> Last but not least, he credited old age with bringing him a new kind of intellectual freedom. At 94, he said, “You no longer worry about keeping your job.”
I really liked this last line. I agree. I think that I would be much more productive in my life if I didn't had to think aboud keeping my job and having enough funds for expenses.
Hopefully, minimal income will become a standard thing in the future.
Many tech workers do this to themselves because they feel like they need to keep up with the Joneses.
That $120k startup job? Move to a cheaper locale, make half of that in a job that gives you more free time, and you are still making a salary that most workers would kill for. That's easier said than done, but tech workers are some of the most privileged in the world. If you can't make it by on a tech salary, an extra $10k isn't going to do you any good - and that's what basic income promises for each person if the government decides to spend 3 trillion a year. If you don't want to live off of $12k a year, you have to get another job, which you can do right now if you have decent skills.
Sorry to rant, but basic income gets brought up in every thread like it's a solution, but a basic analysis of numbers says it's...going to be hard to do, realistically.
Hear hear. Anytime there's any discussion remotely related to income, welfare, healthcare, startups, creativity, the basic income evangelical squad shows up in full force. As if Hacker News readers will suddenly quit their jobs and do 'what they really want' if government writes them a $15k check once a year! Most people in this board can make $15k in a year right. now. They can do that living anywhere. But then the whining begins, 'Oh I don't want to move to X because there's nothing to do there', 'Oh that place Y? It's full of [insert people assumed to be ignorant and evil because they have different political beliefs, and they don't eat organic]', 'I need to be close to Z', 'I have a family', blah blah blah. None of this is going to change if the government starts shoveling cash out to anybody and everybody.
Many tech people take sabbaticals to work on creative projects or open source it just leaving, using savings from previous years as a form of "minimal income".
I'd say many would like to have more people to have this sort of opportunity, which is currently only limited to the very privileged.
It seems you're misunderstanding what people mean when they talk about that freedom. It's not that we can't already earn 15k doing _something_. It's that we can't earn 15k working solely on a pet project for a few years. Think Stardew Valley -- the dev relied on being a movie usher and his girlfriend's grad student stipend to get by.
I don't care about Joneses. I fear being irrelevant as I age, losing my mental acumen. Falling victim to an illness ect. I want my savings to cushion me during the fall. I want to retire comfortably as I don't plan to have kids.
Yeah, it does seem hard to make the numbers work. I always get tripped up because I usually wind up around $2-4 Trillion per year, which is like the whole federal budget. Let's see if I'm remembering that wrong.
So we'll give every adult in the United States a basic annual income of $10,000. It's hard to live off of that in many parts of the country, but we should start small. There are about 250 million adults in the USA as of 2016 (245.3 according to wikipedia, but let's keep it round.)
So...yep, that's $2.5 Trillion a year. You can argue that you'd pay for it with a tax on upper earners, but I haven't seen any actual numbers to support the theory that you could raise that amount via taxes on the wealthy. And I don't feel like looking into tax brackets and wages and crap right now.
I also think you're right that your average tech worker should be able to scrape together a 5-figure unemployment/job-hunting backup fund fairly quickly.
Don't forget the state and municipal budgets. Leaving those out can really skew your comparison to other countries which may be structured very differently. State budgets in the US combine to another $1.9 trillion [0], with some states like North Dakota having a budget as high as $18,760 per capita! Now I'm not saying it's possible to simply sacrifice all of those budgets on the altar of basic income, but it seems pretty reasonable that we might find a more efficient allocation of resources. After all, California's budget per capita is only $4,366.
I'm not making a judgment about whether it's economically feasible or not (as I have neither the expertise or the data to be able to figure out out), but I think part of the idea of basic income is that it would replace other forms of welfare, so the actual increase in the budget wouldn't be the full $2.5 trillion (although it would still be quite sizable).
$12k is the cited number that you see a lot in basic income discussions. That's just over the poverty level. That's not enough to live on and it's practically a bonus for some members of this site. It's not enough to do anything with.
But just to do that in the US you are talking about 3 trillion dollars (300 million x $10k for easy math) that you have to find in the budget. Now basic income advocates will say you can make up some if not most of that by cutting welfare programs, but given the nature of welfare programs - good luck. That stipend is also not enough to pay for healthcare, so you can't cut that.
How exactly do you convince a nation which already isn't willing to pay for healthcare to pay for basic income, too?
I'd love to be wrong, but I've never seen any numbers that are workable, especially in a political climate anything like today.
I'm living on less than $12k in Oakland while also self-funding a homebuilding startup. What do you mean "can't do anything"? I have to be careful when I do a work day with my partner, because I can't always afford it, so progress is slow, but it's working. It's happening. He wanted to work this weekend, but I'm just barely going to make rent so we have to wait. We're doing a work day next weekend though.
It's not meant to be literal, but anyways the fact that you are prevented from working because you have so little money available says enough.
I've lived on $30k and that takes a lot of sacrifice. It's hard for me to imagine $12k. Even a ghetto $500 a month apartment means you're left with $500 for food, transport, etc. Ugh. Car insurance and gasoline cuts out a car. Public transport can still be expensive. You're either walking or biking and probably renting a bedroom? Someone's subsidizing your diet and/or you are eating lots of cheap food. It'd be interesting to hear more about how you pull it off.
