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Yeah, but by doing all that you are oppressing the oppression which the lack of those very things makes so much easier, do you ever think about that??
No, you don’t, because you only think of your face and never how the boot on it feels./s
If people have nothing to lose, they’re gonna act like they have nothing to lose…
Like, it’s basic psychology. Resource scarcity changes how our brains work, it’s literally Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
I hit rock bottom. Was broke.
My thoughts on stealing changed entirely. I couldn’t care less. I had bigger concerns than other people’s property. Most people steal out of desperation and when you’re desperate, your moral compass disappears.
Society is perpetually 9 missed meals away from collapse.
They don’t want to lessen crime, not really anyway.
They want to increase prison labor capacity by arresting and charging more people
Americans maybe. There’s other countries that don’t have legal slavery.
Big if true
Exactly. Most people get into crime because their backs are to the wall. They’re stuck in debt due to medical treatments they had to get, they’re struggling to pay obscene rent prices and risk being kicked out their home - there’s plenty of reasons, and much of it is down to poverty.
If you give people legitimate, easily accessible support nets that are enough to actually survive on, then you’ll get less crime. It’s rather simple.
I got a degree in criminology about 25 years ago and can confirm that there was no dispute in the science at that time that this was the way to reduce crime.
Everything else had been tried and tried again and proven not to work. It was around that time that my (then) field realized that the DARE program increased drug use.
It was almost 25 years after the St. Louis (maybe wrong city, it’s been a while) Crime and Control study proved that flooding the streets with more police officers only pushed crime into other neighborhoods.
The methods to reducing and ending crime have been well known to science. People who talk about harsh law enforcement and punitive corrections are either ignorant, emotional blowhards, or not serious about reducing crime.
Do you have some beginner friendly references I could look at? I live in a MAGA heavy state and although logic doesn’t always work the more tools in my belt the better!
This is why we say “the cruelty is the point”. As you note, these are not serious people trying to reduce crime. They are straight up lying about their goals, possibly even to themselves. The whole mindset is against the idea that crime is something that even can be reduced; rather, “bad people” will always do “bad things”, and it’s up to “powerful men” to protect the rest of society from them. It is rooted in a deeply authoritarian mindset that puts them as one of the “powerful men”. If you were to reduce crime, how can they prove that they’re one of the “powerful men”?
well, the powerful man probably think that covering people’s basic necessities wouldn’t reduce crime. After all, they have those covered in spades, and yet steal billions of dollars each year
Thank you for this great insight and information.
Thanks for sharing your experience
This is a spectacular post
yeah. i thought this was common knowledge myself (as a layman) but then i realized i lived in an intellectual bubble, and that most conservatives would reject the idea even when presented with evidence because cruelty is the point.
that’s when i realized that the only solution was to get rid of conservatives.
seriously. none of this will ever change until the vast majority of abrahamic religious minded, protestant work ethic devoted people are gone.
and for those that say, “if you just educate them”, well… they stand in the way of education reforms, so…
the answer remains: [redacted]
Yeah. There was a time that I wanted to believe conservatives were merely misguided. Now I know: they are straight up evil. As dehumanizing and unkind as it is, I have started to mentally replacing them with orcs, goblins, and dragons.
A small part of me is sad about the death of my naivety. Then my brain reminds me what price society has paid for hosting these malicious turds. If there is a Reconstruction 2.0, these words must be followed: “Rip and tear, until it is done.”
Fantastic reply. Thanks for taking the time to write it out and thanks again for the insight into the very important work you do.
Thank you for typing that out!
First, thanks for taking the time to do that writeup!
Second - do you happen to have links to any likely sources that would present that info in a digestible manner? I’m not asking this to challenge you, I’m asking so I have linkable references in future discussion.
Thanks!
Someone else asked for this too and I’m really having a hard time coming up with anything.
All good, no worries, still a great writeup!
