5 ms·

Basic Income Has Silicon Valley to Thank

9 points by cryoshon 11y ago

johnebgd 11y ago
I don't see how the world moves forward without this but I don't see how people used to the old way of doing things will accept it either...
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > I don't see how the world moves forward without this but I don't see how people used to the old way of doing things will accept it either... You could just as easily say that about any major change.
gpsx 11y ago
I think basic income solves one of two important problems. The problem it doesn't solve is what people will do with their time. I'd like to see a requirement that everyone work. The exact definition of work would have to be determined along with a way of measuring/enforcing it. This might not be easy. There is always more work that can be done. One source of work could be a government website that can provide jobs for people that don't have them, with pay for the work just being the basic income - workfare.gov.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > The problem it doesn't solve is what people will do with their time. How is this a problem? Don't people solve that individually, by doing what has the most utility for themselves? > I'd like to see a requirement that everyone work. Either (1) you don't need this, because everyone will have work available that pays something that they are willing to accept for their time, or (2) such a requirement is mandated involuntary servitude. In neither case does the requirement seem desirable. > One source of work could be a government website that can provide jobs for people that don't have them, with pay for the work just being the basic income - workfare.gov. If basic income is conditioned on doing qualifying work, its fundamentally different from the unconditional basic income generally proposed, and instantly avoids the advantages flowing from the unconditional part of the proposal.
- WorldMaker 11y ago
  «The problem it doesn't solve is what people will do with their time.» What would you do with your time if you weren't required to work for your living? I'd spend more time writing fiction and videogames, personally. Others want to act, write poetry, create art, perform music, romance, raise kids, the list extends out to so many extremes of human expression and desire. I'd probably read more books and play more videogames and attend more concerts, too. There would certainly be a lot more Netflix binging, in general. But the problem here is that people see such culture (leisure) as sinful/wasteful, rather than a goal, a possibly better human existence. If more people have leisure time, so what? At some point we have to admit to ourselves (as this is deep in the American DNA at this point) that the Puritans were wrong and backbreaking labor is not the end all/be all of human experience. It's not a more "pure" life to work ourselves to death and it's not "guilty" or "irrational" or "wasteful" to balance some pleasure and leisure into one's life. People should not have to "earn" a right to the bottom rungs of Maslow's Hierarchy: they should have food, shelter, safety, health. Why should "work" be an entry bar to claiming one's basic rights as a human being in a caring society? The concept of "basic income" is that everyone gets it, regardless of qualification. If people want to earn income over and above that, they are welcome to: there will still be startups and companies and projects that will (need to) pay for labor. If people want to live on the bare minimum that "basic income" provides for them and spend the rest of their life in relative leisure, then let them. What harm does that do to society? If companies have such a great need for that extra labor they would be missing they can pay the value that that loss of leisure is actually worth and lure the "lazy" out of leisure through enough incentive. If someone tries to leave beyond their means and uses "basic income" as a crutch they'll quickly find themselves dealing with the same disincentives that poor people already