No car. I only use public transit a few times a week. I walk a lot. It's not hard to eat for $100-200 a month if you cook for yourself. You're right it's a sacrifice, but it's doable. It would not be doable on $0, and that's the difference basic income makes.
I have an immense amount of stress from coming up with the $1000 every month. It's hard to predict, but I suspect without that distraction I would be further along in my process. It's been slow, although I'm almost done with this phase.
"It's not meant to be literal, but anyways the fact that you are prevented from working because you have so little money available says enough."
Wait, if he got that money in basic income then he wouldn't have to work his day job as much, giving him both more time and money to bootstrap his business, yeah?
If you've spent so much time on this discussion, you should know that only people near and below the poverty line actually receive that money, the rest have it absorbed into their own taxes.
I love the idea of basic income, but proponents need to a) make much, much better economic arguments, b) stop being so afraid of numbers, and c) get a dose of political realism. We do not live in a Star Trek universe when you only need to convince one wise leader like Captain Picard or Janeway.
If you're American or based in the USA, that means accepting the fact that a large chunk of the population adheres (consciously or not) to a particularly stark version of Calvinism that says wealth is a sign of God's favor, poverty is a punishment for sin, and a whole truckload of authoritarian correlates. Considerations of rationality, economic efficiency, and equity all factor into policy discussions in the US, but are by no means dominant - hence the perennial proposals to impose drug tests on welfare recipients despite the abundant evidence that this is a complete waste of time and money in the places where it has already been tried.
That's an ideology, not a fact. There is lots of evidence of cooperation, symbiosis, and eusocial behavior, all of which differ from pure competition and complicate things. Nature can be very competitive, but a lot of the time it's also lazy and harmonious and prefers slack over maxing out efficiency.
From my food stamp days, now some 30-40 somewhere years later, thanks for the gift which was so necc. Once back out on the sidewalk with worries where my next quarter gallon of gas was going to come from, the movie show to have a respite from stern lectures I did not deserve, or deserve three hours rather than two, some nights, being in a very small square footage living area and in the corner on a mattress behind my privacy wall of another mattress, or the equivalent, the taxpayer would be paying for spending more
unhealthy and wasteful than the taxpayer would choose. Surmising from here, half of recipients non-transparency as to the continuation of the program, irrevocably. Like the THING tadpole that would refuse to turn into a frog and thrive on kudzu until the southeast USA would be evacuated due the
symbiotic relationship between the two. OR an
equivalent scenario. But that's just me.
The idea of universal basic income is to end the practice of means-testing; that is, design a social safety net that requires -less- government intervention into your life. You receive a basic income for life, and what you do with it is your freedom to choose.
Yes, it may require higher taxes or new taxes like a carbon tax or land value tax. But is higher taxes == more government intervention?
It is awfully peculiar that universal basic income is so readily touted here. If there is even the slightest hint of monetary compensation in an article or comment, someone has to chime in saying basic income is the solution. While the crucial point you bring up about actually funding it is usually brushed aside.
Are you trying to start or end a conversation with these figures?
I've noticed a trend where someone thinks that some napkin math ends a conversation, and it seems a bit like scientism to me.
For example, many BI schemes I've seen discussed assume that most people with jobs will be taxed to reclaim the UBI and the actual benefit is for people trying to get out of poverty who aren't trapped by egregious equivalent tax rates where they lose 2 dollars of benefits for every extra dollar they earn and so rationally decide that working less is more financially rewarded.
I'm trying to start a conversation, but a less vague one(although to be sincere, I'm doubtful about basic income - I think the same goals(which are great) , if possible to reach, would require something far more complex, both on the giving money side, but also on structuring the economy in certain ways that would reduce the cost of living)
But could you please share some numbers for those offers you proposed - they'll be interesting to hear.
I think it works best as a negative income tax. If you make no money, you get a refundable credit up to, say $25k/year. This would phase out as you earn income, so that once you're earning over $25k you're paying in and not getting the credit. This way people still have an incentive to work if they want more, but they won't starve if they earn less.
This way you're not giving a flat $25k to someone who's already earning $100k. But if that person loses their job, they'll still get enough to live on.
If the amount you receive is inversely proportional to how much you earn then this effectively creates a marginal tax on earnings, therefore creating a disincentive to seek further employment for fear of losing existing benefits.
This is one of the main problems UBI seeks to address by not being means tested like current benefits.
If instead of phasing out the earned credit for any earnings below $25k/year it was just withdrawn above that threshold (an effective marginal tax rate of 100% beteen $25k-$50k/year) then you would get clustering of incomes at just under $25k/year with no incomes between $25k-$50k/year. Potentially you could phase it out starting at $25k as arguably the incentive effects are less pronounced at higher incomes. Obviously this could not be considered universal however.
I think I get what you're saying, and that's the problem with the hard cutoffs we have for aid now. Wouldn't it be solved by just making it completely smooth up to 25k/year?
If you earn $0, you get $25k.
If you earn $10k, you get $15k
If you earn $24999, you get a $1 credit.
Anything $25k and up, you get 0 credits, with a progressive tax scheme to support the above.
I guess it's not "universal" per se, but the only means testing would be to figure out how much income you made, which the government already does in the course of collecting income taxes anyway.