It was almost 25 years after the St. Louis (maybe wrong city, it’s been a while) Crime and Control study proved that flooding the streets with more police officers only pushed crime into other neighborhoods.
Small point about this in particular, but isn’t the above evidence that this is effective at removing crime from an area? Why not do the same in the “other neighborhoods”, too, then?
Especially if you combine the above with what you described later to reduce recidivism:
the way to reduce recidivism to almost nothing is to provide good health care, good mental health care, and to teach people marketable skills, all in a safe environment.
Seems like a solid plan to me, and police forces would naturally/gradually shrink over time, to suit the overall crime rate as it goes down.
I can almost picture the classroom I was sitting when I first learned about the study and having the exact same reaction you did.
Part of the study controlled for that, in the context of practical limitations. They divided the city into sectors and absolutely flooded certain sectors with cops while doing minimal patrols in the others, or in some cases none at all. The crime just moved in the opposite way. When the police presence increased in one sector, the crime rate went down there, but went up in the others. And then when they switch the sectors, the crime switched back. So practically speaking, cities and towns would have to be able to sustain that high level of policing, which hardly anyone wants. I see towns get into it over a budget allocation to hire one additional officer, let alone the number they would need to sustain to keep up the sort of levels needed to push crime out everywhere. And maybe some places would be able to do it, but the crime would just push to other areas, foisting the problem onto other communities. Further, I think there’s very little appetite in America to actually put a police officer on every corner. Nobody would like living in that world.
practically speaking, cities and towns would have to be able to sustain that high level of policing, which hardly anyone wants.
But it’d be temporary for it to be that high, no? Am I misremembering, or is this basically the way that NYC stopped being so infamously crime-ridden? I was under the impression that it’s not as aggressive now as it was then.
Hastily-googled, but this seems to confirm at least some of what I remember reading a while back: https://www.nber.org/digest/jan03/what-reduced-crime-new-york-city
I think there’s very little appetite in America to actually put a police officer on every corner. Nobody would like living in that world.
Yeah, probably. Was just wondering about it hypothetically.
After all, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right?
Here’s some further reading in the problem I was describing.
emotional reactionaries who just want to see bad guys be treated badly to make themselves feel better about crime
I keep thinking about Dukakis. They asked if he would change his mind/support the death penalty if his wife was murdered. He said no - and folks flipped their shit.
The “left” as it exists in the US is so cowed by the idea of a Willie Horton scenario that it has to lean into that same evil vindictiveness. The 1994 Clinton crime bill which devastated Black communities was Dems trying to show off how “tough on crime” they could be.
Criminals are a safe “other” to hate.
Trump mandated that lead piping won’t be replaced. That stuff correlates with crime rates, far as location goes. Brilliant. 🤦♂️
To add to that, it’s the same with homelessness. Every 1-4 years, architecture students and urban planning students are asked to do projects on helping to house the homeless or something similar. Every time, they come up with innovative and unique ways to handle it. People forget about and/or realize that no one will try any of them. Repeat.
I remember reading that a study showed that giving homeless people (without drug problems) a steady source of money, and not even that much money, helped almost all of them get back on their feet.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment
What I keep getting held up on is that if the science keeps pointing toward the same conclusion, how do you actually apply those to society? How to you convince the voting masses to institute these changes? Because the average person won’t accept repealing things like three strikes and minimum sentencing, they just assume that a “tough on crime” attitude is the way to go. If a politician comes along offering justice system reform, he’d never make it into office because people would assume he’d be letting criminals run rampant unpunished.
Related, I’ve heard people argue against UBI by saying that it would just make people lazy and not want to work at all.
Related, I’ve heard people argue against UBI by saying that it would just make people lazy and not want to work at all.
I mean, it’s completely unrealistic to think that this would not be the case for some X% of the population. It’s already the case now, with the welfare programs we already have, after all. What number that X is, is what’s unclear. People saying “nobody will work” are definitely wrong, though, lol.
