SRSLY now: the Paris Hilton problem

Mark, your analogy and mine are different. No one comes to an average person's house and takes all their money away violently. If PETA came at me, as they have done to other people here at UCSF, I'd file charges, as some small group of individuals committed acts of violent crime. And we have a well-established and tested justice system to deal with exactly these sorts of things.

But if the US government decided my research was bad and would close my lab just cuz, sure I'd move to China, or anywhere else where I could work.

I'm not sure how your point relates to mine: namely, that if we want to 'fix' poverty, we should treat causes, not symptoms. Meaning we first have to isolate causes. 'Not having any money' seems like a special case of 'bad luck' as a cause. I'm saying that, rather than resort to mysticisim ('these people are poor just because!'), maybe will, drive, motivation and education
are 1) more likely and 2) easier/cheaper/better to remedy.
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And: no, really. Why not give everyone $50,000 instead? How do you determine the magic dollar amount to hand out every New Year's? And don't you think that we should be doing this, right now, in fuckin' New Orleans?

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And, also really: people are poor, simply because they are poor? What's the evidence that free money cures poverty? Any precedent at all?

A priori, we can assume Milton Friedman, a Nobelist, was not an idiot. This idea Chris mentions is (reading Wikipedia) called 'negative income tax'. Apparently this almost actually happened (http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/NegativeIncomeTax.html).

I'm still not seeing why a lot of people wouldn't just quit their shit jobs and rake in the $24000 a year. Why work a really crappy job, tons of hours and stress, just to earn an extra $10-20 thousand on top of that? You can live well, really well, on 24k, I know first-hand.

Incentive to work is a deep problem, near the order of 'source of consciousness' and 'beginning of the universe' deep.

Read the linked article- apparently there have been some attempts to try this experimentally in Seattle and Denver. Disincentive to work was high but not as bad as feared by critics. There was more family breakup than expected. Doesn't say why, but I'd guess that when people work less, they get bored and do dumb stuff.

Plus, what about Paris Hilton? She doesn't necessarily 'work', but to be fair, this system would still give her $24,000 for earning $0? (Let's assume she only has an off-the-books allowance, like any child, from her parents. Forget her revenue from perfume, her nightclub, and her porn movie.)

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We coullllld just put electrodes in people's brains and make them 'like' working. Or hell, make them 'like' being poor. It's cheaper, and you can't beat the happiness Turing test: if someone looks happy and claims to be happy, regardless of the electrode in their head- well, you have to just accept the fact that that person is truly happy.

Real problems like poverty are only partially physical, at best. There are physical causes (Katrina in NO, e.g.), but it's mostly behavioral in my view. Meaning that we need behavioral technologies to ameliorate behavioral problems.

Here's a last analogy. Alcoholism is a real problem, and a complicated one at that. So the solution is to make alcohol illegal? Sounded good but it failed. Why it failed, and why alcoholism is a problem in the first place, are fascinating to contemplate, and I think not unrelated to the discussion here on DiDTT.