Maybe it's not a full time job. Maybe it's something you're just really interested in doing, but isn't economically viable. Maybe it's a hobby or craft that you're able to somewhat monetize but not fully support yourself with, at least at first, but it can grow to fully support you if you're not scrambling to keep yourself alive for the first couple years.
Many people are not going to just sit around the house and play video games all day. People have a natural desire to do productive things.
How is that a 100% tax rate? If you earn 10k, you keep the entire 10k, plus get a 15k credit. That is a negative tax. The government is not taking any of your income, it's giving additional income.
If you do nothing, you get 25k. Until you find a job that pays more than 25k, any work you do puts zero additional dollars into your pocket. That is effectively a 100% tax rate. It means you have zero incentive to work unless you can make the jump from 0 to more than 25k.
No, it doesn't. That assumes that the only reason anyone would do a job is to get paid, which is true a priori. Plenty of people do volunteer work without getting paid for it. Perhaps a lot more would if they were on a 25k basic income. That doesn't change the fact that what you described above featured a 100% tax rate on all income below 25k.
Per a very worrisome concurrent to this 4 8 2017 thread about stroke survival and cost, how is a UBI in a land of 'buy more hamburger, buy more tobacco, buy more white bread, buy more audience-centric entertainments' ... maybe all using non-pedestrian means for the purchase [ vehicle, taxi, ...] not having a hidden cost to society in obesity/stroke/diabetes constant diet and exercise sub-par but par for that the neighbors are doing and up to and demand for friendliness, earlier stroke risk in a sizable number of the UBI while young but much more less healthy, not out of breath activities during ones day 2019 vs 1819, and the consequential thirty years after its onset not Pritikin or similar while young and in one's productive years, tearing asunder the capacity of society to deal with it in a traditionally within-ones-extended family medical care with once a week medical assitance, where the norm is now maybe or will be, confiscate, put in villa of warehoused stroke obese survival bedrooms, with TV, cake, etc, and overworked underpaid and maybe even deprived of retirement income for current health plan tax, nursing staff and the like?......
.....................................
.....................................
For instance, I was once bullied into obesity and suffer a consequential decades later heart risk I only learned existed while passing a clean stress test, then learning a few weeks ago that per /r/medicine that small plaques are omnipresent for STEMI fatal consequences and all the while unbeknownst to
the bearer of same [ I ] and his doctor and the like, invisible on EKG and the stress test, and a dangerous onset in the young people of today, should they be inside during the many hours our forefathers were picking cotton, treading in the woods trapping wildlife, praying for their next meal without an electric kitchen, and at time suffering mini starvations in village and forest enclave and/or during winters and/or during times such as the Dust Bowl or Great Depression when bus rides, one's vehicle in front to go to/from appointment, ER, movie, restaurant,takeout, pizza aisle special coupon venue, grocery to excess with an electric car at the assist, etc, and other in-city in-town behind-gated-walls within-HOA within residential condo enclave with elevator not stairs, and on and on, and due to the 85% spending of what is spent by women head of household vs that 1810-ish no credit card for women yet, much less bank account nor vehicle, and the like, but a ring finger from which to ask allowance for the meal in the few hours the farm owner or ranch owner or
town storeowner with closures every Sat Sun as a matter of course, was home and had limited 'where is our next meal coming from' times of solace within each others' shared fears and prayers vs celebrations from remote 'what about the weather at the other side of the world, what we can do to help' hours of 'are you with, or against' polls needing hours of divisiveness, take sides, slander if one is into that cup of tea, and the like, parisan to well-fed plaque-while-we-talk or plaque-as-we-view stroke-risk-more-next-week-than-this-week, oops,that is 500K, as per YN on 4 8 2107, frightening the high pulse pressure wonderer and concerned person for the health of his literate and skilled former colleagues and present-day citizenry, beset by cost and ethics conundrums, but always at the ready to inquire of each other, and may I paraphrase what I heard while waiting for a wrist Xray after a spill,
female... it is 2pm, have you overeaten yet? yummy!
male... Yes I overate, but only once, So good!
female... and last saturday?
male... Yes, I had that plate at such and such restaurant, but it was only overeating because of the previous day's birthday party for ____________ relative, which was so yummy!
Which is not to be overly critical of the conversation, because I was once a part of a same group and overfed, but due to ignorance and naive utopian goal from being bullied that in hindsight was only extremely damaging to my own health, vs victimizng to others which one could take it as, since it encouraged overeating if one was observing my overeating, and was accompanied by my strange silences as one by birth-surgery isolation not very conversant, still, in conversation as I prefer to write to expound, as this, and
....
well, whatever.
.....
tl;dr... UBI may impose a decades-later extreme uptrend in stroke among a not-small
subset of its recipients... costly to society and the families of those UBI gainers of income at the earliest years of its onset.
Something to put into the mix, if one is so inclined. [ text input box here not conducive to editing, and also out of time, dual-reason only of draft quality small treatise, I as newbie to YN may be excused. Thanks! IAMYD ]
As a concrete example, the original formulation was a 2 for 1 tax credit. Let's say taxes are 10% if BI is $1000 dollars, and you earn no money, you get $1000.
if you earn $500, ($50 in taxes), you get 2 for one credits, so that pulls $25 out of your 1000, you take home $500 for working, and $975 for BI.
if you earn $100000, $10000 in taxes, you get a 2 for one credit, so only $8000 in taxes.