face: bad credit, collections agency, the prison-industrial complex. Already productivity statistics are telling us that there are fewer jobs needed than people that exist in this country, and with increasing automation this trend will only get worse. We can't enforce 100% employment, and why should we? Instead, we need a solution for a (much) less than 100% employment world and punishing people with crippling poverty and debt seems like a far less useful solution than whining that maybe some people might find a way to take their basic income, find some shelter and a lifestyle that is sustainable under it, and binge watch Netflix for the rest of their lives without ever "working a job". What you perceive as a problem here is a failed assumption: the Puritan belief that people only live meaningful (sinless) lives if they devote themselves to some hateful job and work to earn their way to a better life (heaven for the Puritans; a leisure-full retirement if they are lucky after putting their nose to the grindstone, in the case of the classic American middle class propaganda). Sorry for the long rant here, but it's just something that I think we have a hard time talking about in America precisely because we've got a bundle of culturally foundational DNA that makes it tough to talk about without first attacking those foundational assumptions. Hopefully, maybe this helps explain what you are missing in the concept?
mgrpowers 11y ago
Does anyone have any examples on what the total cost would be per person. I've mostly seen 12-18k per person but that obviously wouldn't fly in San Francisco or Boston. I recently drove through Kansas and stopped in Quinter, population 955. The per capita income is $15,588 so around $15m for just income not including health insurance/etc. How do we go about justifying basic income for a city this size whose primary export is corn. I'm a huge basic income fan and would like to contribute to the conversation I just don't know where to start.
- WorldMaker 11y ago
  One place I find it useful to start is with the one empirical attempt to actually try basic income, the Canadian Mincome Experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINCOME https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINCOME The other direction is to look at today's Social Security (basic income for the elderly) and attempt to extrapolate what/how you would expand the program to cover every citizen. For instance, examining the impact of fixed incomes on the elderly versus the cost of living in various parts of the country and how the elderly today are already coping with such issues. Another direction I've been trying to keep an eye on and follow as best I can is the discussions and work going on in (fringe) economics under the name "Modern Monetary Theory": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > One place I find it useful to start is with the one empirical attempt to actually try basic income, the Canadian Mincome Experiment Mincome was not an unconditional basic income, which is what the recent "basic income" efforts have been about. It was a means-tested social benefit program (though with perhaps lighter administrative overhead, since it was a strictly cash-benefit program with only outside income affecting grant eligibility, rather than the rather complex set of factors typical of social benefit programs.) Most of the benefits claimed from UBI are tied pretty specifically to the unconditional aspect. OTOH, its results are interesting in that even with the reduction in benefits for outside income ($0.50 benefit reduction on each $1 of outside income), only teenagers and new mothers worked substantially less. This is interesting in considering UBI, since UBI has less reduction in incentive to work (no reduction in benefit for outside income). > The other direction is to look at today's Social Security (basic income for the elderly) Social Security isn't even approximately a basic income -- benefits are determined by tax payments (ultimately, by income earned in jobs subject to Social Security tax.)

