used to say american QOL and wants to have those same nice things the neighbors have- after all they grow up in the american school system meeting other kids right?.. so you need to work to get those high QOL things and suddenly you’re in the situation I have described: needing more professional attainment to keep up the expected QOL and delaying children.
Does that make sense?
Do you have any kind of evidence showing that free of all financial constraints people will not have children in a mid-high COL area?
If we’re gonna go to sci Fi then you could solve overpopulation with FTL travel, terraforming, and farming, and we’d just spread out across the galaxy and then galaxies until the universe experiences heat death, I assume that solves it.
Also like. Overpopulation isn’t really an issue. Every country that has modernized and increased education, distribution of goods, and gained some sense of reasonable health care has seen a reduction in births
“This transporter will help us solve overpopulation”
“How’s that work?”
“Stand right here”
Any hard science fiction clings to the fact that taking people off the earth is a luxury only afforded to the most influential and powerful, unless you have critical skills to do a job that they can’t find with space residents.
Imagine what would be needed to ferry a million people off the earth in one year. Then imagine that there are 20-50 billion souls eager to have that luxury off-planet destination life. The math never adds up.
Imagine what it would have taken in 1800 to build an iphone. Now imagine there are hundreds of millions of people wanting that same luxury. The math doesn’t work out.
Not the same scale. If we had the same technology back then it would probably be possible, but the population has exploded since. If we still had 1/8th the people we might get that, but there’s no way we can produce a billion iphones every time an upgrade comes along, let alone 8 billion.
Standards have to drop for real even equity compared to what we are used to in the west. This would be true even if we took everything from the top 10% (which globally seems to include nearly all of the US, even us middle class working peons.)
We’ll all be long dead by the time interstellar travel is here for a handful of individuals, and we may even be dead before we find another planet that could be habitable in a million years time.
You’re realistically targeting ultra-long-term solutions, all of which ignore the fact that we’re trashing this one pristine planet right now by filling it with billions and billions of souls more than it can sustainably support.
Indeed, I’m just having fun, that’ll never happen
The real solution is right under our noses. We need to shrink humanity.
I mean not really no. Even without any artificial limits, as people gain education and move out of poverty, birth rates naturally go down.
In fact birth rates in some places are decreasing as we speak.
Allowing everyone access to education and a UBI would cut birth rates. Going below 1.5 or so would actually be undesirable.
People with the lowest income have the highest birth rate.
Seems to me like lots of wealth is the solution to the population crisis.
Also with Star Trek technology we can let people live in the holodeck.
I’m happy with my salary.
I actually like my job, and the salary is enough for me and the rest of my household to live off of while making down-payments on the house and the car. Now, if only I was a happy person…
Hey this sounds like me
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No amount will make me happy.
Once your basic needs are met, the equation becomes: Salary = Expenses + Savings. So, the questions becomes, how much savings makes you happy?
If you are happy to work in your job until “retirement age”, a small savings rate will do, in theory; that is if the salary is adjusted for cost-of-living and tax.
Are you happy working this job for the rest of your life? Full time (whatever that means in your work culture)?
Yes, I’m lucky enough to have a good salary, but I can tell people there is no top limit. Once you have your needs met then you’re exactly right, it’s about retirement planning and savings, and there could always be more. The fact is that the only true money amount that will make someone happy is the amount that allows them not to work anymore
Hey you guys, how for away do you think that mirage is?
It depends where you live but it was figured out to be about 110k a decade ago on average in the US. Where I live that sounds pretty close maybe 140. However, I am biased since I truly don’t want to own a house. Would rather rent.
I really hated renting, I would rather pay someone to manage my own house than put up with landlords again
For me, other factors are much more important than the salary.
A tedious job with unpleasant colleagues would never make me happy, no matter how high the salary. On the other hand, if I had a job that was fun and had nice colleagues, I would be happy with a salary that only covered the essentials.
Also, I would rather have a salary that only covers the essentials for 30 hours a week than a salary twice as high for 60 hours a week. What good is money if I can never spend it?
There are more factors that are more important to me than the salary. How much physical labor is involved in the job? Do I have to work at night? Do I work shifts or do I have flexible working hours? Does the employer offer a pension plan? Are there any other benefits? Where would I have to work, close to friends and family or far away? …
Yeah, there really isn’t just one threshold value that would make me happy. More is better of course, but there are too many other factors.
Though it’s probably worth mentioning that I don’t have any children and don’t plan on having any.