BI makes it always better to earn some money.
People always seem to forget the tax credit side, and assume we're just writing everyone a check.
Actually, you (they) kinda do want to incentivise not working.
The idea is that, currently, "not working" is dis-incentivised to such a degree that it creates more problems than it solves. Consider:
- For currently unemployed people: are they lacking in motivation, or in ability?
- For people who legitimately cannot find employment: is it moral to expose them to policies aimed at punishing 'freeloaders'?
- Considering existing work-requirements even for basic assistance with food and housing: is it correct to say these operate from a model of human motivation where people stop trying as soon as they can afford the basic necessities of life?
- Do you stop trying as soon as you know you have enough food and a roof over your head for the foreseeable future?
- Do you know anybody who does that?
- If people are forced into jobs with the thread of starvation or homelessness, what are the trade-offs they are required to make? I. e. to what degree is this forcing short-termism, and hindering their ability to invest time into, for example, education?
- To what degree does the looming threat of starvation compromise the position of low-income workers in negotiations with employers?
- Consider some model citizen from the lower middle class that you can think of: maybe a factory worker from the midwest, or an accountant's clerk in Houston, whatever... They have been gainfully employed for all their (adult) life, and will be for the foreseeable future. Question: How much needless anxiety is that person possibly experiencing, because they are just some random economic events away from complete destitution?
- To what degree could society profit by mitigating some of the risks associated with attempting something new?
Let's talk other concerns, like inflation and housing. Many of the people who are most in need of help would be fine if we brought back genuinely affordable housing AND if size and cost of housing keeps going up and up, no amount of basic income guarantees any kind of real security. If you print enough money to issue a UBI, you will have massive inflation, devaluing the amount they are being given. It creates a situation where no amount is ever enough. But if we can inject genuinely affordable housing back into the system, a thing that is practically extinct, then even losers with a part-time, minimum wage job should be okay.
(And don't bust my chops about using the word losers. I am homeless. It is not me looking down my nose at other people, JFC.)
>> The rest have their basic income absorbed by their taxes.
Isn't this whole notion of BI dependent on the political support of a large share of Americans who think they'll get money - and now you're saying they won't ?
Or in other words - why aren't talking about unemployment insurance that doesn't forces you to work ? because that's what's your offer is.
BI is not dependent on the political support of Americans. Americans don't even have universal health care, so BI will probably be implemented somewhere more progressive.
BI is not the same as unemployment insurance, because that would require you to work beforehand. It's also not the same because with every dollar you earn, you loose the same dollar from your unemployment insurance. BI would mean that the first couple of thousand of dollars you earn, you will keep. Essentially it provides an incentive for those on welfare or unemployment to engage in at least some work, because they can keep that money.
Well, you could structure the income tax so that you'll have to pay the BI back, if you earn above whatever. Sure, there's no difference at the end of the year, but it should be easier to sell.
Good point. I personally support a basic income, but I also accept that it would require massive tax increases. It seems like a lot of the pro-BI rhetoric out there just waves away any serious fiscal concerns.
It a world where economies, political systems, and even entire ecologies are being horribly degraded by historically extreme concentrations of wealth, a massive tax hike is a feature, not a bug. Some may ignore this aspect of UBI programs, to others it's just as important as the social security and well-distributed economic base that UBI provides.
"But...but redistribution!"
Yeah, about that. Unless you've been protesting the massive policy-driven upward redistribution of wealth that's happened over the past three decades, your position probably isn't as principled as you imagine. More on the specifics of how the great grift worked can be found here https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-07/how-middl...
So promulgate and make certain a UBI, but roll back based on new concentration of wealth within the upper quadrile than the lower three quadriles itself reversing course so that "oh, we do not need the UBI any more because", where is that Congress of sorts, excluding the upper quadrile, and specifically its mailing address? Because based on my two posts above, approximate number, I would like to make myself useful rather than a glance at the sayings of the upper quadrile, glance at the sayings of the three lower quadriles, and once-a-lower-quadrile-for certain and now all over the map depending upon which UBI I should maybe be entitled to unless I am recused for being a spokesperson for that lower three quadriles, another way to make Dad proud of me were he still living. Or something. [ if the reader of this reply will forgive me, I am not certain if I am agreeing or disagreeing with the post to which I am replying, but confirming to myself that I can post within YN as a new skillset. Critiques welcome, but probably will not reach me as I doubt to read this same thread tomorrow. Doubly apologetic. Thanks.
Our society isn't mature enough for basic income to be viable... it's going to take many decades to get there.
Let's focus on education and healthcare first. An effective universal education and healthcare system could be the foundation for BI in the distant future (both socially and politically).
I think billions of people not having to worry about starving or keeping a roof over their heads would kick-start the biggest creative revolution in human history.