I think you could address that by using what I call “Universal Ranked Income”. The idea is that there are floors and ceilings on income, wealth, and so forth. The floor is basically a minimum wage, while the ceiling of the highest income bracket is absolute - people simply do not get any more income at that level, regardless of their job or investments.
In addition to this, job classes should be assigned a rank based on the effort, risk, and knowledge required to perform the task. The job class has a fixed income, that employers can’t alter. They cannot manipulate the number of workdays, the income of a job is fixed, with each month delivering a set wage. Workhours and days are also fixed, to prevent employer manipulation.
Next, is a small pool of income archetypes, from lowest to highest. By keeping the diversity in job ranks to a dozen at most, employees can say “My boss isn’t supposed to get that much money, they are only X. Something smells!”. By creating a framework of obvious rules, it would be easier for society to nip potential oligarchs in the bud.
Here are some ranks from my notes as a baseline sample:
Rank 0: $10,000 per year, 05% / 10% cultural & social taxes, resulting in -$1,500. Has no work obligations.
Rank 1: $10,000-20,000 per year, 10% / 10% cultural & social taxes, resulting in up to -$4,000. For students, who receive a level of income based on grades.
Rank 2: $40,000 per year, 15% / 10% cultural & social taxes, resulting in -$10,000. Waiters, clerks, curbside hawkers, daycare staff.
Rank 3: $60,000 per year, 20% / 10% cultural & social taxes, resulting in -$18,000. Crop pickers, athletes, sex workers, couriers, nurses, police, teachers, journalists, soldiers in cold zones.
Rank 4: $80,000 per year, 25% / 10% cultural & social taxes, resulting in -$28,000. Doctors, engineers, lawyers, professors, researchers, hot zone troops.
Rank 5: $100,000 per year, 30% / 10% cultural & social taxes, resulting in -$40,000. Astronauts, Firemen, ambulance staff, hot battlefield leaders, surgeons, diplomats, lumberjacks, lead researchers.
If you look at the example, notice that education has become a job. It delivers a variable income based on performance, but is still less valuable than being a waiter, who has a fixed $40k income. Education is a pathway to a career, and people can focus on the path, since education offers an income for being studious. The current method of education sucks, because a person has to balance their survival, wellbeing, and education against each other. This is extremely inefficient and punishes people.
Further, I think the URI can potentially negate inflation. This is because the value of money has to be judged against the fixed incomes of society. Remember, jobs lost value, largely because employers keep the fruits of productivity to themselves. By enforcing fixed incomes for everyone and placing heavy restrictions on organizations, we can mitigate that siphoning of wealth. Price controls are much easier when you don’t have a huge variety of income factors to confuse the calculation.
Basically, wealth inequality.
It should be very difficult to be very poor or very wealthy.
Man can be free only when and if he’s able to rise above his insecurities
“Those who make peaceful reform impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
Yes, but no one can get fabulously rich off this.
Yes. I don’t remember the name of the civilization, but there was an entirely “peaceful” society that existed for several hundred years, until Christopher Columbus showed up, and raped and murdered them all.
No group of people has ever been peaceful with each other, let’s stop this anti-west fantasy and start talking about real problems, like how to fix democracies and capitalism
https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/north-american-indigenous-warfare-and-ritual-violence
https://newsofstjohn.com/the-taino-legacy-of-a-peaceful-joyous-and-ingenious-people/
Try again, and stop erasing history. They were unique because they lived on an isolated island, so they didn’t have neighbors to make war with.
And when they got close, they killed each other. So to my point, maybe some people should just live on a different planet
You didn’t bother reading the source. No they didn’t. Stop trying to whitewash history. They had ceremonial battles that included wooden “weapons” to resolve disputes. They didn’t kill each other.
And you’re just using a trite anti-west agenda talking point. The archaeological records shows existence of precolonial war
https://courses.washington.edu/war101/readings/Lambert--archy of N Am warfare.pdf
Sure between other nations of Native Americans, on the main continent. This One group lived on one of the larger Carribean islands, managed to not have any war, because no one else came out that far.
