Posts by BenWilson
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: Approved by lunchtime, in reply to Bart Janssen,
So … you agree with me that our representatives need to take into account evidence when they make laws.
Absolutely. But what actions that "taking into account" leads to are far more complex than just taking the advice of whoever produced that evidence. In the same way that a courtroom judge should certainly take expert testimony into account, but is still the person who has to judge whether the law has been broken and what an appropriate sentence might be (in the case of judge-only trials).
In other words, I'm saying "evidence based decision making" != "scientists make the decisions". But you were never saying that anyway. It was more "scientists should always have input into the decisions that are about scientific matters'. On that I have no argument.
Bringing it back to this discussion, I simply read Matthew as rejecting the idea that scientific evidence alone would be a sufficient basis for legislation. It was probably a straw man, but that doesn't make it any less true. We still have to make judgment based on that evidence, and the judgment might not be to the liking of the scientists (or whatever other expert source we choose instead), since the way they would then act on the evidence is based on their values, and these may not represent society at large.
-
Hard News: Approved by lunchtime, in reply to linger,
“being scientifically literate” does not imply “having direct experience of being a working scientist”, in much the same way as
“being competent to understand and adjudicate uses and results of magic” does not imply “being able to cast spells”.No, but it sure would help.
-
Hard News: Approved by lunchtime, in reply to Bart Janssen,
What Mathew was saying was it’s Ok to make rules and laws that are wrong – because democracy.
I can't speak for Matthew, but I think this is an overly simplistic representation of his argument. It's more just a rejection of what you are saying is a straw man, that our social order should be formalized as a meritocracy (rather than being a vague meritocracy, on the definition of merit as the people see it). I accept your statement that this is not your argument.
What I did say is that the democratically elected representatives are failing to do their job if they make laws that not based on facts, data and evidence. It’s not complicated.
It's not complicated, certainly. But it is an opinion. It looks to me like a necessary but not sufficient condition of the job of a representative. It fails to take into account other parts of the job - the main one being to represent. But you address that with:
Making a law that says compound X is illegal because use of compound X is culturally unacceptable is a different thing and may or may not be reasonable depending on the culture.
And there's the conflict. That IS the case for this particular discussion. I agree that representaves should take data and evidence into account. They also should take their assessment of the culture into account (although again it would be much nicer if they could do THAT using data and evidence too).
As for “the people” being in charge – well that sounds nice until you get a council deciding to remove fluoride from the water supply to the detriment of the public health
Sure, I think they are making a bad call. But having "scientists" in charge sounds all nice too, until they decide to underfund, for example, teaching in the Arts, because they have a strong bias on that account. Then you've got no comeback at all and can't even vote the buggers out.
But I don't think anyone is arguing for either extreme case anyway. Neither democracy that ignores science, nor science that ignores democracy.
As for scientists ruling the country – well it would be nice to have a minister for science who was scientifically literate at least.
Yes, just as the Minister of Magic should probably be a wizard. And definitely should NOT be the Prime Minister. For similar reasons that the Prime Minister should not be the Minister of Finance.
-
Hard News: Approved by lunchtime, in reply to Craig Young,
I tend to agree with Bart about this one, Matthew.
I tend to agree with Matthew about this one, Craig. But it's typically cross-purposed, since we can have both evidence based policy and a democracy at the same time, if the democratically elected leaders (and/or the underlying public that elected them) decide to follow evidence, and that's probably something more like what both Bart and Matthew are arguing for.
But if the two come into conflict, I would most certainly not favour a system in which the opinion of a small number of people, even if they're scientists, however informed, could trump the political will of the people. It's hard to imagine a system which would more rapidly degrade the impartiality of science, and undermine it. It would no longer be an opt-in system, it would lose the internal power it has that struggling factions are allowed their go. Just as we separate religion from governance, so should be continue to separate the pursuit of scientific truth from it. For the good of the religion, and the pursuit of scientific truth, and governance.
There are plenty of situations, though, where it's practical to set it up like that. Medicine is one of them. It's obviously much more practical to have the large array of available drugs decided on by bureaucrats and medical scientists for the most part. But the overarching control should still be held by the people. Only they should set the parameters of moral right and wrong. The scientists constrain their activities to the parameters of evidentially true or false (well, more likely to probable and improbable).
