Eugine_Nier comments on What would you do with a financial safety net? - Less Wrong

4 Post author: faul_sname 16 January 2012 11:38PM

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Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 January 2012 06:24:20PM 1 point [-]

In fact, my optimal design would permit chosen individuals to try over and over again without penalty, encouraging them to take risky opportunities, provided there is at least a straight-face possibility of correspondingly high reward.

In practice, these kind of situations tend to lead to things like the dot-com bubble.

Comment author: Cog 18 January 2012 05:21:01AM 0 points [-]

I'm not sure I understand the leap in logic there. If people have a reasonably comfortable minimum income regardless of what they do, how does that induce runaway speculation? Would venture capital firms not be as hesitant to hand out money to people who consistently failed to return on investment? Granted, VC firms could still get caught up in fads like in the dot-com bubble, but I don't foresee a minimum income really driving (very rich, well above the minimum income level) VCs into higher risk taking behavior.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 January 2012 05:27:39AM 1 point [-]

Would venture capital firms not be as hesitant to hand out money to people who consistently failed to return on investment?

Moridinamael was talking about permitting individuals "to try over and over again without penalty", what you describe is an example of a penalty.

Comment author: amir_ressaissi 20 January 2012 10:53:28PM 0 points [-]

Yeah, what if instead of enough money for a year, you were provided a "reasonably comfortable minimum income" indefinitely? In other words, imagine if somehow magically (or with technology :-) ) most of the basic things needed in life were provided to you. What would you do? Have you been taught to deal with lots of free time? No probably not. We have only been taught to work work work!!

Now imagine if most of society had lots of free time? As a teacher, I think we could do so much more if there was less emphasis on having a job and more emphasis on doing/learning cool stuff just for fun. Of course this would have to be reinforced at home and in society. It would be easy to fall into the "entertainment" trap but I think that given proper training and good social programs, people would actually spend more time on being creative, discussing and solving problems than watching TV and playing video games.

I dream of the day when no one has to work more than 2 hours/day. With 7 billion it shouldn't be that difficult right?

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