I’m NOT talking about any of the other nations that existed on the continents. You asked for an example and I’ve given you the only historical example I can think of. I don’t even include the Sentinel Islanders here, because while they haven’t been recorded to have participated in a war, they are clearly hostile to outsiders. The Taino didn’t respond with any hostility, to the point that Columbus made a remark in his diary that they would be easy to make slaves of the people, since they had no will to fight back. They were a communal society that didn’t have neighbors to fight with. They also lacked the gold and silver that CC was looking to pillage.
So humans are so shitty even if one group is able to miraculously come up with a non-violent society (perhaps partially due to geographic isolation, they will be found by the violent humans?
You wanna know what else makes billionaires billions of dollars? A strong middle class…the one with a lot of disposable income to, you guessed it, spend on goods and services!
Make enough affordable reliable cars then people with the disposable income will buy a new one every 5ish years and then the secondary used car market has good reliable cars to sell
But I don’t want money in 5 years, I want it now!
— A 300 lbs toddler with an inherited hedge fund.
Every dollar the “middle class” has in disposable income is a dollar the billionaires didn’t hold onto.
I can’t find the podcast. Maybe someone else can post an article about this:
Several years ago, I listened to a podcast that interviewed a man in Chicago who was conducting a study. His team found people with a criminal history(I think maybe drug dealers?) and tell them they’ll get $1000 a month. No strings attached.
There were a few who didn’t use the money well, but most quit crime/dealing drugs entirely. They found steady work and some went back to school.
All they needed was an opportunity to feel financially safe, feed their kids, and pay rent.
They’ve been trying it across the world, it’s called Universal Basic Income. It’s been proven mostly successful every time.
Here’s an old article about the US: https://mashable.com/article/cities-with-universal-basic-income-guaranteed-income-programs
Yeah! I wanted to specifically call out the study on UBI with formerly incarcerated people.
I know a lot of pushback on UBI is that it will make people lazy, or emboldened criminals. It has the exact opposite effect.
I believe that’s manufactured pushback tbh. People who are overworked might think it would make themselves lazy. At first, maybe? To get your thoughts in order, it might look lazy. But most people who feel safe with a steady income want to be productive.
I was talking about it with my GF over breakfast. She’s being worked to the bone, waking up in pain etc. and thought about alternatives.
She had the idea of a cat-bookstore-library-café. Imagine being able to sit down with a nice [beverage of your choice], read a good book, have a curious kitten climb onto your lap… Sure, it wouldn’t be for everyone and probably too expensive to run at a profit, but it might be possible with UBI.
And she’d still want to work her other job part-time too, just not full time anymore. She’d still be contributing, just in a different way.
It’s not “universal” unless/until it’s given to everyone. Until then, it’s just another targeted welfare program, “offered to a select portion of a city’s population instead of all residents”, as your link says.
You can’t say UBI has been “proven mostly successful” without actually doing UBI, considering its main hurdles are related directly to giving out that much money to everyone. A UBI of $12000/year ($1000/month) for just all working-age people in the US (a bit over 200 million) would cost the government $2.4 TRILLION, yearly.
Even seizing the entirety of every US billionaire’s net worth (est. $4.5 trillion), assuming you could convert it straight across into cash 1:1 (which you can’t), and cutting defense spending (~$850 billion), the two most common ways I’ve seen people claim we can pay for UBI in the US, even if defense was cut to literal zero (also absurdly unrealistic), that still wouldn’t even cover the cost of this UBI for three years.
I’ve had this discussion before. You might want to do some more research and have sources. I would advise you to look at really good sources about the following points:
- “It’s not “universal” unless/until it’s given to everyone.”
- “…would cost the government $2.4 TRILLION, yearly.”