Yes, this often leads to poor decisions. It does, however, protect against the worst kind of decisions. That's always been the main function of democracy, that it's a system that has a non-violent safety valve. Until I was convinced that a body of scientists had the same thing, I could not agree to allow it arbitrary control over the laws of my country. I'd need to understand that it's internal organizational structure was essentially aligned in the same way as the democracy in the first place, with it's source of moral principles coming from the people it stood for. Maybe it works that way now, if so, I'd like to hear the details. But what it currently looks like is a meritocracy, and that's NOT the same thing at all. That's more like the kind of system that the catholic church used for centuries, and that's an example that should make it clear exactly what the failings of such a system can be like.
-
Hard News: Approved by lunchtime, in reply to Ray Gilbert,
We still let them play with toy guns though :-)
-
Polity: Eleventy billion dollars!, in reply to Tom Semmens,
why is there so little questioning of the sky high cost of living in NZ?
Because that is off-topic, basically. It's a perfectly fair question to ask, but what does it have to do with this discussion? UBI or the currently welfare model with it's 100,000 people getting absolutely nothing at all: Under both, a cauliflower will still be a rip in NZ. Separate issue.
-
Polity: Eleventy billion dollars!, in reply to Tom Semmens,
It seems to me that if the purpose of a UBI is to guarantee a sufficient income for everyone to participate in society in a future where robots have largely replaced people for doing work then $211 a week is nonsense
Yup. But I think it's also a start. Currently, it's a nonsense that a lot of people don't even get. In the long run, I'd think the UBI should just rise to cover the whole gamut of unemployment, pension, student, and family allowances. But in the short run it can do a great deal to alleviate the worst kind of poverty, simultaneously with getting its foot in the door.
Your argument here is basically "Because the UBI doesn't create instant Utopia, then it's not worth having". It's weak. We're talking incrementalism because it's practical. If you have an objection to the incrementalist approach then perhaps you're actually just making a case for a higher UBI. Good luck selling that with the enormous tax increase it necessitates. Perhaps we might have more luck doing that after piloting it in with something that's only a very small rise, with the much more targetted aim of eliminating poverty, and we can work on socialist nirvana in the longer run?
What would stop Mary’s boss, when it came to her next pay review, saying “Hey! It’s been a tough year, no money in the kitty for a pay rise but that’s all right the government gave you a huge one anyway!”?
Yup. That could happen. But also, Mary could far more easily tell her boss to get fucked without being immediately destitute. So there is that. Ultimately, what's going to drive wages is mandated minimums, and beyond that, the actual market. If the guy can't get an acceptable quality employee to work for the lowest wage, he'll have to put the wage up. It already works this way. There is currently nothing to stop bosses refusing pay rises, and they're doing it all the time. So I don't think this criticism is very strong.
How politically defensible is a UBI when you would have our hostile, reactionary pro-boss class media contrasting at every possible opportunity virtuous, hard working young middle class family trying to get ahead in the face of unfair huge marginal tax rates in a society that exclusively measures success in wealth with meth mums breeding for cash and living the high life?
I don't understand your point at all here. Are you asking how you sell it to arseholes? I don't know. You probably can't. This is a Labour Party potential policy discussion, not an Arsehole Party one.
The Chicago economic gangsters loved the idea of a UBI because they envisaged that it freed the state from moral responsibility to its citizens.
You'll have to give a reference for that. Who are you even talking about? They sound confused. A UBI is providing every citizen with cold hard spendable cash. That doesn't sound like they're "freeing themselves from moral responsibility". It sounds like the opposite.
What would stop a right wing government upping the UBI and abolishing free health and public education?
What would stop them from doing that without a UBI? Nothing. They're doing it anyway. We don't have free health or education now.
-
Hard News: UMR: Medpot and the public, in reply to Tom Johnson,
Well I'm willing to say that at the barest minimum it should be sold on its medical benefits. Believing in that people shouldn't be suffering excruciating pain in the presence of an extremely simple and cost effective pain relief method, doesn't require anywhere near so many leaps as believing in blanket legalization. Obviously I believe in blanket legalization, but I don't think pain relief should be piggy backed onto that debate, which has gone on an on and is just reaching opinion equity now.
I'd say the same goes to a lesser degree for remedies to the cold and flu, which have been adversely affected by the war on P, a war that is clearly being lost anyway. Why practically the entire population is denied an effective remedy just so that the remedy can't be used as a base ingredient for an illegal drug that has clearly not been slowed by this ban, is beyond me.
But medical pot doesn't need to piggy back onto that either. I think that one at least has the slight silver lining that the dumbarses that prohibit pseudoephedrine based cold medication have to suck on miserable colds themselves on a yearly basis. Maybe that will, in the long run, end that particular madness.
