> the notion of promising parts of your future labor income
Maybe I'm missing the object of sneer but isn't that just a loan? Don't have access to the article referenced.
Yeah, I believe it also stops after a certain amount of time, which seems to be straightforwardly an improvement on student loans. Of course, the american student loan system is diabolically evil by the standards of the rest of the world, so most things are an improvement, and would straightforwardly be better if done by the government where there was no profit motive.
>they only make you pay it back if your income exceeds some threshold.
Thus discouraging entrepeneurship and ruining the economy, how are you going to run an economy if you don't make people suffer?
It's not an income trap, as the amount they make you pay back varies smoothly with your income. (Assuming it works like normal stocks.)
(I probably missed the joke, though.)
It was a comment from my own personal experience with the English student loans system: as long as I never make above a certain (low) wage I never have to pay the loan back after 30 years, assuming they don't change the rules when they inevitably privatise that loan and break their own laws in doing so. The joke is that setting a rule whereby you don't have to make x amount before having to start repayments is a disincentive to make money. On a naive capitalist account of incentives this would ensure that nobody would ever bother to make enough to have to pay back the loan.
Wait, they really made an income trap? That's ridiculous. Is the marginal "tax rate" ever greater than 100%, or do they at least manage to vary the cost smoothly?
...the joke is that people would deliberately avoid earning money not to face having to pay their loans. Specifically, the joke is on people who think in terms of one disincentive or one incentive and don't go any further in actually looking about how people behave. I'm mocking libertarian and neoliberal types who believe that if one disincentive to earn exists then that means nobody will try to earn anything.
Shit, you're right, I forgot that we can never do anything that will make sociopathic rich people sad even for a moment. Oh well. Back to the drawing board!
That leads to every moron with half a brain getting a bachelor's degree and then thinking working as a foreman in a warehouse is beneath him.
Then you have to import fricking Filipinos and Mongols to work in warehouses, and the rest of the economy suffers from too many idiot project managers.
It could work, provided you restricted the number of university graduates to a reasonable amount. But no one in Europe did that except the tankies and they're all like 90 nowadays and out of power, and they had their own host of problems.
Here's one of those "critiques":
>This is better than loans as it matches your income and not the amount you owe plus interest. And there's a max they can take. The amount of shares you give up is decided based on your degree. I spend 1/5 of my income on loans, I would have loved to have this choice.
That seems... reasonable? I don't see what the problem is with this. Paying with a percent of future income instead of a lump sum loan seems like a brilliant idea. Lambda is being accused of "looking like slavery" for providing this alternative while we don't have free education for all. And don't get me started on the casual use of the term "slavery".
Imagine having an idea "It's like a loan, but you pay less if you earn less" and fucking up the PR so hard people hear your idea and think "It's slavery with extra steps"
I don't see how this is a PR problem, surely Lambda giving the **option** of paying in a percentage is better than student loans, which is better than no education & working for minimum wage. Anyone who hears Lambda's idea and thinks "slavery" thinks both of those are *also* slavery (she says as much). If you think capitalism is slavery, fine, but a PR team can't prevent that.
Full quote:
>To some people, the notion of promising parts of your future labor income to someone or something else sounds repugnant, almost like a kind of slavery. Yet is it really so objectionable? **Unlike slavery, these deals are voluntary. Anyone who has written a book or done a film is familiar with the idea of offering some share of the future income to an agent, in return for assistance. And of course corporations, many of which rely on individual talent as their main asset, sell equity in themselves.**
I think whoever phrased this as "Sell shares in yourself" (I heard it described this way on a podcast), was probably not having a good day when they came up with that
PedanticRomantic said outright that [her problem is with phrasing that implies directly that slavery isn't that bad and not with the system itself](https://twitter.com/PedanticRomantc/status/1115643317306269696?s=19).
The ISA concept is probably better than student loans, but Lambda
looks sketchy as hell. I would not trust someone who put 100% of his net
worth into Tesla stock.
I think I’m missing some context, here. I know Paul Graham, the
left-wing objections to him, and the fee structure of Lambda, but I know
nothing of PedanticRomantic, so that might be where the gap is.
Paul Graham is one of the most insufferable people on twitter
The tweet being ‘critiqued’.
The ISA concept is probably better than student loans, but Lambda looks sketchy as hell. I would not trust someone who put 100% of his net worth into Tesla stock.
Income redistribution is slavery?
I think I’m missing some context, here. I know Paul Graham, the left-wing objections to him, and the fee structure of Lambda, but I know nothing of PedanticRomantic, so that might be where the gap is.