... peak oil? [ worry about starving... what about the children ? ] UBI of minor amount buys a residence? [ what ??? ] as to the rest of the sentence, I read 'internet, electricity, loudness, what do we know, ' as in
biggest: electricity
creative: internet
revolution: it is louder after dusk nowadays
human history: we should maybe ask our elders. I know I should, and the non-TV ones may surmise we should proceed with caution, if we [meaning the say-so NOT needing UBI ] proceed to tax [ half of that latter set taxing the other half, robbing peter to pay paul...] proceed at all, given the not-in-the-surplus area of the US at least, budget at the present time by almost every measure and metric. But am open to discussion, or reply, but to this post, as others, at this time I will be out of time to check a reply to this post even, so this is really more of 'my first YN thread where I reply to any I can reply to', maybe as a one-time occurance, as I've procrastinated for health reasons in many other areas. Apologies....
And as a newbie, I can edit my own posts.
Apologies for the third lines above [ above
Apologies ] and all the other similar lines in the other posts I've made in this thread, newbie, de facto first day responding vs daily reading. Sorry!
/end errata/
Wouldn't you expect communist nations would be the most creative using this logic? There really isn't a good way to measure creativity but I'm curious if that is true.
Well, that would presume that Communism frees you from having to worry about starving or keeping a roof over your head, when historical evidence would suggest that it actually makes those things worse, and adds a healthy dollop of "having to worry about whether the thing I create will get me sent to the gulag" which doesn't exactly do wonders for creative freedom.
At this point, places like Scandinavia should have made it clear that socialism per se isn't the problem so much as cult-of-personality authoritarians who use the ideals of socialism as cover for bottomless corruption and ruthless oppression.
I don't buy the idea that the ideal just hasn't been tried. It has been tried. To the extent that it always instantly degenerates into the same failures when tried at scale, that's not because it hasn't been done right... it's because it doesn't work. They always turn into dictatorships almost instantly because that turns out to be the only way to keep the proletariat from discussing the fact that this Communism thing isn't working out as promised and we should probably throw the bums who made the promises out. Turning into a police state, and based on the evidence, killing a few thousand to a few million of the most talkative[1] to intimidate the rest becomes instantly the only way for the animals-who-are-more-equal to stay more equal. Even the propaganda moves used to justify this to the populace are tediously predictable ("those failures you're trying to talk about don't exist but to the extent they do they're the fault of people trying to keep their ill-gotten gains away from the revolution." Have you ever really thought about why "re-education camps" are called that?).
I am not aware of a successful "communism" that scales above the Dunbar number, and while I can point at ones that are arguably successful at sizes below that number there are even more that have failed even below that number.
[1]: People who post to the internet about how wonderful Communism are generally posting about how wonderful it would be to have a government who would target them for death pretty early on, as they are the "talkative ones" who would be watched. Same, incidentally, for the people who actively riot in favor of giving the government lots more powers to, oh, say, take "care" of people passionate enough to riot in favor of overthrowing the government, which is really appealing right up to the point that you are the government.
to work, state would have to make very good short-mid term prediction to determine production.
If we had true AI, I think communism would be manageable on a bigger scale.
Of course, once we have true AI, human history is also over.
Besides the fact that communism didn't remove the worries about basic necessities, it also didn't reduce the burden to work - communism is all about full employment, so you don't get the time to be creative.
Additionally, there were few incentives for people to be creative (you couldn't benefit from your creative work), and also many restrictions on creativity (art/culture was directed by the state, freedom of speech minimal).
Old before my time, one would be genuinely and irrevocably aghast at the strides and leaps of this Faulkner-centric nobody as he strove 24/7 three decades with four hours not five hours sleep so critical infrastructure could be upheld in a major city and rumored to be half a man, and treated as such VS 1880 credit where credit is due. As noun and adjective and adverb and such, commas parenthesis and the like, have their place in the pay-for-coding and startup my startup nicely vs a bit unwise, one would be cautioned to be cautious, multiply and with thesaurus in hand if need be, if only to save the USA from overspending creeping in, in modern 1990 times vs 1880 rhymes, and as such commission a commission, or at least citizenry vote first happenstance and rollback opportunity, before any such, I got mine, here is a cake mix, vs the time honored I got mine, here is a textbook of yore. In other words, a standard thing if and when it suit the Lord as on Mr Goodenough's wall in 1880, vs the multple Lords, or portending to be, no not-good-enough Lords walls, nowadays, preparing to tax and spend some more before the wise full-term Mr goodenough has his say so in the matter. Or, most of the respondents to this thread, or within it.
All I have the compentency, or time, to say in the matter at the first post, as there are ... hmm only 1? I thought tens... well, I am not commenting as the second one in. In fact, if you read the above, you did not read it. [ half in jest, apologies but I thought I would have a lot more to say... and
more posts would have already been made. One may forgive the intonation I was asking anything directly of the persons who usually post to direct their answers to me, as the number two post, vs pass my post by, skimming as one reads the other more say-so
as full-term persons ones. Thanks.
What's the reasoning behind altering the submission title? It is most definitely click-bait: To Be a Genius, Think Like a 94-Year-Old and was appropriately being flagged by users precisely for that.
More so a single isolated case of a researcher with an entire lab of young students is not particularly good supporting evidence of some people become more creative with age either -- if the intention is to write about the later an actual over-view of the field or related fields should be required.
I'm very much looking forward to the longevity/healthspan movement succeeding: I there is an immense amount of good that will come from having healthy 150 year olds around, who still have the stamina to pound a fist on the table. I expect there will be a lot less ageism and their wisdom will be worth gold for businesses willing to listen.