- “Even seizing the entirety of every US billionaire’s net worth and cutting defense spending wouldn’t even cover the cost of this UBI for three years”
Your numbers and projected income is way wonky. I’ll discuss it when you come back with sources from the studies of UBI and why most experts think they worked being referenced.
I’m not the other person but I’ve had this discussion in work before and people have hit back with the following:
This wouldn’t work because with all these people getting UBI would just mean companies would put prices up to levels making the UBI worthless. For example if the cost of living is $1000 and you give people who need it $1000 then before long the cost of living would rise to $2000.
Now I’m in support of doing more for the average person and taking from corporations but I just don’t know how to argue against their, albeit lacking in actual data, arguments.
This wouldn’t work because with all these people getting UBI would just mean companies would put prices up to levels making the UBI worthless. For example if the cost of living is $1000 and you give people who need it $1000 then before long the cost of living would rise to $2000.
It’s the guaranteed part that makes a difference. If they know they can at least buy toiletries or whatever with the money.
I don’t understand the cost of living part? Are they raising the prices randomly? Is it because more people are buying stuff, so there’s more demand? Then more jobs are created. It’s a very vague question.
Apologies for being vague, it’s been a while since I’ve had this discussion.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding UBI as being linked to the cost of living, in that the UBI would provide for people’s basic needs and if they wanted more than that then they could find a job to supplement their income or maybe it’s one or the other.
I think what they were getting at ok the raising prices is that because there is more spending power then that means corps would like to get their hands on this extra money by raising prices.
I’ll try and broach this topic again and get their objections and bring it up next time I see this discussion.
No worries, I’m guessing they won’t be able to respond either. It sounds like talking points they were given by a podcast or something, and they didn’t really look into it. Whenever people start spouting those kind of things, digging deeper into their thoughts will usually tell you pretty quickly how much they believe or are repeating.
For example if the cost of living is $1000 and you give people who need it $1000 then before long the cost of living would rise to $2000.
You may choose to have a $2000 cost of living, but you would choose that too through a pay raise. You could be empowered to keep $1000 cost of living, and there would be more apartments like “yours” if everyone else is moving up in lifestyle.
UBI gives you more choices. If you think everyone else is passive, just paying what they are told, you can use the opportunity to build more affordable life options for people, including easy access to loans from all of the extra money getting spent.
So when I said cost of living I meant in general and not on an individual basis.
For example $1000 would cover all rent and bills, but then companies or landlords get greedy and raise prices so the cost of living is now $2000 making UBI futile. Rather than an individual increasing their own cost of living. If that makes sense.
Your example cost of living can apply to many people close to poverty line. Whether that is “general” or you is the same.
UBI will cause some inflation. More demand for stuff, quickly, with supply needing to catch up, and better labour bargaining power meaning higher labour costs.
But it is completely unreasonable to say that UBI makes people no better off. None of the money that gets spent or paid in taxes is destroyed. Very significant economic growth occurs. China can keep up with supply if US can’t, and we are collectively better off, but the richest are especially better off, with cheaper options for stuff. If housing costs skyrocket, big incentive for builders. You can choose room mates that with UBI can afford to pay. If you don’t want/need to work you can move to boonies where costs are lower, also with room mates. UBI lets people afford buying homes, with necessarily good credit from UBI safety net. Group buying easier.
Your fearmongering is not just false, it is an argument for continued power imbalance slavery. Even if your fear was true, we would still be better off through more choices and more power.
If sellers can fix prices so easily they’re a cartel. Your whole economy is way fucked in that case so you definately need radical reform of one type or another, UBI is the least of your worries. Paying monopoly prices for everything is your big problem, you do need to get on with effective anti-trust action - or other radical market reform.
Even if no prosecution due to regulatory capture and so on though, a cartel of enough oligopolists in inherently unstable and they have to work hard to keep up the cooperation, it becomes a complex situation but underying it, the first one to cut prices will sell way more units and eat the others market share . This doesn’t work all the time in all industries, but general competetive pressure does sometimes work to mediate excess profits in some circumstances.
