Johanna

The right question to ask isn’t: Can we afford a basic income? The right question is: What’s the optimal level of basic income for our economy? How much basic income can our economy handle without causing inflation or other problems? To what extent will various taxes and other economic policies increase or decrease that amount?

Is a person with two children and a gambling addiction better off with food stamps and housing vouchers, or with UBI payments?

But even with project managers, cascading failures remain a risk due to the nature of construction. Construction has the unfortunate combination of building mostly unique things each time (even similar projects will be built on different sites, in different weather conditions, and likely with different site crews) and consisting of tasks that are... See more

Mechanization doesn’t require replicating a human’s movement exactly. The greatest gains from mechanization occur when a complex human movement can be replaced with a simple mechanical movement. A ship’s propeller doesn’t move the same way a fish’s tail fin does - it replaces the back and forth movement of the tail with a simple rotation that... See more

Basic jobs don’t help the disabled. (...) First, the disability application process is a mess. Imagine the worst DMV appointment you’ve ever had to obtain the registration to a sketchy old car you got from a friend, then multiply it by a thousand – then imagine you have to do it all while being too disabled to work. (...) Second, disability is... See more

What the Fed is actually trying to do here—as opposed to the story it’s telling about what’s happening in the economy—is clear, yet extremely difficult: It is trying to destroy demand just enough to reduce excess inflation but not so much that the economy crashes. This a little bit like trying to tranquilize a raging grizzly bear with experimental... See more

In 2012, the University of Maryland sociologist John P. Robinson reviewed more than 40 years of happiness and time-use surveys that asked Americans how often they felt they either were “rushed” or had “excess time.” Perhaps predictably, he concluded that the happiest people were the “never-never” group—those who said they very rarely felt hurried... See more