It could be a problem in science and politics too. Science already has issues with new ideas being very strongly resisted until the generation in power flops over. In a world where people live healthily to 150 and beyond, the young would quickly become a permanent minority with little voice. Risk of stagnation would dramatically increase across all fronts.
The Zuckerberg line about younger people being smarter is the dumbest line in history relating to this industry. It makes Gates' claim about 1MB being all anybody would ever need look like beautiful wisdom in comparison.
However, you don't need to be 94 to be brilliant either.
When you're young you have fewer commitments, more time, more energy, and an ability to recover from marathon slogs to get work done. Your lack of experience may hamper you in some fields, but it also allows you to see the World from a different angle which might, given your field, be an advantage.
When you're older, you will have far more experience, insight, and the ability to allow your subconscious to bring together disparate experiences and thoughts into new ideas. However, you may be cognitively locked into seeing things a certain way, you will more likely have other draws on your time and you're less likely to be able to do (or recover from), 100-hour weeks.
Both groups have something to offer, but the idea that one group is better than the other is ludicrous.
Young people are not smarter. Old people are not wiser. They each just have different life experiences, abilities and ways of prioritising time.
>The Zuckerberg line about younger people being smarter is the dumbest line in history relating to this industry. It makes Gates' claim about 1MB being all anybody would ever need look like beautiful wisdom in comparison.
Only it was 640K (the old IBM PC limitation), and Gates never said it (at least can't be verified from any source).
But even if he HAD said it, it's still a perfectly fine claim, since it spoke for users of the IBM PC of the time, given programs and common applications of the time. And as it's said to be told around 1980-81 it was totally write: it took half a decade or more for the limit to even matter to users. Obviously the hypothetical Gates would have perfectly known future PCs would need more memory, and there's nothing in the quote to imply it was meant as something that would be true forever.
Zuckerberg's line on the other hand is total BS. But then again his main claim is hitting the jackpot with the right crappy PHP app that appealed to the zeitgeist. So more of an "right idea at the right time" person than a real genius like Bill Joy.
Only a sheltered 22-year old could make that statement. Dumb indeed.
Old people do tend to be wiser. When you are 20 you simply can't make up for the 10 extra years of experience you are missing against someone who is 30...and someone who is 50 and has used the last 20 years improving themselves (after having a decade of their 20s to make mistakes you can't imagine)...forget about it. No matter how smart you are you can't overcome the slow accumulation of experience that time brings.
I think what Goodenough says about not closing your mind as you age is key. Some old people stop learning, but if you combine a lifetime of learning and being willing to change your mind, it's remarkable what you can do. One of the great detriments to the tech industry is the youth movement. Giving college kids the world is detrimental to the world and ultimately those people. Adversity is good.
Pulling all-nighters, working multiple 7 day work weeks, 18 hour days; those are all signs of weakness. But for some reason, some people think it's great and it shows teamwork and loyalty and blah...
It's just a poorly managed/developed project. Plain and simple.
Long days of work are often far more productive for me. It usually takes me a couple of hours to get the entirety of the problem/solution in my head. I might accomplish five or ten times what I would if that 18 hours was split across three days.
That's a different situation than what I am referring to. You're talking more about being in flow. I'm talking about poorly run projects where it becomes a requirement to work long hours and weekends. It simply isn't a sustainable way to work.
Here are some things that decline with age:
- Grip strength
- Sperm count in men
- Sperm quality in men
- Fertility in women (even before menopause)
- Skin elasticity
- Eyesight
- Muscle definition
- Aerobic capacity
- Wound healing rate
- Hair growth rate
- Sleep quality & duration
- Testosterone levels
- Thermal adaption to changes in temperature
It appears to me that every bodily system slowly degrades as you age. Care to site any scientific studies showing that intelligence does not decline with age? That is a surprising claim to make.
Read the article? Goodenough credits his old age productivity to the fact that he's been able to think about the same problem for decades, and that he's been able to learn about different fields in sufficient depth that he can find new connections between them.
All the stuff you mention, you can measure. How do you measure intelligence? The kind of intelligence/wisdom that leads to making new scientific discoveries?
I will posit that raw intellectual horsepower might decline with age (and even then, what the hell is this thing and how would we measure it?), but it's also clear to me that decades of accumulated wisdom and study can increase the likelihood of making a new discovery.
Intelligence is not a physical property, it's an information property. It's built out of time, not any physical stuff. It's software, not hardware. And increases in intelligence also increase the efficiency with which the agent gathers information... so even if the sensory bandwidth of the input devices is declining, the perceptual bandwidth can be increasing.
Of course eventually you start running up against mechanical limits and you decline. But that peak is much later than the peak in sensory bandwidth.
sol_remmy says:>"It appears to me that every bodily system slowly degrades as you age. Care to site any scientific studies showing that intelligence does not decline with age? That is a surprising claim to make."
Studies show that older people are smarter. Despite your apparent youth, I'm fairly certain you can find the relevant studies.
In intellectual and creative work, the mind is not just hardware but also software and data. It's entirely plausible that the software gets better fast enough (with the right life experiences) to dominate the hardware getting worse with age.
the question on my mind these days, is if Zuckerberg in 2017 is still that foolish. He seems to have learned his lessons about getting caught in public saying foolish things. Does he still believe foolish things though? I think he does, and that frightens me because of how much power he now has.