Now, if you’d picked a broken market like rents and said landlords fix rental prices higher, yes - dysfunctional market, high barriers to entry, no real liquidity, rare transactions, powerful intermediators, weak ill informed buyers; yes such a market probably would benefit from price regulation or increasing social housing provision.
I’d love to see the evidence for the 1:1 happening in practice. I suspect it’s someone’s perverse-dream, very strong assumptions about universal sellers power and consumers total inability to substitute.
You might want to do some more research and have sources.
I brought up a handful of VERY easily-verifiable, non-controversial data points, and just did some simple math. But, I guess, for the extremely lazy:
- $1000/mo x 12 = $12000/yr
- Number of working-age (16-64) Americans = ~210 million (I rounded down to 200 and counted working-age only (i.e. no elderly/retired), two things that make my argument WEAKER)
- $12 thousand x 200 million = $2.4 trillion
- Combined net worth of US billionaires is ~4.5 trillion. But hey, I found a much higher estimate that puts it a bit above 6 trillion. That gets you almost a whole extra year!
- Latest US defense spending budget is $850 billion
Assuming stripping defense down to zero (which again, is an absolutely absurd hypothetical made for the sake of argument, and making my argument AS WEAK AS POSSIBLE) and applying the entire $850 billion to the UBI price tag, you’re left with a yearly cost of $1.55 trillion. And even using the higher estimate of $6 trillion from the billionaires, 1.55 goes into 6 less than 4 times.
The only thing ‘wonky’ is your refusal to accept mathematical reality.
P.S. Telling me to look at really good sources for ‘it’s not universal if it’s not given to everyone’ made me laugh pretty hard.
Where do you think the money goes when people get them? They don’t “dissappear”, so the “three years” you get from your billionairs in your example is you not understanding economy, even if you math is correct as you describe it.
The money people get would circulate and be taxable, so the government will get most of that money back to repeat giving out more the next month.
Also, your example I only using billionaires wealth instead if increasing taxes that more people are able to afford now that they have this UBI. The ones who have more than they need in income would be taxed harder, as they earn enough that they don’t need the UBI, but since it’s universal, they still receive.
I’ll discuss it when you come back with sources from the studies of UBI and why most experts think they worked being referenced
There are alternatives that would have a similar effect, without the scary price tag. A negative income tax is an example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
The politics are easy, except that it needs a political champion who promises and delivers the redistribution of power that is UBI.
A UBI of $12000/year ($1000/month) for just all working-age people in the US (a bit over 200 million) would cost the government $2.4 TRILLION, yearly.
Technically UBI saves government money. That $2.4T is just transfers from net tax payers to net receivers. But because programs can be cut at that UBI level, It costs somewhere around $1200B (all government levels) less to provide $2.4T. Once you look at military budget as something that could increase your own cash, even more.
A fair tax system that eliminates payroll taxes and pays for universal healthcare can be 33%. Or 25% for first $100k income, and surtaxes at higher income levels.
https://www.naturalfinance.net/2019/06/andrew-yang-and-democrat-tax-proposals.html
Why the hell would we give the rich $12k/year.? It makes no sense for it to be “universal,” we should change the branding. Doesn’t make it the bad idea you are so eager to paint it.
Negative income tax solves the “rich people getting 12k/yr they don’t ‘need’” issue. Beaurocracy/overhead has already been mentioned as another reason.
Why the hell would we give the rich $12k/year.?
Because the administrative costs associated with making sure they don’t, will cost even more. That’s one of the main upsides of UBI–no means testing makes it have practically no ‘overhead’. If means testing were added, its price tag would be even higher.
Nationalize Corporations
That’s precisely it, there’s lots of evidence which shows that welfare programs are better for creating stable societies.
This is stupid, there will always be crime. These things should be happening simply because that’s actually TAKING CARE OF YOU’RE CITIZENS.
Brought a tear to my eye, yo.
