This is thrown around as some sort of truism that humans become animals at the smallest inconvenience; but there is simply no evidence for it. On the contrary, there is loads of evidence that humans work together and support each other especially well through hardship.
Not only that but they are actively moving into these countries, because, like everybody, they like a functioning government that provides infrastructure, housing and health care for their citizens. This makes for much more livable cities and a happy society.
IMHO this is an effect of the exponentially increasing wealth inequality.
We are allowing a tiny elite to hold a larger and larger fraction of the overall wealth, while workers, middle class AND the government are losing more and more of the wealth.
Governments, until now, are refusing to tax the uberrich, and continue to squeeze out workers and middle class in an attempt to stop the bleeding. Since this is bound to not work (workers and middle class are rapidly losing their share as well); governments are forced to scrap public services like health care, housing, schools, etc.
Bond markets are now realizing that the governments are not taxing the only fraction of society who owns everything - and so it makes sense that the bond markets become increasingly worried that governments can pay their interest at all.
I don't understand how this is a wealth inequality issue, excess capital should cause bond prices to go down not up, as more wealthy are competing for more investments driving bond yields down.
Return of your capital is not important than return on your capital; and if you as a bond buyer are worried that the government can’t pay back your loan at all, you will increase the interest rate on it.
The wrong assumption is that you had any skills before that. But what you (and nearly all of us did) was using other sources to generate work. You looked up stuff online, asked a colleague who did this before and so on. Then simply fitted you heard into what you were doing. Now the source is one place and you are romanticizing former you.
This assumes that people on a UBI just chill at home and play video games the entire day, which was disproven in about every experiment that was ever run on this.
It’s human to want to contribute to society; and people use UBI mostly to get their shit in order, and THEN to get a 2nd degree and rejoin the labor force.
So, yes, they would in fact become teachers, nurses or or constructors.
You could carbon tax it, and give people immediately back the equivalent of what they would lose (on average). Then they can keep their lifestyle - if they are truly diehard about it - or they can adopt a climate friendlier lifestyle and pocket the change.
That was exactly the plan in Germany when we finally had a progressive ("center-left") government coalition a couple of years ago. The plan was dragged out and eventually killed by the centrist/neoliberal coalition partner (FDP). It is extremely sad it went this way. Just think of the acceptance the people would've had: Germans might have called for higher CO2 taxes out of pure selfishness...
Thats a lot of taxes for a few cities worth of people. Especially since Americans already paid for fibre to be laid to everyone in to US' home until the fund was embezzled.
I can't be absolutely sure, but I don't think this is true. This company [1] I'm paying 2euro/month to, AFAIK is not subsidized and never was. They already spread fiber and cable long before we joined EU (in 2007) and I had this 2euro plan since 2006.
I’ve come to understand the inequality crisis (which manifests itself as a cost-of-living crisis for most people) as one of the root causes for the poly-crisis we are living through.
For climate change, I can totally understand how a household struggling to feed their kids will reject messaging of the form „oh and btw you also need to stop driving your car and heat your home lest the planet dies“. Of course they will revolt against that.
To me, fundamentally, the west MUST solve the inequality crisis first before we can ever hope of solving any of the other problems. People need slack to care about the environment, their neighbors, peace, etc.
And the other aspect of it is fairness - people rightfully look at the top, say „well the billionaires are jetting all around the globe and no one gives a fuck, why should I cut my holidays?“
We need to fix inequality first, and I project that most other issues we have today will magically resolve themselves.
This is thrown around as some sort of truism that humans become animals at the smallest inconvenience; but there is simply no evidence for it. On the contrary, there is loads of evidence that humans work together and support each other especially well through hardship.
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