I think the hardest part of anyone's career is when the children are young - you do not have time. Unfortunately, it is also the time that you have the moment to spring up in your career because you have experience and energy (which you use for the kids of course and not self growth)
A few years ago the New York Times' science writer published a book called "The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind. She summarized the latest medical research, which was concluding that brain performance didn't really taper off as we aged, and there were actual spikes in performance in specific areas.
While there were smaller declines in things like remembering names, one theory was that what we know gets consolidated, allowing older brains to make greater leaps in logic more quickly. While older brains are distracted more easily, one study suggested people learn to compensate by using the left and right brain together to maintain focus and progress, and this results in bringing more "firepower" to bear on the tasks at hand.
Recently I realised something that sounds like it should be obvious, but isn't: there's a fundamental difference between creativity, in the sense of true originality, and technical talent, in the sense of being good at some selection of the arts or sciences.
We tend to think of creativity as a generic ability to build or imagine new stuff - probably in the arts, sometimes in engineering or the sciences.
But in fact technical creativity is mostly about copying existing techniques and practices - i.e. competently repeating what other people have done, perhaps with some minor twists.
Free original thinking/expression is an unrelated talent, and much less common.
You can have either, or neither. Only very rarely do you get both.
> technical creativity is mostly about copying existing techniques and practices - i.e. competently repeating what other people have done, perhaps with some minor twists.
> Free original thinking/expression is an unrelated talent
Unrelated? If you think the latter is completely unrelated, what do you think it involves?
Obviously not totally orthogonal, just loosely correlated, but significantly so below some threshold.
E.g. it's not like someone with an IQ of 80 can be totally creative -- except if by "creative" we just mean "has lots of imagination".
But what we casually call creative is not just being imaginative in abstract, but coming up with innovative solutions and important works. Which requires intelligence -- especially if those works are of the engineering and scientific kind.
Maybe it's difficult to be really creative without being intelligent -- Einstein being a good example of someone who was extremely intelligent and extremely creative.
However, it's very easy to be immensely intelligent and have zero creativity, indeed to be conformist to an absurd degree. Elite bureaucrats are exactly like this, at least in many European countries.
Is it possible to be very creative and dim-witted? I'd be very tempted to say yes but I have to admit I can't provide lots of examples.
This title is extremely clickbaity. Think like a 94-Year-Old? Any 94-Year-Old? Couldn't they pick something that is relevant to the article about Goodenough's new battery research? He is the exception, not the rule. Mainstream media makes my brain hurt.
The Fields medal, the Nobel price for Mathematicians, exists already since decades and is only for people younger than 35. One point might be also that when you learn more and more, you can do more things. I think in the past there seemed to be the thinking that learning too long would be counterproductive. That's still reflected by the fact that managers earn more on average than engineers.
I'm only making fun of "thinking like a 94 year old": There is no such thing in my opinion. ( And to be a genius you only have to work on something to the point of obsession but some may disagree )
There are many more people who are considered obsessed with something and are not considered geniuses than there are people who are considered geniuses.
An easy example is music. The world is full of professional and amateur musicians, many of who are considered obsessed and yet people considered geniuses rare, perhaps only a handful every century.
"I have to hire someone to change my tire,patch my roof,paint my house,cook me dinner,fix my plumbing,drive me to work,coach me through life,teach me how to talk to women,provide me with a safe space.."
I'm 28 and nothing infuriates me more than late 20's or early 30's year old man-children making fun of a generation who won WW2, put a man on the moon, improved civil rights tremendously, and ushered in an era of human prosperity and progress never seen before. Such arrogance from a group of people who have accomplished little of note in comparison.
I don't feel superior teaching a man to use Google if that man when he was a decade younger than the age I am now was flying a chopper over Vietnam to support his wife and two children. Listen and learn from them while they are still around.
This is kind of a tangent, but some of your examples (patch my roof, fix my plumbing, paint my house) touch on a topic I think about often. I think there's been a decline in "handiness" and self-sufficiency, at least among white-collar workers. But I'm not sure it's entirely bad; I think it's just a different mindset.
I'll use myself as an example. Growing up, I helped my dad do most of the maintenance on our house & 7-acre property. We brought in experts sometimes, but we'd typically take a crack at it first and could usually handle it ourselves. So many weekends and evenings were spent on these projects like replacing toilets, installing hardwood floors, building sheds, painting, cutting down trees, etc.
I've noticed that as an adult with a house and family, I am much more likely to call in a professional. I'll still do the quick and easy stuff, like replace a ceiling fan or maybe a bathroom faucet, hang some blinds, etc., but once a project looks like it'll take more than, say, 2 hours, I'll find a professional. For example, I use a yard service for my yard that is about 1/15 the size of my childhood yard.
Sometimes I feel stupid paying others to do things I can do. I know my ancestors (especially male ancestors) would find it ridiculous for me to pay someone else to do something so basic. But it comes down to a cost-benefit analysis.