-
Polity: Eleventy billion dollars!, in reply to Tom Johnson,
It is a policy which will ignite the economy and the soul of the poorest people who make our nation great , give them dignity.
That’s the most important outcome I see coming from it. And that’s a much bigger group than it might seem. People on absolutely nothing is big enough, but you can see that the point where the UBI crosses our actual income line is around the 75,000th poorest person.
That’s 75,000 people who could be better off. The way in which they would be better off is also important. If the EMTR issue beaten down (which UBI is strongly aimed at), then their freedom to work for a low wage without costing themselves money in lost benefits could be a very strong source of improved levels of self-respect and dignity, a genuine path out of the benefit trap.
If the UBI were $200/week, and there was a $100/week top up for the sole parent, it’s not at all unimaginable that they would think a part time job paying them, say, $200/week was well worth it, and they’d get themselves off that $100/week unemployment benefit that much more quickly. Even on minimum wage, a part time job you can do while the kids are at school would be worth having. But currently, they have to get well over $300/week to make it worth doing. Well over (I can't say exactly how much because people evaluate that differently).
For a single person 25+ years old, the $34 in the hand that they could get from the unemployment benefit would almost be a no-brainer to lose in favour of a minimum wage job for as little as 1 hour per day. Essentially any silly way they can make money would be worth doing, be it trading goods online, running a very marginal trade services biz, perhaps because of a lack of customers in the early period.
What I’m saying here is that if the unemployment benefit was actually fuck all because the UBI covered most of it, then it would hardly be much of a disincentive to work. It might not even need to be eradicated, it could just sit there as that bare minimum that the terminally lazy or unemployable could eke their lives out on. As they already do.
-
Polity: Eleventy billion dollars!, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Yes, those new taxes are all possible. I guess my approach, though, and that of others looked to make it a fiscally neutral switch, is to not couple it with too many other changes. Then it isn’t associated permanently with anything that could go wrong with all those changes.
CGT and land tax changes could, for instance, tank the property market. You probably wouldn’t want that to happen just when you were piloting your brand new benefit.
It’s already a hell of a lot of change to talk of radically re-aligning the existing benefits and taxes so as to make it all neutral. My graph doesn’t show how the benefits are distributed along that income curve. It can’t. Well, I don’t have the data for that anyway.
The only two benefits I have a firm opinion on are unemployment and pensions. Both should be reduced by the UBI amount, initially, to leave those getting them no better or worse off. The pension is, after all, already a partial UBI. And the unemployment benefit is one of the main things the UBI is meant to replace. But the many other benefits…? I’d hope that WFF could be significantly replaced by it, since it’s a system that already takes your income into account. Maybe those 3 are where it could stop, initially, being by far the biggest line items, and also being mutually exclusive (you can’t be on one if you’re on any of the others). The exclusivity means you’re not going to be taking away 2 benefits from anyone. Are there any others that are also mutually exclusive with this set? Student allowances maybe. I don’t know if there are people getting them who also get WFF. But if so, that’s the least problematic, since WFF is probably the most re-jiggable being a tax credit. All the other benefits put together only come to 6.2 billion, so maybe that’s where you end the changes, at least initially, and just cost the whole thing out based on reducing those 4 benefits by the UBI. Student allowances would disappear? Jobseeker would be almost gone – a later rise in the UBI could kill it permanently. It might be worth just going for broke on that, since it’s damned close to $200 already, and the number was clearly chosen for that reason. It could probably be raised to cover almost all the existing beneficiaries rates, and those few exceptions that get a substantially higher rate (sole parents, DPB and widows benefits), could be treated as exceptions.
Ultimately, welfare changes would reorder the graph (the x axis is sorted in order of lowest to highest income all sources aggregated). So it’s hard to see how to avoid having some winners and losers. Only the most extreme example that Matthew Hooton describes, where it is simply a new and extremely expensive benefit could do that, and it might not work even then, if income tax changes laid new differential costs on people. I’m doing my best to find a method by which such reordering is kept to a minimum. The only real way to ensure people don’t get less money is to throw money at the problem.
All that said, I can’t think of any tax or welfare change ever that didn’t have new winners and losers.
ETA: And to that end, of course, this being Labour, the idea of the new winners being the underclass, and the new losers being the very highest income earners, shouldn't be too hard to swallow.
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 101 102 103 104 105 … 1066 Older→ First