9 points by cryoshon 11y ago

I don't see how the world moves forward without this but I don't see how people used to the old way of doing things will accept it either...

dragonwriter 11y ago
> I don't see how the world moves forward without this but I don't see how people used to the old way of doing things will accept it either... You could just as easily say that about any major change.

gpsx 11y ago

I think basic income solves one of two important problems. The problem it doesn't solve is what people will do with their time. I'd like to see a requirement that everyone work. The exact definition of work would have to be determined along with a way of measuring/enforcing it. This might not be easy. There is always more work that can be done. One source of work could be a government website that can provide jobs for people that don't have them, with pay for the work just being the basic income - workfare.gov.

dragonwriter 11y ago
> The problem it doesn't solve is what people will do with their time. How is this a problem? Don't people solve that individually, by doing what has the most utility for themselves? > I'd like to see a requirement that everyone work. Either (1) you don't need this, because everyone will have work available that pays something that they are willing to accept for their time, or (2) such a requirement is mandated involuntary servitude. In neither case does the requirement seem desirable. > One source of work could be a government website that can provide jobs for people that don't have them, with pay for the work just being the basic income - workfare.gov. If basic income is conditioned on doing qualifying work, its fundamentally different from the unconditional basic income generally proposed, and instantly avoids the advantages flowing from the unconditional part of the proposal.
WorldMaker 11y ago
«The problem it doesn't solve is what people will do with their time.» What would you do with your time if you weren't required to work for your living? I'd spend more time writing fiction and videogames, personally. Others want to act, write poetry, create art, perform music, romance, raise kids, the list extends out to so many extremes of human expression and desire. I'd probably read more books and play more videogames and attend more concerts, too. There would certainly be a lot more Netflix binging, in general. But the problem here is that people see such culture (leisure) as sinful/wasteful, rather than a goal, a possibly better human existence. If more people have leisure time, so what? At some point we have to admit to ourselves (as this is deep in the American DNA at this point) that the Puritans were wrong and backbreaking labor is not the end all/be all of human experience. It's not a more "pure" life to work ourselves to death and it's not "guilty" or "irrational" or "wasteful" to balance some pleasure and leisure into one's life. People should not have to "earn" a right to the bottom rungs of Maslow's Hierarchy: they should have food, shelter, safety, health. Why should "work" be an entry bar to claiming one's basic rights as a human being in a caring society? The concept of "basic income" is that everyone gets it, regardless of qualification. If people want to earn income over and above that, they are welcome to: there will still be startups and companies and projects that will (need to) pay for labor. If people want to live on the bare minimum that "basic income" provides for them and spend the rest of their life in relative leisure, then let them. What harm does that do to society? If companies have such a great need for that extra labor they would be missing they can pay the value that that loss of leisure is actually worth and lure the "lazy" out of leisure through enough incentive. If someone tries to leave beyond their means and uses "basic income" as a crutch they'll quickly find themselves dealing with the same disincentives that poor people already face: bad credit, collections agency, the prison-industrial complex. Already productivity statistics are telling us that there are fewer jobs needed than people that exist in this country, and with increasing automation this trend will only get worse. We can't enforce 100% employment, and why should we? Instead, we need a solution for a (much) less than 100% employment world and punishing people with crippling poverty and debt seems like a far less useful solution than whining that maybe some people might find a way to take their basic income, find some shelter and a lifestyle that is sustainable under it, and binge watch Netflix for the rest of their lives without ever "working a job". What you perceive as a problem here is a failed assumption: the Puritan belief that people only live meaningful (sinless) lives if they devote themselves to some hateful job and work to earn their way to a better life (heaven for the Puritans; a leisure-full retirement if they are lucky after putting their nose to the grindstone, in the case of the classic American middle class propaganda). Sorry for the long rant here, but it's just something that I think we have a hard time talking about in America precisely because we've got a bundle of culturally foundational DNA that makes it tough to talk about without first attacking those foundational assumptions. Hopefully, maybe this helps explain what you are missing in the concept?

mgrpowers 11y ago

Does anyone have any examples on what the total cost would be per person. I've mostly seen 12-18k per person but that obviously wouldn't fly in San Francisco or Boston. I recently drove through Kansas and stopped in Quinter, population 955. The per capita income is $15,588 so around $15m for just income not including health insurance/etc. How do we go about justifying basic income for a city this size whose primary export is corn. I'm a huge basic income fan and would like to contribute to the conversation I just don't know where to start.

WorldMaker 11y ago
One place I find it useful to start is with the one empirical attempt to actually try basic income, the Canadian Mincome Experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINCOME https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINCOME The other direction is to look at today's Social Security (basic income for the elderly) and attempt to extrapolate what/how you would expand the program to cover every citizen. For instance, examining the impact of fixed incomes on the elderly versus the cost of living in various parts of the country and how the elderly today are already coping with such issues. Another direction I've been trying to keep an eye on and follow as best I can is the discussions and work going on in (fringe) economics under the name "Modern Monetary Theory": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > One place I find it useful to start is with the one empirical attempt to actually try basic income, the Canadian Mincome Experiment Mincome was not an unconditional basic income, which is what the recent "basic income" efforts have been about. It was a means-tested social benefit program (though with perhaps lighter administrative overhead, since it was a strictly cash-benefit program with only outside income affecting grant eligibility, rather than the rather complex set of factors typical of social benefit programs.) Most of the benefits claimed from UBI are tied pretty specifically to the unconditional aspect. OTOH, its results are interesting in that even with the reduction in benefits for outside income ($0.50 benefit reduction on each $1 of outside income), only teenagers and new mothers worked substantially less. This is interesting in considering UBI, since UBI has less reduction in incentive to work (no reduction in benefit for outside income). > The other direction is to look at today's Social Security (basic income for the elderly) Social Security isn't even approximately a basic income -- benefits are determined by tax payments (ultimately, by income earned in jobs subject to Social Security tax.)