For example, I recently paid someone $800 to install flooring. It took him and his helper 2 days to complete the job. I could saved that money by doing it myself, but to me, it was totally worth it. They're pros; so what took the two of them ~14 hours probably would have taken me at least 30-40 hours. That's roughly 4-5 days of non-working time, weekends or PTO. Like everyone else these days, I work a lot; so my personal free time is precious. $800 is worth less to me than 4-5 days of time to spend with my wife and kid, or I could spend that time working and at my billable rate, make a substantial multiple of $800. And the pros almost certainly did a better job than I would have.
If I had done it myself, I would have learned/honed a skill, but how many times will I need to install flooring in my life? I'm glad I could do it in a pinch, but it's not a skill I really care about mastering.
Of course, my dad was a c-level exec, and he came to a different conclusion. I can respect the self-sufficient approach, but I don't place a ton of value on it. And that shifting mindset seems to be true for many of my friends and acquaintances who are under 40 or so.
> Like everyone else these days, I work a lot; so my personal free time is precious. $800 is worth less to me than 4-5 days of time to spend with my wife and kid,
You just got done saying how you spent all this time with your Dad fixing stuff, but you don't want to spend 4-5 days fixing stuff because you want to spend time with your wife and kid... Why not just work together? Jobs like that have lots of different parts, from demolition to making lunch. It's much more fun as a family than for Dad to go off and do it alone.
> how many times will I need to install flooring in my life? I'm glad I could do it in a pinch, but it's not a skill I really care about mastering.
If your work involves creativity you'll use that experience thousands of times. Every detail of the process is a metaphor for all kinds of things. There's no border in my head between coding, business, gardening, and homebuilding. All of those practices self-reinforce. Things I learn in one domain constantly solve problems in others.
There is this idea in the tech world that the most stimulating environment for solving coding problems is a sterile office with a bunch of computers, and non-stop exposure to the concrete problem space. But I find a few minutes in the garden, a long walk, a break to cook lunch... these are often much more fertile areas for me to solve challenging questions.
Most software management processes just value "did today's widget do it's behavior", and don't encourage people to solve the higher level challenges in their codebase. Those are opportunities which can offer 100x increases in productivity, but most tech managers would rather get 20 widgets built than suffer watching an engineer smoking pot and making elaborate meals in the kitchen for two weeks and then two weeks refactoring things that already worked into a (seemingly arbitrarily) different shape.
My kid is 3. Try installing flooring or doing any type of home repair with a 3 year old running around. Good luck.
Sure, it's good to have hobbies. I like to forage mushrooms, cook, hike, photograph, etc., and I agree they are stimulating, creative, whatever. Who's arguing otherwise? I don't follow. My dad's only real hobby was working on the house and yard. One could argue that's less stimulating than having hobbies spanning a more diverse set of skills. Also, maybe parents should occasionally consider what hobbies their children want to do.
I have installed flooring a few times in my life. I have never consciously used that experience in other facets of life. All it taught me is that I would rather spend my time doing something else. I don't find it particularly satisfying or enjoyable. Let's say I have 5 more instances of wanting new flooring in my life. What I'm saying is I'd prefer to have 25 days where I can choose how I want to spend time rather than spend those 25 days installing flooring to save $4000. I think most of my peer group thinks similarly, whereas I think many middle class people would have made the opposite decision a generation ago.
My point was not that you should only be coding or sitting in an office or something. I don't know where you got that idea. My point was that I don't inherently value self-sufficiency when it comes to home/yard/car maintenance – at least not to the same degree that previous generations did.
And obviously all of this is on a spectrum, right? I think it's important to know how to change a tire or jump a battery, if you drive often. I know how to change my own oil but rarely choose to. I don't know how to, say, change my brake pads. It's probably easy, but it's not something that comes up often enough that I care about learning – and not an area I want to test my amateur abilities.
EDIT: Anyway, I'm not trying to argue, though I acknowledge I am bristly in the text above. I actually agree with most of what you said. You're totally right that as my daughter gets older, there's more opportunity for the family to do projects together, and if she enjoys learning how to install a new light fixture or whatever, that can be a hobby for us to do together. Though I still wouldn't view it as inherently much more valuable than other hobbies, like camping or painting, and that's where I think my viewpoint differs from my parents' or grandparents'.
In all honesty we've become a throw away generation without the ability to get in there and see how the machine work. Inevitable perhaps but the former generation are much more handy than we and frankly have probably in many cases got a better bottom up view of how things work under the covers
Yeah, I think globalization has made products so commoditized, its more economical to throw them away than fix them. 4k 55' TVs for less than a grand; in the 80s that purchase would have been a projection TV for several thousand dollars (in 80s dollars!) and would have been kept for a decade or more. Now, it's toss it and upgrade. Same with PCs, etc.
> we've become a throw away generation without the ability to get in there and see how the machine work.
You should check out YouTube. Your perception seems to be skewed, maybe by your social circle? We're living in a golden age of "ability to get in there and see how the machines work".
While the last named author is usually the "CEO" of the research, there are 3 other researchers on that paper. The first author, a woman. Damn, the research findings, if replicable are groundbreaking. But the "trending-topic of the moment" is the author's advanced age. It's just poor journalism.
I really liked this last line. I agree. I think that I would be much more productive in my life if I didn't had to think aboud keeping my job and having enough funds for expenses.
Hopefully, minimal income will become a standard thing in the future.